Anglomania (14 page)

And yet to call him a liberal might be misleading, for his politics were never consistent. He was sometimes a liberal, attracted to British constitutionalism. But enlightened despotism also had its appeal. Many things about him suggested an earlier age. He has been described as “a somewhat outmoded grand seigneur who lived as though it were still the Rococo …” Progressive and reactionary at the same time: impatient to reform the present, while yearning for the past. That is why Pückler, and others like him, were attracted to England, which seemed both freer and more aristocratic than the rest of Europe. This attraction was expressed in Pückler’s masterpieces: the fabulous English-style gardens he laid out in his Prussian domains.

The inspiration for his first landscape garden in Muskau was Stourhead, in Wiltshire, which Pückler visited in 1815. He was shown around William Kent’s eighteenth-century garden-park by its then owner Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Sir Richard was particularly proud of his rhododendrons, imported from the Himalayas. But Pückler was more impressed by the scale and quasi-natural, asymmetrical beauty of the classicist landscape, loosely inspired by Poussin’s painting. Long views of sloping turf were animated by Roman temples, serpentine lakes, and antique bridges. Stourhead excited a cocktail of ideas and emotions: pride in landownership, spontaneous love of nature, appreciation of antiquity, yearning for Milton’s lost paradise, and celebration
of blurred borders—between art and nature, feudalism and democracy, Parliament and king, commoner and noblemen. Stourhead, in short, was an Anglomane’s dream.

When Pückler started his garden-park at Muskau, an unprepossessing, sandy property on the border of Prussia and Saxony, he was in a Byronic mood. He had always been prone to aristocratic eccentricities: having his coach pulled around Berlin by tamed deer, or dinners “in the English style,” served on black shrouds instead of white linen. But back from England in 1815, he was given to extreme romantic gestures. One night, he entered the tomb of his ancestors and kissed his grandfather’s bones. Then he picked up the walnut-colored skull of a notorious great-aunt (“wicked Ursula”), which promptly disintegrated, leaving a mass of worms writhing in his lap. Apparently, he felt better for that and started work on the transformation of “Muskau Castle.”

The house itself, a seventeenth-century building, was turned into a stately home, furnished entirely in the English manner. Servants were dressed in English liveries and wore English wigs. For his garden-park, Pückler bought up all the neighboring districts, which would cause him great trouble, since he didn’t have the money to pay for them. But financial constraints never stopped him. He was a nobleman; his was not the vulgar task of making money, he just spent it. Many of his designs were eventually carried out with the help of Humphrey Repton’s son, Adey, and the architect Friedrich Schinkel.

An “English house” was built, with a
Bowlinggreen
in the garden. A
Pleasureground
was laid out, between garden and park. Fields were provided for grazing sheep, and a village was demolished to make way for an ornamental farm. Pückler’s lifelong taste for the Orient found expression in Islamic and Chinese follies; waterfalls were constructed in artificial lakes; clumps of trees were planted in the style of William Kent and Capability Brown; a pheasantry took the shape of a Turkish country house; and a Temple of Stability was erected in memory of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, whose bronze bust stood like a Greek god inside the temple. Pückler also built a hermitage and advertised in the local press for a hermit. An old veteran “with a monstrous nose” turned up, but soon got bored and left his grotto, never to be heard of again.

Pückler was of course not the first European “parkomane” to build
an English-style Arcadia. We know about Voltaire’s garden in Ferney, and Montesquieu’s English garden in Bordeaux. There were English gardens in Naples, around Amsterdam, in Sweden and Russia, and all over Germany. All eighteenth-century Anglophiles knew Joseph Addison’s articles in
The Spectator
on ornamental farms and “democratic parks.” They had read Alexander Pope on the ideal of “unadorned nature.” The third earl of Shaftesbury’s theories about the “genuine order” of nature, represented by “the rude Rocks, the mossy
Caverns
, the irregular unwrought
Grottos
and broken Falls of waters, with all the horrid Graces of the
Wilderness itself
,” were famous. Stephen Switzer wrote, in
Iconographia Rustica
, that the “so-much-boasted Gardens of France” would “give way to the superior Beauties of our gardens, as her late Prince has to the invincible force of the British arms.” He was right. English gardens took the Continent by storm.

