Authors: Ian Buruma
The idea of latching Englishness, or English art, onto a thoroughly German idea was, as we know, not new. In a way, that is what the young Pevsner did in his earliest studies of the English character. It almost amounted to a modern form of
Ossianismus
or Shakespearomania. Like many young men in the Weimar Republic, he was a modernist. He believed that the clean lines of Bauhaus architecture and its ideals of well-designed commercial products and good, functional housing for the masses were in the true spirit of the times. The zeitgeist was modernist. Pevsner, like his professor, was a great believer in zeitgeist. The idea was first developed by Hegel, who thought that history was subject to universal laws. One time spirit follows another, in a logical chain of progress. Styles change with the times, along with economic and political conditions. To adopt the style of a previous age was, in Pevsner’s phrase, to commit the crime of “historicism.” But national character (
Volksgeist
) functions as a kind of recurring leitmotif. Modernism, then, was the inevitable result of everything that had happened before. But it was affected, in different nations, by different national spirits.
Pevsner had already worked out the essence of the English national spirit early on. It was not strikingly original. The English, he wrote in a German paper in 1934, were reserved, pragmatic, realistic, practical, reasonable people. But they could also be prone to strange, poetic fancies. English art excelled in understated portraits, finely observed genre pictures, sharp satire, sometimes with the decorative richness that was typical of Celtic design. But since so much in English art was realistic, it would follow, according to Pevsner, that English rebels would be inclined to move in the opposite direction and escape into the world of dreams and fairy tales. This, too, was based on a Hegelian notion
borrowed from Pinder. National character, like the zeitgeist, is subject to a “dialectical process”; it is a synthesis of contradictions. Pinder, and consequently Pevsner, called these “polarities.” So Hogarth, the satirist, Constable, the realist, and Blake, the dreamer, were all quintessentially English.
Pevsner’s article, which was based on a lecture given at the Royal Academy in London for the opening of an exhibition of British art, was entitled “The Englishness of English Art,” the same title he would give to his Reith Lectures in 1955 and the famous book that followed. Most of the ideas Pevsner expressed in the Reith Lectures he had already fully developed in 1934. He didn’t mention the Celtic influence anymore, it is true. That was replaced by the Gothic influence. But Pevsner’s main project in the 1930s, his modern Ossianism, as it were, was to work out the connection between English pragmatism and the modern movement, or more specifically, between William Morris and the Bauhaus.
The English, especially Morris, were hailed by Pevsner and others as the pioneers of modernism. Modernism was nothing if not international. Indeed, according to Pevsner, all “healthy” arts are “essentially internationalist.” The word “healthy” is important: modern movements were meant to be fresh, healthy, youthful antidotes to the sickly zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement was of course pre-fin de siècle, but also, in Pevsner’s view, a typical manifestation of the practical English character. Mass-produced, well-designed art for daily use was the thing, not the personal expression of individual artists—especially if they were unhealthy. The Glasgow tea rooms (tea was healthy) by Charles Rennie Mackintosh were an inspiration, as were Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, Charles Voysey’s wallpaper designs, and Arthur Mackmurdo’s furniture and social theories. Modern art and design should not just look good; they should be useful tools of social reform.
Pevsner was not alone in his enthusiasm for English Arts and Crafts. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos saw late-nineteenth-century London as the “centre of European civilization.” The lack of ornamentation, the “rational” design of Voysey’s domestic architecture, fitted the modernist taste for sobriety. Pevsner, in his book
An Outline of European Architecture
, wrote admiringly of “the boldness of bare walls and long horizontal bands of windows. In such buildings of the [eighteen]
nineties England came nearest to the idiom of the Modern Movement.” No wonder the Prussian Board of Trade and Design sent a man (named Hermann Muthesius) to the embassy in London in 1896 to observe trends in British architecture and design.
However, if proto-modernism had been the reason for Pevsner’s early enthusiasm for Britain, he must have been very disappointed by what he saw when he arrived there in the early 1930s. Compared to Berlin, London was a fuddy-duddy metropolis, a city of neo-this and neo-that. The shabbily genteel suburbs that charmed John Betjeman cannot have impressed a young German with Bauhaus on his mind. Far from being boldly modernist, England was soggy with “historicism.” Another refugee from Germany (though born in Vienna) was the architect Ernst Freud. He came to London in 1933 and noted that “it is quite surprising to a continental observer how few modern buildings are to be found and that on the whole the idea of modern architecture has not yet begun to influence the features in English towns.”
