Sándor Baumgarten,
Hope’s Forgotten Champion
Jerry Nolan
Le
Crepuscule neo-classique. Thomas Hope
(Paris: Didier, 1958), 272pp.
It was probably after reading
Anastasius that Sándor Baumgarten (1893-1970), the independent Hungarian
scholar, wanted to write the life of its author. At the beginning of his
research, Baumgarten read in the Literary Gazette (1831) that the paper
hoped that ‘some competent person will prepare and lay before the public an
ample account of the life, travels and writings of Mr. Hope, convinced as we are
that it would be peculiarly interesting to the literary, scientific and higher
circles of society.’ Quite early on in his researches, Baumgarten began to feel
that he had given himself a task which had been utterly neglected over four or
five generations. The challenge was not only to find some original Hope
documents but to develop his own skills to match the many interests of such a
widely travelled and knowledgeable man. The very extensive bibliography in
Baumgarten’s book displayed just how far and wide into primary and secondary
sources he ranged in search of Hope. There was much use made of published
correspondence, memoirs and contemporary criticism. One of the most notable
successes of the enterprise was the tracking down of Hope unpublished letters
in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Bibliothèque of Geneva, the
Bibliothèque Municipale of Bassano del Grappa, the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris and the Bibliothèque Royale in Copenhagen. The sheer paucity of primary
sources led Baumgarten to think that many things which could have facilitated
his research must have been either stupidly or wickedly destroyed. Baumgarten’s
suspicion fell on members of Hope’s family, probably his grandson, who might
well have suppressed the evidence for their father’s dissenting voice in order
to protect their own exalted ambitious plans to rise high in British society,
and this suspicion turned into full scale conviction as the researcher began to
piece together his own portrait of Hope by means of the study of the published
writings and of reactions from his contemporaries. Baumgarten’s stroke of genius
was that he structured his book in such a way that the attentive reader is put
into pole position to observe Hope in a series of double-roles which reveal the
dialectical rhythms of his experiences.
Banker and Aesthete
Baumgarten studies Hope’s
self-understanding as a member of one of the great banking families at the time
by highlighting Hope’s published account of his childhood love of architectural
drawing when other children were concentrating on more or less correct
reproductions of familiar images such as flowers and landscapes. Later in life
Hope copied engravings of many places including the ruined sites in Asia Minor
and went on to draw much of what he saw on his Grand Tour of the Orient.
Baumgarten discusses dilettantism as an element in his character but shifts the
emphasis onto Hope’s efforts to admit the wider public to his house in Duchess
Street, London where they could admire and learn from the display there of great
art from many cultures. In Baumgarten’s view, Hope believed that works of art
belong also to the community and should never be ‘at home in churlish cabinets
concealed’. Baumgarten tells the story of how Hope’s wealth was used as a patron
and draws special attention to the case of the Danish sculptor Bertel
Thorvaldsen (who was born in Iceland) whom he rescued during a visit to Rome in March 1803 on the very day
the sculptor, who had run out of money, was about to be expelled by the police
of the Vatican State. Hope was to play Maecenas to the ever grateful sculptor.
Neo-Classicist and Transculturalist
In his view of Hope as neo-classicist,
Bamgarten reveals his own considerable hostility to the tendency of associating
Hope too closely with the spread of neo-classical taste in design during the
Regency period. Baumgarten’s opposition to neo-classicism is implied in the
book’s title. For him, neo-classicism was the new intolerant religion favoured
by those Enlightenment enthusiasts who, in order to become Greek and Roman
again, seemed determined if necessary to disenfranchise themselves from
everything else. Hope is criticized for his involvement in some of the ephemeral
reviews of the neo-classical movement which, according to Baumgarten, were read
by the devotees with as much fervour as diocesan bulletins were consumed by the
Christian party faithful. These devotees went on rather quickly to imitate the
Christian religion further by exposing heretics and turncoats among the
themselves and by opposing Christianity itself when each Doric column erected in
Edinburgh or on the lands of the Northern Semiramis was seen as a challenge to
the Kirk or Orthodoxy. Unfortunately Baumgarten does not pause in this tirade
long enough to seek the explanation of how Hope managed to be
simultaneously neo-classicist in some areas and cross-culturalist overall.
More attention to details included in Hope long review of world cultures in his
Essay on Man would have helped on this point. However what Baumgarten
does manage to do is to rescue Hope from being captured as their prisoner, then
or afterwards, by the neo-classical aesthetes.
Christian and World Philosopher
Baumgarten refers to Essay on Man
when he quotes the opinion on the book by Thomas Carlyle who had praised and
recommended Anastasius. Carlyle dismissed the book as ‘this monstrous
anomaly, where all sciences are heaped and huddled together and the principles
of all are, with a childlike innocence, plied hither and thither…
a general agglomerate of all facts, notions, whims and
observations as they lie in the brain of an English gentleman.’ Baumgarten
confesses to feeling attracted to Hope’s sense of wonder before the universe
which surely must stretch far beyond the stretch of Christian thought when the
realization dawns that human beings on this globe are running around on a
miniscule part of the prodigious universe – so prodigious that no human should
pretend to be certain about its curvature. For Baumgarten, Hope seemed to be on
a path which was to lead to the development of scientific knowledge – ahead of
Einstein, in fact! Baumgarten lacked the philosophical knowledge to examine in
depth Hope’s suggestions for the way forward in science, but he was determined
to encourage his readers to begin to think like Hope and move beyond the limits
set by Carlyle.
