Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [23]
No one was more useful as a magnet of other nations’ animosities than that catalyst of his epoch, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Forever spoiling to emphasize his own and his country’s importance, to play a role, to strike a pose, to twist the course of history, he never overlooked an opportunity. He hankered to be influential and usually was.
On December 29, 1895, the long-standing conflict between the Boer Republic of the Transvaal and the British of the Cape Colony was broken open by the Jameson Raid. Nominally under British suzerainty but virtually independent, the Boer Republic was a block in the march of British red down the length of Africa and an oppressor of the Uitlanders within its borders. These were British and other foreigners who, drawn by gold, had flocked to, and settled in, the Transvaal until they now outnumbered the Boers, but were kept by them without suffrage and other civil rights, and were seething with grievances. Inspired by imperialism’s impatient genius, Cecil Rhodes, Dr. Jameson led six hundred horsemen over the border with intent to bring about an uprising of the Uitlanders, overthrow the Boer government and bring the South African Republic under British control. His troop was surrounded and captured within three days, but his mission released a train of events that was to take full effect four years later.
For the moment it provided the ever alert Kaiser with an opening. He telegraphed congratulations to President Kruger of the Boer Republic on his success in repelling the invaders “without appealing to the help of friendly powers.” The implication that such help would be available on future request was clear. Instantly, every British gaze, like spectators’ heads at a tennis match, turned from America to Germany, and British wrath was diverted from President Cleveland, always unlikely in the role of menace, to the Kaiser, who played it so much more suitably. In helping to bring on the ultimate encirclement that he most dreaded, the Kruger telegram was one of the Kaiser’s most effective efforts. It revealed a hostility that startled the British. From that moment the possibility that isolation might prove more hazardous than splendid began to trouble the minds of their policy-makers.
The year 1895 was prolific of shocks, and one that shook society unpleasantly occurred two months before the Conservatives took office. The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, for acts of gross indecency between males, destroyed both a brilliant man of letters and the mood of decadence he symbolized.
The presumption of decay had been heavily reinforced two years earlier by Max Nordau in a widely discussed book called Degeneration. Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria he traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woollen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”
Wilde, conforming to the duty of a decadent, was already engaged in destroying himself. In his role