The most deliberately democratic garden is probably the Englische Garten in Munich, with its wooden Chinese pagoda and its beautiful lake. Its architect, an American by birth named Benjamin Thompson, but better known by his later German title, Reichsgraf Rumford, had originally planned the park for the Bavarian king’s army. But the storming of the Bastille in 1789 made Rumford and his colleagues so nervous about the possibility of popular unrest that the English garden was redesigned as a “people’s park.” This concept was not so strange, considering that most seventeenth and early eighteenth century British landscape gardens had been open to the public, precursors, in a way, of the theme parks that would attract millions of tourists two hundred years later.

The finest English garden in Germany was built before Prince Pückler was born, not far from Muskau and quite close to Branitz, where he died. I visited Wörlitz on a freezing December day in 1995. The ground was hard; the grass felt flinty. A powdery frost stuck to the Doric temples and Gothic follies. The lakes were frozen, so I couldn’t take a boat to Rousseau Island, where a replica of Rousseau’s tomb was placed to commemorate the philosopher of “nature, pure nature.” There was also a replica of Vesuvius, called the Stein, which had once had regular eruptions of artificial fire. It was being restored, so I could not look inside to see how the fireworks actually functioned. I was almost alone in the vast park, with its acres of farmland, its lakes, and its mazes. There was hardly a sound, except from the odd flight of geese
and the crackling of frost under my shoes. Wandering along the “belt” coiling round the garden-park from folly to folly, vista to vista, it was still possible, even in midwinter, to share Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau’s vision of paradise.

Prince Franz had visited England several times in the 1760s and 1770s. He knew Horace Walpole and had met the Adam brothers, as well as the European idol of that time, Laurence Sterne. He saw Kew Gardens, of course, as well as Blenheim, Stowe, Castle Howard, and other great estates. Franz liked England so much that he had wanted to stay forever, but he was called back home by Friedrich II, so he built “my own England” in Wörlitz instead.

Franz’s idea of England, expressed in this Arcadian garden-park, combines all the elements that had made English parks famous. A Chinese bridge shows the contemporary fashion for chinoiserie. Mock ruins of antiquity illustrate the ravages of time, as well as the continuity of history. A miniature version of the iron bridge over the Severn spans one of the canals, leading to the lake, where a hermitage offers the chance for solitary contemplation. Grottoes built, like Piranesi dungeons, of large weatherworn stones and classical temples of Venus and Flora testify to the prince’s love of Italy and ancient Rome. There are echoes of Stourhead in the redbrick “English” Gothic facade of a country house, whose other side, in cream and white, is designed in the Italian Renaissance manner. A miniature of Sir William Hamilton’s villa in Naples stands next to the model Vesuvius. The main house is the first example in Germany of Palladian architecture. And then there is my favorite place: the “view of tolerance,”
Toleranzblick
. Standing back from a classical urn, your gaze is directed along a canal to a distant view of a late Gothic church steeple, standing next to a synagogue modeled after a Roman temple.

It is a moving vision, this mixture of classical, Renaissance, and Gothic styles, this English garden in the flatlands of eastern Germany, this Arcadia of Enlightenment. More “democratic” than most English estates, since anybody was allowed to enter through its unguarded borders, the Wörlitz park is more than a fantasy of England; it is a fantasy of Europe, for it is a German vision of an English vision of antiquity, based not only on Milton’s poetry and Rousseau’s ideas but on the classical landscape paintings of Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Strolling through this garden paradise is meant to be an emotional as well as an
intellectual experience. You reflect on art and nature while enjoying fits of melancholy, or joy, or whatever is appropriate to the genius of place—another concept popularized by Alexander Pope.

Goethe called Wörlitz the Elysian Fields. He wrote a letter about it to Charlotte von Stein. The words are carved on the wall of the Nympheum, a little Greek temple embedded in the mock ruin of an ancient wall. Goethe was touched by the way “the gods had allowed the princes to create a dream.” It was like a fairy tale, he added, of the purest loveliness. There is a poem by Auden in which he makes a distinction between Utopias and Arcadias: the former look toward the future, and the latter to the past. Both are dreams: the Arcadian past never existed, any more than the Utopian future ever will. There is an odd ambivalence, or even contradiction in the aristocratic dreamscapes of Wörlitz, or Stowe, or Muskau: they are progressive and nostalgic, liberal and conservative; they celebrate natural freedom, as well as natural order. If it is natural for man to be free, it is also natural for princes to rule, not absolutely, as in France, but liberally enough to accommodate ambitious new blood and retain their privileges.

