"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmospheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as _his_ subject.
If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality _are his subject;_ that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.[10]
The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do not help the work as literature. The acute observer is often referred to:
Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected...."
Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator...."
Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected...."
Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would certainly have imagined...." (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower." Page 196.)
This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so _thick_ when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves _with a stupidity,_ with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of _mæstria_, if they _were_ dispassionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long _tenzone_ so fiercely and loudly, a long argument _for_ the old lavender. There is also the constant implication that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's complaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed-rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not _as_ stage scenery, but as nature.