by Jan Morris
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All over the Empire this trend towards the aloof and the grandiloquent was apparent. Government Houses, for example, became very grand indeed, however minuscule their colonies: for as a perceptive official memorandum put it, ‘the keeping up of an outward appearance of power will in many instances save the necessity of resort into the actual exercise of it’. The one at Hamilton in Bermuda had a Medici air: it was supposed indeed to have been originally designed for erection outside Florence, and stood among great groves of cedar-trees, crab-grass lawns and banana orchards as if a prince were indeed its occupant, instead of (more often than not) a superannuated and not very successful general. The one at Nassau in the Bahamas, on the other hand, aspired more towards Chatsworth or Woburn in manner, and actually had deer in its park, while the one at Hobart in Tasmania, set with turrets and flagstaffs against the mass of Mount Wellington, looked suggestively like Balmoral.2
Even the white settler colonies progressed with astonishing speed from the homely to the pretentious. Some lovely buildings had been erected out there in the earlier years of the century. There were the delectable country houses of Tasmania, built to a square simple Georgian of finely-dressed stone: rectory sort of buildings, Gainsborough buildings, with their big sash windows, their whitewashed dairies, the lovely oaks and elms transplanted with them from the English countryside, their verandahs incongruously roofed with corrugated iron, their tall chimneys aromatic with eucalyptus smoke. Or there were the stone farmhouses built by British settlers in the flank of the Little Karroo, along the coast from Cape Town—buildings so strong, so organic, so deep-shaded by trees and cosy with dry-stone walling, so exquisitely set in their hill-sides, that they might have been lifted stone by stone from Radnor or Brecknock, together with their pigs, sheep and leather buckets.1 And the handsomest small market towns of East Anglia could offer no happier architectural ensemble than the public square at St George’s in Bermuda, which was seventeenth century in origin, but had been discreetly embellished and preserved throughout the heyday of the sugar colonies: an authentic hole-in-corner English square, opening at one side to the harbour, and cluttered all about with wood-framed shuttered houses, open staircases and tall white chimneys—two comfortable old pubs, and the town pillory, and poking quaintly above the houses the tower of St Peter’s, 300 years old already, in whose shady churchyard the negroes sprawled and gossiped among the tombs sealed with whitewash, and from whose belfry on Sundays mellowed English bells summoned the expatriates to worship.
But this modesty of scale and demeanour had not survived. The early settlers knew their place in the comparative order of things, but your mid-century Australian or Canadian was limitless of pretension. The cities of the new British nations were urgently grandiose: ugly often, like Toronto, heavy sometimes like Melbourne and Auckland, but never diffident and seldom mean. Even the cramped terrace houses of Sydney, sprawling in their white thousands over the hills of Paddington or Balmain, possessed a certain air of ease, with their wrought-iron balconies and their voluptuous magnolias, while in fast-rising suburbs from Victoria to Ontario the new rich of the British Empire, flourishing on wool or diamonds, railway boom or ostrich feather fashions, built themselves mansions in the full amplitude of the Gothic orthodoxy.
Such new buildings offered no ideological lessons. They were no longer a projection of ideals, like the great white houses along Garden Reach at Calcutta, nor was there to them any suggestion of fantasy or transience. They expressed, like Darjeeling, more pride than purpose. We are here, they seemed to say, on top of the world: as though the dream of empire, scarcely yet formulated, had already in a sense been fulfilled. The Anglo-Indian bungalow had begun life modestly and racily as a Europeanized Bengali cottage—a stationary tent, as one Englishman suggested in 1801: but by the middle of the century it had become, with its wide verandahs, its gauze screens, its elaborate cooling devices and the servants thronged and squabbling through its out-buildings, more like a rich man’s retreat.
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For if some of the gaiety was leaving the Empire now, so was much of the easy amateurism. In art especially a new professionalism was apparent. The British Empire had never been short of artists: every possession, every campaign, had been meticulously recorded in a hundred sketch-books. There had always been professionals in the field, men like the Daniells or Zoffany who followed the flag specifically in search of subjects or commissions: but more notably, there had been an inexhaustible number of amateurs. Many were soldiers, especially engineers, who had learnt the elements of sketching as part of their military training, and whose pictures were touched up for them, or corrected, by professionals at home. Many were officers’ wives, among whose lady-like accomplishments water-colour painting was almost obligatory.
So the earlier years of Victoria’s empire were richly recorded. Often the pictures were fearfully inaccurate, sometimes as a result of the professional touching-up, sometimes because of lack of skill, sometimes because the artist over-responded to his stimuli, and saw the giant carved figures of the Elephanta Caves, say, or the rapids of the Winnipeg River, even bigger or more tumultuous than they really were. These distortions were, however, guileless. They were part of the prevailing dilettante charm, like the harmless exaggeration of a raconteur, or a memory that grows brighter with the years. By the 1850s a different kind of distortion was appearing. Now for the first time we see imperialist art. In the popular history books hack professionals portrayed the scenes of the Mutiny in a spirit of vicious caricature, while the generals or pro-consuls whose pictures appeared in the magazines began to look more than mortal. An unearthly aura seems to surround the imperial heroes in these commissioned portraits, and they stand in god-like poses on their hillocks, or battlements, or Parliamentary terraces, holding foam-flecked chargers, maps or Order Papers: their faces are invariably grim, they are often romantically cloaked or furred, and they seem to be looking out across veld or S.W.1, towards imperial hazards yet to be defied.