Various images and memories came to me as I sat in the Nympheum, stamping my shoes to stay warm. I thought of Bernardo Bertolucci’s early movies, with their ambivalent mixture of faith in revolution and nostalgia for aristocratic style. I thought of a lunch party I once attended in London. There were several German guests with famous names, a Bismarck, a von Moltke, and I think a von Trott, all “good” liberal Germans, whose fathers and grandfathers had been opposed to Hitler. (Helmut von Moltke was executed for his role in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler; on her prison visits, his wife brought him packets of English tea.) One of these good liberal Germans, dressed in a beautifully cut English flannel suit, remarked—prompted by what?—that England was “really the only place one could still live.”

Above all I thought of my grandparents’ garden in Berkshire, my childhood Arcadia. My grandmother cultivated it with Germanic fastidiousness. She would agonize about the flower beds, and the trees, and the lawn. In letters she wrote to my grandfather during the first anxious year of the war, when he was abroad in the army, the state of their roses was discussed in much detail. I roamed in that garden with a heady sense of freedom. My grandparents’ garden, to me, stood for England, an ideal of England. To my grandparents, I think the garden
meant something more profound. Owning that patch of land meant they belonged. It was their piece of England. They, the children of German-Jewish immigrants, had domesticated it, made it their own. They could afford to laugh about the colonel down the road, in the twee little cottage past the old parish church, who said, when they first moved in: “Don’t like the name, don’t like the money.”

Domesticated landscape, privately owned: it is an idea of England that goes beyond my childhood idyll, or my grandparents’ sense of belonging. My great-grandfather Hermann Regensburg, who had come to London as a young man, liked to spend his holidays in his native Germany, where he would make straight for the Black Forest with his German friends. The untamed forest remained part of his idea of Germany. The English countryside is cultivated. Pückler found it “too cultivated, too complete, and so in the end wearisome.” Men cannot live with undisturbed bliss all the time, which, he said, “is perhaps why the dear Lord drove our ancestor Adam out of paradise so that he would not die of boredom in the place.”

Much land on the Continent was in private hands, but the noble ideal of country life, of owning property and cultivating the garden, however small, became a bourgeois ideal in England earlier and more intensely than anywhere else. If it was natural for my great-grandfather Hermann to return to the Black Forest, it seemed natural to my grandparents to cultivate their own bit of Berkshire. My childhood Arcadia was a bourgeois version of an eighteenth-century idea of “natural order.” So far as landownership is concerned, wrote Pückler in 1833, “England is at least a century ahead of us in the scale of civilization.”

W
HEN
P
ÜCKLER ARRIVED
in England in 1826, for his second and longest stay, the great garden-parks were less open to the public than was usual a hundred years before. Some parks of the early eighteenth century, set in vast estates, grown even vaster through enclosure acts, were designed to demonstrate the Roman grandeur of Whig grandees. Castle Howard was such a place, or Robert Walpole’s Houghton Hall, in Norfolk. Lesser gentry and landowners in opposition to the Whig establishment favored garden-parks that illustrated the ancient liberties
of country squires; hence, for instance, the Gothic temple at Stowe. Called the Temple of Liberty, it celebrated such fond icons of ancient English liberties as King Alfred and the Magna Carta. “Thank the Gods that I am not a Roman” is Viscount Cobham’s motto engraved above the temple door. But the division between Whig grandees and Tory gentry shrank. The real gap was between those who owned land and those who didn’t. Those who did liked to seal themselves off from what was often the source of their new wealth: the ugly sight of industry.

Riding outside London in August 1827, Pückler was attracted by a fine house and grounds. He dismounted and asked the porter whether he could take a look inside. After some hesitation, the porter let him in, whereupon a fat man appeared from the house, in a rage.
“Qui est-vous, monsieur?”
he shouted.
“Que cherchez-vous ici?”
Pückler apologized for his intrusion, mounted his horse, and rode off, laughing at the fat man madly shaking his fist. He later noted: “The anxiety with which the rich English shut up their property from the prying eyes of the stranger is sometimes truly amusing, but may occasionally be painful.” He later returned to the house and found to his dismay that the porter had been dismissed with his wife and children, after many years of service, for having allowed a stranger in without permission.