Further thoughts on the ending of The Ambassadors: a great novel with great limitations

Perhaps in yesterday's post - I'm not even sure - I may have said that at the end of Henry James's "The Ambassadors" Chad decides to stay in Paris as the protagonist, Strether, returns home - but in fact they both return to "Woollett," Connecticut (one of the essays in the Dupree volume that I finished says it's meant to be Worcester, Mass.) - Chad, having tired of Mme de Vionnet, goes home to work in the "advertising" side of the family biz. Well, first of all, we hardly care about Chad - he's a cipher, and it doesn't make a bit of difference to the reader whether he stays or goes. I didn't pick up in first reading how he's so willing to dispose of Mme De V. - he's as shallow and egocentric as Strether. Anyway, our investment is really with Strether, who, after telling Little Bilham in the key scene of the novel that he has to "live" - decides essentially to go home to wither and die, to turn his back on his one chance at love. James, in his preface to Ambassadors, says that the character of Miss Gostrey is kind of a foil, a novelist's device to elicit thoughts and ideas from Strether. What a horrible thing to say about one of your own characters! She's as much a real character as any of the others in this novel, and Strether's cavalier treatment of her is abominable. Some of the essays suggest that Chad will go home and eventually marry Mamie, his sister's sister-in-law: what chance to do you give that marriage? He'll cheat on her, remembering his good old days in Paris and the now long gone Mme de V. - the classic older woman, cf Flaubert's great Sentimental Education. One of the best essays on the Ambassadors, appended to the Dupree edition, is Forster's selection from Aspects of the Novel: he essentially says that Ambassadors is not a difficult novel (I disagree) and that it has an almost perfect structure (I agree) but to obtain that structure James has a severely limited # of characters (true) and, most important, severely limited characters (double true): James's characters, though they seem to be worldly, are narrow minded and at base all alike - they all think and speak like the author. As Forster notes, he achieved his ends, but at a very large cost.