Houston Stewart Chamberlain - Early Life

Early Life

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, and he was brought up by his grandmother in France.

Chamberlain's education began in a Lycée at Versailles and most of his education occurred 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. The young Chamberlain was "a compulsive dreamer" more interested in the arts than the military, and he developed a fondness for nature and a near-mystical sense of self. 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 At the age of fourteen he had to be withdrawn from school.

He then traveled 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), Graebe, Müller Argoviensis, Thury, Plantamour, and other professors. He studied systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body.

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 was immersed in philosophical writings, and became a Völkisch author, one of those who were concerned more with art, culture, civilisation and spirit than with quantitative physical distinctions between groups. This is evidenced by his huge treatise on Immanuel Kant with its comparisons. His knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche is demonstrated in that work (p. 183) and Foundations (p. 153n). By this time Chamberlain had met his first wife, the Prussian Anna Horst, whom he was to divorce in 1905.