The double negative mutes the effect without denying it. It is a characteristic of James’s style, avoiding commitment, asserting by paradox. Hyacinth’s emotion is then allowed to escape in generalizations. The conditional ‘would have detested’ opens a possibility to the reader in order to close it, and more negatives precede the Princess’s positive response. Even there James goes on to modify the clear impression of the ‘air’ she had – or appeared to have. The reader’s understanding advances slowly, as along a road where there are many possible alternatives presented, testing the winding way, not always quite certain where he has arrived, until he casts a glance back to see that tentativeness of advance has always been impelled by firmness of purpose. James modified the passage slightly in the New York Edition, but its essence is unchanged.

V

The central interest of the story is psychological and moral-aesthetic (not moralizing in any obvious, didactic sense). States of feeling are obscure, fluid, in contrast to physical circumstance. James sets the realistic physical circumstances plainly enough for his purpose, and there are beautiful descriptions not only of beautiful things, but also of things ugly and oppressive in themselves. The setting of the novel is of the greatest importance because the misery and squalor of the multitude, which are contrasted with the beauty and comfort of the few, are the source of the central dilemma. But the novel is about human responses, not physical actuality for its own sake.

The interest in character is more deeply personal than even James himself probably realized. There is no reason to doubt the account in his Preface that the idea for The Princess Casamassima grew from his walking the streets of London, and his consciousness both of London’s wealth and of the misery of the millions who lived amongst it and were excluded from it. ‘What would I do in such circumstances?’ was a natural question for one so sympathetic, sensitive, imaginative, intelligent, as Henry James. James shows himself asking precisely this question in his comment on The Portrait of a Lady. He remarks how the characters floated into his mind ‘all in response to my primary question, “Well, what will she do?” ’ * It is pre-eminently the question a novelist asks himself, as opposed to the storyteller of a traditional tale, whose whole outline is already fully known to him and to his audience or reader. The novelist has to think of a character, imagine his or her feelings, establish motives, which give rise to actions, which concern other people, who react to the principal character’s ideas, feelings, and so forth, in a sequence. The novel achieves its sense of being a ‘history’ by being, as it were, a ‘displaced autobiography’, or an autobiographical fantasy, which needs knowledge for the description of attendant circumstances, but which depends on imagined personal response to those circumstances.

Thus it is that James the novelist projects himself, sympathetic, sensitive, imaginative and intelligent, into the situation of one deprived of social advantage, doomed for ever to miss appreciation of, or as in the novel he terms it even more significantly, being ‘initiated’ (p. 164), into the beautiful things of the world. In this novel, James’s hero, his ‘little presumptuous adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity’ (Preface, p. 43) is clearly an imaginative surrogate for the author. In this respect The Princess Casamassima is one of James’s most personal novels, even if it is a cliché of criticism that the novel is also one of James’s socially most engaged writings.

Though James’s sympathetic detachment allows him to pursue his thoughtful analytical exploration without that kind of personal projection which distorts a work of art, he is nevertheless more deeply engaged here (as in all his greater novels) than the emphasis on comment and analysis, if left unqualified, may suggest. He is not a bland explorer of other people’s misery by the device of a superficial personal transposition. His identification with his hero is profound. Though James’s own life was not a tragedy, Hyacinth’s deeply wounded sensibility is James’s, his joys are those of James, his ambiguity towards his project is the ambiguity of James himself towards life, and the frustration of Hyacinth is the expression of a deep sense of exclusion from life in James himself. Hyacinth could only resolve his terrible dilemma by suicide, presenting us with a spectacle of tragic frustration which James himself only escaped by the practice of that art which was, in one sense, itself a retreat from the life of action.

James recognized this recessive aspect of himself in other places, notably in the curious late story ‘The Jolly Corner’, published in 1908. In this story the hero, Spencer Bryden, returns, as did James himself in 1904, to the United States after a long absence in Europe. In his childhood home he meets the ghost of his other potential self, that self which remained at home. This other self, if realized, would have made money and tasted power; in other words, would have lived rather than written about life. The duality of character is deep in James. It is the source of much of his ambiguity, his power to see both sides of a question.