James himself, however unversed in politics he might have been, had no deficiency of art-appreciation. He wrote well and copiously about painting, sculpture, and architecture. But not in his novels. There all is allusion and murmurous, indistinct evocation of objects and vistas, in comparison with which Whistler’s “Nocturne” is a sharp-edge photograph.
In the novels, a taboo is operating—a taboo that enjoins him, like Psyche in the myth or Pandora or Mother Eve, to steer clear of forbidden areas on pain of losing his god-sent gift. The areas on which neither he nor his characters may touch are defined by the proximity of thought to their surface—thought visible, almost palpable, in nuggets or globules readily picked up by the vulgar. Art in other hands might have been such an area, but James took the risk—after all, it was his own great interest—and he actually dared make it the ruling passion of several of his figures, at the price, however, of treating it always by indirection, as a motive but never as a topic in itself. If you think of Proust, you will see the difference.
With religion and philosophy, though, James is as circumspect as he is with politics. As son and brother, he must often have heard these subjects earnestly discussed, which perhaps accounts for his dislike of ideas in general. Or was this only a sense, which grew on him as he sought to find his own way, that he must not trespass on father’s and brother’s hunting preserve? In any case, with the exception of The Bostonians—a middle-period extravagant comedy, which he came almost to disavow, full of cranks, cults, emancipated women, do-gooders, religious charlatanry—neither he nor his characters has a word to say on these matters, nor—it should go without saying—on science. With so much of the stuff of ordinary social intercourse ruled out, the Jamesian people by and large are reduced to a single theme: each other. As beings not given to long silences, who are virtually never seen reading, not even a guidebook, that is what they are condemned to. Whenever a pair or a trio draws apart from the rest, it is to discuss and analyze and exclaim over an absent one—Milly or Maggie or Isabel. Yet here too there is a curious shortage of ideas of the kind you or I might formulate in discussing a friend. In their place are hints, soft wonderings, head-shakings, sentences hanging in the air; communication takes place between slow implication and swift inference: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” The word “Wonderful!” returns over and over as the best that can be said by way of a summing-up.
As James aged, his reticence or the reticence he imposed on his surrogates grew more “wonderful” indeed. With The Wings of the Dove, we arrive at a heroine of whom we know only three things: that she is rich, red-haired, and sick. She is clearly meant to be admirable, as we infer from the gasps and cries of the satellite figures around her—“Isn’t she superb?,” “Everything about you is a beauty,” “beautiful,” “a dove,” “Oh you exquisite thing!” But vulgar particulars are never supplied. As James himself observed in his Preface, “...I go but a little way with the direct—that is with the straight exhibition of Milly; it resorts to relief, this process, whenever it can, to some kinder, some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with. ...” And he continues: “All of which proceeds, obviously, from her painter’s tenderness of imagination about her, which reduces him to watching her, as it were, through the successive windows of other people’s interest in her.”