Travels With Henry James

by Henry James

  HOMBURG REFORMED

  July 28, 1873

  Bad Homburg Palace, ca. 1860.

  I HAVE BEEN FINDING HOMBURG A VERY PLEASANT PLACE, but have been half ashamed to confess it. People assure me on all sides that its glory is sadly dimmed, and that it can only be rightly enjoyed to the music of roulette and of clinking napoleons. It is known by this time, I suppose, even in those virtuously disinterested communities where these lines may circulate, that the day of roulette in these regions is over, and that in the matter of rouge-et-noir united Germany has taken a new departure. The last unhallowed gains at the green tables were pocketed last summer, and the last hard losses, doubtless, as imperturbably endured as if good-natured chance had still a career to run. Chance, I believe, at Homburg was not amazingly good-natured, and kept her choicest favors for the bank; but now that the reign of Virtue has begun, I have no doubt there are plenty of irregular characters who think that she was much the more amiable creature of the two. What provision has been made for this adventurous multitude I am at loss to conceive, and how life strikes people now for whom, at any time these twenty years, it has been concentrated in the shifting victory of red or black. Some of them have taken to better courses, I suppose; some of them, doubtless, to worse; but I have a notion that many of them have begun to wear away the dull remainder of existence in a kind of melancholy, ghostly hovering around the deserted Kursaals. I have seen many of these blighted survivors sitting about under the trees in the Kurgarten, with the old habit of imperturbability still in their blank, fixed faces—neat, elderly gentlemen, elderly ladies not especially venerable, whose natural attitude seems to be to sit with their elbows on the table and their eyes on the game. They have all, of course, a pack of cards in their pockets, and their only consolation must be to play “patience” for evermore. When I remember, indeed, that I am in legendary Germany, I find it easy to believe that in these mild summer nights, when the stupid people who get up at six o’clock to drink the waters are safely in bed, they assemble in some far-away corner of the park, and make a green table of the moonlit grass. Twice a week the old gaming rooms at the Kursaal are thrown open, the chandeliers are lighted, and people go and stare at the painting and gilding. There is an immense deal of it, all in the elaborate rococo style in which French decorators of late years have become so proficient, and which makes an apartment look half like a throne-room and half like a café; but when you have walked about and looked at the undressed nymphs on the ceilings and the listless crowd in the great mirrors, you have nothing to do but to walk out again. The clever sumptuosity of the rooms makes virtue look rather foolish and dingy, and classes the famous M. Blanc, in the regard of pleasure-loving people, with the late Emperor of the French and other potentates more sinned against than sinning—martyred benefactors to that large portion of the human race who would fain consider the whole world as a watering-place. It is certainly hard to see what thrifty use the old gaming-rooms can be put to; they must stand there always in their gorgeous emptiness, like the painted tomb chambers of Eastern monarchs.

  There was certainly fair entertainment in watching the play—and in playing, according to circumstances; but even in the old days I think I should have got my chief pleasure at the Kursaal in a spectacle which has survived the fall of M. Blanc. As you pass in the front door, you look straight across the breadth of the building through another great door which opens on the gardens. The Kursaal stands on an elevation, and the ground plunges away behind it with a great stretch, which spreads itself in a charming park. Beyond the park it rises again into the gentle slopes of the Taunus mountains, and makes a high wooded horizon. This picture of the green hollow and the blue ridge greets you as you come in, framed by the opposite doorway, and I have sometimes wondered whether in the gaming days an occasional novice with a tender conscience, on his way to the tables, may not have seemed to see in it the pleading face of that mild economist Mother Nature herself. It is, doubtless, thinking too fancifully of human nature to believe that a youth with a napoleon to stake, and the consciousness of no more rigid maternal presence than this, should especially heed the suggestion that it would be better far to take a walk in the woods. The truth is, I imagine, that Nature has no absolute voice, and that she speaks to us very much according to our moods. The view from the terrace at the Kursaal has often had confusion pronounced upon it by players with empty pockets, and has been sentimentally enjoyed by players with a run of luck. We have the advantage now, at least, of finding it always the same, and always extremely pretty. Homburg, indeed, is altogether a very pretty place, and its prettiness is of that pleasing sort which steals gradually on the attention. It is one of nature’s own watering-places, and has no need, like so many of the audacious sisterhood, to bully you by force of fashion into thinking it tolerable.

