by Henry James
AN EX-GRAND-DUCAL CAPITAL
September 6, 1873
Darmstadt Castle, Hessen, Germany, ca. 1900.
SPENDING THE SUMMER JUST PAST AT HOMBURG, I HAVE been conscious of a sort of gentle chronic irritation, of a natural sympathy with the whole race of suppressed, diminished, and mutilated sovereigns, in my frequent visits to the great dispeopled Schloss, about whose huge and awkward hulk the red roofs of the little town, as seen from a distance, cluster with an air of feudal allegiance, and which stands there as a respectable makeweight to the hardly scantier mass of the florid, fresh-colored Kursaal. It was formerly the appointed residence of the Landgrafs of the very diminutive state of Hesse-Homburg, the compact circumference of which these modest potentates might have the satisfaction of viewing, any fine morning, without a telescope, from their dressing-room windows. It is something of course to be monarch of a realm which slopes away with the slope of the globe into climates which it requires an effort to believe in and are part of the regular stock of geography; but perhaps we are apt to underestimate the peculiar complacency of a sovereign to whose possessions the blue horizon makes a liberal margin, and shows him his cherished inheritance visibly safe and sound, unclipped, unmenaced, shining like a jewel on its velvet cushion. This modest pleasure the Landgrafs of Hesse-Homburg must have enjoyed in perfection; the chronicle of their state-progresses should be put upon the same shelf as Xavier de Maistre’s “Voyage autour de ma Chambre.” Though small, however, this rounded particle of sovereignty was still visible to the naked eye of diplomacy, and Herrvon Bismarck, in 1866, swallowed it as smoothly as a gentleman following a tonic régime disposes of his homoeopathic pellet. It had been merged shortly before in the neighboring empire of Hesse-Darmstadt, but promptly after Sadowa it was “ceded” to Prussia. Whoever is the loser, it has not been a certain lounging American on hot afternoons. The gates of the Schloss are now wide open, and the great garden is public property, and much resorted to by old gentlemen who dust off the benches with bandannas before sitting down, and by sheepish soldiers with affectionate sweethearts. Picturesquely, the palace is all it should be—very huge, very bare, very ugly, with great clean courts, in which round-barrelled Mecklenburg coach-horses must often have stood waiting for their lord and master to rise from table. The gateways are adorned with hideous sculptures of about 1650, representing wigged warriors on corpulent chargers, twisted pillars, and scroll-work like the “Flourishes” of a country writing-master—the whole glazed over with brilliant red paint. In the middle of the larger court stands an immense isolated round tower, painted white, and seen from all the country about. The gardens have very few flowers, and the sound of the rake nowadays is seldom heard on the gravel; but there are plenty of fine trees—some really stupendous poplars, untrimmed and spreading abroad like oaks, chestnuts which would make a figure in Italy, beeches which would be called “rather good” in England; plenty of nooks and bowers and densely-woven arcades, triumphs of old-fashioned gardenery; and a large dull-bosomed pond into which the unadorned castle-walls peep from above the trees. Such as it is, it is a place a small prince had rather keep than lose, and as I sat under the beeches—remembering that I was in the fatherland of ghost-stories—I used to fancy the warm twilight was pervaded by a thin spectral influence from this slender stream of empire, and that I could hear vague supernatural Achs! of regret among the bushes, and see the glimmer of broad-faced phantoms at the windows. One very hot Sunday the Emperor came, passed up the main street under several yards of red and white calico, and spent a couple of days at the Schloss. I don’t know whether he saw any reproachful ghosts there, but he found, I believe, a rather scanty flesh-and-blood welcome in the town. The burgomasters measured off the proper number of festoons, and the innkeepers hung out their flags, but the townsfolk, who know their new master chiefly as the grim old wizard who has dried up the golden stream which used to flow so bounteously at the Kursaal, took an “outing” indeed, like good Germans, and stared sturdily at the show, but paid nothing for it in the way of hurrahs. The Emperor, meanwhile, rattled up and down the street in his light barouche, wearing under his white eyebrows and moustache the physiognomy of a personage quite competent to dispense with the approbation of ghosts and shopkeepers. “Homburg may have ceased to be Hessian, but evidently it is not yet Prussian,” I said to a friend, and he hereupon reminded me that I was within a short distance of a more eloquent memento of the energy of Bismarck, and that I had better come over and take a look at the expiring Duchy of Darmstadt. I have followed his advice, and have been strolling about in quest of impressions. It is for the reader to say whether my impressions were worth a journey of an hour and a half.
