Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (34 page)

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.

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’.

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 characters 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—

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.

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:

They could be melancholy, like this plaint from West Africa:

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:

And hardly less vibrant was the tributary verse to General Sir Charles Fraser, V.C., in the Royal Garrison Church at Aldershot:

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:

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: