The
advantage is peculiarly felt on that crucial occasion at Gloriani's,
where Strether's sudden flare of vehemence, so natural and yet so
unlike him, breaks out with force unimpaired. It strikes freshly on
the ear, the speech of a man whose inmost perturbations we have indeed
inferred from many glimpses of his mind, but still without ever
learning the full tale of them from himself.
The Ambassadors, then, is a story which is seen from one man's point
of view, and yet a story in which that point of view is itself a
matter for the reader to confront and to watch constructively.
Everything in the novel is now dramatically rendered, whether it is a
page of dialogue or a page of description, because even in the page of
description nobody is addressing us, nobody is reporting his
impression to the reader. The impression is enacting itself in the
endless series of images that play over the outspread expanse of the
man's mind and memory. When the story passes from these to the scenes
of dialogue--from the silent drama of Strether's meditation to the
spoken drama of the men and women--there is thus no break in the
method. The same law rules everywhere--that Strether's changing sense
of his situation shall appeal directly to the onlooker, and not by way
of any summarizing picture-maker. And yet _as a whole_ the book is all
pictorial, an indirect impression received through Strether's
intervening consciousness, beyond which the story never strays.
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