In my previous post on Henry James’s late novel The Ambassadors, I highlighted the inadequacy of Strether for the sensitive mission to Paris via London. There are a few plot spoilers in what follows.

I’d like to explore a few more passages to try to show James’s skilful, witty handling of characters interacting in ways that produce drama and comedy.

In Book 2 ch.1 Strether has another conversation with his shrewd, perceptive and generally more worldly confidante Maria Gostrey. She puts it to him that Chad Newsome is a young man he’s been sent out to ‘rescue’, his mission is to separate him from ‘the wicked woman’ he’s assumed to be involved with in Paris.

This blunt assertion has the effect on Strether of ‘pulling him up’ – an idiom that’s used several times about him in such exchanges. She makes it clear he hasn’t any grasp of the ‘facts’ of the matter, and his assumptions once again reveal the narrow-minded prudishness of Woollett people back home in New England.

A little later in this chapter Miss Gostrey asks him what he does in Woollett. He tells her that the town has a ‘Review’, financed by his fiancée Mrs Newsome (Chad’s mother), which he ‘not at all magnificently, edit[s]’. She asks what kind of review it is:

His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”

Mrs Newsome must be quite a ‘swell’, Miss Gostrey teases, and so must he; no, he insists, “that’s not the way it works”. She sees through his show of modesty: “you efface yourself”. He protests; his name is on the cover – this is what he’s ‘reduced to doing’ for himself:

“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.”

As we saw last time, when she got him to confess he can’t enjoy life as he should, she serves to expose his rather endearing lack of self-confidence; that wasn’t false modesty – he genuinely thinks he’s a “failure”. This scene, with its witty dialogue and comic tone, shows up the novel’s central theme: that Strether is a sad, Prufrock-like character who senses his inadequacy, which is worse than not knowing it.

This characterisation is reinforced a few sentences later. The Review, he tells Miss Gostrey, goes in for unpopular opinions – ‘”that is so far as we dare.” She presses him again:

”And how far do you dare?”

“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith.”

Like Prufrock, Strether longs to feel strong emotion, but doesn’t ‘dare’ disturb the universe. Leavis’s objection, that I wrote about in the first of these posts on The Ambassadors, was that what Paris represented – for Strether and for people in general – wasn’t fully ‘realized’. I disagree. Passages like this reveal, even before he gets to Paris, that his experience of Europe, where Miss Gostrey acts as not just a confidante but also as a catalyst, brings about an epiphany. He comes to see clearly the shortcomings and petty joyless puritanism and vulgarity of Woollett.  He’s forced to confront his timid passivity and submissiveness in his relations with the formidable Mrs Newsome and her set.

This theme is reinforced through the rest of the novel. In Book 4 ch. 1, Strether tells Chad in Paris quite openly about the purpose of his visit: “to make you break with everything”. Chad’s calm and dignified response is ‘disconcerting’ to him (this is another term often used of Strether). He perceives in Chad’s expression a kindness, because Chad can see Strether’s ‘disordered state’ – is even sorry for him. Once again Strether confronts the ludicrousness of his position. When Chad presses him to admit that his people assume he’s being detained in Paris by ‘some woman’: ‘“Is that…what they think at Woollett?”’, Strether ‘changed colour’, feeling he’s stated his case ‘stupidly’. He’s shown blushing on several occasions like this in the novel; his embarrassment is salutary. Chad concludes with a final, fateful thrust: ‘”I must say then you show a low mind!”’

Chad has completely turned the tables on Strether; once again he has been ‘pulled up’ by the young man’s superior worldliness; he’s exposed the ‘smugness’, ‘vulgarity’ and ‘pride’ that inspired Strether’s mission. The comic reversal has a serious side. Chad is later to be seen to be not entirely truthful in his representation of his relationship with Mme de Vionnet, the ‘wicked woman’. But Strether’s bumbling, unquestioning acceptance of Woollett values is being seriously undermined – to the extent that he starts to take Chad’s side. He’s repeatedly forced to acknowledge his own limitations, with reminders of ‘what he didn’t know’ – what was good or bad. He’s lost his way, and this mission is yet another of the many ‘mistakes’ he admits to on several occasions.

These are brought out most clearly in the famous scene in Book 5 ch.2, when Strether urges Chad’s young friend Little Bilham:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

Bilham mustn’t leave it until too late, he insists, as he has.

“I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m too old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least…It’s too late. And as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having the gumption to know it was there…Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t know quite which…at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake…don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

He might ostensibly fail in his mission to bring Chad back into line with Woollett’s values (and paradoxically Chad reveals himself to be not so far removed from them after all), but in ‘failing better’ he finally starts to ‘see’, to ‘know’ more about himself. Leavis accused James of failing to show clearly what Strether learns – but that’s the whole point: he has to recognise he’s made mistakes, missed the train of life, as he put it, before he can start to be capable of living a fuller, more rewarding life.

His epiphany is brilliantly evoked in the final pages of the novel (Book 12 ch. 5). Having a farewell meal with Miss Gostrey, they discuss Chad’s decision to return willingly to Woollett  – a choice that now Strether perceives as the young man’s fickleness and heartless abandonment of Mme de Vionnet. Once again he’d misread the situation; Chad’s veneer of charm was not, as he’d come to believe, the nobility of a true ‘gentleman’.

Miss Godfrey asks if Strether might now be able to patch things up with his fiancée Mrs Newsome, given that he could make a case for not having failed in his mission to send the son home. No, he insists, all is over between them. She presses him: is he sure?

“Oh yes – sure now. Too much has happened. I’m different for her.”

…”I see. So that as she’s different for you-“

“Ah but,” he interrupted, “she’s not. And as Miss Gostrey wondered again: “She’s the same. She’s more than ever the same. But do what I didn’t before – I see her.”

The brilliance of the novel, to sum up, then, is that James presents in what’s outwardly a comedy of manners a sad, moving story of a disappointed man being changed utterly by his contact with European culture. He may not be truly enlightened as a consequence, but he is at least rendered capable of perceiving his shortcomings. In a novel in which ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ are constantly referenced, Strether is shown, with the subtlety and poise of a master of the genre, to learn something crucial about the change he’s undergone; to paraphrase Dylan in ‘Love Minus Zero’, he learns some truths about failure and success.