ong the
boulevards with Chad, he lounges on a chair in the Champs Elysees with
some one else--we know the kind of scene that is set for Strether,
know how very few accessories he requires, and know that the scene
marks a certain definite climax, wherever it occurs, for all its
everyday look. The occasion is important, there is no doubt about
that; its importance is in the air. And Strether takes his part in it
as though he had almost become what he cannot be, an objective figure
for the reader. Evidently he cannot be that, since the centre of
vision is still within him; but by an easy sleight of hand the author
gives him almost the value of an independent person, a man to whose
words we may listen expectantly, a man whose mind is screened from us.
Again and again the stroke is accomplished, and indeed there is
nothing mysterious about it. Simply it consists in treating the scene
as dramatically as possible--keeping it framed in Strether's vision,
certainly, but keeping his consciousness out of sight, his thought
un-explored. He talks to Maria; and to us, to the reader, his voice
seems as much as hers to belong to somebody whom we are
_watching_--which is impossible, because our point of view is his.

A small matter, perhaps, but it is interesting as a sign, still
another, of the perpetual tendency of the novel to capture the
advantages which it appears to forego. The Ambassadors is without
doubt a book that deals with an entirely non-dramatic subject; it is
the picture of an _etat d'ame_. But just as the chapters that are
concerned with Strether's soul are in the key of drama, after the
fashion I have described, so too the episode, the occasion, the scene
that crowns the impression, is always more dramatic in its method than
it apparently has the means to be. Here, for instance, is the central
scene of the whole story, the scene in the old Parisian garden, where
Strether, finally filled to the brim with the sensation of all the
life for which his own opportunity has passed, overflows with his
passionate exhortation to little Bilham--warning him, adjuring him not
to make _his_ mistake, not to let life slide away ungrasped. It is the
hour in which Strether touches his crisis, and the first necessity of
the chapter is to show the sudden lift and heave of his mood within;
the voices and admonitions of the hour, that is to say, must be heard
and felt as he hears and feels them himself. The scene, then, will be
given as Stre