This was the first of James's tales to be published in England, and it is his first nouvelle, perhaps his favourite form: in the Preface to The Lesson of the Master he waxes lyrical about "the beautiful and blest nouvelle." Among the many merits of the tale is its architectonic structure. None of the scenes is set in Geneva, but Winterbourne, the central intelligence, studies there, and its presence is powerfully felt throughout as a citadel of European protocol, though this is enforced, ironically enough, by none more strictly than the expatriate Americans: social proprieties and forms of courtship are "stiff," which is a nodal term, and Geneva is of course spectrally presided over by the figure of Calvin. In Rome, the setting for the second half of the tale, Genevan proprieties are reinforced by shades of Papal and Imperial authority, and it is there that the pathetically unorganized, unformulated American "sense of freedom", associated with "innocence" and embodied by Daisy, is pitted against this adamantine power. There is no doubt where our sympathies lie.

The unpretentious heroine's name is Annie P. Miller; her familiar name associates her with all that is "natural," universal, and perennial, though her action is no stronger than a flower. The "[child] of nature and of freedom" is deplored and virtually disowned by her expatriate countrywomen as "common" and has on her side only her own ignorant but engaging vitality and courage, feebly supported by the unauthoritative forms of distant Schenectady, New York, where her father stays, running a "big business." He leaves Daisy's travels in Europe to her mother, who is a passive nonentity, and her nine-year-old brother, who is amusingly undisciplined and assertive. Even representatives of New York and New England society seem to range themselves with Genevan rigidities—James's father once described Calvin as "a sort of model Bostonian"—and this is a significant and rich complication of James's international theme.

The characters and action are arranged in relation to the two poles of Geneva and Schenectady: Daisy's mother is in contrast to Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello; Randolph, Daisy's free-ranging young brother, is at a hotel where "Polish boys [walk] about, held by the hand, with their governors." This polarity is dramatized in the friction in the mind and conscience of Winterbourne, a Europeanized American; the oppositions are much more effective than they were in "Mme. de Mauves," where the characters were either idealized or stereotyped and the conflict melodramatic rather than internal and convincing.

The "Genevese mind," given support and force by a sort of "German earnestness" and "narrowness and intolerance"—qualities soon to be given prominence in Confidence—is epitomized in Mrs. Costello, social arbiter even though an invalid, who holds court sitting, significantly, "on a little portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters" of St. Peter's, attended by "a dozen of the American colonists in Rome." Rome and St. Peter's have already appeared prominently in James's fiction. The ways in which James uses famous places and monuments as dramatic presences show the benefits of his sentimental tourism and also the progress of his artistic skill. The historic reverberations that were contrived with ingenuity in "Travelling Companions" are now, in Daisy Miller, being orchestrated with dramatic force. Like the narrator in "Four Meetings," but with a less questionable motive, Winterbourne tells Daisy the "history of Bonivard," which goes "into one ear and out of the other"—Daisy is different from Caroline Spencer—but, ironically, it was she who in the first place wanted so "dreadfully" to visit "that old castle," the Chateau de Chillon, quite oblivious of the free spirit that was extinguished there, as hers is to be in Rome. Toward the end, Winterbourne comes upon Daisy and her Italian escort, Giovanelli—the couple that respectable society will not receive—when she is seeing "the Colosseum by moonlight" and in fact catching the Roman fever that will kill her; the irony is patent and poignant when Daisy says of Winterbourne, "He looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs." She is a different kind of martyr. James is squeezing every drop from the Roman orange.

Less obvious but not less judicious is the new and convincing balance James strikes in the international theme. Whereas infamy tended in the earlier stories to be located in the European upper-class (Clement Searle's English cousin, M. de Mauves, or the Vicomte de Treuil) and virtue to be monopolized by Americans adventuring at their peril in Europe, now the evil is less melodramatic but more tragic, being rooted in this instance in the unfeeling stiffness of the American colony in Rome, though Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker are not by nature malicious or cynical and indeed seem to have Daisy's best interests at heart. Moreover, an ironic light, quite absent in the case, for example, of Euphemia de Mauves, plays about Daisy, for whom our sympathy and admiration are aroused, so the justice is more even-handed and compelling. Daisy's appendages, her brother Randolph and her mother, are even ridiculous in their ignorance and gaucherie. They ironically illustrate the severe limitations of Daisy's culture and reinforce the gentle comedy of Daisy's innocence as well as the tragic pathos of her fate.

