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 really 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.
By 1905 Claude Bragdon had recognized that, “Like some microscopist whose instrument, focussed on a pellucid drop of water, reveals within its depths horrible monsters feeding on one another, Mr. James shows forth the baffled passion, fear, jealousy, and wounded pride, the high courage and self-sacrifice which may lurk beneath the fair and shining surface of modern life in its finest and most finished manifestations.” Isabel Archer has become someone upon whom nothing is lost, and her adventure has become one of perception and heightened thought: “Isabel had often seen that before, certainly; but what she had not seen, or at least had not noticed. . . .” Such moments of static perception and intense consideration are particularly common and extended in the last three James novels, in
The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove,
and
The Golden Bowl.
At a climactic moment in that final novel, for example, Adam Verver asks his daughter an apparently mild question and his daughter responds, also mildly, in twenty words—but not before a narration of seven hundred tense words describes the extraordinary mutual consciousness that fills the seconds between uttered question and uttered response. Thought in James becomes a great player, and it is thought accreted, aestheticized, glorified, toyed with, poeticized, rarefied, refined, indulged, coaxed, venerated, and eventually haunted.
The first
New York Edition
preface describes the consequence of how complexity rages when such thought slowly unwraps experience: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily
appear
to do so.” And in the final preface, “the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable, so the act has its way of abiding and showing and testifying, and so, among our innumerable acts, are no arbitrary, no senseless separations.” First and last, James emphasizes that nothing ever stops, that experience is “unquenchable,” that no detail fades, that no action is discrete, that closure is fantasy, that there is always another side, and another turn of the screw, and therefore that some complicating beast—one probably unknown to the simpler convictions of only yesterday—is surely out there ready to be born. A century later the lesson remains forceful.
James relates how “the young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of the surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations . . . ,” and how that artist had to comprehend that “continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.” Such metabolizing complication becomes the generalized condition of the late fiction, and therefore, in
The Golden Bowl,
Fanny Assingham must explain to her husband how the unfathomable complexity of each “case” means that one must always proceed with great caution: