2008م - 1444هـ
The Ambassadors



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

The Ambassadors 1

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.