t
everything in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean, complete and
functional scene, treating ALL the submitted matter, as by logical
start, logical turn, and logical finish) is discriminated preparation,
is the fusion and synthesis of picture. These alternations propose
themselves all recogniseably, I think, from an early stage, as the very
form and figure of "The Ambassadors"; so that, to repeat, such an agent
as Miss Gostrey pre-engaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty
wing with her shawl and her smelling-salts. Her function speaks at
once for itself, and by the time she has dined with Strether in London
and gone to a play with him her intervention as a ficelle is, I hold,
expertly justified. Thanks to it we have treated scenically, and
scenically alone, the whole lumpish question of Strether's "past,"
which has seen us more happily on the way than anything else could have
done; we have strained to a high lucidity and vivacity (or at least we
hope we have) certain indispensable facts; we have seen our two or
three immediate friends all conveniently and profitably in "action"; to
say nothing of our beginning to descry others, of a remoter intensity,
getting into motion, even if a bit vaguely as yet, for our further
enrichment. Let my first point be here that the scene in question,
that in which the whole situation at Woollett and the complex forces
that have propelled my hero to where this lively extractor of his value
and distiller of his essence awaits him, is normal and entire, is
really an excellent STANDARD scene; copious, comprehensive, and
accordingly never short, but with its office as definite as that of the
hammer on the gong of the clock, the office of expressing ALL THAT IS
IN the hour.

The "ficelle" character of the subordinate party is as artfully
dissimulated, throughout, as may be, and to that extent that, with the
seams or joints of Maria Gostrey's ostensible connectedness taken
particular care of, duly smoothed over, that is, and anxiously kept
from showing as "pieced on;" this figure doubtless achieves, after a
fashion, something of the dignity of a prime idea: which circumstance
but shows us afresh how many quite incalculable but none the less clear
sources of enjoyment for the infatuated artist, how many copious
springs of our never-to-be-slighted "fun" for the reader and critic
susceptible of contagion, may sound their incidental plash as soon as
an artistic process begins