The German Genius

the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserworth near Düsseldorf, which trained teachers and nurses. It was her visit to the institute in 1850 that convinced her that nursing could be a profession, much more than menial employment. She returned the following year for training herself. 19
    The interest in German—and especially Prussian—education was growing in England (“Look at Germany” was a frequent mantra). In 1861, Mark Pattison, an Oxford don who had been the London Times correspondent in Berlin, was appointed to a commission that was asked to report on German schools. In the published document, he argued that the real bedrock of the German success story with its schools—which had now been in existence for half a century—was compulsory attendance; this was, he concluded, “a precious tradition.” Arnold himself, when he gave evidence to the Taunton Commission on Endowed Schools, also recommended German (and French) practices, his arguments proving so compelling that his report was later published separately as Higher Schools and Universities in Germany (1882). He advocated a much greater concentration on science, again as was true in Prussia. 20 Philology was still central, in the German way, and Max Müller, a German polymath whose knowledge of Sanskrit was such that the East India Company commissioned an edition of the Rig Veda, settled in Oxford. Despite all this, in 1860 Germany still had six times as many students per capita of the population than did Britain. 21
    B RITAIN’S G ERMAN R EAGENT
     
    Following the visit of Justus von Liebig, the biologist, to Britain, at the invitation of the British Association (see Chapter 13), two “outstations” of Giessen were founded: these were the Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1843 and the Royal College of Chemistry in 1845. Von Liebig’s advice was sought in regard to the presidency of the Royal College, and he recommended August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort, met Hofmann at Brühl on the Rhine and subsequently interceded with the king of Prussia to allow the chemist a leave of absence from the University of Bonn for two years. Hofmann stayed in Britain for more than a decade, and the various aspects of his multifarious career are considered later. 22
    “The most active German reagent in Britain from 1840 to 1859 was Prince Albert.” History has been kind to Albert. His great contribution, according to Hermione Hobhouse, was “to free the British monarchy from the Party allegiances which had hitherto been accepted, to pave the way for a constitutional model in which there was a place for Her Majesty’s Opposition as much as for Her Majesty’s Government.” 23 His most tangible monuments were the royal palaces which, we are apt to forget, were built or remodeled in his lifetime: Buckingham Palace, Balmoral Castle, Osborne on the Isle of Wight, and the farm buildings at Windsor Castle.
    Born in 1819 at the Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg, Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was the second son of Duke Ernest I, and grew up in a world with intimate links to British royalty. Queen Victoria was Albert’s cousin, her own mother, the Duchess of Kent, being Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg.
    Albert was an intelligent and above all interested consort, who did much to stimulate proliferation of the arts and sciences in Britain. He became known for his visits to the studios of living artists, persuaded the queen to be more practically involved in philanthropic matters, and was himself president of the British Association at the association’s meeting in Aberdeen in 1859, and chairman of the international conference on statistics (very close to his heart, for he had been tutored by M. Quetelet, one of the French founders of the subject) in 1860. It was the prince who suggested in 1855 that the entry to the diplomatic service should be by competitive examination, rather than by patronage, as was traditional. 24
    He was the most important figure in the British collecting world in the 1840s and 1850s, his taste enriching the National Gallery as well as the Royal Collections. Consulting Ludwig Gruner, an art expert from Dresden, among the works he acquired were Duccio’s Crucifixion , Fra Angelico’s St. Peter Martyr , and Lucas Cranach’s Apollo and Diana and Madonna and Child . Albert set in train several major studies of his favorite painter, Raphael, the intention being