The Country
p. 23-36
Texte intégral
What we seek in Europe is Nature refined and transmuted to art.1
1James’s first contact with the French country—which was also his first real contact with “Europe”—occurred when he was a little over thirteen and travelling with his parents from Lyons to Geneva. As he was ill and had fever he lay stretched in the carriage but from there he could distinguish the landscape quite clearly. Suddenly the street of the little village they were crossing opened on a large spot and the boy saw ruins for the first time. The next moment he caught sight of an old woman in sabots, the very first peasant he had ever beheld. This struck him in such a way—the fever had probably something to do with his excitement—that he was still able to remember every detail of it when he wrote A Small Boy and Others:
Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was “Europe,” sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me—as if by a mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn’t have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an uninhabitable town abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things than I then knew.2
2It appears from James’s comment that although this took place on the French soil it had actually little to do with France proper: it was still “Europe” as opposed to America, where there were neither ruins nor peasants. James never became really familiar with the country as he did with Paris. Apart from Etretat, where he occasionally went for a rest when he lived in the capital, and from Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he stayed some time as a boy before embarking for London and America, he did not know the French provinces well.
3Portraits of Places contains the account of some of his excursions in the French countryside. As the human figure, according to James, has a higher relief in the country than in town and as the seaside is the place where psychological studies prosper best, these excursions are very often pretexts for mental excursions on the differences between French and Anglo-Saxon manners, habits and types. James considers that it is always interesting to compare one race with another and that by doing so one generally finds oneself at a loss to choose between one nation and another, the national virtues of every country being as numerous as they are different. For an American used to the immensity of his own country it is both striking and amusing to notice the contrast between two such almost contiguous towns as Boulogne and Folkestone. After living in England for some time James has become a little insular himself and understands better than before the emotions of young Englishmen landing in France for the first time. The differences between America and “Europe” now strike him less than the contrasts inside Europe. When still on the boat but approaching the French coast James has the impression of passing into a region of intenser light and clearer colours; when landing on French soil he is amused by the picturesqueness of everything and feels as though he had covered a far greater distance than the few miles between Folkestone and Boulogne-sur-Mer.
4What most strikes James in France besides the picturesqueness, the general sociability and the epicurean character of the French, is the hold of the “administration” on French life in general, the influence of the clergy and the importance of the army. “In France the ‘administration’ is the first thing that touches you; in a little while you get used to it, but you feel somehow that, in the process, you have lost the flower of your self-respect.”3
5The sight of officials can only irritate the Anglo-Saxon visitor who arrives on the continent. He has the impression that the individual is sacrificed to a system; even if the system is good and aims at the good of the majority (James notices for example that porters give their tips to an official in order that they should be paid into a common fund and divided into equal parts afterwards), the Anglo-Saxon traveller dislikes it because it reminds him that “the individual, as an individual, loses by all that the administration assumes.”4 Another important institution in France is the clergy. In Rheims Cathedral James reflects on its tremendous hold over the imperial régime. He contrasts the magnificent structure of the church with the powerful organization it covers. His liberal instinct clashes with his aesthetic sense but when the old canons of Rheims begin to sing and a beadle asks him to move out of the choir an upsurge of anti-catholic feeling makes him side with the republicans and sympathize with the French effort “to learn the lesson of national self-control and self-government.”5 As for the army it occupies the front of the French stage but it has a pictorial quality which rather gratifies an American. Moreover, the five years military service have a beneficent effect on the character of the young generation in that “it toughens, hardens, solidifies them; gives them an ideal of honour, of some other possibility in life than making a fortune.”6
6At the seaside James notices the difference between the French jeune fille, who remains “quietly browsing in the maternal shadow,” and her American sister, independent and free to mix with the young men of her choice. He accounts for the difference by the fact that the French girl is always sure to get married since her family settles the matter for her, and that in France to get married means to acquire freedom and a social status. Nothing, he remarks, is more respectable than a French mère de famille. Her “majestic plumpness” makes her appear quite different from the “lean and desiccated person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often converts the blooming American girl,”7 though it may also be the result of the best meals in the world! James appreciates a good dinner. He compares a little inn in the country where he is served an excellent meal with a similar place in England where a waiter in an old evening dress would have treated him to cold meat and cheese, and he remarks ironically that if one is treated more as a gentleman in England “it is too often forgotten, however, that even a gentleman partakes of nourishment.”8 The Frenchman knows how to live and he cares for the satisfaction of his taste and senses:
French people must have a good dinner and a good bed; but they are willing that the bed should be stationed and the dinner be eaten in the most insufferable corners.9
7James could have found no better words to summarize the mentality of the average Frenchman with his contempt for appearances, his sense of economy and his epicureanism.
