Novels of Empire 9780231887359

Table of contents :
Contents
1. The Novel Follows the Flag
2. The Burden of the Mystery: India and Indo-China
3. Places in the Sun: Africa
4. Other Englands: Australia and New Zealand
5. Epilogue
A Selected Bibliography of Colonial Fiction
Index

Citation preview

Novels of Empire

SUSANNE HOWE

Novels of Empire

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 1949

COPYRIGHT PUBLISHED

IN

GREAT

OXFORD

1949.

COLUMBIA

BRITAIN,

UNIVERSITY

MANUFACTURED

CNIVrRSITY

CANAPA, PRESS, IN

THE

AND

LONDON, UNITED

TRESS,

INDIA

BY

TORONTO, STATES

NET

YORK

GEOFFREY

OF

AND

CUMBERLEGE

BOMBAY

AMERICA

for

G, R., and G. W H O W I L L H A V E ALL THE

ANSWERS

Contents 1.

2.

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E F L A G

3

UNION

3

JACK

TRICOLOR.

IO

BLACK, WHITE, RED

I 5

THE

19

NOVELS

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E AND INDO-CHINA

MYSTERY:

INDIA 32

THE BURDEN THE

HAPPY

32 YEARS

38

BATTLE PIECES LIGHTENING

3.

64

THE

68

WORK

73

THE MYSTERY

78

PLACES IN T H E S U N : A F R I C A

82

T H E GREAT O P E N CHARACTER

DON'T

SPACES

82

BUILDING

SOIL S N U F F I N G

4.

BURDEN

FENCE

AND ROME

89 LA

GRANDE

96

M E IN

I03

ODIOUS C O M P A R I S O N S

I06

N O B L E SAVAGES

J 16

EARTHLY

I 23

PARADISES

OTHER E N G L A N D S : ZEALAND

AUSTRALIA

AND

NEW 130

HOLLYWOOD READY-MADES

I30

T H E OUTSIDERS

I 39

OF TWO M I N D S

I43

NO M O R E CONQUISTADORS

I47

OLD A N D N E W

Ijl

viii j.

CONTENTS EPILOGUE

A S E L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF C O L O N I A L FICTION INDEX

Novels of Empire

ι. The Novel Follows the Flag

T

UNION

JACK

H E E X P A N S I O N of England worked its way naturally into the Victorian novel. At first this new theme was absorbed genially, uncritically, into that capacious embrace. In the happy fifties and somewhat less happy sixties of the great Queen's reign, the novel was sprouting and leafing out with a kind of Elizabethan exuberance into the most prodigious of the literary forms. Hardly anybody noticed the stories and the people of a greater and greater Britain mingling in its rich and cheerful confusion. Yet they were there, the innocent heralds of dark days to come. They were simply becoming a part of English life. But most Victorian readers were scarcely aware that, from the thirties to the seventies, fiction began slowly to trundle in the footsteps of colonial expansion. During these years the missionaries and explorers were paving the way for the empire builders. Behind Manchester mills and the Condition-of-England question was Indian cotton. The green and pleasant land of the gentry and the holdings of the comfortable squires often depended for maintenance on a younger son whose wealth derived from Australian gold or wool. Saving souls at home could be a dull business, and hunting foxes was unquestionably expensive, but dark men and bright tigers were waiting in Africa for the devout and the adventurous.

New continents looming across great distances did not appeal to the creative imagination in the thirties and they called for no change in the themes and characters of fiction. Thanks to the colonies, Harriet Martineau could develop her Illustrations of Political Economy in somewhat greater variety when she began

4

T H E N O V E L F O L L O W S T H E FLAG

to publish that monumental work in 1 8 3 2 . In Dickens's time, wayward boys and other blighted beings could in actual fact, as well as in stories published in his Household Words, be provided for in Australia. But for most writers the colonies were merely another source from which to add to the prolific clutter of the novel as it existed in the early and mid-Victorian years. The satisf y i n g formula of the love-plot-with-economic-obstacles was not threatened by the development of distant lands. Down the wide, peaceful streams of those ample three-decker plots that delighted the circulating libraries, colonial figures swim easily enough. Their heads bob up for a moment as they depart for the Antipodes, or arrive thence unexpectedly to cause a fine domestic flurry and trim the unruly ending for a hard-pressed author. But for the most part they are permitted to drift uneventfully out of sight. Many an engaging ne'er-do-well like Micawber and many a poor pretty creature like Hetty Sorrel disappears conveniently over the colonial horizon. Lost with many other loose ends in that veritable paradise of loose ends which so often constituted Volume III, they mingled unregarded with the throngs of more important people provided by the generous novelist with such a lavish hand. Y e t the novel at this stage made a hotbed for their future growth into full-time full-size characters. They sink into its very nourishing subsoil only temporarily. Presently their country's halcyon days of quiet annexation and expansion would draw to a close. British "guardianship" could keep leading to British " e x tension" in a kind of happy trance f o r just so long. When E n g land in the eighties swept into high-powered unashamed imperialism, with all its sinister accompaniments, even the characters in her colonial fiction felt the vibration. They take on a new and threatening stature. A t last England had given up pretending that Greater Britain was a pocketful of bits and pieces collected informally by enthusiastic explorers and traders because no one else wanted them. So her fictional characters also get rid of their disguise with a disarming honesty. Once they had been jolly or

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E FLAG

j

melodramatic or amiably eccentric adventurers from a homeland that had "conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind" as Seeley, the Cambridge historian, so engagingly put it. Now they are to become predatory, aggressive organizers and exploiters on the grand scale, zealous, hardy, unscrupulous. Once they had reflected the old, comfortable casuistry, the charming disingenuousness of the British attitude toward the fringes of the world. Now they reflect the strain and tension of her bitterly competitive scramble with France and Germany for the last habitable spaces of the globe. In the easygoing welter of the Victorian novel, arrivals from the east or from "down under," even if they read Carlyle or Disraeli, are burdened with no message, no mission, no prophecy regarding England's destiny in far places. Their long quiet years were based on an England in which Manchester men in the Colonial Office and Little Englanders in the House of Commons had no interest in aggrandizement. C. W . Dilke, just out of Cambridge in 1866 and traveling around the world, found it as Mr. Willkie did later, a very large world indeed. He also found, somewhat to his surprise, a great many Englishmen in it. So he gave his travel book of 1868 the fortunate title of Greater Britain. The phrase stuck because the book becamc famous, but the idea meant little to the average Britisher before the imperial eighties. From that decade onward the heroes of colonial fiction pull their whole weight in heavy loads of the Gospel of Empire. They are no longer extras. Complete novels are devoted to them and their questionable doings. These doings are largely concerned with the propagation and maintenance of a new religion, the religion of the "solid block" of territory in any uncharted country, the religion of "Cape to Cairo." Behind this new evangel is the full pressure of late Victorian materialism and nationalism, not only in England but in France and Germany also. The fictional characters who find themselves the exponents of this new doctrine, are weighed down with its grandiosity. They tend to lose their sense of humor under the burden of it. Their authors felt the same

6

T H E NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

desperate need, however, to justify it in fiction as the politicians at home were feeling in fact. Shouldering the "white man's burd e n " with more or less fervor, sometimes with only half-stifled protest, your true hero of a colonial novel has no chance to relax. He is egged on not only by Seeley and Kipling but by ChamberIain's firm and dry pronouncements about commerce, "that greatest of all political interests," and by some echoes, no doubt, of Ruskin's fine writing of 1870 about "the motionless navies of Europe," to which he likened England's colonies in a highly picturesque passage in his first Slade Lecture. Nietzsche and Bergson soon replaced Ruskin, and our hero finds himself with all retreat into the old Victorian "Gemütlichkeit" cut off forever. So he and his French and German fellows trek gamely through a veritable wilderness of colonial novels for the last half century and more. From the pages of Thackeray and W. D . Arnold he has graduated to the newer India of Kipling and thence to the India of Edward Thompson and E. M. Forster and Christine Weston. Generations of novelists from Captain Marryat to Olive Schreiner, and from Gertrude Millin to Francis Brett Young and Stuart Cloete, have told of his exploits in A f r i c a . Against the Australian background of convict camp and bush, gold mine and sheep ranch, he figures in Henry Kingsley's turbulent novels, those "charters of Australia" as native sons consider them. Then he moves from Kingsley and Trollope and Bulwer to the sterner pages of Marcus Clarke, the leisurely masterpieces of Henry Handel Richardson, and such recent indictments as Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land. Scarcely a colonial episode on any continent has been denied fictional treatment: convicts in Sydney, Kitchener in the Sudan, Rhodes and his dream of Middle A f r i c a , English and French rubber plantations in the Malay States, John Nicholson taking the Delhi Gate, missionaries in Zulu kraals, miners after diamonds in Kimberley, English tutors bringing up Indian maharajahs, all have found chroniclers. G. A . Henty and Talbot Mundy, Morley Roberts and Brett Young, Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, Maud Diver and E. M. Forster—a stranger

