LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY 59 if it makes him look at any arrangement with the 'very humble* as potentially compromising. Such a deflection of interest from persons to their surroundings is likely to create a kind of insensitivity which, once recognised, James would find very disturbing indeed. Hyacinth's contact with 'civilised conditions' has not strengthened his humanity and the growth of his sensibility is not worth the respect James accords to it. Hyacinth's appreciation of the 'monuments and treasures of art' and the 'conquests of learning and taste' is similarly drained of much of its human value since he responds to these objects in abstraction from the living human conditions from which they emerged. His response to the human being during his continental tour also tends to be abstract and aesthetic. Hyacinth refers to the ^Venetian girl face5 which he finds 'wonderfully sweet' and the effect he tells us, "is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look underfed) is framed in the old faded shawl." (II, 142). These girls, when Hyacinth bends his 'general' eye on them, become mere objects of aesthetic contemplation for him. Their sad faces and their being underfed make them more aesthetically satisfying to contemplate. This aspect of Hyacinth's growth of taste should serve to highlight the limited human content of the idea of civilisation which is James's positive in the novel. An abstract ideal of civilisation which is exclusionist and bypasses issues of social justice and social equality is bound to appear unsatisfactory in any concrete representation. This detailed analysis of The Princess Casamassima was undertaken to bring out the ideological character of James's values and to demonstrate that the weaknesses of the novel which either go unnoticed or are explained away simply in terms of technical blemishes, are in fact very intimately connected with James's fundamental attitudes. The liberal writers have a way of giving a cover to their preferences, attachments and prejudices by speaking in the name of human freedom and human nature in general. What exactly they mean by freedom and how much of real substance is there in their human concerns has to be determined by means of a detailed critical analysis since they usually do not make their basic assumptions and prepossessions explicit. The purpose of this paper will have been served if it could help in sharpening an awareness of the poverty of conservative-liberal philosophy which we tend to absorb from the dominant tradition of literary criticism. In the name of autonomy and purity of art or authenticity of the private vision, both writers and the reading public are often sought to be insulated from the major social and political concerns of our time, While the conservative outlook can safely rely on habitual responses and ingrained prejudices which have got so much fused with our experience that they can be invoked in the name of 'human nature' itself, new ideas challenging the established social order have to be more explicitly formulated and more emphatically put forward. This gives a handle to the conservative-liberal champions of 'human nature' to dub all such disturbing ideas as abstract or ideologically propagandist. As Raymond