Americanism in Henry James' "The Modern Warning"

Of the English-speaking visitors who visited the United States in the nineteenth century and then wrote and published their impressions, the most famous are Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold. Among the many others now largely forgotten is Sir Lepel Henry Griffin. In 1884, after a visit of some three weeks, Griffin joined the field of those critics of American democracy with "A Visit to Philistia," followed by a small volume titled The Great Republic. The idea for Henry James' story "The Modern Warning"—first called "Two Countries"—came to him from his reading of Griffin's book.¹

The work of an individual famous in his day for several well-publicized administrative successes as a member of the Indian Civil Service, The Great Republic takes up the matters of politics and manners in the U.S. as the writer had encountered them. Griffin's stance and attitude, along with the flavor of his language, can be gleaned from the opening pages:

America of to-day, the apotheosis of Philistinism, the perplexity and despair of statesmen, the Mecca to which turns every religious or social charlatan, where the only God worshipped is Mammon, and the highest education is the share list; where political life, which should be the breath of the nostrils of every freeman, is shunned by an honest man as the plague; where, to enrich jobbers and monopolists and contractors, a nation has emancipated its slaves and enslaved its freemen; where the people is gorged and drunk with materialism, and where wealth has become a curse instead of a blessing. [In fact] America is the country of disillusion and disappointment, in politics, literature, culture, and art; in its scenery, its cities, and its people. With some experience of every country in the civilised world, I can think of none except Russia in which I would not prefer to reside, in which life would not be more worth living, less sordid and mean and unlovely.²

In sum, concludes Griffin, "the ideal aristocracy, or government of the best, has in America been degraded into an actual government of the worst, in which the educated, the cultured, the honest, and even the wealthy, weigh as nothing in the balance against the scum of Europe which the Atlantic has washed up on the shores of the New World."³

Most readers on either side of the Atlantic were unimpressed. In the United States, Griffin's work was dismissed as a study of "our institutions through the large lens of a telescope," according to one reader.⁴ In England, Arnold carefully distanced himself from his countryman;⁵ while Goldwin Smith joined the dissenters by cautioning that The Great Republic was "too rampant to produce a serious effect."⁶

In James, who was always alert to possibilities for new stories and novels, The Great Republic sparked an idea of promise: the excesses of patriotism. He had already touched on the subject in stories such as "An International Episode," "Pandora," and "The Point of View." When this last story was published in 1883 in the Century, it prompted an unexpected remonstrance from Thomas Sergeant Perry, James' good friend, over his satirical characterization of the American "democrat." James fired back. "Who are 'the people?'" he began. "I think it odious for any class to arrogate that title more than another. . . . I pretend to be one 'of the people,' moi. And I can imagine no coterie-literature more coterie than a class of novel devoted to the portrayal of the professional democrat."⁷

Shortly after reading The Great Republic in 1884, James set down notes for a new story. In a notebook entry dated five days after the Fourth of July, he conceived of a character who would stand as the "type of the conservative, fastidious, exclusive Englishman (in public life, clever, etc.), who hates the U.S.A. and thinks them a contamination to England, a source of funeste warning, etc., and an odious country socially." The plot, as James saw it, calls for the Englishman to fall in love with "an American Girl and she with him." The complication, as...