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE FLAG

7

conglomeration of styles and reputations than these concerned with colonial fiction would be hard to find. Perhaps this very diversity accounts for the persistence of the colonial novel in public favor. For it has persisted, from the eighties to the present time, against stiff competition. Was it merely because Kipling gave it a good send-off? Or because the interest in empire itself was widespread enough to sustain it? Did World Wars I and II, with their attendant colonial problems, give a new impetus to these books? All these factors may have played their part, but it seems more likely that certain waves of literary taste and fashion must be held accountable for it. Too much Zola had an upsetting effect on many British readers besides Tennyson. The literature of the Social Deposits—that mass of novels which strove from the 1870s to 1 9 1 4 to draw public attention to all sorts and conditions of men—met in certain quarters with a stubborn sales resistance. The readers who put up this resistance no doubt felt a little like the Prince of Wales who was put, in 1884, on an ill-fated Royal Commission for Inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes. He attended four or five sessions, during which he spent much time drawing Union Jacks on the paper before him in red and blue pencil, and then escaped quietly to Paris and Wiesbaden. Masses of evidence, no matter how true, can be boring. Without doubt what the Prince heard gave authenticity to such titles as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London ( 188 3 ) , Horrible London ( 1 8 8 9 ) , Darkest England and the Way Out ( 1 8 9 0 ) , but it was a dreary business. To Edward V I I I it would all have meant something; to the future Edward V I I it meant a vague discomfort and a vast ennui. He was a strictly average reader. Many other average readers found novels based on all this evidence rather too much for them. T o the more critical-minded, the too obvious mixture of the case history and a philanthropic, sob-story kind of pseudo-journalism seemed designed to produce a Dickensian catch-in-the-throat that was démodé. Walter Besant, Arthur Morrison, Richard Whiteing, the early Somerset

8

T H E NOVEL FOLLOWS T H E FLAG

Maugham, even the lighter touch of a Neill Lyons, played a little too confidently, it seemed to the aesthetes and literati, on the emotions to be derived from smiling with wet eyes. In more ordinary readers, stories about blighted slum children, servant girls with illegitimate babies, and toughly gallant Cockney maidens had produced a feeling of "something too much of this." They wore you all out with compassion. Too much compassion is not only monotonous but probably unhealthy. So, even as the Prince slipped away to the Riviera, the reading public slipped away in droves, as many Victorian memoirs record, and escaped to Treasure Island, The Prisoner of Zenda, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And as if by the way, they fell into the robust and manly arms of Kipling himself. They were not callous readers. Many an uncomfortable late Victorian sensed the social impasse, the dead-end street, and sniffed the harsher air of new worlds to come. But he hoped he might not live to see them. It seemed to him only too likely that there was no way, no way at all, out of "Darkest London." It was possible that even the Salvation Army, the new settlement people at Toynbee Hall, the Socialists, the clergy themselves, to say nothing of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, might not find it. But out of "Darkest Africa" there was a way. Personal courage and endeavor were still valid. Stanley had proved it in real life, and many a good vigorous novelist came thundering cheerfully after him. They took the tired Victorian out of mean streets, hospitals, prisons, into good English fresh air again. (Even if it was tropical air it was chiefly English-owned). They took him out of the long, level, semidetached chronicles of drab lives and nether worlds, to places where people could frankly take sides again and sportsmanship was valued. They gave him back his good honest plot. Neither the social novelists nor those tiresome writers who persisted in following a commonplace young man through the public school and the university, and were telling about themselves all the time, cared much for the plot. The reader had had his fill of confessions of convicts and autobiographies of thieves. The writers about em-

THE NOVEL

FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

9

pire gave him as much good red-blooded adventure as Stevenson, and left him with the comfortable feeling that realism had not been sacrificed either. O f course these books were not squalid but they were not fairy tales. They were as historical as Stanley Weyman and Maurice Hewlett, but they dealt with history in the making, in which, as an approver of empire, the reader had a part. The tales were nothing to be ashamed o f ; they were about real life. They were stories of high adventure, to be sure, but of work and effort also, exerted c o m f o r t a b l y far from home. They told of personal idealism and heroism for a great cause, but they were innocent of social reproach. They were not difficult or recondite or decadent, and were therefore reassuring to those who deplored the intellectual snobbery or the slight touch of mauve mixed with the blue of the aesthetic groups. The followers of Ouida and Marie Corelli found satisfactory quantities of sensation and romance in many stories about the Empire. Admirers of Rhoda Broughton or W. B. Maxwell for their sharp observation of contemporary manners combined with human understanding found these qualities in many stories about India, for instance, where the gossip of the hill stations and the finer shades of Anglo-Indian society afforded the novelist ample material for satirical comment and drawingroom comedy if he was inclined that way. In short, these books had a little of everything except what contemporary readers were tired of, and they satisfied everybody. N o one should be persuaded, though, that he will find in English textbooks and histories of fiction a classification neatly labeled " N o v e l s of E m p i r e " or " T h e Colonial Influence." Bibliographers and librarians have made a few tentative gestures toward gathering and arranging titles, it being their nature, and indeed their profession, to gather and arrange much that resists with all its might such a tidy process. T h e English have always been rugged individualists in the matter of literary categories. Even from the larger isms of the nineteenth century, romanticism, symbolism, and all their kind, the English have mostly remained happily

IO

THE NOVEL

FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

centrifugal. T h e y will not cluster, nor are they very keen on classifying. T h e y do not like to carve out a little piece f r o m the fine disorderly mass of fiction in general, and distinguish it by a name or compare it by its literary ancestries with other related pieces. They have a healthy native distaste f o r imposing an artificial literary order where no order is or can be. With the French and the German novels about their colonies, on the other hand, the bibliographers have had a much better time. These books fit more neatly into certain fairly definite national traditions in French and German literature, and into national types of fiction in particular. T h e y have a more clear relationship with actual events in French and German colonial history than their English counterparts do.

TRICOLOR

The French, like the English, present the paradox of apathy about colonics at home and large annexations in the east. But the reasons f o r the early French apathy were different. Feelings of economy were very persuasive. Subsidies f o r Algeria, conquered in 1 8 3 0 , had always been large and returns on this investment had been small. Then, too, the Revolution had left a sediment of romantic humanitarianism in the French mind, a feeling later attacked bitterly by the classicists in literature but reinforced by the anticolonial Socialists in politics. A s a result of this old Revolutionary inheritance, many Frenchmen were persuaded, like many Little Englanders, that colonizing led inevitably to the oppression and exploitation of native peoples. H a d not Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand shown these picturesque

primitives

living in a noble state of innocence and pastoral bliss? A f t e r 1 8 7 0 , furthermore, although these brightly colored tropical scenes were receding into a dim idyllic past, and French colonial scruples along with them, other considerations slowed up French colonial expansion. For after 1 8 7 0 an expansionist was " a traitor to France on the R h i n e " and, still worse, probably a Germanophile.

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

But the noble savages of romantic origin left their mark on French fiction. A strain of romantic exotisme runs through the whole history of the French novel in the nineteenth century, forming a fertile strip in which the true colonial novel could germinate. This kind of novel emerges as a definite form around 1900, a good deal later than its English equivalent. The vast background of English colonial fiction emerged from the eighteenth century, like Victorian fiction itself, with characteristic casualness and confusion. The " t r u e " English colonial novel as handled by Kipling, Forster, Y o u n g , Cloete, H. H . Richardson, grew up out of the muddle of mid-nineteenth century fiction as produced by Bulwer, Kingsley, Trollope, and Marryat, into which the colonies were swept more by accident than design. But the " t r u e " French colonial novels of Randau, Anély, Bertrand, and Leblond, were to grow from the highly colored exotic stories of travel and romance in the east, purveyed by Pierre Loti in the 1880s and '90s. The exotic poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and a host of lesser travelers in the Orient also fostered the French passion for the remote and the strange. So the French colonial novel was developed in the rather special and separate forcing house of nineteenth century exotisme, which was a holdover from the romantic taste for the exotic of an earlier Revolutionary generation. Novels about Frcnch colonial possessions, then, have behind them a more specialized nineteenth century tradition than the English. They did not spring naturally out of the general blending with miscellaneous themes for fiction, like their English relatives. Because of this tenacious romantic strain in their background, the novels of nineteenth century France abound in South Sea idyls, Oceanias, Polynesian paradises, and noble savages. Gauguin came honestly by his passion for seeking escape and the ideal life in an island setting. Modern French novels and travel books excel in islands. The French creative fancy has centered about them ever since Robinson Crusoe was naturalized in France and Paul et Virginie wrung the hearts of its readers. The vogue of Leconte de Lisle, himself a native of la Réunion, also contributed to the