  Your half-hour’s run from Frankfort across a great sunny expanse of corn-fields and crab-apple trees is indeed not particularly charming; but the sight of the town as you approach it, with its deep-red roofs rising out of thick shade at the base of its blue hills, is a pledge of salubrious repose. Homburg stands on a gentle spur of the highest of these hills, and one of its prettiest features is your seeing the line of level plain across the foot of its long sloping main street and the line of wooded mountain across the top. The main street, which is almost all of Homburg proper, has the look of busy idleness which belongs to watering-places. There are people strolling along and looking into the shop-windows who seem to be on the point of buying something for the sake of something to do. The shops deal chiefly in the lighter luxuries, and the young ladies who wait in them wear a great many ribbons and a great deal of hair. All the houses take lodgers, and every second one is a hotel, and every now and then you hear them chanting defiance at each other to the sound of the dinner-bell. In the middle of the street is the long red stuccoed façade of the Kursaal—the beating heart of the Homburg world, as one might have called it formerly. Its heart beats much slower now, but whatever social entertainment you may still find at Homburg you must look for there. People assemble there in very goodly crowds, if only to talk about the dreadful dulness and to commiserate each other for not having been here before. The place is kept up by a tax, promptly levied on all arriving strangers, and it seems to be prosperously enough maintained. It gives you a reading-room where you may go and practice indifference as you see a sturdy Briton settling down heavily over your coveted Times, just as you might of old when you saw the croupier raking in your stakes; music by a very fair band twice a day; a theatre, a café, a restaurant, and a table-d’hôte, and a garden illuminated every three or four evenings in the Vauxhall manner. People differ very much as to the satisfaction they take in sitting about under flaring gas-lamps and watching other people march up and down and pass and repass them by the hour. The pastime pushed to extremes tends, to my own thinking, to breed misanthropy—or an extra relish at least for a good book in one’s own room and the path through the woods where one is least likely to meet any one. But if you use the Kursaal sparingly, and reserve it for an hour or two in the evening, it is certainly amusing enough.

  I should be very sorry to underestimate the entertainment to be found in observing the comings and goings of a multifarious European crowd, or the number of suggestions and conclusions which, with a desultory logic of its own, the process contributes to one’s philosophy of life. Every one who prefers to sit in a chair and look rather than walk up and down and be looked at, may be assumed to possess this intellectual treasure. The observations of the “cultivated American” bear chiefly, I think, upon the great topic of national idiosyncrasies. He is apt to have a keener sense of them than Europeans; it matters more to his imagination that his neighbor is English, French, or German. He often seems to me to be a creature wandering aloof, but half naturalized himself. His neighbors are outlined, defined, imprisoned, if you will, by their respective national moulds, pleasing or otherwise; but his own type has not hardened yet into the Old-World bronze. Superficially, no p
eople carry more signs and tokens of what they are than Americans. I recognize them as they advance by the whole length of the promenade. The signs, however, are all of the negative kind, and seem to assure you, first of all, that the individual belongs to a country in which the social atmosphere, like the material, is extremely thin. American women, for the most part, in compliance with an instinct certainly not ungraceful, fill out the ideal mould with wonderful Paris dresses; but their dresses do little toward completing them, characterizing them, shelving and labelling them socially. The usual English lady, marching heavily about under the weight of her ingenious bad taste, has indescribably more the air of what one may call a social factor—the air of social responsibility, of having a part to play and a battle to fight. Sometimes, when the battle has been hard, the lady’s face is very grim and unlovely, and I prefer the listless, rustling personality of my countrywomen; at others, when the cause has been graceful and the victory easy, she has a robust amenity which is one of the most agreeable things in the world. But these are metaphysical depths, though in strictness they ought not to be out of the way as one sits among German pipes and beer. The smokers and drinkers are the solid element at the Kursaal—the dominant tone is the German tone. It comes home very forcibly to the sense of our observant American, and it pervades, naturally enough, all his impressions of Homburg. 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 would, and to call if necessary for a pipe and beer also, and build yourself into good humor with it. It is very pleasant, in an unfamiliar country, to collect travellers’ evidence on local manners and national character. You are sure to have some vague impressions to be confirmed, some ingenious theory to be illustrated, some favorite prejudice in any case to be revived and improved. Even if your opportunities for observation are of the commonest kind, you find them serving your purpose. The smallest things become significant and eloquent, and demand a place in your note-book. 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 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—when at last, of an evening, I have found the end of a bench on the promenade behind the Kursaal. One’s impression of Germany may or may not be agreeable, but there is very little doubt that it is what one may call highly nutritive. In detail, it would take long to say what it consists of. I think that, in general, in such matters attentive observation confirms the common fame, and that you are very likely to find a people on your travels what you found them described to be under the mysterious woodcut in some Peter Parley task-book or play-book of your childhood. The French are a light, pleasure-loving people; ten years of the Boulevards 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. A few weeks ago I left Italy in that really demoralized condition into which Italy throws those confiding spirits who give her unlimited leave to please them. Beauty, I had come to believe, was an exclusively Italian possession, the human face was not worth looking at unless redeemed by an Italian smile, nor the human voice worth listening to unless attuned to Italian vowels. A landscape was no landscape without vines festooned to fig-trees swaying in a hot wind—a mountain a hideous excrescence unless melting off into a Tuscan haze. But now that I have absolutely exchanged vines and figs for corn and cabbages, and violet Apennines for the homely plain of Frankfort, and liquids for gutturals, and the Italian smile for the German grin, I am much better contented than I could have ventured to expect. I have shifted my standard of beauty, but it still commands a glimpse of the divine idea.

