The Ambassadors (2 page)

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 galere? To answer these questions plausibly, to answer them
as under cross-examination in the witness-box by counsel for the
prosecution, in other words satisfactorily to account for Strether
and for his "peculiar tone," was to possess myself of the entire
fabric. At the same time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a
certain principle of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his
peculiar tone without a reason; it would take a felt predicament or
a false position to give him so ironic an accent. One hadn't been
noting "tones" all one's life without recognising when one heard it
the voice of the false position. The dear man in the Paris garden
was then admirably and unmistakeably IN one—which was no small
point gained; what next accordingly concerned us was the
determination of THIS identity. One could only go by probabilities,
but there was the advantage that the most general of the
probabilities were virtual certainties. Possessed of our friend's
nationality, to start with, there was a general probability in his
narrower localism; which, for that matter, one had really but to
keep under the lens for an hour to see it give up its secrets. He
would have issued, our rueful worthy, from the very heart of New
England—at the heels of which matter of course a perfect train of
secrets tumbled for me into the light. They had to be sifted and
sorted, and I shall not reproduce the detail of that process; but
unmistakeably they were all there, and it was but a question,
auspiciously, of picking among them. What the "position" would
infallibly be, and why, on his hands, it had turned "false"—these
inductive steps could only be as rapid as they were distinct. I
accounted for everything—and "everything" had by this time become
the most promising quantity—by the view that he had come to Paris
in some state of mind which was literally undergoing, as a result
of new and unexpected assaults and infusions, a change almost from
hour to hour. He had come with a view that might have been figured
by a clear green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the
liquid, once poured into the open cup of APPLICATION, once exposed
to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red,
or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple,
to black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented
perhaps, for all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so
violent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise
and alarm; whereby the SITUATION clearly would spring from the play
of wildness and the development of extremes. I saw in a moment
that, should this development proceed both with force and logic, my
"story" would leave nothing to be desired. There is always, of
course, for the story-teller, the irresistible determinant and the
incalculable advantage of his interest in the story AS SUCH; it is
ever, obviously, overwhelmingly, the prime and precious thing (as
other than this I have never been able to see it); as to which what
makes for it, with whatever headlong energy, may be said to pale
before the energy with which it simply makes for itself. It
rejoices, none the less, at its best, to seem to offer itself in a
light, to seem to know, and with the very last knowledge, what it's
about—liable as it yet is at moments to be caught by us with its
tongue in its cheek and absolutely no warrant but its splendid
impudence. Let us grant then that the impudence is always
there—there, so to speak, for grace and effect and ALLURE; there,
above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art, and
because, as we are always disappointed when the pampered don't
"play up," we like it, to that extent, to look all its character.
It probably does so, in truth, even when we most flatter ourselves
that we negotiate with it by treaty.

All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable,
placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional
assurance—an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic
had I been in fact too stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none
the less, as the links multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for
the determination of poor Strether's errand and for the
apprehension of his issue. These things continued to fall together,
as by the neat action of their own weight and form, even while
their commentator scratched his head about them; he easily sees now
that they were always well in advance of him. As the case completed
itself he had in fact, from a good way behind, to catch up with
them, breathless and a little flurried, as he best could. THE false
position, for our belated man of the world—belated because he had
endeavoured so long to escape being one, and now at last had really
to face his doom—the false position for him, I say, was obviously
to have presented himself at the gate of that boundless menagerie
primed with a moral scheme of the most approved pattern which was
yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid facts; that is to
any at all liberal appreciation of them. There would have been of
course the case of the Strether prepared, wherever presenting
himself, only to judge and to feel meanly; but HE would have moved
for me, I confess, enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual
man's note, from the first of our seeing it struck, is the note of
discrimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress, the
drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest imagination,
we have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate; the
element that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick,
as I have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral
substance. Yet here it was, at the same time, just here, that a
shade for a moment fell across the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the
platitudes of the human comedy, that people's moral scheme DOES
break down in Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that
hundreds of thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less
cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of the
probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work
myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL association, one
of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I
think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The
revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most
interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any
betise of the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown
forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong
trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to bring
him out, through winding passages, through alternations of darkness
and light, very much IN Paris, but with the surrounding scene
itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been
dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene
would have done as well for our show could it have represented a
place in which Strether's errand was likely to lie and his crisis
to await him. The LIKELY place had the great merit of sparing me
preparations; there would have been too many involved—not at all
impossibilities, only rather worrying and delaying difficulties—in
positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's interesting relation, his so
interesting complexity of relations. Strether's appointed stage, in
fine, could be but Chad's most luckily selected one. The young man
had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent charm; and where he
would have found it, by the turn of his mind, most "authentic," was
where his earnest friend's analysis would most find HIM; as well as
where, for that matter, the former's whole analytic faculty would
be led such a wonderful dance.