This was of course precisely what many other émigrés, and foreign Anglophiles, liked about England: its cussed traditionalism—fuddy-duddy, perhaps, but also stable, peaceful, and never extreme. Since the refugees had come to escape from zealotry and extremism, British conservatism was often seen as a balm for wounded souls. Even as tough a campaigner as Arthur Koestler, who was hardly the type to potter about in suburban gardens, loved England as “a kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age.” (When he came to England, to escape from the Nazis, he had only just given up being a communist.)
One of the most effusive enthusiasts of English suburban calm was Steen Eiler Rasmussen. His descriptions, in the mid-1930s, of Hampstead Garden Suburb, the home of so many refugees, are lyrical. Rasmussen, who was not a refugee himself, is bowled over by pretty timbered cottages and mock Tudor homes, with clanking garden gates and green bowling greens, seen through the haze of a late summer’s evening. London, to Rasmussen, is the capital of liberty, and its higgledy-piggledy rows of individual family houses are its most splendid ornaments, so unlike the rigid avenues and Napoleonic order of Paris. He dreams of a future Europe, filled with Hampstead Garden Suburbs, harmonious and free. But, alas, chilly winds are blowing the other way. Instead of European cities becoming more like Hampstead
Garden Suburb, London is in danger of being Europeanized. Le Corbusier’s dreaded “Bonapartism” is already crossing the Channel. Tall buildings are coming up, old English traditions abandoned. It is enough to make an Anglophile weep, and Rasmussen ends his book almost in hysterics:
And now London, the capital of English civilization, has caught the infection of Continental experiments which are at variance with the whole character and tendency of the city! Thus the foolish mistakes of other countries are imported everywhere, and at the end of a
few years all cities will be equally ugly and
equally devoid of individuality.
This is the bitter
END
He did not mention the fact that the architects of many of these Continental experiments were refugees from Vienna, Weimar, and Berlin: Ahrends, Goldfinger, Rosenberg, and Gropius, among others. And some of their clients were refugees too. But of course Rasmussen wrote his book in 1934, before these architects had left their modern marks on England’s green and pleasant land. Modernist architecture was in fact neither totally unknown in Britain nor always unwelcome. The émigré architects had their British supporters. But they were not yet in the mainstream. To most English people, modernism was both socialist and foreign, which came down to much the same thing. To express their hatred of both, English conservatives fell back on the same national character theories that enchanted the modernist Pevsner.
Sir Reginald Blomfield, for example, principal architect of the Imperial War Graves Commission, was one of the English grandees who hated modernism. To show up its foreign provenance, he insisted on calling it “modernismus.” This “essentially Continental” creed, he wrote, “claims as a merit that it is cosmopolitan. As an Englishman and proud of his country, I detest and despise cosmopolitanism.” But that was not the worst of it. Since modernism emphasized collective goals above individualism, it was totalitarian. Pevsner would have agreed with this, but not with the following conclusion: “Whether this movement is Hitlerism or Bolshevism, Fascism or Communism, is immaterial … the frantic things we see in our Galleries, the horrible noises that we hear
on the wireless, the packing-case buildings that we see disfiguring the landscape, and the gratuitous eccentricities that disturb us in the streets, all spring from this insidious and dangerous germ.”
The use of biological terminology is interesting. Rasmussen spoke of an “infection” and Blomfield of a “germ”: foreign bodies in a native organism. The irony here is that the émigré architects, who carried these noxious germs, had escaped to England from a régime that used just such terms to persecute its enemies, particularly modernist, cosmopolitan Jews, who “infected” the native German organism. The émigrés’ idea of freedom was a world without native organisms, a clean, planned, mechanical, international world, stripped of romantic, historical, and above all nationalist associations. Those who didn’t manage to practice their theories in England mostly moved on to America, which was more receptive to modernism and had more money to pay for it.
