Some Europeans might insist that American innocence in Henry James is less ignorance of evil than an inability to comprehend how insecure and dangerous life can be, and so James’s daring, generous, sometimes lucky, optimistic, incurably young, and frequently rich Americans make big mistakes and often fare badly—even when Europeans have nothing to do with it. After ignoring their counsel, Daisy Miller walks into the miasmal Colosseum at midnight and then takes ill and dies. When experience gets redefined by James as intense awareness, and when tradition instructs that every perception and every action has a past, a present, and a future, the value of innocence becomes a tough call. The innocent eye that rakes the horizon may be as glorious as Emerson’s transparent eyeball or as fresh as the eye of an American Adam who would extinguish prejudice and see the world as if for the first time. But then again it may only be an eye that offers a fearfully blank stare, and then blinks and forgets.
From the vantage of the early twenty-first century, the clash of civilizations that James considered can seem relatively mild, and yet his exploration remains sobering. If even between sibling cultures an abyss was discovered to have quietly ripped open—and in his fiction none of the marriages between the Old World and the New claim sure success—what chance does the West have to reconcile with the world of the real East, where stern authority has no desire to mask its will with exquisite charm? In Melville’s book an island harpooner awakens out of Ramadan and then slides into bed beside his newly found American friend, but Queequeg and Ishmael drift through a woozy political idyll virtually impossible in or out of Henry James. The divide between a culture of individual freedom and a culture of tradition—H. G. Wells identified communities of will, and communities of faith and obedience—is a great divide, and it is a persistent and deep one in Henry James, as it should be, even though many Americans in the novels scarcely seem to notice. In the tales and novels it often is the exact place where things tear asunder, a place of broadly political crisis that stubbornly resists reconciliation—at least without the virtual annihilation of one side or the other.
In reference to that annihilation, the death of Daisy Miller is really only a little death, and soon some battles go to the Americans. In James’s 1884 “Pandora,” a German aristocrat on a New York-bound ocean liner sits on deck and reads a tale about a “forward little American girl, who plants herself in front of a young man in the garden of an hotel.” Of course he is reading Henry James’s Daisy Miller. After having dismissed Pandora Day as merely a “Daisy Miller en herbe,” Count Otto Vogelstein soon recognizes her more hard-boiled charm, and later in Washington he observes the young woman on a sofa beside the President of the United States: “He looked eminent, but he looked relaxed, and the lady beside him was making him laugh.” Soon news comes that her unremarkable fiancé from Utica, New York, has been offered the post of minister to Holland. With “Pandora,” James extends his consideration of the general American character, here as that of the “American Girl” defined by a simple fact: “You knew her by many different signs, but, chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents that told the story; you always saw that her parents could never have made her.” She, this American girl, had invented herself. And by 1884 one already suspects that, unlike Daisy Miller, Miss Pandora Day—with her half-ominous, half-innocuous name—will be hard to kill.
But stray victories or not, for the most part in James’s fiction, those Americans who would be free take great personal risks, and those societies that would be very free risk losing some of the most alluring and stabilizing features of civilization. James presents a cultural and moral interplay where there are always trade-offs. One way or another in his fiction, freedom—and it is heady freedom—figures as a wild ride into the night, even when a young lady merely stays up late with gentlemen, or chooses an ill-advised husband, or takes a quiet stroll around town after dark. When at the end of Daisy Miller the two rivals meet over the young woman’s grave, her Italian escort sputters out his excuse: “For myself, I had no fear; and she wanted to go.” When James revised the tale, he intensified the declaration: “‘For myself I had no fear; and she—she did what she liked.’ Winterbourne’s eyes attached themselves to the ground. ‘She did what she liked!’ ”
To do what one likes. If it does not quite suggest the dark side of democracy, it nonetheless sounds a hint of brutality as obdurate as anything that motivates the aristocrats who work for themselves, for their families, for their heritage, for their own specific kind. And as much as James loves the Americans he creates—and that is almost always the case—he brings few of them close to happiness. Again and again as their personal paths trace the long bloody unfolding of human liberty, James shows their freedom as extraordinary—as a wondrous thing—and yet he never fails to present it as perilous, and as one of the most fragile inventions that has been brought out onto the face of the earth.
III.
