Henry James
Preface to volume 21
of the New York edition
(containing : The ambassadors)
(1909)
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
does n’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you
have your life. If you have n’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 would n’t have wrecked him. It was immeasurable,
the opportunity to ‘do’ a man of imagination, for if
there might n’t be a chance to ‘bite’,
where in the world might it be? This personage of course, so enriched,
would n’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 has n’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 would n’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 had n’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 is n’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 could n’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 should n’t make
a single mouthful of ‘method’, should n’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 end 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 would n’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.
end of preface to volume 21
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website