Lady Barbarina

(1922)

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. -- from the Author's Preface

HENRY JAMES.

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