The Ambassadors

by Henry James

But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.

“so you see that I don’t love beneath my station.”

giving himself over to the simple pleasures of genial living.”

It would not have escaped James that one of the ghosts at the windows was his younger self.

In not seeking wisdom, he found knowledge instead, and he had no idea what to do with knowledge.

Knowledge emerges gradually, silently, darkly, with subtlety, and then it is complete, more complete than if everything were explained in speech or set out clearly by the author in a paragraph.

“He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.”

and the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.

“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.”

Maria Gostrey,

He had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh—that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering groping tentacles—was exactly society, exactly the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short Europe.

“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of my youth!” But our realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”

It’s exactly the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”

The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef.

the hum of vain things.

They represented now the mere sallow paint on the door of the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up—a structure he had practically never carried further.

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognize the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one’s steps among them.

But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and—I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—to sniff.”

Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

He was extraordinarily glad to see her, expressing to her frankly what she most showed him, that one might live for years without a blessing unsuspected, but that to know it at last for no more than three days was to need it or miss it for ever. She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?

The light was in her eyes.

They were in presence of Chad himself.

The ground had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had supervened.

Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained.

One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.

A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or, better stil...

It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but that was on the basis of the old quantity.

What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn’t know; but he had borne them because in the first place they were private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute.

In Paris such debts are tacit.”

Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe.

“Is there some woman? Of whom he’s really afraid of course I mean—or who does with him what she likes.” “It’s awfully charming of you,” Bilham presently remarked, “not to have asked me that before.” “Oh I’m not fit for my job!”

It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well. He had at all events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one.

Her laugh produced in him a momentary gloom.

They once more, in spite of this vagueness, exchanged a look—a look that was perhaps the longest yet.

He had dropped on a sofa for dismay; but she seemed, as she stood over him, to have the last word. “Wasn’t what you came out for to find out all?”

Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence, on Chad’s introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue.

“Oh they’re every one—all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up. There are always artists—he’s beautiful and inimitable to the cher confrère; and then gros bonnets of many kinds—ambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews.

Strether wondered, desiring justice. “They seem—all the women—very harmonious.” “Oh in closer quarters they come out!” And then, while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the harmonies,

“Well,” said little Bilham, “you’re not a person to whom it’s easy to tell things you don’t want to know.

He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass.

“It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike me as in danger of missing the train;

Beginning of his speech to Billam.

What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower?

Miss Gostrey

Maria Gostrey,

All these people—the people of the English mother’s side—had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to.

“Ah his idea was simply what a man’s idea always is—to put every effort off on the woman.”

She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson.

He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.”