Even in the flesh, one sometimes feels, the imperial activists now moved pictorially. We read of an incident, for instance, during the siege of Lucknow, when the Nepali prince Jung Bahadur visited General Colin Campbell in his tent outside the city. A guard of kilted Highlanders greeted him, pipers stalked up and down, the guns of battle rumbled and shook the ground as the two men talked, and in the middle of the durbar, impeccably timed, a tall and handsome British officer, glamorous in fighting gear, entered the tent to report the capture of one of the main enemy strongholds—‘very little loss on our side, about 500 of the enemy killed!’ Or consider the British entry into Peking during the China War of 1856, when Lord Elgin arrived to express the Queen’s displeasure at the obstructive behaviour of the Chinese. Three miles up the highway to the House of Ceremonies the British majestically marched—General Sir Robert Napier in the van, Lord Elgin in a sumptuous sedan chair with another horseback general at his side, then 400 marching soldiers, and 100 sailors, and two bands—through the symbolic gates of the hall, through the ornamental gardens, up the cobbled way—and when, near the Grand Entrance, Prince Kung, attended by 500 mandarins, closed his hands before his face in submissive greeting, ‘Lord Elgin’, we are told, ‘returned him a proud contemptuous look, and merely bowed slightly, which must have made the blood run cold in the poor Prince’s veins’.
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One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down….
Yet the dream did not, by and large, much inspire the writers of England. They could not ignore the imperial crescendo, of course, and many had imperial connections of their own. Captain Marryat captured the Akyab Peninsula in the first Burmese War. Fanny Burney’s brother was first Resident of Arakan. Thomas Love Peacock worked at East India House. Thackeray was born in India. One of Dickens’ sons was in the Canadian police, another was buried in Calcutta. Sometimes they portrayed imperial characte
rs incidentally, as Thackeray immortalized the nabobs in the person of Colonel Newcome, and Dickens lampooned the evangelical imperialists in Mrs Jellyby. Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, all wrote around the imperial theme at one time or another, and by the nature of his office Tennyson, Poet Laureate through the High Victorian years, intermittently celebrated the Queen’s imperial dignity—
… Statesmen at her council met
Who knew the seasons when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet.
By shaping some august decree
Which kept her throne unshaken still,
Broad-based upon her people’s will,
And compassed by the inviolate sea.1
The best novels about imperial life were written by practitioners on the spot (most of the worst, too, especially those that made up the vast and painful corpus of Anglo-Indian romance). Meadows Taylor, for instance, was an Anglo-Indian whose book Confessions of a Thug was a memorable fictional reportage of the Sleeman campaign: while Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, which first exposed the horrors of the Tasmanian convict settlements, approached the stature of epic.1
But the giants of the day did not respond to the fact of British ascendancy in the world, the establishment of new Britains overseas, or the hardening imperial arrogance of the nation. No great literature came out of the Mutiny, one of the most extraordinary events in human history; nobody wrote the sagas of the imperial families, generation succeeding generation on the distant frontiers; to English men of letters the imperial story was only ancillary to greater themes at home, and even the wistful imperial tragedies of time, distance or disillusion, did not seem the stuff of art.
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Only the lapidary monuments of the Raj sometimes suggested this fragile sense of waste. Occasionally a tomb itself revealed it, like the little Ionic temple which, high above Grand Harbour at Malta, honoured the memory of Sir Alexander Ball, the first Governor—built of Malta’s soft golden stone, shaded by palms and hibiscuses, and looking so cool, so white, so small and poignant in that setting that it might have been a monument to homesickness itself. More often it was the inscription upon the tombs that could move the susceptible traveller. Comic sometimes, pathetic very often, sometimes pompous, sometimes innocent, they were like a communal text of the great adventure, chiselled on granite, sandstone or marble across half the world.
They could be caustic, like this tribute to a Governor of Bermuda:
To enumerate the many rare Virtues which shone united in the Governor of that little Spot were to tell how many great Talents and excellent Endowments are wanting in some, whom the Capriciousness of Fortune Exposes in a more elevated and Conspicuous station.
They could be melancholy, like this plaint from West Africa:
By foreign hands thy dying lips were closed,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
By foreign hands thy humble grace adorned,
By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned.
Often, especially after about 1850, they expressed with a stunning blandness the evangelical fatalism of the day, like that favourite epitaph for babies dying in the miseries of a tropic confinement or infancy—The Lard gave and the Lord batb taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord. This is the motto that Battery Sergeant Major J. Evans, Royal Artillery, chose for the grave of his little daughter, Minnie, aged 4½‚ buried at Malta in 1874: I’M GONE TO JESUS. WILL YOU COME!! And when they elected a memorial church upon the site of the entrenchment at Cawnpore, to honour the Britons so hideously slaughtered at the Ghat or in the Bibighar, they placed upon its wall a definitive text of imperial Christianity: The sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with all the glory which shall be revealed to us.
