Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  Having identified the perfect gentleman, Taine was keen to see how and where he was manufactured. And this is where Tom Brown came in. Tom was Taine’s literary cicerone to the educational establishments of England. Taine’s observations on Harrow, Eton, and Rugby are larded with quotations from Tom Brown’s School Days, which he took as a somewhat prettified but nonetheless accurate guide to typical English attitudes. Oddly, he had least to say about Rugby. But all three schools convinced him that Hughes was right: here was an example of the grand principle of self-government, “a sort of small, distinct State with its own Chiefs and its own laws.” The Chiefs were of course the young gentlemen of the sixth form, who made sure the strong didn’t bully the weak and the school laws were always obeyed. Thus were the “seeds of the spirit of association” planted. Public school education was the perfect “apprenticeship in both obedience and command, since every cricket team accepts a discipline and appoints a leader.” All this was particularly admirable, because it was natural: “… human nature is treated here with more respect and is less interfered with. Under the influence of an English education boys are like the trees in an English garden; under that of our own, like the pleached and pollarded trees of Versailles.” The metaphor was no less potent to Taine for having been worn to shreds for well over a hundred years.

  This, then, was the ideal. But when he used his eyes, Taine was often disgusted by the inevitable results of the very system he professed to admire. Tom Brown’s father is quoted as saying that he didn’t “care a straw” whether his boy learnt his Greek particles. All he wanted was for Tom to be a “brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian.” A master at Eton told Taine that games always came first, books second. The scholarly Frenchman deplored this exaggerated and philistine development of “the rougher instincts.” The emphasis on sports, he said, often produced nothing but sportsmen and louts. As for flogging and fagging, he was both perplexed and shocked, but concluded that these went hand in hand with the national penchant for drunkenness and gluttony.

  Taine witnessed the caning of several boys at Harrow (“fourteen strokes each”) and found it impossible to imagine French teachers performing such a task with similar enthusiasm. But what really threw him was the delight taken by the budding English gentlemen themselves in this form of punishment. He was told of an incident at Charterhouse, where boys protested against the idea of replacing corporal punishment by fines. “Long live the whip!” they shouted, and, Taine recalled with utter amazement, “on the following day, renewed acquaintance with their beloved rod.” The English gentleman and his rod would remain a stock figure in the more scabrous French fantasies. The English lord in German fiction is usually a flamboyant homosexual; in France he is almost invariably a lover of sadomasochism.

  Fagging, to Taine, seemed a thoroughly unwholesome institution. The obligation of young boys to slave for their seniors was bound to cause brutality and abuse. Or as Taine preferred to put it, this system encouraged the excesses to which English boys were by their energetic (Nordic) temperament already inclined. Here, then, was the dark side of “self-government”: “For, by and large, a school conducted on such lines is a sort of primitive society in which force reigns almost unchecked, the more so in that the oppressed make it a point of honour never to denounce their oppressors.”

  Taine’s organic idea of national character may seem a trifle old-fashioned now, but at least it saved him from the starry-eyed Anglomania that made others see Britain only in a positive light. He had no reason to ignore the shadier aspects he observed, because he never believed that one country could serve as a model for another. There are some odd contradictions in his views. He admired the British government by gentlemen and aristocrats and applauded the “natural” deference paid to them, but could not bear the servility of the British lower classes or the general acceptance of social and economic inequality. At Oxford he noted how poor students “toady to their noble or gentle fellow-undergraduates” in the hope of getting on in life. But perhaps he would have ascribed his apparent ambivalence to his being a Frenchman, whose living fibers issued from different soil.

  Imitating foreign institutions without discrimination would indeed be like sowing the seeds of tropical plants in hard, northern clay. And it is easy to see how Taine would not have wished to be associated with the absurd Parisian Anglomanes with their whist drives and “five o’clock teas.” But the trouble with Taine’s brand of conservatism is that it contains a kind of political paralysis. He could observe the stability of British government and contrast it to the violent upheavals in France, but if national character was indeed the key, such observations could serve no political purpose. The world is what it is because it grew that way, like a tree, and there is nothing much we can do to improve it.

