Ariel

by Derek Johns

  The introduction sounds the theme. As with the first paragraph of so many of Jan’s books, it concisely states what the writer intends and what the reader may expect:

  The theme of this book is one of muddled grandeur. It sets out to describe the largest of Empires, the British, at its moment of climax – which I have taken to be the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, before the Boer War cracked the imperial spirit, and still more terrible events destroyed it. The scale of this spectacle was tremendous, but there was nothing simple or clear-cut to it. All was sprawling, tangled, contradictory, elaborate. For every idealist there was a rascal, for every elegance a crudity, and the British presence across the world displayed no ordered Roman logic.

  Some have suggested that James was inspired by Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, but Jan denies this, pointing out that the ‘logic’ of the British was very different from that of the Romans, and that the narrative method of their respective books was also very different. If there is a model for Jan’s style of history writing then surely it is that of the first teller of historical tales, Herodotus.

  James goes on in the introduction to say that he has not tried to hide a ‘sensual sympathy’ for the period. He concludes that the pages of Pax Britannica ‘are perfumed for me with saddle-oil, joss-stick and railway steam’:

  I hope my readers will feel, as they close its pages, that they have spent a few hours looking through a big sash window at a scene of immense variety and some splendour, across whose landscapes there swarms a remarkable people at the height of its vigour, in an outburst of creativity, pride, greed and command that has affected all our lives ever since.

  No one reading these words can doubt that they are in the hands not of a scholarly historian but of a story-teller, and it is stories that largely compose the three volumes of the trilogy, especially Heaven’s Command and Farewell the Trumpets. The opening paragraph of Pax Britannica itself represents a portrait, the literary counterpart perhaps of something by John Singer Sargent:

  Before she set out on her Diamond Jubilee procession, on the morning of June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria of England went to the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace, wearing a dress of black moiré with panels of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. It was a few minutes before eleven o’clock. She pressed an electric button; an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office in St Martin’s le Grand; in a matter of moments her Jubilee message was on its way to every corner of her Empire.

  James goes on to state the imperial rationale:

  It was not merely the right of the British to rule a quarter of the world, so the imperialists thought, it was actually their duty. They were called. They would so distribute across the earth their own methods, principles and liberal traditions that the future of mankind would be reshaped. Justice would be established, miseries relieved, ignorant savages enlightened, all by the agency of British power and money.

  The success of this creed was what was being celebrated on that day in 1897. And Pax Britannica anatomises this success. It is organised thematically, in chapters on the empire’s structure, communications, commercial and military establishments, architecture and so on. Some of the important dominions rate a chapter, notably India, Ireland, Rhodesia and Canada, and there are more pen portraits, of Salisbury, Rhodes, Kitchener and (Joseph) Chamberlain among others.

  The book describes how a process that was not forethought seemed by 1897 to be predestined:

  The infatuated British public did not greatly concern itself with the motives of Pax Britannica. It had happened. It was splendid. It was part of the divine order which had made Britain supreme and Victoria sixty years a queen. The pragmatic tradition of England, like the climate of the island, was antipathetic to clear-cut analyses, the definition of principles or the formulation of intentions. Besides, the various pieces of the Empire had accrued so gradually, often so imperceptibly, like layers of molluscs clinging to a rock in the ebb and flow of the tide, that the process seemed altogether motiveless. It had not exactly been achieved. It was more properly ordained – a charismatic anointment of the British, like a Higher Summons.

  A Cambridge professor of history of the mid-nineteenth century, Sir John Seeley, once wrote that it seemed to him that the empire had been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Heaven’s Command, which describes the rise of the empire, demonstrated how uncoordinated and in a sense unintentional this process was, arising from many different motives – commercial, strategic, religious. The pages of Pax Britannica are full of sober assessments of these motives. And now and then, as though James has been restrained for too long, the scene painter returns:

  What incentives they were! The smell of the veldt, the illicit delight of a sabre-slash in the sunshine, a drum-beat out of the forested hills, the first sod turned on your own homestead, with a million acres to come; the wheezing breath of your dear old bearer, as he lit the juniper fire in the morning, and brought the teapot steaming to your bed; the never-sated excitement of tigers, the pride of red tunic and swagger stick in the bazaars, the thump of the band behind you as you clattered, the Colonel’s lady, in your spanking tonga through the cantonment, or the dull gleam of a nugget in the clay, Twelve Below Discovery on Bonanza Creek: gracious acceptance of curtsies, on the lawn for the Queen’s Birthday – sparkle of brass polished thin, as your carriage braked precariously down the tree-shaded road from the Peak …

  These imperial pleasures may not appeal to us now. But the exuberance of James’s prose makes the reader feel them, and better understand why they were so seductive. Hand in hand with imperial pleasures, however, go imperial assumptions:

  Nobody, of course, denied that the natives could be clever. Old Thomas Cook, introduced to a Sudanese magnate called the Mudir of Dongola, thought him ‘one of the ablest and cleverest men I have ever met’. No, it was character the coloured peoples were thought to lack – steadfastness, fairness, courage, sense of duty, such as the English public schools inculcated in their pupils … The emergence of Western-educated Indians, speaking a flowery English of their own, casually failing to recognize their own pre-ordained place in the order of things – the arrival on the scene of these bouncy protégés did nothing to draw the British closer to their wards, but only exacerbated their aloofness.

