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The Ambassadors: A New View
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The retirement to Rye, which occurred in 1897, when James was fifty-four, distinguished between his life of experience and his life from ‘past accumulations’ (as he once called it). His peregrinations over, he set himself, masterwise, to producing a world compact of all he had been able, coherently, to think and feel.“ Despite the fact that The Ambassadors is one of the most original of all James's productions, no novel is so much the result of all his ”past accumulations“ as this one.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 Austin Warren, “Myth and Dialectic in the Late Novels,” Kenyon Review, v (Autumn 1943), 551.
2 First published in the North American Review, Jan.-Dec. 1903; issued by Methuen & Co., London, on 24 Sept. 1903, with Chs. 28 and 35 omitted in serialization, in their proper places. The first American edition, issued by Harper & Brothers, on 6 Nov. 1903, inserted Ch. 28 in Part XI, rather than at thse end of Part X, and following the first chapter in Part xi. The New York Edition unfortunately used the Harper text. See Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James (London, 1957), pp. 336, D 533; 123–126, A 58a, b.
3 The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1947), pp. 225–229, Torquay, 31 Oct. 1895; 313, Lamb House, 19 Oct. 1901; 372–374. “The Ambassadors: Project for a Novel,” ed. Edna Kenton, Hound & Horn, vii (Apr.-June 1934), 545–547. To W. D. Howells, Lamb House, Rye, 10 Aug. 1901, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (2 vols., New York, 1920), i, 376–377. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), pp. 307–308.
4 I see nothing in this suggestion that does particular violence to the sound observation of Louis Brodin, “Louis Lambert Strether, le héro des Ambassadeurs, cherche, comme son homonyme balzacien Louis Lambert, la révélation du mystère de la vie.” Les Maîtres de la littérature américaine (Paris, 1948), pp. 410–411.
5 The Notebooks, pp. 225–228.
6 The Notebooks, p. 389. Italics mine.
7 The Notebooks, p. 390. See Leon Edel, “Introduction,” The Sacred Fount (New York, 1953), p. xxvii, for an interpretation of “Egeria.”
8 The Art of the Novel, p. 317. “What he [James] did was to ally the breathless sort of interest possible in … detective story fiction to a subtle search for motives. Lambert Strether's worried hunt … for the reality and truth of Chad Newsome's motives through false scents and in and out of dead ends and misleading side paths is the sublimation of the hunt for the clue.” Elizabeth Stevenson, The Crooked Corridor (New York, 1949), p. 138.
9 The Art of the Novel, p. 317. “The first completely satisfying way of writing a novel,” Dorothy Richardson says in The Trap. See Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel: 1900–1950 (Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 46–55.
10 Percy Lubbock, Craft of Fiction (New York, 1921), pp. 158–170; Martin W. Sampson, “Introduction,” The Ambassadors, Harper's Modern Classics (New York, 1930), pp. vii-viii; R. P. Blackmur, “Introduction,” The Art of the Novel, p. xxxv; Bruce McCullough, Representative English Novelists (New York, 1946), pp. 288–290; Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 56, and The Twentieth Century Novel (New York, 1932), pp. 190, 197–198, 204.
11 Modern Fulton Studies, iv (Summer 1958), 157–164. Before Tilford's thorough critique James Southall Wilson in “Henry James and Herman Melville,” [Va. Quart. Rev., XXI (Spring 1945), 283] had indicated variance in the point of view in The Ambassadors.
12 The consistent use of “I” for the narrator's thinking in The Sacred Fount isn't the point of difference; one can indifferently think of one's self as “I” or as “Lambert Strether.” Nor does the fact that James attacks the use of first person narrative for its “terrible fluidity of self-revelation” rob him of his historical importance. (See The Art of the Novel, pp. 320–321.) No one can tie Edouard Dujardin to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though he plainly has his con nection with Ulysses; the former is a logical development out of James's experiments. I have thought that James himself may have owed something to Paul Bourget's Cosmopolis (1893).
13 The Art of the Novel, p. 317. Italics mine.
14 The Art of the Novel, p. 70.
15 The Notebooks, p. 227.
16 Leon Edel, “Introduction,” The Other House (New York, 1947), pp. xv-xviii. James was acquainted with Rosmersholm from 1891. The Scenic Art. ed. Allan Wade (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948), pp. 245, 254, 256 n., 369. He used ideas from this play in The Other House (1896). Herbert Edwards, “Herbert James and Ibsen,” American Literature xxrv (May 1952), 208–211, has some excellent general suggestions about James's use of Ibsen, but does not touch on Rosmersholm as a source for The Ambassadors.
