What is striking in all of these examples, and I could have given many more from other writers, is the complete lack of specificity about what it is that France represents. The nation does not just stand, as Wharton suggests, for an idea, but for any idea that can be projected upon it. Indeed James seems to acknowledge this in his opening sentence:
I think that if there is a general ground in the world on which an appeal might be made, in a civilized circle, with a sense of its being uttered only to meet at once and beyond the need of insistence a certain supreme recognition and response, the idea of what France and the French mean to the educated spirit of man would be the nameable thing
(Wharton 1).
Throughout the rest of the essay however, France seems rather to be the unnameable thing. There is no mention of any of the tokens by which one might gain access to French life or culture—not a place name, not a region, not a writer, not an artist, a politician, a historical figure, a fictional character, a cathedral, a museum, nor an item of food or clothing. The only thing you might gather about the nation if you didn’t know much about it already is that it is “our great neighbour” (“France” 5). And given James’s ambivalent national status in the summer of 1915, this use of first person plural could quite logically locate France somewhere in northern Mexico.
If you don’t know what you mean by “France” before you start, this essay will do nothing to explain, and I suspect this is the point. Like the title of the essay, France here is a word merely, a sign which invites multiple forms of signification, thus forcing readers to supply their own details. Of course, this is one of the key tactics of propagandist writing, to abstract and generalise, thus inviting a quick judgement rather than a thorough investigation. However, the call to certainty is undercut (as ever) by James’s syntax in this sentence. A personalised and conditional opening clause: “I think that if,” and the deviations and diversions of the sentence structure remind us that the wartime James remains as hesitant and introspective as usual.
The one thing that James does appear to say about France is that it is somewhere else. Indeed this seems to be its primary appeal—not in a crass escapist way, but in its constant challenge to and extension of familiar values. It is “a native genius so different from our own” which prompts
“our growth of criticism and curiosity” (“France” 3). It is another family, which has “a way […] of interesting us more than our own” (4). Unlike Wharton, who repeatedly insisted on her immersion in and identification with French culture and society, James appears to value France as the embodiment of some kind of otherness or alternative identity. This is particularly interesting given the place that France, especially Paris, plays in James’s own psychological alterity. In A Small Boy and Others he recounts the nightmare scene of being pursued by some hideous form through the Gallerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, and then turning to pursue the phantom figure in turn, thus assuming the predatory role of the other form. There is also the poignancy of James’s deathbed dictations in which he speaks as Napoleon, suggesting that his debilitating stroke provided access to some fractured element of James’s personality that saw itself as quintessentially French. This seems initially odd, but is not entirely nonsensical. France fascinated James by the tension which it appeared to perpetuate between form and freedom in all areas of public, private, and artistic life. This tension also lies at the core of James’s ideas about his own art, and characterises much of what we know about his own personality. So it is perhaps not surprising that his splintered self should, as it were, seek resolution there. However, the tension between cultural form and material excess also informs James’s ideas about civilisation in ways that are complex and unsettling.
Civilisation
This tension was not just appealing to James. As Jean Méral points out in his study Paris in American Literature, the idealisation of France as an alternative location of identity was seductive to many nineteenth-century American writers, for whom Paris operated not simply as a site of projection, where forbidden desires and aspirations could be explored, but also as a cipher which represented the entirety of European experience and tradition (Méral 44). By extension, it comes to represent, as Wharton notes, the very history of civilisation, without (from an American perspective) the political and religious complications of London and Rome.
James is often assumed to buy wholesale into this picture of Paris and of French culture in general. Many faulty readings of The Ambassadors, for example, are due to the assumption that James venerates French culture as the height of civilisation, and that by civilisation, James means something in the line of Matthew Arnold’s faith in European high culture as a redemptive social force. However, as both Tim Lustig and Pierre Walker point out, James’s terminology is not interchangeable with Arnold’s. Lustig notes that for Arnold, civilisation and culture are two separate things: civilisation refers to the infrastructure of a society, its buildings, machinery and systems, while culture refers to the intellectual and artistic activity of a society. Thus, for Arnold, as Lustig notes, America could be civilised but was not yet “cultured”
(Lustig “James, Arnold” 175). In Civilization in the United States (1888), Arnold argues that America has material comfort and urban organisation, but is not
“interesting.” There is a lack of “the elevated and the beautiful” (Arnold 357-58). It has no history, no castles, no Elizabethan houses. James appears to offer a similar viewpoint in his earlier study of Hawthorne (1879) where he notes the lack of “high civilization” in American life in the 1840’s:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, etc…
(Hawthorne [London 1967] 55).