  These words call to mind Dr Aziz in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, a book describing the country only a few years before James was born. Most of Forster’s British characters assume unquestioning superiority over the Indians, or the ‘niggers’ as they constantly refer to them. Dr Aziz must pay for his presumption, as he must pay for his intelligence and ability.

  In Pax Britannica the great hero/villains of the empire are memorably drawn. Herbert Kitchener was:

  … yet another Anglo-Irishman, another soldier’s son, but in no other way did he resemble his peers. Set beside Wolseley’s languid elegance, or the neat genial precision of Bobs [Earl Roberts], Kitchener looks like a kind of ogre. He was only forty-eight in 1897, but around him a mystique had long arisen, a glamour which set him apart from other soldiers, and made him one of the figureheads of the New Imperialism. He was huge in stature – six feet two inches in his socks – and terrible of visage, and his life was powered by an overriding and ceaseless ambition.

  The portraits of many of the other protagonists of empire, whether famous or unknown, are drawn throughout Pax Britannica and enliven its pages greatly.

  For James it was the ‘aesthetic’ of the empire that he appreciated, and this appreciation is evident throughout. But he is aware that this aesthetic had by the late nineteenth century led to mixed effects back home:

  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. Carl
yle, 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 the country houses. By the nineties, though, the imperial idea had been vulgarized …

  The researches James conducted in order to write Pax Britannica led to an awareness of the results of sixty or more years of empire-building, but they did not necessarily confront him with the ways in which the empire’s eminence had been achieved. This would be the province of Heaven’s Command, and the realities that his researches for this book revealed led James to be less sympathetic to his subject. But for now, Pax Britannica concludes with a sort of apologia for the empire:

  To Queen Victoria the fabric of her great Empire must have seemed almost indestructible. It had been created in her lifetime, and now in the last years of her reign it had reached its noonday … Today imperialism has long lost its power to move men’s hearts, and the idea of alien rule, however benevolent, is unacceptable to most civilized peoples. In those days it was different. Self-determination was not yet a creed, nor even often an aspiration, and colonial rule was not in itself degrading. Stripped of its emotional overtones, the British Empire did possess several tremendous merits. It was an association of like-minded States of British origin, whose friendship and kinship would prove a blessing to the world at large. It was an instrument of universal order …

  Written after Pax Britannica and published five years later, in 1973, Heaven’s Command charted the rise of the empire, and the tone is rather different. Given the fact that from the mid 1960s onwards James was receiving hormone treatments (and for a while dividing his time between Oxford, where he dressed as a woman, and Wales, where he remained the family man, father of four) it is reasonable to speculate whether this change in tone had physiological causes. Certainly there is an emphasis on individual personalities in Heaven’s Command, a concern for the welfare of the people of the empire, both rulers and ruled. Is this an expression of a more feminine approach? It is hard to say. But the style remains essentially unchanged, and it is perfectly possible to ascribe the differences between Pax Britannica and Heaven’s Command to a growing awareness of the iniquities of the imperial system, iniquities that would offend anyone, irrespective of gender. Jan believes that her sensibility did not fundamentally change with her change of gender. It is possible to conclude that what changed was not the way Jan saw the world, but the way the world saw Jan. If this is the case, we must look elsewhere for the causes of any change in her concerns as a writer.

  Heaven’s Command opens with Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837 and extends to 1897. It is divided into three sections, ‘The Sentiment of Empire’, ‘The Growing Conviction’ and ‘The Imperial Obsession’. It follows a loosely chronological course, ranging over all the parts of the empire. All the familiar stories are here: the ‘Great Game’ in Afghanistan, the Indian Mutiny and the Siege of Lucknow, the Ashanti and Zulu Wars, Burton and Speke on the Nile, Gordon at Khartoum; and they are all brought vividly to life by James’s pen. In the Prologue he writes:

  The British Empire, as my own generation knew it in the middle of the twentieth century, was really Queen Victoria’s empire, for the older mercantile empire of America, India and the sugar colonies had been something different in kind, remote from the mythology of topee and White Man’s Burden upon which we were all reared. I was born in 1926. I was thus just in time to see schoolroom maps emblazoned pole to pole in the imperial red … I was in time to witness this immense organism uniting for the last time to fight the greatest war in its history; and I was in time, in 1947, to spend my 21st birthday on a British troop train travelling from Egypt (where the Empire was noticeably not wanted) to Palestine (which the Empire emphatically did not want).

