Not all travellers between England and Germany were quite so high-minded as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson.
The son of divorced parents whose marriage had brought together the neighbouring Saxon estates of Branitz and Bad Muskau, Prince Pückler was a good-hearted Lothario whose affectionate marriage in 1817 to Lucie von Pappenheim, a divorced woman nine years his senior, did not prevent the 32-year-old Prince from swiftly seducing his beloved ‘Schnucke’s’ adopted daughter. Lucie – as she always would be throughout all the coming years of their long-lived partnership – proved remarkably forgiving. A word with her father, the Prussian State Chancellor, resulted in Pückler’s rank being raised from a count to that of a prince; sadly, Chancellor Hardenberg had less luck in persuading the pious Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm to offer the dashing Pückler a lavish sinecure at the court of Berlin.
The princely title was welcome, but what Pückler needed was money. Funds were urgently required for the grandiose landscaping projects by which the Prince – ardently supported by Lucie –had begun to transform the estate that he had inherited from his father in 1811 into one of the glories of Europe.
The inspiration for Muskau had originally come from England. Back in 1814, Pückler and his garden director had followed in the footsteps of Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, undertaking a whirlwind investigative tour of the great English gardens created by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. By 1822, when Repton’s son arrived at Muskau to contribute a few such aristocratic touches as an enclosing fence, Pückler’s park had acquired a distinctly English look, its streams and paths designed to lead the stroller’s eye – as at Stourhead and Wilton – towards strategically placed statues or patches of colourful foliage. The addition of a thatched cottage (complete with resident hermit) paid playful homage to England’s Picturesque style; Pückler’s larger achievement was to create from dull terrain a lovely and varied landscape that betrayed no hint of a controlling eye.
Muskau’s park was beautiful; maintaining it was ruinous. The worried Prince cut his retinue in half and sold off his beloved English horses; Lucie’s failed attempt to create a fashionable spa (Muskau’s remote position kept the fashionable world away) was followed by the voluntary sale of her jewellery, and then her silver plate. The bills continued to mount.
In 1823, Lucie came up with a more radical solution: divorce, to be followed by her spouse’s speedy remarriage. True, her husband was now pushing thirty-nine and beginning to grey, but dye could be purchased. Pückler still possessed charm, height, elegance and a title: these attributes were surely enough – so Lucie schemed – for the Prince to ensnare a young woman who was both rich enough to pay their bills and tolerant enough to set up household with a new husband and his very tactful ex-wife.
The Prince, to his credit, was hesitant: he loved his ageing wife almost as much as his beloved park. In the end, however, he agreed that they had found no better alternative strategy. In January 1826, the Pücklers’ legal divorce was finalised. Eight months later, leaving the estate in Lucie’s capable hands, the Prince embarked upon his hunt for a golden bride.
With money as the prime objective, there was only one place to go. Twenty-two years of warfare had inflicted surprisingly little injury on England, an island with ready access to raw materials that could – with the help of a magnificent merchant navy – be imported from its colonies, processed (with the aid of sweated labour) at English-owned factories, refineries and mills, and exported at a handsome profit. English finance was booming, a fact that Prince Pückler’s genial London banker, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, was happy to demonstrate at his own dinner table, where he loved to show off the astonishing range of dress-uniforms required for his professional visits to the courts of Europe’s impoverished nobility.
As a venture into matrimonial enrichment, Pückler’s two-year sojourn in England ended in abject failure. The Prince had no real heart for his dubious mission; he preferred flirting with pretty young milliners to proposing marriage to the daughters of a prosperous fleet of merchants and mayors. Few British daughters would, in any event, have gained permission from their parents for such an improper match; divorce was a subject that the English still found shocking, while the suggestion of a ménage à trois, even if established in faraway lands, was beyond their worst nightmares.
On the other hand, as an open-minded traveller’s chance to experience and report back home (to the faithful Lucie) about the houses, monuments and strange habits of the English when at home, the Prince’s journey proved – with a few reservations – a resounding success. Fortunately for the future finances of Muskau and Branitz, Pückler was an assiduous and witty correspondent; his pleasure in writing shines out of every page of the book that would later make his name.
One of the great joys of Pückler as an historian is his candour. Mr Thomas Cooke’s celebrated (but entirely unnuanced) performance in the play adapted from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein left a cultured visitor as cold as the rowdiness of the English audiences. Shakespeare, performed in the age of Kean, Kemble and Macready, was another matter. Goethe was quite wrong, the Prince announced, to assert that Shakespeare was intended only to be read. His compatriot’s misfortune (in Pückler’s view) was never to have seen Shakespeare performed upon an English stage.
