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The Ambassadors

By Henry James.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Preface The Ambassadors Book I I II III Book II I II Book III I II Book IV I II Book V I II III Book VI I II III Book VII I II III Book VIII I II III Book IX I II III Book X I II III Book XI I II III IV Book XII I II III IV V Colophon Uncopyright Imprint The Standard Ebooks logo.

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Preface

Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of The Ambassadors, which first appeared in twelve numbers of The North American Review (1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book V, for the readerā€™s benefit, into as few words as possibleā ā€”planted or ā€œsunk,ā€ stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Stretherā€™s irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Glorianiā€™s garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friendā€™s enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of The Ambassadors, his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. ā€œLive all you can; itā€™s a mistake not to. It doesnā€™t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you havenā€™t had that what have you had? Iā€™m too oldā ā€”too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore donā€™t, like me today, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now Iā€™m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you donā€™t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!ā€ Such is the gist of Stretherā€™s appeal to the impressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the word ā€œmistakeā€ occurs several times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarksā ā€”which gives the measure of the signal warning he feels attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps after all constitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in conditions that press the spring of a terrible question. Would there yet perhaps be time for reparation?ā ā€”reparation, that is, for the injury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and in which he has even himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all events sees; so that the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of this process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the spoken word, for I was to take the image over exactly as I happened to have met it. A friend had repeated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Stretherā€™s melancholy eloquence might be imputedā ā€”said as chance would have, and so easily might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday afternoon of summer, many persons of great interest being present. The observation there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the ā€œnoteā€ that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purposeā ā€”had contained in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the time and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may call the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in

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