8It was not until 1882 that James started on a tour to western and southern France with the settled design of writing a travel book on the French country. Just as the letters to the Tribune contain James’s account of his year in Paris A Little Tour in France10 constitutes his contribution to travel writing, which was then an important literary genre in America. Before the turn of the century, people still rode on horseback or walked leisurely across the countryside; they sat for hours in creaking coaches or for weeks in arm-chairs on the boats. They had plenty of time for talking, brooding, or reading. Any sort of writing about travel was therefore popular. Nobody would have thought of going away without his Baedeker or his Murray, and everyone read the travel sketches that appeared regularly in the best American magazines of the time; everyone knew Irving’s Sketch-Book, Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. The more educated knew Ruskin, Stendhal or Taine. James had read them, he had reviewed Gautier’s notes on Russia and Constantinople and he considered the travel accounts of other writers an indispensable basis for the American travelling abroad.
9His own Transatlantic Sketches, English Hours and Italian Hours were to range with the best-sellers of his time. Besides, travel also provided him with the subject of many a tale and with the very basis of the international theme which he was to exploit all through his work.
10James warns us in the Preface to A Little Tour in France that the only pretension of the notes gathered there is to be pictorial and he apologizes for their being hardly anything more. He had to choose, he says, between the perception of surface, i.e., the mere delight of the eyes, and the perception of more serious matters. He could see no happy mean between the pictorial elements and all the others—social, economic, historic. Once more acknowledging his debt to France he expresses his regret at having been unable to speak about it in a more explicit way:
Not one of these small chapters but suggests to me a regret that I might not, first or last, have gone farther, penetrated deeper, spoken oftener—closed, in short, more intimately with the great general subject.11
11But his relation to France is by now so deep that it goes far beyond the level of mere appearances:
There are relations that soon get beyond all merely showy appearances of value for us. Their value becomes thus private and practical, and is represented by the process—the quieter mostly, the better—of absorption and assimilation of what the relation has done for us. For persons thus indebted to the genius of France—however, in its innumerable ways, manifested—the profit to be gained, the lesson to be learned, is almost of itself occupation enough.12
12This explains why James never remains on the surface even when he thinks that he is doing so. A landscape, a town, a house bring back to him memories of French history or of old literary acquaintances. The book records the impressions of a cultivated man, an admirer of France, saturated with French literature and French history, visiting the country with Stendhal in his pocket and a lot of literary reminiscences in his mind.
13The tour begins in Touraine, which, much like Warwickshire, is to him literature come to life. He walks for hours in the old streets of Tours, evoking the spirit of Rabelais and Descartes and endlessly pursuing the ghosts of Balzac’s characters. He strolls about the streets, meeting the novelist at every corner, and when he decides to make his first excursion from Tours he chooses Langeais because the name reminds him of the duchess who figures in several of Balzac’s novels. It is a literary pilgrimage, a pursuit of ghosts. Things do not appear to him as mere objects; they have a soul and “the characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as it were, as well.”13 Since things have a soul they must be treated as persons. James’s description of “the light, sweet mansion” of Chaverny reminds us of Newman’s timidity in front of the old patrician house of Claire de Cintré:
It had a striking character of elegance, produced partly by a series of Renaissance busts let into circular niches in the façade. The place looked so private, so reserved, that it seemed an act of violence to ring, a stranger and foreigner, at the graceful door.14
14Because he wants to remain on the surface of things, James limits his comments on the French to a few commonplaces about their civility, their beautiful language and so on. Nothing is very deep or very detailed but we can hardly charge him with superficiality since he himself writes: “the reader will long since have discovered that this was an idle journey and that I give my impressions as they came to me.”15 The book, however, throws light on his method of writing, his debt to Balzac, his adherence to realism and his divergence from earlier French writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Stendhal. At Chenonceaux he remembers that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had mentioned the castle in his Confessions and after remarking that the latter’s description was rather poor for one of the most romantic houses in France he concludes:
The eighteenth century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques has said that Chenonceaux was a “beau lieu,” he thinks himself absolved from further characterisation. We later sons of time have, both for our pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute than this to the architectural gem of Touraine.16
