Preface

Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of "The Ambassadors,"

which first appeared in twelve numbers of _The North American Review_

(1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation

involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of

Book Fifth, for the reader's benefit, into as few words as possible--

planted or "sunk," stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current,

almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition

of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion,

and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet

lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case,

in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham

on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he

yields, for his young friend's enlightenment, to the charming admonition

of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact

that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him AS

a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could

desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of

"The Ambassadors," his fingers close, before he has done, round the

stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues

officiously to present to us. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you

have your life. If you haven't had that what HAVE you had? I'm too

old--too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses;

make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom;

therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion.

I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it,

and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like

so long as you don't make it. For it WAS a mistake. Live, live!"

Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to the impressed youth, whom

he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the word "mistake" occurs

several times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarks--

which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels attached

to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps

after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up

to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible question.

WOULD there yet perhaps be time for reparation?--reparation, that is,

for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to

say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even himself had

so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all events SEES;

so that the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say

the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of this

process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again

into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the

spoken word, for I was to take the image over exactly as I

happened to have met it. A friend had repeated to me, with great

appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction,

much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Strether's

melancholy eloquence might be imputed--said as chance would have,

and so easily might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden

attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday afternoon of summer,

many persons of great interest being present. The observation

there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the "note"

that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purpose--had contained

in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the time

and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered

and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may

call the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the

tideway; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the

noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What

amplified the hint to more than the bulk of hints in general was

the gift with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token were

sealed up values infinitely precious. There was of course the seal

to break and each item of the packet to count over and handle and

estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint, all the elements

of a situation of the sort most to my taste were there. I could

even remember no occasion on which, so confronted, I had found it

of a livelier interest to take stock, in this fashion, of

suggested wealth. For I think, verily, that there are degrees of

merit in subjects--in spite of the fact that to treat even one of

the most ambiguous with due decency we must for the time, for the

feverish and prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its

dignity as POSSIBLY absolute. What it comes to, doubtless, is that

even among the supremely good--since with such alone is it one's

theory of one's honour to be concerned--there is an ideal BEAUTY

of goodness the invoked action of which is to raise the artistic

faith to its maximum. Then truly, I hold, one's theme may be said

to shine, and that of "The Ambassadors," I confess, wore this glow

for me from beginning to end. Fortunately thus I am able to

estimate this as, frankly, quite the best, "all round," of all my

productions; any failure of that justification would have made

such an extreme of complacency publicly fatuous.

I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective

intermittence, never one of those alarms as for a suspected hollow

beneath one's feet, a felt ingratitude in the scheme adopted,

under which confidence fails and opportunity seems but to mock.

If the motive of "The Wings of the Dove," as I have noted, was to

worry me at moments by a sealing-up of its face--though without

prejudice to its again, of a sudden, fairly grimacing with

expression--so in this other business I had absolute conviction

and constant clearness to deal with; it had been a frank

proposition, the whole bunch of data, installed on my premises

like a monotony of fine weather. (The order of composition, in

these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of

publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared

as the later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could

feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference

between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a

difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel

it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out,

in this full and sound sense of the matter; it shed from any side

I could turn it to the same golden glow. I rejoiced in the promise

of a hero so mature, who would give me thereby the more to bite

into--since it's only into thickened motive and accumulated

character, I think, that the painter of life bites more than a

little. My poor friend should have accumulated character,

certainly; or rather would be quite naturally and handsomely

possessed of it, in the sense that he would have, and would always

have felt he had, imagination galore, and that this yet wouldn't

have wrecked him. It was immeasurable, the opportunity to "do" a

man of imagination, for if THERE mightn't be a chance to "bite,"

where in the world might it be? This personage of course, so

enriched, wouldn't give me, for his type, imagination in

PREDOMINANCE or as his prime faculty, nor should I, in view of

other matters, have found that convenient. So particular a luxury

--some occasion, that is, for study of the high gift in SUPREME

command of a case or of a career--would still doubtless come on

the day I should be ready to pay for it; and till then might, as

from far back, remain hung up well in view and just out of reach.

The comparative case meanwhile would serve--it was only on the

minor scale that I had treated myself even to comparative cases.