17 The Notebooks, p. 397.
18 Henrik Ibsen, The Pretenders and Two Other Plays, Everyman's Library, 659 (London, 1913), pp. 229–316.
19 The Art of the Novel, p. 319.
20 Henry James: The Major Phase (New York, 1944), p. 21. “Perhaps the greatest triumph of the novel is the way in which the terrible Mrs. Newsome invisibly dominates the action from her New England home.” Orlo Williams, “The Ambassadors,” Criterion, vni (Sept. 1928), 60.
21 The Tragedy of Manners (New Haven, 1957), p. 47.
22 The Notebooks, pp. 379–380, 400–401.
23 The Notebooks, p. 372.
24 I cannot go along completely with Leon Edel, who so identifies Little Bilham. See his admirably graphic “Jonathan Sturges,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, xv (Autumn 1953), 1–9. What remains distinctly “American” about Little Bilham is probably from Sturges. Edel: “Logan Pearsall Smith told me once that Henry James relished Jona-than Sturges' wit …” (p. 5). Is the wit of Little Bilham striking in the story?
25 In fact, the very opposite is true, as Frederick C. Crews points out (p. 43).
26 Among them, a young man as sophisticated would not do as a prospective fiancé for Mamie Pocock.
27 Following the entry for 25 Mar. 1899 in The Notebooks, pp. 97–98, in which James outlines the story of Trilby as Du Maurier gave it to him, the editors reveal how James encouraged Du Maurier to write the story himself. When it was appearing serially, James wrote Du Maurier from Venice in May 1894, “Trilby goes on with a life and charm and loveability that gild the whole day one reads her” (The Letters, i, 213).
28 See Donald M. Murray, “James and Whistler at the Grosvenor Gallery, American Quarterly, iv (Spring 1952), 49–65, for James's disapproval of Whistler's art.
29 See Ch. vi.
30 In few books is the “heroine” so long withheld from us. Strether meets her in Ch. Xi. This was planned so that we should identify ourselves with Strether as much as possible before the encounter. By introducing her daughter and allowing Strether to focus for a time on the latter, James further subordinated Marie to Strether. The mother-daughter relationship to Chad was possibly suggested by Henry Esmond. The Newcomes gave a name to Strether's fiancée and Chad, and the Colonel's relation to Clive and his final humility has a faint bearing on the history of Chad and Strether. Maria Gostrey one morning reminds Strether “of Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club.”
31 “There could be nothing more trivial than the donnée of The Ambassadors; there is no dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an American who is engaged in that odd way common to Mr. James's characters, to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear of an entanglement with a Frenchwoman.” Rebecca West, Henry James (New York, 1916), p. 108.
32 Beach, The Method, p. 135; Pelham Edgar, Henry James: Man and Author (Boston, 1927), pp. 312–313; Matthiessen, The Major Phase, p. 26; Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1957), p. 222; Richard Chase, “James's Ambassadors,” Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 1958), p. 130.
33 Not too much should be made of his mild “asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it [his encounter with Maria] as disloyal.”
34 John Rosmer is without imagination and discrimination, hence he cannot understand that it is love which impelled Rebecca, and he forces a test upon her which leads to their joint suicide. James has been helped to his characterization not only by studying Rosmersholm, but by reading intently Shaw's Tshe Quintessence of Ibsenism (London, 1891). Shaw's position as an interpreter of Ibsen, who had challenged the abilities of James's actress friends, Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea, as well as Shaw's defense of Guy Domville, was a factor in drawing James to Shaw. See “Preface to the First Edition,” The Quintessence (New York, 1957), p. 20; Elizabeth Robins, Theatre and Friendship (New York, 1932), p.107; The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 47. For Shaw's views of Ibsen's attack on idealism, see The Quintessence (1957), pp. 37–45, 79, 100–106.
35 The Art of the Novel, p. 310 (italics mine).
36 “… it is his [Strether's] lovable goodness, like that of Mr. Longdon in The Awkward Age, that makes its appeal to my affections….” Dorothy Bethurum, “Morality and Henry James,” Sewanee Review, xxxi (July 1923), 329.
37 H.J.: Man and Author, p. 332.
38 “The burden of The Ambassadors is that Strether has awakened to a wholly new sense of life. Yet he does nothing at all to fulfill that sense” (Matthiessen, p. 39). “What it comes to … is that, while Chad himself is fairly bloodless for a young lover of a mature mistress … Strether becomes almost virtuous—a kind of perambulating mirror.” Williams, p. 58; F. W. Dupee, Henry James, A.M.L. (New York, 1951), p. 243; “Strether … suffers from the standard Jamesian ambivalence of holding ‘experience’ at arm's length at the same moment he longs to embrace it.” Arthur L. Scott, “A Protest Against the James Vogue,” College English, xm (Jan. 1952), 200; F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, n.d.), p. 161.
