The Ambassadors | Page 5

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.
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 servants of man, incurring ignominious
dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether under some
muddled pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge
away. The process, 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