The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  A lens which is focused on Britain at this watershed of European history, the opening of the 1870s, depicts then a scene which is out of kilter with the rest of Europe, almost comically so. After his release from imprisonment in the palace of Wilhelmshöhe above Cassel, Napoleon III went into exile in England, living with Empress Eugénie at Chislehurst, Kent, for the last two painful years of his life. (She survived until 1920.) He merely crossed the English Channel, but in some ways he could have been crossing to a different universe.2 He had left behind the bloodshed, passion and wretchedness depicted in Emile Zola’s 1892 novel La Débâcle (which must be the best war novel ever written, set in 1870–1) and entered Middlemarch (published in 1872 the year after Marx’s The Civil War in France but holding up a mirror to a world whose continental equivalent had been pounded, mortared, out of existence, but which would survive in England for another forty years). So it was that, while the Fathers of the First Vatican Council were declaring the pope to be infallible, the fellows of Balliol were at last electing Benjamin Jowett as master; while in Paris they formed a Commune, in London they played the first Football Association Cup; and while the Communards were being butchered at the ‘Federates’ Wall’ – as it came to be known – in the Père Lachaise cemetery, the English Parliament was setting up the Local Government Board.

  ‘What a base, pot-bellied blockhead this our heroic nation has become; sunk in its own dirty fat and offal, and of a stupidity defying the very gods’ was how Carlyle saw matters.3

  As he had laboured through long years on the life of the great German Enlightenment monarch – years poor Mrs Carlyle had dubbed ‘the valley of the shadow of Frederick’ – Carlyle had prophesied the eventual dominance of Europe by Germany. Froude describes the outcome of the Franco-Prussian war as ‘an exhibition of Divine judgement which was after Carlyle’s own heart’. Carlyle shared with the majority of the British an anti-French prejudice – not dissipated in his case by the fact that Napoleon III (as Prince Louis Napoleon) had once visited the sage of Cheyne Row. (A mean, perjured adventurer, Carlyle had thought him; Napoleon had got into his carriage asking if ‘that man was mad’.)4 Most English followers of events on the continent felt pity for France in its desolation, and above all for Paris, the hunger and despair of the siege, the internecine destructiveness of what followed. London alone sent £80,000 worth of provisions to the starving,5 but here her kindly-minded subjects were not at one with the Queen, who was cock-a-hoop at the Prussian victory. ‘How dreadful the state of Paris is! Surely that Sodom and Gomorrah as Papa called it deserves to be crushed,’6 she wrote to her daughter the Crown Princess of Prussia. ‘The joy of our army,’ Vicky gushed back to her mother, ‘around Paris is not to be described.’7 (But Queen Victoria changed her mind after the Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine.)

  Salisbury, who was far from being philoteutonic, was fluent in French and kept a house in France, did not rejoice in the Prussian victory, but spoke for Conservatives everywhere when he wrote (to G.W. Sandford, 24 September 1870), ‘whatever else Bismarck does I do hope he will burn down the Faubourg St Antoine and crush out the Paris mob. Their freaks and madnesses have been a curse to Europe for the last eighty years.’8

  Carlyle, in a long and measured letter to The Times, bemoaned ‘this cheap pity and newspaper lamentation over fallen and afflicted France’.9 He reminded readers that ‘a hundred years ago there was in England the liveliest desire, and at one time an actual effort and hope, to recover Alsace and Lorraine from the French’.10 He concluded, ‘That noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should be at length welded into a Nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France, seems to me the hopefulest public fact that has occurred in my time.’11

  The British government retained a neutral stance. Vicky was displeased by her mother’s speech from the throne on 9 February 1871 which referred to the belligerents, in a war as yet unresolved, as ‘two great and brave nations’. She must have known that the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament was simply an expression of the politics of her government; that, though the sovereign read out the words, they had been scripted by the prime minister – in this case Gladstone.

  As had happened before in Gladstone’s career, there was a tortuous moral and intellectual complexity in his attitude to the Franco-Prussian war, to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in particular, to Europe generally. He told the Queen ‘in a very excited manner’ that there would ‘never be a cordial understanding with Germany if she took that million and a quarter people against their will’. But his sovereign, and his Cabinet, were against Gladstone, favouring the neutral stance adopted in the Queen’s Speech. That wasn’t the end of the matter, however. Although in public Gladstone was a neutral, he let off steam by writing, anonymously, in The Edinburgh Review an article entitled ‘Germany, France and England’ in which he deplored Bismarck’s action, and denounced ‘Bismarckism, militarism, and retrograde political morality’. The Daily News seized on the obvious identity of the author and ‘leaked’ it. It was a moment comparable to the Newcastle speech at the beginning of the American Civil War when Gladstone, as it were, accidentally blabbed out his sympathy with the Confederacy. Consummate politician that he was, he knew how to use such supposed gaffes to play to the gallery, to signal to his supporters that he would like to take particular views, populist or otherwise, were he not restrained by party, or Cabinet, colleagues. He was ‘the People’s William’.