This list is, of course, notorious and there is much more of it. However, what is generally overlooked is that James’s point here is that Hawthorne did not need these things to write. Life was interesting enough to him without them. When we recall this, James’s use of the term “high civilization” takes on a mocking and sarcastic tone, undercutting the supposed superiority of European tradition in order to celebrate Hawthorne’s American ingenuity
in doing without such things. Indeed, James’s account of “civilization” is often less than respectful—especially where France is concerned. His early essays on Paris written for the New York Tribune in 1875-76 and collected as Parisian Sketches take a light view of French civilisation—perhaps as part of James’s desire to reach his American newspaper audience. Certainly, the word appears rather less than you might expect for one supposedly in awe of European sophistication, and is rarely used seriously. When it does appear, it is more often used in connection with the fripperies and frivolities of Parisian life, such as extravagant clothes, light opera and candy boxes:
The bonbonnière, in its elaborate and impertinent uselessness, is certainly the consummate flower of material luxury; it seems to bloom, with its petals of satin and its pistals of gold, upon the very apex of the tree of civilization
(Parisian Sketches 41).
James’s anxiety about the proximity of material luxury and civilisation lingers on throughout his writing career. It is especially prominent in his late novels where we see James eliding the Arnoldian distinction between material wealth and aesthetic culture. Increasingly, James appears to accept that culture costs money, but also that one can buy culture without acquir-ing either good taste or good behaviour or even, like Adam Verver, without being very “interesting.” James’s distrust of civilisation is still evident as late as 1907 in The American Scene, where he uses the word both with and without heavy sarcasm. There is the “breathless civilization” reflected in the ever changing brick and marble of the New York cityscape which fore-tells the “defeat of history,” there is the multifaceted “idea of civilization”
that takes form in the historical “richness” of Richmond Public Library, and there is finally, and damningly, the Pullman car’s “pretended message of civilization” which piles up its arrears against the poor, the dispossessed and the racially excluded (The American Scene [1987] 81; 279; 334).
Conclusion
James’s track record with “civilization,” therefore, makes it tricky to draw any firm conclusions about his uses of the word in his war essays and letters. Did he really condone a war to defend an idea that over the years he had associated with French chocolate boxes, Native American clearances, English public schools and opera bouffe? It is hard to believe either that James instantly abandoned his scepticism about civilisation on the brink of the war, or that he continued to use the term with its usual double-edged
asperity. Tim Lustig argues that James’s really important statement about the war is his declaration “for I believe in Culture” at the end of “The Long Wards” (“James, Arnold” 125). Lustig’s reading of this statement suggests that for James it was not the material trappings of civilisation that mattered so much as the intellectual and artistic values of society. But is it something material or something aesthetic that James mourns after the bombing of the Rheims Cathedral in September 1914?—an outrage which he characterises as “the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man” (Lubbock 421). Civilisation, like France itself, appears to have been for James contradictory, sometimes sublime, sometimes false and shabby, something which blurred the boundary between the material and the abstract, a concept onto which many associations can be projected and yet one which offered an ideal of form which James could not quite do without.
I for one don’t mind James’s lack of finality in his war essays. It suggests to me that his remarkable mind was still open to contradiction and reorganisation and was therefore still flexible and responsive to experience.
The war clearly tested James’s values, as it tested those of so many others, and we should remember that none of his responses to the conflict, whether in letter or essay form, were ever intended to be his final words on the subject. So, it is perhaps not so surprising that his essay on “France” is rather speculative and impressionistic in tone. James himself was feeling his way forward cautiously, revising his own vocabulary, hoping that something could be saved from the past, but vividly aware that civilisation required remaking in the light of new events. And the more optimistic of his war letters (to a range of contacts including Wharton, Scribner’s and Hugh Walpole) point to his desire to do just that through his writing. As he wrote to Alfred Sutro’s wife early in the war:
I hold that we can still, he and I, make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss—and that the preservation of it depends upon our going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not chucking up
(Lubbock 402).
Civilisation, in his war writings, seems to signify for James not so much a place or a fixed set of cultural values as a process of creation, the ability to make something out of experience. And this is in the end what he celebrates about France—her ability to “gather the rarest and sweetest fruits of our so tremendously and so mercilessly turned up garden of life” (“France” 6).
When he says that she remains “our incalculable, immortal France,” he is not looking back but ahead to the many ways in which she will reinvent herself in the future (8).