The Ambassadors Read Free Page B

entered the room and found Madame Merle standing close to the fire and Osmond, Isabel’s husband, seated. “Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected.” So, too, in this scene in
The Ambassadors
, Strether’s ability to notice became a way for his innocence to be darkened. His labor, James wrote, had been lost. But as usual the implications of loss in these late novels of James was not simple. It should not surprise us when the passage ended not with defeat for Strether, but a new opening for his imagination: “He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.”

     
    C OLM T ÓIBÍN was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including
The Blackwater Lightship; The Master
, winner of a
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize; and
Brooklyn
, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín is the Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies at Princeton University and lives in Dublin and New York.

A N OTE ON THE T EXT
     
    This Modern Library paperback follows the text of
The Ambassadors
found in the 1909 New York Edition of
The Novels and Tales of Henry James
, except that Book Eleventh, I and II, follow the order of the first English edition, in accordance with contemporary scholarly preference. In addition, some minor adjustments have been made to modernize spelling and punctuation.

P REFACE
Henry James
     
    Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of
The Ambassadors
, which first appeared in twelve numbers of the
North American Review
(1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader’s benefit, into as few words as possible—planted or “sunk,” stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether’s irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani’s garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend’s enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him
as
a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as wecould desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of
The Ambassadors
, his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what
have
you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it
was
a mistake. Live, live!” Such is the gist of Strether’s appeal to the impressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the word “mistake” occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarks—which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible question.
Would
there yet perhaps be time for reparation?—reparation, that is, for the injury done his character;