By Bergotte
Henry James believed that consciousness was the most important thing in the world. Not action, not achievement, not the accumulation of experience in the traveller’s sense — the places visited, the people met, the events survived — but the quality of attention brought to experience, the precision and depth with which a mind registers what is happening around it and within it. This is a proposition that sounds, on first encounter, like the aesthetic preference of a privileged man who never had to worry about whether the rent was paid. It is, in fact, one of the most demanding and most searching ideas about human existence that any novelist has ever pursued. James spent sixty years and more than twenty novels testing it against the hardest cases he could imagine, and the conclusion he reached — that consciousness is both the greatest gift available to a human being and, in a world indifferent to its value, a source of the most exquisite and most particular suffering — is one that the twenty-first century, with its epidemic of distraction and its systematic assault on the examined life, has done nothing to make less urgent.
The Master
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, the second son of Henry James Senior, a restlessly original religious philosopher, and the brother of William James, who would become the founder of American pragmatism and the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The James family was one of the most intellectually extraordinary in American history, and Henry grew up in an atmosphere of relentless discussion, European travel, and the assumption that the life of the mind was the only life worth living. His father moved the family between America and Europe repeatedly throughout his childhood — New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne, Newport — producing in him a permanent sense of displacement that became, over time, the ground of his most characteristic perceptions. He was never entirely at home anywhere, and the condition of the observer who is sufficiently inside a world to understand it and sufficiently outside it to see it clearly became not merely his biographical situation but his artistic method.
He settled in England in 1876, first in London and then, from 1898, at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, where he dictated his late novels to a typist — the elaborate, coiling syntax of the major phase partly a product of composition by dictation, the sentences thinking aloud, qualifying themselves, circling their own propositions before committing. He became a British citizen in 1915, the year before his death, as an act of solidarity with England during the war — a gesture that combined genuine feeling with characteristic indirection, the declaration of belonging made at the moment when belonging could no longer be taken for granted. He died in London in February 1916, having suffered a stroke the previous December from which he never fully recovered. His last words, reportedly dictated to his secretary as if for a novel, were: So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.
He was the most formally conscious novelist in the English language — the writer who thought most rigorously and most explicitly about what the novel was for, what it could do that no other form could do, and how it should be constructed to do it. The prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition of his collected works, published between 1907 and 1909, constitute the most sustained and most sophisticated body of literary criticism in English, and they are inseparable from the novels themselves: the theory and the practice illuminate each other in ways that make James, uniquely, a writer who must be read twice — once for the experience and once for the understanding of what the experience was designed to produce.
The Central Intelligence
James’s technical innovation — the one that changed the novel permanently and that every subsequent novelist has had to reckon with — is the use of what he called the central intelligence or the central consciousness: the device of filtering all the events of a novel through the perceptions of a single character, so that the reader knows only what that character knows, perceives only what that character perceives, and is therefore implicated in that character’s limitations, prejudices, and blind spots in a way that the omniscient narration of the Victorian novel never required.
This is not merely a technical choice. It is a philosophical one. By committing to the limited perspective of a single consciousness, James is making a claim about the nature of knowledge itself: that we never have access to reality directly, only to our perception of it; that what we know about other people is always a construction, always partial, always shaped by what we bring to the encounter; that the gap between our understanding of a situation and the situation itself is permanent and unbridgeable and the source of most of what goes wrong in human life. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady does not simply make a mistake in marrying Gilbert Osmond. She constructs, from the available evidence and her own desires, a version of Osmond that is a portrait of her own aspirations rather than a perception of the actual man, and the novel is the long, painful process of the portrait giving way to the reality.
The device produces a particular kind of dramatic irony that is uniquely Jamesian: the reader, confined within the consciousness of the central character, nonetheless perceives — through the accumulation of details the character notices but misinterprets, through the behaviour of other characters whose motives the reader can infer even when the central consciousness cannot — that the character is wrong about something fundamental, and that the wrongness is going to cost. This is not the dramatic irony of the thriller, where the audience knows the killer is behind the door. It is something more intimate and more uncomfortable: the experience of watching someone you are inside use their intelligence to construct a prison they believe to be a palace, and being unable to warn them because you are them.
Isabel Archer and the Trap of Freedom
The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, is the novel in which James’s central argument about consciousness and its costs is first fully stated, and Isabel Archer is the character through whom that argument is most completely — and most painfully — made. She arrives in Europe from Albany, New York, carrying what James describes as an extraordinary number of ideas about life and a passionate desire to be free of all constraints upon their exercise. She refuses the wealthy Lord Warburton because his certainties would limit her. She refuses the devoted Caspar Goodwood because his love is too direct, too physical, too demanding of an answer she is not ready to give. She accepts the small income left her by her cousin Ralph Touchett — who loves her and who arranges the legacy precisely so that she can be free, so that her independence can be fully expressed — and then, with the whole world before her, she chooses Gilbert Osmond.
