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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2021
It has been observed that Henry James's prefaces for the New York Edition arc often unreliable as guides to the finished stories because they are so concerned with the germinations of his ideas. The very emphasis upon beginnings is presumably James's way of insisting upon the distance and the labor between the germ and the maturity of a work, a point which he explicitly invites us to ponder in the Preface to The Wings of the Dove:
... some acute mind ought surely to have worked out by this time the “law” of the degree in which the artist's energy fairly depends upon his fallibility. How much and how often, and in what connexions and with what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe, that of his prime object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute for it-or in other words at all appreciably to exist? He places, after an earnest survey, the piers of his bridge-he has at least sounded deep enough, heaven knows, for their brave position; yet the bridge spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of the original design.
page 371 note 1 The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1948), p. 297.
page 371 note 2 The Notebooks of Henry Jomes, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock (New York, 1947). These entries are: (1) 12 Nov. 1892, the first notation of the donnée with a brief sketch of its possibilities; (2) 26 Aug. 1893, a short entry (“I am putting my hand to the idea of the little story on the subject of the partagé child”), touching on its principal interests and tinkering with the basic plot; (3) 22 Dec. 1895, again putting his pen to this subject for a 10,000 word story, concentrates on the interest in the story and sketches a ten-chapter scenario; (4) 22 Sept. 1896, a brief entry noting that he has written the first four chapters; (5) 26 Oct. 1896 (at this point he has apparently finished eight chapters, and pauses to do a more elaborate scenario); (6) 21 Dec. 1896, an entry concerning the immente value of the scenic method and mentioning by the way that he has still to do 10,000 words of What Maisie Knew.
page 374 note 3 What Maisie Knew, Vol. XI of The New York Edition, pp. vi-vii. Subsequent quotations from the Preface and the novel will be indicated parenthetically in the text. The New York Edition will be used because its stylistic revisions do not affect the subject of this paper.
page 378 note 4 By autumn 1896 James was apparently thinking of the story at “a 25,000 word novelette,” ai reported in a note in the Bookman, XI (Dec. 1896), 59.
page 383 note 5 The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), I, 293.