12

T H E NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

popularity of the island theme. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, when English novelists were using Indian and Australian settings as a matter of course, French soldiers and administrators were still striving to conquer and organize A l geria. This region was to become one of the richest backgrounds for the later French colonial novel. But it could not be exploited f o r purposes of French fiction until the scramble for A f r i c a in the eighties had made this part of the world mean something to the people at home. In the sixties, Indo-China was added to the French colonial picture. But for most of the nineteenth century, French writing about the colonies naturally turned to the past. Partial to islands as usual, it dwelt with characteristic fondness on Haiti and Mauritius, as well as on settings in the new world, Santo Domingo, French Canada, and Louisiana. The exotic tradition, not in its pure and conventional form, but blurred, f u l l of false local color and luxuriant descriptions, has been the despair of French critics. Much good writing about the colonies was stifled by a quite natural critical impatience with too many volcanic islands, sumptuous with sunsets, perfumes, and languorous native maidens. Critical distaste for this sort of thing cast a shadow even on the work of later exponents of exotisme like Loti, Gauguin, Emile Nolly. Let us, said the critics, have no more evocations of Oriental atmosphere and mystery. The whole mass of exotic material played into the hands of those passionate classicists who, right up to the eve of the 1940 debacle, were waging the eternal French battle against romanticism. The idealized savages, the lush backgrounds, the morbid humanitarianism, to what pernicious influences do we owe them, asked the classicists, if not to the Revolution of 1789, the undisciplined and formless ideas of Rousseau (who can be and has been blamed for almost everything) and to the insidious, pervasive infiltrations f r o m that source of all evil—German "nature philosophy" and German romanticism in general? In the early 1900s when the French colonial novel, unlike the English, was shaping up into something like a "school" of its own, thanks to the classicists a

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E

FLAG

!3

sharp line was being drawn between the literature of what Pierre Mille scornfully called "le tourisme colonial," and the sterner, barer outlines of the " t r u e " colonial novel. This distinction, because of their less acute need to define and segregate types, and the more miscellaneous origin of their colonial fiction, the English did not have to make. Tunis and most of Indo-China had been added to France's colonial possessions by the time that the race for empire got under way in the eighties. Eugene Etienne, Jules Ferry, Barthélémy St. Hilaire, Gabriel Hanotaux, Alfred Rambaud, and Paul LeroyBeaulieu, among others, convinced a still somewhat reluctant French nation that its commerce, its national prestige, in fact its survival, depended on its becoming a leading colonial power. French scientific "missions" crossed and recrossed from every direction the most pitiless regions of Africa. Persuasive speakers trumpeted that "the future of France is in her colonies." In fact the whole modern French imperial enterprise, like the much older and more firmly established British effort and the much newer German one in the same direction, was getting up a fine head of steam. The Gospel of Grab and the Doctrine of the Solid Block lent itself as well to the Gallic idiom as to any other. Colonizing was one way of canceling the inferiority complex engendered by defeat in 1870; it was a gesture of national energy, an affirmation of strength. The glories of the seventeenth century French colonial past could be revived. So the French colonial novels are naturally full of talk about "regeneration," of a revitalized nationalism, of an insistence on the glory of war, force, and dangerous living. This has always been the self-assertive language of a people recovering from defeat. The Nazi order in Germany appealed to the same national state of mind and fostered its aggressive national policies in much the same words. Stories about soldiers, explorers, and administrators are easily paramount in French fiction about colonial life; merchants appear less often than in German fiction of the same class. For the French, the flag and "la gloire" preceded trade in remote regions of the earth. National honor occupied first

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E F L A G place as a colonial motive, and commerce was kept out of sight, even after 1892 when a new protectionist policy made French colonial expansion an economic and social necessity of the first importance. The colonial interests of France, Germany, and England were everywhere in conflict, and the wonder is that nowhere did any two of these nations combine against the third on a large scale or for any length of time. The whole thing was a kind of European juggling match, a series of tricks in sleight-of-hand, with the last habitable pieces of the globe. Of course, each nation fancied itself as producing the colonizers par excellence, with special talents for subjecting native races, and for organizing and administering the various and sundry wastelands snatched from them. In general, the French were inclined to shrug off as childish and uninformed the opinions of those who took for granted the much advertised British superiority in colonizing, while the Germans were more definitely jealous of the British reputation. The French knew that their own achievements equaled the best that the British could show, but the Germans, coming later into the scramble, felt that they had to prove their merit. Yet despite all the latent jealousies and hostilities, Europe surprisingly managed to divide up Africa and adjust other tangled colonial claims throughout the world, without much bloodshed —European bloodshed of course. The wars in the colonial novels up to 1 9 1 4 are native wars. The extermination of a few tribes like the Zulus and the Hereros (or even the Boers, though it took a long time) was something quite different from European warfare. Ruthlessness was considered a sort of duty in the interest of "race superiority" and was often necessary to round out one of the Solid Blocks of colonial domain to which each country aspired. But England was carefully keeping the balance of power in Europe, and the Marquis of Salisbury believed in peace as the best bulwark against revolution in an increasingly industrial society. All of the Solid Blocks had to be organized after they had been grabbed, and the organizing as well as the grabbing of empire

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE FLAG

15

served as an outlet f o r national energies and enthusiasms almost as effective as w a r itself.

BLACK,

WHITE,

RED

Before 1 8 7 0 the Germans can hardly be reckoned as contenders in the great European f r e e - f o r - a l l of expansion. Their fiction is reticent about colonial aims and ambitions. Y e t in the 1840s German traders and missionaries were in Zanzibar, and in 1848 R e b mann and K r a p f , the missionary-explorers—with talents similar to those so happily combined, Scottish style, in the person of Livingstone—discovered Mt. Kilimanjaro. Sir John K i r k , British consul at Zanzibar since the fifties, clashed there with the German explorers and propagandists, the Denhardt brothers, in the seventies. The great steamship-owner Woermann had established warehouses and trading posts in West A f r i c a as early as the fifties and sixties. Carl Peters, that spectacular and often unconsciously amusing organizer and publicist f o r the fatherland in foreign parts, was rushing about East A f r i c a in the eighties busily making treaties with native chieftains. This nonchalant treaty-making was a practice in which all European powers and their representatives became skillful. For sheer numbers, Stanley probably holds the record with 450. B u t f e w have been as delightfully clear and specific as Peters was in his reports and journals, as to just how it was done, how much liquor and how many presents and how many sociable baths with savage chieftains were necessary in each case. Y e t very little of this f r u i t f u l material for fiction was used by German novelists during most of the nineteenth century. The victory of 1 8 7 0 , the unification of the Reich in 1 8 7 1 , and the prosperity of the following years (the " G r ü n d e r j a h r e " ) resulting from the payment of the French indemnity were needed to make Germany join in the coming rush f o r empire. During the mid-nineteenth century years when German;.·'s delayed commercial and industrial development was taking place, well be-

16

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

hind that of England and France, very few foundations were being laid for the novel of colonial life—the "Kolonialroman" as the systematic German textbooks call it, or the "ethnographischer R o m a n " as it has been more tactfully called since 1 9 1 9 . While Indian and Australian vistas were glimpsed more and more frequently beyond the overcrowded rooms of Victorian family chronicles, and while French novelists were happily obsessed with exotic island paradises, or with taking apart French society at home, the German novel was taking a different course. German writers were learning to deal with the domestic scene under the influence of English masters such as Scott, Bulwer, and Dickens, and of French models such as Balzac. They were listening with more and more attention to the exhortations delivered by the critic Julian Schmidt in his Grenzboten articles. He urged a sane realism and the adapting and naturalizing of British patterns of the novel to German life and manners, particularly to the neto commercial and industrial life so rapidly expanding in Germany. This effort to make fiction approximate the contours of daily life in Germany, to picture the German at work in his shop, his office, and on his farm, as the Englishman and the Frenchman had long been pictured, led logically enough to the novels about mercantile life and the merchants engaged in it, the " K a u f mannsroman" as the German historians of fiction obligingly label it. This is the kind of novel that, considering the great days of the Hansa, might well have had an earlier development in Germany. But history had made it impossible for German fiction to keep pace with the national life, as English and French fiction had done. The " K a u f m a n n s r o m a n " became popular only in the nineteenth century, when it blended with other favorite forms of fiction, the historical novel, the family chronicle, the "Zeitroman" or novel reflecting a whole period and its life. This blending process gave depth and body to the novel of German commerce and commercial people, and made it a sound basis for later novels about the colonies and colonial people. The German beginnings of the novel of distance and adventure

