Finally, the best known and perennial favorite among James's early stories is Daisy Miller (1878), a nouvelle that like "Madame de Mauves" employs third-person narration focused on a viewpoint character of "register." It occupies a special place in his canon for several reasons. First, its notoriety and popularity made James for a brief moment in his career a popular writer: Howells could have a character in The Rise of Silas Lapham refer casually to "Daisy Millerism"; society was even said by Howells to divide into "Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites"; and James was frequently identified on the title pages of his later novels as the author of Daisy Miller. The story, published in Cornhill Magazine by Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf's father), was pirated immediately, sold twenty thousand copies in pamphlet form in a few weeks, and spawned a play and even a Daisy Miller hat. The reason for this early and enduring interest is that James had fully identified and staked as his imaginative territory the plight of the international American woman whose free-spiritedness flouts European respectability. He also had focused swiftly on the antagonism between Daisy and the Europeanized "gang" abroad and had rendered convincingly the "moral muddlement" of the expatriate American Frederick Winterbourne, James's viewpoint character and a man attracted to Daisy's "natural elegance," yet who eventually sides with her antagonists, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, both Europeanized Americans. Newly abroad from Schenectady, New York, Daisy's principal "crimes" are that she ignores class structures and customary behavior, whether at Vevey or in Rome, and both speaks and walks freely with whomever she likes, in essence treating all she meets as equal human beings. Eventually she dies of malarial or "Roman" fever after exposing herself through evening walks in the Colosseum with Mr. Giovanelli, a simple man disapproved of by the ardent American colony of matrons who assume custodial standing over Daisy and her family and who define expatriate morality. Daisy thus dies a sacrificial victim like the Christian martyrs who have preceded her.

To tell the story this way, however, is to fail to represent James's skillful complication of the conflict, his dialectical inquiry, or at least what has been called his "middle point of view." The key to any sophisticated reading along the line James intended is to focus as well on Winterbourne, since his is our point of view, whereas Daisy remains, as she should, the "phenomenon" into whose consciousness we are not permitted to enter, yet whose continual and insubstantial "chatter" and love of a "fuss" qualify her stature otherwise as free spirit and genuine expression of nature opposed to artificial forms of respectability. Both Winterbourne and Daisy are in James's language "queer mixtures" of contradictory elements and "booked to make a mistake" with each other because the reactions of each to the other are culturally and socially predetermined. He lives in Geneva and has lived in Europe since a boy of twelve, about the same age as Daisy's rambunctious brother, Randolph. Daisy's beauty and natural good taste in clothes no less than her enthusiasm and spontaneity do not change the fact that, like her mother and her absent, "downtown" father too busy working to come abroad, she inhabits an intellectual vacuum: mother and daughter in central and southern Europe can share as conversational topics only Randolph's antics and Schenectady's Dr. Davis, and Daisy believes Europe is "nothing but hotels." Although much attracted to her, Winterbourne recognizes eventually that she is "nothing every way if not light"—a "lightweight" in Jamesian lexicon usually meaning someone without sufficient consciousness. Daisy's own "queer mixture" incorporates her "natural elegance," commensurate with the flower for which she is named, and it includes her nighttime martyrdom symbolized by the same flower, the "day's eye," which is eclipsed at night; but it also comprises her "chatter," stubbornness, foolishness, and, on occasion, a sort of tactless crudity. The emphasis in Daisy Miller remains at the level of social determinism, and it is in that respect fundamentally what its companion tale immediately following it is called, "An International Episode," but with an extremely crucial difference necessary for grasping James's internationalism. In Daisy Miller he portrays the conflict and mutual misunderstanding that arises not between Americans and Europeans but between the "natural" American free spirit and the complicated response to that spirit by the Europeanized American, Winterbourne, who is at once attracted and repelled by it, as well as by the other Europeanized Americans who are merely repelled and think Daisy "of the last crudity" and a "little abomination."

