Osmond is precisely what James’s critics accused his creator of being — a sterile aesthete — and James was well aware that they shared some apparent characteristics, not least the passionate attachment to art. Hence his insistence that the novelist’s moral responsibility went with an acute sense of the dangers involved in the aesthetic life when it loses touch with other realities. For the resemblance with Osmond is only skin deep, and in this respect James is closer to Ruskin than to Wilde, profoundly committed to the human and moral value of art. The dangers of the aesthetic life are explored in the novel in very different ways through both the major characters. If Osmond is a cruel realist who knows how to turn the world to his own account, Isabel is the kind of dangerous idealist who thinks the world will conform to her desire. The heroine of her own romance, she is rescued from the dullness of Albany after her father’s death by a maternal-aunt-cum-fairy-godmother, who whisks her away from the German philosophers she is reading in her father’s library (where the symbolism is perhaps a little heavy-handed) to Europe and a great inheritance — adventures which confirm her sense of a charmed life. In possession of her fortune, Isabel is able to live in the aristocratic way which she later characterizes as ‘the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment’ (Chapter 42) — a creed which echoes James’s own artistic ideal. But Isabel, for whom aristocracy offers a compelling image of virtue, is to discover (like so many other protagonists in the later novels) that there is an ironic disjunction between the good and the beautiful, the virtuous and the aristocratic. The difference between imaginative transcendence of this disjunction and painful experience of it in life is an abiding theme in James, so many of whose characters find themselves wanting to take seductive appearance for reality — only to find that there is indeed a reality there, but not the sort they counted on.