Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  Franco-German relations were a complicated affair, since the two peoples were hardly alike. It is clear from Fontane’s and, above all, Herzen’s descriptions that their attitudes to English life were quite different. To the French, the debacle of 1848 was a minor setback in a glorious revolutionary history. France was the grandest nation on earth, every thinking man’s second home, the womb of high civilization and universal ideas. England was an island of shopkeepers. The English didn’t even speak French. And their food …! The Germans, on the other hand, had a Kultur, but not as yet a unified nation. Lacking a nation-state, they lacked national self-confidence. They tended to regard the English as a Nordic race, akin but superior to themselves, and so the thing to do in London was to imitate them as best one could. Herzen: “As a rule, if a German undertakes any kind of business, he at once shaves, turns his shirt collar up to his ears, says yes instead of ja and well where there is no need to say anything at all.”

  Fontane mentions several such Anglicized Germans. One was a Berlin merchant named Müller, who insisted on being called Mr. Miller, even by other Germans. He dressed in the English style: stiff collar, black coat cut tightly at the waist, hair parted in the middle, and, above all, no beard. Too much facial hair was considered to be very Continental in those days. That is why The Times referred to the “wretched population of foreigners wearing hats such as no one wears, and hair where none should be …” Men with beards were likely to be abused in the street by drunken English louts.

  Italians had a word for foreign mimicry of the English style: gentlemanismo. The type is still with us of course: Italians in their tweeds, distinguished from the original models by the sheer elegance of their cut and design; Dutchmen in their blue blazers; and so on. But the Anglicized German is of a particularly rigorous, though now dwindling, breed. My friend G. M. Tamas, the Hungarian philosopher who admired Count Erno de Teleki’s tweed jacket in the milk bar in Transylvania, recalled a college dinner at Oxford in 1988. He made two faux pas, he said: “First, I poured the port into the wrong glass. Second, I addressed the Warden, a distinguished German scholar of the old school that you can meet nowadays only in England, in German. He replied, politely, but with iron determination, in English.”

  Not that this sort of thing ever really endears the foreigner to an Englishman. For gentlemanismo always has something faintly ridiculous about it. The details are never quite right. It is surely not for nothing that the most popular foreigner in Britain in the nineteenth century was not some mincing figure with central parting and an English suit but Garibaldi, whose no less affected pose as a revolutionary brigand, in his red shirt, long beard, cloak, and sailor’s kerchief draped around his shoulders, could not have been further removed from gentlemanismo. But Garibaldi’s popularity was not just a question of dress. It was also what he stood for. A patriot concerned with the liberation and independence of his country was viewed with more sympathy in Britain than dreamers of universal liberty, fraternity, and brotherhood. Kossuth and Garibaldi were heroes, adored by the masses and lionized by the elite. The British upper class would entertain powerful foreigners. As long as they were patriots, not revolutionaries.

  To be a revolutionary and an Anglophile was really a contradiction in terms. Revolution had become as alien to England, and the idea of England, as Byron himself. All radicals in exile wondered why this should be: how had Britain managed to achieve its peculiar equilibrium, based on a combination of social stability and inequality, of freedom and dull conformity, tolerance and provincial smugness, civility and greed? British social, political, and economic life smothered any chance of revolution. In Britain, as Marx concluded, even the workers were bourgeois. And to be bourgeois was to be mediocre. This drove some foreign radicals to despair. Others came to admire it. The former tended toward Anglophobia, the latter to Anglophilia. Anglophobes regarded Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo as a victory of mediocrity over European glory. Anglophiles were glad to see French vainglory fall and were impressed by the way Wellington had to answer questions from plodding parliamentarians, like any other elected politician.

