Anglomania (4 page)

As in all discussions of national character, this worrying over Englishness usually results in great balls of intellectual wool. Englishness is a romantic not a political concept. There is nothing particularly wrong with this. It might even produce some good poems—though it is likely to produce many more bad ones. But the narrow defensiveness of much anti-European rhetoric often obscures the more practical reasons why many Europeans have admired Britain in the past.

I have chosen to reexamine some of those reasons from a European point of view or, rather, from a gallery of views. I have selected a number of European Anglophiles and, by way of contrast, some ferocious Anglophobes, to see what Europeans particularly admired (or loathed) about Britain and how much, if anything, of these virtues (or vices) has survived. The choice of characters might strike the reader as eccentric. Some are famous, others obscure. Some obvious candidates have been left out; Napoleon, for example. None of my Anglophiles loved Britain blindly (blinding passion is more a mark of the haters). Most of them,
especially the more starry-eyed, saw their dreams tarnished in the end by a sense of disillusion—the necessary condition for recognizing something approximating the truth.

S
INCE
A
NGLOPHILIA IS
often a matter of style, some of the examples in the following chapters might seem superficial, or frivolous. But frivolity can contain hidden depths. I have a Hungarian friend named G. M. Tamas. He is a professor of philosophy and a classic Anglophile. Like many central European Anglophiles, Tamas could not be less English in behavior or appearance—in spite of his white linen suits and Harris tweeds. He is a thin, dark, bearded man, intensely intellectual, garrulous, and excitable about culture and politics. Tamas is the kind of man you would expect to see at a café table in Budapest or Bucharest, manically arguing an abstruse philosophical point. He is a talker. He takes things seriously. He worries about the world, which is always on the brink of catastrophe.

Tamas was born in Cluj, Transylvania, where his grandfather was a cantor at the local synagogue. After moving to Budapest, he became a political dissident. Like many who suffered under communism, he admired Margaret Thatcher. Tamas paid the usual price for his dissent: isolation, arrests, spells in jail. After 1989, he became a liberal conservative politician. But he was soon disgusted with the political climate in his country, which he still regarded as a degenerate, antidemocratic madhouse. So he became a philosopher at large, roaming the world, talking incessantly about the Central European debacle, and dreaming of an English home.

In 1988, a year before the end of the Soviet Empire in Europe, Tamas wrote an article in
The Spectator
that contained an image that provided the kernel for this book. Like Churchill’s cigar, the Clare College tie, and the brown brogues, it concerns a fetish. It is the best, most concise expression I know of a timeless Anglophilia:

How to be a gentleman after 40 years of socialism? I recall the tweed-clad (Dunn & Co, 1926) and trembling elbow of Count Erno de Teleki (MA Cantab, 1927) in a pool of yoghurt in the
Lacto-Bar, Jokai (Napoca) Street, Kolozsvar (Cluj), Transylvania, Rumania, 1973. His silver stubble, frayed and greasy tie, Albanian cigarette, implausible
causerie
. The smell of buttermilk and pickled green peppers. A drunk peasant being quietly sick on the floor. This was the first time I saw a tweed jacket.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

V
OLTAIRE’S
C
OCONUTS

“By G—– I do love the Ingles. G—d dammee,
if I don’t love them better than the French by G—–!”

—V
OLTAIRE

W
HY CAN
’
T THE WORLD BE MORE LIKE
E
NGLAND
? T
HIS IS
the question raised by Voltaire in the
Philosophical Dictionary
of 1756. It is a curious question to ask, especially for a Frenchman. But Voltaire first came to England in 1726, thirty-eight years after the Glorious Revolution and twenty-six years after the building of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London (with money from a Quaker and wooden beams donated by Queen Anne). Having suffered a stint in the Bastille for publishing a satirical poem and unable to publish another poem on religious persecution in France, Voltaire saw England as a model of freedom and tolerance. That is why I will start my gallery of Anglophiles with him. Voltaire is the first or at least the most famous, most eloquent, most humorous, most outrageous, and often the most perceptive modern Anglophile.

