[...] Reading is, of course, a major motif in the book, which is appropriate in a story about interpretation and misinterpretation — about Isabel Archer’s failure to ‘read’ her situation correctly; but that is no excuse for us to imitate Isabel’s attempt to re-write reality to her liking. And if the novel is taken to be about reading as one or two commentators have strangely suggested, the heroine’s fate stands as a dire warning to critics. As if to underline this point, James quotes Turgenev to the effect that it is pointless arguing with a writer’s choice of material, which is as personal to him as his own character. Anyone who quarrels with the novelist’s subjects must ‘point out' what they should have been. Better still, according to James, if they learn to read properly and concentrate on their proper critical function, which is not to argue with the choice of subject but to discuss its treatment. For this is what ‘pointing out’ amounts to: the study of how, not what.

James’s invocation of Turgenev’s authority in all these matters is significant. The two men knew one another in their Paris years, and while the American novelist owed a greater technical debt to other writers, Turgenev’s artistic example was vital to him as a novelist who put art above polemics without falling into the opposite trap of what James saw as sterile Flaubertian artifice. The trick was to maintain the balance between realism and formalism. Turgenev does this with consummate art, and James achieves it in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, which followed The Portrait of a Lady in 1885 and 1886. In all these novels we are aware of the writer’s passionate detachment: his determination to see the case from all sides which produces the typically Jamesian sense of luminous sympathy.

[...] James, like Turgenev, was attacked in his time for thematic triviality and moral indifference, especially when compared with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Zola. These writers, it was argued, were concerned with the major themes of politics, ethics and religion. ‘They discussed social reform, involving themselves and their work in the great issues of the day, while Turgenev and James merely trifled wittily with the private lives of the upper classes in the Wildean manner. The accusation of triviality is palpable nonsense, and On The Eve, Fathers and Children, The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians are there to prove it — as is The Importance of Being Earnest for that matter. The charge of moral indifference is equally absurd, but James’s discussion of just this topic in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady is worth recalling, given its bearing on the story. The novelist, he tells us, is primarily an artist, not a moralist. This is no abnegation of his ethical responsibility. On the contrary, what James calls ‘the moral sense’ of a work of art therefore depends not upon the ‘dull dispute’ about subjects or the crude taking of sides which inevitably leads to melodrama or sentimentality, but on the artist’s ability to render life as faithfully as possible in all its subtlety and complexity. Art is indeed about life, but in order to appreciate that we must first grasp the fact that it is art and approach it accordingly. For as this novel’s title suggests, the relationship between art and life, and the ways in which art is a part of life and a medium through which we can understand and misunderstand it, appropriate and misappropriate it: these themes are of supreme importance for James, and nowhere more so than in The Portrait of a Lady, where we might argue that the heroine’s disastrous confusion of the aesthetic and the ethical constitutes the very basis of the plot when she mistakes Gilbert Osmond’s narcissistic aloofness for moral virtue.

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.

[...] Only very late in the story, when she finally sheds tears for her dying cousin Ralph, can Isabel admit the folly his last illness brings home to her, seeing herself now not as subject but as object. For by this time she herself has experienced at the hands of Gilbert Osmond whatit is to be used and patronized. Osmond does consciously what Isabel has done unconsciously, subordinating the lives of those around him, including his own daughter, to a ruthless egotism masquerading as aristocratic exclusiveness. Isabel thus finds her dreams embodied in a parody of her own determination to spurn the cheap and the vulgar — and it is Osmond who eventually reveals to her how fatally her idealism is compromised by selfishness and self-delusion, in one of the earliest examples of the doubles and near-doubles who haunt so much of James’s later fiction.

It may seem strange to speak of such a book in tragic terms, when it is, after all, only the commonplace story of a misjudged union and an unhappy marriage, yet it is precisely James’s treatment of his subject which raises a trivial episode to tragic heights. In the preface he compares Isabel with Portia, but I wonder whether the Duchess of Malfi would not be a better comparison from the great age of English tragedy. For James’s insistence on Isabel’s private consciousness of her plight as the central issue can easily obscure her status as a public spectacle, the image of the suffering woman who, in Aristotelian manner, falls from prosperity to adversity in a reversal of fortune brought about by her own blindness, while the chorus looks on and supplies a commentary.

Yet such hermeneutic fertility is nevertheless ironic in view of James’s Wittgensteinian claim — voiced in the same preface — that the critic’s business is merely to ‘point out’ a novel’s significant features and leave it at that.