  Herzen, like so many liberals with an aristocratic background, was ambivalent. He could never pass with indifference the engraving of Wellington at the moment of victory at Waterloo: “I stand gazing at it every time, and every time my heart is chilled and frightened. That calm, English figure, which promises nothing brilliant …” Wellington and Blücher had “turned history off the high road and up to the hubs in mud …” But Herzen also realized that Napoleon was a monster whose ideals resulted in slaughter. And since Herzen had grown disillusioned with the bloody glory that every revolution seemed to carry in its wake, he was inclined, as he grew older and lived in England longer, to appreciate the muddy mediocrity of that foggy nation in which he had found a temporary refuge from Continental tempests. He settled in Putney, among other places, where he established a comfortable routine of reading The Times every morning and drinking pale ale in the evening. He called himself the “old Putneyman,” hardly a Byronic sobriquet.

  However, the question remained: why would poor English men and women turn out in huge numbers to greet Garibaldi as a working-class hero and not wish to rise against their own betters, who kept them so firmly in their places? Garibaldi was treated by English crowds as royalty. Better than royalty: on royal occasions the rabble got drunk and unruly, but in Garibaldi’s presence, they worshiped in perfect order. Women kissed his sleeves. Men came out to cheer him as though he were the Messiah. Some even paid precious shillings to buy bottles of soapsuds, allegedly from the hero’s own washbasin.

  Herzen saw in this behavior a silent (or not so silent) protest against British working-class conditions. Yet these same people tolerated a political system that was not of their choosing and certainly not always governed in their interest. Marx, with his customary contempt for the people whose cause he championed, liked to put it down to stupidity, when he wasn’t announcing (until he knew better) that the revolution in Britain was imminent. John Bull is usually described as “slow-witted.” In a letter to Engels, Marx refers to “these thick-headed John Bulls, whose brainpans seem to have been especially manufactured for the constables’ bludgeons …”

  The responses of foreign exiles to English complacency reflected their own ideas and experiences, as well as the countries and conditions they had left behind. Herzen arrived in London in 1852, from Paris, where he had been living since 1846. The illegitimate son of a nobleman, a gifted journalist and a disillusioned revolutionary, he was brilliantly wishy-washy. He had embraced, at various times, Hegel’s dialectics, Saint-Simon’s socialism, Proudhon’s anarchism, constitutional liberalism, and the benevolent autocracy of Tsar Alexander II. He was forever finding himself stuck between camps: between Russian “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles,” between radicalism and reformism, revolution and evolution. But like Pückler and Tocqueville, he was essentially an aristocratic free-thinker, attracted to the British rule of law. Also like Pückler, he often felt like a man born in the wrong age. He compared himself not to Pückler, of course, but to Byron, whose tragedy had been that England and he “belonged to different ages and two different cultures.”

  In 1849 Herzen was tired of revolution and Utopian ideals, and even, after serious marital problems, life itself. He no longer believed in absolutes, or that reason could impose itself on society, or that history moved according to the rules of logic. And he wanted to be left alone. He was, in short, in the perfect state of mind for a lengthy stay in London, and for a study of that peculiar mediocrity that seemed to permeate its life. On solitary walks through the streets of Camden Town and Primrose Hill, or sitting in his lodgings decorated by the landlady with busts of Queen Victoria and Lola Montez, he pondered why “the only countries in Europe that are tranquil are those in which personal liberty and freedom of speech are the least restricted.” His examples were Holland, Switzerland, England, and as the brightest future prospect, the United States. Of these countries, Hol
land was the most prosperous, the most bourgeois, and the most boring. England, too, would settle down quietly in her pettiness, if it weren’t for the feudal privileges of landownership. Without that weight bearing down on the working class, England would be a nation of contented shopkeepers, just like Holland.

  England was nonetheless quite placid and bourgeois enough. Herzen was fascinated by John Stuart Mill’s attack on the conformism of English life, the deference to custom, the lack of individual spark, of grandeur, of soul. Having been exercised himself by the question of soul, which being Russian was only natural, Herzen took this very seriously. Sad that the Byronic age in Britain was over, he, too, noted how fashion had supplanted eccentricity. The question was whether there was a connection between political liberties and social conformity, and if so, what that connection could be.

