rs 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 of
self-revelation. I may seem not to better the case for my
discrimination if I say that, for my first care, I had thus inevitably
to set him up a confidant or two, to wave away with energy the custom
of the seated mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block of
merel