His narration must have discounted the effect of his
outburst, leading us up to the very edge of it, describing how it
arose, explaining where it came from. He would be _subjective_, and
committed to remain so all the time.
Henry James, by his method, can secure this effect of drama, even
though his Strether is apparently in the position of a narrator
throughout. Strether's are the eyes, I said, and they are more so than
ever during this hour in the garden; he is the sentient creature in
the scene. But the author, who all through the story has been treating
Strether's consciousness as a play, as an action proceeding, can at
any moment use his talk almost as though the source from which it
springs were unknown to us from within. I remember that he himself, in
his critical preface to the book, calls attention to the way in which
a conversation between Strether and Maria Gostrey, near the beginning,
puts the reader in possession of all the past facts of the situation
which it is necessary for him to know; a _scene_ thus takes the place
of that "harking back to make up," as he calls it, which is apt to
appear as a lump of narrative shortly after the opening of a story. If
Strether were really the narrator, whether in the first person or the
third, he could not use his own talk in this manner; he would have to
tell us himself about his past. But he has never _told_ us his
thought, we have looked at it and drawn our inferences; and so there
is still some air of dramatic detachment about him, and his talk may
seem on occasion to be that of a man whom we know from outside.
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