The dramatic method,
as we ordinarily understand it, is ruled out at once. Neither as an
action set before the reader without interpretation from within, nor
yet as an action pictured for the reader by some other onlooker in the
book, can this story possibly be told.
Strether's real situation, in fact, is not his open and visible
situation, between the lady in New England and the young man in Paris;
his grand adventure is not expressed in its incidents. These, as they
are devised by the author, are secondary, they are the extension of
the moral event that takes place in the breast of the ambassador, his
change of mind. That is the very middle of the subject; it is a matter
that lies solely between Strether himself and his vision of the free
world. It is a delightful effect of irony, indeed, that he should have
accomplished his errand after all, in spite of himself; but the point
of the book is not there, the ironic climax only serves to bring out
the point more sharply. The reversal of his own idea is underlined and
enhanced by the reversal of the young man's idea in the opposite
sense; but essentially the subject of the book would be unchanged if
the story ended differently, if the young man held to his freedom and
refused to go home. Strether would still have passed through the same
cycle of unexpected experience; his errand might have failed, but
still it would not have been any the more impossible for him to claim
his reward, for his part, than it is impossible as things are, with
the quest achieved and the young man ready to hasten back to duty of
his own accord.
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