468
PARTISAN REVIEW
Strether puts his hand on Chad's arm. This homosexual element is the
other side of Strether's diffidence with women, of the passivity that
overtakes him when he tries to stand up, step inside the picture frame,
and participate in the scene of heterosexual life. He explains his refusal of
Maria in moral terms, presenting it as an act of self-denial, " 'That, you
see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything
for myself.' " But it is set in the context of an oddly revealing image...
'I'm not,' he explained, leaning back in his chair, but with his eyes on a
small ripe round melon - 'in real harmony with what surrounds me.' "
The seductive little melon is an emblem of the sensuous pleasures that do
not truly tempt him.
Strether has made the familiar Jamesian bargain, acquiring a more
developed consciousness - "wonderful impressions" - at the cost of ma–
terial and sexual advantage. But like all the great decisions in life, this
one is not entirely conscious and voluntary. He cannot do otherwise
than he does. Strether has wanted to understand, above all to
see.
And
what he sees, finally, is a representation of the encounter that is the
source oflife. Perhaps the observer who cannot re-enact this scene himself
is the one to give us the keenest sense of its pathos and danger. Sex is
shown in the novel not only in its sensuous natural beauty and its power
to educate and transform, but also in its inextricable connection with
violence, suffering, age, and death. The power and terror of this
recognition confirm Strether in his sense of his own incapacity. He
chooses the part of knower and watcher rather than actor in the scene
James himself seems to have found this pattern in his own earliest
memories, among them the poignant image in
Notes
of
a SOli alld
Brother
of "the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's win–
dow, unattainable, impossible." The wistful child spectator somehow
utterly cut off from the image behind the glass, a scene of the vivid
sweetness of life, is very like the young man in the Boston gallery gazing
hopelessly at the Lambinet canvas, or the older figure on the riverbank
watching the couple on the water. Through Strether, James shows us
something of the nature and cost of seeing - which is just what he set
out to do. "The precious moral of everything," he wrote in the preface
to
The Ambassadors,
"is just my demonstration of this process of vision."
