Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  But Tocqueville found an explanation for the peculiar tenacity of aristocratic power in England. Unlike the French nobility, English aristocracy was not a caste. It soaked up new money and those who acquired it. The border separating nobility from common men was remarkably porous. Tocqueville speculated that this might have something to do with the English dislike of abstract ideas: everything in England was a little soggy, including class boundaries. A man could become a gentleman, but you had to be born a gentilhomme. Tocqueville wrote: “Since everybody could hope to become rich, especially in such a mercantile country as England, a peculiar position arose in that their privileges, which raised such feeling against the aristocrats of other countries, were the thing that most attached the English to theirs. As everybody hoped to be among the privileged, the privileges made the aristocracy, not more hated, but more valued.” Like the Royal Exchange, with its statues of Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, newly acquired estates served as traditional settings in a commercial society, as exclusive Arcadian visions in an industrial landscape, as valuable spoils for the very rich. The common worship of money meant that status and political power were fluid commodities. In theory, and often in practice, they were open to all who could afford them.

  To a man as conscious of his noble station as Pückler, the English pursuit of wealth and the use of that wealth to buy status seemed frightfully vulgar. Of course his fastidious disdain for commercial greed might have had something to do with his own position. Pückler was greeted on his arrival in England by George IV’s brother, the duke of Cumberland, with the words “Na, da kommt ja der Fortune-hunter” (“So, here comes the fortune-hunter”). Like quite a few English noblemen, the duke took pride in his rude manners, but he was not wrong in this instance. Pückler was so defensive about his quest for a profitable marriage that he cut all references to it in his published letters. He wrote to Lucie that his pride stood in the way of a successful conclusion to his “wife-hunting.” It was indeed a tawdry business. At one point he was haggling over the price of one prospect while trying to seduce her sister.

  Pückler was more of an aesthete than Tocqueville. He was particularly sensitive to the theater of English life, the surface of things, the representation, and the inevitable cracks where vulgarity showed through the glitter. He was fascinated, like Tocqueville, by Parliament. Like Tocqueville, he was moved by the sight of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, humbled in debate. He recognized the dignity of a government that represented “gigantic power in the outside world” and was like “an unassuming family relationship on the inside.” The House of Commons, he reported, was like “a dirty coffeehouse where most members sprawl with their hats on and talk all sorts of trifles while their colleagues are speaking.” He was elated and depressed: elated when he fancied himself an Englishman, depressed when he remembered he was a German.

  The relative freedom of speech in England was another reason to feel elated, or, thinking about Prussia, depressed. But Pückler was shocked by the coarse, gossipy nature of the popular press. His description still rings true: “An extraordinary English custom is the constant intrusion of the newspapers into private life. Anyone who is of the slightest importance sees himself not only exposed by name in the most tasteless detail … but also if he does anything worth recounting, he will be exposed without shame and judged ad libitum.” Pückler himself made frequent appearances in the gossip columns. He affected a lofty disdain.

  The crudeness of the English rabble never ceased to amaze him. He loved Shakespeare (though not as much as he loved Byron) and traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he carved his name on the wall of Shakespeare’s house. Although he had attended readings by Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck in Berlin, it was only after seeing Kemble and Kean onstage that he understood Shakespeare’s true greatness. The English theater audiences, however, were unspeakable. People of quality, it seems, rarely visited the theater. No wonder: the lobbies were filled with drunken whores who displayed themselves in the most brazen fashion, clutching at the men passing through, offering half an hour for a shilling. The audience was so noisy that the actors had a hard time making themselves heard.

  But if the canaille was bad, so were the toffs. Much of Pükler’s life in England was spent in their company—aside from his many inspection tours of correctional institutions, which impressed him for their order, cleanliness, and in one case (York) the elegance of the prisoners’ uniforms. He attended all the most fashionable balls and dined with the grandest people. There was always another party to go to, another garden to visit, another woman to flatter. And much of the time, he dreamt of escape. For he found English upper-class society dull, stiff, heartless, haughty, narrow, cold, selfish, and lacking in grace. He was astonished to see a distinguished admiral in full dress uniform noisily spitting on the floor for ten minutes after dinner. Another gentleman of high rank told him that a good fox hunter should stop at nothing in his quest. Even if his own father should fall into a ditch, he would make his horse leap over him and trouble himself no more about him until the chase was over. English nobility had none of the poetry, the levity, the chivalry of French aristocracy. There was, in Pückler’s view, just a cold stony self-love, the residue of brutish feudalism.

