Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  There was a coarseness to the New Imperialism which repelled many Englishmen. In its early days, beneath the magic touch of Disraeli, it had seemed an oriental fabric, tinged with chinoiserie and Hindu fable, scented with the incense that appealed to the generation of the Oxford Movement, and tasselled like a Liberty sofa-cover. Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold had all, at one time or another, celebrated the grandeur or the burden of Empire in language of moving nobility, while graceful fancies brought home from the East added spice to English design, like the gay bubble-domes of the Brighton Pavilion or the hospitable stone pineapples on the gateposts of country houses. By the nineties, though, the imperial idea had been vulgarized—adopted by the Penny Press, and loudly painted over. Barbaric Africa was the stadium of Empire now, all was more brutal or more seamy than it used to appear, and aesthetically the movement was running to excess, too noisy, too garish, too grandiose. British imperialism had lost its old air of amateur superiority, and was indeed actually engaged in competition with upstart foreign rivals: it was hard to reconcile the idea of Thermopylae, white-jerkined heroes upon a sun-scoured pass, with all the bands and blarney of the Jubilee, or even with Kitchener’s armies labouring with desperate caution and at excessive expense up the Nile. Most of the best artists boggled at the theme, finding it irrelevant to their passions, and of those gifted men who seized upon it only one or two worked its mass of material into lasting art.

  2

  No English Delacroix arose, to celebrate in swirls of crimson the arrogant pageantry of Governors or Frontier Guides. No Turner painted the Punjab Mail running through Rajputana, or the ships of Empire hull-down at Kantara. No bitter genius looked behind Kitchener’s moustache, as Goya had looked into the eyes of Wellington. There were few ferocious cartoonists to rip away the shams of Empire: Punch seldom went further than gentle chaff, and Max Beerbohm’s mock-Britannia was really rather attractive. What one might call the Imperialist School of painting consisted chiefly of respectful portrait painters, delineators of official ceremonial and water-colourists of pleasant nostalgia.

  Only one memorable painter responded absolutely to the heroic theme: Lady Butler, wife of an Anglo-Irish general and sister of Alice Meynell the poet. Elizabeth Butler, née Thompson, was said to have acquired her taste for military subjects at a blow, like a revelation, after watching some army manoeuvres in 1872: but her husband must have infected her with an almost complete range of military emotions. A Catholic from Tipperary, he served in India, Burma, the Channel Islands—went to Canada for the Fenian fighting, to West Africa for the Ashanti wars, to South Africa for the Zulu wars, to Egypt for Tel-el-Kebir, to the Sudan with Wolseley—was the author of Akim-Foo: the History of a Failure, and thought the Gordon relief expedition ‘the very first war during the Victorian era in which the object was entirely worthy and noble’. Out of it all he emerged an intuitive sympathizer with rebel nationalists all over the Empire.

  This stormy soldier was Lady Butler’s devoted companion for more than thirty years, but while his mind moved ever farther away from the principles of the New Imperialism, her art was trapped in a convention of military pride. She became suddenly famous in 1874 with a picture called The Roll Call‚ which Queen Victoria acquired, and thereafter she was rigidly typed as a painter of war. She was easily the Army’s favourite artist, because she always got the uniforms right, and the great public loved her work because it so faithfully expressed the British mystique of splendour in misfortune. Even her titles were perfect: The Remnants of An Army, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, Steady the Drums and Fifes. In sitting-rooms up and down the land, in club smoking-rooms from tropic to tundra, engravings of Lady Butler’s pictures prominently hung. ‘Floreat Etona’‚an apotheosis of subaltern courage, was in every other boy’s room at Eton, and Ruskin declared Quatre Bras to be ‘the first fine pre-Raphaelite picture of battle that we have had’. Perhaps the most celebrated of all her works was The Survivor, which portrayed the solitary Dr Brydon, the only man to escape from the massacre of the British in Afghanistan in 1838, hacking back to Jellalabad on his emaciated pony. It was, to most British minds, a scene at once tragic and stirring, especially as they knew that ‘Bobs’ would later revenge it: but one wonders how General Butler felt about this immortalization of a campaign which, of all the colonial wars the British fought, was perhaps the least justified.1

  3

  Few other professional painters made the Empire either their subject or their market, though the amateurs were always prolific, husbands and wives alike setting up their easels and dashing off a landscape at the drop of a topee—the Simla Fine Arts exhibition was one of the great events of the Indian season.

  In the self-governing colonies professional art had a difficult time of it, because nothing local was considered worthy of a gentleman’s house, and the best drawing-rooms were always decorated with the burns, allegories and battle-scenes of genuine Royal Academicians, imported at vast cost from England. In the art schools of cities like Melbourne, Cape Town and Toronto the safest orthodoxies of the day were assiduously passed on to young colonials, often by instructors from London. When rebels did arise, like the ‘Heidelberg’ painters of Australia, who looked at their country in an altogether new way in the late 1880s—when painters did break away from the norm, they generally returned to it soon enough, and ended up as fashionable nonentities painting flattering portraits of magnates’ wives.

