The German Genius

than once with George Eliot, who was no less fascinated, although her focus was the higher criticism of the biblical texts. This form of study was every bit as controversial in Britain as it was in Germany and accounted for much of the prejudice north of the Channel against Germans, the names that were particularly reviled in Britain being Strauss and Feuerbach. George Eliot, however, was a “freethinker” and this made her open to ideas from abroad and gave her the courage to translate Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846. She too thought that Britain couldn’t afford to ignore German developments.
    Not that she was blind to Germany’s shortcomings any more than was de Staël—she found the “ Gelehrten ,” the scholars of Weimar, “naively pompous.” And yet, in 1865 she published an article with the title “A Word for the Germans,” in which she conceded that Germans could at times be weighed down by a laborious, cumbrous writing style, but insisted: “If he is an experimenter, he will be thorough in his experiments; if he is a scholar he will be thorough in his researches. Accordingly no one in this day really studies any subject without having recourse to German books.” 13 No one, she concluded, could call himself an expert on anything until he had read what the Germans had to say. 14
    The pre-eminence of Germany had been the case for some time in education. Francke’s work, for example, attracted interest very early on, and charity schools were founded in Britain on the same principles as those at Halle. 15 A description of Halle and its system was published by Dr. Josiah Woodward, as Pietas Hallensis in 1705, and widely read in America too. Anthony Boehm, a graduate of Halle, opened a Francke-inspired school in Britain as early as 1701.
    As interest in German thought grew, an increasing number of boys were sent to Germany for language training, for which the demand was so great as to encourage L. H. Pfeil, father of Goethe’s secretary, to found a school dedicated to the purpose. In 1800 a dedicated periodical was founded for those interested in Germany. Called The German Museum or Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in General , it lasted for barely three years, but then some of its features were taken up by Blackwood’s Magazine . 16
    More important in the long run was Thomas Campbell’s idea that a University of London should be founded along the lines of the Universities of Berlin and Bonn, rather than on the Oxford or Cambridge model. When it was founded, the University of London had a chair of German right from the start, the professor being none other than Schleiermacher’s brother-in-law. German philologists occupied both the chair of Oriental languages and that of Hebrew. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, who became one of the University of London’s most substantial benefactors, and subsequently Britain’s first Jewish baronet, traveled to Bonn and Berlin to clarify his ideas about what a university should be. 17 Before the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge produced its report in 1850, Oxford had already made an attempt to become more “German” by introducing lay professors and a more practical examination system.
    Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, was the first man north of the Channel to acknowledge the value of philology. He recognized the advances being made in Prussia, going so far as to teach “his” boys German rather than French. After The German Museum had come and gone, a second periodical, The Philological Museum , started in 1831. This did better, becoming virtually a “parish magazine” for the Germanists. 18 Hardly less influential than Arnold was his great-nephew, Adolphus William Ward. He studied at Leipzig, caught what he called the “German fever” and, after he had gained the professorship of History and English Language and Literature at Owens College, Manchester (the future University of Manchester) in 1866, set about transforming it to a research-oriented German-style university.
    The most famous British academic of that time was John Emerich Edward Dalberg (later Lord) Acton (1834–1902). He had a German mother, and partly for this reason spent eight years studying under the historian Johann Döllinger at Munich. Acton became known for his survey in the English Historical Review of “The German Schools of History.” No less inspired by Germany was Florence Nightingale, who was much taken by