Abstract
IN The Ambassadors JAMES fully achieves what he had approached in many of his earlier works: the identification of action with vision. Although the protagonist, Lambert Strether, is one of James's spectator heroes, he does not have the same kind of serious deficiency that holds Ralph Touchett back from life or that is equivalent to the intellectual pride in the narrator of The Sacred Fount. In the person of Strether vision is action; it represents a full participation in experience. It is dynamic, dramatic, and personal. James traces the development of Strether's understanding of a particular Parisian social group. Before Strether Chad, he discovers the beauty of Paris: its cultural, aesthetic, and architectural richness, which indicates a way of life more satisfying than that of Woollett. Even before he meets Chad, his prejudices against Paris begin to be modified, and after he meets Chad they all but vanish. James dramatizes Strether's awakening in visual terms. Strether sees truth: in the architecture of Chad's home and in Chad's appearance in a theater box. Each successive impression forces Strether to shift his moral position, to consider the relation of the new impression to his duty to Mrs. Newsome; by seeing one thing differently he is made to see other things differently. Midway in the novel Strether, in the process of comparing the life of his new Parisian friends to his own starved past and equally bleak future, reveals to Little Bilham the startling influence of Paris on him. In his advice to Bilham to live, Strether shows his realization of
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