BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

writer to reason that hilly, coastal England spawned an active, Athenian-like race of busy traders
while flat, dull, inland Germany produced conservative, Spartan agriculturalists. The analogy
inferred British cultural superiority and portended inevitable conflict. 24 Although patriotic
writers extolled a British affiliation with Greek heroism and commercial acumen, the
Roman/British capacity for empire building and administration became a more significant point
of resemblance. 25 In some cases neo-Romanism implied a repudiation of the Greek ideal which,
in the realm of intellectual cultivation, befit the Germans only too well. Frederic Harrison wrote
in 1871:
Mind, 324.
In their later ages the Greeks, with their matchless mental gifts, were of almost no
account as a nation; whilst the Romans, in cultivation far their inferiors, were foremost by
the ascendancy of their national genius. The real strength of a nation, especially in these
days, consists not in its achievements in science or art, but in the degree to which its
national will can command the sympathies and give shape to the wants of the age. 26
Placed in the midst of an alarmist polemic for an interventionist policy against Germany
during the siege of Paris at the close of the Franco-Prussian war, Harrison’s paean to Rome deftly
assuaged British imperial pride while paying tribute to the undeniable achievements of German
24 See “French, Germans and English,” British Quarterly Review 13 (February 1851): 348.
25 Even the greatest of Germanophiles, Thomas Carlyle, had called the English a “dumb
people” because, “Like the Old Romans, and some few others, their Epic Poem is written on the
Earth’s surface.” But he also warned of the “Berserkir-rage” caged up within the breasts of these
“silent” descendants of the ancient Teutons. See Carlyle’s Past and Present (London: Chapman
& Hall, 1843) chap. 5, “The English,” quoted in English Prose of the Victorian Era, ed. Charles
Frederick Harrold and William D. Templeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 224,
228.
26 “The Duty of England,” Fortnightly Review 9 n.s. (February 1871): 145-66, reprinted in
Frederic Harrison, National and Social Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 60.
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