dreadful
purpose of giving his creator no end to tell about him - before which rigorous
mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed. I was far from the
serenest; I was more than agitated enough to reflect that, grimly deprived of
one alternative or one substitute for telling, I must address myself tooth and
nail to another. I couldn't, save by implication, make other persons tell each
other about him - blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which reaches
its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite to the paths
of the novel: with other persons, save as they were primarily his persons (not
he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply nothing to do. I had relations for
him none the less, by the mercy of Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition
was to be a muddle; if I could only by implication and a show of consequence
make other persons tell each other about him, I could at least make him tell
them whatever in the world he must; and could so, by the same token - which was
a further luxury thrown in - see straight into the deep differences between what
that could do for me, or at all events for him, and the large ease of
autobiography. It may be asked why, if one so keeps to one's hero, one shouldn't
make a single mouthful of method, shouldn't throw the reins on his neck and,
letting them flap there as free as in »Gil Blas« or in »David Copperfield,«
equip him with the double privilege of subject and object - a course that has at
least the merit of brushing away questions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I
think, that one makes that surrender only if one is prepared not to make certain
precious discriminations.
    The first person then, so employed, is addressed by the author directly to
ourselves, his possible readers, whom he has to reckon with, at the best, by our
English tradition, so loosely and vaguely after all, so little respectfully, on
so scant a presumption of exposure to criticism. Strether, on the other hand,
encaged and provided for as »The Ambassadors« encages and provides, has to keep
in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary than any our straight and
credulous gape are likely to bring home to him, has exhibitional conditions to
meet, in a word, that forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation. I may
seem not to better the case for my discrimination if I say that, for