'The Things of the World Could Fall Into Abeyance'

In Book Seventh of The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, anxious over his conflicting obligations to Mrs. Newsome, Madame de Vionnet and Chad, finds a sanctuary in Paris:

“It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church – still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly . . .”

Llike his creator, Strether is not notably religious. He’s a sensitive man, wishing to do right by all involved, but uncertain how to proceed. In Note-Dame Cathedral he finds not resolution but a measure of solace:

“He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of a museum – which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form of sacrifice did at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee, the things of the world could fall into abeyance . . . Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.”

James had published one of his most beautiful stories, “The Altar of the Dead,” in the collection titled Terminations in 1895. George Stransom, not among the formally faithful, finds a place to honor all but one of his dead. Again, the site is a Roman Catholic church, this time in London:

“He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on his hands. His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him. It seemed to him he had come for the great surrender. At first he asked himself how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the very desire to move gradually left him. He had come, as he always came, to lose himself . . .”