128).

It is the function of the historian of fine consciences, and a main interest of the book, to define and explore the gradations of moral character. James is not a simple moralist. The gradations he is interested in run from ‘fineness’ of moral taste to ‘vulgarity’ more subtly than from goodness to wickedness, though connected with that scale. Thus Paul Muniment, we are told in the same passage, has ‘a heavy mouth and rather vulgar nose’, and an ‘admirably clear, bright eye, light-coloured and set very deep; for though there was a want of fineness in some of its parts, his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution’. There is an ambiguity of character here which reflects the ambiguous part Muniment plays in the development of Hyacinth’s fate. Such ambiguity is part of the novel’s picture of the mysterious complexity of life.

Most, but not all, the ‘fine’ characters are working class. Lady Aurora, who differs from her rich family in being shy, awkward, not beautiful and not well-dressed, with little money of her own, occupies her time in personal philanthropy amongst the poor, paid for by strictly economizing in her own needs. She is ‘fine’ though perhaps ineffectual. The other upper-class characters are mainly, and convincingly in the moral sense, vulgar, like Captain Sholto, the rich, worldly, idle man who claims to love the Princess Casamassima. And even the beautiful Princess herself, whose brilliance epitomizes the world of art and beauty which captivates Hyacinth, is by contrast with Lady Aurora just a trifle vulgar. It is Lady Aurora who, as a matter of course, treats Hyacinth as ‘a gentleman’ and pays ‘homage to the idea of his refinement’ (p. 427; ‘… his fine essence’ appears in the New York Edition of 1909).

Hyacinth himself is characterized by the absence of vulgarity. The Princess speaks to him about himself during his visit to her (rented) country-house, Medley Park, which so opens his eyes to the beauty of the world.

‘You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the hole you have described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life.’ (p. 337).

This is highly satisfactory in a hero who deserves our admiration as well as our pity. Part of the grounds of the pity, and the essence of the novel, is rendered in the same passage when, after a conversational faux pas which Lady Aurora would never have made,

Five minutes later she [the Princess] broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy and putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. ‘Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you are constituted, to feel the capacity that you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!’

Their conversation flourishes and in the end, ‘He told her, in a word, what he was’ (p. 337), that is, the story of his birth. This is to Hyacinth his shameful secret, yet in a curious way neither she nor we feel it is ‘vulgar’. Hyacinth is at times conscious of the ‘noble’ blood in him, and this and his French origin seem both for him and for James to account for something of his moral quality, his artistic interest in his trade of bookbinding, his capacity to learn French and Italian, and to relish the beauty of art and nature. He certainly inherits nothing evil; only his origins and circumstances breed in him a divided nature. It is a superb irony that this wondrous visit to Medley Park comes soon after he has made the ‘sacred vow’ to do the desperate deed which shall help destroy this world of beauty and privilege and will cost him his life.

Neither Hyacinth nor any other good character is presented as unduly grand. James shows his torments and incomprehensions, though Hyacinth always seems outwardly self-assured. The novelist frequently refers to him even patronizingly, as ‘our little bookbinder’. His features are finely cut, his hair handsome, his clothes neat and clean, but he is shorter than the Princess and never a commanding presence. The discontented starving working men who meet in the dirty smoky club-room of the ‘Sun and Moon’ speak foolishly and repetitively. There is no sentimentalization of the poor by James himself, who gently mocks Lady Aurora and the Princess for idealizing the poor. The misery of poverty is the more effectively rendered, as in the long account of the meeting in Chapter 21. James’s detail is sufficient to realize the physical atmosphere, and faultless in itself. We smell the damp foul air.

A sidelight on Hyacinth’s situation which shows how close to life James could come, even if he rarely offered trivial daily detail, is given by the autobiographical memoir of J.