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other connexion
I just glanced at that such passages as that of my hero's first
encounter with Chad Newsome, absolute attestations of the
non-scenic form though they be, yet lay the firmest hand too—so far
at least as intention goes—on representational effect. To report at
all closely and completely of what "passes" on a given occasion is
inevitably to become more or less scenic; and yet in the instance I
allude to, WITH the conveyance, expressional curiosity and
expressional decency are sought and arrived at under quite another
law. The true inwardness of this may be at bottom but that one of
the suffered treacheries has consisted precisely, for Chad's whole
figure and presence, of a direct presentability diminished and
compromised—despoiled, that is, of its PROPORTIONAL advantage; so
that, in a word, the whole economy of his author's relation to him
has at important points to be redetermined. The book, however,
critically viewed, is touchingly full of these disguised and
repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these intensely
redemptive consistencies. The pages in which Mamie Pocock gives her
appointed and, I can't but think, duly felt lift to the whole
action by the so inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of
our just watching and as quite at an angle of vision as yet
untried, her single hour of suspense in the hotel salon, in our
partaking of her concentrated study of the sense of matters bearing
on her own case, all the bright warm Paris afternoon, from the
balcony that overlooks the Tuileries garden—these are as marked an
example of the representational virtue that insists here and there
on being, for the charm of opposition and renewal, other than the
scenic. It wouldn't take much to make me further argue that from an
equal play of such oppositions the book gathers an intensity that
fairly adds to the dramatic—though the latter is supposed to be the
sum of all intensities; or that has at any rate nothing to fear
from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to shrink in fact
from that extravagance—I risk it rather, for the sake of the moral
involved; which is not that the particular production before us
exhausts the interesting questions it raises, but that the Novel
remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent,
most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.
    HENRY JAMES.

Book First

I
    Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about
his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to
arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from
him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced
for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they
should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that
extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted
Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock,
that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of
it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without
disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with
all respect to dear old Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to
himself—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn't see
enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as
operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men,
wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as
it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into
his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should
he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the
nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe. Mixed with
everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that
it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a
sufficient degree.
    That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon,
thanks to this happier device—such a consciousness of personal
freedom as he hadn't