Pax Britannica (38 page)

As Cervantes was to his declining Spain, Kipling was to this climactic Britain. In the pages of
Don
Quixote
every nuance of the age was somewhere illustrated: in Kipling’s poems and stories there was almost no facet of imperialism, no British mood or attitude, no character of Empire that did not find its place. It was all there somewhere. Kipling seemed to understand all the disparate motives of Empire—perhaps he even shared them all, at one time or another: the various philosophies he distilled in his writings were a kind of imperial symposium, a mock-up. Of all the imperialist poets, Kipling was alone in his expertise. Tennyson never set eyes on Lucknow, Alfred Austin never rode down to Doornkop, poor Henley’s heroisms were enacted on a hospital bed. But Kipling was an Anglo-Indian of the second generation, born in India. The Empire was his nursery. Around his childhood the Civil Servants came and went, the regiments were posted home to depot, the visiting parliamentarians devised their instant answers to famine or land settlement: but Kipling was of the country, and he spent the best part of his young manhood there. Elderly Anglo-Indians predictably derided his pretensions to an understanding of the country, but Kipling was entitled to feel that his roots, like Kim’s, were in imperial soil.

The peak of Kipling’s popularity coincided with the climax of the New Imperialism. When, a few years later, the cause lost its certainty, Kipling lost some of his readers. For a few years he, more than anyone, gave voice to the national emotions. If he had hymned the Empire fifty years earlier, few would have listened. If he had laboured the theme fifty years later, he would have been shouted down. As it was, his art and his moment perfectly fitted. He alone, with all the world of the imperial adventure revolving around those years, turned it into a body of literature—perhaps no other English artist has been so identified with a moment of history. Kipling was an imperial figure in his own right: his American publisher once described him as ‘the world’s first citizen’.

Yet imperialism was only a means for Kipling. At his worst, it is true, he thumped a tub as crudely as anyone. Even Elgar thought some of his work ‘too awful to have been written’, and reports of his first visit to America, very young and precociously celebrated, were enough to make a Jingo squirm: asked by reporters for his reactions to San Francisco, he replied: ‘When the
City
of
Peking
steamed through the Golden Gate I saw with great joy that the blockhouse which guarded the mouth of “the finest harbour in the world, sir” could be silenced by two gunboats from Hong Kong with safety, comfort and dispatch.’ But if he often seemed bloodthirsty and xenophobic, no less often did he honour the brotherhood of man, at a time when that conception was out of fashion among the English. In a period of proud isolation he was a passionate Francophile, and a percipient—if often maddened—admirer of America. While the British went through their worst phase of colour consciousness, Kipling was honouring the strong man of any race:

Nobody saw more clearly through the petty pretences of imperial life, the expatriate snobberies, the red tape and the bumble. Kipling could never have written as G. W. Steevens wrote of the lascar—‘this sort of creature has to be ruled’—for he loved India with a sensual liberty, and captured its colours and sounds, squalors and nobilities with devoted precision. The most truly splendid of his heroes were Asiatics—Kim’s Lama, Gunga Din, or Sir Purun Dhas, K.C.I.E., the Prime Minister of Mohiniwala, who became a guru in his old age, and lived in friendship with the wild beasts of the hills. The public only snatched at Kipling’s eulogies of Empire, or his romantic evocations of its duties and excitements: but he mocked it, too, berated it sometimes, and like the excellent reporter that he was, relished a good exposé now and then.

His view of Empire, though it seemed to synthesize the public attitudes, was in fact intensely personal. Just as he fitted into no social slot, or artistic coterie, so his political conceptions were less
orthodox than they seemed. He once described in mystical terms his view of the Pax Britannica: ‘I visualized it, as I do most ideas, in the shape of a semicircle of buildings and temples projecting into a sea—of dreams.’ In less abstracted moments he sometimes saw the Empire as a benevolent despotism ruled by the people of the Five Nations—the five great white settlements, Britain included. This was not because he believed one race to be inherently superior to another, but because he thought the races were good at doing different things. The Indians were good at spiritual exercise. The Japanese made lovely objects. The French knew better than anyone how to make the most of life. The British were best at governing. Kipling tended to scoff at the notion of a developing Empire, its subject peoples gradually ushered towards self-rule—when he did suggest it, as one chore of the White Man’s Burden, he was careful to emphasize how very gradual the process ought to be. He was often contemptuous of the half-educated native, and he detested the idea of Westernizing the oriental peoples, or presuming to improve them.

