SOURCE: "Daisy," in Henry James: The Conquest of London, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962, pp. 302-18.

"My London life flows evenly along, making, I think, in various ways more and more of a Londoner of me," Henry wrote to William at the end of January 1878. "If I keep along here patiently for a certain time I rather think I shall become a (sufficiently) great man. I have got back to work with great zest after my autumnal loafings, and mean to do some this year which will make a mark. I am, as you suppose, weary of writing articles about places, and mere potboilers of all kinds; but shall probably, after the next six months, be able to forswear it altogether, and give myself up seriously to 'creative' writing. Then, and not till then, my real career will begin. After that, gare à vous."

The passage reads as if Henry were proceeding according to a deliberate time-table. He must be patient for a "certain time"; he will make his mark "this year"; he will, after the next six months, be ready to begin to write in earnest. There was insight here into the inner calendar of his life. For what came to pass was that Henry wrote Daisy Miller during that winter; it was accepted by mid-April for the Cornhill Magazine—the journal of Thackeray and Trollope—and was published within six months. After that Henry was to be considered by the world "a (sufficiently) great man."

I

Almost the first thing Henry had done after returning from the Continent to his fireside in Bolton Street was to write the tale suggested by Miss Bartlett's [an acquaintance of James's] anecdote: that of the American girl snubbed in Roman-American society. The story reads today—has always read—as if it had flowed spontaneously out of the tip of Henry's pen: it has a splendid lucidity and a vividness of form and detail; a kind of ironic laughter echoes between its lines until it reaches its final, gently-sketched scene of pathos. The circumstantial detail of Daisy lives with extraordinary authenticity, for it was transposed directly from Henry's half-dozen years of Continental journeyings. The little crimson drawing room in the Via Gregoriana, where Mrs. Walker turns her back on Daisy—we have seen Henry there, in January of 1873, visiting the Tweedys; Vevey and the Castle of Chillon—this was where Henry and Alice joined the Bootts during their long-ago summer of Swiss travel; the Colosseum by moonlight, William's touch of the Roman fever, Giovanelli as a cavaliere avvocato, the Protestant cemetery—all spill over into fiction from felt backgrounds and Roman springtimes to give the tale its air of freshness and reality; there is no lingering and no explaining; the story moves with quiet, swift incident and an inexorable logic of its own.

That logic resides above all in the image of Daisy Miller. Miss Bartlett had no need to describe the young lady of her anecdote—Henry had seen her in her multitude, stepping confidently ashore from the trans-Atlantic liners, in fine dresses with flounces and ribbons, carrying her head high, talking in her thin, gay voice, possessed of the tournure of a princess. Young Daisy is a clear and dancing image—pure nineteenth century Schenectady or Utica, exposed to the bright Swiss summer sun on Lake Geneva and the turquoise skies of Rome. For all her brilliant array of dresses and her air of sophistication, she is garbed in the innocence of Eve, in all her nakedness, before the tasting of the apple.

He had first submitted the tale to the editor of Lippincott's in Philadelphia,* who returned it without comment. Henry was not certain why, and he found the absence of comment grim. He accordingly asked a friend (perhaps Leslie Stephen) to read the story; the opinion he got was that the editor had probably rejected it because he considered it "an outrage on American womanhood." Henry himself was not convinced: he thought that perhaps the story was simply too long. At any rate he submitted it to the taciturn Stephen of the Cornhill, who accepted it "with effusion." In fact it was sent to the printer at once, and Henry made his bow for the first time in an English magazine in the June and July 1878 issues. His failure to assure himself of American publication lost him the valuable magazine market in the United States: the story was pirated immediately both in New York and Boston and when Harper brought it out in their Half-Hour Series as a pamphlet it sold 20,000 copies in a matter of weeks. It was priced at 25 cents and this meant that Henry's royalties were negligible. "I have made $200 by the whole American career of Daisy Miller," he told Howells. The tale was destined, however, to be "the most prosperous child" of Henry's invention.

II

Daisy Miller had a sub-title. Henry called it "A Study," perhaps to suggest that he had written the equivalent of a pencil sketch on an artist's pad, rather than a rounded work. Later he said it was because of "a certain flatness"—suggested in the very name of his heroine. And indeed the slightness of the story has made a later generation wonder why it should have proved so attractive. A modern reader, unrehearsed in the history of manners, would wonder, for instance, at the social fuss which occurs merely because an American girl "dates" an Italian. The informality of the twentieth century can little understand the formality of the nineteenth; and the snobberies of Roman-American society seem exaggerated to the point of caricature.

