James’s frequent lists of adjectives and adverbs without commas (e.g. ‘the large simple scared foolish fond woman’ and ‘the long lean loose slightly cadaverous gentleman’ in ‘Fordham Castle’) are left intact, but in about half a dozen instances the omission of a necessary comma has been rectified. In fewer than a dozen instances has consistency of hyphenation or italicization been imposed, and one spelling has been corrected. The apparent error of a section number ‘I’ at the start of ‘The Middle Years’ (with no ‘II’) has been omitted, although some critics have argued ingeniously that this is a deliberate joke, alluding to the fact that there is to be no second chance for Dencombe.

SELECTION PRINCIPLES

Any selection should include some account of the principles on which it was made. My aim has been to represent something of the diversity, in both style and subject matter, of James as a writer of tales, and to offer some compromise between the familiar and expected and the less well-known. The emphasis has rightly fallen on the former category, but it is hoped that some of the tales here – ‘The Pension Beaurepas’, ‘Greville Fane’, ‘In the Cage’, ‘Broken Wings’, ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’, ‘The Birthplace’, ‘Fordham Castle’ – will be less familiar and neither less interesting nor less enjoyable for that. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) and ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) have been excluded simply because they are long and very familiar and are already available in Penguin editions. A few works were excluded on the unfashionable grounds that they seemed to the present editor not to merit their current reputations: at worst, such a view may merely be a provocation to readers to see for themselves in the case of, for example, ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895), ‘Glasses’ (1896), ‘The Great Good Place’ (1900) and ‘The Bench of Desolation’ (1909–10). Beyond these points, principles of selection give way merely to a list of regrets. In particular, it is regrettable that only lack of space has led to the exclusion of any tale earlier than 1877. Here ‘A Landscape Painter’ (1866), James’s extraordinary modern reading of Hamlet, ‘Master Eustace’ (1871), ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (1873) and ‘Madame de Mauves’ (1874) all have strong claims on our attention. Above all, one regrets that absence of the long and admittedly somewhat meandering ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ (1871), in which an American confronts the ghost of what it might have meant to stay in Europe in a way which anticipates ‘A Jolly Corner’, Spencer Brydon’s confrontation with the ghostly self who has stayed in America. Here, as in pairing ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘Julia Bride’, late James is in mirroring dialogue with his earlier self in ways which further substantiate the claim made in the Introduction that Henry James’s creative life may been read as a life of tales. Perhaps finally one must recognize that a selection justifies itself only in the dissatisfactions it induces in readers – and in the stimulus it affords them to seek more of the author’s tales.

Four Meetings

I saw her but four times, though I remember them vividly; she made her impression on me. I thought her very pretty and very interesting – a touching specimen of a type with which I had had other and perhaps less charming associations. I’m sorry to hear of her death, and yet when I think of it why should I be? The last time I saw her she was certainly not – ! But it will be of interest to take our meetings in order.

I

The first was in the country, at a small tea-party, one snowy night of some seventeen years ago. My friend Latouche, going to spend Christmas with his mother, had insisted on my company, and the good lady had given in our honour the entertainment of which I speak. To me it was really full of savour – it had all the right marks: I had never been in the depths of New England at that season. It had been snowing all day and the drifts were knee-high. I wondered how the ladies had made their way to the house; but I inferred that just those general rigours rendered any assembly1 offering the attraction of two gentlemen from New York worth a desperate effort.

Mrs Latouche in the course of the evening asked me if I ‘didn’t want to’ show the photographs to some of the young ladies. The photographs were in a couple of great portfolios, and had been brought home by her son, who, like myself, was lately returned from Europe. I looked round and was struck with the fact that most of the young ladies were provided with an object of interest more absorbing than the most vivid sun-picture. But there was a person alone near the mantel-shelf who looked round the room with a small vague smile, a discreet, a disguised yearning, which seemed somehow at odds with her isolation. I looked at her a moment and then chose. ‘I should like to show them to that young lady.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Latouche, ‘she’s just the person. She doesn’t care for flirting – I’ll speak to her.’ I replied that if she didn’t care for flirting she wasn’t perhaps just the person; but Mrs Latouche had already, with a few steps, appealed to her participation. ‘She’s delighted,’ my hostess came back to report; ‘and she’s just the person – so quiet and so bright.’ And she told me the young lady was by name Miss Caroline Spencer – with which she introduced me.

Miss Caroline Spencer was not quite a beauty, but was none the less, in her small odd way, formed to please. Close upon thirty, by every presumption, she was made almost like a little girl and had the complexion of a child. She had also the prettiest head, on which her hair was arranged as nearly as possible like the hair of a Greek bust, though indeed it was to be doubted if she had ever seen a Greek bust. She was ‘artistic,’ I suspected, so far as the polar influences of North Verona2 could allow for such yearnings or could minister to them.