United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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LEWIS AND JAMES A Critical Survey of ‘The Ambassadors’ and ‘Babbitt’ KAY ROWLETTE HHHE GERM of James’s idea in writing “The Ambassadors” is to be found in chapter xi of this book. Strether acknowledges to “Little Bilham” that he has made the mistake of not living, and advises his young friend to “live all he can”: “Don’t forget that you’re young— blessedly young; be glad of it, on the contrary, and live up to it. Live all you can, it’s a mis¬ take not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so, all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place,—well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my hav¬ ing had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint, receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.” It is the life of the intelligence that Strether here has in mind. As the critic Beach points out, “He has done the best he could for himself in Woollett. He has attached himself to the woman of highest intelligence and most im¬ posing character in the place. He has published a magazine with a green cover. But he has not enjoyed there the intellectual amenities for which he has himself such an unusual aptitude. He has never found intelligence tempered with imagination, intelligence made sociable.” The process of the story is one of vision rather than action. It is a process of enlighten¬ ment. What we are really occupied with is the discovery of Paris, or, more strictly speaking, the relation Strether bears to that order of civilization. The subject proper is the matter of free intellectual exploration in general, of the open mind in contrast to the mind closed and swaddled in prejudice and narrow views. We have the contrast of two civilizations—the Puritanic and the hedonistic, the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the American and the Euro¬ pean. “Strether’s discovery of the open mind is his discovery of Europe.” All this contrast has to be discovered through Strether himself; and he perceives it by means of three sets of characters revolving about him. Madame de Vionnet represents the pure European strain; Chad and Maria Gastrey the transformed American type, and Waymarsh and Sarah Pocock, not to mention the invisible but omni¬ present Mrs. Newsome, the unchangeable, im¬ movable American species. “The Ambassadors” attains unity and sim¬ plicity by focusing on “the intellectual adven¬ ture of one man in the exploration of one sim¬ ple human situation.” This method, however, confines James strictly to Lambert Strether; he forfeits the valuable privilege of exploring the mental processes of other characters. They reveal themselves to us only as they reveal themselves to Strether. We are not even al- lowd to concentrate for a moment on the love affair between Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet, which James makes merely incidental to the emancipation of Strether from the limit¬ ing prejudices of Woollett. Appreciative readers of Henry James are rather scarce. The common protest made against him is that he is so vague, so rambling, so complicated, that we get lost trying to fol¬ low him, and even if we do push on intrepidly to the end we find that there really is no de¬ finite conclusion. To many, James’s work is nothing but a heaping up of trivialities. Yet, to quote Brownell, “life, considered as artistic material, is to James himself so serious and so significant that nothing it contains seems trivial to him. ... If he eschews the foreign, he revels in the pertinent. As an artist he has a pro¬ found respect for his material, and all details 26