Pax Britannica (37 page)

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

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: 

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
twenty
years
have
passed
away
(wrote Ernest Pertwee, for example, recalling the heroes of the Zulu wars)

Here Francis Doyle points a favourite imperial moral:

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

And here George Barlow disposes of suggestions that the One Race may be losing its virility:

In the flood of verses that greeted the Jubilee itself the clichés came in relentless spate, Crown and Flag and Fleet and Throne, Duty with Beauty, Malta with Gibraltar, State with Great, Honour
escorting Freedom across the Ocean Deep, and inevitably at the end of it all the virtual impossibility of finding anything new to rhyme with Victoria:

Out of the frenzy three writers emerge, already famous in 1897, who seem utterly indigenous to that moment, as though they could have celebrated no other English epoch, and who were indeed prime movers of the national spirit.

The first was G. A. Henty, born in 1832 but still going strong. Nobody enjoyed the period more, in person or in art, and nobody made better use of it. After an expensive education (Westminster and Cambridge), Henty began a life of adventure as a hospital orderly in the Crimean War, and presently graduated to war journalism. He was with Garibaldi in the Tyrol, with Napier in Ethiopia, in Paris under the Communes, with the Russians at Khiva, with Wolseley in the Ashanti country, with the Carlists in Spain and the Turks in Serbia. All these experiences he distilled into jolly yarns, together with a long series of specifically imperial adventures. They were resoundingly successful from the start. Who had not read
On
the
Irrawaddy:
A
Story
of
the
First
Burmese
War,
or
By
Sheer
Pluck:
A
Tale
of
the
Ashanti,
or
For
Name
or
Fame
‚
or
The
Dash
for
Khartoum
?
It was a dim uncle who did not at least consider, as he thumbed through the Army and Navy Christmas catalogue,
Red
skin
and
Cowboy
or
At
the
Point
of
a
Bayonet
. Henty was once the editor of a magazine called
The
Union
Jack,
and he was a regular contributor to the
Boy’s
Own
:
probably nobody more profoundly influenced the late Victorian generation of young Britons. He prided himself, we are told, on his ‘historical fidelity and manly sentiment’: but it is sad to discover, by comparing one of his racy reconstructions with the standard historian’s account of the same episode, how simple was his technique of adaptation, so that such a phrase as ‘Simpson was determined that his relations with the authorities should not be adversely affected by these events’, might come out,
in
Mogul
and
Merchant:
A
Tale
of
John
Company
,
something like this: ‘Simpson laughed. “Whatever happens,” he told the boy, “I shall stick by the Maharajah, and hope that he thinks none the worse of me for it.”’ Were it not for his manly sentiments, one might almost accuse Mr Henty of
cribbing
.
1

A second truly imperialist writer was the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin. Lord Salisbury judged the public mood astutely when, in 1897, he appointed as Lord Tennyson’s successor this eager expansionist, an almost paranoically conceited versifier whose elevation was greeted by intellectual London with mingled derision and dismay. The New Imperialism had triumphed, even in poesy.
Punch
described the Austin ingredients as being one British Lion, one England’s Darling, three ounces of patriotism, three ounces of loyal sentimentality, one pound of commonplace and classical idioms
ad
nauseam
.
Austin was appointed Laureate chiefly because Swinburne, the obvious candidate, was disapproved of by the Queen: but it was as though the scholarly Salisbury, noting with distaste the distorted nationalism of the plebs, had thrown them a minstrel to their own crude taste. The very first thing Austin wrote on assuming office was his notorious poem in
The
Times
on the Jameson Raid, by which he will probably be longest remembered, and of which one stanza may stand as representative of his whole output:

There was truth to this unfortunate poem—many a man
did
live famous for daring wrongs more reprehensible than a Jameson Raid. What made it so unhappy was its apparent endorsement by the official bard of the principle that if a wrong succeeds it is a wrong no
longer (especially since there were strong suspicions that
The
Times
, which paid
£
25 for the piece, was itself privy to the conspiracy). But though the poem was greeted with ribaldry from intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, the general public loved it, and
The
Times
had many requests for permission to reproduce it or set it to music. Salisbury evidently knew his man—and his electorate. It was Austin’s opinion that no poem could really be called great unless it was an epic or a dramatic romance extolling simultaneously love, patriotism and religion, and this was, of course, a simulacrum of the imperial mission, as it seemed to the New Imperialists. Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne were all unfitted to the splendours of the age, Austin thought, because they were either feminine or lyrical—two un-imperial attributes.
1

Yet the third of our writers, a short-sighted journalist of fey and sentimental inclinations, was himself as potent an imperial force as any battle fleet or India Council. Rudyard Kipling, 32 in 1897, was already at the height of his fame.

Like a slap in the face from an old roistering companion, Henry V turned princely, one morning that festive summer Kipling’s poem
Recessional
appeared in
The
Times
. It sounded a sombre, almost a frightened note, a warning against overconfidence, ‘frantic boast and foolish word’. Its sacramental solemnity jarred, and seemed to imply that the Jubilee celebrations were all tinsel and conceit: but there were many people in England who recognized its justice, and
The
Times
printed columns of grateful letters. Almost nobody else in the kingdom could have expressed such views at such a moment, and commanded such respectful attention: and though the hysteria
of the New Imperialism shrilled on its way unabashed, still the publication of
Recessional
was a watershed in the imperial progress—the moment when the true laureate of Empire saw, apparently for the first time, something ugly beneath the canopy.