Family Man and Angry Rebel
One of Baumgarten’s most striking
conclusions is that Thomas Hope was so little understood and appreciated by his
wife and sons. Samuel Rogers’s opinion is quoted on the trials and tribulations
of the ‘poet-banker’ whom Baumgarten readily identifies as Hope: ‘He has a wife
who inflicts on him each season two or three immense evening parties. During one
of them, totally lost, with his elbows on the mantelpiece, he was accosted by a
gentleman who said to him, “Sire, as neither you nor I know anyone here, the
best would be, I believe, to go home.’ Baumgarten argues that one of the reasons
why Hope remained a social outsider was that English society never forgot and
forgave him for his non-English origins. Baumgarten is highly sceptical about
the role of Hope’s eldest son Henry Thomas in the posthumous publication of
Essay on the History of Architecture posthumously in 1835, when only part of
the work was ever published and believes that the most interesting and
revelatory pages, those which best characterized their author, never saw the
light of day and must have been disposed of by somebody nearby. Commenting on
the final Hope sale at Christie’s in 1917 of the heirlooms inherited down the
family line from Hope’s eldest son Henry Thomas, Baumgarten’s scorn is obvious:
‘One can understand: why force a great grandson to lug after himself all this
bric-a-brac, all this past? Over there the war was pushing up the prices of
works of art; we forgive…’ Baumgarten viewed with scepticism the testimony of
Irene Law in The Book of the Beresford Hopes (1928) where her great
admiration for her grandfather Alexander J. B. Beresford Hope led her towards
the belittlement of the achievements of her great-grandfather Thomas. Baumgarten
warms to one of Hope’s cries of social rebellion in Essay on Man – now at
last the man can talk freely! - by quoting from a passage about the unjust
leisure class who consume their fortune in ‘an empty, sterile and hollow
ostentation, keeping up a stupid pomp.’
The Bombshell of Anastasius
Chapter XI ‘Un Don Juan en Prose’ (pp.
164-206) is the tour de force of the book. Marshalling a vast range of
sources, Baumgarten quite brilliantly recreates the sensational drama which
happened in Regency society among the Whigs and the Tories when this bombshell
of a novel was lobbed into the public domain. Baumgarten gives a remarkably
balanced account of supporters and opponents, many of them strident, by quoting
chapter and verse across the vigorously expressed divisions. The ongoing
editions, translations and sales of the book at the time confirmed the enormous
impact on the many who read the account of Anastasius, the world traveller. The
chapter’s title has misled some critics to jump to the conclusion that
Baumgarten is taking the story of Anastasius to be a variation on the legend of
Don Juan. Actually Baumgarten is drawing attention to the original nature and
instant fame of Byron’s Don Juan because Byron was giving to the old legend a
highly original angle by using the adventures of a vulnerable Don Juan as
a vehicle for a biting satirical view of the unquestioned orthodoxies of
contemporary society, so, like Byron, Hope was confronting the public with
unpalatable truths about the drift of civilization. Baumgarten concludes by
deeply regretting the fact that while Byron’s unfinished work continued to
challenge generations of readers, Hope’s completed work with its perennial
message for humanity too quickly became one of yesterday’s irrelevant works.
Two Reviews of Baumgarten’s Hope
There were two significant reviews of
Baumgarten’s book about Hope published in England. David Irwin in The
Burlington Magazine, December 1959 complained about Baumgarten’s inadequate
analysis of Hope’s attitude to Greek antiquity in general and to Hope’s own
acquisition of Greek art in Italy. Irwin went on to regret that Baumgarten
failed to discuss thoroughly Hope’s eclecticism especially as Hope, in his book
about furniture in 1807, used illustrations based on classical, Egyptian and
Oriental sources to show his aesthetic preferences. Another question left
unanswered by Baumgarten, in Irwin’s view, was the nature of the eclecticism as
shown in the portrait by Beechey when Hope had himself painted in Turkish dress.
Douglas Dakin, in The Modern Language Review January 1960, described the
book as a scholarly monograph. Dakin sympathized with Baumgarten’s problems
caused by the chronic unavailability of primary sources and expressed deep
regret that Hope had never found a Boswell. Dakin’s response to Hope’s Essay
on Man was positive: ‘Hope, the former dilettante whose classicism had been
a religion and perhaps an escape, endeavoured to come to grips with life in all
its aspects and to understand nature.’ What Dakin liked most in Baumgarten’s
book was the way in which he ‘skilfully builds up the picture of Hope growing
older in the changing environment’. Dakin concluded by recommending that the
book would be extremely valuable in an English translation. Irwin’s concerns
were addressed by David Watkin in his 1968 book Thomas Hope and the
Neo-Classical Idea. Dakin’s concerns have never really been addressed – most
significantly, an English translation of his book has never appeared. Neither
Irwin nor Dakin showed much enthusiasm for a re-launch of Anastasius but
Dakin referred to the work – in passing – as ‘brilliant’.
Hope for Baumgarten
This publication of The Long Riders’
Guild Anastasius fulfils Baumgarten’s dream of the long awaited
resurrection from the dead of the work by Hope which he championed most
passionately. Already the LRG is planning to republish Baumgarten’s book about
Hope in that long awaited English translation because – for all its hectic pace
of researching, strong personal opinions, inevitable gaps, minor inaccuracies,
inaccurate details, hasty final proof-reading – Le Crépuscule
néo-classique:.Thomas Hope is a work to treasure not only for its many
insights into a complex Regency figure, whose range of achievements tends
to elude cultural historians, but also as a prime example of a scholar’s
romantic travelling across countries in person and in imagination to find out
more about a kindred spirit!