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E F L A G might well have drawn upon the highly romantic lives of national explorers and missionaries in Africa around 1850. But as in the parallel cases of England and France, these fathers of empire did not seem important at home until the eighties. Then actual German colonizing began to catch up with the efforts of the rest of Europe, though without the long quiet years of preparation that gave England and France such tremendous impetus in their final sprint for world dominion. So it came about that the first heroes of German fiction in any way comparable with the "squatter aristocracy" of Kingsley and Bulwer in Australia, or with the high-minded soldiery of W. D. Arnold in India, consisted of solid middle-class merchants like Gustav Freytag's Anton Wohlfahrt in Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) 1855. Although these traders may journey, with their firm's great wagons full of German goods guarded by giant Schnauzers, no further than the Polish marshes, they take with them German ideals of thoroughness, honesty, and order, and a passion for work and decisive action. These were the qualities, exerted patiently in "German West" and "German East," in Togoland and the Cameroons, which made it possible for the Germans to overhaul and in some cases outstrip their colonial rivals in spite of a late start. National prestige, carried more dashingly to distant lands by Englishmen and Frenchmen, was in Germany's case patiently and prosaically built up by such merchants as figure in the "Kaufmannsromane" of Freytag, Willkomm, König, Keller, Frenssen, Spielhagen, Marlitt. Transplanted to colonial settings, they keep their high standards of honesty and fair dealing and add to them a zeal for spreading "Deutschtum." This zeal was intense once it started, but never was a nation so hard to propagandize into empire. Unification in 1871 and rapid strides in economic development were making Germany well able to hold her own with other continental powers and even to rival England. Explorers, missionaries, shipowners, bankers, and enthusiasts like Carl Peters all brought pressure to bear on Bismarck

i8

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E F L A G

and his free-trade, anti-imperialist policies. But let trade come first, was Bismarck's conviction, and then the flag if it cared to. Even in 1 8 7 1 most of his countrymen probably agreed with him when he said, " I do not want colonies at all. Their only use is to provide sinecures. That is all England at present gets out of her colonies, and Spain too. And as for us Germans, colonies would be exactly like the silks and sables of the Polish nobleman who had no shirt to wear under them." As late as 1889 he was declaring, "Von Haus auf bin ich kein Kolonialmensch." Actually he began about 1875 to yield to pressure in favor of expansion. The pressure groups headed by bankers and merchants were in his case most persuasive; the Jewish bankers, Bleichröder and Hansemann, were among his most trusted advisers. A f t e r 1879 he agreed to protect German manufacturers and decided on the new general policy that the soldier and the trader might advance hand in hand, as it were, into Germany's foreign dominions; let them keep step at least, and not allow the flagwaving to come first. The cautious German fostering of the precedence of trade in her colonies by all manner of "Vereine" and "Gesellschaften" built a firm foundation for her colonial successes. So it is not surprising that after 1879 a whole new world of commerce opened up throughout Africa and in the Pacific Islands of the South Seas to German capital and to German authors too. Here was a new field for the merchant-hero. He might be based on an important character in real life like Lüderitz, the Bremen merchant who founded Germany's first colony in S.W. Africa in 1883, or on humbler originals. A f t e r all, many of his less exalted brethren had journeyed, in fact and in fiction, to outlying places on nothing grander than a "Woermanndampfer." Like England and France, Germany sent with her traders and soldiers her own brand of Kultur. She found in her colonies the markets for surplus manufactures, and outlets for surplus population as well. She also found relief for a national phobia of long

T H E NOVEL FOLLOWS T H E FLAG

19

standing. The fear of "encirclement"—the German national obsession—is not of recent origin any more than are Prussianism, or Geopolitik, or other Teutonic phenomena. The feeling of being deliberately stifled by other nations goes a long way back of 1939 and 1 9 1 4 to the earlier days when economic nationalism was being urged upon Germany by experts like List and Roscher in the eighteen forties. Somewhat later the historian Treitschke and the explorer and publicist Hiibbe-Schleiden were developing this same idea when they urged their countrymen to "think imperially" and to take up "Weltpolitik." The Germans in their turn finally fell victim to the European disease: "Ausdehnung"—expansive imperialism. THE

NOVELS

The onset and progress of this competitive expansion is faithfully described for us in the novels of the three nations who were the chief participants. The casualness of the British imperial pattern, the envy and hate and unwilling admiration of the English existing among the German expansionists, the romantic but eventually harsh and authoritarian view of her dependencies held by France, all these diverse elements are reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in the mass of colonial fiction that sprang up between 1880 and 1 9 1 4 . The world of those years has crumbled, and these novels and their heroes go far toward explaining why. They outline a large part of its foundations. It may be that they will be the best monument to empire, in terms of human understanding and human values, long after World War II has slipped into the distant past. The authors of all but one group of these books looked upon the imperial idea as no unmixed blessing. They are pretty clearly divided into three classes: the Defenders, the Doubters, and the Attackers. Even the defenders are often uneasy, or sell truth down the river for a good story. The imperial picture, of course, in its infinite variety, could amply justify each of these positions.

20

THE NOVEL

FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

For the defenders it offered Stoic or Dionysian heroes and deeds aplenty, as fashion and individual talent dictated. For the doubters there were the Janus-faces of mixed motive and of good motives working ill, or just the vague, blurred human tendency to peter out, to fail in unspectacular ways, to make inevitable mistakes, to hope f o r the far-off hazy goal of Somehow Good as an end to this vast imperial muddle, as to other muddles. The attackers f o u n d explosive f u e l f o r their anger—cruelty, oppression, power run riot; in every new imperial field the dragon's teeth sprouted and Hydra-headed monsters spawned in g r a t i f y i n g profusion. The defenders, it would seem, have had the easiest time of it as novelists. T h e y are the high-pressure, high-tension

people,

well extraverted, sometimes hyperthyroid, but never dull. T h e y are nevertheless a little anxious, and this suppressed anxiety gives their books a spring and verve; they have a tendency to rush f r o m episode to episode without looking too f a r into the jungle or the bush f o r trouble in the shape of a general idea. T h e y are sometimes, though not necessarily, superficial, and almost always good reading. W e should not be ungrateful f o r the Edgar Wallaces and Talbot Mundys of this world; the Commissioner Sanders of one, and the J i m g r i m of the other have become household words. So has Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, to whom they are both related. N o r should we refuse an occasional comfortable wallow in the sentimentalities of Maud Diver's India. She told a good story, and if she seems unconcerned with the story's implications Kipling can take the blame. The defenders are of various kinds. Many of them refuse to recognize that empire itself, and therefore the grab bag of material f o r fiction that it presents to the author's eager fingers, is infinitely confused and confusing. It is consistent only in its chronic state of chaos. Y e t at moments it has a w a y of looking streamlined, simple, noble. Most of the defenders snatch at these moments only to find themselves, too late f r o m an artistic point of view, baffled by this contradictory and generally unmanageable little section of the Great Experiment they have laid hold o f .

T H E N O V E L F O L L O W S T H E FLAG

21

So inconsistencies must be hustled out of sight, half-truths must be juggled into prominent positions, and the endings must be so explosively good that among the bravos no one will be heard to murmur, "Well, but on the other hand. . . . " Another defensive group gives up this kind of strenuousness altogether. According to them there is no use in striving and straining to impose even a fictional order on this complex phenomenon of empire. Its very complexity and diversity are the things to be stressed, its hectic vitality, its contradictions and general untidiness. I f the whole thing is to make any sense, it can be made to do so only by accepting it on its own terms. It is better to plunge right in and let local color do its work and violent human gestures justify themselves by their violence. Many a writer before and after Kipling has taken this plunge, even though, like Kipling, he sacrificed his social and artistic integrity to do so. Still other defenders relax even further and take the empire at face value. These have the easiest time of all, as people on the positive side always do. They are not even aware of accentuating or defending anything; the attitude of unquestioning acceptance is instinctive. They think of themselves as simply the truthful reporters of a great campaign or expedition or adventure. The greatness must be obvious to all and sundry; no need to stress it. They can narrate rapidly and romanticize and describe freely and objectively a kind of life in strange continents that will be all fresh and new to the folks at home. They write in the full glow of discovery and revelation. They have not only discovered empire but also the bottomless resources of empire as a feeder for fiction. They are the authors of boys' books like G. A. Henty's, or like Captain Marryat before him, authors of books about the cheerfully strenuous hunting-and-shooting men. All these are far from that wavering group whom we may call the doubters, the unhappy, hesitant, tender-minded, middle-ofthe-road people on the question of empire. They arrive in Africa or Indo-China, or Australia, in a kind of trance. " W h y are we here at all?" they ask themselves miserably. Some very strange echoes

22

THE N O V E L FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

are their only answer. They look at the vast spectacle and try to see both sides, or they look at it and . . . wonder, like Louisa Gradgrind. {"Louisa, never wonder!") For their own peace of mind it would have been a f a r better thing for them to have heeded that stern rejoinder. But not for their novels. For the doubters, it seems, have produced out of their own travail and vexation of spirit, some of the best books on this vexed imperial theme. Their own wobbling state of mind has given their characters a very human, puzzled, rueful quality that makes them come all too uncomfortably to life. In their very failure to achieve that most desirable condition—a Stand, a Point of View, on the whole imperial exploit—they seem real to us. They are of course in a regrettable state, a lamentable condition, and they are entirely convincing.