James uses Daisy's brother Randolph to satirize the blinkered self-regard and complacency of some Americans: "American men are the best," he says. James might even be making fun of his earlier international tales. Mrs. Miller is absurdly naive, ignorant, lacking in curiosity and taste, and utterly unconscious of the rocks on which Daisy's slender craft will founder: "We only want to see the principal [castles]. We visited several in England."

It is not only that James is more even-handed but also that he hits on characteristics that struck readers, especially European readers perhaps, as typically American. To a European, Randolph's independence would be indiscipline and impertinence, and Daisy would seem uncouth, or at least ungracious, when she deplores "those dreadful old men that explain about the pictures and things," or is so frank in "persiflage," and so brazenly open about her volitions: "Don't you want to take me out in a boat?" she says to Winterbourne. But the characters are American in the very tones of their voices, whereas the speech of Clement Searle, Theobald, and Eugene Pickering was not distinct from that of the Europeans. Consider the compactness, frankness, and dryness of Randolph's one-liner: he says that the ship the City of Richmond was "the best place I've seen. . . . Only it was turned the wrong way." When Winterbourne says politely that he would have liked to call on Daisy sooner in Rome but that he has "only just stepped out of the train," Daisy's disconcerting rejoinder is, "You must have stayed in the train a good while after it stopped!" This is indeed American tactlessness!

In this regard, a letter James wrote to Howells on 24 October 1876, not long before he left Paris for his final domiciliary perch in London, marks an important change in his art that allows one to see that he was ending one phase of his career and beginning another. Howells had argued for a different end for The American, wanting a marriage in the end between the American Newman and the French noblewoman, and James answers: "The whole point of the dénouement was, in the conception of the tale, in his losing her. . . . My subject was: an American letting the insolent foreigner go, out of his good nature, after the insolent foreigner had wronged him and he had held him in his power. To show the good nature I must show the wrong and the wrong is of course that the American is cheated out of Mme de Cintré." James might have gone on to say, as he did in the Preface to The American, that the work is a romance. James seems to have turned the crucial corner from romance to realism in his international tales when he wrote "Four Meetings" and Daisy Miller. Again it is in his tales that James conducts his experiments and makes his advances.

Even if they were wrong, it is significant that James and Howells both thought that Lippincott's Magazine had declined Daisy Miller because "it was seen to be presenting an unfavourable image of American girlhood"; in fact the satire is mild and tolerant and clearly overridden by the author's approval and affection, which is to be distinguished from the attitude of Winterbourne. The portrait of Daisy shows some of the qualities in her that James in propria persona felt in his large New York cousinage, the Emmet families; if they belonged to a somewhat more sophisticated society than Daisy does, they nevertheless had, in their "singularly natural way," some of what we see in Daisy, who says, "If I didn't introduce my gentlemen friends to mother . . . I shouldn't think I was natural." As James explained to Mrs. Lynn Linton in 1880, "Poor little Daisy Miller was, as I understand her, above all things innocent." In this respect one could say of James's presentation of Daisy what James said about Thackeray's of Becky Sharp: the "satire . . . always goes hand in hand with a certain tender, sympathetic comprehension of her, with the thoroughly human tone which belongs to perfect insight"; two years later, in 1875, James commented on "how humanly, how generously" George Eliot exhibits the ladies of the "ridiculous" and "disagreeable" Dodson family. James not only borrowed from but successfully emulated writers he admired.

