Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (49 page)

One could see by the look of them which of these two remarkable rivals stood for Empire. Disraeli the literary Jew, with his black curls, his brilliant eye, his flashy dress, his catchy way with words and notions, his fun, his conceit, his air of worldly scandal—Disraeli the author of
Sybil
and
Tancred
seemed nurtured for sultry enterprise. Temperamentally he was an oriental himself, and he loved pomp and glitter, whether real or spurious. Many of the imperial activists were not altogether British, or stood in some way aside from the British mainstream, and Disraeli was from start to finish a gaudy outsider. The son of a littérateur, he went neither to public school nor to university, and married a widow thirty years his senior, excessively plain but agreeably rich, whom he adored for the rest of his life. He charmed the susceptible Queen, antagonized the conventional gentry, thrust himself into the senior ranks of the Conservative Party by guile and showmanship. His great political successes were managed as
coups
de
théâtre
, and his debating technique was wonderfully dramatic He had no evangelical impulse
whatsoever, being utterly without religious instinct, and the older he got, the less he cared for orthodoxy of appearance or behaviour. Even the way he talked was intriguing—standard English but with an indefinably foreign gloss.

As he governed, so he lived—with bravura. He revelled in the company of women, captivating them in return with his high spirits and curious fancies—‘I am the blank page,’ he once declared, ‘between the Old Testament and the New.’ His house at Beaconsfield, which he dearly loved, was not large, nor even impressive, but was full of delight: a Gothick house, tucked away in a fold in the Chilterns, with a couple of ponds where Disraeli ineptly fished, a dingle running down to the valley in which he loved to plant trees, a pleasant arcaded verandah for writing witty novels on, and a hall full of mementos. The house had an eastern tinge, like a muted cousin of Sezincote, and perhaps it was the Jewishness in Disraeli, the old ineradicable strain of awareness, that made him feel England to be too large for her islands, and sent his eyes so often to the east.

Mr Gladstone preferred chopping trees down, as if in holy judgement. Legend does not see him as a creative man, but as a figure of grave arbitration—a better, grander, wiser man than Disraeli, but less brilliant, and much less fun. He seems to us far older than his rival, but he was really five years younger. Though his father was self-made, Gladstone’s background was orthodoxy itself—Liverpool and Jamaica money, Eton and Christ Church education, staunch Anglican religion, Scottish origins, and a profound Victorian belief that all politics, all life itself, could be defined in terms of right and wrong. A self-mortifying Christian faith lay behind his every activity, whether it be his concern with the welfare of the Armenians of Turkey or the nocturnal visits to London prostitutes which so damaged his reputation with Queen and public, but which were really so guileless an expression of kindness. Yet he was a man of disturbing contradictions, self-doubts, inconsistencies—a much odder fish than Disraeli really, and something of an enigma still. He was highly sexed, and in private life a passionate traditionalist—‘in everything except essentials’, as Arthur Balfour was to say, ‘a tremendous old Tory’. Gladstone’s wife was once heard to sing with him, their arms entwined around each other’s waists,

Gladstone’s children loved him dearly, treating him with cheerful familiarity and talking to him in a private language. Gladstone’s monarch detested him, and showed it so clearly in her neglect that it became one of the sadnesses of Gladstone’s life—for he did not possess the knack of charm, and spoke his slightly Lancashire English in such learned convolutions, with such labyrinthine qualifications and subordinate clauses, that it was hard for him to express a simple thought, or bring to the surface the innocent benevolence that lay behind his majesty.