I was to hasten to add however that, happy stopgaps as the minor

scale had thus yielded, the instance in hand should enjoy the

advantage of the full range of the major; since most immediately

to the point was the question of that SUPPLEMENT of situation

logically involved in our gentleman's impulse to deliver himself

in the Paris garden on the Sunday afternoon--or if not involved by

strict logic then all ideally and enchantingly implied in it. (I

say "ideally," because I need scarce mention that for development,

for expression of its maximum, my glimmering story was, at the

earliest stage, to have nipped the thread of connexion with the

possibilities of the actual reported speaker. HE remains but the

happiest of accidents; his actualities, all too definite,

precluded any range of possibilities; it had only been his

charming office to project upon that wide field of the artist's

vision--which hangs there ever in place like the white sheet

suspended for the figures of a child's magic-lantern--a more

fantastic and more moveable shadow.) No privilege of the teller of

tales and the handler of puppets is more delightful, or has more

of the suspense and the thrill of a game of difficulty

breathlessly played, than just this business of looking for the

unseen and the occult, in a scheme half-grasped, by the light or,

so to speak, by the clinging scent, of the gage already in hand.

No dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and

the rag of association can ever, for "excitement," I judge, have

bettered it at its best. For the dramatist always, by the very law

of his genius, believes not only in a possible right issue from

the rightly-conceived tight place; he does much more than this--he

believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious "tightness"

of the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any

respectable hint. It being thus the respectable hint that I had

with such avidity picked up, what would be the story to which it

would most inevitably form the centre? It is part of the charm

attendant on such questions that the "story," with the omens true,

as I say, puts on from this stage the authenticity of concrete

existence. It then is, essentially--it begins to be, though it may

more or less obscurely lurk, so that the point is not in the least

what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably,

where to put one's hand on it.

In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that

admirable mixture for salutary application which we know as art.

Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute full-handed

that ingredient; it plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in

the garden of life--which material elsewhere grown is stale and

uneatable. But it has no sooner done this than it has to take

account of a PROCESS--from which only when it's the basest of the

servants of man, incurring ignominious dismissal with no

"character," does it, and whether under some muddled pretext of

morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The process,

that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is

another affair--with which the happy luck of mere finding has

little to do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well

over; that quest of the subject as a whole by "matching," as the

ladies say at the shops, the big piece with the snippet, having

ended, we assume, with a capture. The subject is found, and if the

problem is then transferred to the ground of what to do with it

the field opens out for any amount of doing. This is precisely the

infusion that, as I submit, completes the strong mixture. It is on

the other hand the part of the business that can least be likened

to the chase with horn and hound. It's all a sedentary part--

involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the highest

salary paid to a chief accountant. Not, however, that the chief

accountant hasn't HIS gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at

least the equilibrium of the artist's state dwells less, surely,

in the further delightful complications he can smuggle in than in

those he succeeds in keeping out. He sows his seed at the risk of

too thick a crop; wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who

audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any price. In consequence

of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to

have my choice of narrating my "hunt" for Lambert Strether, of

describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend's

anecdote, or of reporting on the occurrences subsequent to that

triumph. But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in

each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this

licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or

conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of

one's story. It depends so on what one means by that equivocal

quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to

the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.

I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist,

and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as

really the more objective of the two.

The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour

there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have

been then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically

and, as the artless craft of comedy has it, "led up" to; the

probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a

predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated. Where

has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing (as we

Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our foredoomed clutch of exotic