William Delafield Arnold's young hero in Oakfield ( 1 8 5 3 ) is one of the best of these tender-minded heroes in earlier times. Ε. M. Forster's schoolmaster, Fielding, in A Passage to ìndia ( 1 9 2 4 ) , is young Oakfield's modern blood brother. Both are eternally twisting their heads to look forward and backward as well as all around. It cannot be done. But they both have charm and great courage, and they both . . . wonder. Your true defender never wonders. T o pass from the divided minds of the doubters to the onetrack minds of the full-fledged attackers of empire, is to leave speculation behind. There is nothing like a good solid state of hatred to make a novel "jell." T o put down Sir Gilbert Parker or Morley Roberts and take up Gertrude Millin, Evelyn Waugh, or William Plomer on the subject of British dominion in Africa is to move from the twilight realms of doubt into the daylight of relative certainties. Henri Daguèrches in 1 9 1 3 is still wondering about the French and their doings in Indo-China; Claude Farrère and Jean Marquet in the 1920s are no longer wondering. Sometimes the author's hatred of the imperial idea crystallizes in savage and satirical amusement. Olive Schreiner was no imperialist, but she was vague and grandiose about it. Elspeth H u x -

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

ley and Winifred Holtby find the whole notion of empire and its pretensions such a grotesque and fantastic business that they cannot help saying so in words that have an edge to them. Frieda von Bülow and Gustav Frenssen in the early nineties were not quite sure where Germany should stand in the colonial line-up; H a n s G r i m m has no hesitation in saying that she should stand first and that her watchword in the process of getting to preeminence should be "Annihilate the British!" The haters and attackers do not produce genial books, or books pervaded by a fine detachment, but they make up for this in sureness of touch. It is a great thing to have made up your mind. The defenders of empire in fiction saw no necessity for making up their minds. For them only one point of view was possible. It was not even a point of view; it was rather an attitude or mental climate. Being sanguine people by nature, accepters and yeasayers, they were not consciously taking an affirmative position with regard to imperial expansion. They were not arguing its nobility of motive against their skeptical colleagues who wrote novels to show up the whole colonial confusion as a race for gain and glory in about equal parts. The defenders were simply deluded into defending the indefensible by seeing only its redeeming features. It was easy for them in the joyful exuberance of the creative drive to accept a great wealth of fine material for novels without scrutinizing very closely or critically the complicated organism that provided it. That has been the artist's right at all times; one is grateful that for the most part novelists write novels and not tracts. In this case, however, enthusiasm lent itself readily to the affirmative side of a bitter and dubious business. It did so with much bounce and vigor and success. We should remember that the celebrators of empire wrote, as a rule, in perfect good faith, just as many a near-sighted, strenuous empire-builder built in perfect good faith. The novelists took the institution of empire itself, along with the multiplicity of people and situations that it so prodigally furnished forth, completely for granted. With dazzled eyes they saw the sheer vitality of the

T H E NOVEL FOLLOWS T H E FLAG whole colonial enterprise and endowed it with some mystic glory, usually national or racial, that completely paralyzed any will to question it, before any question could arise. They forgot that vitality in itself is not always entirely unchallengeable; an octopus, after all, has vitality too. The glamor that attaches to empire-building is bound up with this almost indestructible vitality. The tough plant of imperialism flowered in so many wholly admirable ways that it is no wonder enthusiastic novelists were blinded by its luxuriance and easily overlooked or remained unaware of an underlying sordidness at the roots. On the surface, imperialism could be seen as a race full of high endeavor, a great adventure. It did actually call for and develop some of the greatest human virtues—courage, self-denial, physical and moral endurance, and, paradoxically enough, a passion for freedom. In the last analysis this paradox is not puzzling (put merely human. Until very recent times, freedom of enterprise and of personal endeavor was what the novelists emphasized, because they valued it as their contemporaries did. " O f old sat Freedom on the heights," intoned Tennyson, and in the case of the forefathers of empire a true respect for freedom and a fairly disinterested desire for as much of it as possible for as many people as possible are justifiably assumed by the novelists who write lyrically about the early days of expansion. Even quite realistic politicians and historians can admit that in the development of the imperial octopus "the initiative . . . is taken by interests but the support is given by ideas." Surely the most innocent and most compelling of these supporting ideas was concerned with liberty first of all. So a kind of nobility, a kind of simple, almost Biblical grandeur, surrounds the novelists' as well as the historians' pictures of the fathers of empire. Later years have shown some of it to be spurious, but one cannot blame the many novelists who have chosen to overlook that. They have looked back with nostalgia to the patriarchs who were occupying the last great empty spaces of the

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

globe during those expansion years in the eighties and nineties of last century. The story of these most blameless of the empirebuilders is the story of one of the last great human adventures on an epic scale. A simplicity and largeness of gesture became them because of their deeds. Freedom still sat upon the heights in those twenty years between the Berlin Conference and the turn of the century. Stanley and de Brazza racing f o r the Congo, Hewitt and Nachtigal racing f o r Senegal, Sir John Kirk and the D e n hardts struggling for Zanzibar, were all thinking, whatever their motives, in large terms. Even the gospel of the Solid Block can be seen by the novelists in its best light. It can be interpreted as the high-handed but generous carving out, for one nation or another, of great chunks of the earth's last usable regions. It took courage and a certain primitive simplicity of mind which we may not see again. T h e portraits of the missionary-explorers are particularly hallowed for the novelists by the glamor of that vanished freedom. The material f o r fiction about them has been mainly supplied b y themselves. Rebmann and K r a p f , Moffatt, Mackay, and many others have left their own colorful records. Livingstone crossing the Zambesi with his ox wagons can still refuse to cross f u r t i v e l y by night. " A n d should such a man as I flee? N a y , verily, I shall take observations for longitude and latitude tonight, though they be the last. . . . " He lived dangerously without benefit of Nietzsche and shot his lions with a flintlock. There is grandeur of the old-fashioned kind in his simple words in 1 8 5 7 to C a m bridge students: " I beg to direct your attention to A f r i c a . I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again." The Word had gone forth, but fell on deaf ears. For the young men at Cambridge were not yet interested in A f r i c a . O x f o r d and Ruskin and Rhodes were to publicize it for them in a different vocabulary many years later, by which time Livingstone's words had suffered a sea change indeed. It was a pity. For an empire built on the meanings he

i6

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS T H E F L A G

attached to words might have been a very different thing from what England actually built. He lived, as he spoke, in the old, plain, intrepid tradition, and knew what freedom was. The novelists of all nationalities have paid tribute to that knowledge and to the vanished way of life in which it was rooted. They recognized that these were the halcyon days, perhaps the very last days that could nourish the fine flowering of individualism. The early empire-builders were, indeed, rugged individualists. They performed, unaided, exploits of personal initiative and courage and did not have to prove any particular social dogma except the simple and self-evident necessity for advancing the power of England or France or Germany by land and sea. They were animated by a great faith in the future of the human race, a race that they assumed was to live, partly as a result of their efforts, in peace, and above all in freedom. We cannot blame the novelists who are fascinated and charmed by them and what they stood for. Integrity, especially when buried in the past, is something that may be romanticized and even drawn more than lifesize, with impunity. It was the strongest redeeming feature of empire, which in the long run it was powerless to redeem. By the time that trains, steamships, and planes replaced the ox wagon, there was not enough integrity to go round. The novelist, then, was justifiably enchanted by the great vitality, the assumption of a large freedom, the development of certain sturdy, Stoic qualities, and a quite genuine, rugged individualism and integrity. Moreover, the whole colonial drama was played out against a setting of epic size that matched the gestures. This element of vastness is connected politically with the gospel of the Solid Block, but in literature it proves more defensible than in history, and the novelists accept it without demur. For them there is some sort of intrinsic merit in largeness. The magic and mystery of space in itself and for its own sake are something to conjure with. The novelists who write about Australia and Africa, as we shall see later, are quite naturally those who value it most highly and exploit it most romantically. The

