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The Ambassadors
The Ambassadors
James, Henry
Published: 1903
Type(s): Novels
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org
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About James:
Henry James, son of theologian Henry James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psy-
chologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary
critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe and be-
came a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for novels, novellas
and short stories based on themes of consciousness and morality.
James significantly contributed to the criticism of fiction, particularly in his insistence
that writers be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world.
His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators
in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An ex-
traordinarily productive writer, he published substantive books of travel writing, biography,
autobiography and visual arts criticism.
Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for James:
• Hawthorne (1879)
• Daisy Miller (1879)
• The Bostonians (1886)
• Wings of the Dove (1902)
• The Golden Bowl (1904)
• Washington Square (1881)
Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.
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Preface
Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of "The Ambassadors," which first ap-
peared 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 im-
pressed 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 condi-
tions that press the spring of a terrible question. WOULD there yet perhaps be time for re-
paration?—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 recognise 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, accord-
ingly, 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
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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 oc-
casion on which, so confronted, I had found it of a livelier interest to take stock, in this fash-
ion, 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 Ambassad-
ors," 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 adop-
ted, 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 expres-
sion—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 un-
der 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. Noth-
ing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of the mat-
ter; 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 com-
parative case meanwhile would serve—it was only on the minor scale that I had treated my-
self 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 in-
volved in our gentleman's impulse to deliver himself in the Paris garden on the Sunday af-
ternoon—or if not involved by strict logic then all ideally and enchantingly implied in it. (I
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say "ideally," because I need scarce mention that for development, for expression of its max-
imum, my glimmering story was, at the earliest stage, to have nipped the thread of connex-
ion with the possibilities of the actual reported speaker. HE remains but the happiest of ac-
cidents; 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 hand-
ler of puppets is more delightful, or has more of the suspense and the thrill of a game of dif-
ficulty 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 dram-
atist 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.
In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that admirable mixture for salutary
application which we know as art. Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute full-
handed that ingredient; it plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of
life—which material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner done this
than it has to take account of a PROCESS—from which only when it's the basest of the ser-
vants of man, incurring ignominious dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether un-
der some muddled pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The pro-
cess, that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is another affair—with which
the happy luck of mere finding has little to do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty
well over; that quest of the subject as a whole by "matching," as the ladies say at the shops,
the big piece with the snippet, having ended, we assume, with a capture. The subject is
found, and if the problem is then transferred to the ground of what to do with it the field
opens out for any amount of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I submit, completes
the strong mixture. It is on the other hand the part of the business that can least be likened
to the chase with horn and hound. It's all a sedentary part— involves as much ciphering, of
sorts, as would merit the highest salary paid to a chief accountant. Not, however, that the
chief accountant hasn't HIS gleams of bliss; for the felicity, or at least the equilibrium of the
artist's state dwells less, surely, in the further delightful complications he can smuggle in
than in those he succeeds in keeping out. He sows his seed at the risk of too thick a crop;
wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any
price. In consequence of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to have
my choice of narrating my "hunt" for Lambert Strether, of describing the capture of the
shadow projected by my friend's anecdote, or of reporting on the occurrences subsequent to
that triumph. But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in each direction; since it
comes to me again and again, over this licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, con-
ceived or conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story. It de-
pends so on what one means by that equivocal quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and
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