But his toings and froings to the Continent and across the Atlantic, his literal and his imaginative voyagings, his comparings and contrastings, were never really over: even on his deathbed by the Thames in Chelsea, James continued to travel far and wide in his imagination, rearranging the entire world in his tenacious but now fragmenting mind. His elder brother, the philosopher William James, was led to conclude that Henry was ‘really… a native of the James family, and has no other country’,5 but even this may be too fraternally appropriative: Henry James was unique, an internationalist at a time when this signified, not today’s bland homogeneity and erosion of difference, but comedies and tragedies of distinctiveness and divergence. The tales, particularly the earlier works such as ‘Four Meetings’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ here, are the lasting record of James’s appreciation of the international. Other tales here realize the fuller implications, beyond any literal contrast of European and American perspectives, of this international vision, and of the challenge which such a vision represents for the writer.

How is a writer to depict worlds so various? In 1884, in his great, ever hesitating, ever qualifying essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James spoke up for fiction as history, for fiction as what we rather glibly call ‘realism’. He declared that the writer of fiction must ‘possess the sense of reality’. But which reality? James himself immediately expands into a wondering, complicating celebration of the mind’s relation with its worlds:

Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms… Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations… The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience… If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe…6

‘Experience’ flows into ‘sensibility’, into ‘consciousness’; ‘experience’ is related to, and then equated with, ‘impressions’. From here James goes on, all gently and benignly, to proffer to the intending writer a piece of advice which perhaps only a Henry James could fulfil, a piece of advice baffling, exhausting, well-nigh impossible: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’7

The terms for the great Jamesian drama – the encounter between the mind and the world, the romantic and the realistic, vision and fact, art and life – are already declaring themselves here; and he is already varying his emphasis and his priority, just as each of his tales varies in its particular configuration of that drama. Near the end of James’s life, H. G. Wells’s mocked ‘the elaborate copious emptiness’ of Jamesian style and described, with cruel comedy, James’s narrative as ‘a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea’.8 In reply and rebuke, Henry James declared: ‘It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process.’9 However, it was a few years earlier, in the Preface to the volume in the important New York Edition of those tales centred particularly on ‘the literary life’ (represented in this selection by ‘The Lesson of the Master’, ‘The Death of the Lion’ and ‘The Figure in the Carpet’), that James was to elaborate more publicly and more fully the argument for art in opposition to, and in rebuke of, actuality; he argued for imaginative possibilities above reality’s probabilities. Faced with the accusation that such tales focused on ‘supersubtle fry’ who were without precedent in real life, James defended an art which ‘implies and projects the possible other case, the case rich and edifying where actuality is pretentious and vain’. If art and life were not in accord, then ‘so much the worse for that life’. And James warmed to his audacious argument with his disbelieving reader:

What does your contention of non-existent conscious exposures, in the midst of all the stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy, imply but that we have been, nationally, so to speak, graced with no instance of recorded sensibility fine enough to react against these things? – an admission too distressing. What one would accordingly fain do is to baffle any such calamity, to create the record, in default of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honourable, the producible case. What better example than this of the high and helpful public and, as it were, civic use of the imagination?… How can one consent to make a picture of the preponderant futilities and vulgarities and miseries of life without the impulse to exhibit as well from time to time, in its place, some fine example of the reaction, the opposition or the escape?10

However, in the stories here, we can also often find James taking a sharp look at ‘all the stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy… the preponderant futilities and vulgarities and miseries of life’, including those realities of the world of work and of ordinary people with which his writing is not usually associated. James himself worried that his talent did not stretch ‘downtown’, to the world of business, but was confined ‘uptown’, in New York and elsewhere, with the ladies. Nevertheless, the figure of Mr Ruck is the most sympathetic portrait in ‘The Pension Beaurepas’, an informed observation of a New York businessman, on unhappy holiday, failing in health and failing financially, as his wife and daughter continue only too well in their roles, spending his wealth in the ‘stores’ of Europe. The ugly horror of American business emerges again, in ghostly form, in ‘The Jolly Corner’. On the other side of the Atlantic, ‘The Birthplace’ begins with a wonderfully economical and sharp-eyed depiction of genteel poverty in Blackport-on-Dwindle. But the great work in this respect is ‘In the Cage’, combining an extraordinary particularity in its realization of the ordinary woman at work with – in a nouvelle notorious for its cryptic difficulties – an astonishingly direct diagnosis and denunciation of the late nineteenth-century aristocracy. The telegraphist hates them: ‘They’re too real! They’re selfish brutes.’

What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of every instant and every motion… What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime.

This is not to suggest that the revelation of ‘stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy’ is limited to matters of class; when James turns to the life of the family, his attention appears similarly unremitting. The vileness of the Moreen parents in ‘The Pupil’ is hard to match; the children of ‘Greville Fane’ are pitilessly selfish, in fact murderous.

But James was never content merely to depict and to diagnose vain actuality. His tales also celebrate creative reaction. ‘Daisy Miller’ has been attacked for failing on both accounts, attacked both for its unpatriotic satirizing of the American girl and for its idealizing of her. Within the tale, Daisy Miller is the victim, among the expatriate American community in Europe, of too dogmatic, too confident, too single-minded readings: in this respect, the tale itself was to suffer from readings analogous to those inflicted on its eponymous heroine. In his Preface to this story James recalls how ‘in Italy again… in Venice… on the Grand Canal’, he was the recipient of such criticism. There two friends – again American expatriates – voice opposing views about the tale: one identifies in two young American girls they are watching on the terrace of a Venetian hotel ‘a couple of attesting Daisy Millers’. The other friend, however, protests that, in his portrayal of Daisy Miller, James ‘quite falsified… the thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of “observing”’. On this account, James has failed to produce a realistic and satiric diagnosis of the Daisy Miller type; he has misled critical judgement and indeed rendered a judgemental attitude impossible; he has been led astray by his ‘incurable prejudice in favour of grace’.