For truly majestic he was—a splendid pale face, a thrilling voice, a flaming eye, and all the presence of greatness.
1
We have already seen him in his political youth, colliding with the Bishop of Paxos: let us visit him finally in his old age at home and at peace in his beloved Flintshire home. One best approaches Hawarden (pronounced ‘Harden’) from the north, through its wide but gloomy park, dingy with industrial particles, and past the ruins of its mediaeval fortress, restored by Mr Gladstone himself upon a grassy mound. Around this bump the drive proceeds, and there in all its faintly comic dignity stands Hawarden Castle—which came into Gladstone’s possession by marriage, but became his spiritual home. Its centre portion is Georgian, but the Victorians have worked enthusiastically upon its wings, and now no building in England is more authentically Gladstonian. High and heavy are its towers, mullioned its innumerable windows, fine old oaks and elms surround it, and its rooms appear to be, from our respectful distance beyond the ha-ha, mahogany-panelled, book-lined, damask-curtained and embellished with busts of philosophers.

From the house a wide lawn with rose beds runs away to the surrounding wall and the playing-field of the Hawarden Cricket Club beyond: and there in the distance upon a deck-chair we may see the Grand Old Man himself, ‘The People’s William’, all in black and white—wispily bearded, leaning back with his right hand thrown sideways as if to catch manna from the elms, and his left hand holding
before his eyes a small but evidently solemn volume—a recent Homeric commentary, perhaps, a new theory of economic progress, or possibly a re-issue of one of his own scholarly works (for long before his death the entries under his name filled twenty-five pages of the British Museum Catalogue).
1

Both these statesmen knew the potential of the imperial excitement, and both were willy-nilly caught up by it, Disraeli dying triumphant at its apogee, Gladstone surviving sadly to see even his own Liberal Party split by its dynamic. Around their persons the debates of empire were to swirl; the one man would always be identified with patriotic dash, the other with liberal humanity, but both were to find themselves in the end the agents of imperialism.

Disraeli did not of course invent Imperialism as a political philosophy. He merely gave it a new emotional force, and translated into demagoguery the intuitions of seers like Ruskin. He crystallized the idea, dressed it up, gave it a new sheen, and eventually made it part of the Tory political credo. As a word and as a philosophy, imperialism gained a new currency. The Liberals threw it back at Disraeli with contempt—a vogue word, they said, and a vogue doctrine.
The
Times
called it ‘tawdry’, the
Spectator
called it ‘despotism coupled with vulgar mass-appeal’, and
Punch
dismissed it as cheaply specious: 

But Disraeli had judged right. The diverse sentiments of Empire, whose development we have traced through war, commerce and
philanthropy, were coalescing now into grandiloquence and chauvinism. ‘What does Imperialism mean? demanded the philosopher Robert Lowe. ‘It means the assertion of absolute force over others … if by the menace of overbearing force we can coerce a weaker state to bow before our will, or if, better still, we can by a demonstration of actual force attain the same object, or, best of all, if we can conquer our adversary in open fight, and impose our own conditions at the bayonet’s point, then, as Dryden sings, “these are imperial arts and worthy thee”.’ He was speaking ironically, but in fact he was prophetic. By 1877 Gladstone reckoned that Disraeli’s aggressive overseas policies were supported by ‘the Clubs, the London Press (in majority), the majority of both Houses, and five-sixths or ninetenths of the Plutocracy’. Before very long the public as a whole would freely express its approval of imperial braggadocio, even bloodshed:
Punch,
The
Times
and the
Spectator
would all be organs of imperialism; the Poet Laureate of England would not be ashamed to confess that his idea of heaven was to sit on a lawn being brought news alternately of British victories by land, and British victories by sea.