Osmond is the novel’s great villain and its most subtle creation. He is a man of exquisite taste, perfect manners, and absolute egotism — a man who has organised his entire existence around the cultivation of his own aesthetic refinement and who regards other people, including his daughter Pansy and eventually his wife, as objects to be arranged rather than persons to be known. Isabel chooses him because she reads his withdrawal from the world as evidence of a spiritual superiority, his coldness as evidence of a discrimination so fine that ordinary social pleasures bore him, his control as evidence of a depth that is waiting to be released by the right understanding. She reads him, in other words, as she wishes to read him — as a projection of her own idealism — and the marriage is the catastrophic consequence of the gap between her perception and the reality.
The novel’s most extraordinary passage is in the sixth chapter of the second volume, known simply as Isabel’s vigil: a fifty-page interior monologue, conducted through a single night in which Isabel sits by a dying fire and thinks, in which she finally understands the full nature of what she has done and why she did it and what it has cost her. It is the first great interior monologue in the English novel, written fifteen years before stream of consciousness had a name, and it is still one of the most devastating demonstrations of what fiction can do that no other form can: take you inside a mind at the moment of its most complete self-recognition and hold you there until the recognition is total.
What Isabel recognises is not simply that she has married the wrong man. She recognises that the freedom she valued so highly — the freedom she refused Warburton and Goodwood to protect — was always, in her case, freedom from rather than freedom to, a negative liberty that had no positive content and was therefore available to be filled by the first strong character who presented himself as its worthy object. Her intelligence, her idealism, her refusal of the conventional — all the qualities that made her interesting and that Ralph loved in her and that Warburton and Goodwood desired — had not protected her from Osmond but delivered her to him, because Osmond understood exactly how to present himself to a consciousness of Isabel’s particular formation.
She stays. In the novel’s final pages, when Caspar Goodwood offers her escape — offers her, with a passionate directness that she has always resisted and that now, for the first time, she feels the full force of — she refuses and returns to Rome. Readers have argued about this ending since the novel’s publication. Does she stay out of cowardice, out of duty to Pansy, out of the Protestant moral formation that James was simultaneously inhabiting and questioning? He does not say. He shows her running, and the door of the house closing, and Ralph Touchett dead, and the whole elaborate, costly architecture of her freedom in ruins around her. The ending is not a judgement. It is a portrait, finished at last.
The Wings of the Dove
The three novels of what James called his major phase — The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) — represent the fullest and most technically demanding expression of his vision, and they have divided readers ever since between those who find them the summit of the novel’s possibilities and those who find the late style — the long, parenthetical, endlessly qualifying sentences — an obstacle to the very consciousness they are meant to illuminate. Both responses are understandable. The late style is genuinely difficult. It is also, on its own terms, one of the great achievements of literary prose: a syntax that mimics the actual movement of a fine mind processing a complex moral situation, qualifying every assertion as soon as it is made, refusing the false certainty of simpler constructions.
The Wings of the Dove is the novel in which James most directly confronts what his vision of consciousness costs when it is placed in a world of concrete need and moral compromise. Milly Theale, the American heiress who is the novel’s centre and its moral standard, is dying — of what is never specified, the illness remaining as vague and as absolute as death itself — and she is in Venice, and she loves the world, and she wants to live. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are in love with each other and cannot marry because Kate’s family is poor and Densher has nothing. Kate devises a plan: Densher will court Milly, allow her to fall in love with him, and when she dies — which she will — she will leave him money and they will marry on it. The plan is not stated directly. It is understood between them in the way that James’s characters understand the things they cannot say, through the fine machinery of implication and inference that his novels require the reader to operate.
Milly discovers the plan. She dies anyway, and she leaves Densher the money anyway, and the gesture — the bequest made in full knowledge of the betrayal, the love extended past the discovery of its exploitation — is the moral centre of the novel and the most complete expression of what James means by the quality of consciousness: the capacity to perceive fully, to understand completely, and to respond not with rage or withdrawal but with the finest possible version of the feeling that was there from the beginning. Milly’s bequest is an act of consciousness so refined that it transcends the situation that produced it, and it destroys the relationship between Kate and Densher as surely as rage would have done, because Densher cannot accept the money — cannot build a life on it — and Kate cannot understand why not, and the incomprehension is the measure of everything that separates them.
Strether and the Unlived Life
The Ambassadors is the novel James himself considered his finest, and it is the one in which his argument about consciousness achieves its most personally inflected expression. Lambert Strether, a middle-aged editor from Woollett, Massachusetts, arrives in Paris to retrieve the young Chad Newsome from the clutches of a presumably corrupting European influence and bring him home to marry and take over the family business. Instead, Strether is himself transformed — by Paris, by Chad, by the Countess de Vionnet, by the simple, overwhelming experience of a world lived at a different pitch of intensity than anything Woollett has offered him.