aids to expression) in that galere? To answer these questions

plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in the

witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other words

satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his "peculiar

tone," was to possess myself of the entire fabric. At the same

time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a certain principle

of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his peculiar tone

without a reason; it would take a felt predicament or a false

position to give him so ironic an accent. One hadn't been noting

"tones" all one's life without recognising when one heard it the

voice of the false position. The dear man in the Paris garden was

then admirably and unmistakeably IN one--which was no small point

gained; what next accordingly concerned us was the determination

of THIS identity. One could only go by probabilities, but there

was the advantage that the most general of the probabilities were

virtual certainties. Possessed of our friend's nationality, to

start with, there was a general probability in his narrower

localism; which, for that matter, one had really but to keep under

the lens for an hour to see it give up its secrets. He would have

issued, our rueful worthy, from the very heart of New England--at

the heels of which matter of course a perfect train of secrets

tumbled for me into the light. They had to be sifted and sorted,

and I shall not reproduce the detail of that process; but

unmistakeably they were all there, and it was but a question,

auspiciously, of picking among them. What the "position" would

infallibly be, and why, on his hands, it had turned "false"--these

inductive steps could only be as rapid as they were distinct. I

accounted for everything--and "everything" had by this time become

the most promising quantity--by the view that he had come to Paris

in some state of mind which was literally undergoing, as a result

of new and unexpected assaults and infusions, a change almost from

hour to hour. He had come with a view that might have been figured

by a clear green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the

liquid, once poured into the open cup of APPLICATION, once exposed

to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red,

or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple,

to black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented

perhaps, for all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so

violent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise

and alarm; whereby the SITUATION clearly would spring from the

play of wildness and the development of extremes. I saw in a

moment that, should this development proceed both with force and

logic, my "story" would leave nothing to be desired. There is

always, of course, for the story-teller, the irresistible

determinant and the incalculable advantage of his interest in the

story AS SUCH; it is ever, obviously, overwhelmingly, the prime

and precious thing (as other than this I have never been able to

see it); as to which what makes for it, with whatever headlong

energy, may be said to pale before the energy with which it simply

makes for itself. It rejoices, none the less, at its best, to seem

to offer itself in a light, to seem to know, and with the very

last knowledge, what it's about--liable as it yet is at moments to

be caught by us with its tongue in its cheek and absolutely no

warrant but its splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the

impudence is always there--there, so to speak, for grace and

effect and ALLURE; there, above all, because the Story is just the

spoiled child of art, and because, as we are always disappointed

when the pampered don't "play up," we like it, to that extent, to

look all its character. It probably does so, in truth, even when

we most flatter ourselves that we negotiate with it by treaty.

All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable,

placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional

assurance--an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with

logic had I been in fact too stupid for my clue. Never,

positively, none the less, as the links multiplied, had I felt

less stupid than for the determination of poor Strether's errand

and for the apprehension of his issue. These things continued to

fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form,

even while their commentator scratched his head about them; he

easily sees now that they were always well in advance of him. As

the case completed itself he had in fact, from a good way behind,

to catch up with them, breathless and a little flurried, as he

best could. THE false position, for our belated man of the world--

belated because he had endeavoured so long to escape being one,

and now at last had really to face his doom--the false position

for him, I say, was obviously to have presented himself at the

gate of that boundless menagerie primed with a moral scheme of the

most approved pattern which was yet framed to break down on any

approach to vivid facts; that is to any at all liberal

appreciation of them. There would have been of course the case of

the Strether prepared, wherever presenting himself, only to judge

and to feel meanly; but HE would have moved for me, I confess,

enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual man's note, from the

first of our seeing it struck, is the note of discrimination, just

as his drama is to become, under stress, the drama of

discrimination. It would have been his blest imagination, we have

seen, that had already helped him to discriminate; the element

that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I

have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance.

Yet here it was, at the same time, just here, that a shade for a

moment fell across the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes

of the human comedy, that people's moral scheme DOES break down in

Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of

thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical

persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable

catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself up

about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL association, one of the

vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I

think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The

revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most

interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any

betise of the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown

forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong

trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to

bring him out, through winding passages, through alternations of

darkness and light, very much IN Paris, but with the surrounding

scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than

had been dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another

surrounding scene would have done as well for our show could it

have represented a place in which Strether's errand was likely to

lie and his crisis to await him. The LIKELY place had the great

merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too many

involved--not at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and

delaying difficulties--in positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's

interesting relation, his so interesting complexity of relations.

Strether's appointed stage, in fine, could be but Chad's most

luckily selected one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for

circumjacent charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn

of his mind, most "authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis

would most find HIM; as well as where, for that matter, the former's

whole analytic faculty would be led such a wonderful dance.

"The Ambassadors" had been, all conveniently, "arranged for"; its

first appearance was from month to month, in the _North American

Review_ during 1903, and I had been open from far back to any

pleasant provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one's

actively adopting--so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional

law--recurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here

regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude jolts--

having found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every question

of form and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the

major propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed; that of

employing but one centre and keeping it all within my hero's compass.

The thing was to be so much this worthy's intimate adventure that

even the projection of his consciousness upon it from beginning to end

without intermission or deviation would probably still leave a part of

its value for him, and a fortiori for ourselves, unexpressed.

I might, however, express every grain of it that there would be

room for--on condition of contriving a splendid particular economy.

