Hints from Horace to Childe Harold. James was a particularly erring critic when it came to his own writings. This fact is attested to by his rewriting and ruining some of his best early stories. The tales in this volume are not apprentice work. They show the hand of the master. True, there is the influence of Hawthorne and George Eliot in a strong degree and a romanticism is occasionally indulged in from which the later James would have recoiled, but the fiction is solid and above all, entertaining. The author cherished a kindly feeling for these tales all his life, and in the last of his autobiographical works published—Middle Years—he tells with gusto how Tennyson highly praised before him one of these tales written just before James went to Europe in the spring of 1869.
James has also left us a record of the affection he entertained for them and also suggests that their origin had as a basis actual experiences. He writes in Notes of a Son and Brother, page 436, in speaking of his early tales, published during the period represented by the ones in this volume:
"I of course really and truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else whatever—cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything but them. These secrets of imaginative life were in fact more various than I may dream of trying to tell; they referred to actual concretions of existence as well as to the suppositious."
This collection is a resurrecting of literary material whose loss has been and would have continued to be unfortunate for American literature.