15His own tribute is larger indeed, covering eight pages where Rousseau had taken six lines. In his Transatlantic Sketches James, then travelling in Switzerland, had evoked the names of Rousseau and Mme de Staël, and had remarked that in spite of their association with a country where landscape was the main attraction, these writers were “sturdy non-conductors of the modern tendency of landscape to make its way into literature” and that their works but poorly helped the tourist “for a deeper relish of the lake.”17 The same may be said of Stendhal. James deplores this writer’s obvious lack of pictorial quality in Mémoires d’un Touriste. Stendhal, he says, is always suggestive and every traveller in France should carry the book in his luggage, but
he has the defect that he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and that his style is perversely colourless for a man so fond of contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks surmounted with sentimental “subjects.” Stendhal does not admire these clocks, but he almost does.18
16Stendhal is better company in the large towns than along the banks of the Loire. He is fond of large, square buildings but he often misses the charm of a landscape and he has nothing to say about the beautiful castles along the Loire. In the large towns he is a better guide “though as discursive as Sterne and strangely indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt to render.”19 Mâcon reminds James of Lamartine, and he remarks that the poet’s description of his birthplace in Les Confidences is so poetical and tallies so little with reality that it is an obstacle rather than an aid to the discovery of the house. Unlike all the above-mentioned writers, Balzac succeeds in conveying such a sense of reality that James finds himself trying to identify the former residence of Mademoiselle Gamard and uses the Comédie Humaine as he would use a Baedecker except that the former is more alive and suggestive. Looking back at Angoulême from the window of the train he evokes the figures of David and Eve Séchard, of Lucien de Rubempré and of Madame de Bargeton. He imagines the latter sitting in front of him with her Jewish turban and Eastern brooch, her scarf of gauze, her cameo necklace and her robe of painted muslin, and she is more real to him than any historical character:
The persons I have mentioned have not that vagueness of identity which is the misfortune of historical characters; they are real, supremely real, thanks to their affiliation to the great Balzac, who had invented an artificial reality which was as much better than the vulgar article as mock-turtle soup is than the liquid it emulates.20
17James constantly refers to the landscape of Italy “as if it were the measure of the beauty of every other.”21 The Place du Capitole in Toulouse reminds him of the Piazza Castello at Turin and the way the town looks out on the Garonne makes him think of Pisa looking out on the Arno. After his first visit to Italy he had felt “wretched and broken-hearted” and when he had to leave the country in 1870 “the south of France was a poor consolation.”22 Italy is the country of art, beautiful landscape, exceptional sights. France is the country of civility, good manners, comfort: the social element is what dominates the scene. If he contrasts the landscape of France with that of Italy James also contrasts the French with the English, always trying to hold the scales even because he is himself too refined and too cultivated to think that there are any absolute standards of culture. Now and then he rejects some false valuation of the French, for instance, the commonplace assertion that they are a pre-eminently sociable nation:
They seemed to me as silent as Americans when Americans have not been “introduced,” and infinitely less addicted to exchanging remarks in railway trains and at tables d’hôte than the colloquial and cursory English;… The English, who have for ages been described (mainly by the French) as the dumb, stiff, unapproachable race, present today a remarkable appearance of good-humour and garrulity and are distinguished by their facility of intercourse…. The question of which is the better taste, to talk to strangers or to hold your tongue, is a matter apart; I incline to believe that the French reserve is the result of a more definite conception of social behaviour.23
18Observing a game of whist at Bourges he notices that the players are all fearful “cads” but he hastens to add—faithful to his habit of ever readjusting the balance—that they are less heavy, less brutal than English-speaking cads, just as the little café is a more civilized place than an English public house or an American saloon. After complaining about the discomforts of a railway in France and regretting “the paternal porter and the responsive hansom,” which are “among the best gifts of the English genius to the world”24 he adds at once that the bouillon at Lyons was far better than any he could have obtained at an English railway-station. Whenever he finds accommodation in a good hotel he does not hesitate to mention its name. In the Transatlantic Sketches he had already recommended the excellent Hotel Gibbon at Lausanne and the charming Hotel Byron at Villeneuve, saying that it was, to his taste, “quite the reverse of a profanation to commemorate a classic site by a good inn.”25