  Political liberties must be protected by free institutions, such as a freely elected parliament, an independent judiciary, and a free press. Such institutions were strong in Britain, and by and large the people respected them. In France, Italy, or Germany, the people were oppressed by political authorities but did not respect them or the laws they made. This meant, in Herzen’s view, that individuals on the Continent were less obedient in private, that is, less conformist in their thinking and more receptive to new ideas on how to improve their lot. Having been cut off from the Continent by Napoleon, Britain was insulated from these ideas. The waves of revolution had broken by the time they reached the English coast.

  “The Englishman’s liberty,” wrote Herzen, “is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience. His freedom is in the ‘common law,’ in habeas corpus, not in his morals or his way of thinking.” Like the Swiss, the English had found ways to protect themselves from political tyranny. Both peoples disliked centralized government, for, as Herzen pointed out, “Centralisation may do a great deal for order and for various public undertakings but it is incompatible with freedom. It easily brings nations to the conditions of a well-tended flock, or a pack of hounds cleverly kept in order by a huntsman.”

  However, even the proudest Britons submitted to the tyranny of public opinion, of society’s prejudices, of fashion. And this led to the “conglomerated mediocrity” that Mill deplored. This is what made England seem so pinched, so bourgeois, so joyless, so narrowly conformist, so unimaginative, so relentlessly gray and hypocritical to generations of Continental Europeans. It is this that produced the tabloid press, sniffing at the merest whiff of scandal and hounding those unlucky enough to be caught at transgressing the norms of bourgeois society.

  Herzen wrote: “The freer a country is from government interference, the more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.”

  This was a shrewd and not altogether flattering assessment. But if all Herzen had done was to point out the un-Byronic nature of Victorian society, he would not have done a great deal. He went further, however, and wondered whether only a people incapable of inner freedom could manage to have a liberal form of government. It is a peculiar paradox—that only a nation of inhibited conformists could live in freedom, that only a natural order based on custom and tradition could produce and sustain liberal institutions. And that these institutions were the products not of logic, or grand ideas, but of history, grown over time like a fine variety of rose, adapted perfectly to the conditions of the English clay. Although he deplored English conformism, this was something that appealed to Herzen. He was, after all, tired of grand ideas and prepared to see a certain elegance, even poetry in the growth of liberal institutions.

  How different it all was from France! A Frenchman, he thought, would never understand the world of self-government, decentralization, expanding capriciously of its own initiative. English law, resting on an incongruous multiplicity of precedents, was like a dark forest, with majestic trees and an abundance of flowers and plants. How could a Frenchman, used to “his little Codex, with its sanded paths, its clipped shrubs and policemen-gardeners in every avenue,” be expected to see the beauty of these luxuriant English woods?

  Here the Russian Anglophile sounds like a classic English Tory philosopher, a Bagehot, an Oakeshott, a Roger Scruton before his time. In fact, of course, his ideas were very much of Herzen’s time, for it was then, in the wake of the European revolutions, that the shibboleths of the Enlightenment and 1789 were being most severely tested. All this organic language was a conservative antidote to ideas of universal salvation. Herzen’s rhapsody of the English landscape was far removed from Voltaire’s coconuts, which, after all, could in theory do well anywhere. But Herzen was not an abstract thinker. He was above all an observer, a superb journalist who tested his thoughts on reality. His admiration for the British law found its highest expression in his descriptions of how it worked in practice.

  There was, for example, the case of Simon Bernard. Dr. Bernard was arrested in 1858 for his alleged involvement in a bomb plot against Napoleon III. Bernard was French, and although the bomb had been prepared on English soil, the French government made menacing noises. This frightened English businessmen with interests in France. Since unprincipled cowardice was in Herzen’s opinion the natural consequence of capitalism, Lord Palmerston’s government felt the French had to be appeased; hence Bernard’s arrest, hence the introduction of a Conspiracy Bill aimed at politically active foreigners, hence the confiscation of an obscure pamphlet concerning the pros and cons of tyrannicide, and hence the arrest of an even more obscure Polish exile whose name was amongst the subscribers.