Other persons in no small number were to people the scene, and each

with his or her axe to grind, his or her situation to treat, his or her

coherency not to fail of, his or her relation to my leading motive,

in a word, to establish and carry on. But Strether's sense of these

things, and Strether's only, should avail me for showing them;

I should know them but through his more or less groping knowledge

of them, since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting

motions, and a full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would

give me more of the effect I should be most "after" than all other

possible observances together. It would give me a large unity,

and that in turn would crown me with the grace to which the

enlightened story-teller will at any time, for his interest,

sacrifice if need be all other graces whatever. I refer of course

to the grace of intensity, which there are ways of signally achieving

and ways of signally missing--as we see it, all round us, helplessly

and woefully missed. Not that it isn't, on the other hand, a virtue

eminently subject to appreciation--there being no strict, no absolute

measure of it; so that one may hear it acclaimed where it has quite

escaped one's perception, and see it unnoticed where one has gratefully

hailed it. After all of which I am not sure, either, that the immense

amusement of the whole cluster of difficulties so arrayed may not operate,

for the fond fabulist, when judicious not less than fond, as his best of

determinants. That charming principle is always there, at all events,

to keep interest fresh: it is a principle, we remember, essentially

ravenous, without scruple and without mercy, appeased with no cheap

nor easy nourishment. It enjoys the costly sacrifice and rejoices

thereby in the very odour of difficulty--even as ogres, with their

"Fee-faw-fum!" rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen.

Thus it was, at all events, that the ultimate, though after all so

speedy, definition of my gentleman's job--his coming out, all

solemnly appointed and deputed, to "save" Chad, and his then

finding the young man so disobligingly and, at first, so

bewilderingly not lost that a new issue altogether, in the

connexion, prodigiously faces them, which has to be dealt with in

a new light--promised as many calls on ingenuity and on the higher

branches of the compositional art as one could possibly desire.

Again and yet again, as, from book to book, I proceed with my

survey, I find no source of interest equal to this verification

after the fact, as I may call it, and the more in detail the

better, of the scheme of consistency "gone in" for. As always--

since the charm never fails--the retracing of the process from

point to point brings back the old illusion. The old intentions

bloom again and flower--in spite of all the blossoms they were to

have dropped by the way. This is the charm, as I say, of adventure

TRANSPOSED--the thrilling ups and downs, the intricate ins and

outs of the compositional problem, made after such a fashion

admirably objective, becoming the question at issue and keeping

the author's heart in his mouth. Such an element, for instance, as

his intention that Mrs. Newsome, away off with her finger on the

pulse of Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than

circuitously present through the whole thing, should be no less

felt as to be reckoned with than the most direct exhibition, the

finest portrayal at first hand could make her, such a sign of

artistic good faith, I say, once it's unmistakeably there, takes

on again an actuality not too much impaired by the comparative

dimness of the particular success. Cherished intention too

inevitably acts and operates, in the book, about fifty times as

little as I had fondly dreamt it might; but that scarce spoils for

me the pleasure of recognising the fifty ways in which I had

sought to provide for it. The mere charm of seeing such an idea

constituent, in its degree; the fineness of the measures taken--a

real extension, if successful, of the very terms and possibilities

of representation and figuration--such things alone were, after

this fashion, inspiring, such things alone were a gage of the

probable success of that dissimulated calculation with which the

whole effort was to square. But oh the cares begotten, none the

less, of that same "judicious" sacrifice to a particular form of

interest! One's work should have composition, because composition

alone is positive beauty; but all the while--apart from one's

inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever

recognising or ever missing positive beauty--how, as to the cheap

and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and

even as to the commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be

sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and installed it may

always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have

blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet, how, as

its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the

wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading but

the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to

be kicked out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for

example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace--

the menace to a bright variety--involved in Strether's having all

the subjective "say," as it were, to himself.

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him

with the romantic privilege of the "first person"--the darkest

abyss of romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand

scale--variety, and many other queer matters as well, might have

been smuggled in by a back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the

first person, in the long piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness

and that looseness, never much my affair, had never been so little

so as on this particular occasion. All of which reflexions flocked

to the standard from the moment--a very early one--the question of

how to keep my form amusing while sticking so close to my central

figure and constantly taking its pattern from him had to be faced.

He arrives (arrives at Chester) as for the dreadful purpose of

giving his creator "no end" to tell about him--before which

rigorous mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed.