  There is something here, too, which pleases, suggests, and satisfies. Sitting of an evening in the Kurgarten, within ear-shot of the music, you have an almost inspiring feeling that you never have in Italy—a feeling that the substantial influences about you are an element of the mysterious future. They are of that varied order which seems to indicate the large needs of large natures. From its pavilion among the trees ring out the notes of the loud orchestra, playing Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber—such music as no other people has composed, as no other people can play it. Round about in close groups sit the sturdy, prosperous natives, with their capacious heads, their stout necks, their deep voices, their cigars, their beer, their intelligent applause, their talk on all things—largely enjoying, and yet strongly intending. Far away in the middle 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 the German success I envy, but the powerful German temperament and the comprehensive German brain. With these advantages one needn’t be restless; one can afford to give a good deal of time to sitting out under the trees over pipes and beer and discussion tinged with metaphysics. 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 generally of excellent stature, and they have faces in which the look of education has not spoiled the look of good-natured simplicity. They are all equipped in brand new uniforms, and in these warm days they stroll about in spotless white trousers. Many of them wear their fine blonde beards, and they all look like perfect soldiers and excellent fellows. It doesn’t do, of course, for an officer to seem too much like a good fellow, and the young captains and adjutants who ornament the Kurgarten of an evening seldom err in this direction. But they are business-like warriors to a man, and in their dark-blue uniforms and crimson facings, with their swords depending from their unbelted waists through a hole in their plain surtouts, they seem to suggest that war is somehow a better economy than peace.

  But with all this, I am giving you Hamlet with Hamlet himself omitted. Though the gaming is stopped, the wells have not dried up, and people still drink them, and find them very good. They are indeed a very palatable dose, and “medical advice” at Homburg flatters one’s egotism so unblushingly as rather to try the faith of people addicted to the old-fashioned confusion between the beneficial and the disagreeable. You have indeed to get up at half-past six o’clock—but of a fine summer morning this is no great hardship—and you are rewarded on your arrival at the spring by triumphant strains of music. There is an orchestra perched hard by, which plays operatic selections while you pace the shady walks and wait for your second glass. All the Homburg world is there; it’s the fashionable hour; and at first I paid the antique prejudice just mentioned the tribute of thinking it was all too frivolous to be salutary. There are half a dozen springs, scattered through a charming wooded park, where you may find innumerable shady strolls and rustic benches in bosky nooks, where it is pleasant to lounge with a good light book. In the afternoon I drink at a spring with whose luxurious prettiness I still find it hard to associate a doctor’s prescription. It reminds me of a back-scene at the theatre, and I feel as if
I were drinking some fictitious draught prepared by the property-man; or rather, being a little white temple rising on slim columns among still green shade, it reminds me of some spot in the antique world where the goddess Hygeia was worshipped by thirsty pilgrims; and I am disappointed to find that the respectable young woman who dips my glass is not a ministering nymph in a tunic and sandals. Beyond this valley of healing waters lie the great woods of fir and birch and beech and oak which cover the soft slopes of the Taunus. They are full of pleasant paths and of the frequent benches which testify to the German love of sitting in the open air. I don’t know why it is—because, perhaps, we have all read so many Teutonic legends and ballads—but it comes natural in Germany to be in a wood. One need have no very rare culture, indeed, to find a vague old friendship in every feature of the landscape. The villages with their peaked roofs, covered with red scalloped shingles, and the brown beams making figures on the plastered cottage walls, the grape-vine on the wall, the swallows in the eaves, the Hausfrau, sickle in hand, with her yellow hair in a top-knot and her short blue skirt showing her black stockings—what is it all but a background to one of Richter’s charming woodcuts? I never see a flock of geese on the roadside, and a little tow-pated maiden driving them with a forked switch, without thinking of Grimm’s household tales. I look around for the old crone who is to come and inform her she is a king’s daughter. I see nothing but the white Kaiserliche Deutsche sign-post, telling one that this is such and such a district of the Landwehr. But with such easy magic as this I am perhaps right in not especially regretting that the late enchantress of the Kursaal should have been handed over to the police.