So why can’t the world be more like England? In fact, Voltaire’s query was a bit more specific: Why can’t the laws that guarantee British liberties be adopted elsewhere? Of course, being a rationalist and a universalist, Voltaire had to assume that they could. But he anticipated the objections of less enlightened minds. They would say that you
might as well ask why coconuts, which bear fruit in India, do not ripen in Rome. His answer? Well, that it took time for those coconuts to ripen in England too. There is no reason, he said, why they shouldn’t do well everywhere, even in Bosnia and Serbia. So let’s start planting them now.

You have to love Voltaire for this. It is liberal. It shows reason and good sense. It is wonderfully optimistic. And it is too glib. But then comes the Voltairean kicker at the end: “Oh, how great at present is the distance between an Englishman and a Bosnian!”

I was thinking about his coconuts while sitting in Voltaire’s old garden in Ferney, now called Ferney-Voltaire, just across the French border from Geneva. It was an open day at the château. I had just been inside Voltaire’s old bedroom. The walls were decorated with prints of his heroes: Isaac Newton, Milton, and George Washington. There was also a larger picture of Voltaire himself ascending to a kind of secular heaven, being greeted by angels, or muses, while his critics writhe in agony below, like sinners in hell.

Voltaire was proud of his garden. He thought it was an English garden. He often boasted of having introduced the English garden to France, along with Shakespeare’s plays and Newton’s scientific ideas. He wrote to an English friend, George Keate, that Lord Burlington himself would approve of the garden. “I am all in the English taste,” he wrote. “All is after nature,” for “I love liberty and hate symmetry.” He designed it himself. But in fact, the style, judging from old prints, and from what is still visible today, is too small, too neat, too formal, too fussy—in a word, too French—to be a truly English garden of the eighteenth century.

Yet it is not without charm, even today. It is formal yet quirky and allowed to run a little wild here and there. There is a splendid terrace, with a view of a round pond and a fountain. Straight gravel paths are lined with lime trees and poplars. Behind the house is a long path with a straight row of hornbeams growing on either side—the “longest row of hornbeams in Europe” according to a local tourist guide. It must have been near there that Voltaire tried to grow pineapples, which, alas, died in the cold European winter. His vegetable garden is still there, however. And so is his fish pond, now dry.

I sat in the old fish pond, waiting for a reading of Voltaire’s texts to
begin. After a while, two actors, a dark-haired young man in jeans and a leather jacket and an elegant blond woman, climbed onto a wooden stage and began to read. The text was “Catechism of a Gardener,” Voltaire’s satire on nationalist prejudices published in the
Philosophical Dictionary
. The actor and actress read most of it in French, but when they found some passages unpronounceable, they giggled and continued in Serbo-Croat. They were Bosnians from Sarajevo.

V
OLTAIRE
’
S FIRST IMPRESSION
of England was of its fine, sunny weather. He landed at Gravesend, at some time—we don’t know quite when—in the spring of 1726. “The sky,” he recalled, “was cloudless, as in the loveliest days of Southern France.” He wrote this at least a year later, and it may well be that the cloudless sky, as well as much else in Voltaire’s account of England, owed something to the writer’s imagination. The weather had to be fine; it matched Voltaire’s idea of England, as the land where the Enlightenment found its brightest expression.

Voltaire gazed at the Thames in Greenwich, with the sun casting jewels on the gently shimmering water. The white sails of merchant vessels stood out against the soft English greenness of the riverbanks. And look! There were the king and queen, “rowed upon the river in a gilded barge, preceded by boats full of musicians, and followed by a thousand little rowing-boats.” The oarsmen were dressed “as our pages were in old times, with trunk-hose, and little doublets ornamented with a large silver badge on the shoulder.” It was clear from their splendid appearance and “their plump condition” that these watermen “lived in freedom and in the midst of plenty.”