Off on tour, with Byron’s works tucked under his arm for company, the energetic Prince paid his respects to the ruins of Newstead Abbey and travelled on to Wordsworth’s Tintern. Henry VIII was praised, tongue-in-cheek, for adding such ravishing ruins to the landscape, while the great landowners of Wentworth Woodhouse and Petworth were scolded for swelling their funds by allowing cattle to graze right up to the windows of their elegant dining rooms. Such unimaginative use of private land, Pückler announced, was nearer to sacrilege than the destruction of monasteries by an angry Tudor king.
It was inspiring to stride through the chilly vacancies of a ruined abbey; Pückler, accustomed to the generous heat of German stoves, was less happy about the English habit of keeping their large homes at the same temperature as their drafty monuments. The coldness of country-house bedrooms was almost on a par, the Prince complained, with the peculiar behaviour of the English when at table. Why was it that he must always be placed so close to the sharp elbow of his hostess and so far from the soft bosoms of her pretty daughters? Why did an Englishman have to wait to catch another’s eye and initiate a toast before being allowed a second glass of wine? And why, after leaving the dining table, was it considered acceptable for one rude English youth to bury his nose in Madame de Staël’s book and speak to nobody, while he himself must work so hard to be unfalteringly amusing to society?
The Prince was a restive guest at the homes of England’s aristocracy. His favourite hostess came from an entirely different milieu.
Harriet Mellon was a plump and chatty ex-actress whose first marriage, to an elderly and enormously rich banker, Thomas Coutts, had been followed by a second, to the young and desperately poor Duke of St Albans. The widow (or her sacks of gold) had bewitched the youthful Duke while they were both staying with Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford in 1825; Scott, in turn, had a very soft spot for the loquacious Harriet.
And so it was that on one of the many nights that Prince Pückler dined at jolly Harriet’s Highgate home, he was thrilled to find that the Duchess (knowing how Scott loved all things Germanic) had placed Britain’s most celebrated author next to him at the table. The meeting was a huge success. Pückler told ghostly stories of the sort that Lucie loved to hear; Scott, an eager collector of German folktales, listened enthralled. The gentlemen’s conversation continued long enough after dinner for the Duchess to complete a sketch of Sir Walter’s worn but animated face. She posted the result to Pückler, a literary trophy for the finest of the four elegant scrapbooks he had recently purchased (no expense spared) from his compatriot Rudolph Ackermann’s smart new shop in the Strand.
Pückler failed to return home with the richly endowed wife who had been the object of his venture. An improvement in the Prince’s fortunes – as it turned out – would owe more to his loyal Lucie than to the improbable Lady Bountiful of their shared dreams.
In the summer of 1828, when Pückler had been away in England for almost two years, Lucie received a visit from Karl August Varnhagen (a close friend of Goethe’s), whose wife Rahel Levin (one of a new and sizeable group of Lutheran converts who had exchanged their Jewish faith for social acceptance) was among the most renowned literary hostesses in Berlin. The Varnhagens were enchanted, both by the glorious gardens and by Lucie’s doting stories of an absent husband. When the Princess read aloud from some of Pückler’s witty travel letters, Varnhagen insisted that they should be published. He even volunteered to act both as editor and publicist.
Letters from a Dead Man, as the German edition was cautiously presented, in order to protect the name of the garrulous – and still very much alive – Prince, came out in 1830. Garlanded with tributes from Varnhagen, Goethe and even the brilliant young Heinrich Heine, the book was an immediate success. In the words of Pückler’s most recent biographer, Peter Bowman, Letters from a Dead Man became ‘the publishing sensation of the decade’.1
A second and equally forceful boost to Pückler’s career came to him from England. Hearing about the success of the Letters in Germany (and doubtless remembering how well he had done from de Staël’s De l’Allemagne), John Murray was keen to publish an English translation. He was also anxious not to act without advice. When his chosen translator, Sarah Austin, disclosed that the Prince’s book poked fun at the English nobility, Murray recoiled. Mrs Austin, charmed by the book, tracked down a braver publisher.
Mrs Austin had her own reservations about Pückler’s letters. England, in 1831 (as the era of Romanticism ebbed), was growing primmer and the Prince’s book was being targeted at a Christmas market composed principally of female readers. Saucy jokes and stories of sexual encounters would not improve its sales. To Pückler’s disgust, Mrs Austin wrote to advise him that she had appointed herself as his sole censor.
