A Landscape Painter - By Henry James - PREFACE - THE four tales comprising this volume are printed now for the first time in America in book form. All of them were written by Henry James before he had attained his twenty-fifth year. They are remarkable for their maturity of thought and clarity of style. It has been the general opinion that James, like George Eliot, achieved his Iiterary development rather slowly, since it was known that he was thirty-two years of age when The Passionate Pilgrim, his first collection of tales, and Rodrick Hudson, his first long novel, were published. As a matter of fact, however, Jarnes had been writing for the leading magazines since he was twenty-two. The first story in this volume, A Landscape Painter, ap- peared in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1866, and was the second story James had published up to that time. The tales in this volume are among the most precious in our literature, and James himself thought highly of them, since he collected them in...