39 The AH of the Novel, pp. 307, 313.
40 My italics. It would have been quite ironic if the mysterious object, manufactured in Woollett, on which the Newsome fortune rests, were a tin jelly-mold, and thus the metaphor got embedded in Strether's consciousness. Patricia Evans makes a very good guess, however, that the Newsomes were match manufacturers in “The Meaning of the Match Image in James's The Ambassadors,” MLN, LXX (Jan. 1955), 36–37. Yet I am almost persuaded that it was a timepiece. See R. W. Stallman, “Time and Unnamed Article in The Ambassadors,” MLN, LXXII (Jan. 1957) 27–32 and especially his “ ‘The Sacred Rage’: The Time-Theme in The Ambassadors,” Modern Fiction Studies, in (Spring 1957), 41–56. But see Leon Edel's dissent in “Time and The Ambassadors,” MLN, Lxxin (Mar. 1958), 177–179.
41 The Tragedy of Manners, p. 36. See also Arnold L. Goldsmith, “Henry James's Reconciliation of Free Will and Fatalism,” NCF, xiii (Sept. 1958), 116–118.
42 We should note, however, in this development a reversal of roles, for when Chad wishes to go home, it is now Strether who dissuades him. It is this which leads E. M. Forster to declare that The Ambassadors has the pattern of an hourglass. Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), pp. 218–234. Forster's argument that characterization in the novel has been curtailed in the interests of pattern has been successfully controverted by E. K. Brown in Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto, 1959), pp. 24–27, who makes a point also of James's gradation of character. In regard to the reversal of roles, Brown points out that Strether “becomes Chad's peer in the appreciation of Europe, then his superior.”
43 The Destructive Element (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 79.
44 This seems almost a direct echo of Oswald's declaration to his mother, Mrs. Alving, in Ibsen's Ghosts: “I'm not thinking anything, Mother, I'm not capable of thinking—I've had to give that up.” The Play, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1951), p. 562. Strether is thinking, of course, of his free delivery of opinions in Gloriani's garden.
45 With this should be linked, of course, Strether's disillusionment with Wraymarsh.
46 John Russell in “Henry James and the Leaning Tower, New Statesman and Nation, xxv (17 Apr. 1943), 255, quoting from a letter to Edward Warren, the architect, from James in 1899, shows the novelist's ambivalence towards Paris: ”It strikes me as a monstrous massive flower of national decadence, the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes … [yet] with a deal of beauty still in its great expensive symmetries and perspectives—and such a beauty of light.“
47 Caroline Gordon, in an otherwise excellent paper, seems to have missed the point of this scene when she writes, “It is largely through her realization of Chad's limitations …that Mme de Vionnet arrives at her profession of faith, Christian charity, which she makes that night to him [Strether].” “Some Readings and Misreadings,” Sewanee Review, LXI (Summer 1943), 388. Edward Wagenknecht's comment, “It is only superficially that The Ambassadors can be regarded as an anti-Puritan book, for even Mme de Vionnet learns that ‘the only safe thing is to give’ ” is equally out of focus. “Our Contemporary, Henry James,” College English, X (Dec. 1948), 132.
48 Italics mine. Was James influenced by Shaw's attitude towards love? (Seen. 34.) “Love, as a practical factor in society, is mere appetite. The higher development of it which Ibsen shows us occurring in Rebecca West in Rosmersholm is known to most of us by the descriptions of great poets…. Tannhâuser's passion for Venus is a development of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois Jack for his Jill.” The Quintessence, p. 51.
49 James's own perfect phrase for the novel. The Art of the Novel, p. 316. For me, Ferner Nuhn's interpretation destroys the very essence of the novel: “The American man was likely to be a boor in the pages of … James, while if … not a boor he was almost sure to be … a little weak, precious, and slightly pathetic, like Strether…. Chad Newsome's ‘unsanctified union‘—is transformed, by its beautiful manners … into something essentially good…. The vision of what Paris means as liberation has come too late for Strether himself. But he at least can bless Chad's choice, even if it means blessing, on the grounds of culture, the fact of adultery.” The Wind Blew from the East (New York, 1942), pp. 74, 115.