Lord Carnarvon, Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, was nicknamed ‘Twitters’ and at first found it difficult to understand what imperialism meant. Later he sorted it out in his mind, and cogently explained it to others. There were two kinds of imperialism, he said. There was the false kind—Caesarism, despotism—and there was the British kind—a world-wide trust, keeping the peace, elevating the savage, relieving the hungry, and uniting in loyalty all the British peoples overseas. Imperialism certainly entailed expansion, but it was not bullying expansion, it was merely the extension of British institutions and wholesome influences, if necessary by force. This conception proved irresistible. It became the great popular movement of the late nineteenth century, displacing humanitarianism in the universal approval. It seized in its enthusiasm all classes of the British, and eventually all parties too. Queen Victoria loved it; Lord Salisbury, the greatest of the aristocrats, gave it the sanction of the patricians; chambers of commerce voted in its favour; family generations devoted themselves to its service; churchmen raised collections for it; soldiers and sailors revelled in it; children collected
biscuit lids stamped with its emblems; the poor looked to its gaudy stimulations and sang its rumbustious rhythms in music-halls; the rich looked to its dividends, and remembered the blessings of Rand or Broken Hill as they sang the national anthem. ‘The British People’, Disraeli once wrote, ‘being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class, require grave statesmen’: but they also required excitement. Imperialism gave them, in the last twenty-five years of Victoria’s reign, the most exciting, the most astonishing, perhaps, for better or for worse, the most satisfying quarter century in all their modern history.

On the surface it was just an urge to glory. ‘A nation without glory’, wrote Garnet Wolseley once, ‘is like a man without courage, a woman without virtue. Those who in youth learn to value it as a holy possession are, as life goes on, inspired by its influence. It becomes eventually a sort of national religion….’ The long success of the British, proceeding from triumph to triumph since the end of the Napoleonic wars, had gone to their heads, and given them a new taste for supremacy: like many another nation at the summit of its power, Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century was an image of conceit, and brazenly equated glory with strength, wealth and size.

But the sense of duty, too, powerfully contributed to the passions of Empire. It was less a missionary duty now: the idea that the world’s natives could be converted to Christian Britishness had lost some of its conviction. But it was still, in its austere way, a philanthropic mission. Justice, security, communications, opportunity—these were the advantages of civilization which the British now diligently if aloofly distributed among their subjects. Indian school textbooks, in the second half of the century, included a short chapter entitled
Angrezi
Raj
Ki
Barkaten
—
Blessings
of
the
English
Raj
. It enumerated law and order, schools, canals, roads and bridges, railways, telegraphs and public health, but made no reference to the ending of evil custom, the reform of society, or the benefits of Christian example. The British had no doubts about the merits
of their own civilization, or qualms about their mission to distribute it across the world: but they had come to suppose that not all aspects of it were transplantable.

The profit motive, too, had subtly shifted its emphasis. It was still potent, of course, perhaps preeminent among the imperial urges, but now it had undertones of disquiet. Great Britain was still the supreme industrial, financial and commercial Power of the world, but only just. Rivals were catching up. Economically the 1870s were difficult years for the British, and the financiers of the City of London, the industrialists of the north, began to feel that their preeminence might not last for ever. Germany and America would soon be producing more steel than Britain; most European countries had now completed their own industrial revolutions; in a whole range of new products, chemical dyes to breech-loading guns, British designers and manufacturers lagged behind. The penalties of easy success were beginning to show—complacency, conservatism, even laziness—and the old panacea of Free Trade was losing its effect. Only Empire, it seemed to many businessmen, could restore the proper status quo: with new markets, with new sources of raw material, and with convenient barriers, actual if not explicit, against foreign competition.

Strategically the impulses of the new imperialism were also largely defensive. If the London military planners wished to acquire new territory, it was generally to prevent foreigners acquiring it first, or to protect some existing possession, or guard a threatened trade route. The grand assurance of Waterloo and Trafalgar had waned rather with the years. The Britain of the 1870s was no longer beyond challenge. The Americans, in their civil war, had shown themselves capable of immense military exertion, and had for a few years possessed not merely the most experienced, but actually the largest armies in the world. The Germans, newly federated, proved by their victory over France in 1870 that they were the most formidable military nation in Europe, unlikely to leave the British Empire indefinitely sacrosanct. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Americans were all building battle fleets. The world was far more complex than it had been in 1837, and Britain’s place in it was so much the less serene. Once again, imperialism seemed to
provide an answer: not only the means of strategic insurance, but good practice for the armed forces too, and the most awesome possible instrument of warning. Across the world the flag flew, and everywhere it seemed to say ‘Hands off!’