by Jan Morris
There is a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused … Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and of the Arts, faithful guardian of time-honoured principles? This is what England must either do or perish; she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea … If we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their children to love her … You think that an impossible ideal. Be it so; refuse to accept it, if you will; but see that you form your own in its stead. All that I ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and for yourselves, no matter how restricted, so that it be fixed and unselfish.
Such a view of the imperial summons placed the Empire in the very centre of national affairs—a task, Ruskin seemed then to be saying (for he soon lost interest in the subject), around which the whole of British life should revolve. Few who heard him that day could have been unmoved by the appeal, and some we know were influenced by it for the rest of their lives; for the first time the imperial idea now seemed to satisfy some craving in the British consciousness. Times had greatly changed during the thirty years since Victoria’s accession, when the possession of the Empire had seemed an irrelevance, or an eighteenth-century anachronism. In those days the announcement of a debate on imperial matters would almost certainly empty the House of Commons. The imperial topics were seldom political issues, the great public was not interested, and during the first half of the century no sensible politician would have cared to stake his future upon the issue of overseas expansion. Though in fact the Empire had steadily grown throughout the Queen’s reign, it seemed to have happened without design or satisfaction—‘in a fit of absence of mind’, as was said of the process in a famous phrase. Even as late as 1861 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was recommending a complete withdrawal from West Africa, and though many Britons felt a sense of imperial duty, few were yet moved by an imperial enthusiasm.
Between 1837 and 1869, six men had been Prime Ministers of England. Three had been Conservative, three Whig or Liberal, but none could really be described as men of Empire. Melbourne had been a gentlemanly relict of the previous century, Peel a social reformer from the new industrial classes, Derby, Russell and Aberdeen old-school patricians. It occurred to none of them that the destiny of the British might lie primarily not in the British Isles at all, but in distant possessions overseas. Even the fire-eater Palmerston, ready though he was to slap a gunboat up any creek in defence of British interests, did not wish his country to possess the world, believing rather in the power of trade and moral prestige: unable to find a Colonial Secretary, it was said, for one of his ministries, with a sigh he took on the job himself—‘Come upstairs with me, H., when the council is over, we will look at the maps and you shall show me where these places are’. At no time in the first half of Victoria’s reign was Empire a central preoccupation of British statesmanship. Imperial episodes sometimes captured the centre of the stage—the Afghan tragedy, the Durham Report, the Mutiny—but no politician had tried to give the Empire an ideological meaning, or to convince the small and privileged electorate that theirs must be an imperial future. On the whole the Tory Party was the party of Empire, as the trustees of tradition and pride, while the Liberals were the champions of free trade and liberty: but neither could be described as a party of imperialism—a word which indeed carried for the English distasteful undertones of foreignness.
In the 1870s, however, there were signs that the British conviction of merit was growing into a conviction of command. Ruskin’s vision was partly an inspiration, but partly a symptom: and during the next decade two astonishing statesmen forced the issue of imperialism into the forefront of British affairs, capping the Victorian age with its passions. Benjamin Disraeli became the maestro of Empire: William Ewart Gladstone, its confessor.
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They might have been cast by some divine theatrical agency for their parts in the drama, so exactly suited were they to their roles not merely in manners and morals, but actually in appearance. They represented two complementary impulses in the British political genius: the idealistic impulse, which wished to make Britain the paragon of principle, the urge for glory, which fed upon the exotic, the flamboyant, even the slightly shady. In Victorian politics both these elements thrived, as they thrived too in everyday life, and it was their confrontation at the apex of the century that dictated the final character of Victoria’s Empire, setting its style and dictating its reputation for posterity.
Disraeli adopted the imperial cause deliberately. He recognized it for what it was, a sure vote-catcher, especially since the Reform Bill of 1867 had added a million urban labourers to the franchise (as early as 1849 he had suggested giving seats at Westminster to thirty MPs from the colonies, as a means of strengthening the Tory party). It was in June 1872, in a famous speech at the Crystal Palace, that he first presented to the British public his own romantic prospectus of Empire, coupling it with the English Constitution as the foundation of Tory policy. The English, he said, had a choice before them. They could choose to be subjects of ‘a comfortable England’, insular and ordinary, or of ‘a great country, an imperial country, a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world’.
Later this conception intermittently coloured all his politics, and guided his statesmanship too. Half-measures of glory were unworthy of such a nation at such a time. ‘Money is not to be considered in such matters‚’ he told the House of Commons when accused of extravagant imperial expenditures, ‘success alone is to be thought of.’ At home, he accused the Liberal Party of wanting to jettison all the splendours of Empire, and described the English working classes as being ‘proud of belonging to an Imperial country’. Abroad he attended the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which settled the fate of south-eastern Europe for the next thirty years (and incidentally gave Britain possession of Cyprus), as the representative not just of a nation, but of an Empire—‘an Empire of liberty, truth and of justice’. He believed in the show of things, in prestige, in self-advertisement. Nations like people, he believed, were accepted at their own valuation. When he created Victoria Queen-Empress, or ordered the posting of Indian troops to Malta, or manipulated the Eastern Question to his purposes, he was making fact out of fantasy, and exploiting the world’s imagination. To the end of his days he represented, more colourfully than any other great statesman of British history, that latent English taste for the spiced and the half-foreign which was a driving motive of imperialism—after the Mutiny he was widely tipped as the first Viceroy of India, a dazzling prospect unhappily never fulfilled.
Tremendously on the other side stood Gladstone, who distrusted the imperial ethic with fastidious profundity, and made equal political capital out of his opposition to it. Gladstone was at once more explicit in his philosophies, and more diffuse. His every political instinct was for Little England, and for him the true national glory lay in moral superiority—supported of course by commercial good sense, for he was after all the son of a Liverpool West Indian merchant.1 The central strength of England, he wrote in 1878, lay in England. Those who believed in imperial expansion were the materialists of politics. ‘Their faith is in acres, in leagues, in sounding titles and long lists of territories. They forget that the entire fabric of the British Empire was reared and consolidated by the energies of a people which was … insignificant in numbers … and that if by so
me vast convulsion our transmarine possessions could all be submerged, the very same energies of that same people would … without them in other modes assert its undiminished greatness.’
Gladstone’s most celebrated political tour-de-force was his Midlothian campaign, the whirlwind speaking tour by which, in 1879, he snatched an electoral victory from the Conservatives, and brought the Liberals back to power. This was not only a democratic innovation—the first time a British statesman of his rank had so freely solicited the support of the electorate: it was also a passionate attack upon the idea of Empire. In every corner of the globe, Gladstone cried, British imperialism had come as a pestilence. The Queen’s imperial title was theatrical bombast. The current war against the Afghans was a crime against God. In South Africa 10,000 Zulus had been slaughtered ‘for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and homes, their wives and families’. These were false phantoms of glory—mischievous and ruinous misdeeds—a policy in its result disloyal, in its essence thoroughly subversive—a road which plunged into suffering, discredit and dishonour. National pride should not blind a nation to higher dictates of justice. ‘Remember the rights of the savage! … Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own!’
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,
A ragamuffin husband and a rantipoling wife,
We’ll fiddle it and scrape it through the ups and downs of life.
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
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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:
Imp
erialism ! Hang the word! It buzzes on my noddle‚
Like bumble-bees in clover time. The talk on’t’s mostly twaddle.
Yet one would like to fix the thing, as farmer nails up vermin;
Lots o’big words collapse, like blobs, if their sense you once
determine.
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.
