deprecated, respect for the declared taste of the reading public than because he loved them for their own sake. It would, for instance, have been difficult to exclude _Daisy Miller_ from any representative collection of his work, yet the popularity of the tale had become almost a grievance. To be acclaimed as the author of _Daisy Miller_ by persons blandly unconscious of _The Wings of the Dove_ or _The Golden Bowl_ was a reason among many for Henry James's despair of intelligent comprehension. Confronted repeatedly with Daisy, he felt himself rather in the position of some _grande dame_ who, with a jewel-case of sparkling diamonds, is constrained by her admirers always to appear in the simple string of moonstones worn at her first dance. From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found himself involved in a highly practical examination of the scope and limits of permissible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often revised their verse with good effect. Why should the novelist not have equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a conviction that it cannot be improved. It was Henry James's profound conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty years in the wilderness of British and American misconceptions without yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing tempters should have lost faith in himself. But he was well aware that the game of revision must be played with a due observance of the rules. He knew that no novelist can safely afford to repudiate his fundamental understanding with his readers that the tale he has to tell is at least as true as history and the figures he has set in motion at least as independently alive as the people we see in offices and motor-cars. He allowed himself few freedoms with any recorded appearances or actions, although occasionally the temptation to correct a false gesture, to make it "right," was too strong to be resisted. We have a pleasant instance of this correction in the second version of _The American._ At her first appearance, the old Marquise de Bellegarde had acknowledged the introduction of Newman by returning his handshake "with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." In the later edition she behaves differently. "Newman came sufficiently near to the old lady by the fire to take in that she would offer him no handshake.... Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him and refused what she did refuse with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." There were good reasons why the Marquise should have denied Newman a welcoming handshake. Her attitude throughout the book was to be consistently hostile and should never have been compromised by