The French visitor then proceeded to a racecourse, where he was delighted by the spectacle of pretty young women, all of them “well made,” dressed in calicoes, galloping up and down on their horses with exquisite grace. While feasting on the beauty of Englishwomen, Voltaire met a group of jolly Englishmen, who welcomed him heartily and offered him drinks and made room for him to see the action. First Voltaire was reminded of the ancient games at Olympia, but no, “the vast size of the city of London soon made me blush for having dared to liken Elis to England.” His new friends told him that at that very moment
a fight of gladiators was in progress in London, and Voltaire instantly believed himself to be not in Greece but “amongst the ancient Romans.”

He was not alone in this conceit. It had become fashionable among the English themselves to think of their country as the incarnation of the Roman republic, pure, simple, uncorrupted by imperial fripperies, a model of liberty and classical grace. Venice was another source of inspiration. The combination of trade, freedom, and the rule of a noble elite was irresistible to Whiggish aristocrats who saw merit in trade and championed individual liberty. They could not get enough of Canaletto’s paintings of Venice to hang on their walls. When the great Venetian came to London in 1746, he too envisioned the British capital as a modern Rome.

But after the sun went down, a darker side of paradise was revealed to Voltaire. In the evening, he was presented to ladies of the court. Thinking they would surely share his enthusiasm for the sunny scenes he had witnessed on the riverbank, he told them all about his day, only to be met with an agitated flutter of fans. The ladies looked away from the excitable Frenchman in disdain, breaking the silence only to cry out all at once “in slander of their neighbours.” Finally one lady felt compelled by common courtesy to explain to the foreigner that the young women he had admired so foolishly were maidservants, and the jolly young men mere apprentices on hired horses.

Finding this hard to believe, or perhaps not wishing to believe it, Voltaire went out the next morning to look for his companions of the previous day. He found them in a dingy coffeehouse in the City of London. They showed none of their former liveliness and good cheer, and all they said to Voltaire, before discussing the latest news of a woman who had been slashed by her lover with a razor, was that the wind blew from the east. Hoping to find more gaiety in higher circles, Voltaire set off for the palace, only to be told there too that the wind was in the east. And when the wind was in the east, said the court doctor, “people hung themselves by the dozen.”

Although Voltaire was enough of a realist to treat the drawbacks of English life with sardonic wit, his England remained on the whole a sunny place, for it was based on an idea. The core of the idea was liberty and reason. Since reason, in his view, was a universal value, England, to him, provided a universal model. This makes him the father
of Anglophilia, even though the nature of European Anglophilia would change considerably, especially after the French Revolution. Voltaire truly wished the rest of the world to be more like England. Others, like Montesquieu, soon took up the same idea. And this at a time when the
ton
of the upper class in England was still firmly Francophile.

Voltaire’s idea of England was a caricature, to be sure. There is a line to be drawn, crooked, frequently distorted, often imaginary, but a line nonetheless, from Voltaire to Margaret Thatcher: Britain as the island of liberty, facing a dark, despotic Continent. As with all good caricatures, Voltaire’s idea was not without substance. Even as the British aristocracy was imitating the language, dress, and manners of the French court, eighteenth-century Britain was a freer, more tolerant place than France. The Glorious Revolution had produced a constitutional monarchy, while in France an absolute monarch had robbed French Protestants of their religious freedom. After the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, more than eighty thousand French Protestants and dissenters moved to London. Some of them would meet at the Rainbow Coffee-house in Marylebone to discuss politics and religion. They read the books of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Newton. And news of their discoveries soon found its way back to France, where they inspired Voltaire and Montesquieu.

Voltaire became an Anglophile in about 1722. Before that he had been a gifted libertine on the make, a powdered rake with a taste for actresses and rich men’s wives. He liked to amuse old roués with satirical poems, and he annoyed the authorities enough with his sallies to be jailed at the Bastille. His first literary success—a sensation, in fact—was his play
Oedipe
, performed in 1718. At the age of twenty-four Voltaire was hailed as the heir of Corneille and called the Sophocles of France—comparisons he himself did nothing to discourage. Philippe d’Orléans, the French regent, gave him a gold medal. And so did King George I of England, after the British ambassador, the second earl of Stair, had called Voltaire “ye best poet maybe ever was in France.” (Not that the Hanover king would have understood this fine phrase; he didn’t speak English.)