Authors: Ian Buruma
Their Byromania, however, is not why European radicals came to Britain. They had been driven across the Channel by the reaction of the old regimes; it was either London or jail. The paradox of Britain, which all of them recognized, was that it may have been boring and conservative, but it was also the freest society in Europe. In London, the exiles could say and print what they liked. With one or two exceptions, such as Garibaldi and Kossuth, the foreigners were treated with indifference by the English. They could hold forth and dream and write and scheme without fear of being arrested, or even listened to. Most of them clung together in feuding foreign enclaves: the Germans in pubs around Long Acre, Italians in Hatton Garden, Poles and French in cheap boardinghouses off Leicester Square. Many exiles, including Marx, made a living in journalism. Some sponged off their compatriots through various confidence tricks and scams. Others taught foreign languages to English children. German musicians, with Wagner and revolution on the brain, played polkas in disreputable dance halls, where girls in tights adopted “antique” poses. Mazzini exported lace to Genoa in exchange for macaroni.
British intellectuals who formed the closest friendships with the Continental exiles often shared their prejudices. Marx’s best British friend was the radical agitator David Urquhart, a famous Turkophile. Turkey was a popular destination for mid-nineteenth-century radicals. But Urquhart’s Turkophilia went so far that even in London he ate Turkish food, bathed in Turkish baths, and lounged on Turkish sofas. He was also a ferocious hater of Russia and its alleged allies. In his overheated imagination, Palmerston was a Russian agent, as were Cobden, Kossuth, and Mazzini. But Marx was sound. Urquhart shared not just Marx’s Russophobia but his hatred of parliamentary government.
Carlyle was an even stranger case. He was a good friend of Mazzini and Herzen, yet his disdain of liberal party politics easily matched that of Urquhart. In a letter to Herzen, he wrote that he much preferred the despotic rule of tsars “to the sheer Anarchy (as I reckon it sadly to be) which is got by ‘Parliamentary Eloquence,’ Free Press, and counting of heads.”
One of the best observers of the foreign refugees, besides Herzen, was Theodor Fontane, who first arrived in Britain from Berlin in 1844. Although he was not a political exile, the promise of freedom was one of London’s main attractions for him too. He liked to think that all Englishmen had the words “I am a free man” written on their foreheads. He saw England “the way the Jews in Egypt saw Canaan,” as “the promised land of freedom and independence.” The only drawback he could see in those early days was that the English couldn’t sing. Fontane was a poet and aspiring novelist, but since England, in his view, didn’t inspire poetry, he wrote articles for a Prussian newspaper instead.
Fontane lived for a time in rooms at 27 Long Acre. On the ground floor was a pub, run by a former German gymnast named Scharttner. A fat beery figure with unsteady republican opinions, Scharttner had married an Englishwoman and presided over “Meetings” at his pub, during which, in the fug of cheap cigars, “the future presidents of an undivided German Republic” made ferocious speeches to other foreigners sitting around a large round table piled high with yellowing democratic newspapers from Europe. “When I come to power, you’ll be the first to be shot!” was a commonly used phrase among Scharttner’s clientele. On Saturday nights the “Meetings” got especially lively, for they were joined by French refugees, who were even louder than the ale-drinking Germans. Fontane would be kept from his sleep until morning by the din of French and German songs, toasts to the eternal Franco-German friendship, and much swearing and shattering of glass. In the morning, 27 Long Acre reeked of cheap brandy and beer.
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, Holland 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.”