One of the great images of deception, drama and high society in eighteenth-century Europe was the masquerade, supremely embodied in the great masked Carnivals of Rome and Venice and hauntingly captured in the paintings of Tiepolo, Guardi and Longhi. By the time the young American writer Henry James came to Europe in search of the picturesque Old World he had passionately read about, papal Rome had been absorbed into the new kingdom of Italy, and the once-glamorous tradition didn't measure up to the images that had stirred his childhood day-dreams. As he says in ‘A Roman Holiday' (an 1873 essay collected in John Auchard's Penguin Classics edition of Italian Hours) ‘I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a frontispiece, in vain for any object at all that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood pulled over their chignons.' Feudal, aristocratic, rigidly hierarchical Europe was rapidly if unevenly modernizing itself -- commercializing, democratizing, unmasking. James had enough mocking American humour to profit from the frequent discrepancy between the shabby realities he encountered and the glowing civilization of his imagination.

His second serious novel and one of his most popular works, The American (1877) is the tale of an American millionaire coming to Paris in search of a wife. Here James dramatised what he took to be a real, emblematic social struggle of his age, between a proudly exclusive but financially challenged old aristocracy and the confident upwards thrust of the new money, derived from `vulgar' trade, which wanted to buy a place at the top table. By the time he wrote his richly ironical and self-critical Preface to the novel in 1907, he had long realised how `romantic' his idea of proud aristocratic exclusivity had been, how `the great house of Bellegarde' he had surrounded with such an aura of inflexible French royalist class-prejudice would in reality `positively have jumped' at the chance of a marital alliance with his easygoing democratic businessman-hero. It does not spoil the novel as a romance, but his mistake had been not to realize how the `accommodation of the theory of a noble indifference to the practice of a deep avidity is the real note of policy in forlorn aristocracies'. Indeed, throughout his subsequent work forlorn characters, not necessarily `noble' by birth but beautiful or refined or with tastes above their incomes, struggle in different ways with the great money-question.

But the romance and high drama that the young James had imagined as permeating Old Europe, amid what to him was the artistic flatness of American society just after the Civil War, were still there, for him, beneath the surface -- only the surface was no longer that of a literal, artificial mask. As James moved further into British society after settling in London in 1876, his penetrating insight into the nature of the imperial but fast-changing civilization around him -- which his fiction sets out to document as Balzac did that of post-Napoleonic France -- opened up disturbing perspectives on what drove people's behaviour behind their polite exteriors. His virtuosic essay on London in 1888 ends with a chilling picture of the social `Season', which he describes as the British equivalent of the Venetian Carnival with its masquerades. He finds an unsettling foreign image for the British upper classes:

`it is a fine, decorous, expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks are not of velvet or of silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh and blood, the material of the most beautiful complexions in the world.'

The main underlying motive of the great social game in the capital is stated by the sly, mean, mercenary Lord Mark in one of James's great late novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), when he says to the heroine, apparently demonstrating his trustworthy candour, `Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing.' After The American, few of James's fictions could be accused of naïveté about the importance of money. Readers of what is perhaps his best-loved novel, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), where he finds romance in `the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny', as he calls it in the Preface, will have felt the horror of empty selfishness that James evokes beneath the smooth, refined exterior of his wealthy heroine's suitor, a Europeanized and `demoralized' American, Gilbert Osmond, the human ruthlessness of the fortune-hunter. And James's most Jane-Austen-like work, Washington Square (1880), gives a cool, withering treatment to the plausible-seeming Morris Townsend, a young American of extravagant tastes formed on imprudent European travels, who hopes to repair his finances by marrying the modest, passionate, heiress who is our heroine.

The Jamesian image of the mask and what lies beneath -- as a representation of the tension between the truth of inner feeling, whether avidity or suffering or both, and the decorous, deceptive surface presented to others -- receives its most extended and extraordinary exposition in what is his strangest novel, The Sacred Fount (1901). This novel is a teasing drama of emotional vampirism and fine-spun speculation taking place over a country-house weekend. The narrator's crisis of interpretation is summed up when he and the other characters discuss a mysterious painting in the house, of a young man in black, with a pale, lean, livid face and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows, like that of some whitened old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the spectator at first simply as some obscure, some ambiguous work of art, but that on a second view becomes a representation of a human face, modelled and coloured, in wax, in enamelled metal, in some substance not human. The object thus appears a complete mask, such as might have been fantastically fitted and worn. As its Penguin Classics editor, John Lyon, says, `that picture sustains contradictory, indeed opposing possibilities' -- to one character it is `the Mask of Death', to the narrator `the Mask of Life'. The maddening appeal of The Sacred Fount is the way it draws us into the narrator's intensive close reading of the passions of his fellow-guests, into wondering about the putative adulteries he tortuously traces between them. When his theories seem confirmed, he can seem to show the glee of an ingenious author creating a plot, rather than the interest of an ordinary houseguest detecting a hidden relationship:

`I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight.'

The book leaves us, as John Lyon argues, with the question still open as to whether we are to share this narrator's sense of what lies beneath the masks, or whether we are to agree with the terms of his final dismissal by the possible villainess of the piece:

`My poor dear, you are crazy, and I bid you good-night!'