Sometimes epitaphs successfully translated the bravado of the imperial way—Abruptly Terminated by Assassins, as it said succinctly of somebody’s life on a brass in Lahore Cathedral. At Multan, for instance, the epitaph of two young administrators whose assassination in 1848 led to the final annexation of the Punjab began with the romantic declaration:
On this, the farthest frontier of the British Indian Empire,
which their deaths extended,
lie the remains of
PETER VANS AGNEW WILLIAM ANDERSON
of the and Lieut. 1st Bombay
Bengal Civil Service Fusilier Regt.
And hardly less vibrant was the tributary verse to General Sir Charles Fraser, V.C., in the Royal Garrison Church at Aldershot:
Wounded, helpless, sick, dismounted,
Charlie Fraser, well I knew
Come the worst I might have counted
Faithfully on you.1
The nearest to literary grandeur among the imperial epitaphs, perhaps, was achieved by Macaulay, who wrote the tribute to Lord William Bentinck inscribed upon his statue on the Maidan at Calcutta:
Who, placed at the head of a great Empire, never laid aside the simplicity and moderation of a private citizen…. Who infused into oriental despotism the spirit of British freedom…. Who never forgot that the end of Government is the welfare of the governed…. Who abolished cruel rites…. Who effaced humiliating distinctions…. Whose constant study it was to elevate the moral and intellectual character of the nation
And undoubtedly it was Walter Savage Landor, in the most famous imperial epitaph of all, who came nearest to capturing the frail sense of disillusion that haunted the British Empire even in its prime. Rose Aylmer was an almost legendary young Anglo-Welsh beauty with whom Landor had fallen in love at sight one day in the Swansea Circulating Library. She had been staying with an aunt in India‚ had died of dysentery, and had been buried in the Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, itself an imperial city of the dead, laid out in avenues of domes, obelisks and classical temples like an architectural display. Upon her tomb was inscribed the elegy which almost alone, among all the hundreds of thousands of imperial epitaphs, catches the heartbreaking loss of life and love which was so often the price of dominion:
Ah, what avails the sceptred race!
Ah, what the form divtne!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
She was 20 when she died so squalidly in Bengal—from earing too much fruit, we are told—and the poet survived her for sixty-four years.
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Let us end with the humblest of literary forms, the graffito. Every empire left its scratches. The Spanish conquistadores carved their names in exquisite calligraphy on desert rocks in New Mexico. The Romans cut theirs sacrilegiously upon the Colossi of Memnos. The British left the same such homely souvenirs across the world, wherever a ship put in, a company halted on the march, or an idle sentry doodled with his bayonet point in the night. At Muscat in the Persian Gulf, where the British claimed misty powers of suzerainty, a tall bluff above the harbour was daubed all over with the names of British warships, piquantly flaunted up there beside the fortress that represented the lost empire of the Portuguese. On the walls of the water catchment tank at English Harbour, in Antigua, Nelson himself had scratched the name of his ship, HMS Borealis, and the remains of his own name could still be seen, it was said, among the myriad Robinsons, Thomases and Williamses carved there in the limestone. On the ruins of Persepolis in Persia, that grand fragment of an older empire, generations of British imperialists had shamelessly carved their signatures: wandering diplomats and intelligence agents, soldiers scouting the approaches to India, unexplained adventurers, scholars taking the long road home. And in the Red Fort at Delhi, where the British Army now maintained a garrison of its own, many a redcoat had by now scratched his initials, his regiment and the homesick date upon Bahadur’s soft sandstone. Slightly sweaty we may imagine such a young man there, in his thick
serge and white-crusted webbing, his rifle propped against the wall, his helmet pushed to the back of his head, his tongue protruding slightly in concentration beneath his moustache: the bul-buls sing in the garden trees, a distant clamour sounds from the bazaar, a desultory murmur of Indian voices rises from some shadowy arch beneath his watchtower—until he hears the orderly sergeant approaching, with a stertorous clatter up the winding stone staircase, and hastily returning his bayonet to his scabbard, tilting his topee correctly above his eyes, he stands ready with his back to the parapet, in case those new-scratched letters in the old stone, with half a heart and a sweetheart’s crooked initials, should show up in the moonlight and betray him.1
1 Though Scott was not allowed to crown it, as he wished, with four gigantic female figures, one of them Britannia; other parts of his Gothic design, however, he was able to adopt for his later masterpiece, St Pancras Hotel.
1 Whose pattern, published by James Gibbs in his Book of Architecture, was reproduced not only in India, but in South Africa, Canada and Australia too: perhaps the last example was the Dutch Reformed Church at Cradock in South Africa, completed in 1867 nearly 150 years after the original conception.
1 Darjeeling remains much as it was, and the hill-towns of India, halfheartedly copied elsewhere, were to prove, I think, the only truly original socio-architectural conception of the British Empire—unless you count the bungalow.