 observation as this last on the whole delightful head, where
representation is concerned, of possible variety, of effective expressional
change and contrast. One would like, at such an hour as this, for critical
licence, to go 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