I confess, to begin with, that they form no very terrible tale—that I saw none of the “prominent citizens” confined in chains, and no particular symptoms of the ravages of a brutal soldiery. Indeed, as you walk into the town through the grand, dull, silent street which leads from the railway station, you seem to perceive that the genius loci has never been frighted, like Othello’s Cyprus, from its propriety. You behold it embodied in heroic bronze on the top of a huge red sandstone column, in the shape of the Grand-Duke Louis the First, who, though a very small potentate, surveys posterity from a most prodigious altitude. He was a father to his people, and some fifty years ago he “created” the beaux quartiers of Darmstadt, out of the midst of which his effigy rises, looking down upon the Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, of the locality. Behind him the fine, dull street pursues its course and pauses in front of the florid façade of the Schloss. This entrance into Darmstadt responds exactly to the fanciful tourist’s preconceptions, and as soon as I looked up the melancholy vista, my imagination fell to rubbing its hands and to whispering that this indeed was the ghost of a little German court-city—a mouldering Modena or Ferrara of the North. I have never known a little court-city, having, by ill-luck, come into the world a day too late; but I like to think of them, to visit them in these blank, early years of their long historic sleep, and to try and guess what they must be dreaming of. They seem to murmur, as they snore everlastingly, of a very snug little social system—of gossiping whist-parties in wainscoted grand-ducal parlors, of susceptible Aulic councillors and aesthetic canonesses, of emblazoned commanders-in-chief of five hundred warriors in periwigs, of blonde young hussars, all gold-lace and billet-doux, of a miniature world of jealousies and intrigues, ceremonies and superstitions—an oppressively dull world, doubtless, to your fanciful tourist if he had been condemned to spend a month in it. But Darmstadt, obviously, was not dull to its own sense in the days before Bismarck, and doubtless the pith of its complaint of this terrible man is that he has made it so. All around Duke Louis’s huge red pedestal rises a series of sober-faced palaces for the transaction of the affairs of this little empire. Before each of them is a striped red-and-white sentry-box, with a soldier in a spiked helmet mounting guard. These public offices all look highly respectable, but they have an air of sepulchral stillness. Here and there, doubtless, in their echoing chambers, is to be heard the scratching of the bureaucratic quill; but I imagine that neither the home nor the foreign affairs of Hesse-Darmstadt require nowadays an army of functionaries, and that if some grizzled old clerk were to give you an account of his avocations, they would bear a family likeness to those of Charles Lamb at the India House. There are half-a-dozen droshkies drawn up at the base of the monument, with the drivers sitting in the sun and wondering sleepily whether any one of the three persons in sight, up and down the street, will be likely to want a carriage. They wake up as I approach and look at me very hard; but they are phlegmatic German drivers, and they neither hail me with persuasive cries nor project their vehicles forcibly upon me, as would certainly be the case at Modena or Ferrara. But I pass along and ascend the street, and find something that is really, very Ferrarese. The grand-ducal Schloss rises in an immense mass out of a great crooked square, which has a very pretty likeness to an Italian piazza. Some of the houses have Gothic ga
bles, and these have thrifty shop-fronts and a general air of paint and varnish; but there is shabbiness enough, and sun, and space, and bad smells, and old women under colored umbrellas selling cabbages and plums, and several persons hanging about in a professional manner, and, in the midst of it all, the great moated palace, with soldiers hanging over the parapets of the little bridges, and the inner courts used as a public thoroughfare. On one side, behind the shabby Gothic gables, is huddled that elderly Darmstadt to which Duke Louis affixed the modern mask of which his own effigy is the most eminent feature. A mask of some sort old Darmstadt most certainly needs, and it were well if it might have been one of those glass covers which in Germany are deposited over too savory dishes. The little crooked, gabled streets presume quite too audaciously on uncleanness being an element of the picturesque. 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. There is dirtiness and dirtiness. Sometimes, picturesquely, it is very much to the point; but the American traveller in Germany will generally prefer not to enjoy local color in this particular form, for it unfavorably reminds him of the most sordid, the most squalid prose he knows—the corner-groceries and the region of the docks in his native metropolis.
