The Ambassadors | Page 9

fifty ways in which I had
sought to provide for it. The mere charm of seeing such an idea
constituent, in its degree; the fineness of the measures taken--a real
extension, if successful, of the very terms and possibilities of
representation and figuration--such things alone were, after this fashion,
inspiring, such things alone were a gage of the probable success of that
dissimulated calculation with which the whole effort was to square. But
oh the cares begotten, none the less, of that same "judicious" sacrifice
to a particular form of interest! One's work should have composition,
because composition alone is positive beauty; but all the while--apart
from one's inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers
ever recognising or ever missing positive beauty--how, as to the cheap
and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as
to the commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for
and paid for! Once achieved and installed it may always be trusted to
make the poor seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair
for failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue
of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and
pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself,
have to be kicked out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for
example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace-- the
menace to a bright variety--involved in Strether's having all the
subjective "say," as it were, to himself.
Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him
with the romantic privilege of the "first person"--the darkest abyss of
romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale--variety,

and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by
a back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the first person, in the long
piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that looseness, never
much my affair, had never been so little so as on this particular
occasion. All of which reflexions flocked to the standard from the
moment--a very early one--the question of how to keep my form
amusing while sticking so close to my central figure and constantly
taking its pattern from him had to be faced. He arrives (arrives at
Chester) as for the dreadful purpose of giving his creator "no end" to
tell about him--before which rigorous mission the serenest of creators
might well have quailed. I was far from the serenest; I was more than
agitated enough to reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or
one substitute for "telling," I must address myself tooth and nail to
another. I couldn't, save by implication, make other persons tell EACH
OTHER about him--blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which
reaches its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite
to the paths of the novel: with other persons, save as they were
primarily HIS persons (not he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply
nothing to do. I had relations for him none the less, by the mercy of
Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition was to be a muddle; if I
could only by implication and a show of consequence make other
persons tell each other about him, I could at least make him tell THEM
whatever in the world he must; and could so, by the same token--which
was a further luxury thrown in--see straight into the deep differences
between what that could do for me, or at all events for HIM, and the
large ease of "autobiography." It may be asked why, if one so keeps to
one's hero, one shouldn't make a single mouthful of "method," shouldn't
throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free as in "Gil
Blas" or in "David Copperfield," equip him with the double privilege of
subject and object--a course that has at least the merit of brushing away
questions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I think, that one makes
that surrender only if one is prepared NOT to make certain precious
discriminations.
The "first person" then, so employed, is addressed by the author
directly to ourselves, his possible readers, whom he has to reckon with,
at the best, by our English tradition, so loosely and vaguely after all, so

little respectfully, on so scant a presumption of exposure to criticism.
Strether, on the other hand, encaged and provided for as "The
Ambassadors" encages and provides, has to keep in view proprieties
much stiffer and more salutary than any our straight and credulous gape
are likely to bring home to him, has exhibitional conditions to meet, in
a word, that forbid the terrible FLUIDITY