The Ambassadors | Page 6

again, over this licentious
record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or conceivable, has
been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story. It depends so
on what one means by that equivocal quantity. There is the story of
one's hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the
story of one's story itself. I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist
one's a dramatist, and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike
me as really the more objective of the two.

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