The Schloss, however, is picturesque without abatement, and it seems to me a great pity there should not be some such monumental edifice in the middle of every town, to personify the municipal soul, as it were, to itself. If it can be beautiful, so much the better; but the Schloss at Darmstadt is ugly enough, and yet—to the eye—it amply serves its purpose. The two façades toward the square date from the middle of the last century, and are characteristically dreary and solemn, but they hide a great rambling structure of a quainter time: irregular courts, archways bearing away into darkness, a queer, great yellow bell-tower dating from the sixteenth century, a pile of multitudinous windows, roofs, and chimneys. Seen from the adjacent park, all this masses itself up into the semblance of a fantastic citadel. One rarely finds a citadel with a handsomer moat. The moat at Darmstadt yawns down out of the market-place into a deep verdurous gulf, with sloping banks of turf, on which tame shrubs are planted and mingled with the wild ones lodged in the stout foundations. It forms, indeed, below the level of the street, a charming little belt of grass and flowers. The Schloss possesses, moreover, as it properly should, a gallery of pictures, to which I proceeded to seek admission. I reflected, on my way, that it is of the first importance, picturesquely speaking, that the big building which, as I just intimated, should resume to its own sense the civic individuality of every substantial town, should always have a company of soldiers lounging under its portal and grouped about the guard-room. A green moat, a great archway, a guard-room opening out of its shadow, a couple of pacing sentinels, a group of loafing musketeers, a glimpse on one side of a sunny market-place, on the other of a dusky court—combine the objects as you may, they make a picture; they seem for the moment, as you pass, and pause, and glance, to transport you into legend. Of course the straddling men-at-arms who helped to render me this service were wearers of the spiked helmet. The Grand-Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt still occupies the Schloss, and enjoys a nominal authority. I don’t know on what terms he holds it, nor what are the emotions of the grand-ducal breast when he sees a row of these peculiarly uncompromising little head-pieces bristling and twinkling under his windows. It can hardly be balm to his resentment to know that they sometimes conceal the flaxen pates of his own hereditary Hessians. The spiked helmets, of course, salute rigorously when this very limited monarch passes in and out; but I sometimes think it fortunate, under these circumstances, that the average German countenance has not a turn for ironical expression. The Duke, indeed, in susceptible moods, might take an airing in his own palace without driving abroad at all. There are apparently no end to its corridors and staircases, and I found it a long journey to the picture-gallery. I spent half an hour, to begin with, in the library, waiting till the custodian was at liberty to attend to me. The half-hour, however, was not lost, as I was entertained by a very polite librarian, with a green shade over his eyes, and as I filled my lungs, moreover, with what I was in the humor to call the atmosphere of German science. It was a very warm day, but the windows were tight-closed, in the manner of the country, and had been closed, presumably, since the days of Louis the First. The air was as dry as iron filings; it smelt of old bindings, of the insides of old books; it tasted of dust and snuff. Here and there a Herr Professor, walled in with circumjacent authorities, was burying his nose in a folio; the grey light seemed to add a coating of dust to the tiers of long, brown shelves. I came away with a headache, and that exalted esteem for the German brain, as a mere working organ, which invariably ensues upon my observation of the physical conditions of German life. I don’t know that I received any very distinct impression from the picture-gallery beyond that of there being such and such a number of acres more of mouldering brush-work in the world. It was a good deal like the library, terribly close, and lined for room after room (it is a long series) with tiers of dusky brown canvases, on which the light of the unwashed windows seemed to turn sallow and joyless. There are a great many fine names on the frames, but they rarely correspond to anything very fine within them, though, indeed, there are several specimens of the early German school which are quite welcome (to my mind) to their assumed “originality.” Early or late, German art rarely seems to me a happy adventure. Two or three of the rooms were filled with large examples of the modern German landscape school, before which I lingered, but not for the pleasure of it. I was reflecting that the burden of French philosophy just now is the dogma that the Germans are a race of faux bonshommes; that their transcendental aesthetics are a mere kicking up of dust to cover their picking and stealing; and that their frank-souled naïveté is no better than a sharper’s “alias.” I don’t pretend to weigh the charge in a general sense, but I certainly think that a good French patriot, in my place, would have cried out that he had caught the hypocrites in the act. These blooming views of Switzerland and Italy seemed to me the most dishonest things in the world, and I was puzzled to understand how so very innocent an affair as a landscape in oils could be made such a vehicle of offence. These were extremely clever; the art of shuffling away trouble has rarely been brought to greater perfection. It is evidently an elaborate system; there is a school; the pictures were all from different hands, and the precious receipt had been passed round the circle.