In fact, Winterbourne's tale, if as James's "register" it is his tale—is really about the making of a Europeanized American, his ultimately siding with Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello against Daisy, his rejection of his own attraction to her "natural elegance" or what he earlier calls her "queer little native grace." That sad and deleterious process of rejection completes itself by the very end, when he returns to Geneva and to a "very elever foreign lady," the antithesis of a Daisy Miller. His name of course insinuates such moral culpability, for the chilly Winterbourne does in a real sense "kill" the innocent and vulnerable Daisy, especially when he espies her at the Colosseum with Giovanelli and turns against her: Daisy herself cries out, "Why it was Mr. Winterbourne. He saw me and he cuts me dead!"—her colloquialism doubling as James's metaphor for the death of a flower. Winterbourne's moral failure is underscored by James in numerous ways, including the young man's eventual reaction of "horror"—the very word used of Daisy by Mrs. Costello early on—and also his "relief" at finally deciding that Daisy "had no shades [and] was a mere black little blot." Shades and nuances comprise a virtual microcosm of James's own epistemology and aesthetic practice, and therefore as "register" Winterbourne's relinquishing of "shades" at this critical moment in the story in effect pits him against everything James stands for as a writer and humanitarian sensibility.

There are very many other such instances where James's verbal patterns serve to indict Winterbourne. He himself admits that he has "lived too long in foreign parts" when he realizes from the lips of Mr. Giovanelli, ironically the one real European of the story, that Daisy was "the most innocent." One of the innumerable verbal signifiers for Winterbourne's flawed character occurs when James with exquisitely deceptive simplicity says of him that at the Colosseum he sought "a further reach of vision, intending the next moment a hasty retreat." This is yet another instance in James of "reflexive" or "ricochet" language: for while the literal meaning is that Winterbourne intends to leave the monument quickly lest he become infected with the malarial disease, the deeper meaning, conveyed in subsidiary metaphor, is that in the course of his story Winterbourne first expands his "vision" by his positive response to Daisy and then "retreats" from his enlarged horizon by rejecting her. In point of fact, James drives home this kind of moral reflexivity when he writes of Winterbourne's Colosseum repudiation of Daisy's "shades," "He stood there looking at her, looking at her companion too, and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely he himself must have been more brightly presented." Any reader who assumes this is only a description of Winterbourne's visibility in moonlight simply does not comprehend James's Emily Dickinson-like layering of the figurative within the literal. Not only is the young man "shown" in the fullness of his own moral deformity, he even fails to realize that Daisy at that moment is visually enshrouded in the tenebrous "shades" he has just now abruptly denied to her character.

Although Daisy Miller remains a comedy of manners, James's later revisions coat it with a symbolic and poetic overlay, one that not only emphasizes her charm and spontaneity and the disagreeableness of her censors, but also stresses her obvious ties to nature, ties that, inevitably, also betoken her subjugation to its laws and processes. The "Roman fever" or "miasma" she catches in her innocence is worldly evil, which is pervasive, whether she knows it or not. Her instincts against conformity are most valid when she tried to coax Winterbourne out of his "stiffness," just as his are most valid when he senses that, with all her vibrant parts, she yet fails to "compose." It is not Daisy's directness, her fresh beauty, or obvious lack of ulterior design in her negotiations with people, any more than, say, Billy Budd's, that tell against her. Rather, she is unfortunately as devoid of a real inward life, as she is of any guile. That void is filled up instead with capriciousness, chatter, and the unexamined desire for a "fuss." Daisy's will is at once strong and weak by virtue of the indistinctness of her aims and the absence of any critical reflection of them.

Thus the story remains a true dialectical inquiry from the early James and a penetrating examination of the internationalism that would be the hallmark of his finest novels throughout his career. Although it remains implicit, the iconography of this tale and of James's international theme tells us that nature requires art, activity and energy require meaning and consciousness, innocence requires experience, freedom demands an awareness of life's limitations, and spontaneity must always inhabit a world of history and custom. James's great early success in Daisy Miller with his distinctive social realism and his figure of the young American woman does not prevent our seeing in retrospect that we have also a case of quasi-tragedy through cultural implantation; or, to put it another way, a social comedy of errors with a darkening and lyric edge. This retrospective view is also reinforced by our awareness that in The Portrait of a Lady Henry James was soon to deepen his generic Daisy Miller type into Isabel Archer and make her, rather than a male character, the reflecting consciousness of her own "history."