The Ambassadors (3 page)

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.

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about
his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to
arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from
him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced
for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they
should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that
extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted
Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock,
that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of
it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without
disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with
all respect to dear old Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to
himself—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn't see
enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as
operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men,
wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as
it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into
his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should
he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the
nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe. Mixed with
everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that
it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a
sufficient degree.