The Ambassadors (3 page)

James dramatized this idea of innocence and its opposite, put the conflict between them into one of the greatest scenes he ever created.

From early in his career, he knew the power of the recognition scene, the moment when a third person sees two people together and knows by something in their posture, in their gaze, in the aura they give off, that they are involved in some form of duplicity. Knowledge emerges gradually, silently, darkly, with subtlety, and then it is complete, more complete than if everything were explained in speech or set out clearly by the author in a paragraph.
Earlier in
The Ambassadors
he had turned this trick on its head when he allowed Strether and Gostrey to observe Chad in silence, and learn everything about him. Towards the end of
The Ambassadors
James used it again to devastating effect when Strether, still in search of sensation, traveled out of Paris by train at random to sample the French countryside.

In eight pages, James managed to conjure up the scene in all its affecting detail, and Strether’s response to it he rendered exquisite and fine. But such things in James were always a preparation for the drama of human relations, and what Strether saw in that out-of-the-way place—the two people who appeared before him on the water and the unmistakable relation between them—had the same power as the scene towards the end of
The Portrait of a Lady
when Isabel entered the room and found Madame Merle standing close to the fire and Osmond, Isabel’s husband, seated. “Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected.” So, too, in this scene in
The Ambassadors
, Strether’s ability to notice became a way for his innocence to be darkened. His labor, James wrote, had been lost. But as usual the implications of loss in these late novels of James was not simple. It should not surprise us when the passage ended not with defeat for Strether, but a new opening for his imagination: “He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.”

C
OLM
T
ÓIBÍN
was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including
The Blackwater Lightship; The Master
, winner of a
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize; and
Brooklyn
, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín is the Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies at Princeton University and lives in Dublin and New York.

This Modern Library paperback follows the text of
The Ambassadors
found in the 1909 New York Edition of
The Novels and Tales of Henry James
, except that Book Eleventh, I and II, follow the order of the first English edition, in accordance with contemporary scholarly preference. In addition, some minor adjustments have been made to modernize spelling and punctuation.

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 recognize 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.