Preface - Page 2

action, not to say
the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of this
process of vision.

Nothing can exceed the closeness with which the whole fits again
into its germ. That had been given me bodily, as usual, by the
spoken word, for I was to take the image over exactly as I
happened to have met it. A friend had repeated to me, with great
appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction,
much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Strether's
melancholy eloquence might be imputed--said as chance would have,
and so easily might, in Paris, and in a charming old garden
attached to a house of art, and on a Sunday afternoon of summer,
many persons of great interest being present. The observation
there listened to and gathered up had contained part of the "note"
that I was to recognise on the spot as to my purpose--had contained
in fact the greater part; the rest was in the place and the time
and the scene they sketched: these constituents clustered
and combined to give me further support, to give me what I may
call the note absolute. There it stands, accordingly, full in the
tideway; driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the
noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it. What
amplified the hint to more than the bulk of hints in general was
the gift with it of the old Paris garden, for in that token were
sealed up values infinitely precious. There was of course the seal
to break and each item of the packet to count over and handle and
estimate; but somehow, in the light of the hint, all the elements
of a situation of the sort most to my taste were there. I could
even remember no occasion on which, so confronted, I had found it
of a livelier interest to take stock, in this fashion, of
suggested wealth. For I think, verily, that there are degrees of
merit in subjects--in spite of the fact that to treat even one of
the most ambiguous with due decency we must for the time, for the
feverish and prejudiced hour, at least figure its merit and its
dignity as POSSIBLY absolute. What it comes to, doubtless, is that
even among the supremely good--since with such alone is it one's
theory of one's honour to be concerned--there is an ideal BEAUTY
of goodness the invoked action of which is to raise the artistic
faith to its maximum. Then truly, I hold, one's theme may be said
to shine, and that of "The Ambassadors," I confess, wore this glow
for me from beginning to end. Fortunately thus I am able to
estimate this as, frankly, quite the best, "all round," of all my
productions; any failure of that justification would have made
such an extreme of complacency publicly fatuous.

I recall then in this connexion no moment of subjective