The story of Daisy's short-lived adventure in Europe begins in Vevey at the Trois Couronnes, where the Europeanized American, Winterbourne, meets in the garden of the hotel the little American boy Randolph, who is boastful, unhappy, full of misplaced energy and a quite justifiable sense of being dragged about Europe when he would rather be at home. While the stiff and formal Winterbourne—through whose eyes we see Daisy—chats with the boy, his sister joins them, and presently they are talking quite familiarly to one another, even if they have not been properly introduced. Her name is Annie P. Miller but everyone calls her Daisy. She is a pleasing flirt: "Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?" she asks. She expects young men to give her their undivided attention, and she arranges to go, unchaperoned, with her new acquaintance to visit the Castle of Chillon. Winterbourne's aunt, who knows all the proprieties, sniffs her disapproval, between migraine headaches: the best she will allow Daisy is that "she dresses in perfection—no, you don't know how well she dresses." For the rest, Winterbourne admits that the girl is rather "uncultivated." "She is very common," says his aunt.

Daisy is described to us, more often than not, in negatives; she is not insipid, and she is not exactly expressive; there is no mockery in her, and distinctly no irony. She has a bright, sweet, superficial little visage: her features are eminently delicate. "There isn't any society," she claims in describing her experiences of Europe, and she adds, "I have always had a great deal of gentlemen's society." Her misfortune is that she does not know the European definition of a gentleman and believes her own conception of one to be universal.

Later that year, in Rome, Winterbourne meets her again: we still see her through his eyes. As in the anecdote, she has acquired a charming Italian: his name is Giovanelli; he has a mustache, is attentive, and if he does not understand her flirtatious nature, he "must wonder at his luck." Winterbourne perceives quite clearly that Daisy is not interested in marrying him and that the Italian does not hope to marry her; but he enjoys her company, and she is pleased to have a "gentleman" dance attendance on her, as her boy friends did in Schenectady. It never occurs for a moment to Daisy that she is the subject of gossip, and that her behavior violates the European code: that young girls simply do not go about without a chaperon. When Mrs. Walker overtakes her and Giovanelli in the Pincian gardens and points out to her that what she is doing "is not the custom here," Daisy replies ingenuously enough: "Well, it ought to be, then!" The girl has no standards; she sets her own; she has never been given any; she does not even know what "standard" means. And even when she is snubbed in Mrs. Walker's drawing room, she does not comprehend the meaning of the gesture. She cannot accept the notion—it is fundamental to her nature—that conduct anywhere can be different from what she has known in Schenectady.

Winterbourne is unable to decide whether this bright, young, admirably-turned-out example of the new American generation is "honest" or frivolous, whether she is innocent or wicked. A true Jamesian male, he never quite makes up his mind. When he encounters Daisy and Giovanelli rambling late in the evening in the Colosseum he thinks his worst suspicions may be right. The story moves swiftly to its denouement. Daisy catches the Roman fever and dies of it; and by "the raw protuberance among the April daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, Winterbourne and Giovanelli exchange the remarks which are, so to speak, her epitaph. "She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable," says Giovanelli—whose name expresses youth and irresponsibility—and, he adds, "she was the most innocent." Winterbourne, whose name expresses the frosty stiffness Daisy had complained of in him, can only stare at the grave and decide that Miss Miller would have "appreciated one's esteem."

III

If the tale of the girl from Schenectady is now a piece of superseded social history, one aspect of it has assumed a new relevance: this is the unerring vision which James had of the total abdication, by the mass of American parents, of all authority over their children. The entire discussion of "permissiveness" in our time and the re-evaluation of progressive education makes James's picture of the two Miller children singularly relevant. Daisy is allowed to wander about Rome with Giovanelli at all hours of the night; it is she, not her mother, who exercises authority over the travelling group. Both, in turn, abdicate authority to Eugenio, the courier, who is treated as if he were a member of the family. Nine-year-old Randolph does as he pleases.

"Did you get Randolph to go to bed?" asked the young girl.

"No; I couldn't induce him," said Mrs. Miller, very gently. "He wants to talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to that waiter."

Daisy recalls that "it isn't so bad as it was at Dover."

"And what occurred at Dover?" Winterbourne asked.

"He wouldn't go to bed at all. I guess he sat up all night—in the public parlour. He wasn't in bed at twelve o'clock: I know that."