  Worst of all were the dandies. Pückler’s disdain for the English “Exclusives” is perhaps a bit surprising, given his own reputation as a dandy. He was always impeccably dressed, in perfectly starched linen cravats, emerald silk waistcoats, dove gray trousers, and shoes as light as paper, freshly varnished every day. And he shared such dandyish characteristics as ennui, cultivated nonchalance, and sensitivity to fashion. But he lacked the typical dandy’s heartlessness. The deliberate boorishness of London swells, tittering among themselves for days after having insulted some unfortunate society figure, was not his style at all. Their lack of scruples, their provinciality, and above all their egotism, which the dandies elevated to a kind of elegant virtue, disgusted him. He quotes one leader of fashion as saying, “I like selfishness; there’s good sense in it. Good nature is quite ‘mauvais ton’ in London; and really it is a bad style to take it up, and will never do.”

  Fashionable society, then, was dominated by the false and despicable refinement of the Exclusives, while the rapacious mob ran riot at the other end of the social spectrum. In the middle, Pückler saw what he thought was the best of English society: the prosperous middle class, unfashionable, kind, patriotic, and hospitable. “Admittedly,” wrote Pückler to his Little Lamb, “this class of people is often ridiculous,” but he respected them, and their “natural egotism” was less boundless than that of their social betters. These were the people who represented Tocqueville’s “America,” the entrepreneurs, the tireless workers, the newly rich. And they could not have had less in common with Pückler himself.

  So where did he fit in? Nowhere, and that was his problem. The England he described, as opposed to the country he had imagined, was vulgar, feudal, republican, and aristocratic, not a bad summary of English society even now. Upper-class family relations, with sons leaving home after becoming adults, Pückler found “coldly republican.” He was more admiring of an acquaintance who cut off his dead mother’s head so he could kiss her skull for the rest of his life. Republicanism to Pückler meant coldness and egotism, just as feudalism meant brutishness and egotism. What he missed among his English peers was the cultivated, free-thinking, eighteenth-century French style that he affected himself.

  That is to say, he found it only rarely, and then only among fellow misfits. One of Pückler’s most amusing encounters with English society occurred after he had left it behind (without finding a wife). In the early morning of January 2, 1829, he boarded the packet boat from Dover to Calais and arrived in France “almost with the feeling of a prisoner returning home after a long confinement.” He breathed “the purer air” of France and reveled in “the spontaneous, friendly, confiding manners” of the French. At last he was in a town whose houses and roofs weren’t obscured by a sooty haze. He gaz
ed back across the Channel and saw a black, mountainous cloud, which he identified as solid fog. And there, in glorious Calais, he decided to look up the most famous English dandy of his time, Beau Brummell, who was dreaming of fashionable London and felt like a prisoner in France.

  Brummell, like Voltaire and Goethe before him, was a fixture on the itinerary of gentlemen touring Europe. Brummell’s schedule was so busy that Pückler was unable to secure a dinner invitation. So he visited his rooms in the morning. Brummell was just completing his second toilet (three were necessary to complete his morning). Dressed in a flowered dressing gown, a satin cap with gold tassels, and Turkish slippers, he was brushing his few remaining teeth with a piece of red root. Pückler knew all the famous Brummell anecdotes: the laundry sent to Paris, the insults to the prince regent, and so on. He wrote to the Little Lamb that Brummell’s influence in London, exerted without the benefit of fortune or birth, said everything about the nature of that society. Brummell excelled in “noble impudence, a droll originality, a pleasant sociability and a talent in dress.” There was still enough of the Regency buck left in Pückler, and of genuine, if now rather pathetic style in Brummell, to make the meeting a success. Brummell asked Pückler about London society and told him how much he wanted to be consul in Calais, which would save him from destitution. Pückler agreed that the British nation really owed something to the man who invented the starched neckcloth. When Pückler took his leave, Brummell apologized that he could not offer his guest a Swiss valet to show him out. No money, thought Pückler to himself, no Swiss. They spoke in French throughout.

