Strether: a vessel of conscience:

'I'll save you if I can'

What I remembered most distinctly about Henry James' 'The Ambassadors' was the account of Strether's visit to Mme d Vionnet at her home. I was no less impressed by it when I I re-read the novel. Let me recount it.

Strether had already met her briefly for the first time at a reception and been struck by the fact that this so-called woman of the world was so little unlike the respectable ladies he had left behind in Woollett. Now this unexpectedly favourable initial impression gets further adjusted. First, the appearance and atmosphere of her home itself, seeped in culture and tradition, provides an intuition as to the quality of its mistress: "The general result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour. The air of supreme respectability - that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against."

Supreme respectability

That long drawn out first sentence, with its vague beginning - "no name on the spot "-, followed by the diffident attempt at clarity - ''come nearest to naming" - , the stumbling onto the right description - "air of supreme respectability"-, and the groping to qualify this further - "small, still, reserved" yet "distinct and diffused" -; all this follows the outworking of Strether's thought process as he tries to make sense of the impression the place makes on him.

Virginia Woolf

The awkward intricacy of the expression actually captures the halting manner in which the mind works in such a situation. That is to say, a mind such as Strether's which is not blinkered but receptive to external influences however unexpected.

This is how Strether's original sense of Mme de Vionnet's similarity to the American women gets altered to "the sense of her rare unlikeness to the women he had known....Everything in fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house and the old objects." Such is the effect upon him of the house, but now his attention fixes on its mistress:

"She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair, one of the few modern articles in the room; and she leaned back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine prompt play of her deep young face...Madame de Vionnet, while Strether was there, wasn't to shift her posture by an inch."

As she sits almost motionless like the embodiment of all the positive impressions Strether has received so far, we can sense his being carried away and weakened in his resolve to deliver his ultimatum. She senses this herself and takes the bull gently by the horns: " 'I don't think you seriously believe in what you're doing," she said; 'but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you quite as if you did." Not surprisingly, Strether's favourable intuitions about her come to the surface: "At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was - there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form - one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere reconition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs Newsome.."

Actual manner

Again, note the skill with which the style, straining almost over-meticulously to find the appropriate words, reflects the actual manner in which Strether's consciousness gropes towards an understanding of the situation with which he is confronted. We are hardly therefore taken by surprise when, after their conversation has ranged over what she has done for Chad and she asks:" 'Well, don't you think that for that -' ", he takes the words out of her mouth and finishes for her: " 'I ought to save you?; ' " The chapter thereafter concludes: "So it was that the way to meet her - and the way, as well, in a manner, to get off - came over him. He heard himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his flight. 'I'll save you if I can.' "

The wheel has come full circle. Strether, unable to stem the tide of the impressions he has received since meeeting Mme de Vionnet, has revised his mission from saving Chad to saving her. The daring of his surrender to this reversal is almost too much for him and he has to take his leave. And if we are utterly convinced by this conclusion to the episode, it is entirely due to the brilliance with which James' late style has followed the twists and turns of Strether's consciousness as it painstakingly makes it way there.

Nearly twenty years earlier, in his essay, 'The Art of Fiction' (1884), James had written these famous words: "Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the effort whose strenuous force keeps Fiction on her feet." When he wrote this he was still very much the traditional novelist, working from an omniscient viewpoint. In 'The Ambassadors' he is the pioneering psychological novelist using a third person monologue whereby everything is seen from his protaganist's viewpoint. Yet the words of his essay now apply even more forcefully, his late style "catching the very note and trick and the rhythm" of the interior life of his protagonist wherein the story unfolds.

Over fifteen years after 'The Ambassadors' was published Virginia Woolf, whom many regard as the pioneer of the stream of consciousness method, wrote these equally famous words: "The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel....Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?"

It is evident that James had already anticipated Woolf's insistence on the primacy of the mind of man as the filter through which the impressions of life should pass. The great difference is that James does not, in the process, discard the moral purpose that drives the great novelist.

His vessel of consciousness, as we noted last week, is also a vessel of conscience. Strether does not merely drift amid a sea of impressions, he allows the awakening of his consciousness to rouse his conscience to do what he believes to be the right thing even if it means sacrificing his own interests.

Richness and complexity

And it his here that the thematic value of the novel comes to the fore. Its apparent theme is the need to live life to the full as epitomised in Strether's exhortation to Little Bilham: "Live all you can, it's a mistake not to." It is Strether's exposure to the richness and complexity of Parisian life that opens his mind to life's potential. He tries to realise this at least vicariously by enabling Chad and Mme de Vionnet to continue what he believes to be their beautiful relationship. When he discovers that the relationship is of the common type for all its semblance of rarity, he does his duty by Mme de Vionnet and prepares to return to Woollett, "having got nothing for himself" and having rejected the opportunity of making a new life for himself with Maria Gostrey.

This decision Leavis could not understand. But it is artistically as necessary to the real theme of the novel as was Isabel Archer's decision in 'The Portrait of a Lady' to remain with the despicable man she had married. The theme of that novel is that the spirit is not free to live as it wishes but gets trapped by circumstances, resulting in the need for sacrifice if the spirit is to remain pure.

The theme of 'The Ambassadors' is not dissimilar. The spirit, in its quest to live and let live, 'breaks its nose' against the reality that the life offered by the world is ultimately corrupt and treacherous. The only way for the spirit to keep its integrity is to acknowledge its mistake and turn its back on the type of life-fulfilment that the world offers. Because Strether, unlike Isabel, is in the evening of his life, this ending does not seem as tragic as that of 'The Portrait'. That is why one thinks of 'The Ambassadors' as a tragi-comedy.