It was in Rome during the autumn of 1877; a
friend
then living there but settled now in a South less weighted with appeals and
memories happened to mention – which she might perfectly not have done
– some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter, whose
young daughter,
a child of nature and of freedom, accompanying her from hotel to hotel, had
‘picked up’ by the wayside, with the best conscience in the world,
a good-looking Roman, of vague identity, astonished at his luck, yet (so
far as might be, by the pair) all innocently, all serenely exhibited and
introduced: this at least till the occurrence of some small social check,
some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity, and which I
forget. I had never heard, save on this showing, of the amiable but not
otherwise eminent ladies, who were n’t in fact named, I think, and
whose case had merely served to point a familiar moral; and it must have been
just their want of salience that left a margin for the small pencil-mark
inveterately signifying, in such connexions, “Dramatise, dramatise!”
The result of my recognising a few months later the sense of my pencil-mark
was the short chronicle of
Daisy Miller,
which I indited in London the following spring and then addressed, with no
conditions attached, as I remember, to the editor of a
magazine
that had its seat of publication at Philadelphia and had lately appeared to
appreciate my contributions. That
gentleman
however (an historian of some repute) promptly returned me my missive, and
with an absence of comment that struck me at the time as rather grim –
as, given the circumstances, requiring indeed some explanation: till a friend
to whom I appealed for light, giving him the thing to read, declared it could
only have passed with the Philadelphian critic for ‘an outrage on
American girlhood’.
This was verily a light, and of bewildering intensity; though I was
presently to read into the matter a further helpful inference. To the fault
of being outrageous this little composition added that of being essentially
and pre-eminently a
nouvelle;
a signal example in fact of that type, foredoomed at the best, in more cases
than not, to editorial disfavour. If accordingly I was afterwards to be
cradled, almost blissfully, in the conception that
Daisy
at least, among my productions, might approach ‘success’, such
success for example, on her eventual appearance, as the state of being
promptly pirated in Boston – a sweet tribute I had n’t yet
received and was never again to know – the irony of things yet claimed
its rights, I could n’t but long continue to feel, in the
circumstance that quite a special reprobation had waited on the first
appearance in the world of the ultimately most prosperous child of my
invention. So doubly discredited, at all events, this bantling met
indulgence, with no great delay, in the eyes of my admirable friend the late
Leslie Stephen
and was published in two numbers of
The Cornhill magazine
(1878).
It qualified itself in that publication and afterwards
as ‘a Study’; for reasons which I confess I fail to recapture
unless they may have taken account simply of a certain flatness in my poor
little heroine’s literal denomination. Flatness indeed, one must have
felt, was the very sum of her story; so that perhaps after all the attached
epithet was meant but as a deprecation, addressed to the reader, of any
great critical hope of stirring scenes. It provided for mere concentration,
and on an object scant and superficially vulgar – from which, however,
a sufficiently brooding tenderness might eventually extract a shy
incongruous charm. I suppress at all events here the appended qualification
– in view of the simple truth, which ought from the first to have been
apparent to me, that my little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in
critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms. It
comes back to me that I was at a certain hour long afterwards to have
reflected, in this connexion, on the characteristic free play of the
whirligig
of time. It was in Italy again – in Venice and in the prized society of
an interesting friend, now dead, with whom I happened to wait, on the Grand
Canal, at the animated water-steps of one of the hotels. The considerable
little terrace there was so disposed as to make a salient stage for certain
demonstrations on the part of two young girls, children they, if
ever, of nature and of freedom, whose use of those resources, in the general
public eye, and under our own as we sat in the gondola, drew from the lips
of a second companion, sociably afloat with us, the remark that there before
us, with no sign absent, were a couple of attesting Daisy Millers. Then it
was that, in my charming hostess’s prompt protest, the whirligig, as I
have called it, at once betrayed itself. “How can you liken
those creatures to a figure of which the only fault is touchingly
to have transmuted so sorry a type and to have, by a poetic artifice, not
only led our judgement of it astray, but made any judgement quite
impossible?” With which this gentle lady and admirable critic turned on
the author himself. “You know you quite falsified, by the turn
you gave it, the thing you had begun with having in mind, the thing you had
had, to satiety, the chance of ‘observing’: your pretty perversion
of it, or your unprincipled mystification of our sense of it, does it really
too much honour – in spite of which, none the less, as anything
charming or touching always to that extent justifies itself, we after a
fashion forgive and understand you. But why waste your romance?