19When he travels James rarely complains. He does not mind the discomforts of the way: he is too diverted by the scenery, too full of the general atmosphere or simply too interested in what is going on around him. We think of the hero of his tale At Isella who has the impression, when he sits down to dinner, that he sits down to one of the factitious repasts which are served upon the French stage and minds what he is going to see rather than what he is going to ear: this traveller could be James himself. He liked a good dinner but he was not perturbed by a bad one and he described it in the most vivid style:
I sat down with a hundred hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of Languedoc adhering to their hands and their boots. I mention the latter articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very hot, and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odour: there was in particular a horrible mixture known as gras-double, a light grey, glutinous, nauseating mess, which my companions devoured in large quantities. A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a farmers’ ordinary. The conversation was mainly bucolic; though a part of it, I remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to whether or no the maid-servant were sage—a discussion which went on under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful gras-double, and to which she contributed the most convincing blushes. It was thoroughly méridional.26
20Instead of complaining about bad accommodations or delays in train or coach schedules he recalls them with light humour and irony. He relates how he once had to spend the night in a house with an entrance like that of a stable and “an odour compared with which that of a stable would have been delicious,”27 and he seems to relish the picturesqueness of his unpleasant arrival at Narbonne:
On issuing from the station at Narbonne I found that the only vehicle in waiting was a kind of bastard tramcar, a thing shaped as if it had been meant to go upon rails; that is, equipped with small wheels, placed beneath it, and with a platform at either end, but destined to rattle over the stones like the most vulgar of omnibuses. To complete the oddity of this conveyance, it was under the supervision, not of a conductor, but of a conductress. A fair young woman with a pouch suspended from her girdle had command of the platform; and as soon as the car was full she jolted us into the town through clouds of the thickest dust I ever have swallowed. I have had occasion to speak of the activity of women in France—of the way they are always in the ascendant; and here was a signal example of their general utility.28
21Travelling in the French provinces James notices, as he had done in Paris, the discrepancy between the external appearance of French people and their education. He is struck, for instance, by the doorkeeper of the citadelle at Carcassonne, a little Frenchman who knows the place thoroughly, which makes James reflect on the democratic conditions of French life. Though permeated to a high degree by the civilization of his country the little man remains essentially of the people, he is “untouched by the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman,” but at the same time he has “a netteté, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is rarely either blessed or cursed with”; in front of such a personage James understands “the red radicalism of France, the revolutions, the barricades, the sinister passion for theories.”29
22James’s little tour terminates in Dijon, where, significantly, what he likes best is the Parc, “a jardin français of the last century—a dear old place, with little blue-green perspectives and alleys and rond-points, in which everything balances.” He walks there alone in the late afternoon and gives us his impressions:
At the end of it was a little river that looked like a canal, and on the farther bank was an old-fashioned villa, close to the water, with a little French garden of its own. On the hither side was a bench, on which I seated myself, lingering a good while; for this was just the sort of place I like. It was the farthermost point of my little tour. I thought that over, as I sat there, on the eve of taking the express to Paris; and as the light faded in the Parc the vision of some of the things I had enjoyed became more distinct.30
23This will be one of the typical positions of the Jamesian hero travelling in France, and in a novel this passage would introduce the most important revelations about the latter’s mind. But here, unfortunately, it concludes James’s tour and we must leave the writer as dusk slowly falls upon his meditation.
24On the whole A Little Tour in France does not tell us much about what James thought of France and the French. The book, of course, does not aim at being a serious study and if James does not say much it is probably because he has little to say. But like his Parisian letters, these notes help us to understand him better by throwing light on the perceptive tourist with an open mind, a profound desire to understand rather than judge, a solid knowledge of French literature and history, and a great admiration for Balzac. They also reveal the equanimity, gentle humour, and exquisite delicacy of the man whom his sister Alice used to call the “angel.” “If Paris is France, France is by no means Paris”: such is the proposition with which James started his tour and which he believes has been abundantly demonstrated as he ends it. For him nothing can equal Paris, and though he admires the strength and dignity of the French provinces he does not relish them as he does the brilliant city. On 17 October 1883, he wrote to Grace Norton that he liked Touraine but found the rest of France rather disappointing because, once he was in the south, he could not console himself for not being in Italy.