  Sometimes professionals went out to try their luck in India, directly commissioned like Val Prinsep, or on speculative ventures. There was, in fact, a recognizable Anglo-Indian School—landscape and portrait art in which the robust frankness of the English style was subtly washed or attenuated by native influence. The best-known example hung, in the 1890s, in the ballroom of Government House, Madras, and was a favourite conversation piece at balls and soirées. It was Thomas Hickey’s portrait of Eyre Coote, one of the most formidable of the early Indian administrators, which awestruck sepoys, in the absence of its subject, used to salute instead. It was a fairly frightening picture still. Coote had a cadaverously saturnine face, a Kabuki mask-face, and he is pictured with one hand on his sword-hilt, as though he is just resheathing it after decapitating somebody. There is a sepoy on his knees behind him, and another attendant holds various pieces of accoutrement at his side. An air of ritual catastrophe impends, and one would not be surprised to see the picture conveyed on swaying poles in some arcane ceremony, Coote’s eye flashing right and left, and innocents all about shading their eyes against the influence (though, in fact, the Governor, when Hickey pictured him, was probably only putting on his fineries for some harmlessly decorative function).

  4

  Most of the statues in the British Empire were statues of Queen Victoria, but in their day several memorial sculptors had found profitable imperial fields. Those inescapable portrayers of marble grief, John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Richard Westmacott, were represented all over the Empire (their heavier works had often gone out as ballast), and here and there a heroic effigy stood out from its stodgy peers with a touch of life and laughter, or even a sneer. Charles Summers’s huge group of the lost explorers Burke and Wills, looming lugubriously over Collins Street in Melbourne, was a grim reminder to Australians of the red emptiness still at their backs.1 Lord Nelson high on his column in Dublin, placed there by Thomas Kirk in 1808, looked a little lumpish from ground-level, but was easily able to inspire the loathing of the Irish dissidents, and seemed sure to be blown up one day.2 The statue of Lord Cornwallis in Fort St George in Madras was by Thomas Banks,3 and showed a cast in the hero’s left eye. Asked why he had thought it proper to ‘commemorate this obliquity of vision’, the sculptor had explained, in a reply Veronese would have relished, that if the cast had been inwards it would have suggested a contracted character, and he would have suppressed it: ‘but as eyes looking to the right and left at the same moment would impart the idea of an enlarged and comprehensive mind, I have thought it due to the illustrious Gov
ernor-General to convey to posterity this natural indication of mental greatness’.

  For pious respect was the hall-mark of imperial sculpture, and recreations of triumph and carnage, in the French manner, were regrettably rare. A perfect example of the British genre was the façade of the Crawford Market in Bombay, an ambitious structure in what was described as the Flemish-Moorish style, with flagstones imported from Caithness and iron roof supports shaped like griffins. The stone reliefs above the entrances portrayed such an India as the British dreamed of, represented by groups of chiselled Indian agriculturists: slender, dignified people, with large well-behaved dogs at their feet, standing erect and trimly shaven at the edge of their fields and looking loyally out of their cornice, one supposes, towards an unseen and much-beloved district officer. Wisdom, age, beneficence were more often commemorated than daring or bravura, and for a representation of the sheer awfulness of Authority one could hardly improve upon the splendid bronze of Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, which was erected there in 1895, and which showed him immensely bearded, unshakeably serene, huge, terribly old and utterly infallible, sitting in wide ceremonial robes opposite the General Post Office.1

  5

  But they were mostly of the Queen. Like unearthly plants that summer the statues of the Queen-Empress sprouted through the foliage of Empire. They were not yet stained with verdigris or bird-droppings, nor had the tropical mosses and grasses filled in the cracks between their granite blocks. Troops of coolies and gardeners brushed their plinths, superintendents of parks periodically inspected them, princely donors took their house guests to admire them, and peasants out of the countryside, lined up beside their drooping spike-chain rails, gazed silently upon that plump metallic matron, chewing their betel-gum or smoking their loose-rolled Jamaican cigars. To many she must have seemed some species of totem or fetish-figure, for in those huge imperial images she appeared to have nothing so ordinary as legs, but was rooted immovably in the soil, bronze to granite to earth itself.

  6

  Marches and oratorios, fanfares and even ballets sounded the imperial strains; gigantic choirs sang patriotic cantatas; the splendid anthems and Magnificats of Anglican Victorianism seemed to resound through the English cathedrals from distant tympani of Empire. And tormentedly through the genius of Edward Elgar ran melodies of the imperial theme, sometimes brash, sometimes melancholy, echoing those varying moods in which sensitive minds so often contemplated the great adventure. Elgar reached middle age in the heyday of the New Imperialism, in that provincial society which was perhaps most susceptible to its dazzle, and for a time he succumbed to the glory of it all. In Elgar’s Worcestershire of the nineties the innocent manifestations of imperial pride must have been inescapable, drumming and swelling all around him: but if at first his response was conventional enough, in the end it was to give the imperial age of England its grandest and saddest memorials.

