James's characters can never step up and say what they mean - unless they're intemperate Americans

In addition to the "lady" (Isabel Archer) in Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady," we meet several other major players in the novel in the early pages, and James crafts a beautiful and (for him) succinct portrait of each. Touchette senior, an American who moved to England and made a success in banking, settles in England, but is always identifies himself as an American (this an obvious source of tension in his marriage, as his wife seems to be one of those Jamesian characters trying to slough off their American heritage and become a European), and his son, gone from Harvard to Oxford to English banking where he wasn't apparently quite the star his father was and then he became ill, some kind of lung ailment, and seems to spend the rest of his life (he's maybe about 30?) taking care of his health. These are the characters who will orbit around Isabel (along with her British and American suitors, whom we've met, and the meddling aunt, Mrs. Touchette) and determine her fate. When we read James, or at least when I do, my blood boils at the way the characters accept their social position (largely inherited) basically do nothing to improve the lives of anyone around them much less to improve the world, and trouble themselves over the slightest nuances of feeling and sentiment - without ever being able to just step up and say what they mean. (An American could do this - and then be shunned for brashness and intemperance.) Yet this is the James world, and to read him is to accept him for what it is, what he is. In Portrait, it's interesting to me that, at least at the outset, he does more than usual to establish the socioeconomic setting of his characters and he seems to have some distance from their wealth and privilege.