  THIS WAS NOT the way Coubertin chose to read Taine. He was bowled over by Notes on England. In his excitement, he ignored the negative impressions described in the book and was instead fired up by the enthusiasms, especially in the chapter on education. He read Taine’s book as a blueprint for social action. Here, at last, was the perfect explanation for the “superior power of the Anglo-Saxon world”: an education system that produced masters instead of slaves. Through Dr. Arnold’s reforms the British had achieved nothing less than a moral revolution, bloodless, without Jacobins and riots. The English gentleman was made fit to govern by la pédagogie sportive, which developed both body and mind, in the spirit of ancient Greece. Taine was quite right to compare English sportsmen to Greek athletes. His only mistake, in Coubertin’s opinion, was to have underrated the importance of sports. For sport, surely, was the key to everything: moral, physical, and even political. Now Coubertin could see the great task ahead of him: he would launch a similar revolution in France. The humiliation of the French defeat at Sedan would be washed away by “the moral armament of education.” The example of Tom Brown would make French manhood rise again. And Coubertin would use his family fortune to found a new order of sporting knights, tilting their oars and cricket bats against the decadence of France.

  Unlike Taine, Coubertin saw absolutely no reason why Dr. Arnold’s revolution could not be duplicated elsewhere. So he traveled to England many times in a very different frame of mind—not as a student of national character but as a man with a mission. Rugby School would be a model, not a mere object of anthropological study. His first stop, in 1883, on the way to Dr. Arnold’s tomb, was a Jesuit college near Windsor, to visit a Polish friend. A Jesuit establishment would not have been at the top of his list, but he was reassured by his friend that “the English Jesuits are more English than Jesuit.” And so it turned out. Coubertin was particularly pleased to see that the school magazine was filled with the results of cricket matches and swimming contests.

  Coubertin had promised his parents he would frequent only the best houses in England and not be dragged down by that nation’s notorious Protestant boorishness. He paid his respects to the count of Paris, the “legitimate” pretender to the French throne, residing at Sheen House, and was introduced into London society, whose habits he described rather well. The round of dinner parties was endless, the conversation invariably stilted, and the women he found dull. But he adored the pomp and spectacle that the Victorians devised as expressions of British Heritage. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, for example, which he attended in 1887, was marvelous. The presence of the queen of Hawaii amused him greatly. The color of her skin, he observed, was bound to cause a certain amount of commotion. It was difficult enough, he said, to get English people to stand up for this exotic sovereign. The American wife of the French ambassador, Mme. Waddington, flatly refused to be so humiliated before a “coloured lady” and stayed resolutely on her chair.

  It was, however, in the studies, quadrangles, playing fields, and changing rooms of public schools that Coubertin felt most at home. There his various enthusiasms were fully gratified. He was delighted by Queen Victoria’s visit to Eton. The bands played; the “Eton-boys” mar
ched and sang and displayed their flaming torches in the shape of the royal monogram; the gilded carriages were drawn by handsome grays; the flags, the coats of arms, the uniforms—“vraiment c’était un beau spectacle …” His admiration of British upper-class flexibility was given a fine illustration at Harrow, where he lingered over the fascinating sight of an aristocratic “fag” massaging the naked torso of an athletic grocer’s son—a very rich grocer’s son, bien entendu. Like Taine, he was much impressed by the system of “self-government” by senior boys, which he saw as a model of constitutional government. And the mood at the time cannot have been too vehemently anti-French. In December 1883, the Rugby School debating society discussed the motion “that the character of Napoleon deserves our admiration.” Half the members agreed.

  The public schools were expensive, of course, and thus restricted to an elite, but for Coubertin that was precisely their attraction. Inequality, he said, was a necessary condition in education, as much as in any other human endeavor. So “let us renounce that dangerous pipedream of an equal education for all and follow the example of the [British] people who understand so well the difference between democracy and equality!” The case of liberal Anglophilia could not have been better put. But he also had a personal reason to take this view. He turned his sense of dislocation as an aristocrat in republican France upside down and worried about people of humble backgrounds becoming déclassé by being educated above their station. Equal education for all, he thought, bred discontent, rebelliousness, and ultimately revolution.

