The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IT IS STRIKING that Henry James composed his political novel The Princess Casamassima, with its vista of London anarchists, well in advance of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. At about the same time, he wrote The Bostonians, also political, but there the war is between women and men. I prefer The Bostonians but have considered it at length in a book called The Daemon Knows (2015). The problem of The Princess Casamassima, though compelling as it unfolds, is Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist. James audaciously compared him to Hamlet and to Lear. I must admit that I do not understand how James could think that. Poor Hyacinth is a victim of social, economic, and cultural forces far beyond his ken. Hamlet's consciousness is more capacious even than that of Henry James. The Prince of Denmark is his own worst enemy. King Lear's range of affect transcends anything in the world of Henry James or of any other writer, be it Homer or Dante, Cervantes or Montaigne.

Hyacinth is the child of an affair between Florentine Vivier, a French courtesan, and an unnamed English lord. Florentine deftly stabs her lover, who expires, and she is sentenced to Millbank prison. As she dies, Hyacinth's adoptive mother, Pinnie (Miss Pynsent, a close friend of Vivier), brings him into the prison. Much later, Hyacinth will learn that Florentine was his mother and the slain lord his father.