BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

overgrown, decadent Goliath? This inversion of the imperial paradigm, which had formerly
placed England as the heroic underdog, now cast England as the “weary Titan, staggering under
the too-vast orb of his fate” or a “huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and
toes stretched in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.” 21
During the long interval before this conceptual “turning of the tables,” however, neo-classicism
and romanticism had allowed a reappraisal of antiquity and folklore that smoothed over
associations with paganism offensive to Christian sensibilities. Thenceforth, the rich repositories
of imagery supplied both by national myth and the classical model of empire would prove
serviceable to moralistic perspectives on the realities of nineteenth-century imperialism.
Comparisons with Antiquity
Appreciation of the splendors of ancient Greece and Rome in an age of imperialism often
led to identification with those ancient models of empire, a vantage point which placed Germany
historically in opposition to “civilization.” 22 In 1854 Kingsley’s Westward Ho! likened the
exploits of the sixteenth-century English sea dogs to those of the Greek heroes at Troy, Marathon
and Salamis. 23 The tendency to draw comparisons with the classical world led one anonymous
21 The statements made respectively by Joseph Chamberlain, while Colonial Secretary,
and Thomas Sanderson of the Foreign Office are quoted in Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German
Antagonism, 229.
22 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 288-91, has documented the infatuation with
Hellenic culture, especially an admiration for the Greek ideal of rounded self-development, in
writers like Matthew Arnold, J. A. Symonds and Walter Pater. While their ideas opposed John
Stuart Mill’s more Romantic conception of individuality, both schools recognized Goethe,
ironically, as a modern proponent of self-development. See also Richard Jenkyns, The
Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 331-34 on
Hellenism and empire.
23 Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!, chap. 1, 2-3, cited in Houghton, Victorian Frame of
118