  The main attraction, however, was sports—cricket, boxing, rowing, football. This is where Tom Brown is shown by Coubertin to be the harbinger not only of French rebronzing, but of the modern Olympic movement as well. Fresh air and exercise gave English boys an air of vigorous health, so lacking in French schools, where pale weaklings abounded. A boy exhausted from a day of sports would sleep well at night, without falling prey to unwholesome thoughts. But of course the pédagogie sportive was more than that. Without sports there would be no muscular Christian gentlemen, and without those, there would be no British Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons would be as corruptible, decadent, unstable, frustrated, and prone to fits of anarchy as the French.

  Coubertin ascribed this exalted idea of sports entirely to Dr. Arnold and his reforms. He was in fact quite wrong about this. Indeed, the basis of the modern Olympic movement could be seen as a deliberate misinterpretation of Dr. Arnold’s ideas; it was a Gallic distortion of Arnoldism, seen through the rosy haze of Tom Brown’s School Days. First of all, Dr. Arnold was not particularly interested in games. He rode horses and liked to take brisk walks. As further evidence of his sporting nature, Coubertin tells us that the doctor enjoyed throwing snowballs at boys. But games were never part of his pedagogic ideas. Nor was Arnold anything like the gentle figure Coubertin depicts. Coubertin would have us believe that Arnold hated corporal punishment and would do anything rather than resort to the rod. The real Dr. Arnold was sued for, among other things, excessive and unfair flogging.

  Dr. Arnold, like Coubertin and Taine, regarded himself as a liberal. He was in fact far more conservative than either of them. Tolerant of free speech in principle, he said he would give John Stuart Mill “as much opportunity for advocating his opinion, as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay.” On religion, he was a zealot. He pleaded for the absolute unity of church and state and prayed for divine intervention to bring it about. He was haunted by Moral Evil, whose presence he felt everywhere. Even when he was surrounded by beauty, as at Lake Como, he was reminded of Moral Evil. English people living abroad, taking up foreign habits (such as eating fish with knives), were corrupted by Moral Evil. And Moral Evil was forever ensnaring boys. They might be saved from the red-hot claws of Satan and turned into muscular Christians, but not by playing cricket. They had to listen to the doctor’s sermons and submit to the praeposters of the sixth form, who were given the liberty to treat the boys as slaves.

  Thomas Hughes downplayed the religious side of Dr. Arnold’s Rugby and promoted his own enthusiasm for games. There is plenty of violence in Tom Brown’s School Days—something Coubertin preferred, on the whole, to ignore—but no mention of Satan, or Moral Evil. Hughes saw organized games as an essential tool to build the characters of gentleman, and invigorate the weedy masses too. This was conventional wisdom among Victorian progressives, even though Arnold did not share it.

  Cardinal Newman, the leader of the Oxford movement and later convert to the Catholic church, saw “liberal” values in sports. Manly games, he argued, were liberal, while manual labor, professional pursuits, and business transactions could never be. His idea of liberalism, certainly shared by Coubertin, was akin to amateurism: the pursuit of excellence for its own sake, the disinterested prowess of the amateur.

  Coubertin, then, took his sporting philosophy from Hughes and incorporated it in what he called the régime Arnoldien. Since boxing is extolled in Tom Brown’s School Days as the “natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels,” Coubertin concluded that pugilism and the doctor’s muscular Christianity naturally went together. In his words: “Putting a solid pair of fists in the service of God is a condition for serving him well.” Taine would not have approved of such rough sentiments, and I doubt if Dr. Arnold would have either. One can only wonder what Mr. Gladstone thought when Coubertin put it to him at one of their meetings.

  Coubertin admired Gladstone, whom he called the “veteran boater” for his prowess as an oarsman at Oxford. (There is actually little evidence of Gladstone’s rowing prowess, except for an expedition to Henley as a student and his apparent knowledge of currents in the River Thames.) Coubertin’s accounts of meeting the prime minister are highly amusing, though perhaps not intentionally so. On one such occasion, in 1888, Coubertin asked Gladstone whether he agreed with him that the renaissance britannique had been entirely due to Dr. Arnold’s reforms. Gladstone seems to have been at a loss for words and said he needed time to think that one over. They met again the next day (Gladstone had a weakness for aristocrats). He said, with solemn courtesy: “Your point of view is quite new, but … it is right.”

