sion of all the past facts of the situation
which it is necessary for him to know; a _scene_ thus takes the place
of that "harking back to make up," as he calls it, which is apt to
appear as a lump of narrative shortly after the opening of a story. If
Strether were really the narrator, whether in the first person or the
third, he could not use his own talk in this manner; he would have to
tell us himself about his past. But he has never _told_ us his
thought, we have looked at it and drawn our inferences; and so there
is still some air of dramatic detachment about him, and his talk may
seem on occasion to be that of a man whom we know from outside. The
advantage is peculiarly felt on that crucial occasion at Gloriani's,
where Strether's sudden flare of vehemence, so natural and yet so
unlike him, breaks out with force unimpaired. It strikes freshly on
the ear, the speech of a man whose inmost perturbations we have indeed
inferred from many glimpses of his mind, but still without ever
learning the full tale of them from himself.

The Ambassadors, then, is a story which is seen from one man's point
of view, and yet a story in which that point of view is itself a
matter for the reader to confront and to watch constructively.
Everything in the novel is now dramatically rendered, whether it is a
page of dialogue or a page of description, because even in the page of
description nobody is addressing us, nobody is reporting his
impression to the reader. The impression is enacting itself in the
endless series of images that play over the outspread expanse of the
man's mind and memory. When the story passes from these to the scenes
of dialogue--from the silent drama of Strether's meditation to the
spoken drama of the men and women--there is thus no break in the
method. The same law rules everywhere--that Strether's changing sense
of his situation shall appeal directly to the onlooker, and not by way
of any summarizing picture-maker. And yet _as a whole_ the book is all
pictorial, an indirect impression received through Strether's
intervening consciousness, beyond which the story never strays. I
conclude that on this paradox the art of dramatizing the picture of
somebody's experience--the art I have been considering in these last
chapters--touches its limit. There is indeed no further for it to go.

XII

There is no further for it to go, for it now covers the whole story.
Henry James was the first writer of fiction, I j