  Thus the reader is reminded of the assumptions James grew up with. Less than a century later the schoolrooms of Britain are full not of maps of places emblazoned in red but of pupils whose origins may be traced back to those places. In Jan’s beloved Oxford a controversy has raged over whether the statue of Cecil Rhodes that adorns a wall of Oriel College should be removed. This passage of time and the changes it has brought about must always be borne in mind when reading Jan on the empire.

  Heaven’s Command opens with a scene that is typically Morrisian and which establishes the narrative mode: ‘In October 1837 the Honourable Emily Eden, a witty and accomplished Englishwoman in her forty-first year, was accompanying her brother Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, on an official progress up-country from Calcutta. Lord Auckland was homesick, but his sister was irrepressibly entertained by everything she saw, and she recorded all her impressions in vivacious letters home.’ James goes on to describe this journey, and the whole panoply of the Raj is immediately established through this personalising technique, through the eyes of a woman whose experience happened to be representative of a larger, shared experience.

  This story-telling mode is complemented by terse and telling observations on the nature of the empire: ‘It was only to be expected that the improving instinct would presently father the interfering impulse, as the evangelical power of Britain pursued new fields of action.’ By mid-century, ‘the pattern of sovereignty was established once and for all. Half India was ostensibly under the control of its own princes, hundreds of them, ranging from millionaire rajas to petty village chieftains: but none of them was really competent to act without the approval of the Raj, and the British were the true rulers of the entire sub-continent.’

  There is a considerable emphasis on India throughout the book. India very clearly illustrated the way the empire as a whole grew, not in any strategically planned way, but more improvised, more opportunistic. Beginning for purely commercial reasons with the East India Company in the ports, extending into the interior under arrangements with the local princes that gradually turned them into dependents, and finally consolidated as the Raj, with Disraeli pronouncing Victoria not only Queen of England but also Empress, imperial India is the empire in microcosm.

  Disraeli merits a classic pen portrait:

  Himself a romancer, an adventurer, a Jew, an exotic, he inspired Victoria with the vision of imperial splendour, diamond-starred, universal, upheld by elephants, emus and giraffes, attended by turbaned lancers and respectful aborigines … 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.

  William Gladstone, on the other hand, was a more reluctant imperialist:

  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’.

  As the empire grew, so did its methods more often involve violence and deceit. The British government found itself complicit in Cecil Rhodes’s megalomaniacal attempt to make Africa British from Cairo to Cape Town:

  This was something new to Victoria’s Empire. The aim was brasher. The means were more dishonest. There were hints of falsehood in high places which would have repelled Disraeli as much as they would have horrified Gladstone. Big business of a distasteful kind was concerned with the adventure. The evangelical instinct of Empire played no part in it, and the profit motive was blatant … There was no dignity to this gamble. If it succeeded, it would be a triumph of a vulgar kind: if it failed it would be ignominy.

  And so Heaven’s Command reaches its conclusion, at the zenith of empire in 1897:

  Not many people doubted the rightness of Empire – ‘any question of abstract justice in the ma
tter’, wrote Trollope, ‘seems to have been thrown altogether to the winds’. The British knew that theirs was not a wicked nation, as nations went, and if they were insensitive to the hypocrisies, deceits and brutalities of empire, they believed genuinely in its civilizing mission. They had no doubt that British rule was best, especially for heathens or primitives, and they had faith in their own good intentions. In this heyday of their power they were behaving below their own best standards, but they remained as a whole a good-natured people. Their chauvinism was not generally cruel. Their racialism was more ignorant than malicious. Their militarism was skin-deep. Their passion for imperial grandeur was to prove transient and superficial, and was more love of show than love of power. They had grown up in an era of unrivalled national success, and they were displaying the all too human conceit of achievement.

  The third act of the empire show is described in Farewell the Trumpets. This takes up the story in 1897 and extends to 1965, to the death of the last unreconstructed imperialist, Winston Churchill. It is divided into three sections, ‘The Grand Illusion’, ‘The Purpose Falters’ and ‘Farewell the Trumpets’. In the introduction Jan (no longer James) writes:

  This book is the right-hand panel, so to speak, of a triptych depicting the rise and decline of Queen Victoria’s Empire … Farewell the Trumpets completes the ensemble with a narrative picture of the imperial retreat from glory. Taken together, the three are intended to be an impressionistic evocation, subjective and often emotional, of a great historical movement. I have been concerned not so much with what the British Empire meant, as what it felt like – or more pertinently, perhaps, what it felt like to me, in the imagination or in the life … For towards the end of this volume I become an eye-witness, and immediately less reliable.