THE NOVEL

FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

very largeness of their backgrounds makes it possible f o r them to ignore or to excuse the concomitant unwieldiness, confusion, and mindlessness of much of the imperial drama that took place against these backgrounds. Vastness blurred and smoothed out all that. T h e people in their books are as space-intoxicated as they are themselves. Size was endowed w i t h a magical virtue and s y m bolism of its o w n ; somehow, they supposed, it must be the underlying or producing cause of those other great redeeming factors, vitality and freedom. So the whole imperial exploit was f r o m the very start hallowed f o r uncritical and admiring writers and readers by this closely connected trinity of imposing abstractions— size, vitality, and freedom. N o r were these all. The novelists well disposed to empire f o u n d other apparently redeeming features that placed the whole enterprise on the side of the angels. " W h e r e a gate is thrown open, human destiny begins," wrote Hans G r i m m , Germany's greatest colonial novelist, in 1 9 3 4 . This sense of a national or racial destiny, a mission, as of something inevitable, dynamic, not made by human agency but set in motion by some impersonal life-force perhaps, is a persuasive accompaniment of imperialism wherever it goes. A s expanding empires swept through all those "opened gates" of A f r i c a , Australia, or the newer India; of Cochin-China and A n n a m ; of Lüderitzland, the Bismarck Archipelago, and K i a o - C h o w ,

applauding

novelists who chronicled and hymned the glories of the great spectacle were bewitched by the conviction that they were f o r t i f y i n g the Children of Light on a heaven-sent crusade. T h e feeling of dedication to this mission or destiny was as elevating morally, and as unquestioned, as the concepts of size, vitality, and freedom, which were taken f o r granted with equal ease. Like these, the crusading spirit constituted a salvationary force able to counteract all the mistakes that expansion trailed after itself. The great End surely justified the means. For the French, the great End was the accomplishment of their "mission civilisatrice," their " e f f o r t civilisateur" in the colonies, to which the

28

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE FLAG

speeches of their politicians exhorted them. The novels of Louis Bertrand, Pierre Mille, and Robert Randau expound the national mission and reecho the exhortation. The Germans also, it seems, were on a "Kulturmission" of impressive proportions. Their novelists, from Frenssen to Hans Grimm and the author of Rodenkampp Söhne, are concerned with reinforcing this idea. The British, while busy spreading freedom and justice for all by shouldering the White Man's Burden of responsible government for subject peoples, are celebrated in fiction not only by the conventional cheering section composed of Kipling and his followers, but by a more subtle variety of fictionized propaganda. This is written by the more thoughtful group who feel that perhaps an obscure Nemesis must lie in wait for so much power; in order to disarm it, they refrain in their novels from exalting the power, and brood instead upon the solemn and tremendous human responsibility that it imposes. If we may believe French, German, and English spokesmen in the colonial offices of their respective countries, the novelists were justified. All three countries were, it seems, equally concerned to accomplish their national destinies and missions. They wanted to "civilize" and not exploit their colonial dependencies. There were representative public men in each country who quite sincerely believed in the elevated purpose of the whole expansionist movement, so far as their own countries were concerned and regardless of the corruption prevalent among other nationals. Of course, there is no doubt in the mind of any uncritical author of colonial fiction that his own nation's brand of civilization is the best of all possible brands. Each civilization is the best because it is founded on a glorious and spotless past. So the cleaning up of the earlier chapters of the imperial saga forms a congenial theme for politicians and novelists alike. After the Hansa, the Germans could point to a long record of honorable Eastern trade, to the great shipping companies of Woermann and O'Swald; to intrepid explorers like Nachtigal, Rohlfs, Barth, von der Decken; to fearless and altruistic mission-

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

aries of Lutheran or Moravian persuasion. The French and British had a longer record to clean up in making their heroic retrospects, but they were not slow with the whitewashing. The "effort civilisateur" that the French have made in the colonies has, they hasten to say—and the novelists corroborate them—been based on "la simple propagande pacifique de notre bonté." For England, Seeley and Cromer and Mary Kingsley, among many others, were busy clearing the wilderness of the colonial past. Even while urging aggrandizement and a willing shouldering of "the burden," they generously admit that in the origins of Greater Britain covetousness and heroism have been mixed. They maintain, however, as their novelists also imply, that "its annals are on the whole better, not worse, than those of most." This is a dangerous and equivocal line of defense at all times, and as applied to the Empire it did not seem quite good enough to some critics or to some novelists at home. These were the captious or suspicious folk whose jaundiced view of empire contrasted with the rosy glow in which the yea-sayers enveloped it. They furnished ammunition for, and backed up the doubters, not the defenders, of imperialism's achievements as they became articulate in fiction. They voiced the political and social skepticisms which gave the middle-of-the-road novelists their basis, and kept them uneasily turning their heads and wondering and muttering, " B u t on the other hand . . . , " and finding no answer. William Watson, for instance, wrote sourly, Best by remembering God, say some, We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I think, has mainly come When we forgot, when we forgot. Many there were who agreed with him. The house cleaning of the imperial past was materially hastened by this point of view and by such skeptics at home as John Morley, W . I.. Courrney, and most of the Fortnightly group. I f Britain and the rest were to build truly heroic societies in their colonial

THE NOVEL FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

possessions, and were truly to maintain by means of them what Ruskin called, "the motionless navies of Europe," then the imperial record in future would have to approximate perfection, no less. Otherwise, empire would simply breed wars, oppression, exploitation of all sorts, as J . M. Robertson and Robert Wallace pointed out. Imperialism was expensive, it meant more despotism abroad and more "aristocratic recrudescence" at home. It was vast and showy and not free from discreditable stains. Obviously it did not always make for peace, order, and freedom, as its supporters so loudly claimed. So one should not imagine that the voices from home formed a unanimous chorus of praise and enthusiasm. The more skeptical writers of fiction based on colonial and imperial themes had their voices too; they made no reassuring chorus; they may have been a little thin and irresolute and querulous; but they were there. A n d so the disillusioned crew, the sad and disappointed young men, the cynical and sometimes angry middle-aged men, in countless stories of life at the edges of the world, are allowed also to say their say. Sometimes they say it very pungently indeed, especially when they are angry enough. They are the downright attackers, as distinguished from the doubters. They and their authors are the people who are not impressed by any of empire's redeeming features. They look upon it with a coldly rageful eye. There may be redeeming features, yes, but the whole imperial scene is not redeemed by them. For these angry people it is irredeemable, inexcusable, indefensible on any grounds whatsoever. They wrote some hard-hitting and devastating novels, wrathful, astringent books. They were not all in English either. For fiction, always adaptable in all languages, followed without strain the stepped-up tempo of the new imperial idea in the eighties and nineties all over Europe. Throughout the colorful years of the Victorian "Sunset" and " A f t e r m a t h , " French and German novels, too, have their version of the colonial story. It is an instructively different version from the English one, often amusingly and

T H E N O V E L FOLLOWS THE

FLAG

31

ironically so. But the French and German novels also follow the missionaries, the merchants, and the flag into foreign parts with a readiness and gusto quite equal to the English. If anyone can doubt that imperialism played a large part in leading the world down the great slide to 1 9 1 4 and thente to 1 9 3 9 , let him read some of these French and German contributions to the " g e n r e " of the colonial novel. They shriek aloud with national rivalries, grudges, jealousies, antipathies, and misunderstandings. They were all, as Max Beerbohm so happily said of the plight of Wordsworth and the little girl, "at cross-purposes in the Lake C o u n t r y . " But they come together in blissful agreement on one grandly satisfying theme—a deep resentment, or at best, a deep suspicion of England. And no wonder. She has, it seems, eternally beaten them to the draw; she has got there first with the most, in the all-important matter of pegging out claims for posterity on all the frontiers of the world. And the earliest of these was India.

