The Ambassadors | Page 7

grace and effect and ALLURE; there,
above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art, and because,
as we are always disappointed when the pampered don't "play up," we
like it, to that extent, to look all its character. It probably does so, in
truth, even when we most flatter ourselves that we negotiate with it by
treaty.
All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable, placed
themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance--an air
quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had I been in fact too
stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none the less, as the links
multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for the determination of poor
Strether's errand and for the apprehension of his issue. These things
continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and
form, even while their commentator scratched his head about them; he
easily sees now that they were always well in advance of him. As the
case completed itself he had in fact, from a good way behind, to catch

up with them, breathless and a little flurried, as he best could. THE
false position, for our belated man of the world-- belated because he
had endeavoured so long to escape being one, and now at last had
really to face his doom--the false position for him, I say, was obviously
to have presented himself at the gate of that boundless menagerie
primed with a moral scheme of the most approved pattern which was
yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid facts; that is to any
at all liberal appreciation of them. There would have been of course the
case of the Strether prepared, wherever presenting himself, only to
judge and to feel meanly; but HE would have moved for me, I confess,
enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual man's note, from the first
of our seeing it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as his drama is
to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. It would have
been his blest imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him
to discriminate; the element that was for so much of the pleasure of my
cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral
substance. Yet here it was, at the same time, just here, that a shade for a
moment fell across the scene.
There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of the
human comedy, that people's moral scheme DOES break down in Paris;
that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of thousands of
more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit
the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I came late
in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL
association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause
no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The
revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most
interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any betise of
the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown forward, rather,
thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of intense reflexion:
which friendly test indeed was to bring him out, through winding
passages, through alternations of darkness and light, very much IN
Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor matter, a mere
symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in the philosophy of
Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have done as well for our
show could it have represented a place in which Strether's errand was

likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The LIKELY place had the
great merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too
many involved--not at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and
delaying difficulties--in positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's
interesting relation, his so interesting complexity of relations. Strether's
appointed stage, in fine, could be but Chad's most luckily selected one.
The young man had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent charm; and
where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind, most
"authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis would most find
HIM; as well as where, for that matter, the former's whole analytic
faculty would be led such a wonderful dance.
"The Ambassadors" had been, all conveniently, "arranged for"; its first
appearance was from month to month, in the _North American
Review_ during 1903, and I had been open from far back to any
pleasant provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one's actively
adopting--so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional
law--recurrent breaks