In Daisy Miller James brings Americanness and Innocence together very convincingly. Daisy's innocence is quite different from Euphemia de Mauves's, and different again from that of the later exemplars of innocent young womanhood, Isabel Archer and Milly Theale. She does not have their intelligence, education, or cultivated sensibility, and because of this she is all the more vulnerable and evokes all the more pathos. European readers could be moved by her even while they were entertaining somewhat superior and patronizing attitudes to the naive and immodest American girl, thus flattering themselves and having their preconceptions confirmed by a writer who was himself a good American. James no doubt amused himself as well as his readers with this play on national traits, but the strength of the tale derives from the deeper sources of James's imagination that sprang from a conception of Innocence betrayed. As we move from "Four Meetings" to Daisy Miller, we cross the unmarked boundary between pathos and tragedy and reach the deep waters that will be plumbed later, in James's greatest fiction. As James said to Howells in a letter written about a year before Daisy Miller appeared: "I suspect it is the tragedies in life that arrest my attention . . . and say more to my imagination."

It is in such mundane-sounding matters as technique and method, however, that Daisy Miller has perhaps its highest merit and its deepest interest for the student of James's career. And here we turn from Daisy to Winterbourne. He is not the narrator but the centre of consciousness and a participant, and thus subject to the reader's scrutiny. Winterbourne is an American too, but, unlike Daisy, he has "imagination and . . . sensibility," or at least the cultivation that comes from education and a knowledge of Europe; he has been absorbed into Europe's artificial and structured society. In this way he is a lapsed American, "dishabituated to the American tone," which means that he has almost lost his innocence, but not quite, for he can still at their first meeting respond to Daisy's American quality: he realizes that hers "was not . . . what would have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl's eyes were singularly honest and fresh."

Winterbourne's "old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism" goes together with his innate characteristics, which are hinted at by his name rather less obtrusively than was the character of the New England town by the name "Grimwinter" in "Four Meetings." Though susceptible to Daisy's charm, he is emotionally inhibited and timid; this reinforces his Genevan wariness, and from the outset we find him wondering "whether he had gone too far" and, with barely adequate cause, he tentatively decides "he must advance farther, rather than retreat."

How far and how quickly James has come in fitting the means of a narrator to the ends of his art is shown by a comparison of Winterbourne and his function with the unnamed and rather featureless narrator and his ineffectual role in "Crawford's Consistency," published two years earlier. The latter is merely an observer and, though he has sympathy, is scarcely involved in Crawford's misfortunes, indeed he does not even understand how they come about. Winterbourne is different. From the beginning he is "amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed," and what he sees and feels fuels an urgent, unceasing, and never resolved debate in his mind and conscience, in this he is like Longmore in "Mme. de Mauves." He is very much involved, even to the point of wondering whether he is in love with Daisy and should court her. On the one hand, he thinks Daisy is merely a "flirt"—the word recurs frequently—"a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person," but then, as we have seen, he thinks again and again that she is as "innocent" as she is beautiful. And, when Winterbourne does "advance farther" and says, "I should much rather go to Chillon with you" than stay to look after Randolph, he is taking up a position that entails responsibilities. At Vevey, in the first half of the tale, he defends Daisy against his aunt Mrs. Costello's acerbic comments, and in Rome, where he is in somewhat hes nt pursuit of Daisy, he is really on the spot.

It is interesting to follow in some detail Winterbourne's feelings and inner struggle in Rome through several pages. In spite of the admonition of Mrs. Walker, he allows Daisy to conscript him to take her to the Pincio, a very public promenade, so that she can meet Giovanelli. Winterbourne, as usual, is complaisant. Still he resents the Italian as a rival, although he has not, despite some encouragement, declared his affection for Daisy and therefore has no claim to assert, and it is this jealousy that partly explains why Winterbourne is highly critical of Giovanelli and thus of Daisy too: "Winterbourne felt a superior indignation at his own lovely fellow-countrywoman's not knowing the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one." He is soon wondering whether Daisy is guilty of "extreme cynicism": it is impossible to regard her as a "well-conducted young lady; she was wanting in a certain indispensable delicacy." The countermovement sets in before the end of the paragraph, however: "But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence."

