Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

Генри Джеймс

Henry James

Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

PREFACE

I have gathered into this volume several short fictions of the type I have already found it convenient to refer to as “international”—though I freely recognise, before the array of my productions, of whatever length and whatever brevity, the general applicability of that term.  On the interest of contrasted things any painter of life and manners inevitably much depends, and contrast, fortunately for him, is easy to seek and to recognise; the only difficulty is in presenting it again with effect, in extracting from it its sense and its lesson.  The reader of these volumes will certainly see it offered in no form so frequent or so salient as that of the opposition of aspects from country to country.  Their author, I am quite aware, would seem struck with no possibility of contrast in the human lot so great as that encountered as we turn back and forth between the distinctively American and the distinctively European outlook.  He might even perhaps on such a showing be represented as scarce aware, before the human scene, of any other sharp antithesis at all.  He is far from denying that this one has always been vivid for him; yet there are cases in which, however obvious and however contributive, its office for the particular demonstration has been quite secondary, and in which the work is by no means merely addressed to the illustration of it.  These things have had in the latter case their proper subject: as, for instance, the subject of “The Wings of the Dove,” or that of “The Golden Bowl,” has not been the exhibited behaviour of certain Americans as Americans, of certain English persons as English, of certain Romans as Romans.  Americans, Englishmen, Romans are, in the whole matter, agents or victims; but this is in virtue of an association nowadays so developed, so easily to be taken for granted, as to have created a new scale of relations altogether, a state of things from which emphasised internationalism has either quite dropped or is well on its way to drop.  The dramatic side of human situations subsists of course on contrast; and when we come to the two novels I have just named we shall see, for example, just how they positively provide themselves with that source of interest.  We shall see nevertheless at the same time that the subject could in each case have been perfectly expressed had all the persons concerned been only American or only English or only Roman or whatever.

If it be asked then, in this light, why they deviate from that natural harmony, why the author resorts to the greater extravagance when the less would serve, the answer is simply that the course taken has been, on reflexion, the course of the greater amusement.  That is an explanation adequate, I admit, only when itself a little explained—but I shall have due occasion to explain it.  Let me for the moment merely note that the very condition I here glance at—that of the achieved social fusion, say, without the sense and experience of which neither “The Wings of the Dove,” nor “The Golden Bowl,” nor “The Portrait of a Lady,” nor even, after all, I think, “The Ambassadors,” would have been written—represents a series of facts of the highest interest and one that, at this time of day, the late-coming observer and painter, the novelist sometimes depressed by all the drawbacks of a literary form overworked and relaxed, can only rejoice to meet in his path and to measure more and more as a portent and an opportunity.  In proportion as he intelligently meets it, and more especially in proportion as he may happen to have “assisted” from far back at so many of the odd and fresh phenomena involved, must he see a vast new province, infinitely peopled and infinitely elastic—by which I mean with incalculable power to grow—annexed to the kingdom of the dramatist.  On this point, however, much more