Pax Britannica (36 page)

The British had a genius for parks, and in the end perhaps it would be for these noble urban expanses, preserved with such a sense of scale and human values, that their Empire would longest be thanked. There was something very superior to the imperial parks. They seemed to announce a grand disregard of petty side-issues, like land values, or property rights, and at the same time a mastery of nature apparently so complete that their designers could afford to relax their discipline, and let things run a little wild within the stockade of the surrounding city. King’s Park at Perth, indeed, was simply a slab of native bush, fenced about above the harbour and preserved for ever as the aborigines had known it: while Phoenix Park in Dublin, though it contained a zoo, a race-course and several official residences, was so vast—1,750 acres—that it was virtually open country, its paths highways and its mansions country houses. The Maidan at Calcutta was just the opposite: in the centre of a tumultuous oriental metropolis (for by the 1890s the City of Palaces was scarcely recognizable) a huge ordered pleasure-garden, scrupulously
British, with tennis courts, golflinks, bicycle tracks, cricket pitches, riding roads, innumerable statues of generals and administrators, and down at the river’s edge an ornamental pagoda, a substantial piece of loot from Burma.

The Maidan was originally no more than a clear field of fire for Fort William, but sometimes the creation of such a park showed astonishing self-denial. Nobody doubted that Vancouver, incorporated as a city in 1886, would one day be among the chief ports of the Americas. It was founded as the western terminus of the C.P.R., and was already booming. Yet in a particularly covetable part of the city area, beside the narrows which formed the harbour entrance, the city fathers established a park. It was to become, so many travellers thought, the most beautiful park in the whole world, half savage, half domestic, with water on three sides of it and the soft Pacific winds ruffling its trees—a damp west coast park, where the moisture steamed out of the tree-bark when the sun came out, and sometimes even the morning birds were to be seen preening their feathers in a haze of vapour. The great port grew all around it, but never encroached, and sentinel for ever at its gate stood the Queen’s Governor-General of the day, Lord Stanley, with the inscription upon his plinth: ‘To the use and enjoyment of people of all colours, creeds and customs for all time, I name thee Stanley Park.’
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The garden instinct of the English did not always survive migration.
The private houses of the simpler Australians and Canadians notably lacked greeneries—not just because of the climate, for public gardens thrived, but perhaps because life was too near the soil already, without bothering about herbaceous borders. The Briton fresh from Britain, though, as soon as he moved into a new bungalow, or set down the family baggage on a new small-holding, almost always got hold of some seeds or cuttings to make himself a garden. The gardens of Government Houses were often the only consolations for restless Governor’s ladies, and tea among the orchids on the buffalo-grass lawn was an imperial institution—the wildest dreams of Kew were the facts of Katmandu. Sir George Grey, the man the aborigines so loved, created a remarkable garden on the island of Kawau, in the Hauraki Gulf, north of Auckland. He built a house of concrete there, stocked it with a good library, and surrounded it with exotic foliage. He brought oaks from California, Norfolk Island pines, Chinese willows, pines from Tenerife, fibrous plants from Chile and Peru, silver trees from South Africa, camphor trees from Malaya—and all through the shrubberies, to be glimpsed by the studious statesman from his library windows, ostriches and white-ringed Chinese pheasants stalked, and kangaroos queerly lolloped.

Most expatriate Britons, counting the months to home leave, had garden aspirations of a different kind. Love of their own country was very strong among this people; nostalgia and homesickness were among their weaknesses. It was roses these transient imperialists pined for, stocks and honeysuckle, lavender hedges and spring daffodils. Up their little gardens sprang, hopeful around each bungalow, and there were rose-petals in bowls in the sitting-room, and nodding wallflowers beside the compound gate. With luck, when the Empire-builder moved elsewhere, or went home for good at last, his successor loved the garden in his turn, so that it proliferated down the generations, and was immortalized in scrapbooks. If not it very soon languished. The weeds of the country started up triumphantly, tangled trees overcame the flower-beds, and presently all that was left in souvenir was a bramble of English roses gone wild in the undergrowth, their scent forgotten and their colours faded.

S
OLDIERS, sailors, politicians, engineers, merchants and men in the street responded to the call of Empire. Artists were more chary. The most talented young men of the nineties, the exquisites of Art Nouveau, the Yellow Book and the Café Royal, expressed values outrageously opposed to those of the imperialists. When
Figaro
once offered its readers a translation of Hunt’s Jingo rhyme—
‘Nous
ne
voulons
pas
la
guerre,
mais,
par
Dieu!
si
nous
combattons’
—the translator was forced to admit that he had been unable to
‘arriver
à
la
sauvage
énergie
de
l’original
’
.
The London intelligentsia was unable to arrive at it either, and though in the universities there were attempts to evolve an intellectual rationale of Empire, creative people were not generally stimulated by the savage energy of the time.

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.

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

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).

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 Governor-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

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.

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.