  Pückler’s disdain for the London dandies, apart from Brummell, reflected his view of himself, and his aristocratic ideals. Dandyism was anti-middle class, a theatrical attempt to stem the rise of bourgeois values by holding them up for ridicule, by acting out an extreme, pseudo-aristocratic form of individualism. Baudelaire, who admired the Regency dandies, saw this clearly. The dandies were the last heroes in an age of industry, of “America.” Democracy would sweep “these last champions of human pride,” these spiritual aristocrats away in a tide of uniform, middle-class mediocrity. But Pückler was not a pseudo-aristocrat. He saw himself as the real thing. What he hated about the dandies was their pretentiousness, their phoniness. They had made a caricature out of values Pückler held dear.

  As a result, Pückler rather missed the point of “fashion.” Of course it was vulgar and provincial; of course the rules that supported the class barriers in England were absurd and stifling. But fashion, however narrow, exclusive, and tawdry, is something everyone can strive for. Snobbery can be a sign of social mobility. Pückler called England a caste society, but in a true caste society there is no need for snobbery, for there is no way up or down.

  Tocqueville, who had a finer political sense than Pückler, understood the role of fashion, even if he did not entirely approve of it. “Luxury,” he wrote, “and the joys of pride have become necessities of life here. Many still prefer the chance of procuring them in their entirety to the establishment of a universal equality around them in which nothing would come to humiliate them.” Tocqueville understood English society, and indeed the nature of liberal democracy, in a way Pükler never did.

  WHEN PÜCKLER WAS tired of society, he turned to nature, or as he would have put it, Nature. That is when he was in his Rousseau mode. “I feel much better with unadorned Nature,” he wrote to Lucie, “than among men in their masks.” He wrote this in the summer of 1828, from Dublin. His trip to Ireland is one of the most remarkable episodes in his book, for it made him reflect on his adventures in England and on the nature of freedom. He loved the Irish landscape. And he was charmed by the Irish. He found them more like the French than the English: lighthearted, friendly, humorous. The country reminded him of Germany, since it lacked the cleanliness and “over-refinement” of England. Indeed, the Ireland he saw was poor and filthy. Standing on the summit of the Three Rocks, a mountain five miles from Dublin, Pückler gazes at the city below, “like a smoking lime-kiln in the green plain,” and at the foothills of Howth, and the mountains of Wicklow, and at a young peasant woman making hay, whose coarse costume and cheerful talk utterly captivate him. It is all so charmingly natural.

  His reaction to Ireland, after England, is the same as that of most Westerners traveling from Japan to Korea—at any rate, before the South Koreans became rich. In Japan everything seems clean, formal, overrefined, prosperous, stiff; in Korea, by contrast, people shout, crack jokes, quarrel in public, and complain of Japanese oppression. Spontaneity appears to be the virtue of the oppressed, and artifice the vice of the oppressors. Ireland, to Pückler, represented the darkest side of English feudalism. It offended his liberal as well as his aristocratic sensibilities.

  The highlight of Pückler’s visit was his meeting with Daniel O’Connell, the campaigner for Catholic emancipation and Irish rights. He traveled to the great man’s castle in a remote coastal part of County Kerry. It was an arduous trip across bays, moors, and rocky mountain tracks. But he made it, soaked to his armpits in seawater, and O’Connell greeted him at his table with a bottle of fine claret. O’Connell was everything Pückler admired in a man: a romantic figure who, despite his blond wig, looked “far more like a general in Napoleon’s regime than a Dublin lawyer.” His friends liked to think he was the descendant of the former kings of Kerry, and he boasted himself—“not entirely without pretension”—of his forefathers in the French aristocracy. A noble man, then, who had dedicated his life to the freedom of his people.

