Abstract
The Ambassadors is clearly a novel: the novel is free, and has the most elastic form. We could be tempted to say that there is no drama in the work. In fact, drama has different meanings. First, it is the name of theatrical plays of a particular kind or period. Secondly, it can mean a situation or succession of events having the dramatic progression or emotional effects on the characteristic of a play, or the quality or condition of it being dramatic. It is a term often refered to by the critics. The drama has links to both feelings and appearances. James gives himself this expression in a passage of the preface to which we will try and give a relevant sense all along this lecture: "The actual man's note, from the first of our seeking it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as the drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate ; the element that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance."