"It was half-past twelve," declared Mrs. Miller, with mild emphasis.

The logic of this is that nine-year-olds apparently must be talked into going to bed, instead of being simply put there; and Randolph's rugged individualism is but the pioneer version of a generation of spoiled young allowed to dominate the American scene. Henry had remembered well the glimpses he had had of children asleep in leather chairs, in the lobbies of Saratoga hotels, at a late hour of the evening. He was to continue, in his tales, to portray the consequences for a civilization of an absence of standards and codes, of a society knowing no rules, and of a "freedom" which consisted in a kind of meaningless pampering of the young—offering the future citizens of his country neither a sense of history nor a charted course in life and civilization.

He was to give forcible utterance shortly after Daisy to this picture of the new American generation in a tale of comparative manners, "The Point of View," in which a repatriated American woman at Newport writes:

The country is made for the rising generation; life is arranged for them; they are the destruction of society. People talk of them, consider them, defer to them, bow down to them. They are always present, and whenever they are present there is an end to everything else. They are often very pretty; and physically they are wonderfully looked after; they are scoured and brushed, they wear hygienic clothes, they go every week to the dentist's. But the little boys kick your shins, and the little girls offer to slap your face! There is an immense literature entirely addressed to them, in which the kicking of shins and the slapping of faces is much recommended. As a woman of fifty, I protest. I insist on being judged by my peers. It's too late, however, for several millions of little feet are actively engaged in stamping out conversation, and I don't see how they can long fail to keep it under. The future is theirs; maturity will evidently be at an increasing discount. Longfellow wrote a charming little poem called "The Children's Hour," but he ought to have called it "The Children's Century."

Seventy-five years after this was written, it is possible to say that the nineteenth—and the twentieth—century had indeed belonged and belongs to the American child.

Daisy Miller remains a remarkable story even if the manners it portrays are outmoded; it has a spare economy, a quick painting of background and a chasteness of narrative, in its summary sketching of American ignorance confronted by American rigidity abroad. It remains also the prototype of the "international" story. Henry was to write many more important and more brilliant tales, but Daisy Miller, like its name, is an early and fresh flower still blooming among his works, "the little tragedy," as Henry explained to a lady who wrote to him, "of a light, thin, natural, unsuspecting creature being sacrificed as it were to a social rumpus that went on quite over her head and to which she stood in no measurable relation." The achieved pathos of this predicament softens Daisy's hardness of surface, and makes her a victim not only of parental and national ignorance, but of her own innocence. Winterbourne, at the end, can only wonder whether he hasn't lingered too long in Europe, whether a civilization—or absence of it—was developing in his native land which he did not know nor understand.

IV

The story, as literary history knows, was an extraordinary success, but not the succès de scandale which legend has attributed to it. There was nothing in the public reaction to warrant any suggestion of "outrage." On the contrary: Daisy was distinctly liked by many American readers. She was a girl of spirit, and from the American point of view, as Edmund Wilson has observed, that spirit went marching on. She resisted the inflexibility of the Europeanized Americans and stood her ground as a "child of nature and of freedom." Only one reviewer seemed to feel that she was unreal; the others, in general, complimented James for his portrayal of certain types of Americans travelling abroad—types, they said, perhaps too often found in Europe. The vogue set off by Daisy continued for a long time afterwards: she became a perennial figure—and "a Daisy Miller" was to be a much-used descriptive phrase whenever some particularly charming, forward young lady from America showed up in Continental surroundings. For a time there were "Daisy Miller" hats in the millinery shops, and presently another book appeared titled An English Daisy Miller, by a magazine writer named Virginia W. Johnson. The little book was "Dedicated to American Women" and its general theme followed Henry's, substituting an English girl for the American. Henry's story was widely translated.

