Aspects of the novel
be seen, by those who cared to see, the figure of the Muse; that Logic,
at the moment of finishing its own house, laid the foundation of a new
one. Here, here is the point where the aspect called pattern is most
closely in touch with its material; here is our starting point. It
springs mainly from the plot, accompanies it like a light in the clouds,
and remains visible after it has departed. Beauty is sometimes the shape
of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would
be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not
I shall call it rhythm. For the moment we are concerned with pattern
only.
Let us examine at some length another book of the rigid type, a book
with a unity, and in this sense an easy book, although it is by Henry
James. We shall see in it pattern triumphant, and we shall also be able
to see the sacrifices an author must make if he wants his pattern and
nothing else to triumph.
_The Ambassadors_, like _Thais_, is the shape of an hour-glass. Strether
and Chad, like Paphnuce and Thais, change places, and it is the
realization of this that makes the book so satisfying at the close. The
plot is elaborate and subtle, and proceeds by action or conversation or
meditation through every paragraph. Everything is planned, everything
fits; none of the minor characters are just decorative like the
talkative Alexandrians at Nirias' banquet; they elaborate on the main
theme, they work. The final effect is pre-arranged, dawns gradually on
the reader, and is completely successful when it comes. Details of
intrigue, of the various missions from America, may be forgotten, but
the symmetry they have created is enduring.
Let us trace the growth of this symmetry.[9]
Strether, a sensitive middle-aged American, is commissioned by his old
friend, Mrs. Newsome, whom he hopes to marry, to go to Paris and rescue
her son Chad, who has gone to the bad in that appropriate city. The
Newsomes are sound commercial people, who have made money over
manufacturing a small article of domestic utility. Henry James never
tells us what the small article is, and in a moment we shall understand
why. Wells spits it out in _Tono Bungay_, Meredith reels it out in _Evan
Harrington_, Trollope prescribes it freely for Miss Dunstable, but for
James to indicate how his characters made their pile--it would not do.
The article is somewhat ignoble and ludicrous--that is enough. If you
choose to be coarse and daring and visualize it for yourself as, say, a
button-hook, you can, but you do so at your own risk: the author remains
uninvolved.
Well, whatever it is, Chad Newsome ought to come back and help make it,
and Strether undertakes to fetch him. He has to be rescued from a life
which is both immoral and unremunerative.
Strether is a typical James character--he recurs in nearly all the books
and is an essential part of their construction. He is the observer who
tries to influence the action, and who through his failure to do so
gains extra opportunities for observation. And the other characters are
such as an observer like Strether is capable of observing--through
lenses procured from a rather too first-class oculist. Everything is
adjusted to his vision, yet he is not a quietist--no, that is the
strength of the device; he takes us along with him, we move as well as
look on.
When he lands in England (and a landing is an exalted and enduring
experience for James, it is as vital as Newgate for Defoe; poetry and
life crowd round a landing): when Strether lands, though it is only old
England, he begins to have doubts of his mission, which increase when he
gets to Paris. For Chad Newsome, far from going to the bad, has
improved; he is distinguished, he is so sure of himself that he can be
kind and cordial to the man who has orders to fetch him away; his
friends are exquisite, and as for "women in the case" whom his mother
anticipated, there is no sign of them whatever. It is Paris that has
enlarged and redeemed him--and how well Strether himself understands
this!
His greatest uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the possible
impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one's
authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast bright
Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard,
in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably
marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together; and what seemed
all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was a place of
which, unmistakably, Chad was fond; wherefore, if he, Strether, should
like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of
either of them?
Thus, exquisitely and firmly, James sets his atmosphere--Paris
irradiates the book from end to end, it is an actor though always
unembodied, it is a scale by which human sensibility can be measured,
and when we have finished the novel and allow its incidents to blur that
we may see the pattern plainer, it is Paris that gleams at the centre of
the hour-glass shape--Paris--nothing so crude as good or evil. Strether
sees this soon, and sees that Chad realizes it better than he himself
can; and when he has reached this stage of initiation the novel takes a
turn: there is, after all, a woman in the case; behind Paris,
interpreting it for Chad, is the adorable and exalted figure of Mme. de
Vionnet. It is now impossible for Strether to proceed. All that is noble
and refined in life concentrates in Mme. de Vionnet and is reinforced by
her pathos. She asks him not to take Chad away. He promises--without
reluctance, for his own heart has already shown him as much--and he
remains in Paris not to fight it but to fight for it.
