The Ambassadors | Page 3

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Project Gutenberg Edition of The Ambassadors, by Henry James. New
York Edition (1909).
Prepared by Richard D. Hathaway
Proofread by Julia P. DeRanek

Volume I

Preface
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