James’s method in these late novels was to find a story which was ostensibly simple and then create a fictional density and complexity within its confines, so that the novel’s power arose from suggestions, implications, and ambiguities. Despite his brother’s view that there was no decisiveness in the action of these novels, they were structured with great dramatic skill. They moved at times with speed, and managed constantly to usurp or play with the reader’s expectations. James used scenes, encounters between characters, or moments of heightened realization, with the force of a master dramatist.
In creating the book from the outline, it might have been easy to make Strether dreamy and ineffective at all times, a sort of middle-aged Hamlet from Woollett. And to make Chad headstrong or easily corrupted, and make Madame de Vionnet into a fortune hunter, or a Frenchwoman of easy morals. And to make the people of Woollett almost comically demanding and narrow-minded.
James came close to giving in to the last of these for good reasons. He could not give Jim and Sarah Pocock the same degree of subtlety and exquisite ambivalence as he did his other characters. In the creation of Chad, as observed by Strether, and indeed by Maria Gostrey, he moved with sly care and smooth understatement. Thus in the first encounter, when Chad arrived in the box at the theater and allowed himself to be studied in silence in the semidarkness by Strether, Gostrey, and the reader, he was a figure at ease in this world, a young American who had undergone some great change, which was seen here as almost spiritual as much as it was stylish. Strether, in recognizing the change and in appreciating the connection between spirit and style, moved away from the certainties of Woollett to some other realm but he did not always stay there. He would, throughout the book, be open himself to shifts and changes.
Thus he and Chad, in the way they lacked solidity, in their openness, stretched the very idea of the character in fiction. “You could deal,” Strether thought when he first saw Chad in Paris, “with a man as himself—you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else.” But dealing with both was the task which James set himself. This very idea of fluidity, unknowability, would inspire Strether as well as James, but it would also make him uneasy. James was careful to make Strether an odd mixture, at times asking crude questions whose tone came directly from Woollett, at other times becoming susceptible to the strange duplicities which went on around him.
That first evening, having met Chad and noted the change in him, Strether did not dither, as he might have done in the hands of a lesser novelist. He moved back into character. “I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything,” he said as soon they were alone, “neither more nor less, and take you straight home, so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it.” The tone here was businesslike, direct, as it would be at other times when Strether felt that he should make himself clear. But James had other plans for tone, as a painter might make the most realistic center for a canvas, each thing drawn with mathematical precision, and then produce the most gorgeous sky or exquisite landscape all around.
In Book Five, Chapter 1, James returned to a world which mattered in his memory. It was the Paris of his youth and it was filled with associations. Once he arrived in London in 1876 he would have a rich social life, but it would not be among artists or bohemians. In his London there would not be a Paul Zhukovsky or anyone like him. Thus, when he came to describe the garden of the artist Gloriani, he was dealing with a part of his own past which he treasured because he had lost it. Gloriani had also appeared in his novel Roderick Hudson, set in Rome, published almost thirty years earlier. Gloriani’s garden in Paris was clearly the garden of the painter Whistler which James had visited in 1875. Now he could place both Chad and Strether there, and Maria Gostrey and Madame de Vionnet. Strether could have a sense in that garden “of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.” It would not have escaped James that one of the ghosts at the windows was his younger self.
When Strether met Madame de Vionnet here for the first time, it would have been easy for James to have made her exotic, extraordinary; it was part of his plan, however, that no character in his fiction would move according to a design but rather according to a dynamic. Strether would feel Madame de Vionnet’s “common humanity,” her ordinariness, more than he would feel anything else. This meant that he would now have to deal with her, take her seriously, and it would also mean that he was more open than ever to misunderstanding her, and indeed, everything around her.
“He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest,” James wrote. What Strether was seeking was experience, the tender taste of life. In not seeking wisdom, he found knowledge instead, and he had no idea what to do with knowledge. He was ready to notice things, and wanted to notice more. As he moved slowly away from the rigidities of his background, he discovered, as did Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, that his only weapon was innocence, an innocence which became more exquisite as the novel proceeded, an innocence which was no use to him in this old world into which he had ventured.
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.”
COLM TÓIBÍN 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.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
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.
PREFACE
Henry James
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 s
econd 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 breathl
essly 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.