Anglomania by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma [Buruma, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82896-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

THIS WAS NOT the way Coubertin chose to read Taine. He was bowled over by Notes on England. In his excitement, he ignored the negative impressions described in the book and was instead fired up by the enthusiasms, especially in the chapter on education. He read Taine’s book as a blueprint for social action. Here, at last, was the perfect explanation for the “superior power of the Anglo-Saxon world”: an education system that produced masters instead of slaves. Through Dr. Arnold’s reforms the British had achieved nothing less than a moral revolution, bloodless, without Jacobins and riots. The English gentleman was made fit to govern by la pédagogie sportive, which developed both body and mind, in the spirit of ancient Greece. Taine was quite right to compare English sportsmen to Greek athletes. His only mistake, in Coubertin’s opinion, was to have underrated the importance of sports. For sport, surely, was the key to everything: moral, physical, and even political. Now Coubertin could see the great task ahead of him: he would launch a similar revolution in France. The humiliation of the French defeat at Sedan would be washed away by “the moral armament of education.” The example of Tom Brown would make French manhood rise again. And Coubertin would use his family fortune to found a new order of sporting knights, tilting their oars and cricket bats against the decadence of France.

Unlike Taine, Coubertin saw absolutely no reason why Dr. Arnold’s revolution could not be duplicated elsewhere. So he traveled to England many times in a very different frame of mind—not as a student of national character but as a man with a mission. Rugby School would be a model, not a mere object of anthropological study. His first stop, in 1883, on the way to Dr. Arnold’s tomb, was a Jesuit college near Windsor, to visit a Polish friend. A Jesuit establishment would not have been at the top of his list, but he was reassured by his friend that “the English Jesuits are more English than Jesuit.” And so it turned out. Coubertin was particularly pleased to see that the school magazine was filled with the results of cricket matches and swimming contests.

Coubertin had promised his parents he would frequent only the best houses in England and not be dragged down by that nation’s notorious Protestant boorishness. He paid his respects to the count of Paris, the “legitimate” pretender to the French throne, residing at Sheen House, and was introduced into London society, whose habits he described rather well. The round of dinner parties was endless, the conversation invariably stilted, and the women he found dull. But he adored the pomp and spectacle that the Victorians devised as expressions of British Heritage. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, for example, which he attended in 1887, was marvelous. The presence of the queen of Hawaii amused him greatly. The color of her skin, he observed, was bound to cause a certain amount of commotion. It was difficult enough, he said, to get English people to stand up for this exotic sovereign.

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