  The interesting thing was the response of the British people. A massive demonstration was planned in Hyde Park, where people would gather from all over Britain to petition the queen. Palmerston was called a traitor. Not that the protesters had any special love for foreigners, but they cherished the right of asylum, as they did their right to free speech. Palmerston was threatening an institution. And Palmerston lost: the bill was dropped, and Lord Derby took over as prime minister. But he was just as fearful as his predecessor of trouble with France. It was bad for business. So to restore good relations, everything possible was done to see Bernard hang.

  Herzen attended the court case. He was astonished by the stamina of judge and jury, which he put down to the Englishman’s habit of overeating and galloping across hedges and fields. He was amused but also impressed by the antiquated pomp of the court, with its rituals, its wigs, and its robes. It quickly became clear under cross-examination that the witnesses for the prosecution were shifty French agents, paid to discredit Bernard. The judge, a dry Scot whom Herzen likened to the wolf who had just consumed Little Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother, summed up at length. The jury declared Bernard not guilty. As soon as the verdict was announced by telegraph, messengers ran around the streets of every town and city, spreading the good news. Crowds gathered all over Britain to celebrate the acquittal. Members of the jury were mobbed by well-wishers on their way to the pub. Women cried, and men threw their hats up into the air. Even the policemen were happy. And so, wrote Herzen, “England celebrated a fresh triumph of her liberty!”

  VOLTAIRE’S ANGLOPHILIA WAS typical of eighteenth-century rationalism. He admired English thinking. Herzen was different. He liked the often irrational customs of English life; he had a taste for the Gothic complexities of English politics and law. Herzen said Britain, compared to France, was like Shakespeare versus Racine. Marx was his antithesis in this respect. Not that Marx disliked Shakespeare: he grew up reading Shakespeare, as well as Voltaire and Byron, and loved quoting from the famous soliloquies. Family picnics on Hampstead Heath would begin with a lunch of ale and cold beef, followed by duets sung with Engels, such as “Oh Strasburg, du wunderschöne Stadt,” and end with citations from Shakespeare. Marx’s problem with Britain was not cultural; it was simply that Britain refused to con
form to Marx’s blueprint for the world. Things never happened the way he predicted they would. The English forest defeated him.

  Despite his dictum that Britain was a fine place, as long as you didn’t have to live there, Marx lived in London from 1849 until his death in 1883. Although a typical German bourgeois in his tastes (heavy food, heavy books, heavy humor), Marx and his family spent much of their lives in squalor. He wrote articles for the New-York Daily Tribune and various German newspapers, lectured here and there, often for the German Workers’ Education Union, studied in the British Museum, and fulminated against everything.

  He fulminated, for example, against the exiles who were at the American consul’s dinner. Mazzini and Kossuth were bourgeois Philistines. Mazzini in particular he denounced for “licking the arse of the bourgeoisie.” Herzen was bourgeois too, and a Russian bourgeois to boot, the worst possible combination in Marx’s eyes. He didn’t want Herzen on the International Committee; he refused even to sit on the same platform with him: “I am not of the opinion that ‘Old Europe’ can be rejuvenated by Russian blood.” He fulminated against his own friends too, including Wilhelm Liebknecht, father of Karl and founder of German trade unionism. Marx said Liebknecht was full of “South German sentimental haziness” and showed dangerous signs of sympathy for “philistine democracy.” And Marx fulminated against Britain.

  Most of his fulminations are recorded in his journalism and his letters to Friedrich Engels, who, unlike Marx, cultivated an air of gentlemanismo. Marx favored a tone of heavy sarcasm, which later infected generations of party hacks from East Berlin to Beijing. The Daily Telegraph was not only a reactionary, bourgeois paper, but “a shit barge which only takes on politics as ballast” or “a sewer, whose editorials drip with all the social filth.” His picture of Britain was not entirely off the mark, but it was a crude caricature. In Britain, he said, everything was measured in “blood and gold”—the latter either inherited or for sale. Parliament was a sham, a tool of landlords and money-lords. The British army was a band of slaves, flogged daily with the cat-o’-ninetails soaked in urine: “The nine-tailed cat is the Cerberus guarding the treasure of the aristocracy.” By selling its offices to the highest bidder, the established church traded “in the ‘souls’ of the English people.”