y referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the
modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems
simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion. "Harking
back to make up" took at any rate more doing, as the phrase is, not
only than the reader of to-day demands, but than he will tolerate at
any price any call upon him either to understand or remotely to
measure; and for the beauty of the thing when done the current
editorial mind in particular appears wholly without sense. It is not,
however, primarily for either of these reasons, whatever their weight,
that Strether's friend Waymarsh is so keenly clutched at, on the
threshold of the book, or that no less a pounce is made on Maria
Gostrey--without even the pretext, either, of HER being, in essence,
Strether's friend. She is the reader's friend much rather--in
consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently require one; and
she acts in that capacity, and REALLY in that capacity alone, with
exemplary devotion from beginning to and of the book. She is an
enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her
mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the
dramatist's art, as we well know--since if we don't it's not the fault
of the proofs that lie scattered about us--is in the use of ficelles;
by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them.
Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business, less
to my subject than to my treatment of it; the interesting proof, in
these connexions, being that one has but to take one's subject for the
stuff of drama to interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as need
be.

The material of "The Ambassadors," conforming in this respect exactly
to that of "The Wings of the Dove," published just before it, is taken
absolutely for the stuff of drama; so that, availing myself of the
opportunity given me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the
latter work, I had mainly to make on its behalf the point of its scenic
consistency. It disguises that virtue, in the oddest way in the world,
by just LOOKING, as we turn its pages, as little scenic as possible;
but it sharply divides itself, just as the composition before us does,
into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare, for
scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and
crown the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, tha