Appendix C - Preface to New York Edition

Summary

Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces are collected in Volume XXXIII of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. The editor of that volume,OliverHerford, has excerpted and prepared the text for this Appendix, and has supplied essential annotations; more extensive notes can be found in The Prefaces.

The Ambassadors: NYE XXI, v–xxiii

Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of “The Ambassadors,” which first appeared in twelve numbers of The North American Review (1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader's benefit, into as few words as possible—planted or “sunk,” stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend's enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of “The Ambassadors,” his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? I’mtoo old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion.