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Houston Stewart Chamberlain (9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was an English-born German author of books on political philosophy, natural science and son-in-law of the German composer Richard Wagner; he is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a "racialist writer".〔http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32349〕 In December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death, Chamberlain married Wagner's daughter, Eva von Bülow (Cosima Wagner was still married to Hans von Bülow when Eva was born-her real father was Wagner). Chamberlain's two-volume book, ''Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts'' (''The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century''),〔 Electronic copy is available from the Hathi Trust Digital Library ((volume 1 )) and ((volume 2 )).〕 published in 1899, became one of the many references for the pan-Germanic movement of the early 20th century, and, later, of the ''völkisch'' antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. ==The Young Wanderer== Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in Southsea, Hampshire, England, the son of Rear Admiral William Charles Chamberlain, RN. His mother, Eliza Jane, daughter of Captain Basil Hall, RN, died before he was a year old; his grandmother brought him up in France. Chamberlain's education, begun in a ''lycée'' at Versailles, took place mostly on the Continent, but his father had planned a military career for his son and at the age of eleven he was sent to Cheltenham College, an English boarding school which produced many army and navy officers.〔Redesdale, Lord, "Introduction" to ''Foundations of the Nineteenth Century'', London, 4th English language impression, 1913, p. vi〕 Chamberlain grew up in a self-confident, optimistic Victorian atmosphere that celebrated the 19th century as the "Age of Progress"; a time of growing wealth, scientific discoveries, technological advances and democratic political reforms, a world that many Victorians only expected to get progressively better and better with Britain of course leading the way for the rest of the world.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 20-21〕 Chamberlain grew up as a Liberal, and shared the general values of 19th century British liberalism such as a faith in progress, of a world that could only get better, of the greatness of Britain as a liberal democratic and capitalist society.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 23 & 27.〕 The young Chamberlain was "a compulsive dreamer", more interested in the arts than in the military, and he developed a fondness for nature and a near-mystical sense of self.〔Mosse, George L. "Introduction to the 1968 Edition." ''Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.'' Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Vol. I. Trans. John Lees. New York: Howard Fertig inc., 1968, p. ix.〕 Chamberlain deeply disliked Cheltenham, and felt lonely and out of place there.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 24-25.〕 Chamberlain's major interests at Cheltenham were the natural sciences, especially astronomy.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 24.〕 Chamberlain later recalled: "The starlight exerted an indescribable influence on me. The stars seemed closer to me, more gentle, more worthy of trust, and more sympathetic-for that is the only word which describes my feelings-than any of the people around me in school. For the stars, I experienced true ''friendship''".〔 During his youth, Chamberlain-while not entirely rejecting at this point his liberalism-become influenced by the romantic conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution, which bemoaned the loss of "Merry Old England", a highly romanticized view of a mythic, bucolic period of English history that never existed with the people living happily in harmony with nature on the land overseen by a benevolent, cultured elite.〔 In this critique, the Industrial Revolution was seen as a disaster which forced people to live in dirty, overcrowded cities doing dehumanizing work in factories while society was dominated by a philistine, greedy middle class.〔 The prospect of serving as an officer in India or elsewhere in the British Empire held no attraction for him. In addition, he was a delicate child with poor health. At the age of fourteen he had to be withdrawn from school. After Cheltenham, Chamberlain always felt out of place in Britain, a society whose values Chamberlain felt were not his values, writing in 1876: “The fact may be regrettable but it remains a fact; I have become so completely un-English that the mere thought of England and the English makes me unhappy”.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 32〕 He then travelled to various spas around Europe, accompanied by a Prussian tutor, Herr Otto Kuntze, who taught him German and interested him in German culture and history. Chamberlain then went to Geneva, where he studied under Carl Vogt (a supporter of racial typology at the University of Geneva),〔Bramwell, A., ''Blood and Soil – Richard Walther Darré and Hitler's "Green Party"'', London, 1985, p. 206, ISBN 0-946041-33-4〕 Graebe, Müller Argoviensis, Thury, Plantamour, and other professors. He studied systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body.〔Redesdale, Lord, ''Foundations'' (1913), p. vi〕 Under the tutelage of Professor Julius von Wiesner of the University of Vienna, Chamberlain studied botany in Geneva, earning a Bacheliers en sciences (BSc) physiques et naturelles in 1881. His thesis, ''Recherches sur la sève ascendante'' (''Studies on rising sap''), was not finished until 1897〔published by Attinger Fréres at Neuchatel the same year〕 and did not culminate in a further qualification. The main thrust of Chamberlain's dissertation is that the vertical transport of fluids in vascular plants via xylem cannot be explained by the fluid mechanical theories of the time, but only by the existence of a "vital force" (''force vitale'') that is beyond the pale of physical measurement. He summarises his thesis in the Introduction: Physical arguments, in particular transpirational pull and root pressure, have since been shown to be adequate for explaining the ascent of sap.