The novel’s most famous passage is the speech Strether makes in a Paris garden to the young sculptor Bilham: Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? He is speaking to Bilham but he is speaking about himself — about the life he did not live, the opportunities he did not take, the consciousness he did not fully exercise because Woollett did not require or reward its exercise. He has arrived at the understanding too late to act on it for himself. He passes it on.
The speech is James’s most direct statement of his central proposition, and it is placed, with characteristic precision, in the mouth of a man who is learning it at the moment when it is no longer of personal use. This is not pessimism. It is accuracy. The understanding that consciousness — fully exercised, fully present to experience — is the only life worth living is an understanding that most people arrive at, if they arrive at it at all, in retrospect. Strether’s tragedy is not that he learned too late. It is that he learned at all, and that the learning, however belated and however costly, is presented as a form of gain rather than simply a form of loss.
The Turn of the Screw and the Treachery of Perception
The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, is James’s most popular work and in some ways his most philosophically compressed — a ghost story that is either a ghost story or a study in hysteria, depending on what you decide about the reliability of the narrator, and that James constructed with sufficient ambiguity to sustain both readings simultaneously for over a century of critical debate.
A governess arrives at a country house to care for two children, Miles and Flora. She begins to see figures — the former valet Quint, the former governess Miss Jessel, both dead — and becomes convinced that the children are in communication with them, are corrupted by them, are in danger. She acts on this conviction with increasing intensity, and the novel ends with Miles dead in her arms and Flora screaming to be taken away from her.
The question the novel refuses to answer is whether the ghosts are real. If they are, the governess is a heroic figure fighting a genuine supernatural evil. If they are not — if they are projections of her own repressed desires and her obsessive attachment to the absent uncle who employs her — then she is a disturbed woman whose certainty about her own perceptions has destroyed the children she believed she was saving. James provides, with perfect evenhandedness, evidence for both readings. He was asked directly, after publication, whether the ghosts were real, and he declined to say. The ambiguity was the point.
What The Turn of the Screw says about the human condition is the darkest version of James’s central argument: that consciousness, however refined, however certain of its own perceptions, cannot guarantee the truth of what it perceives; that the very intensity of our attention can generate its own objects; that the gap between what we see and what is there may be not merely permanent but, under certain conditions of desire and fear, catastrophic. The governess is the Jamesian central intelligence at its most extreme, most committed, most utterly convinced — and possibly most completely wrong. It is the logical limit of the method, applied with a ferocity that the more decorous major-phase novels do not permit.
What James Demands
James is the most demanding writer in this series, and the demand he makes is the same demand his fiction makes of its characters: that you pay attention. Not the partial, distracted attention of ordinary reading, where you follow the plot and absorb the feeling and move on, but the full, patient, exacting attention that his sentences require and reward — the willingness to hold a long qualification in mind while the main clause arrives, to register the significance of what is not said as well as what is, to remain inside a consciousness that is working something out rather than reporting conclusions.
This is, in the most literal sense, a moral demand. James believed — and his fiction demonstrates — that the capacity for this quality of attention is not merely an aesthetic accomplishment but an ethical one: that to perceive another person clearly, to hold the full complexity of their situation without simplifying it to serve your own needs, is the foundation of all genuine human relationship and the only available basis for moral action. The failure to perceive — the hasty judgment, the projection, the comfortable reduction of a complex person to a useful type — is not just an intellectual error in James. It is a form of violence, and it is a form of violence that his novels document with the patience of a great diagnostician and the grief of a man who understood exactly what it cost.
The distinguished thing, when it came for him, found him ready. He had spent sixty years preparing his consciousness to meet it, and the meeting, whatever it was, he had already imagined more completely than most people imagine anything.
Sources and Further Reading
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Penguin Classics, 2011.
James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove. Penguin Classics, 2008.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Penguin Classics, 2008.
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. Penguin Classics, 2009.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories. Penguin Classics, 2011.
James, Henry. The Bostonians. Penguin Classics, 2000.
James, Henry. Prefaces to the New York Edition. In Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Library of America, 1984.
Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. Harper and Row, 1985.
Wood, Michael. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Howe, Irving. “Henry James: The Political Vocation.” In Politics and the Novel. Horizon Press, 1957.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Princess Casamassima.” In The Liberal Imagination. Viking, 1950.
Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. Oxford University Press, 1944.
Tanner, Tony. Henry James: The Writer and His Work. University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. “Henry James’s Ghost Stories.” In Granite and Rainbow. Hogarth Press, 1958.
Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. William Morrow, 1992.
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