James had discovered nothing less than "the American girl"—as a social phenomenon, a fact, a type. She had figured in novels before, but never had she stood in fiction so pertly and bravely, smoothing her dress and asking the world to pay court to her. Hawthorne's American girl in Rome, Howells's American girl in Venice, had not been contrasted with Europe; and those Europeans who were reading Louisa May Alcott had a picture of the American girl largely in her domestic surroundings. The rustling young ladies on the verandahs at Saratoga, the busy beauties of "uptown" New York, the graceful, idle females of Newport, suddenly became Henry's great subject: and all by the simple turn of exhibiting them in their finery, as in all the stages of their timidity or insolence, their doubt or their triumph—at the moment of their encounter with Europe and their retusal to yield their heritage of American innocence. The magazines now clamored for his tales, and Henry addressed himself to making the most of his advantage: in fast succession there came from his little sitting room in Bolton Street "An International Episode," "The Pension Beaurepas," the short novel Confidence, and in due course such tales as "A Bundle of Letters." Henry James made himself the acknowledged master of the "international situation" and he was to use it on a large stage, with substantial characters, in major novels yet to be written. What he had begun, in Roderick Hudson and The American, as stories of American experience in Europe had now, by extension, been discovered by Henry to be social comedy—to have the possibility of being rendered with a light touch and with the exploration of all the ironic, pathetic, comic as well as tragic elements in the theme. "The Americano-European legend," Henry was to call it in the end. And it was his creation, his peopled world. He was to deal with the American girl and the American woman—and the American man as well—exhibit them for almost half a century in their march through foreign countries and their exposure to foreign societies. A critic in the Edinburgh Review was prompted early to reflect on the strange new types which James had brought upon his horizon: American men who corresponded not at all to the popular notion of travelling Americans, and certainly less Philistine than Englishmen abroad, looking at churches, admiring works of art, indulging in civilized conversation, and contemplating their fellow-Americans—Winterbourne, for instance; Daisy Millers who availed themselves in Europe of the liberality and license permitted to young unmarried women in the United States. Their unconventional behavior and their seeming indiscretions might scandalize Europeans, the reviewer felt; but he noticed that even when their passing flirtations were tinged by romance, they usually married for satisfactory settlements. American women in all their variety passed before Henry: the timid, the adventurous, the self-made, the divorcee in search of respectability, the heiress in search of a princedom, the demure maiden in the European pension engaged in an earnest quest for "culture" and self-betterment—and always the chase for the husband. And these were all but a series of sketches from which he would paint his larger, full-length portraits. In a late preface he was to define the various states which he depicted, the predicaments of these fresh, positive, beguiling ladies. They were innocent and they were democratic; they were woefully ignorant of any concept of society—any sense of the old hierarchies and standards; they suffered from an acute state of "queenship," being the spoiled darlings of American men who in the "young roaring and money-getting democracy" were busy with their own affairs, possessing none of the leisure the European males of the upper classes enjoyed in courtship. American men wooed strenuously and, when they married, spent their days creating fortunes for the use of the womenfolk. "An American woman who respects herself," says one of James's married ladies, "must buy something every day of her life. If she cannot do it herself, she must send out some member of her family for the purpose." Thus she explains one of her functions: and in a country of absentee husbands, women, in their reinforced egotism, assume supremacy: they take over education; they exercise such control as they can over the young. It is either excessive or excessively relaxed. James's concern for some years was to be with "the practical, positive, passionless young thing as we let her loose on the world."

To be sure much that James wrote was true of any newly-rich society; and the absentee husband existed in Europe as well—indulging in his adulteries while his wife indulged in hers. What was original for the Europeans was the general freshness and innocence of these products of the new society, their spirit of conquest, their belief in themselves and their ability for self-improvement; above all the strange new egalitarianism, which nourished the legend that an American could do anything. These newcomers to the ancient civilizations came from an order of wealth rather than of aristocracy; and James's picture of them contained a large measure of affection even while he satirized and criticized.

If Daisy provoked controversy it was precisely in the ranks of society. The drawing rooms of Boston and New York echoed to it. "There are many ladies in and around New York today," observed the New York Times in June of 1879, "who feel very indignant with Mr. James for his portrait of Daisy Miller, and declare it is shameful to give foreigners so untrue a portrait of an American girl." The foreigners did not need Henry James Jr. to give them that portrait; they were to see the American girls in their thousands down to modern times. "Harry James waked up all the women with his Daisy Miller, the intention of which they misconceived," Howells wrote to Lowell. "There has been a vast discussion in which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly. The thing went so far that society almost divided itself into Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites. I was glad of it, for I hoped that in making James so thoroughly known, it would call attention in a wide degree to the beautiful work he had been doing so long for very few readers."

Henry was to tell an anecdote many years later: how in Venice one day a lady friend observing two young American girls had spoken of them to him as "Daisy Millers." This was to lead to a remonstrance from a second lady who was with them in their gondola. She remarked that these crude creatures were the real Daisies, about whom James had not written, and that the one he had created was a distortion, because he endowed her with form and prettiness and pathos and bathed her in the beautiful light of his own imagination. Henry was quite prepared to agree. "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."