Authors: Ian Buruma
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 gazed 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.
W
HEN
P
ÜCKLER 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 actually 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.
Lady Hester grew up in the kind of atmosphere Pückler would have understood. Her father, Charles, Lord Stanhope, was one of those eccentric noblemen who turned to political radicalism. He was a republican, a champion of the French Revolution and member of the House of Lords. He insisted on being called Citizen Stanhope, and the family seat of Chevening was renamed Democracy Hall. As is usual with such figures, who love the People in general, he was an impossible tyrant at home. Lady Hester was not a revolutionary herself, but she did insist on her freedom to do or say what she liked. Like Pückler, she was a Francophile—they spoke in French. And like him, she was an adventurous traveler. While they were still living in London, a madman named Richard Brothers predicted that she would one day go to Jerusalem and be crowned queen of the East.