It is an extension of the method, of course, that worked so successfully in The Spoils of Poynton. There the “treasures” had only to be called by that name two or three times, the astonished words “rare,” “precious,” “splendid,” to drop one by one from soft young lips, to convince the reader that “the nice old things” were worth squabbling over at least to those engaged in the squabble. But the moral splendor of a human being needs more demonstration than the museum quality of mobile property, at any rate in a novel. One can decide that the fuss being made about furniture is ridiculous or justified or a little of both, and, as I have been saying, it does not greatly matter which. It is unnecessary to fully sympathize with Mrs. Gereth’s emotions to be amused by the lengths to which she will go in single combat, and in fact one senses James’s own moral reserve on her subject. But the fuss made over Milly Theale makes one irritably ask why, what is so admirable about her that cannot be named, unless it is just her bank balance? Similar doubts may be felt about the Ververs, father and daughter, in The Golden Bowl.
Their creator’s reluctance to furnish them with identifiable traits that might let us “place” them in real life has curious consequences for the principals of the late novels. These figures, one realizes, must be accepted on faith, as ectoplasms emanating from an entranced author at his desk, in short as ghostly abstractions, pale ideas, which explains, when you come to think of it, the fever of discussion they excite in the other characters. Those by comparison are solid. They have bodies and brains, however employed. Motives are allotted to them, such as plain curiosity (the Assinghams, Henrietta Stackpole) or money greed or sexual hunger (both seem to be working, though sometimes at cross-purposes, in Kate Croy, Morton Densher, Charlotte Stant), motives that give them a foot in the actual world. And if, despite their concerted effort of analysis, the principals they keep wondering over evade definition, if, unlike furniture, they cannot be established as universals standing for a whole class of singulars, Milly and Maggie and Chad remain nonetheless ideas of a sort. That is, ideas, expelled by a majestic butler at the front door, return by another entrance and stand waiting pathetically to be dressed in words.
Before leaving James, hoist—if I am right—by his own petard, I want to ask whether his exclusion of ideas in the sense of mental concepts was connected or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not necessarily related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of Nightmare Abbey—young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and Flosky, who has named his eldest son Emanuel after Kant, and Listless, up from London, complaining that Dante is growing fashionable. Each has his own bats in the belfry; there is a bad smell of midnight oil in the derelict medieval structure, where practical affairs are neglected for the necromancy of “synthetical reasoning.” In hearty, plain-man style (which is partly a simulation), Peacock treats the brain’s sickly products as the end-result of the general disease of modishness for which the remedy would be prolonged exposure to common, garden reality.
But for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inartistic objects, like the small article of “the commonest domestic use” manufactured by the Newsome family in The Ambassadors—I have always guessed that it was a brass safety-pin. But safety-pin or sink-stopper, it could not be mentioned in the text, any more than Milly Theale’s cancer (if that is what it was), or, let us say, The Origin of Species. I confess I do not easily see what these tabooed subjects have in common, unless that they were familiar to most people and hence bore the traces of other handling. Yet, though both were in general circulation, a safety-pin is not the same as the idea of natural selection. More likely, James wished his fictions to dwell exclusively on the piano nobile, as he conceived it, of social intercourse—neither upstairs in the pent garrets of intellectual labor nor below in the basement and kitchens of domestic toil. And the garret and the basement have a secret sympathy between them of which the piano nobile is often unaware. That, at any rate, seems to be the lesson of the greatest fictions, past and present.