I was far from the serenest; I was more than agitated enough to

reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one substitute

for "telling," I must address myself tooth and nail to another. I

couldn't, save by implication, make other persons tell EACH OTHER

about him--blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which

reaches its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely

opposite to the paths of the novel: with other persons, save as

they were primarily HIS persons (not he primarily but one of

theirs), I had simply nothing to do. I had relations for him none

the less, by the mercy of Providence, quite as much as if my

exhibition was to be a muddle; if I could only by implication and

a show of consequence make other persons tell each other about

him, I could at least make him tell THEM whatever in the world he

must; and could so, by the same token--which was a further luxury

thrown in--see straight into the deep differences between what

that could do for me, or at all events for HIM, and the large ease

of "autobiography." It may be asked why, if one so keeps to one's

hero, one shouldn't make a single mouthful of "method," shouldn't

throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free

as in "Gil Blas" or in "David Copperfield," equip him with the

double privilege of subject and object--a course that has at

least the merit of brushing away questions at a sweep. The answer

to which is, I think, that one makes that surrender only if one is

prepared NOT to make certain precious discriminations.

The "first person" then, so employed, is addressed by the author

directly to ourselves, his possible readers, whom he has to reckon

with, at the best, by our English tradition, so loosely and

vaguely after all, so little respectfully, on so scant a

presumption of exposure to criticism. Strether, on the other hand,

encaged and provided for as "The Ambassadors" encages and

provides, has to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more

salutary than any our straight and credulous gape are likely to

bring home to him, has exhibitional conditions to meet, in a word,

that forbid the terrible FLUIDITY of self-revelation. I may seem

not to better the case for my discrimination if I say that, for my

first care, I had thus inevitably to set him up a confidant or

two, to wave away with energy the custom of the seated mass of

explanation after the fact, the inserted block of merely

referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the

modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems

simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion.

"Harking back to make up" took at any rate more doing, as the

phrase is, not only than the reader of to-day demands, but than he

will tolerate at any price any call upon him either to understand

or remotely to measure; and for the beauty of the thing when done

the current editorial mind in particular appears wholly without

sense. It is not, however, primarily for either of these reasons,

whatever their weight, that Strether's friend Waymarsh is so

keenly clutched at, on the threshold of the book, or that no less

a pounce is made on Maria Gostrey--without even the pretext,

either, of HER being, in essence, Strether's friend. She is the

reader's friend much rather--in consequence of dispositions that

make him so eminently require one; and she acts in that capacity,

and REALLY in that capacity alone, with exemplary devotion from

beginning to and of the book. She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to

lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her mask, the most

unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the dramatist's art,

as we well know--since if we don't it's not the fault of the

proofs that lie scattered about us--is in the use of ficelles; by

which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them.

Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business,

less to my subject than to my treatment of it; the interesting

proof, in these connexions, being that one has but to take one's

subject for the stuff of drama to interweave with enthusiasm as

many Gostreys as need be.

The material of "The Ambassadors," conforming in this respect

exactly to that of "The Wings of the Dove," published just before

it, is taken absolutely for the stuff of drama; so that, availing

myself of the opportunity given me by this edition for some

prefatory remarks on the latter work, I had mainly to make on its

behalf the point of its scenic consistency. It disguises that

virtue, in the oddest way in the world, by just LOOKING, as we

turn its pages, as little scenic as possible; but it sharply

divides itself, just as the composition before us does, into the

parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare, for scenes,

and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and

crown the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that

everything in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean,

complete and functional scene, treating ALL the submitted matter,

as by logical start, logical turn, and logical finish) is

discriminated preparation, is the fusion and synthesis of picture.

These alternations propose themselves all recogniseably, I think,

from an early stage, as the very form and figure of "The

Ambassadors"; so that, to repeat, such an agent as Miss Gostrey

pre-engaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty wing with

her shawl and her smelling-salts. Her function speaks at once for

itself, and by the time she has dined with Strether in London and

gone to a play with him her intervention as a ficelle is, I hold,

expertly justified. Thanks to it we have treated scenically, and

scenically alone, the whole lumpish question of Strether's "past,"

which has seen us more happily on the way than anything else could

have done; we have strained to a high lucidity and vivacity (or at

least we hope we have) certain indispensable facts; we have seen

our two or three immediate friends all conveniently and profitably

in "action"; to say nothing of our beginning to descry others, of

a remoter intensity, getting into motion, even if a bit vaguely as

yet, for our further enrichment. Let my first point be here that

the scene in question, that in which the whole situation at

Woollett and the complex forces that have propelled my hero to

where this lively extractor of his value and distiller of his

essence awaits him, is normal and entire, is really an excellent

STANDARD scene; copious, comprehensive, and accordingly never

short, but with its office as definite as that of the hammer on

the gong of the clock, the office of expressing ALL THAT IS IN the

hour.

