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DeTroyes - "Four Arthurian Romances, by Chretien DeTroyes"

Hesther Lynch Piozzi - "Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson"

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The Ambassadors

H >> Henry James >> The Ambassadors




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.





Book First




I


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.

That note had been meanwhile--since the previous afternoon, thanks
to this happier device--such a consciousness of personal freedom as
he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of
having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as
promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour
his adventure with cool success. There were people on the ship with
whom he had easily consorted--so far as ease could up to now be
imputed to him--and who for the most part plunged straight into the
current that set from the landing-stage to London; there were
others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn and had even
invoked his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of Liverpool;
but he had stolen away from every one alike, had kept no
appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independently,
unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet
evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the
sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon
and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he
took his potion at least undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at
the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected
that, should he have to describe himself there as having "got in"
so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look
particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in
his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and
pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of
spending. That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the
hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted extremely to
see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay--these things,
it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to
his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was
burdened, poor Strether--it had better be confessed at the outset--
with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in
his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across
her counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend's name, which
she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall,
facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly
determined, and whose features--not freshly young, not markedly
fine, but on happy terms with each other--came back to him as from
a recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the
moment placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her
at his previous inn, where--again in the hall--she had been briefly
engaged with some people of his own ship's company. Nothing had
actually passed between them, and he would as little have been able
to say what had been the sign of her face for him on the first
occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition.
Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as
well--which would only have added to the mystery. All she now began
by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his
enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a
question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut--Mr. Waymarsh the
American lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend. He's to meet me
here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have
arrived. But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to
have kept him. Do you know him?" Strether wound up.

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much
there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own
rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her face--
something more, that is, than its apparently usual restless light--
seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrose--where I used
sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were
friends of his, and I've been at his house. I won't answer for it
that he would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pursued; "but I
should be delighted to see him. Perhaps," she added, "I shall--for
I'm staying over." She paused while our friend took in these
things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed.
They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed
that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,
however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced
too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she
said, "he won't care!"--and she immediately thereupon remarked that
she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the
people he had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give
the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over
the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the
mentioned connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and
there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none
the less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this
in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each
other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They
moved along the hall together, and Strether's companion threw off
that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this
time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of
the steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find
himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of
caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and before he
had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel,
and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as
soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such
good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would
forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been in
possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the
place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a
rueful glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this
personage had seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw,
what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the
lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and
something more perhaps than the middle age--a man of five-and-fifty,
whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face,
a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut,
growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant
but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free
prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been
called, of which, had a certain effect of mitigation. A perpetual
pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually
deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the
curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to
complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have
seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to
Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other
party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light
gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have
marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a
perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her
companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his
consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to
him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass and went through
the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light
overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no
more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been odder
than Strether's sense of himself as at that moment launched in
something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the
sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then.
It had begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing glass
that struck him as blocking further, so strangely, the dimness of
the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the
elements of Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to
make. He had during those moments felt these elements to be not so
much to his hand as he should have liked, and then had fallen back
on the thought that they were precisely a matter as to which help
was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He was about to
go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What had come
as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game--and caught
moreover not less neatly--was just the air, in the person of his
friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession
of those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured
to him as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp
or circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally
with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself
his impression of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized--!"
If "More thoroughly than WHOM?" would not have been for him a
sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep
consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was what--
familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the
compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with
dear dyspeptic Waymarsh--she appeared distinctly to promise. His
pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of
confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case
for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself. She
affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried
five-and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like himself
marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been known to him
how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have
discerned that they had in common. It wouldn't for such a spectator
have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so
sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to
sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly
grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground
indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a
sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the
extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect
to such a sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true,
was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most
showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the
time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway
measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human
material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was
in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases
or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for
convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her
fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor
scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether
was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he
might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected
it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a
short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might
be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite
the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a
concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he
made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes
were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost
have been absent without changing his face, which took its
expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from
other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in
an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by
his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal
of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that
he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn't unaware
that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these
were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely,
were what she knew.

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