  The other question Coubertin had for the veteran boater was more pertinent to his future projects. He wanted to know whether Gladstone thought sports were particularly Anglo-Saxon. Again, Gladstone needed some time to think, but only minutes, not a whole night. He answered that in his view sports did not have a particularly Anglo-Saxon character. For the same sport will take on the colors of the various peoples who practice it. Take wrestling, for instance: so courteous among the Orientals, so brutal among the Greeks. But what had been ordained by nature itself—the joy of pacific rivalry and individual prowess, within the agreed limits of an accepted order—was suited to all people, at all times, in all nations. This was all Coubertin needed to confirm his belief that the French should be taught to play cricket.

  The fact that Coubertin failed in that particular enterprise does not make his ambition inherently ridiculous—after all, the French do play rugby and almost all other British team sports. It is easy to see Coubertin as a figure of fun, but his conviction that one nation’s institutions can be successfully implemented in another is bolder than Taine’s obsession with national character. The main problem with Coubertin’s brand of universalist idealism was not that he ignored history or culture but that, for all his talk of self-government, democracy, and parliamentarianism, he really preferred to ignore politics altogether. He believed that patronage, goodwill, pageantry, and internationalism could solve the problems of human conflict better than politics. It was an aristocratic view, reborn in such well-meaning twentieth-century enterprises as the League of Nations, and indeed the European Union.

  Coubertin was a born committee man. In an ideal world, France would be governed by a committee of gentlemen, not necessarily all of noble birth. Parliament was not their natural domain, but rather grand hotels, where they would converse about the common good over brandy and ci
gars. Ideally, indeed, the whole world would be governed by such men. Not that the whole world would be the same. Not at all. Coubertin did not like to be called a cosmopolitan (one of the favorite insults hurled at the liberals by anti-Dreyfusards). He was an internationalist. National differences would be celebrated in international festivals and universal expositions, where every nation put on a patriotic display of costumes, flags, songs, food, customs, and faiths. Spectacles of this kind, with parades in regional costumes and the like, were commonly staged as symbols of national unity. So why shouldn’t such pageantry unite empires, or indeed the world?

  National festivals and universal exhibitions were a product of empire and the railway age. Local allegiances were being replaced by wider ones. This is what Thomas Hughes lamented at the beginning of Tom Brown’s School Days. The coming of the Great Western Railway, he observed, made Berkshire boys into British boys. Rugby School was in the business of producing muscular administrators of a worldwide empire. Coubertin, like most Victorians, believed in universal progress. He turned this belief into a humanistic cult, whose shrine shifted from Dr. Arnold’s tombstone to Olympia. And he tried to balance this with patriotism. The civilizing glue that would bind all the different peoples and replace armed battle with peaceful rivalry would be sports played in the spirit of Tom Brown’s Rugby and ancient Greece. The main thing was to keep party politics out of this sporting Utopia, for political parties divide, whereas patronage unites.

  Robbed of political content, regional or national identities turn into folklore and pageantry. Ossianism in Scotland, the princely states in India under the British Raj, and, possibly, the European nations in a future united Europe. People, like Coubertin, who approve of this kind of thing can be liberals, but they are very rarely democrats.

  The first thing Coubertin did to promote Anglo-Saxon sports in France was to form the Committee for the Promotion of Physical Exercise. Members included various professors, generals, and writers with an interest in healthful pursuits. Many shared an obsessive concern with corruption, decadence, and unwholesome thoughts. One of Coubertin’s mentors was a sociologist named Frédéric Le Play, who worried a great deal about female chastity, the national birthrate, and other matters of social hygiene. His theories, propagated through Le Play Societies, revolved around family values and patronage. He thought the state and the economy should be run by benevolent autocrats, who would shield the common people from the ravages of competition. Coubertin gave a lecture in London in an effort to convert the English to this anti-laissez-faire message. He had no success.