its pages, as little
scenic as possible; but it sharply divides itself, just as the composition
before us does, into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare,
for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and crown
the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that everything in it that
is not scene (not, I of course mean, complete and functional scene, treating all
the submitted matter, as by logical start, logical turn, and logical finish) is
discriminated preparation, is the fusion and synthesis of picture. These
alternations propose themselves all recogniseably, I think, from an early stage,
as the very form and figure of »The Ambassadors«; so that, to repeat, such an
agent as Miss Gostrey, pre-engaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty
wing with her shawl and her smelling-salts. Her function speaks at once for
itself, and by the time she has dined with Strether in London and gone to a play
with him her intervention as a ficelle is, I hold, expertly justified. Thanks to
it we have treated scenically, and scenically alone, the whole lumpish question
of Strether's past, which has seen us more happily on the way than anything else
could have done; we have strained to a high lucidity and vivacity (or at least
we hope we have) certain indispensable facts; we have seen our two or three
immediate friends all conveniently and profitably in action; to say nothing of
our beginning to descry others, of a remoter intensity, getting into motion,
even if a bit vaguely as yet, for our further enrichment. Let my first point be
here that the scene in question, that in which the whole situation at Woollett
and the complex forces that have propelled my hero to where this lively
extractor of his value and distiller of his essence awaits him, is normal and
entire, is really an excellent standard scene; copious, comprehensive, and
accordingly never short, but with its office as definite as that of the hammer
on the gong of the clock, the office of expressing all that is in the hour.
    The ficelle character of the subordinate party is as artfully dissimulated,
throughout, as may be, and to that extent that, with the seams or joints of
Maria Gostrey's ostensible connectedness taken particular care of, duly smoothed
over, that is, and anxiously kept from showing as pieced on, this figure
doubtless achieves, after a fashion, something of the dignity of a prime idea:
which circumstance