〔Melvin T. Tyree; Martin H. Zimmermann (2003). Xylem Structure and the Ascent of Sap, 2nd ed., Springer. ISBN 3-540-43354-6. recent update of the classic book on xylem transport by the late Martin Zimmermann〕 During his time in Geneva, Chamberlain who always despised Benjamin Disraeli came to hate his country more and more, accusing Disraeli of taking British life down to Chamberlain considered to be his extremely low level.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 353〕 During the early 1880s, Chamberlain was still a Liberal, "a man who approached issues from a firmly Gladstonian perspective and showed a marked antipathy to the philosophy and policies of British Conservatism".〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 78〕 Chamberlain often expressed his disgust with Disraeli, "...the man whom he blamed in large measure for the injection of selfish class interest and jingoism into British public life in the next decades."〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 80〕 In 1881, he wrote to his family in Britain, praising William Gladstone for introducing the Land Bill to bring in "fair rents' in Ireland and withdrawing from the Transvaal.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 78-80〕 An early sign of his anti-Semitism came in 1881 when he described the landlords in Ireland affected by the Land Bill as "blood-sucking Jews", through at this state of his life his anti-Semitic remarks were few and far between.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 79〕 Chamberlain was an early supporter of Hanns Hörbiger's ''Welteislehre'', the theory that most bodies in our solar system are covered with ice. Due in part to Chamberlain's advocacy, this became official cosmological dogma during the Third Reich. Chamberlain's attitude towards the natural sciences was somewhat ambivalent and contradictory – he later wrote: "one of the most fatal errors of our time is that which impels us to give too great weight to the so-called 'results' of science." Still, his scientific credentials were often cited by admirers to give weight to his political philosophy.〔 Chamberlain rejected Darwinism, evolution and social Darwinism and instead emphasised "gestalt" which he said derived from Goethe.〔See (Anne Harrington, ''Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler,'' (Princeton University Press: 1999) online p. 106 )〕 An ardent Francophile his youth, Chamberlain had a marked preference for speaking French over English.〔Buruma, Ian ''Anglopmania An European Love Affair'' London: Vintage Books, 2000 page 219.〕 It was only at the age of twenty three in November 1878, when he first heard the music of Richard Wagner-which struck him with all the force of a religious revelation-that Chamberlain become not only a Wagnerite, but an ardent Germanophile and Francophobe.〔〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 53-54〕 As he put later, it was then he realized the full "degeneracy" of the French culture that he had so admired compared to the greatness of the German culture that had produced Wagner, who Chamberlain viewed as one of the great geniuses of all time.〔 In the music of Wagner, Chamberlain finally found the mystical, life-affirming spiritual force that he been unsuccessfully seeking to find in British and French cultures.〔 Further increasing his love of Germany was that he had fallen in love with a German woman named Anna Horst, and she with him.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 33〕 As Chamberlain's wealthy, snobbish family back in Britain objected to him marrying the lower middleclass Horst under the grounds she was socially unsuitable for him, this further estranged him from Britain, a place whose people Chamberlain regarded as cold, unfeeling, callous and concerned only with money.〔 By contrast, Chamberlain regarded Germany as the romantic "land of love", a place whose people had human feelings like love, and whose culture was infused with a special spirituality that brought out the best in humanity.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 33-35〕 In 1883-1884, Chamberlain lived in Paris and worked as a stockbroker.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 41-43.〕 Chamberlain's attempts to play the Paris bourse ended in failure as he proved to be inept at business, and much of his hatred of capitalism stemmed from his time in Paris.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 43-44.〕 More happily for him, Chamberlain founded the first Wagner society in Paris and often contributed articles to the ''Revue Wagnérienne'', the first journal in France devoted to Wagner studies.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 60-62 & 64-67.〕 Together with his friend, the French writer Édouard Dujardin Chamberlain did much to introduce Wagner to the French, who until then had largely ignored Wagner's music.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 64.〕 Thereafter he settled at Dresden, where "he plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of Wagnerian music and philosophy, the metaphysical works of the Master probably exercising as strong an influence upon him as the musical dramas".〔 Chamberlain immersed himself in philosophical writings, and became a ''Völkisch'' author, one of those concerned more with a highly racist understanding of art, culture, civilisation and spirit than with quantitative physical distinctions between groups.〔Bramwell, A., ''Blood and Soil – Richard Walther Darré and Hitler's "Green Party"'', London, 1985, pps: 23 and 40, ISBN 0-946041-33-4〕 This is evidenced by his huge treatise on Immanuel Kant〔''Immanuel Kant. Die Persönlichkeit als Einführung in das Werk'', Bruckmann, 1905.〕 with its comparisons. His knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche is demonstrated in that work (p. 183) and in ''Foundations'' (p. 153n). It was during his time in Dresden that Chamberlain came to embrace ''völkisch'' thought through his study of Wagner, and 1884 onwards, anti-Semitic and racist statements become the norm within his letters to his family in Britain.