into
the matter of the noted inevitable deviation (from too fond an original
vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the straightest execution
may ever be trusted to inflict even on the most mature plan--the case
being that, though one's last reconsidered production always seems to
bristle with that particular evidence, "The Ambassadors" would place a
flood of such light at my service. I must attach to my final remark
here a different import; noting in the other connexion I just glanced
at that such passages as that of my hero's first encounter with Chad
Newsome, absolute attestations of the non-scenic form though they be,
yet lay the firmest hand too--so far at least as intention goes--on
representational effect. To report at all closely and completely of
what "passes" on a given occasion is inevitably to become more or less
scenic; and yet in the instance I allude to, WITH the conveyance,
expressional curiosity and expressional decency are sought and arrived
at under quite another law. The true inwardness of this may be at
bottom but that one of the suffered treacheries has consisted
precisely, for Chad's whole figure and presence, of a direct
presentability diminished and compromised--despoiled, that is, of its
PROPORTIONAL advantage; so that, in a word, the whole economy of his
author's relation to him has at important points to be redetermined.
The book, however, critically viewed, is touchingly full of these
disguised and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these
intensely redemptive consistencies. The pages in which Mamie Pocock
gives her appointed and, I can't but think, duly felt lift to the whole
action by the so inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of our
just watching and as quite at an angle of vision as yet untried, her
single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our partaking of her
concentrated study of the sense of matters bearing on her own case, all
the bright warm Paris afternoon, from the balcony that overlooks the
Tuileries garden--these are as marked an example of the
representational virtue that insists here and there on being, for the
charm of opposition and renewal, other than the scenic. It wouldn't
take much to make me further argue that from an equal play of such
oppositions the book gathers an intensity that fairly adds to the
dramatic--though the latter is supposed to be the sum of all
intensities; or that has at any rate nothing to fear from juxtaposition
wit