But why should I talk of bad pictures since I brought away from Darmstadt the memory of one of the best in the world? It forms the sole art-treasure of the place, and I duly went in quest of it; but I kept it in reserve as one keeps the best things, and meanwhile I strolled in the Herrengarten. The fondness of Germans for a garden, wherever a garden can be conceived, is one of their most amiable characteristics, and I should be curious to know how large a section of the total soil of the fatherland is laid out in rusty lawns and gravel-paths, and adorned with beechen groves and bowers. The garden-hours of one’s life, as I may say, are not the least agreeable, and there are more garden-hours in German lives than in most others. But I shall not describe my garden-hours at Darmstadt. Part of them was spent in walking around the theatre, which stands close beside the Schloss, with its face upon the square and its back among the lawns and bowers. The theatre, in the little court-city of my regrets, is quite an affair of state, and the manager second only in importance to the prime-minister or the commander-in-chief. Or rather the Grand Duke is manager himself, and the leading actress, as a matter of course, his morganatic wife. The present Grand-Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, I believe, is a zealous patron of the drama, and maintains a troupe of comedians, who doubtless do much to temper the dulness of his capital. The present theatre is simply a picturesque ruin, having been lately burned down, for all the world like an American “opera-house.” But the actors have found a provisio
nal refuge, and I have just been presented with the programme of the opening night of the winter season. I saw the rest of Darmstadt as I took my way to the palace of Prince Karl. It was a very quiet pilgrimage, and I perhaps met three people in the long, dull, proper street through which it led me. One of them was a sentinel with a spiked helmet marching before the snug little palace of the Prince Louis—the gentleman who lately married the Princess Alice of England. Another was a school-boy in spectacles, nursing a green bag full of polyglot exercises, I suppose, of whom I asked my way; and the third was the sturdy little musketeer who was trying to impart a reflet of authority to the neat little white house occupied by the Prince Earl. But this frowning soldier is no proper symbol of the kindly custom of the house. I was admitted unconditionally, ushered into the little drawing-room, and allowed half an hour’s undisturbed contemplation of the beautiful Holbein—the famous picture of the Meyer family. The reader interested in such matters may remember the discussion maintained two years since, at the time of the general exhibition of the younger Holbein’s works in Dresden, as to the respective merits—and I believe the presumptive priority in date—of this Darmstadt picture and the presentation of the same theme which adorns the Dresden Gallery. I forget how the question was settled—whether, indeed, it was settled at all, and I have never seen the Dresden picture; but it seems to me that if I were to choose a Holbein, this one would content me. It represents a sort of plainly lovely Virgin holding her child, crowned with a kind of gorgeous episcopal crown, and worshipped by six kneeling figures—the worthy Goodman Meyer, his wife, and their progenitors. It is a wonderfully solid masterpiece, and so full of wholesome human substance that I should think its owner could go about his daily work the better—eat and drink and sleep and perform the various functions of life more largely and smoothly—for having it constantly before his eyes. I was not disappointed, and I may now confess that my errand at Darmstadt had been much more to see the Holbeinische Gemälde than to examine the trail of the serpent—the footprints of Bismarck.