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 83〕 In 1888, Chamberlain wrote to his family proclaiming his joy at the death of the Emperor Friedrich III, a strong opponent of anti-Semitism whom Chamberlain called a "Jewish liberal", and rejoining that his anti-Semitic son Wilhelm II was now on the throne.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 90.〕 June 1888 was an auspicious month for Chamberlain. Besides for the death of the "Jew-lover" Friedrich III, June 1888 also saw Chamberlain's first visit to the Wahnfried to meet Cosima Wagner, the reclusive leader of the Wagner cult.〔Biddiss, Michael "History as Destiny: Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain and Spengler" pages 73-100 from ''The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society'', Volume 7, 1997 page 80.〕 Chamberlain later recalled that Cosima Wagner had "electrified" him as he felt the "deepest love" for Wagner's widow while Wagner wrote to a friend that she felt a "great friendship" with Chamberlain "because of his outstanding learning and dignified character."〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 74.〕 Wagner came to regard Chamberlain as her surrogate son.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 75.〕 Under her influence, Chamberlain abandoned his previous belief that art was a separate entity from other fields and came to embrace the ''völkisch'' belief of the unity of race, art, nation and politics.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 75.〕 Saxony was a center of ''völkisch'' activity in the late 19th century, and in the elections to the Saxon ''Landtag'' in 1893, ''völkisch'' candidates won 6 out of the 16 seats.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 89.〕 Chamberlain's status as an immigrant to Germany always meant he was to a certain extent an outsider in his adopted country-a man who spoke fluent German, but always with an English accent. In a classic case of being ''plus royalistes que le roi'', Chamberlain tried very hard to be more German than the Germans, and it was his efforts to fit in that led him to ''völkisch'' politics.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 331〕 Likewise, his anti-Semitism allowed him to define himself as a German in opposition to a group that allegedly threatened all Germans, thereby allowing him to integrate better into the Wagnerian circles with whom he socialized with most of the time.〔 Chamberlain’s friend Hermann Keyserling later recalled that Chamberlain was an eccentric English “individualist” who “never saw Germany as it really is”, instead having an idealized, almost mythic view of Germany and the Germans.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 320.〕 This was especially the case as initially the German Wagnerites had rejected Chamberlain, telling him that only Germans could really understand Wagner, statements that very much hurt Chamberlain.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 58.〕 To compensate, Chamberlain become ''über deusche'', the man who wanted to be more German than the Germans. By this time Chamberlain had met his first wife, the Prussian Anna Horst, whom he would divorce in 1905 after 28 years of marriage.〔Shirer, William L. ''The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich'', 1959, p. 105 of 1985 Book Club Associates edition.〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Timeline 1855-1939 )〕 Chamberlain was an admirer of Richard Wagner, and wrote several commentaries on his works including ''Notes sur Lohengrin '' ("Notes on Lohengrin") (1892), an analysis of Wagner's drama (1892), and a biography (1895), emphasising in particular the heroic Teutonic aspects in the composer's works.〔 〕 Stewart Spencer, writing in ''Wagner Remembered'',〔London 2000〕 described Chamberlain's edition of Wagner letters as "one of the most egregious attempts in the history of musicology to misrepresent an artist by systematically censoring his correspondence." In particular, Wagner's lively sex life presented a problem for Chamberlain. Wagner had abandoned his first wife Minna, had an open affair with the married woman Mathilde Wesendonck and had started sleeping with his second wife Cosima where she was still married to her first husband.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 133〕 Chamberlain in his Wagner biography went to considerable lengths to distort the Master's love-life such as implying that Wagner's relationship with Cosima von Bülow only started after the death of her first husband.〔 During his time in Dresden, Chamberlain like many other ''völkisch'' activists became fascinated with Hindu mythology and legend, and learned Sanskrit in order to read the ancient Indian epics like the ''Vedas'' and the ''Upanishads'' in the original.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 page 304〕 In these stories about ancient Aryan heroes conquering the Indian subcontinent, Chamberlain found a very appealing world governed by a rigid caste system with social inferiors firmly locked into their place; full of larger-than-life Aryan gods and aristocratic heroes and a world that focused on the spiritual at the expense of the material.〔 Since by this time, historians, archeologists and linguists had all accepted that the Aryans ("light ones") of Hindu legend were an Indo-European people, Chamberlain had little trouble arguing that these Aryans were in fact Germanic peoples, and modern Germans had much to learn from Hinduism, stating "in the night of the inner life...the Indian...finds his way in the dark more surely than anyone".〔 For Chamberlain the Hindu texts offered a body of pure Aryan thought that made it possible to find the harmony of humanity and nature, which provided the unity of thought, purpose and action that provided the necessary spirituality for Aryan peoples to find true happiness in a world being destroyed by a soulless materialism.〔Field, Geoffrey ''The Evangelist of Race The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1981 pages 304-305〕 The popularity of the Hindu texts with the ''völkisch'' movement explains why the swastika, an ancient Indian symbol was adopted by the ''völkisch'' activists as one of their symbols. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Houston Stewart Chamberlain」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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