25The contrast between the disillusioned tone of this letter and the enthusiasm to which he was moved twenty-five years later by his tour in the Whartons’ car is such that we may wonder whether the enthusiasm was not due to the new experience of motoring rather than to France itself. In 1907 he writes to W.E. Norris about his “long and very interesting, extraordinarily interesting, motor-tour in France,”31 as he had already written to Howard Sturgis a few months before:
I almost blush to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three weeks of really seeing this large incomparable France in our friends’ chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life.32
26The three weeks he spent with the Whartons in the French country must have revealed to him a new France altogether, but apart from the few enthusiastic exclamations in his letters James wrote nothing about it. If he had, his notes would have resembled the impressionistic sketches of The American Scene which appeared in the same year. A ruin and a peasant had once contained a host of suggestions for the young American discovering Europe. But now the suggestions were diffused in the air, and it was almost impossible to put them into words:
There are features of the human scene, there are properties of the social air, that the newspapers, reports, surveys and blue-books would seem to confess themselves powerless to “handle,” and that yet represented to me a greater array of items, a heavier expression of character, than my own pair of scales would ever weigh, keep them as clear for it as I might.33
27At the end of his life James, who had always remained indifferent to what was going on in the world, suddenly let his voice be heard above the noise of the cannons. What grieved him more than anything else was to see his beloved France suffer from the disaster. The injury done to France was an injury done to himself and to what was most precious to humanity. Nobody, he wrote in Within the Rim, can remain indifferent to what is taking place in France for “what happens to France happens to all that part of ourselves which we are most proud, and most finely advised, to enlarge and cultivate and consecrate.”34 France had a mission: it had been designed for growing the precious things that constitute civilization and for scattering them abroad. It represented for all other countries in the world the life of the mind as well as that of the senses; it represented civilization and genius “as no nation since the Greeks has treated the matching world.”35 That is why James wrote to the editor of an American journal to exhort more Americans to volunteer in the motor-ambulance Corps in France. Again and again he urged his fellow-countrymen to take an active part in the struggle. Never, he said, would the western world have a better opportunity to repay its debt to a country without which the world would be a far poorer place to live in:
She is sole and single in this, that she takes charge of those of the interests of man which most dispose him to fraternise with himself, to pervade all his possibilities and to taste all his faculties, and in consequence to find and to make the earth a friendlier, an easier, and especially a more various sojourn.36
28No stone fell in France but James immediately gave vent to his indignation. His voice was even heard on the other side of the Channel when a passage from one of his letters to Edith Wharton was read at a meeting of the Académie Française. “Rheims,” he wrote in this letter, “is the most hideous unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy,” it is “the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man.”37 Those who were responsible for it would bear the shame for ever in the glare of history. Edmund Gosse relates that at the news of the bombing of Rheims the quiet gentleman from Rye had suddenly turned into a wounded lion:
The anguish of his execration became almost the howl of some animal, of a lion of the forest with the arrow in his flank, when the Germans wrecked Rheims Cathedral. He gazed and gazed over the sea south-east, and fancied that he saw the flicker of the flames. He ate and drank, he talked and walked and thought, he slept, waked and lived and breathed only the War.38
29James considered that those who remained passive and silent also had their share of responsibility. To Edith Wharton, who had sent him news from Verdun and who was in the heart of the conflict, he further wrote in March 1915: “Sauvez, sauvez la France! Ah! je la sauverais bien moi, if I hadn’t been ruined myself too soon!”39 On 26 July 1915, a few months before his death, James became a British subject. The temporizing policy of his compatriots had irritated him beyond measure and he wanted to make common cause with those who defended in France the values of civilization. Only an immense love and a lifelong attachment could have prompted the old man, who had always remained outside public life, to take such a step at such a time.
Notes de bas de page
1 At Isella. The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1962-1964), I, 307.
2 A Small Boy and Others, p. 297.
3 Portraits of Places, p. 84.
4 Ibid., p. 85.
5 Ibid., pp. 104-105.
6 Ibid., p. 111.
7 Ibid., p. 159.
8 Ibid., p. 116.
9 Ibid., p. 162.
10 A Little Tour in France (London, 1922 [1885]).
11 Ibid., p. ix.
12 Loc.cit.
13 Ibid., p. 117.
14 Ibid., p. 53.
15 Ibid., p. 163.
16 Ibid., p. 65.
17 Transatlantic Sketches, p. 61.
18 A Little Tour in France, p. 207.
19 Ibid., p. 208.
20 Ibid., p. 156.
21 Ibid., p. 163.
22 Ibid., p. 273.
23 Ibid., pp. 94-95.
24 Ibid., p. 306.
25 Transatlantic Sketches, p. 61.
26 A Little Tour in France, pp. 198-201.
27 Ibid., p. 197.
28 Ibid., pp. 196-197.
29 Ibid., p. 190.
30 Ibid., pp. 333-334.
31 Letters, II, 87.
32 Ibid., p. 75.
33 The American Scene, Preface, p. vi.
34 Within the Rim and Other Essays (London, 1918), p. 89.
35 Ibid., p. 91.
36 Ibid., p. 90.
37 The whole passage on the bombing of Rheims was translated into French by Alfred de Saint-André and read at a meeting of the Académie Française on 9 October 1914. It was printed in the Journal des Débats, 10 October 1914, under the title “La Destruction de la Cathédrale de Reims.”
38 Edm. Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London, 1922), p. 51.
39 Letter to E. Wharton, 5 March 1915. Quoted in Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of a Friendship (London, 1966), p. 206.
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