Then there is the complaint that James is unfathomably slow and dull. And in fact after the great, astounding, and sometimes freakish works of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, the post-Civil War ambition for something called realism could seem woefully tame. William Dean Howells, James’s early editor and then lifelong friend, was writing his own fiction with the expressed ambition of presenting “poor Real life,” but the younger novelist soon grew tired of such humility, and in 1871 James would report to Grace Norton that, concerning his mentor, “Thro’ thick and thin I continue to enjoy him—or rather thro’ thin and thinner.” But Howells, with his healthy democratic sense that there was “nothing insignificant,” was on a good path, and in time that path would become quietly exciting and unquestionably important. As unengaging as the word “realism” may sound, it shouldered a genuinely monumental task as it addressed the radical question of what remained of interest and value once the gods had vanished and all the altars had been stripped bare. No longer encouraged to be remotely religious, dimly transcendental, or even, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, obscurely magical, literature found itself moving onto a potentially dispirited plain of bluntly materialized existence. Some writers, like Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Mary Noailles Murfree, would develop a narrower focus than Howells and dress things up any way they could, throwing out lots of asides that were regional, colloquial, indigenous, or merely peculiar to the elders sitting in rush-bottomed chairs close to the walls. But although local color had diversity and much charm, even such keen observation would never carry the day. The realist revolution had to come from a different focus, and it did.
Although of course that revolution did not start with the fine entertainments that were the Sherlock Holmes tales, that violin-playing English genius understood just where to look. Peering down hard at absolutely pure matter, Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective comprehended that, in order to see the reign of wonder that remained, you needed formidable attention and unflinching concentration, the likes of which had never been known. To find fascination in the divested modern condition, one had to pore over every bit of phenomena as if it were a matter of life and death. And only then might you discover the villain of the piece, the secret truth or the innocent son, and only then would your mind attain to full activity. You would scarcely move a muscle with all that tense watching—and thinking—but you would have your adventure; and so detective fiction, still furiously active today, suddenly began. Holmes’s perceptions would make a baffled Dr. Watson think the solution was magic, but the correction had to come: the solution was nothing of the kind, dear Watson; it was only “Elementary.” There was not one drop of anything occult about it, but merely great intensity and surpassing attention to pure phenomena—an oxymoronic miracle of realism to be sure, but the stuff of realism nonetheless.
Arthur Conan Doyle may have worried about dullness, and he may have known that to make people pay that much attention, at the outset at least you needed something sensational, and it had to be discovered on the blood-splattered carpet. Also, the rug would do well to be found in a real
ly nice room of a duke’s country house, or at least somewhere in the gloomier reaches of the vicarage. But the scenes to which Henry James brought his observation were rarely the sort which intrigued Sherlock Holmes, and so his subjects could seem somewhat dim—until one noticed that they were tumultuous. For example, in “The Beast in the Jungle,” the shape of the tale is the shape of a life in which absolutely nothing happens, and that is the point—although as it is finally extended, elaborated, and then comprehended, it is shocking and breathtaking. James himself knew he would never—or almost never—write of “murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons.” Yet he would find tigers leaping from among the gentle English hills and catastrophe descending over tea.
Far from any muscular picaresque—and that is the habit that still marked the philosophical journey of Moby-Dick or the more purely moral one of Huckleberry Finn—his real vector was the inward turn. Only superficially social, less so in the late fiction when the cast of characters would generally diminish, James’s movement was that of the mind and eye, and so it may be no surprise that he fared rather badly during the five long years when he wrote mostly for the stage. Finally in 1895, when he faced a torrent of catcalls on the opening night of Guy Domville, he fled from the theater “green with dismay.” He declared that “you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse” and returned to the novel. In his effort to win some kind of popular success, he had been willing to rewrite both Daisy Miller and The American as comedies, but happy endings were not nearly enough for his restless audience, and all along he must have known that his great genius was contending with an ostentatious genre that, at least for his hypersensitive characters, could become a wild and fretting dumb show. When, with a long supersubtle look, a gentleman onstage turned to a lady and she looked back at him, all the two valiant actors could do was tense their muscles, stand eerily still, and hope that no one coughed. People always cough. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that in the gigantizing medium of film James finally has some of the popular success he sought. Only now, as the camera looms in and the sound track swells, can the flicker of an eye show as the absolute cataclysm the playwright probably intended it to be.
