Some parts of action and character we see clearly, others progressively less so, and some we can only guess. Almost all personality is puzzling. There are plain questions we cannot ask even our closest, best-known friends, partly because a straight answer from the complexity of human feeling and action is actually impossible. James takes full advantage of the paradox that some of the most objectively real aspects of another person’s character, and perhaps of our own, are those which it is impossible to know, at least for certain. In the course of the novel there are things he refuses to tell, on the grounds that he does not know. Much as he loves the Princess and is jealous of Paul, Hyacinth has surely never been her lover; when he meets the Princess’s husband the author comments, ‘It is needless to go into the question of what Hyacinth, face to face with an aggrieved husband, may have had on his conscience…’ (p. 516; in the New York Edition, this passage begins ‘It is forbidden us to try the question of what Hyacinth…’). Even in the case of Millicent Henning, deciding whether or not to tell Hyacinth the truth about her evening engagement, the novelist says, ‘I know not exactly in what sense Miss Henning decided…’ (p. 536; ‘We are not to know exactly…’ appears in the New York Edition), and readers are left to decide for themselves, according to their experience of the world, their own innocence and their estimate of Millicent’s character, whether she does indeed tell the truth, and whether Hyacinth himself believes her.

The novel takes on the solidity, and the uncertainty, of a ‘history’ because of the novelist’s own genuine sense of the reality of character and event, and consequently of his own inevitably partial knowledge. But James characteristically revels in what to him is mysterious, rather more than what to him is clear. Mystery and uncertainty are of the essence of both character and plot. James enhances this effect because so much of the plot is concerned with a political conspiracy which of its nature tries to avoid discovery.

James also chooses an indirect form of narrative to deepen our sense of mystery and uncertainty. Thus neither of the great climaxes of Hyacinth’s adult life is directly described. The first is the meeting with the international conspirator and organizer of terrorism, Diedrich Hoffendahl. Feeling in Hyacinth, and in the reader, is powerfully built up in the description of the preliminary evening meeting at the ‘Sun and Moon’ and in the long ride in the cab late at night through unknown streets with Muniment, Poupin and the third serious conspirator, the German Schinkel. But the only description of the actual meeting with Hoffendahl and Hyacinth’s giving his ‘sacred vow’ is the rather general account which Hyacinth gives to the Princess at Medley. Thus the viewpoint of Hyacinth is stressed, with its limitations of knowledge and mixture of feelings, to strong artistic effect.

The second climax is Hyacinth’s suicide. This is built up to in the descriptions of a moving sequence of visits and discussions, with Mr Vetch, Millicent Henning, the Princess. We read with the anxious attention of dread and sympathy and expectation. The event itself is only realized in its subsequent discovery by the Princess and Schinkel. The complexity of motivation, Hyacinth’s deep torment, his final decisiveness against himself, are all left the more effectively for us to deduce for ourselves, following and sharing the ignorance, anxiety and grief of the Princess as she seeks to find Hyacinth before he does the dreadful deed, whose simplicity cuts through the complexity of feeling and motive.

IV

The sense of mystery, of objects only partially perceived but sensitively responded to, is partly created by the subtlety and the qualifications of James’s characteristic style, which may puzzle a reader coming fresh to it. It is not calculated for rapid narration of easily observable events, but for evoking delicate nuances, registering uncertainties and possibilities. James’s style in The Princess Casamassima has not reached the extreme tortuosity of the later novels. It still reflects enough of the directly experienced material world to give us solid handholds and even clear signposts. Like Whistler’s famous contemporary picture of Battersea Bridge, although mists surround, and luminosity is as puzzling as it is enlightening, we can still see the solid object of contemplation, still follow a clear narrative. The text of the 1886 edition, here reprinted for the first time, is somewhat simpler, if perhaps a little stiffer, than the text of the New York Edition of 1909, which James polished, though he did not fundamentally change it.

James’s style is well suited to a story whose very essence is concerned with speculation about a secret conspiracy, uncertain and threatening. Such a sense, such speculation, is intrinsic to all James’s greater work, whether long or short. It is at the heart of The Turn of the Screw, to give an obvious example.

The focus is on the inner life, and James makes little attempt to mimic the style of actual speech. Consider, for example, the paragraph describing part of Hyacinth’s conversation with the Princess at Medley Park in Chapter 24:

It was impossible that our young man should not feel, at the end of ten minutes, that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention… The reader may judge whether he had passed through a phase of excitement… but that had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture… He would have detested the idea… and though it could not fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that… he could still not guess how very remarkable, in such a connection, the Princess thought his composure… She had the air – or she endeavoured to have it…; nevertheless… (pp. 334–5)

The passage begins with a double negative which denies any chance that Hyacinth may be conceited, yet allows his enjoyment of Christina’s attention in the next sentence.