James usually limited such fantasticality to his short stories. In one of the most famous, `The Private Life' (1892), collected in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, he carries his preoccupation with the contrast between private reality and social performance to an extreme in a story which is, one might say, a metaphysical joke, though also an allegory of artistic creation. As in The Sacred Fount there is an obsessed narrator, called by his confidante `that frivolous thing an observer', obsessed to a degree that gives us a licence for scepticism but also draws us into James's idea. He is one of a group of artistic Londoners who find themselves holidaying together in Switzerland for a few days. One is the great novelist Clare Vawdrey, based on the poet Robert Browning, of whom James had said, as early as 1877, in a letter I included in Henry James: A Life in Letters, that, strange to say, his talk doesn't strike me as very good. It is altogether gossip & personality & is not very beautifully worded. But evidently there are 2 Brownings -- an esoteric & an exoteric. The former never peeps out in society, & the latter hasn't a ray of suggestion of Men & Women. In the story James crystallizes what is here only suggested and actually splits Vawdrey in two, into a bluff social talker (who seems to have no knowledge of his own work) and the true creative artist, never appearing in public but glimpsed only with his back turned, writing in a darkened room. As we're told, `One's the genius, the other's the bourgeois, and it's only the bourgeois whom we personally know.' The story's second, opposite figure is the urbanely accomplished, glib and superficial painter Lord Mellifont -- `he painted while he talked and he talked while he painted' -- who seems so used up by his social presence that the narrator `had wondered what blank face such a mask had to cover, what was left to him for the immitigable hours in which a man sits down with himself'. In this case it turns out that it is more, or rather less, than a `blank face' that one finds when Mellifont is alone -- Mellifont simply doesn't exist if no-one else is there.

Masks are also associated with acting, and for James, who was a devotee of the theatre and a friend of actresses, the metaphor of acting for social performances had a complex appeal throughout his career. It comes into play for Lord Mellifont's easy manner in company: `he was always as unperturbed as an actor with the right cue. He had never in his life needed the prompter – his very embarrassments had been rehearsed.' The image is more frequently applied to women, perhaps because James is so aware of the pressures on women to project appearances that may not tally with their state of soul. In James's one novel directly dealing with the theatre, The Tragic Muse (1890), a richly witty and profound work about the lives of artists, he portrays a great actress, Miriam Rooth, `a creature who's absolutely all an artist', who in her private life, like Mellifont, arouses in close observers the suspicion that everything she does is scripted and deliberate. The book's hero calls her `a performer who could even produce an impression of not performing'. The novel James spoke of as his first, Roderick Hudson (1875) is the ambitious and much-meditated tale of an American sculptor whose well-meaning sponsor disastrously brings him to Rome to develop his art. This novel contains an antecedent to Miriam in the figure of Christina Light, a strange, passionate femme fatale with a compulsion to dramatize her own sincerest impulses, who is described as `playing a part before the world'. James liked Christina so much he brought her back as the eponymous heroine of The Princess Casamassima (1886), as a femme fatale again, introduced to the novel's humble bookbinder hero in the box of a theatre, `a dusky, spacious receptacle which', James pointedly says, `framed the bright picture of the stage and made one's own situation seem a play within the play'.

James's villains are most often coldly fraudulent, scheming to seduce and dispossess his more innocent protagonists, but the images of masks and acting are not necessarily damning for those to whom he applies them, morally ambiguous though they be. He recognizes some measure of artificiality, even of dissimulation, as, perhaps tragically, an inevitable feature of any civilization. His American heiress-heroine Maggie in The Golden Bowl (1904), realizing at last the false position in which her marriage to a suave Italian prince has placed her and what she now must do, `felt not unlike some young woman of the theatre who, engaged for a minor part in the play and having mastered her cues with anxious effort, should find herself suddenly promoted to leading lady and expected to appear in every act of the five'. When she gets a respite from the strenuous demands of her counter-manipulations, Maggie is like `a tired actress who has the good fortune to be "off", while her mates are on, almost long enough for a nap on the property sofa in the wing'.

The notion of social performance, public and private, is also central to The Bostonians (1886). This is unusual in James's oeuvre in several ways, and may appeal particularly to readers who find his later work too abstract or ‘intellectual’. Set entirely in America, concerned with social and political reformism, and something of a bleakly satirical social panorama, it is also the story of a very unconventional love-triangle. Its beautiful young heroine Verena Tarrant is a charismatic public speaker, the daughter of a mesmeric-healer charlatan and the product of the dingy fringes of Transcendentalism, abolitionism, etc. She seems to represent in some sense the malleable future of America, and she is fought over by two ferocious admirers, both of whom she loves. Olive Chancellor is a rich, neurotic young Boston feminist with a severe case of the New England conscience, who craves a life-partner to give public voice to her own opposition to the male tyranny she sees in every aspect of life. Basil Ransom is an impoverished, unsuccessful, politically reactionary lawyer from Mississippi, who fought for the South in the Civil War, and who rather brutally wants to `save' Verena from public speaking because he is ideologically convinced `that she was meant for something divinely different -- for privacy, for him, for love'. Her talent for performing, he insists, must be confined to the womanly, domestic sphere, to women's duty of `making society agreeable'.

The emotionally and even physically wrenching conclusion to this tragic narrative of a loving girl torn between two uncompromising lovers takes place backstage at the Boston Music Hall, where Verena is about to speak to her biggest audience yet. To drag her away through the crowd Ransom `thrust the hood of Verena's long cloak over her head, to conceal her face and her identity', as if she were a muffled-up Venetian masquerader. But in suppressing her identity he does violence to her spirit, to the delicate ambivalence of her feelings: `he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears'. Though we are in the New rather than the Old World, the inner damage of external repression is recognizable; the truths to which James gives subtle body in all his fiction transcend national boundaries, especially where he is dealing with personal oppression. It is characteristic of him to make us feel and care, as we do here, about what T.S. Eliot called `the deeper psychology' -- about the poignant complexities of what goes on under the surface, beneath the hood, behind the mask.