Good For You

When we left Strether at the end of chapter III:1, he was pondering how best to bring Chad to him; now it seems that Chad has been working to bring Strether to Chad, via the efforts of Little Bilham (apparently acting on Chad's instructions), of whom Strether has made a 'frantic friend.' Strether doesn't realize this until the all-seeing Maria explains to him that Little Bilham and Chad have arranged '[e]very move in the game.' (Strether repeatedly uses the word 'ingenuous' in reference to Little Bilham and his friends, a word that the OED defines to mean, among other things, 'honorably straightforward' and 'innocently frank or open; guileless, innocent, artless;' it seems, though, that Little Bilham is anything but ingenuous, at least insofar as his conduct as intermediary between Strether and Chad is concerned.)

And to make matters worse, Strether's quarry had undergone a metamorphosis:

The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change so complete that his imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the connexion, without margin or allowance. It had faced every contingency but that Chad should not be Chad, and this was what it now had to face with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.

The obvious change is Chad's grey hair, a feature which, to Strether, was not only 'curiously becoming' to him, but also

did something for him, as characterization, also even -- of all things in the world --as refinement, that had been a good deal wanted.

Strether sees Chad's grey hair is a sign of a deeper change; Strether fears that Chad will make Strether feel young by making Chad feel old, a state of affairs Strether had not anticipated ('an aged and hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme'). So, although Strether is bewildered, he knows he can no longer attempt to bring Chad to him in any subtle way; he must act, and act quickly:

For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he would anticipate -- by a night-attack, as might be -- any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy...If he was himself to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so treated before he should have struck out at least once. His arms might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was fifty.

No wonder Strether feels he is 'leading the life of high pressure.'

It always seems to me that Chad's appearance on the scene is rather like Dracula's, and for all the pleasantness of his manner, almost as menacing. He is so completely not what Strether expects that Strether's sense of preparation crumbles completely while he forces himself in vain to attend to the play. Chad couldn't be nicer - and couldn't be creepier. It's unlikely that Strether gets much sleep later on:

If we should go into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark for us the vividness with which he could remember. He remembered the two absurdities that, if his presence of mind had failed, were the things that had had most to do with it. He had never in his life seen a young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night, and would, if challenged on the question in advance, have scarce been ready to  pronounce as to different ways of doing so. But it was in spite of this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned, how.

This feline suppleness of Chad's reminds us of Strether's shock at hearing Maria's opinion - more than mere opinion to her and to him - that Chad has been directing Little Bilham. It is, of course, Little Bilham who was to appear at the theatre, and Chad's doing so in his place highlights the extent of coordination.

*

Also interesting is this bit of philosophy, about explanations.

[Strether's] finest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact - for any one else - explained. One went through vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was a relation only so long as people didn't either perfectly understand or, better still, didn't care if they didn't. From the moment they cared if they didn't it was living by the seat of one's brow; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one might buy one's self off from by keeping the ground free of the wild weed of delusion.

Could this be the writer's philosophy? James himself does a fair amount of explaining as a writer, but it could be classed as description, not as analysis. I think that it's to the problems of analysis that "delusion" relates. There is something vaguely Nietzschean here, but also an impatience with fuss. James hated fuss.