  He was a Catholic, the son of a Worcester music-seller and organist, and he left school at 15 to be a solicitor’s apprentice. No inhibitions of background or education restrained his instincts. His was not the clean white line, the graceful irony, the scholarly allusion. He plunged into the popular emotions of the day with a sensual romanticism, expressing himself not only in music, but also in a flowery and sometimes Jingo prose. He was 40 years old in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, and he saw himself then as a musical laureate, summoned by destiny to hymn Britannia’s greatness. He wrote three celebratory works. There was a cantata called The Banner of St George, with a grand finale glorifying the Union Jack. There was another called Caractacus, predicting out of its ancient context the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the British. There was an Imperial March, played first by massed bands at the Crystal Palace, and later, by special command of the Queen, at a State Jubilee Concert—the only English work in the programme, for music was one field in which the British claimed no pre-eminence. Elgar already had in his pocket-book the tune of Land of Hope and Glory, which was to become, set to words by A. C. Benson, the high anthem of British Imperialism, and he professed himself unblushingly nationalist. ‘England for the English is all I say—hands off! There’s nothing apologetic about me.’ Imperialists took Elgar to their hearts. Military men tapped their feet to his strong tunes and healthy harmonies. Elgar collaborated with Kipling in several songs and a cantata called The Fringes of the Fleet, and for all his Catholicism he seemed to stand for everything properly Anglican and open-air, muscular virtues, honest loyalties—English music should have to it, he thought, ‘something broad, noble, chivalrous, healthy and above all an out-of-door sort of spirit’. Elgar married the daughter of a distinguished Anglo-Indian general, and he was much taken with the county style of life. Sometimes he pretended not to be interested in music at all, in his zeal for gentlemanly English attitudes, and it gave him pleasure when he was mistaken for a general in mufti himself.

  What an ass it makes him sound! With his military posture, his Woolwich moustache, his taste for racing and honorifics, he would have made a perfect butt for satire, if any satirist had been interested. But Elgar was a genius, and a genius, as he wished it, of a peculiarly English kind. There was a ridiculous aspect to him, and it was this that was expressed in his New Imperialism music: but there was also a profound, contemplative and vulnerable side to his nature, and this was reflected in far greater things. His Jingo period was short and delusory, for very soon there entered into his music, once so bellicose, a sad and visionary note. He was no longer writing for the brass bands and choral societies of Worcestershire, nor even for the Crystal Palace. Greater matters than pomp and circumstance engaged his spirit, those manly tunes deepened into more anguished cadences, and there seemed to sound through his works premonitions of tragedy—as though he sensed that all the pride of Empire, expressed at such a comfortable remove in the country drawing-rooms of the West Country, would one day collapse in bloodshed or pathos. Truth will out. Elgar, who wrote the paean of Empire, lived to compose its elegy.1

  7

  The difficulty about imperialism as a literary motif was its diffuseness. It had so many purposes, often contradictory. Its most coherent prophets never quite succeeded in reducing it to theory, and whenever somebody seemed about to devise a shapely formula, a stutter of Maxims announced that the acquisition of some totally different category of possession had knocked it askew already. To some writers the imperial mission formed an aspect of Romanticism, especially in its Victorian guise of noble duty. Rider Haggard, for example, of She and King Solomon’s Mines, was a practising imperialist himself—it was he who had run up the Union Jack in the square at Pretoria, when the British annexed the Transvaal in 1877—and he was genuinely excited by the imperial attributes of fortitude and loyalty he lavished on his heroes. Writers like Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, anything but imperialists themselves, used imperial scenes as backdrops for their fictions: and their evocations of sun and open sea, the whip of the sail and the scented landfall, satisfied that pining for adventure and exoticism that was part of the imperial emotion. Even the aesthetes of the earlier nineties, the Beardsleys, the Wildes and their Yellow Book disciples, were responding to the national appetite for extremism, while their antithesis, W. E. Henley, apotheosized the public school ideas of grit and self-denial: crippled by tuberculosis himself, he compiled an anthology of English poems ‘commemorative of heroic action or illustrative of heroic sentiment’, and summed up a nation’s passionate pride of country in the ecstatic stanza:

  Chosen daughter of the Lord,

  Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,

  There’s the menace of the Word

  In the Song on your bugles blown.

  England—

  Out of heaven on your bugles blown!1

  But the later nineties were thickened years, and as the New Imperialism mounted to its climax it was celebrated mostly in rhetoric or jingle. It seemed to bring out the worst in artists, even good artists, and some of the imperial poetry was terrible. Nigh twen
ty years have passed away (wrote Ernest Pertwee, for example, recalling the heroes of the Zulu wars)

  Since at Rorke’s Drift‚ in iron mood,

  ’Gainst Zulu fire and assegai

  That handful of our soldiers stood;

  A hundred men that place to guard!

  Their officers Brombead and Chard.

  Here Francis Doyle points a favourite imperial moral:

  Vain, mightiest fleets of iron framed;

  Vain, those all-shattering guns;

  Unless proud England keep, untamed,

  The strong heart of her sons.

  Here the Rev. A. Frewen Aylward describes a familiar situation in the field:

  A foe-girt town and a captain true

  Out on the Afric plain;—

  High overhead his Queen’s flag flew,

  But foes were many and friends were few,

  Who shall guard that flag from stain?