2_ The Burden of the Mystery: India and Indo-China THE

N

BURDEN

O V E L S about India p r o v i d e m o r e vicarious d i s c o m f o r t than anyone is entitled to. T h e y are a m o n g the u n h a p p i est books in the l a n g u a g e . T h e y are long on atmosphere,

b u t short on h u m o r and on hope. A n d w h a t an atmosphere it is! H e a v y w i t h the sense of f u t i l i t y and f a i l u r e , g l u e y w i t h h o m e sickness, and c l o u d y w i t h p u z z l e m e n t , it clogs the reader's m i n d w i t h second-hand misery. It smells at some seasons of the d r o u g h t and dust, at others of the steaming rains, and a l w a y s of too m a n y millions of u n h e a l t h y , caste-ridden people too close to the f a m i n e line. It breathes out the unhappiness of the conquered and of the insensitive W e s t e r n c o n q u e r o r in an alien and r e s e n t f u l Eastern w o r l d . T h e g r o w t h of his n a i v e l y surprised " n o b o d y - l o v e s - m e " attitude is sometimes t o u c h i n g , more o f t e n just a n n o y i n g , to the reader w h o f o l l o w s his f o r t u n e s in novels. T h e n w h y f o l l o w t h e m ? W h y c o u r t all the squalor and bloodshed, all the b r o o d i n g and g r o p i n g that India and the E n g l i s h h a v e m a n a g e d to p r o d u c e between them? S w a m p s and jungles, irrigation projects, f e v e r hospitals, and f a m i n e areas, bleak

barracks

and gossipy

business!

back-country

stations—what

a dismal

C r i n g i n g villagers, derisive and dissolute n a t i v e princes, and E n g lish y o u n g e r sons, f a n a t i c a l l y zealous Residents and C o l l e c t o r s , scheming dowagers, bored soldiers, s w e a t i n g and m a r t y r e d m i s sionaries and d o c t o r s — a l l steeped in the steaming b r o t h of the I n d i a n c l i m a t e — " W h a t a s e t ! " as M a t t h e w A r n o l d once r e m a r k e d in another connection. W e m a y u n d e r g o all this oppression and travail of spirit f o r

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

33

various reasons. Perhaps the idlest of them is a kind of low and unworthy curiosity to see what a climate can do to a novelist's outlook and to his style when his shirt is perpetually sticking to his back. There are few crisp, incisive, humorous books about India. N o one feels blithe, gay, or carefree about it. Crispness either wilts utterly away, or becomes a labored and mannered jauntiness with a Kipling accent. Some of Talbot Mundy's Indian stories ( T o l d in the East or Nine Unknown or Full Moon) have this tendency. Humor in an Indian setting tends to go a little wry and sour, or to affect an almost hysterical detachment, as in J . R. Ackerley's delightful Hindu Holiday ( 1 9 3 2 ) . We may analyze our discomfort as readers of fiction about India a little further, and see if we can justify our endurance of it, because we evidently enjoy our suffering; the proportion of these books in the annual output of fiction is large. The writers who wisely give up trying to be crisp or amusing fall into a languor and exhaustion of spirit that has in itself a kind of hypnotic effect. We are stupefied and tortured by it, but lulled and fascinated at the same time. These authors are appalled at the magnitude of the Indian setting and the hopelessness of the human drama it contains. Flora Annie Steel, though she would not have admitted it, conveyed in the 1890s some aspects of this state of mind; E. J . Thompson has allowed something of it to overpower him and escape into his pages. N o definite conclusions are possible here, even much better novelists such as Ε. M. Forster, for instance, seem to say. Better, then, merely to present as faithfully as may be the cloud of misunderstanding, frustration, and regret that the more sensitive Britishers feel around them in India. Somehow the subcontinent and the English in it—that "handful of scattered strangers" as Lord Dalhousie called them long ago—present the outlines of a gigantic mistake. They pose an oppressive enigma to which there is no solution. They constitute a dilemma so large and hopeless that it staggers the imagination. In the face of it, these novelists imply, one had best develop one's own brand of fatalism or stoicism, tempered by such tolerance as one can muster,

34

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

and learn to say " A l l is vain where it is not vile" and to live in hopes of going Home. F o r this Indian department of colonial fiction, as in no other novels in the world, homesickness becomes a specialty. Nowhere in literature, one is tempted to believe, is Home spelt with a larger capital letter. These Anglo-Indian novels contain some of the most shameless exploitations of nostalgia that can be used deliberately to sicken the heart and play upon the sympathies of the reader. From being merely a common human emotion, homesickness in India becomes a prevailing disease, almost a neurosis. It is such a psychological state as might be induced in a susceptible adolescent by the repeated playing of " A u l d Lang S y n e , " the " L o n d o n d e r r y A i r , " and " D e e p R i v e r . " Author and characters may all wallow in it without restraint. Kipling did not always indulge in this kind of sentimentality himself, but he pointed the w a y to it; he struck the attitude of which it is the logical sequel. N o one is a more likely prey to this peculiarly English f o r m of the disease than the Kipling type of "little orf'cer b h o y " or handsome y o u n g subaltern, and all his literary relations. They have not been educated to grow up to their mental and emotional age; they have been trained to assume a brisk indifference to feeling, to become strong silent baby proconsuls, in fact, at too early a stage in their development. This has merely served to drive underground their innate and quite natural "squashiness." We are asked to feel sorry f o r them in any number of Maud Diver's too exalted but o f t e n interesting and rapid stories about India. Pamela Hinkson makes much the same appeal in a recent book called Golden

Rose

( 1 9 4 4 ) , although this works a variety of other stops as well. Homesickness as the background emotion of so many of these novels betrays the most sensible people into all kinds of false attitudes and unlikely comparisons. Ε. M. Forster's somewhat stodgy English people in his Passage to India ( 1 9 2 4 ) look at the large dim outlines of the Malabar Hill and think of "dear

Grasmere"

which symbolizes everything they yearn f o r in the English landscape; dear Grasmere, "romantic yet manageable." It "sprang

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

35

f r o m a kindlier planet." There are no mysterious, hostile or indifferent echoes in the Lake Country, whereas in India "beyond the remotest echo, a silence . . . " bothers them all, though in different ways. The very air is charged with unanswered and unanswerable questions. By comparison with all this simmering vagueness, small, green, reassuring compact England looks to the exiles like the earthly paradise. The hero of W . D. Arnold's fine novel, a pioneer in this Anglo-Indian group, OakfielJ; or, Fellowship in the East ( 1 8 5 3 ) , makes some odd comparisons too. He looks at the Ganges in flood at Hajeepoor, and is reminded o f — what? " H i s own beloved Thirlwater" in Cumberland, of all things. Homesickness is unpredictable indeed, but surely an Arnold—even a young one—should have been more realistic. Surely he must have known when he left Cumberland for the Ganges what he was likely to find. Bui oddly enough he did not know, and neither do many of his fellows in fiction, contemporary and otherwise. Hanoï and Saigon remind the Frenchman of Paris. Perhaps this is another reason why the reluctant reader labors along after these uncomfortable people. His taste has become so warped in the process that he is animated as much by malice as anything else. A n d what so gratifying to malice as the spectacle, gradually unrolling through three hundred pages more or less, of hopeful and highminded people undergoing cruel and perspiring years of disillusionment? The reader knows they have reckoned without the vast boredom, the introspective torment, the "hot dull v a c a n c y " of Indian life. But the knowing reader has been through it all before; he could tell them, poor things. Above all, he knows that their imaginations have not pictured anything like the chronic state of bafflement that is the peculiar lot of the Anglo-Indian. A n d here even the most calloused novel reader will sometimes come upon real tragedy unaware, and be obliged to snap out of his weary cynicism about all things mortal in India. Years of single-hearted and selfless devotion are often pictured in these grueling books as meeting with no reward, no results, no

36

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T Ê R Y

sense of accomplishment or satisfaction in duty done, bleak as that may be. (This defeatist attitude had become chronic before World War II according to Edmond Taylor's recent Richer By Asia). The tragedies develop as the more sympathetic characters try, usually in vain, to search for the underlying causes of their terrible isolation. The French in Annam or Cambodia suffer from the same sensation of being cut off, thwarted, and baffled at every turn, of having fallen upon evil times in an evil land. Henri Daguèrches's Le Kilometre 83 ( 1 9 1 3 ) and Claude Farrère's Les Civilisés (1905) owe much of their sinister charm to the intense but indefinable uneasiness from which their characters suffer on this account. The English, to be sure, looking at their situation objectively as some of them do, both in fact and in fiction, may find a number of good reasons for their plight. These become clear in many novels, from Thackeray's to Edmund Candler's, although they are only incidental to the story in Vanity Fair and The Newcomes. The English are a minority group having a purely official status in the vast continent which they have come to regard as their own. They have never sought to become part of its life as settlers or colonists as they have in Africa and Australia. They have remained aloof, nonpartisan administrators, arbitrators, dispensers of cool, even-handed justice. At their best, perhaps, they have been selfless and disinterested social workers, teachers, medical officers, engineers, remaining rather dispassionate and impersonal about it all the while. Even the most devoted of the nurses and missionaries are busy with God's work rather than man's. Most of them have seen themselves as living a temporary sort of life. Some have been conscious of forming a part of the huge official hierarchy, civil or military, closely organized and closely ruled by caste, rank, and tradition. They have known themselves destined to move onward and upward in it, and eventually out of it, and be graduated Home. Alice Perrin's and Maud Diver's novels make this view clear. " A s early as 1 8 1 9 there had been a Desmond in India," and there has always been one since, Mrs. Diver tells us grandiloquently in Far to Seek ( 1921 ).

