The
revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most
interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any
betise of the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown
forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong
trick of intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to
bring him out, through winding passages, through alternations of
darkness and light, very much IN Paris, but with the surrounding
scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than
had been dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett. Another
surrounding scene would have done as well for our show could it
have represented a place in which Strether's errand was likely to
lie and his crisis to await him. The LIKELY place had the great
merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been too many
involved--not at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and
delaying difficulties--in positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's
interesting relation, his so interesting complexity of relations.
Strether's appointed stage, in fine, could be but Chad's most
luckily selected one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for
circumjacent charm; and where he would have found it, by the turn
of his mind, most "authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis
would most find HIM; as well as where, for that matter, the former's
whole analytic faculty would be led such a wonderful dance.
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