There are cases, too many, in which you ’ve done it again; in which,
provoked by a spirit of observation at first no doubt sufficiently sincere,
and with the measured and felt truth fairly twitching your sleeve, you have
yielded to your incurable prejudice in favour of grace – to whatever it
is in you that makes so inordinately for form and prettiness and pathos; not
to say sometimes for misplaced drolling. 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 – could n’t possibly 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. As for the original grossness of
readers, I dare say I added, that was another matter – but one which at
any rate had then quite ceased to signify.
A good deal of the same element has doubtless sneaked
into
Pandora,
which I also reprint here for congruity’s sake, and even while the
circumstances attending the birth of this anecdote, given to the light in a
New York newspaper
(1884), pretty well lose themselves for me in the mists of time. I do
nevertheless connect
Pandora
;
even quite quaintly or quite touchingly free, as might be – working out
thus on her own lines her social salvation.
This was but five-and-twenty years ago; yet what to-day most strikes me in
the connexion, and quite with surprise, is that at a period so recent there
should have been novelty for me in a situation so little formed by more
contemporary lights to startle or waylay. The evolution of varieties moves
fast; the Pandora Days can no longer, I fear, pass for quaint or fresh or
for exclusively native to any one tract of Anglo-Saxon soil.
Little Bo-Peep’s
charges may, as manners have developed, leave their tails
behind them for the season, but quite knowing what they have done with them
and where they shall find them again – as is proved for the most part
by the promptest disavowal of any apparent ground for ruefulness. To
‘dramatise’ the hint thus gathered was of course, rudimentarily,
to see the self-made girl apply her very first independent measure to the
renovation of her house, founding its fortunes, introducing her parents,
placing her brothers, marrying her sisters (this care on her own behalf
being – a high note of superiority – quite secondary), in fine
floating the heavy mass on the flood she had learned to breast. Something of
that sort must have proposed itself to me at that time as the latent
‘drama’ of the case; very little of which, however, I am obliged
to recognise, was to struggle to the surface. What is more to the point is
the moral I at present find myself drawing from the fact that, then turning
over my American impressions, those proceeding from
a brief but profusely peopled stay
in New York, I should have fished up that none so very precious particle as
one of the pearls of the collection. Such a circumstance comes back, for me,
to that fact of my insuperably restricted experience and my various missing
American clues – or rather at least to my felt lack of the most
important of them all – on which the current of these remarks has
already led me
to dilate. There had been indubitably and multitudinously, for me, in my
native city,
the world ‘down-town’ – since how otherwise should the sense
of ‘going’ down, the sense of hovering at the narrow gates and
skirting the so violently overscored outer face of the monstrous labyrinth
that stretches
from Canal Street to the Battery,
have taken on, to me, the
intensity of a worrying, a tormenting impression? Yet it was an impression
any attempt at the active cultivation of which, one had been almost
violently admonished, could but find one in the last degree unprepared and
uneducated. It was essentially New York, and New York was, for force and
accent, nothing else worth speaking of; but without the special lights it
remained impenetrable and inconceivable; so that one but mooned about
superficially, circumferentially, taking in, through the pores of whatever
wistfulness, no good material at all. I had had to retire, accordingly, with
my yearning presumptions all unverified – presumptions, I mean, as to
the privilege of the imaginative initiation, as to the
hived
stuff of drama, at the service there of the literary adventurer really informed
enough and bold enough; and with my one drop of comfort the observation already
made – that at least I descried, for my own early humiliation and
exposure, no semblance of such a competitor slipping in at any door or perched,
for raking the scene, on any coign of vantage. That invidious
attestation of my own appointed and incurable deafness to the major key I
frankly surmise I could scarce have borne. For there it was; not only that
the major key was ‘down-town’ but that down-town was, all itself,
the major key – absolutely, exclusively; with the inevitable
consequence that if the minor was ‘up-town’, and (by a parity of
reasoning) up-town the minor, so the field was meagre and the inspiration
thin for any unfortunate practically banished from the true pasture. Such an
unfortunate, even at the time I speak of, had still to confess to the memory
of a not inconsiderably earlier season when, seated for several months at
the very moderate altitude of Twenty-Fifth Street, he felt himself day by
day alone in that scale of the balance; alone, I mean, with the
music-masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies and children –
immensely present and immensely numerous these, but testifying with a
collective voice to the extraordinary absence (save as pieced together
through a thousand gaps and indirectnesses) of a serious male interest. One had
heard and seen novels and plays appraised as lacking, detrimentally, a
serious female; but the higher walks in that community might at the period I
speak of have formed a picture bright and animated, no doubt, but marked
with the very opposite defect.end of the preface to volume 18
part of an etext edition of some of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website