But for the moment let the book stand as the type of the
novel in which a mind is dramatized--reflecting the life to which it
is exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life.
This last, in the case of Strether, involves a gradual, long-drawn
change, from the moment when he takes up the charge of rescuing his
young friend from the siren of Paris, to the moment when he finds
himself wishing that his young friend would refuse to be rescued. Such
is the curve in the unexpected adventure of his imagination. It is
given as nobody's view--not his own, as it would be if he told the
story himself, and not the author's, as it would be if Henry James
told the story. The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind;
he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it.
Thus it is that the novelist pushes his responsibility further and
further away from himself. The fiction that he devises is ultimately
his; but it looks poor and thin if he openly claims it as his, or at
any rate it becomes much more substantial as soon as he fathers it
upon another. This is not _my_ story, says the author; you know
nothing of me; it is the story of this man or woman in whose words you
have it, and he or she is a person whom you _can_ know; and you may
see for yourselves how the matter arose, the man and woman being such
as they are; it all hangs together, and it makes a solid and
significant piece of life.
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