Henry James was a novelist who found the ideal of the novel in the rich mixture of the real and the romantic. In The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether's reality as a middle-aged defeated man forms a significant contrast with his romantic imagination, and the process of his vision in the novel is double: he sees a romantic world through his imagination, motivated by his desires, and the cold reality which is gradually thrust to his unwilling eyes. The subtle tension between the reality and his romantic imagination achieved through the technique of the point of view is the charm of the novel present in almost every page. What makes the contrast significant, however, is not the contrast itself, but James's sense of history underlying it. The man of imagination was one of James's favorite subjects all through his literary career. But in this novel James gave him an historic background and created him as a kind of surviving romantic. An awareness of time's irresistible flow pervades the double world of reality and imagination in The Ambassadors, and Strether's sense of time flowing towards his personal death is given a deeper significance by being merged with his awareness of the society moving towards a new and more arid future. If the novel is about the hero's imagined recovery of his lost youth in the irresistible flow of time towards death, it is also about his attempt at recovering an imagined past. James was not, however, a romantic like the hero. There is an ironical distance between the romantic imagination of the hero and the eyes of the author that closely watch both "our poor friend" Strether's inner world and the outer reality. As the outer reality gradually encroaches on Strether's imagination, what is made clear is not only the nature of the society in which a loveless sexual relation can exist illicitly, but also the limitation of Strether's kind of romantic imagination. James was certainly sympathetic towards Strether, but his firm grasp of the historic reality clearly defines the position of his romantic imagination in the then emerging industrial society. Strether can only be its messenger, not its ambassador as he might have wished, and the art needed by the new society is not the kind of literature symbolized by the receding golden cloud of dust, but the new art of advertising. Critics too often analysed the contrast of two cultures: Europe and America. But it is also necessary to find in it the contrast of an imagined romantic past and the world of present reality which destroys it. James's final treatment of the two contrasting characters, Strether and Chad, as the same figures dancing hornpipe or jig in the flow of time, that is history, is worthy of attention. It suggests that James's view ,of history has the same root of tradition as T. S. Eliot's technique in The Waste Land which, although it seems to contrast the decadent present and the better past, implies, on the deeper level, that both the present and the past are essentially haunted by the original sin.
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