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The following is a sample posting to JamesF-L, dated November 27, 1998

From: Casey Abell (CaseyAbell@COMPUSERVE.COM)
Subject: Henry James' German Essays
"Take me at least out of this terrible Italy, where everything mocks and reproaches and torments and eludes me! Take me out of this land of impossible beauty and put me in the midst of ugliness. Set me down where nature is coarse and flat, and men and manners are vulgar. There must be something awfully ugly in Germany. Pack me off there." Roderick Hudson, chapter 22.

Henry James' antipathy toward the Deutschland is no secret. While it's always dangerous to identify a character's opinions with his creator's, nobody can doubt that James shared Roderick Hudson's comparative estimate of the attractions of Italy and Germany. Few Germans appear in James' fiction, and they are usually unsympathetic to the point of stock melodrama. I still remember how Dr. Staub's contribution to A Bundle of Letters sent Clifton Fadiman into that famous anti-German diatribe in his collection of HJ's short stories. As overblown as Fadiman's thunderings might appear to a less involved reader, James himself would probably have agreed with at least their spirit.

So I was very interested in HJ's early essays on Germany included in the Library of America's collected edition of his travel writings. Of course, there's no German equivalent to Italian Hours or A Little Tour in France - James disliked Germany too much to write a great deal about the country. But the two essays, "Homburg Reformed" and "Darmstadt," offer the supposedly nonpolitical HJ's remarkable insights into the nation which, to this day and for better or for worse, has dominated the Continent.

James published the pair of essays in 1873, and he couldn't have picked a more critical time in German history. Bismarck had just welded together the German Empire under Prussian dominance, and had inflicted catastrophic defeats on Austria and France. Nobody could pretend that Germany was anything less than the dominant Continental power, and the more astute British statesmen were already anticipating developments which would come to terrible fruition in our century. The final phrase of "Darmstadt" betrays James' own misgivings when he comments on "the trail of the serpent - the footsteps of Bismarck."

James unabashedly confesses that his opinions on Germany follow what we would nowadays call conventional wisdom. A passage in "Homburg Revisited" admits that "...attentive observation confirms the common fame, and you are very likely to find a people on your travels what you found them described to be...in some play-book of your childhood. The French are a light, pleasure-loving people; ten years of the Boulevard brings no essential amendment to the phrase. The Germans are heavy and fair-haired, deep drinkers and strong thinkers; a fortnight at Homburg doesn't reverse the formula. The only thing to be said is that, as you grow older, French lightness and German weightiness become more complex ideas."

James then launches into a comparison of Italian beauty and German...whatever, which strikingly echoes Roderick Hudson's bombast quoted above. At least James finds a very qualified acceptance of certain aspects of Germany, "a glimpse of the divine idea."

But those glimpses seem always to center on the *old* Germany of a hundred tiny, disunited, and thankfully powerless states. James offers a remarkable eulogy for that now-vanished era, "...a very snug little social system - of gossiping whist-parties in wainscoted grand-ducal parlors, of susceptible Aulic Councillors and esthetic canonesses, of emblazoned commanders-in-chief of five hundred warriors in periwigs, of blond young hussars, all gold-lace and billet-doux, of a miniature world of precedents, jealousies, intrigues, ceremonies, superstitions..." HJ then laments how the "terrible man" (guess who) has crushed all this relatively harmless inconsequence under a unified and much more threatening empire.

But even the old Germany doesn't appeal to James very much, and the word "ugly" gets a workout. At one point he even comments on the sewage system: "The gutters stroll along with their hands in their pockets, as it were, and pause in great pools before crossings and dark archways to embrace their tributary streams, till the odorous murmur of their confluence quite smothers the voice of legend." This reminds me of Mencken's famous remark that James could have used a whiff of the Chicago stockyards. I don't know if HJ ever got close to the stockyards, but he did experience the aroma of German sewage, and he does not seemed to have enjoyed it.

I don't want to make James' German essays sound like one long whine of complaint. He makes the obligatory bows toward Beethoven and Holbein, and admits some of the more pleasant aspects of the Fatherland. The most urbane of travel writers doesn't rant too obviously, but the misgivings constantly crop through the verbiage: "People have come to feel strongly within the last four years that they must take the German tone into account, and they will find nothing here to lighten the task. If you have not been used to it, if you don't particularly relish it, you doubtless deserve some sympathy; but I advise you not to shirk it, to face it frankly as a superior critic should...I have learned no especial German secrets, I have penetrated into the bosom of no German families; but somehow I have received - I constantly receive - a weighty impression of Germany. It keeps me company as I walk in the woods and the fields and sits beside me - not precisely as a black care, but with an influence, as it were, which reminds one of the aftertaste of those articles of diet which you eat because they are good for you and not because you like them."

And James, for all his supposedly fastidious superiority to the grosser facts of existence, harbored no illusions about the ultimate source of German "weightiness." The passage deserves quotation in full, but I have to abridge a little...

"Far away in the mild starlight stretch the dusky woods whose gentle murmur, we may suppose, unfolds here and there to a fanciful German ear some prophetic legend of a still larger success and a still richer Fatherland. The success of the Fatherland one sees reflected more or less vividly in all true German faces, and the relation between the face and the success seems demonstrated by a logic so unerring as to make envy vain. It is not German success I envy, but the powerful German temperament and the comprehensive German brain... But success of course is most forcibly embodied in the soldiers and officers who now form so large a proportion of every German group. You see them at all times lounging soberly about the gardens; you look at them (I do, at least) with a great deal of impartial deference, and you find in them something which seems a sort of pre-established negation of an adversary's chances. Compared with the shabby little unripe conscripts of France and Italy, they are indeed a solid brilliant phalanx...they are businesslike warriors to a man, and in their dark blue uniforms and crimson facings... they seem to suggest that war is somehow a better economy than peace."

Some critics have suggested that James rather lost his head over World War I, that his thunderous anti-German comments during the war were somehow uncharacteristic of an artist caricatured as unmanly, dilettantish and precious. Whatever the merits of HJ's wartime fulminations, they were not alien to his nature. Forty years before Sarajevo and sixty-five years before Warsaw, Henry James saw it coming and didn't like the sight.

Casey Abell