people in the story; his
state of mind would figure in his description on the same terms as the
world about him, it would simply be a matter for him to describe like
another. In the book as it is, Strether personally has nothing to do
with the impression that is made by the mazy career of his
imagination, he has no hand in the effect it produces. It speaks for
itself, it spreads over the scene and colours the world just as it did
for Strether. It is immediately in the foreground, and the "seeing
eye" to which it is presented is not his, but the reader's own.

No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning a
stretch of memory--that is not the image suggested by Henry James's
book. It is rather as though the reader himself were at the window,
and as though the window opened straight into the depths of Strether's
conscious existence. The energy of his perception and discrimination
is there seen at work. His mind is the mirror of the scene beyond it,
and the other people in the book exist only in relation to him; but
his mind, his own thought of them, is there absolutely, its restless
evolution is in full sight. I do not say that this is a complete
account of the principle on which the book is constructed; for indeed
the principle goes further, encompassing points of method to be dealt
with later. But for the moment let the book stand as the type of the
novel in which a mind is dramatized--reflecting the life to which it
is exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life.
This last, in the case of Strether, involves a gradual, long-drawn
change, from the moment when he takes up the charge of rescuing his
young friend from the siren of Paris, to the moment when he finds
himself wishing that his young friend would refuse to be rescued. Such
is the curve in the unexpected adventure of his imagination. It is
given as nobody's view--not his own, as it would be if he told the
story himself, and not the author's, as it would be if Henry James
told the story. The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind;
he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it.

Thus it is that the novelist pushes his responsibility further and
further away from himself. The fiction that he devises is ultimately
his; but it looks poor and thin if he openly claims it as his, or at
any rate it becomes much more substantial as soon as he fathers it
upon another. This is not _my_ story, says the author; you know
nothing