50 I am inclined to think that James identified himself with Strether in his dilemma more closely than he identified himself with any other character in his fiction. H. S. Canby has written, “I believe that the warmth of The Ambassadors, the intensely personal sensitiveness of Strether, its hero, may be explained very simply by saying that Strether is a dramatization of a possible spiritual and emotional adventure of Henry himself.” Turn West, Turn East, p. 270; see also Edgar, p. 310, and Edward Mortimer, “Henry James: 15 April 1943 28 February 1916,” Horizon, via (May 1943), 319. To Joselyn Persse, to whom he sent a copy of The Ambassadors, James wrote, “Don't write to ”thank“ me for it—but if you are able successfully to struggle with it, try to like the poor old hero, in whom you will perhaps find a vague resemblance (though not facial) to yours always Henry James.” The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1955), p. 198.
51 Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), pp. 206–207.
52 The Method (Philadelphia, 1951), p. 141.
53 “Bruce McCullough correctly indicates how Maria's evasion helps Strether's development: ”Let us assume that Miss Gostrey might have told him a great deal more…. The effect upon him would not have been the same as the effect on the method followed. He could not have grasped abstractly what he came to understand by living through“ (pp. 289–290). True, but this has no bearing on her not keeping her word.
54 Though Miss Dorothy M. Hoare does not treat the temptation theme, she understands better than most other critics appear to have done, the reason why Strether does not accept Maria's offer of herself: “The final and crucial passage in the book comes with Strether's refusal to permit himself (for it would involve the loss of integrity on his part, his feeling for Mme de Vionnet being what it is) to accept this offer.” Some Studies in the Modern Novel (London, 1938), p. 14. See also Matthiessen, H.J.: The Major Phase, p. 38. In the clearest contrast between Marie and Maria, Strether notes that the former is “passive under the spell of transmission” while the latter is “pagan, predatory, and even piratical in her treasure hunting. When … he renounces the happiness that Miss Gostrey offers … among other things it is this ‘lust of the eyes and pride of life’ he is renouncing.” Joan Bennett, “The Art of Henry James: The Ambassadors,” Chicago Review, rx (Winter 1956), 20–23; also Adeline R. Tintner, “The Spoils of Henry James,” PMLA, XLI (Mar. 1946), 248–249. This is a factor, surely, but not the primary reason.
55 Henry James, AML, p. 241.
56 Representative English Novelists, pp. 292–293.
57 Stallman, “The Sacred Rage,” p. 47, n. 3, has other examples.
58 “The Altar of Henry James,” The Question of Henry James, pp. 268–270.
59 “Metaphor in the Plot of The Ambassadors,” The New England Quarterly, xxiv (Sept. 1951), 303–305.
60 “The Ambassadors: The Crucifixion of Sensibility,” College English, xv (Feb. 1956), 289–292.
61 Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1957), pp. 208–231, presents an allegorical interpretation of the novel based on the Swedenborgianism of the novelist's father. The interpretation seems desperately strained to me; there are, however, good things in the discussion, for example, the relationship on the score of philosophical theme to Balzac's “Louis Lambert.” I must say I prefer a Swedenborgian interpretation to such a mythological one as is found in Robert A. Durr's “The Night Journey in The Ambassadors,” Philological Quarterly, xxv (Jan. 1956), 24–28.
62 Paul Bourget, Cosmopolis, tr. Cleveland Moffett (New York, 1893), pp. 97, 98, 336.
63 “Metaphor in the Plot,” pp. 297–300. Those who can appreciate nothing in the novel, like Arnold Bennett and F. R. Leavis, seem to me unfortunately self-condemned. See Bennett's Books and Persons (London, 1917), p. 263, and The Savour of Life (Toronto, 1928), p. 118, and Leavis' The Great Tradition (New York, n.d.), p. 161. We should recall, however, that the reader for Harper & Bros, in 1903, H. M. Alden, advised against publication: “We ought to do better.” See James Thurber, Mark Van Doren, Lyman Bryson, “Henry James: The Ambassadors,” Invitation to Learning, i (Winter 1951–52), 364.
64 “The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James,” The Question of Henry James, p. 84.
65 H.J.: The Major Phase, pp. 35–36.
66 The Themes of Henry James (New Haven, 1956), p. 99.
67 The Destructive Element, pp. 80–81.
68 The Method, p. 267.1 find myself in complete accord with Gibson's view, “It is not by accident, certainly, that elements of mystery and complexity in Strether's perception of Paris reappear in the images used to describe the person of the Contesse de Vionnet” (p. 301). Does not Strether, in a certain sense, create both of them for the reader? See also n. 46 above.
69 The Art of the Novel, pp. 52, 309.