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 _galère?_ 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 _bêtise_ 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.