Attention to the psychological, social, and moral close-up, as well as to the unattended impulses and vibrations that gather—strike—then race off in each life each day, had never known such luxury. Critics had long claimed that in Henry James time did creep, and it was nothing new when the subtitle of a 1903 review announced “Four Hundred Large Pages in Which Little Happens.” But that was almost the point, for as James’s novels offered more and still more attention to the multiplied phenomena of life, seconds swelled into eternities where in the half-space between stairway and door an intimacy could be sealed, a betrayal could be launched, a marriage might end, or, as a young woman slowly turned to the wall, she could precisely begin to die. When Graham Greene called Henry James the last of the religious writers, he probably did not mean to insist that James believed in God, but rather that James achieved a near-religious quality as the “last novelist” to whom everything was important and everything mattered—every thought, every half-thought, every hesitation, every evasion, every breath, all of it.
Yet intense attention to an infinite number of minor things—in Joyce, in Proust, in Virginia Woolf, and notoriously in Freud, among others—would more generally mark the modernist sense of what mattered. Even the once heedless Oscar Wilde would one day write from prison that in the end all things had been important: “I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.” He adds up the pieces: “While I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.” It was strange that, like the great Cotton Mather worrying if the tiniest stumble revealed an offense against his Lord, the secular world had slowed all the way down and had once again begun to take infinite care with all the neglected bits of life.
But there was good reason for the heightened attention. In the eighth century the Venerable Bede described human life as a bird’s flight through a warm hall in winter: “the bird swiftly sweeps through the great hall and goes out the other side.” Even in an age of belief, the image must have been formidable, but in the purely secular moment of the late nineteenth century the flight had gained immensely in speed and terror. Writing in an age when God was surely dead, Walter Pater suggested how that flight must somehow be slowed and enriched, its doomed arrow’s path made into a near-infinite and more complicated thing. In the conclusion of his 1873 The Renaissance, Pater recognized the absolutely demystified human span: “We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.” And he observed that “[o]ur one chance lies in expanding that interval, into getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” Pater’s sleight of hand with that briefly living interval might be no more than a clever substitute for the lost Eternity, but the enlargement—once it was glutted with what he called “the fruit of the multiplied consciousness”—might still serve. When Pater spoke of how the artistic consciousness could give a renewed “quickened sense of life,” he said one must “burn with a hard gem-like flame.” And so, as if yearning for the lost world’s extinguished tongues of fire, he moved to make the enriching artist as good as a priest.
A few years after the death of Henry James, James Joyce—Borges’s “near-infinite Irishman”—brought modernist expansion to its limit and, for some, beyond it. When he superimposed ten years out of Homer on an ordinary Dublin day, he immeasurably amplified an arbitrary eighteen-hour period and thereby managed to return at least some sublime richness to the dwindling moment of modern life. Borges judged that the accomplishment of Ulysses, in its “unrelenting examination of the tiniest details that constitute consciousness,” in fact “stops the flow of time.” Yet the fact is that in Henry James a similar enrichment and a similar temporal adjustment had been going on for decades.
In his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction,” James speaks of a writer envied for opportunities which allowed her to write about the “way of life of the French Protestant youth.” James reports she had no special opportunities, but she merely had been gifted with a “genius” for static observation,
. . . having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her direct personal impression, and she turned out her type . . . she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most different stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience and experience only,” I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”
“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost”—Sherlock Holmes might have given the advice to his medical man friend. In the blink of an eye—“it lasted only a moment”—the man or woman of genius takes the fleeting impression and clicks on it and freezes it, and then expands it almost to infinity.
In The Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer stands in a similar doorway and, with sudden intensity, sees a flash of life. Beyond “the threshold of the drawing room she stopped short”—and there, in the space
of an instant, she perceives her husband with one of their old friends:
Madame Merle was there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was talking to her; for a minute they were unaware she had come in. Isabel had often seen that before, certainly; but what she had not seen, or at least had not noticed, was that their colloquy had for the moment converted itself into a sort of familiar silence, from which she instantly perceived that her entrance would startle them. Madame Merle was standing on the rug, a little way from the fire; Osmond was in a deep chair, leaning back and looking at her. Her head was erect, as usual, but her eyes were bent on his. What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. But it was over by the time she had finally seen it.
As if with a magnifying glass out of a detective story, something negligible yet powerful has been detected, and although the “thing” is over by the time it is seen, the perception is prodigious. Isabel Archer has perceived an unsuspected and concealed intimacy—and thereafter a dark secret ranges about in the shadows.