my first
care, I had thus inevitably to set him up a confidant or two, to wave away with
energy the custom of the seated mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted
block of merely referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the
modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems simply to
appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion. »Harking back to make up« took
at any rate more doing, as the phrase is, not only than the reader of to-day
demands, but than he will tolerate at any price any call upon him either to
understand or remotely to measure; and for the beauty of the thing when done the
current editorial mind in particular appears wholly without sense. It is not,
however, primarily for either of these reasons, whatever their weight, that
Strether's friend Waymarsh is so keenly clutched at, on the threshold of the
book, or that no less a pounce is made on Maria Gostrey - without even the
pretext, either, of her being, in essence, Strether's friend. She is the
reader's friend much rather - in consequence of dispositions that make him so
eminently require one; and she acts in that capacity, and really in that
capacity alone, with exemplary devotion, from beginning to end of the book. She
is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her mask,
the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the dramatist's art, as we
well know - since if we don't it's not the fault of the proofs that lie
scattered about us - is in the use of ficelles; by which I mean in a deep
dissimulation of his dependence on them. Waymarsh only to a slighter degree
belongs, in the whole business, less to my subject than to my treatment of it;
the interesting proof, in these connexions, being that one has but to take one's
subject for the stuff of drama to interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as
need be.
    The material of »The Ambassadors,« conforming in this respect exactly to
that of »The Wings of the Dove,« published just before it, is taken absolutely
for the stuff of drama; so that, availing myself of the opportunity given me by
this edition for some prefatory remarks on the latter work, I had mainly to make
on its behalf the point of its scenic consistency. It disguises that virtue, in
the oddest way in the world, by just looking, as we turn