Anglomania (15 page)

The reason for Pückler’s second visit to England had nothing to do with gardens. He went looking for a wife. Not that there was ever a shortage of women in his life. He was a legendary libertine, whose first sexual conquest (of his cousin) took place when he was ten. A tall, handsome man with a rakish little mustache, a rosebud mouth, and a hawk’s nose, he seduced women by the thousands—or so his carefully cultivated legend had it. Flattery was his preferred technique. He even wrote love letters to his own mother. But his present difficulties stemmed from the fact that he had run out of money or, rather, that his creditors were no longer willing to lend him more.

He had always been a spendthrift, that was part of his style, but a sudden crisis had occurred. Of his many mistresses in Berlin, he chose Lucie, née Hardenberg, then the countess von Pappenheim, to be his wife. She was nine years older than Pückler, and physical passion was not the main point of the romance. Lucie was not only wise and amusing company, but her father, Prince von Hardenberg, was chancellor of Prussia, and Pückler was keen to keep his wife in the style to which she was accustomed—with
her
money. They got engaged even
before she was divorced from Count von Pappenheim. Coaches and horses were ordered from England, and English grooms and an English coachman to go with them. (The coachman, a man of giant proportions, proved to be headstrong and had to be sent home.)

Expenses for the wedding party were colossal: mounds of goose-liver pâté were imported from Toulouse and crates of chocolates, tartines, and other confections from Paris. Long silk evening gloves were ordered from Berlin for the ladies from Muskau. Hundreds of workmen were laboring in the gardens to get them ready in time for the feast. Carpets and furniture arrived from Paris and London. And all the bills were sent to Lucie, who balked only when Pückler asked for more money to build a zoo in the castle grounds. But she adored him, and the wedding party was splendid. Lucie’s father, however, was so disgusted by his new son-in-law that he broke off relations, disinherited Lucie, and left Pückler without a ready source of income. The solution, arrived at in 1826, was unorthodox. The couple decided to get divorced so Pückler could find himself a rich wife, who would keep them all in style. The obvious place to find such a person was the richest country in Europe: England.

Before his first trip in 1815, Pückler had not thought all that highly of the British, as opposed to their gardens and their politics. He was, as I said, a Francophile by inclination. Even though he had fought in the “Liberation War” against the French, he had a certain regard for Napoleon. His German would continue to be permeated with French, or Frenchified expressions. But he had been impressed by a show of British power in 1806, when he visited Naples. Just as he was about to sit down for dinner at the house of the Russian ambassador, Count von Bibikoff, an Anglo-French battle started up in the bay. Von Bibikoff ordered his servants to serve dinner on the terrace so his guests could watch the British flagship shoot a French frigate to pieces. A cannon-ball almost landed on the table, an event to which the guests affected an air of supreme indifference.

We know precisely what Pückler thought of Britain in 1826, because he recorded his adventures in wonderfully detailed letters to Lucie, whom he addresses as
Schnucke
, “Little Lamb.” (Pückler was Lou.) These letters, published in 1830 as
Letters from a Dead Man
, made him famous all over Europe and North America. Deservedly so. It is still one of the sharpest and wittiest accounts ever written by a
foreigner about Britain. Too critical to qualify as an Anglomane document,
Letters from a Dead Man
still shows signs of a common strain of Anglophilia: admiration tinged with disillusion. Pückler, like Voltaire, loved the idea of England better than the real thing. During his first visit, in 1815, he was a fox-hunting, whist-playing dandy. Regency London was the ideal place for him then. But in 1826, he noted a discrepancy between the pretensions of an arrogant and, in his eyes, hidebound aristocracy and an increasingly commercial society, run by an energetic bourgeoisie. His sympathies were with the latter. But there are hints of regret in his letters, of nostalgia for an eighteenth-century ideal of nobility, free-spirited, cultivated, liberal, a Whiggish ideal that nineteenth-century English aristocrats were rarely able to match.

Much had changed in England over the last fifty years, even without a revolution. But the commercial, industrial nature of society was often disguised in the trappings of a preindustrial past. Like Voltaire, Pückler visited the Royal Exchange. His guide in the City of London was a Swiss entrepreneur who published a Russian newsletter and owned Napoleon’s coronation robe, which he showed for a fee of five shillings. Voltaire had been impressed by the way men of different faiths did business at the exchange, “as though they all professed the same religion.” Pückler noticed the historical appearance of the place: the statues of English rulers, “as well as the ancient and venerable architecture,” which “awaken poetic feelings, to which the thought of the world market, of which London is the centre, lends an even deeper significance.” Then he looked at the people working there, and he saw “self-interest and greed gleam in every eye.” They were like a “restless, comfortless throng of damned souls.”

Many others have said the same thing about Britain and, of course, America. Theodor Fontane, the Prussian poet and novelist, lived in London in the 1850s. He found that speculation and the rush to make money were the main English occupations. Rich people were worshiped: “The cult of the Golden Calf, that is the great disease of the English people.” Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in England four years after Pückler left. It is interesting to compare his observations with Pückler’s, for the two men had much in common. Both were free-spirited aristocrats, attracted by British liberties. Tocqueville observed the English passion for making money too. But he had already been in America, which inspired his remark “I know of nothing more opposed
to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones.” And yet, on his first trip to England in 1833, he thought an English revolution was still bound to come.

On his way to London, Tocqueville was struck by something that is still striking when you land at Heathrow on a clear day: the grand houses, the large estates, the vast, green lawns. Everywhere he went, he saw the “aristocratic spirit”: at the House of Lords, with its “
parfum d’aristocratie,
” and also at the ancient universities, which still retained their “feudal” privileges. Nowhere, he wrote two years later, “do I find our America.” And so far, miraculously, the “French spirit” of revolution had passed this island by. Like Pückler, Tocqueville felt a romantic attachment to a noble past, even as he worried about the inevitable revolution that would sweep it all away. At Kenilworth, he thought of Sir Walter Scott and “fell into a kind of trance, while it seemed that my soul was drawn toward the past with tremendous force.”

Six years earlier, Pückler had similar reveries about Sir Walter Scott at Warwick Castle. He was inspired by the landscape, the medieval walls, the battered armor and ancestral weapons in the hall: “Is there any man so lacking in poetry that he does not see, even today, the glory of those memorials shining around even the most unworthy representative of such a noble line?” But at Kenilworth, the next day, he fell prey to different emotions. He saw in those ancient stones a “noble monument to annihilation.” He thought about how much had changed and reflected, in the evening gloom, on the “shrieking contrast between the lifeless ruins and the prosaic bustle of a crowd, busied only with gain, in the steaming, smoking, swarming, teeming factory town of Birmingham.”

Tocqueville visited Birmingham in 1835. There, at last, he found a scene that reminded him of America. He observed wealth that was not rooted in the land. Industrial and middle-class England was leading the way to a new world, just like America. “These folk,” he wrote, “never have a minute to themselves. They work as if they must get rich by the evening and die the next day. They are generally very intelligent people but intelligent in the American way.” Since he was French, the Revolution was never far from his mind, and the question that haunted him was how the English aristocracy had managed to hold on to power for so long. Democracy was surely inevitable in England too. And surely aristocratic rule was incompatible with democracy. When he
saw a rough crowd heckling a Tory candidate at a London by-election, jeering like “savages in North America,” he thought he was witnessing the stirrings of revolution. He found it extraordinary that his English friends were “still convinced that extreme inequality of wealth is in the natural order of things.”

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.