Patrolling the Pincio in her carriage in the supervisory function that she has arrogated to herself, Mrs. Walker beckons to Winterbourne. Amenable and docile again, he detaches himself from Daisy and Giovanelli and joins Mrs. Walker; although he objects to Mrs. Walker's tactic of ordering Daisy away from Giovanelli, he does not block it and is in fact the bearer of the summons to Daisy. In the end he merely looks on as Daisy openly and at great length defies Mrs. Walker. His attempt to be neutral and evade his responsibility is not successful, because Daisy embroils him: she turns to him and appeals to him for judgment. He "hesitated greatly" but finally suggests that Daisy "should get into the carriage" and submit to Mrs. Walker and conventional respectability. Thus, when it comes to the test, Winterbourne fails Daisy. This is underlined when his attempt to join Daisy is stopped by Mrs. Walker's declaration "that if he refused her this favour [of remaining with her] she would never speak to him again"; when he tries to explain to Daisy that he must accede to Mrs. Walker's "imperious claim upon his society," she "only shook his hand, hardly looking at him." Seeing Daisy and Giovanelli close together under a parasol, he "lingered a moment, then he began to walk. But he walked—not towards the couple with the parasol; towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs. Costello." In poor Winterbourne's oscillating between Geneva and his own timid spontaneous feelings, James effectively dramatizes his dilemma and his impotence.

James intensifies the drama. Excluded from "respectable" society and by Winterbourne's desertion virtually confined to the company of Giovanelli, whom she must meet outdoors, Daisy is on the path to the Colosseum by moonlight and to her death, but Winterbourne still does nothing to help her. That she is drawn to him is shown by the message she sends him from her deathbed. It is true that he "went often to ask for news of her." but this is too little too late. She dies, leaving him with feelings of guilt and remorse. When he bitterly reproaches Giovanelli for taking Daisy to "that fatal place." he is in part trying to comfort himself, trying to minimize the "mistake" he realizes he has made. He is being rather hard on himself, but it was a dereliction or failure of courage and conviction in an intelligent and sympathetic young man who, like Henry James (one is tempted to say), is by temperament cautious and circumspect, heedful of authority and convention, it is the cynical Giovanelli who is most culpable: when he decides he stands no chance with her, he does not prevent the headstrong girl from risking the dread Roman fever.

Winterbourne is an advance on the narrator in "Four Meetings" because the shortcomings in the latter's conduct are clearly visible in the first scene, whereas Winterbourne's position and views have at first no such obvious flaws. In fact the reader will probably tend at first, in the Vevey scenes, to endorse his judgement that Daisy is "a pretty American flirt." Winterbourne makes his discovery gradually, and, as his view changes, so will that of the reader, who will therefore pass through an analogous experience; we begin to see the truth of Quentin Anderson's perception: James "is . . . aware of the arc which separates the reader and himself. . . . He seeks to diminish that arc, so that the end of the story takes place at the moment when your position coincides with his" [Introduction, Henry James: Selected Short Stories, 1957]. Thus the reader is drawn into the action, following the centre of consciousness, which serves one of the important purposes of the chorus in classical drama. By 1878, with Daisy Miller: A Study, James had forged a technique that would serve him throughout his greatest work.

According to Aziz, James wrote Daisy Miller "in the early months of 1878." It is not surprising therefore that a little earlier, in a letter to Howells of 30 March 1877, we should hear—when he is referring to his next novel, The Europeans—not the ironic self-deprecating note of the past, but a new and exuberant confidence: "You shall have the brightest possible sun-spot for the four-number tale of 1878. It shall fairly put your readers eyes out. The idea of doing what you propose much pleases me; and I agree to squeeze my buxom muse, as you happily call her, into a hundred of your pages." Writing in a soberly prophetic vein to his brother William from London on 28 January 1878, when he was perhaps already at work on Daisy Miller, James said: "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."