Sarah Austin knew her audience. Tour of a German Prince, as it appeared in her judiciously amended four-volume translation, earned generous plaudits both for its author and for Austin herself. Objections to the Prince’s lack of reverence for the English nobility who had so graciously entertained him were drowned in praises for – in the words of the Westminster Review – ‘our friend, our warm-hearted, noble-minded, imaginative, though somewhat wayward, friend . . . we take as much pleasure in his letters, as if we had had the satisfaction of having them addressed solely to ourselves’.2
Translating Prince Pückler into English, Mrs Austin never suspected that the author she so admired had visited her homeland primarily to lay hands on a rich wife. Pückler, engaged in one of the epistolary flirtations at which he excelled, was not about to disillusion an adoring translator.
In 1831, Sarah Austin was a pretty, clever, lively woman in her late thirties. Her home life was not (she wished the Prince to know) satisfactory. (Mr Austin was a depressive hypochondriac, a quasi-Casaubon whose respected writings on legal philosophy were only to be published after his death.) When Pückler began to drop hints to Sarah that she had captured his heart, her response was prompt and ardent. She was not (so she told the Prince) strait-laced. Her energy was far beyond that of the average English woman; her figure – she was eager to assure him – was quite remarkable. Copious specifics followed on, almost in the form of a shopping list: broad shoulders; tiny waist; firm, round bosom; finely turned knees and ankles; a body (as Sarah enticingly stressed) of uncommon flexibility. Venturing further still, Mrs Austin informed the intrigued Prince that her hips ‘and all below them’ were handsome to the point of perfection. All of these delights, as she hinted with no delicacy at all, were currently in need of proper appreciation.3
Pückler’s letters to Mrs Austin have not survived, but, even without them, it’s clear that the Prince offered no discouragement to his bold translator. In the summer of 1832, Sarah blithely announced a new plan: she and her husband would move to Berlin. Here, she calculated, she would be close enough to pay regular visits to Muskau, where she would bear her splendid prince a child and live, embowered by roses, in his park’s thatched cottage.
In the event, it may have come as some relief to the besieged Pückler that John Austin stepped in at this critical juncture, to place a flat embargo on all foreign trips. Sarah’s hopes did not immediately diminish; time and an increasingly one-sided correspondence gradually whittled her last illusions away. When the longed-for first meeting with Pückler finally took place in Berlin in 1842, the occasion proved friendly rather than passionate.
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Pückler’s affections for Sarah Austin may have waned, but his attachment to her homeland remained undimmed. In Germany, he replicated the English style of country life. Travelling around Europe, he always took along a volume of Byron’s poems, a bottle of Harvey’s sauce and a tin of strong English mustard powder.
In 1851, Pückler finally made a return trip to London. This time, instead of courting rich girls, he came to inspect the Great Exhibition and the new Houses of Parliament. But it was a view of the gas-lit bridges arching above the bobbing lamps of shadowy river-craft along the Thames that reminded the nostalgic Prince of what it was that he had always found so charming about England, a country that had provided him with everything except a well-heeled second wife.
Lucie, greatly mourned by the husband whom she fondly addressed to the end as her dearest ‘Lou’, died in 1854. Her modest grave was marked by the Prince with the simple words: ‘I think of you in love.’ For himself, dying seventeen years later at the age of eighty-six, Pückler designed something entirely different.
The pyramid that marks the Prince’s grave can still be seen today. It forms part of the gardens of the Branitz estate that Pückler, paying homage to the England he so loved, had playfully renamed Bransom Hall.
England has not as yet returned the compliment to a remarkable man. The Tour is often rifled for snippets of social comment, but Pückler himself remains a bit of a joke, known chiefly as the inspirer of a comic battalion of fictitious moustache-twirlers, among whom the charming Count Smorltork holds first place in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836).
Elsewhere, the story is quite different. Hints on Landscape Gardening, published in 1834, together with fifty colour illustrations of Muskau, cemented Pückler’s reputation at home as Germany’s pre-eminent landscape architect. It also carried his name to the transcendalists in America. Respectfully visited during Pückler’s lifetime by Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller, Muskau later became a source of inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted. In 1906, Samuel Parsons (the man whose shaping eye contributed so much to New York’s Central Park), singled out Pückler’s genius for painting with nature as being in advance of anything in the world of landscape design that was being achieved in Europe or America at the opening of the twentieth century.
The last word about the man sometimes described as the Goethe of the landscape garden should go to Sarah Austin, whose dedication and sensitive translating skills first won a readership for Pückler outside his native Germany. Publishing, in 1854, a book called Germany from 1760–1814, or Sketches of German Life, Austin remarked that the Germans stand next only to the English as the greatest of travellers: ‘They have more knowledge, simpler habits, less arrogant nationality, and less intolerant prejudices, than any other people.’4
Mrs Austin’s thoughts as she wrote those words, it’s fair to guess, were not too far from her memories of the delightful Prince Hermann Pückler, lord of Muskau and Branitz.