The purposes of imperial rule, he thought, were simpler: to administer justice, to distribute law and order, to build the roads, railways, docks and telegraphs that were the foundations of prosperity. Kipling saw the British Empire as an immense technical consultancy, providing compulsory services: expert legal advice, unrivalled administration, technical skills of every kind. In the astonishingly productive years of his early manhood these are the functions he repeatedly celebrated. His imperial heroes were the doers, the law-givers, the governors, the engineers. He idealized the district officers, brought the common soldiers to life, even celebrated the very machines, ships and locomotives of Empire. It was the professionalism that he most admired, just as he respected craftsmanship in art, and polished his own poems and stories as meticulously, and with just as fine a respect for tolerances and adjustments, as any gnarled workshop foreman of the East India Railway, lovingly passing his grease-rag over a universal joint.

Kipling spoke for his age in its taste for bravado and exotic splash, and in that grand poem
If
—he summed up for a whole generation of Englishmen all that was best in the public school ideal:

He was out of sympathy, though, with many imperial intentions. He expressed no interest in the profit of Empire, public or private. Commerce seemed to bore him, and the merchant princes one might expect to meet in his pages only appear in caricature. He was not a practising Christian, and the evangelical side of Empire was not to his taste. He was concerned more than most with the effect of Empire on the character of the imperialists themselves: it was the
duty
of the British to rule these vast territories, austerely, efficiently, grandly. Kipling was not one of your wild expansionists, and he was only intermittently boastful.

He was a muddled man in many ways, naïve in some things, inspired by conflicting emotions, now responding to one imperial call, now to its opposite. He was identified everywhere with the boom of the New Imperialism: but like Elgar, he was carried by his genius far beyond the trumpery excitement of politics, or even history’s passing crazes, and would be remembered in the end not as an imperial seer, still less as a propagandist, but as a great and often mystifying artist. To the end of his life he thought
Recessional
the best poem he ever wrote.
1

In literature as in art, the British settlers overseas were inhibited by the prestige of the home-grown product. When they did write
books or poems, they often had their eye on a readership in the Mother Country, and laid on the local colour thick, with Maori love-affairs, Zulu atrocities or Red Indians howling across the prairies of the West. Educated emigrants were frequently possessed by rosy visions of the culture they had left behind, looked down upon local idioms and landscapes and were always on about spring flowers in Hertfordshire or the way things were done at Cambridge. Even the folk-art was muted. The Canadians sang no rollicking frontier songs, such as their American neighbours allegedly dashed off around the camp fires, and the British in the Cape and Natal were perhaps overawed by the powerfully Biblical culture of their neighbours the Boers, so that their presence seems in retrospect oddly pallid or agnostic; as if they were only tentatively there at all, and certainly not in the mood to make bawdy rhymes about it. The Rhodesians had not been over the Limpopo long enough to embody the experience even in doggerel. What might be considered an Anglo-Indian folk-literature, mostly produced by senior Civil Servants, was generally cut to a sixth-form pattern, full of parodies and very obscure allusions.

It was only in Australia that one could observe the first glimmerings of what the imperialists would like to call a Greater British culture. The Australians had the advantage of being all on their own, with no Americans next door and no Boers to cap each jollity with a quotation from Ezekiel. A leathery, swaggering people still, they often felt no very powerful affection for the ways of the Mother Country, and were in Australia either because they were the descendants of convicts or because nowhere could be much farther from England. Their new landscape was something altogether
sui
generis
, with its own lolloping fauna and ghostly foliage, and the origins of their settlement, if ignoble, were certainly interesting. Cockney and Irish strains combined to give their society punch and humour, and the feeling that all was an open slate gave it an easy-going, republican feeling.

This new kind of England already had a literature, and a lively body of folk-song and ballad. Its tradition, sweet and sour, ironic but generous, had been launched by Adam Lindsay Gordon, an English emigrant who had killed himself at Melbourne in 1870.
Gordon’s
Bush
Ballads
and
Galloping
Rhymes
had been popular all over the Empire, and for many people they had summed up the whole ethos of colonial adventure, the fresh start and the new fraternity: 

The implicit bond of exiles, cobbers or mates of the Outback ran through the Australian folk-art, and gave it an air of comradely devil-may-care which, not always justly, attached itself permanently to the Australian myth. Here, in Charles Thatcher’s poem
Look
Out
Below
,
is the young digger off to make his fortune: