The culmination of the attack and James’s reply reveal that, by the time he writes this Preface in the first decade of the twentieth century, he has become relaxed and explicit about an art which is not content merely to serve realism:

‘… Is it that you’ve after all too much imagination? Those awful young women capering at the hotel-door, they are the real little Daisy Millers that were; whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more’s the pity, as – for pitch of the ingenuous, for quality of the artless – couldn’t have been at all.’ My answer to all which bristled of course with more professions than I can or need report here; the chief of them inevitably to the effect that my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else; since this is what helpful imagination, in however slight a dose, ever directly makes for.11

Both Morris Gedge in ‘The Birthplace’ and the telegraphist of ‘In the Cage’ might be said to exhibit ‘all too much imagination’. At the end of the latter nouvelle, the telegraphist finally sees ‘in the whole business… the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and delusions and her own return to reality’, and it falls, not to our telegraphist whose imaginings we have followed throughout this long tale, but to the butler Mr Drake to reveal the truth about the shabby amatory intriguings of the tale’s various telegram-sending aristocrats. In ‘The Birthplace’ Morris Gedge almost loses his job as guide and caretaker because of his initial inability to play along with the tourists’ need for stories about Shakespeare’s birthplace, and then, abandoning his critical sense for the creative, triumphantly does his job only too well in vastly embellishing the Shakespearean legend. We might read these two tales as satire, indeed as punitive revelations of illusion. Thus ‘In the Cage’ might take its place in the tradition of prose fiction – of which Jane Austen and George Eliot are famous exponents – which judges the delusions of young women led astray by reading cheap, romantic fiction. ‘The Birthplace’ is a trenchant and prescient critique of the ways in which culture has come to serve cynical commercial tourism: James predicted with extraordinary accuracy the dismal ‘Show’ of present-day Stratford, even down to the catering franchises, the ‘buffet farmed out to a great firm’. But this story, as it initially occurred to James and is recorded in his Notebooks,12 ends with the protagonist denying Shakespeare, refusing to play to the needs of the tourists and being dismissed: wouldn’t that be enough to secure James’s satirical point – without need of the tale’s glorious, imaginative coda? And, in the case of ‘In the Cage’, would we as readers really prefer what the butler saw – the shoddy aristocratic connivings told to us by Mr Drake? There is an imaginative excess in both these tales, an excess centred on their protagonists, which compels our admiration. Both Morris Gedge – described as ‘really a genius’ – and the telegraphist are artists, and if their imaginings exhibit something of what James in ‘The Middle Years’ calls ‘the madness of art’, they are nonetheless artists of a kind remarkably close to James himself. In particular, the action of ‘In the Cage’ is, according to James, ‘simply the girl’s “subjective” adventure – that of her quite definitely winged intelligence’; and, like the reader, he too wonders that such a seemingly unpromising adventure should have ‘whirled us so far’.13 The telegraphist creates a huge adventure from mere scraps – the truncated staccato words and numbers of telegram messages. This ability to make so much out of so little proves to be an especially close parallel to Henry James’s own typical practice as a writer. It was often the case that others – at the dinner table and in other sociable circumstances – would give him ideas or ‘germs’ for stories and he himself wanted to hear them, but not too much of them – there was a limit to what he wanted to hear or to know since ‘anything more than the minimum… spoils the [creative] operation’.14

The tales here are a full and varied record of the worlds of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they also resist those worlds to pursue ‘the reaction, the opposition or the escape’ and to cultivate an artistic consciousness in despite of and in rebuke of reality. They are of an inclusiveness which accommodates both the real and the imaginary, the actual and the creative.

A DRAMA OF SIGNS AND LANGUAGES

In ‘Four Meetings’, prior to what amounts, especially in pre-aircraft days, to her comically, pathetically brief day-trip – a mere thirteen hours – in Europe, the American heroine, Caroline Spencer, asks of our narrator: ‘Do you know the foreign languages?’ It is a question, variously posed and variously answered, which will structure the tale. The diverse replies received in the course of the story are revealingly equivocal: ‘After a fashion’; ‘Some kinds’; ‘I do, madam – tant bien que mal.’ James’s early stories play over what is literally a diverse array of European languages, but all his stories are dramas of translation. Realist novels often invite readers to enter their imaginatively realized worlds and, as it were, to leave words behind: language is offered merely as a transparent window on the world. By contrast, James’s novels and tales are always linguistically self-conscious. Writing on ‘The Question of Our Speech’, he explained the primacy of language:

All life therefore comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with each other. These relations are made possible, are registered, are verily constituted, by our speech, and are successful… in proportion as our speech is worthy of its great human and social function; is developed, delicate, flexible, rich – an adequate accomplished fact. The more it suggests and expresses the more we live by it – the more it promotes and enhances life. Its quality, its authenticity, its security, are hence supremely important for the general multifold opportunity, for the dignity and integrity, of our existence.15

James tells stories through words but he also tells stories about words. They are the very stuff of his tales; quotation marks, italics and repetitions isolate words and phrases as objects in themselves to be held inquiringly up to the light, as it were, wondered at and puzzled over. Characters are forever picking up on each other’s words, repeating them and questioning them (‘The Pension Beaurepas’ offers such dialogue in particularly pure form). Such linguistic self-consciousness makes for a habit of voice in James’s tales which, even in the smallest details, calls the reader’s attention to different ways of thinking and to the different cultures represented by different languages, signs, idioms and conventions. A lot may be lost in translation. People may be lost in translation. Opportunities and constraints cannot always be translated. Signs may all too easily be misread or mistranslated. Above all, too dogmatic and single-minded a reading of people’s words and actions, of the people who speak and act – and, by extension, of stories about such people, can be deadening and destructive: that is the one message, the ‘figure in the carpet’, which these open and exploratory tales consistently offer their readers.

Is a ‘jeune fille’ the same thing as an ‘American girl’? And what is to become of Aurora Church (‘The Pension Beaurepas’) who is in the particular – and perhaps false – position of being neither? Aurora speaks four languages, but is she entirely sure that she knows (American) English? How does a ‘flirt’ differ from a ‘coquette’? How is Winterbourne to interpret Daisy Miller’s various sayings and doings? And how, in turn, are we to understand Winterbourne? Winterbourne will never be more wrong than when he believes that Daisy Miller was ‘easy to read’. Henry St George, the Master of ‘The Lesson of the Master’, is a ‘text… a style considerably involved, a language not easy to translate at sight’. His is a text which neither we nor the narrator shall ever satisfactorily resolve. Morgan Moreen, ‘The Pupil’, is ‘as puzzling as a page in an unknown language… Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation.’ Morgan’s baffling family speak ‘Ultramoreen’, ‘an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher’.