He sows his seed at the risk of
too thick a crop; wherefore yet again, like the gentlemen who
audit ledgers, he must keep his head at any price. In consequence
of all which, for the interest of the matter, I might seem here to
have my choice of narrating my "hunt" for Lambert Strether, of
describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend's
anecdote, or of reporting on the occurrences subsequent to that
triumph. But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in
each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this
licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or
conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of
one's story. It depends so on what one means by that equivocal
quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to
the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.
I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist,
and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as
really the more objective of the two.
The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour
there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have
been then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically
and, as the artless craft of comedy has it, "led up" to; the
probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a
predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated.
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