"The Ambassadors" had been, all conveniently, "arranged for";
its first appearance was from month to month, in the
North
American Review
during 1903, and I had been open from far back
to any pleasant provocation for ingenuity that might reside in
one's actively adopting—so as to make it, in its way, a small
compositional law—recurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up
my mind here regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude
jolts—having found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every
question of form and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the
light of the major propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed;
that of employing but one centre and keeping it all within my
hero's compass. The thing was to be so much this worthy's intimate
adventure that even the projection of his consciousness upon it
from beginning to end without intermission or deviation would
probably still leave a part of its value for him, and a fortiori
for ourselves, unexpressed. I might, however, express every grain
of it that there would be room for—on condition of contriving a
splendid particular economy. Other persons in no small number were
to people the scene, and each with his or her axe to grind, his or
her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his or
her relation to my leading motive, in a word, to establish and
carry on. But Strether's sense of these things, and Strether's
only, should avail me for showing them; I should know them but
through his more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very
gropings would figure among his most interesting motions, and a
full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would give me more of
the effect I should be most "after" than all other possible
observances together. It would give me a large unity, and that in
turn would crown me with the grace to which the enlightened
story-teller will at any time, for his interest, sacrifice if need
be all other graces whatever. I refer of course to the grace of
intensity, which there are ways of signally achieving and ways of
signally missing—as we see it, all round us, helplessly and
woefully missed. Not that it isn't, on the other hand, a virtue
eminently subject to appreciation—there being no strict, no
absolute measure of it; so that one may hear it acclaimed where it
has quite escaped one's perception, and see it unnoticed where one
has gratefully hailed it. After all of which I am not sure, either,
that the immense amusement of the whole cluster of difficulties so
arrayed may not operate, for the fond fabulist, when judicious not
less than fond, as his best of determinants. That charming
principle is always there, at all events, to keep interest fresh:
it is a principle, we remember, essentially ravenous, without
scruple and without mercy, appeased with no cheap nor easy
nourishment. It enjoys the costly sacrifice and rejoices thereby in
the very odour of difficulty—even as ogres, with their
"Fee-faw-fum!" rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen.

Thus it was, at all events, that the ultimate, though after all
so speedy, definition of my gentleman's job—his coming out, all
solemnly appointed and deputed, to "save" Chad, and his then
finding the young man so disobligingly and, at first, so
bewilderingly not lost that a new issue altogether, in the
connexion, prodigiously faces them, which has to be dealt with in a
new light—promised as many calls on ingenuity and on the higher
branches of the compositional art as one could possibly desire.
Again and yet again, as, from book to book, I proceed with my
survey, I find no source of interest equal to this verification
after the fact, as I may call it, and the more in detail the
better, of the scheme of consistency "gone in" for. As always—since
the charm never fails—the retracing of the process from point to
point brings back the old illusion. The old intentions bloom again
and flower—in spite of all the blossoms they were to have dropped
by the way. This is the charm, as I say, of adventure
TRANSPOSED—the thrilling ups and downs, the intricate ins and outs
of the compositional problem, made after such a fashion admirably
objective, becoming the question at issue and keeping the author's
heart in his mouth. Such an element, for instance, as his intention
that Mrs. Newsome, away off with her finger on the pulse of
Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than circuitously
present through the whole thing, should be no less felt as to be
reckoned with than the most direct exhibition, the finest portrayal
at first hand could make her, such a sign of artistic good faith, I
say, once it's unmistakeably there, takes on again an actuality not
too much impaired by the comparative dimness of the particular
success. Cherished intention too inevitably acts and operates, in
the book, about fifty times as little as I had fondly dreamt it
might; but that scarce spoils for me the pleasure of recognising
the fifty ways in which I had sought to provide for it. The mere
charm of seeing such an idea constituent, in its degree; the
fineness of the measures taken—a real extension, if successful, of
the very terms and possibilities of representation and
figuration—such things alone were, after this fashion, inspiring,
such things alone were a gage of the probable success of that
dissimulated calculation with which the whole effort was to square.
But oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that same "judicious"
sacrifice to a particular form of interest! One's work should have
composition, because composition alone is positive beauty; but all
the while—apart from one's inevitable consciousness too of the dire
paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing positive
beauty—how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to
immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity,
positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once
achieved and installed it may always be trusted to make the poor
seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for
failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the
virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of
muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the
particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path! All
the sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to
muster on behalf of the menace—the menace to a bright
variety—involved in Strether's having all the subjective "say," as
it were, to himself.