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Show always to appear in tl:e simple string of moonstones worn at her first dance. From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found himself involved in a highly practical examination of the scope and limits of permissible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often revised their verse with good eftect. Why should the novelist not have equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a conviction that it cannot be improved. It was Henry James's profound conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every sentence. Not to revise would have been to confe•s to a loss of faith in himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty years in the wilderness of British and American misconceptions without yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing temrters should have lost faith in himself. But he was well aware that the game of revision must be played with a due observance of the rules. He knew that no novelist can safely afford to repudiate his fundamental understanding with his readers that the tale he has to tell is at least as true as history and the figures he has set in motion at least as independently alive as the people we see in offices and motor-cars. He allowed himself few freedoms with any recorded appearances or actions, although occasionally the temptation to correct a false gesture, to make it "right", was too strong to be resisted. We have a pleasant instance of this correction in the second version of" The American". At her first appearance, the old Marquise de Belle15arde had ~cknowledged the introduction of Newman by returnmg his handshake "with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." In the later edition she behaves differently. "Newman came sufficiently near to the old lady by the fire to take in that she would offer I' him no handshake .... Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him and refused what she did refuse with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the dauo-hter of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." There were good reasons why the Marquise should have denied Newman a welcoming handshake. Her attitude throughout the book was to be consistently hostile and should never have been compromised by the significantly British grip. Yet it is almost shocking to see her snatching back her first card after playing it for so many years. She was to perform less credible actions than shaking hands with an innocent American, as her progenitor knew very well. He invited his readers, in the preface to The Jlmerican, to observe the impossible behaviour of the noble Bellegarde family, but he realised that since they had been begotten in absurdity the Bellegardes could under no stress of revision achieve a very solid humanity. The best he could do for them was to let a faint consciousness flush the mind of Valentin, the only ,!etached member of the family. In the first edition Valentin warned his friend of the Bellegarde peculiarities with the easy good faith of the younger Henry James under the spell of the magic word "Europe". "My mother is strange, my brother is strange, and I verily believe I am stranger than either. Old trees have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets." To this statement he added in the revised version: "We're fit for a museum or a Balzac novel." A comparable growth of ironic perception was allowed to Roderick Hudson, whose comment on Rowland's admission of his heroically silent passion for Mary Garland, "It's like something in a novel," was altered to: "It's like something in a bad novel." rs |