  Setbacks – such as Disraeli trouncing him and introducing a more radical, and fairer, second Reform Bill than his own – could be represented by Gladstone to his huge and adoring audiences as triumphs of his own. ‘God knows I have not courted them,’ he recorded in his diary after a deliberately rabble-rousing tour of Lancashire.12 His consummate political skills and his long run of political luck could, in his own mind, be very easily explained – ‘The Almighty Seems to Sustain me.’13 A.J.P. Taylor, in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, maintained that Bismarck encouraged the idea of himself as a Machiavel, and revelled in the idea that he had tricked Napoleon III into declaring war on Prussia over the trivial question of the candidature for the Spanish throne. The more people read the confusion of events as a subtle spider’s web of Bismarck’s invention, the stronger Bismarck’s hand. Gladstone, in his prime, had some of these qualities, not of overt humbug, but of quite instinctual political genius, knowing when to surf with, when to swim against, each rolling wave.

  Little as he liked what Bismarck had achieved, a part of Gladstone envied it. He must in fact have been quite pleased when his Cabinet colleagues reminded him of how humiliated Palmerston had been when attempting to guarantee the independence of Danish Schleswig-Holstein when Britain had neither the diplomatic backing nor the military expertise to resist a well-organized Prussian army. Even over so complex and for Gladstone emotionally charged an issue as religious freedom, he had to confess an admiration for the intolerant Kulturkampf. Gladstone’s own attitude to Catholicism, as a High Churchman many of whose closest friends had converted to Rome, was to say the least ambivalent. Yet when he watched Bismarck enact legislation against political Catholicism – prohibiting the Jesuit order in Prussia, banning church weddings and absorbing Church schools into state control, Gladstone could not but be impressed: ‘Bismarck’s ideas & methods are not ours,’ he wrote to Odo Russell at Berlin; it was one of those ominous phrases awaiting a ‘but’, and it comes syntactically late in the sentence, as if the People’s William and champion of liberty, the (new) friend of the Irish, and the demagogue from largely Catholic Liverpool cannot quite believe what he is thinking, let alone not daring to say. ‘Bismarck’s ideas & methods are not our own … I cannot but say that the present doctrines of the Roman Church destroy the title of her obedient members to the enjoyment of civil rights’ (my italics). Gladstone ‘would have to say this publicly, for I want no more storms; but it may become necessary’.14


  As the 1870s unfolded, Gladstone’s preoccupation with Christian Europe as a morally cohesive union was to develop alongside, paradoxically, the distrust of that Roman Catholicism which historically had been the guardian of all the things he held dear: Latin language and culture, theology, the spiritual ideals of the author. Next to Homer, he most idolized Dante. Like the trecento visionary, Gladstone looked for a Catholicism in which the temporal vanities and political ambitions of the Papacy had been crushed; he longed instead for a true Catholicism – i.e. universal Christianity – which would unite the people of Europe against the Muslim culture of the Ottoman Empire and the atheist encroachments of scientific materialism. These thoughts lay behind all Gladstone’s realpolitik, and nothing could be more different from his general view of the world than Disraeli’s definitive speech after the Prussian seizure of Schleswig-Holstein and its victory at Königgrätz:

  It is not that England has taken refuge in a state of apathy, that she now almost systematically declines to interfere in the affairs of the Continent of Europe. England is as ready and willing to interfere as in the old days, when the necessity of her position requires it. There is no Power, indeed, that interferes more than England. She interferes in Asia, because she is really more an Asiatic Power than a European. She interferes in Australia, in Africa, and New Zealand.15

  England, and the world, are still living with these polarities: on the one hand England, a European nation, culturally at one with Europe, is politically detached from it; on the other, while a portion of Britain will always by commerce or politics feel involvement with Europe as a primary interest, others will draw on the historic trading traditions of a seafaring race and look to a greater world. The great contrast between modern Britons and those of the 1870s – speaking now of the intellectual and social elite – is in their sense of German cousinhood.

  Gladstone was perhaps not in the normally understood sense of the term an intellectual, though no one who has surveyed his enormous library at Hawarden, or struggled to read his prolix and eccentric book on Homer, could question that he was a bookish man, one to whom the life of the mind was supremely important. Yet he had the Tractarian narrowness; not ignorance – he was widely read in German, Italian, French – but adopted, deliberate narrowness.

  How different the fortunes of the Church of England might have been if Newman had known German. Mark Pattison in his Memoirs recalls his own struggle with the language, which he did not reckon to have mastered until 1858.16 In the 1820s, there were said to be only two men who knew German. As a High Church bigot who followed the banner of Dr Pusey, Gladstone would have seen the German biblical critics as undermining the Christian faith itself. (For one of those two with perfect German was, of course, Pusey himself, who had been to Germany in his youth, studied at Göttingen and Berlin, heard Johann Gottfried Eichhorn lecture on Balaam’s ass and decided, having been half seduced by the German critics, that their alarming discoveries must be suppressed, ignored, persecuted, silenced.)17 George Eliot satirizes, with a sad gentle satire, this Oxford generation when she makes the dry-as-dust scholar Mr Casaubon, destined to marry Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, write a worthless and unfinishable compendium A Key to all the Mythologies – worthless because he had not read … the Germans.