The "ficelle" character of the subordinate party is as artfully

dissimulated, throughout, as may be, and to that extent that, with

the seams or joints of Maria Gostrey's ostensible connectedness

taken particular care of, duly smoothed over, that is, and

anxiously kept from showing as "pieced on;" this figure doubtless

achieves, after a fashion, something of the dignity of a prime

idea: which circumstance but shows us afresh how many quite

incalculable but none the less clear sources of enjoyment for the

infatuated artist, how many copious springs of our never-to-be-slighted

"fun" for the reader and critic susceptible of contagion, may

sound their incidental plash as soon as an artistic process begins

to enjoy free development. Exquisite--in illustration of this--

the mere interest and amusement of such at once "creative" and

critical questions as how and where and why to make Miss Gostrey's

false connexion carry itself, under a due high polish, as a real one.

Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for mere consistency

of form, to mention a case, than in the last "scene" of the book,

where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever,

but only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite

other than itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed

measure. Since, however, all art is EXPRESSION, and is thereby

vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount of

delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements and

ecstasies of method--amid which, or certainly under the influence

of any exhilarated demonstration of which, one must keep one's head

and not lose one's way. To cultivate an adequate intelligence

for them and to make that sense operative is positively to find

a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that is not

by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense.

To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has

nothing to do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has

everything to do with the manner (the manner of my presentation

of the same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully

economic expression's possible sake, as if it were important and

essential--to do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may

easily become, as one goes, a signally attaching proposition;

even though it all remains but part and parcel, I hasten to

recognise, of the merely general and related question of expressional

curiosity and expressional decency.

I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of

my labour that I have found the steps of re-perusal almost as much

waylaid here by quite another style of effort in the same signal

interest--or have in other words not failed to note how, even so

associated and so discriminated, the finest proprieties and charms

of the non-scenic may, under the right hand for them, still keep

their intelligibility and assert their office. Infinitely

suggestive such an observation as this last on the whole

delightful head, where representation is concerned, of possible

variety, of effective expressional change and contrast. One would

like, at such an hour as this, for critical licence, to go into

the matter of the noted inevitable deviation (from too fond an

original vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the

straightest execution may ever be trusted to inflict even on the

most mature plan--the case being that, though one's last

reconsidered production always seems to bristle with that

particular evidence, "The Ambassadors" would place a flood of such

light at my service. I must attach to my final remark here a

different import; noting in the other connexion I just glanced at

that such passages as that of my hero's first encounter with Chad

Newsome, absolute attestations of the non-scenic form though they

be, yet lay the firmest hand too--so far at least as intention

goes--on representational effect. To report at all closely and

completely of what "passes" on a given occasion is inevitably to

become more or less scenic; and yet in the instance I allude to,

WITH the conveyance, expressional curiosity and expressional

decency are sought and arrived at under quite another law. The

true inwardness of this may be at bottom but that one of the

suffered treacheries has consisted precisely, for Chad's whole

figure and presence, of a direct presentability diminished and

compromised--despoiled, that is, of its PROPORTIONAL advantage;

so that, in a word, the whole economy of his author's relation

to him has at important points to be redetermined. The book,

however, critically viewed, is touchingly full of these disguised

and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these intensely

redemptive consistencies. The pages in which Mamie Pocock gives

her appointed and, I can't but think, duly felt lift to the whole

action by the so inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of

our just watching and as quite at an angle of vision as yet

untried, her single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our

partaking of her concentrated study of the sense of matters

bearing on her own case, all the bright warm Paris afternoon, from

the balcony that overlooks the Tuileries garden--these are as

marked an example of the representational virtue that insists here

and there on being, for the charm of opposition and renewal, other

than the scenic. It wouldn't take much to make me further argue

that from an equal play of such oppositions the book gathers an

intensity that fairly adds to the dramatic--though the latter is

supposed to be the sum of all intensities; or that has at any rate

nothing to fear from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to

shrink in fact from that extravagance--I risk it rather, for the

sake of the moral involved; which is not that the particular

production before us exhausts the interesting questions it raises,

but that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the

most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.

HENRY JAMES.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK FIRST#CHAPTER I


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