Monday, 24 May, is Victoria Day in Canada. A proper time to reflect on the lasting influence of the Empress of India on our present times. And this year it coincides with the publication of a wonderful new book analyzing the continual fascination for Imperial Britain and the code of the 19th Century English Gentleman by Ian Buruma. It is titled "Anglomania: A European Love Affair" in the American version, and "Voltaire's Coconuts: Anglomania in Europe" in the British (recalling Churchill's quip that the two nations are divided by a common language).
It is uncanny how Buruma's book deals with so many of my own personal interests. For example, I am a member of the Voltaire Society of America.
And Buruma begins with a discussion of Voltaire's love of liberty and tolerance, and argues that it was based on a desire to transplant British institutions to other climes. These British ideas would be like coconuts, which are carried by the seas to different lands, and can be transplanted to various landscapes. True, in some places they might need hothouses, but with proper attention, the coconuts might bloom across the globe. Rule by reason, the common law, and a monarchy limited by parliament, were seen as triumphs for mankind which should spread as the light of reason itself illuminated the dark ages which had previously shrouded Europe.
Buruma visits Voltaire's home in Ferney, a shrine to liberty, and recounts how the sage of Ferney placed his hand on the head of Benjamin Franklin's grandson and blessed him with the words "God and Liberty." He visits a German garden designed on the English model by Herr Pickle and recalls German productions of Shakespeare where "Laughter is Forbidden!" We are treated to the political revolutionaries who made London their home: Marx, Mazzini, and others like Herzl who modeled their ideal states on England.
This love of things British, this Anglomania, is not an irrational passion. Rather it is the love of liberty, reason, and common sense that motivates the Anglophile. For in contrast with the continent, torn by oppression, passion, and ideological extremism, the British approach of muddling through has its charms. What the British lack in German thoroughness, or French zeal, they make up in the ability to survive and adapt to a changing world while their traditions remain: decent, solid, middle-class citizens. A little dull perhaps, but with the sectuirty which dullness brings.
If Princess Di reflected the desire for the English of today to become California Girls -- nightclubbing, exercising, psychobabbling -- then it is up to the Buruma's of the world to remind the British why they were beloved for the code of the English gentleman. At its Best, this tradition gives us moments like Prime Minister Tony Blair's reading at Princess Di's funeral.
But the tradition is not without its shortcomings, as Buruma reminds the reader in his account of the xenophobia, insularity and pig-headed drunkenness of a Spectator magazine dinner party that reads like P.G. Wodehouse describing the Drones Club.
For the Britain that the world loves is, of course, only one side of a multi-faceted land. It is the public face of Britain, of well-behaved public school boys (well-caned into good behavior) bringing fair play, railroads, and sanitation to far-flung colonies. It is not the other Britian, as old as the Vikings who settled York -- rapacious, cruel, domineering, and aggressive -- that Buruma or anyone else wishes to see.
Except the British themselves.
For it became apparent on a recent trip to England that the "Ugly Englishman" may well have replaced the Ugly American. Perhaps it was that Britishers got the wrong idea from watching Dallas. To Americans, J.R. Ewing was a sly joke. To many English, just coming out of post-war austerity, he was a role model.
Result: As Americans seek to become more civil, polite and well-behaved, the British attempt to act like Americans of their imagination: loud, vulgar, aggressive. Sitting in an Indian restaurant near Sloane Square one evening, this mild-mannered American was shocked to hear a torrent of profanity gush forth from the mouths of two well-dressed Sloane Ranger-types. Their very public behavior made Howard Stern look restrained.
If the British lose the qualities that made being British synonymous with good manners, and degenerate into a nation of J.R. Ewings and football hooligans, they will lose the admiration of millions of Anglophiles and Anglomanes around the world -- perhaps the very people who value tolerance, education and understanding.
Without its "class," Britain is just a small island with a nice landscape bobbing off the coast of Europe.
Alistair Cooke's Letter From America (BBC)