  Pückler stayed for several days, and when it was time to leave, O’Connell rode with him to the borders of his domain, where he pointed out a tiny island that rose like a mountain from the sea. That, he said, is where he had been obliged to shoot an ox. And he told Pückler the story of this ox. Some years before, O’Connell had the ox shipped to the island so it could roam freely and feed on the pristine meadows. But very quickly the ox took over the island and chased out anyone or anything that tried to land. It would rush round its domain “like Jupiter in the form of a bull with raised tail and fire-darting eyes.” Even the fishermen could no longer approach the ox’s island in safety. So in the end O’Connell decided, with a heavy heart, that the beast had to be put down.

  Pückler took the story to be a superb satire on the perils of absolute freedom. Desire for power, without which you can’t be absolutely free, becomes the desire for dominion. There was a warning there, especially in Ireland, where one was reminded daily of the brutality of British dominion, but Pückler’s conclusion was astonishing and wholly in character. He wrote to his Little Lamb that he knew of no country where he would rather be a great landowner than Ireland. His efforts elsewhere to improve the lot of mankind had met only with obstruction and ingratitude. But here in Ireland, Pückler would have no trouble binding ten or twelve thousand workers to himself “body and soul.” The Irish would make ideal subjects for an enlightened nobleman. They combined the “poetic homeliness” of the Germans, the mental quickness of the French, and “all the naturalness and submissiveness” of the Italians. Above all, they showed such gratitude “for the least friendly word bestowed on them by a gentleman.”

  After his Irish trip, Pückler spent only two more weeks in England before heading for the purer air of Calais. He still had good things to report: the comfort and cleanliness of English inns, and the countryside of the West Country, which he declared to be like the promised land. He also admired the ancient churches around Bath and remarked somewhat wistfully that such beauty can never be reproduced again. “Steam engines and constitutional government contend with it now, better than any modern art. To each age its own.”

  You get the sense from Pückler’s writings that he felt let down by England. Not only had he failed to find a rich wife, but the actual place had not lived up to his idea of it. He loved the freedoms and the laws that protected them, but he was distressed by the vulgarity and open pursuit of self-interest that those liberties allowed. After act
ually living in England, he had come closer to Goethe’s position that cultivating oneself, and one’s garden, was a higher aim than the grubby business of politics. When the liberal revolution broke out in Germany in 1848, Pückler stayed oddly neutral. He was excited by the events and met the revolutionaries, but he refused to take an active part. He despised the monarchy, but he did not think the German people were capable of governing themselves. The failure of the revolution confirmed his negative opinion about the German capacity to build a free state. His despair still has a familiar ring. Although it was natural for an Englishman or a Frenchman to be a patriot, he said, the only sensible option for a modern German was to be a cosmopolitan.

  He was speaking for himself of course. As a cosmopolitan prince, Pückler traveled all over Europe, visiting famous people and fellow misfits: Heinrich Heine in Paris, who couldn’t quite make him out, and Napoleon III, whom Pückler helped to design an English garden-park in the Bois de Boulogne. It wasn’t in Europe, however, that he found the nearest thing to his political ideal, but somewhere more remote, and suitably exotic.

  In 1837, he traveled to the Middle East, dressed, in Byronic fashion, in the colorful garb of a pasha. His host was Mehemet Ali, Egypt’s ruler, an Albanian born in Macedonia in 1769, the same year as Napoleon. Like Pückler, he was an admirer of Saint-Simon’s proto-socialism. His despotic rule over Egypt, Syria, and the Sudan could perhaps be described as a form of aristocratic state socialism.

  Cairo was everything Pückler had ever wished for. He had the freedom of the ruler’s palace; there were moonlit trips down the Nile; and Pückler bought himself a harem at the slave market. His loveliest acquisition was a thirteen-year-old Abyssinian girl called Machbuba. Typically, however, he declared himself too much a freedom-loving Prussian to treat his favorite as a slave. So this “child of nature” became mistress and travel companion in Pückler’s amazing caravan. En route through the pasha’s empire, Pückler visited a famous personage who was in many respects his English, female counterpart: Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of William Pitt the Younger and aspiring queen of the Orient.