  George Eliot, as the young Marian Evans, had translated into English those very works of German scholarship of which Dr Pusey was (rightly) so afraid: David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums (her version was called The Essence of Christianity, 1854). Both were attempts to interpret Christianity in the light of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel, toweringly the most important philosopher of the nineteenth century – one states this as an objective fact in the History of Ideas, quite regardless of whether one agrees with or accepts any part of Hegel’s thought – was all but unread in England during his lifetime (1770–1831). Those who had read the German metaphysicians – Kant, Hegel, Fichte – included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Carlyle, and in Edinburgh Sir William Hamilton. They disseminated some of their ideas, but it was really in the mid-century onwards that their true importance became known to literate English men and women. George Eliot was of central importance in this development. Her life-companion George Lewes was also influential, as the author of the first biography of Goethe, published in 1855. Many devout Germans disliked Lewes’s book, because of its candour about Goethe’s promiscuity, but there could be no doubt about its impact in England, particularly in a world which was only semi-capable of reading German. For here was a figure – a scientific prodigy, a great poet, a dramatist, and a herald of modern views of religion and politics – who in his range and depth and size and confidence was quite unimaginable on the English scene. Here was a true Universal Genius, and no one reading Lewes’s book could suppose that it was an accident that he was a German, any more than it was an accident that Beethoven, Mendelssohn (much more highly regarded by the Victorians than by us), Fichte, Schiller, Kant or Hegel were Germans. No English reader of Lewes’s Goethe when it first appeared could fail to meditate, too, on the contrast between Prince Albert – accomplished musician and linguist, good art historian, amateur architect, politically aware, liberal in religion and politics, intelligently abreast of contemporary scientific discovery – and his wife and her frankly ludicrous uncles.

  A discovery of German philosophy, literature and culture was, for the mid-Victorian generation, the eye-opener into a larger world. It was in 1844 that Benjamin Jowett and Arthur Stanley set out for a walking holiday in Germany and met Erdmann, Hegel’s chief disciple. Thereafter, not only was German philosophy to be the chief source of inspiration for British logicians, metaphysicians and political thinkers for half a century and more; but the whole German educational method – from universal state primary schools to the treatment of science as an essential academic discipline – was to be the envy and inspiration of British schools and universities. One of the chief things to impress George Lewes about Germany – and not merely about Prussia – was the advanced state of scientific education. At Munich in 1854, he had worked in the laboratories where ‘extensive apparatus and no end of frogs’ were put at his disposal. Those very few professional scientists in England would envy the salaries paid to German scientists. (The Hunterian professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, Richard Owen, used to say he could not live on his salary.) ‘When the government establishes a physiological Institute professors (and amateurs) can work in clover,’ Lewes predicted.18

  As the nineteenth century drew to its close, the British love of all things German would widen from the intellectual to the middle classes. But it would go hand in hand with a growing awareness that there was now a power in Europe which was actually preparing to outstrip Britain not only in military power but also in economic prosperity. The aged Carlyle with his last gasp could point to the fact that England had fought a war against Napoleon with Prussia as its ally, and consistently feared and hated France: he could also point out – which a railway journey across the European land-mass could make clear to anyone – that the German states, and the German-speaking peoples of the Austrian Empire with whom they were in a perpetually uneasy relation, made up the huge proportion of the European peoples. Not since the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century had the peoples of Europe learned to live at peace with one another. If they were ever able to do so it would probably be on the basis of some German federalism, of the kind favoured by Prince Albert, and which appears to be the basis of the modern European Union.

  What can’t be denied in terms of population and land-mass is the inevitability of some kind of German ‘domination’ of Europe. The only thing which held this in check was that very French nationalism and expansionism which the British most dreaded. Once, under Bismarck and the new Kaiser, ‘noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should at length be welded into a nation’ the foundations of the Reich had been laid. The figures for the next forty years or so show the dramatic in
crease in German power vis-à-vis Britain. In 1871, Britain had a population of 32,000,000, Germany 41,000,000. These lived respectively in territories of 120,000 and 208,000 square miles. Their respective armies numbered 197,000 and 407,000. By 1914 the British army numbered 247,000, and the German a staggering 790,000. The British navy had 60,000 men in 1872, 146,000 in 1914: the German navy had expanded from a mere 6,500 men to 73,000. Prussian military expansion was being paid for by vast investment in the infrastructure, and by prodigious industrial growth, comparable to Britain’s expansion in the first half of the century. In 1850 there were 10,000 miles of British railway and 6,000 miles of German. By 1910 there would be 38,000 miles of British railway and 61,000 miles of German. In 1880 Britain produced 980,000 tons of steel, to Germany’s 1,550,000 tons. By 1913 this had increased to 6,900,000 tons in Britain and 18,600,000 tons in Germany. As European ‘players’ Britain, for decades easily the most modern, the most technologically efficient and the most industrially productive, now had a major rival against whom competition, in purely European terms, was impossible.

  The area where Britain bore up, and continued to dominate, was in exports and world trade: though Britain’s share of world trade fell from 38 to 27 per cent between 1870 and 1913, Germany’s rose only by 5 per cent.