For the second batch of ambassadors now arrives from the New World. Mrs.
Newsome, incensed and puzzled by the unseemly delay, has despatched
Chad's sister, his brother-in-law, and Mamie, the girl whom he is
supposed to marry. The novel now becomes, within its ordained limits,
most amusing. There is a superb set-to between Chad's sister and Mme. de
Vionnet, while as for Mamie--here is disastrous Mamie, seen as we see
all things, through Strether's eyes.
As a child, as a "bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie
had bloomed for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of
home; where he remembered her at first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's
parlours, a course of English literature reinforced by exams and
teas--and once more, finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept
no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of
things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in
the same basket with the most withered of the winter apples.... He none
the less felt now, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth
of a confidence. For she _was_ charming, when all was said, and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency. She
was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he hadn't found
her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril of
expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without
dreaming it; she was bland, she was bridal--with never, that he could
make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was handsome and
portly, and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly
reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so far discriminate, less as a
young lady than as an old one--had an old one been supposable to
Strether as so committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed
moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of
bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly in
front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the combination of all
of which kept up about her the glamour of her "receiving," placed her
again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the ice cream
plates, suggested the enumeration of all the names, gregarious specimens
of a single type, she was happy to "meet."
Mamie! She is another Henry James type; nearly every novel contains a
Mamie--Mrs. Gereth in _The Spoils of Poynton_ for instance, or Henrietta
Stackpole in _The Portrait of a Lady_. He is so good at indicating
instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate,
deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness;
he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is
delightful.
So Strether changes sides and loses all hopes of marrying Mrs. Newsome.
Paris is winning--and then he catches sight of something new. Is not
Chad, as regards any fineness in him, played out? Is not Chad's Paris
after all just a place for a spree? This fear is confirmed. He goes for
a solitary country walk, and at the end of the day he comes across Chad
and Mme. de Vionnet. They are in a boat, they pretend not to see him,
because their relation is at bottom an ordinary liaison, and they are
ashamed. They were hoping for a secret week-end at an inn while their
passion survived; for it will not survive, Chad will tire of the
exquisite Frenchwoman, she is part of his fling; he will go back to his
mother and make the little domestic article and marry Mamie. They know
all this, and it is revealed to Strether though they try to hide it;
they lie, they are vulgar--even Mme. de Vionnet, even her pathos, once
so exquisite, is stained with commonness.
It was like a chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a
creature so fine could be, by mysterious forces, a creature so
exploited. For, at the end of all things, they _were_ mysterious; she
had but made Chad what he was--so why could she think she had made him
infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made
him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness
that he was none the less only Chad. The work, however admirable, was
nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was
marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations--however one classed them--within the common experience,
should be so transcendency prized.
She was older for him tonight, visibly less exempt from the touch of
time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the
happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet;
and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a
maidservant crying for a young man. The only thing was that she judged
herself as the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgment, seemed but to sink her lower.
So Strether loses them too. As he says: "I have lost everything--it is
my only logic." It is not that they have gone back. It is that he has
gone on. The Paris they revealed to him--he could reveal it to them now,
if they had eyes to see, for it is something finer than they could ever
notice for themselves, and his imagination has more spiritual value than
their youth. The pattern of the hour-glass is complete; he and Chad have
changed places, with more subtle steps than Thais and Paphnuce, and the
light in the clouds proceeds not from the well-lit Alexandria, but from
the jewel which "twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what
seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next."
The beauty that suffuses _The Ambassadors_ is the reward due to a fine
artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the
narrow path of æsthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his
possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself with
modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. Woven
itself wonderfully. But at what sacrifice!