The Ambassadors Read Free Page A

at other times when Strether felt that he should make himself clear. But James had other plans for tone, as a painter might make the most realistic center for a canvas, each thing drawn with mathematical precision, and then produce the most gorgeous sky or exquisite landscape all around.
    In Book Five, Chapter 1 , James returned to a world which mattered in his memory. It was the Paris of his youth and it was filled with associations. Once he arrived in London in 1876 he would have a rich social life, but it would not be among artists or bohemians. In his London there would not be a Paul Zhukovsky or anyone like him. Thus, when he came to describe the garden of the artist Gloriani, he was dealing with a part of his own past which he treasured because he had lost it. Gloriani had also appeared in his novel
Roderick Hudson
, set in Rome, published almost thirty years earlier. Gloriani’s garden in Paris was clearly the garden of the painter Whistler which James had visited in 1875. Now he could place both Chad and Strether there, and Maria Gostrey and Madame de Vionnet. Strether could have a sense in that garden “of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs andtokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.” It would not have escaped James that one of the ghosts at the windows was his younger self.
    When Strether met Madame de Vionnet here for the first time, it would have been easy for James to have made her exotic, extraordinary; it was part of his plan, however, that no character in his fiction would move according to a design but rather according to a dynamic. Strether would feel Madame de Vionnet’s “common humanity,” her ordinariness, more than he would feel anything else. This meant that he would now have to deal with her, take her seriously, and it would also mean that he was more open than ever to misunderstanding her, and indeed, everything around her.
    “He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest,” James wrote. What Strether was seeking was experience, the tender taste of life. In not seeking wisdom, he found knowledge instead, and he had no idea what to do with knowledge. He was ready to notice things, and wanted to notice more. As he moved slowly away from the rigidities of his background, he discovered, as did Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady
, that his only weapon was innocence, an innocence which became more exquisite as the novel proceeded, an innocence which was no use to him in this old world into which he had ventured.
    James dramatized this idea of innocence and its opposite, put the conflict between them into one of the greatest scenes he ever created.
    From early in his career, he knew the power of the recognition scene, the moment when a third person sees two people together and knows by something in their posture, in their gaze, in the aura they give off, that they are involved in some form of duplicity. Knowledge emerges gradually, silently, darkly, with subtlety, and then it is complete, more complete than if everything were explained in speech or set out clearly by the author in a paragraph.Earlier in
The Ambassadors
he had turned this trick on its head when he allowed Strether and Gostrey to observe Chad in silence, and learn everything about him. Towards the end of
The Ambassadors
James used it again to devastating effect when Strether, still in search of sensation, traveled out of Paris by train at random to sample the French countryside.
    In eight pages, James managed to conjure up the scene in all its affecting detail, and Strether’s response to it he rendered exquisite and fine. But such things in James were always a preparation for the drama of human relations, and what Strether saw in that out-of-the-way place—the two people who appeared before him on the water and the unmistakable relation between them—had the same power as the scene towards the end of
The Portrait of a Lady
when Isabel