Blomfield was right in one sense: the politics of modernism was often radical to begin with, usually socialist, sometimes fascist, often Utopian, and given to authoritarianism. Many émigré architects and their supporters, such as Pevsner, were socialists. Pevsner’s mission was to help his adopted country catch up with the zeitgeist. He would describe in words what Gropius, and others, would build in concrete. But there were other refugees, some of them very prominent, who agreed with Rasmussen and Blomfield: they saw England as a safe haven from socialism, as well as fascism, and they never stopped warning the British about catching the socialist virus, which had, in their view, already infected great chunks of the Continent with totalitarianism. To the extent they believed in zeitgeist, which most of them didn’t, they liked the fact that England seemed behind the times. The parallels with 1848 are striking. Then, too, some émigrés, such as Marx, were hoping for an English revolution and disgusted when it failed to arrive, while others, such as Alexander Herzen, admired precisely the lack of revolutionary zeal in this deeply bourgeois land.
O
NE OF THE
most famous immigrants was the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek. A comparison with Pevsner is interesting, because Hayek appears to have stood for the opposite of Pevsner’s modernist ideals, yet
the two men were curiously alike. Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899, came to England in 1931 to lecture at the London School of Economics, and became a British citizen in 1938. He wasn’t Jewish, but, in Nazi eyes, he might as well have been, for he was a classical liberal and an Anglophile, which in German-speaking countries usually amounted to the same thing. Because Margaret Thatcher later adopted Hayek as her principal guru, he got the reputation of being a dogmatic right-winger.
In fact, Hayek was dogmatic about one thing only: socialism, or any other system that proposed to serve the common good by systematic planning of economic or social life, would inevitably end in totalitarian rule. In the tradition of Adam Smith, Hayek thought that individuals in pursuit of their own interests were better placed to create prosperity than official planners, however well intentioned, could ever be. So people should be free to do so, within the limits of a sound legal system and traditional moral constraints. Indeed, in his opinion, commerce had a civilizing influence on those who practiced it freely. The citizens of a free society respect privacy and are blessed with good manners and a sense of humor. Naturally, such ideal Hayekian citizens would live in their own individual houses, with private gardens, and not in anonymous blocks of flats.
Hayek felt at home in England. He virtually made a fetish of it. But it was a particular kind of England, which existed somewhere between a Victorian High Table and a Bateman cartoon. His was a country of genteel suburbs (he lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb), of gentlemen’s clubs (the Reform was his permanent “home”), and of Cambridge combination rooms. “English ways of life,” he wrote, “seemed so naturally to accord with all my instincts and dispositions that, if it had not been for very special circumstances, I should never have wished to leave the country again.” Hayek particularly admired the moral constraints and the love of tradition, which wrapped self-interest in a tweedy cloak of ceremony and good form.
Far from wanting to make England modern, Hayek’s idea of England had a distinctly Victorian, or even Georgian air. He took up mountaineering, he said, to further his understanding of “the English intellectual atmosphere of the nineteenth century.” He read English mountaineering books, which “helped” him “to fit into the English atmosphere.” Hayek thought of himself as a “Burkean Whig.” His intellectual
companions, apart from a few like-minded contemporary dons, were Macaulay, Adam Smith, and Lord Acton. His political hero was Gladstone. Not Disraeli, of course. Dizzy was admired by Germans who detested liberals like Hayek.
To Hayek, classical liberalism and the English way of life were the same thing. This might sound a little sweeping. It ignores the anti-capitalist strains that run through English history. But it is what his German enemies thought too. A hatred of liberalism is what German socialists on the Left had in common with National Socialists on the Right, and Britain was popular with neither. Oswald Spengler, the author of
Prussianism and Socialism
and
The Decline of the West
, called German liberals “the invisible English army which after the Battle of Jena, Napoleon left behind on German soil.” Spengler may not have been quite a socialist, or even quite a Nazi, but he was certainly anti-liberal. Hayek—and not only Hayek—saw Hitler’s and Stalin’s wars against democracy as wars against the West, that is, against Britain and America, against Anglo-Saxon values, against Anglophiles and Jews. Anglophiles and Jews belonged together, for as Hayek quite rightly claimed, anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism sprang from the same root. Britain, then, was the countermodel for the world he had to flee. As with Voltaire, Hayek’s idea of England can be understood only if you remember where he came from.