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

37

A different faction has regarded the whole enormous fabric of British officialdom as merely holding India in trust for the Indians against the time when England might relinquish its hold altogether. In 18 J3 Arnold's Oakfield sees that time as far distant, but he does see it. Edmund Candler's fine political novels, The General Plan ( 1 9 1 1 ), Siri Ram, Revolutionist ( 1 9 1 2 ) , and more especially Abdication ( 1 9 2 2 ) , illustrate this more liberal view. Kipling gives us scattered glimpses of both attitudes. According to the older and more rigid attitude, the continuity of the hierarchy remains, but the individuals within it change and pass. They are not identified in any vital way with their Indian background except in so far as it is the scene of their labors and the source of their salaries. But according to the liberal view of India for the Indians, your enlightened Anglo-Indian has no permanent stake in the shape of things to come, either. In both cases he is a transient. Being a transient is not conducive to a good life in any background, least of all in India. The weight of the past, the almost immeasurable age and intricacy of native civilization, is from the start a handicap to English understanding of India. It induces a defeatist state of mind. In Africa and Australia the English problem has been the relatively simple one of dominating primitive tribes that were subjugated or liquidated if they resisted, or played off against one another to British advantage if they were amenable to tactful handling. This could be done—or at all events was done—without any very profound knowledge of native cultural development, history, or religion. India, on the other hand, though Moslem and Hindu could be played off against each other, confronted the British from the beginning with a mingling of old and complex Oriental civilizations, rich cultural heritages, highly developed linguistic and literary and religious traditions—all at odds with one another. Compared to the relatively sunny and daylight problems of high and dry Africa and Australia, everything in India was alien, mysterious, hostile in a thousand complex, " u n f a i r " ways. Nothing was out in the open. Savages were not simple either, but the Indian was ultracom-

}8

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

plicated and subtle and so were his religious observances and social conventions. Both Hindu and Moslem reserved a kind of mental smile for the crude ways of the blundering British overlord, which made the intruder from the West deeply uncomfortable. It made him feel hesitant and inferior. He could not miss the breath of a Something in the Indian air, other than the damp or the smoke or the dust, that boded him no good. From the earliest nineteenth century tracts to the novels of the Mutiny, from the "east is east and west is west" cliches of the Kipling-made story to the careful, rather wistful probing of the gulf between the Oriental and the Western mind which E. J , Thompson and Forster give us, scarcely a novelist about India is unaware of the profound impasse, the all but insoluble state of being at cross-purposes, which the two races present in confronting one another. A sense of this genuine tragic ingredient in the better Anglo-Indian novels makes many a reader willing to wade through morasses of mediocrity on the chance of coming across an honest dramatic conflict now and again. It assumes varied forms. The native's mental smile at British expense becomes the titter or the sneer, or merely the shrug of boredom, or "downright insolence," according to the view of the novelist, but it is always there. The conquerors, on the other hand, arc bewildered or depressed, angry, conscience-stricken, sternly dutiful, according to their manifold capacities. Almost never are they quite themselves —not since the hundred percent normal Mr. Binnie in Thackeray's The Neuromas. They drop the standards they would live by at home. Both Arnold's Oakfield and Forster's A Passage to India point out that their countrymen have left their manners, and sometimes their morals, " a t the Cape." THF.

HAPPY

YEARS

We should not believe, of course, that novels about India have always been peopled exclusively with psychoneurotics, white or brown. There were many happy years before the middle of the

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

39

nineteenth century when one could read novels with Indian settings from the Minerva Press and Mudie's and still sleep quietly of nights. We may return to those days for a while and see how the Anglo-Indian stories, like so much other English colonial fiction, fitted into the well-established patterns of the English novel. T h e novelists had thirty or forty " q u i e t " years of the earlier nineteenth century in which to do this, years in which scarcely anyone at home, as was so often the case while "reluctant" British expansion was going on, needed to be conscious of India at all. N o one needed to be uncomfortably aware of her as a "problem." If we may believe the novelists, the apathy and ignorance about India prevailing at home are the despair of soldier and civilian alike. Many distinguished Governors-General, before the Crown took over India from the East India Company in i 8 $ 8 , had come and gone—aggressive Wellesley, capable Lord Hastings, energetic Bentinck, Russo-phobe Auckland and fabulous Dalhousie. We hear about them all in novels of a later date. But at the time during which they were establishing "subordinate cooperation" among the native states surrounding John Company's territories, or fighting the first A f g h a n and Sikh Wars, or suppressing the Thugs, no one at home or in India itself felt impelled to write a whole novel about India in terms of Anglo-Indian life and events for their own sake. During these years, too, the trading monopolies and commercial privileges of the old East India Company were quietly being swept away with each renewal of the Charter, in 1 8 1 j , 1 8 3 3 , and 1 8 5 3 . Nabobs, "blackamoor colonels" and other arrivals from India, who battened on the Company and its declining fortunes, continue to be props of the Minerva Press novelists into the nineteenth century. But these "old Indians" belong to a vanished eighteenth century and most readers have the impression that no one before Thackeray is interested in writing about their successors, the " Q u i H a i s " of the years before the Mutiny in 1857. But W. D. Arnold, John Lang, H . S. Cunningham, and J . W . Kaye wrote

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y about them too. These novelists knew a good deal more about India than Thackeray did, but somehow it is only Colonel Newcome, Mr. Binnie, and that unpleasant symptom of the decay of the old order, Jos Sedley, whom we have become familiar with. The others, nevertheless, have their significance too, with the added interest of being contemporary with the events and people they describe. It is a mistake to think of Thackeray as the only creator of these Anglo-Indian figures of the early and midcentury. Edification. Among five or six kinds of novels in vogue during these years that were preliminary to the Mutiny and to Empire, the didactic and pedagogic books written partly for and partly about children, are easily distinguishable. Mrs. Barbauld, Hannah More, Mrs. Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Sherwood, and countless other women wrote them. These tract-like stories seem to have been the almost exclusive province of the Evangelical woman writer. Novels one can scarcely call them; indeed their authors feared and disapproved of the novel as such and did what they could to undermine it. The Evangelicals were beginning to form the moral attitudes of a new Victorian world in which the middle class was to legislate on matters of conduct. It was to decree standards of behavior more decorous than the rowdy and uncouth manners of the old eighteenth century world which Victoria's "wicked uncles" inhabited. Since children and their training are important in the establishment of any new order, juvenile reading formed a new and special concern for the Evangelical mind, and ushered in, with the backing, of course, of Rousseau and Thomas Day, what might be called The Century of the Child. In this Evangelical fortifying of national morals, Mrs. Sherwood and India played an important but depressing part. She was in active missionary work of an educational kind for many years, off and on, at Meerut in the Province of Delhi. Journeys home, which took four months "and an extra four weeks" in those early years (she went out first in 1 8 1 2 ) punctuated her long stays in the

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

4«

Upper Provinces. From a personal point of view they were melancholy years, and her life and letters make gloomy reading. She lost several children in India and the index at the back of F. J . Harvey Darton's book about her ( 1 9 1 0 ) is full of grim little entries under their several names, reading "beauty o f , " "illness o f , " "death o f , " "grave o f . " One would like to think that the poor lady had a little fun writing her stories about children in India, The History of Little Henry and His Bearer ( 1 8 1 2 ) , and The History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye ( 1 8 2 2 ) , but it seems improbable. N o doubt her morbid and edifying fables with a strong Sunday School flavor did much to acquaint the youth of England with Indian ways and atmosphere. By such missionary pieces as these, widely circulated, the foundations of Empire were being laid. They fitted in with the current taste for the pedagogic and didactic and moralistic tone in fiction, and used the Indian scene to lend savor and novelty to the lessons of missionary zeal which they taught. The end, we must hope, justified the means. A more repulsive pair of little ones than Henry and Lucy would be hard to find. They go into gentle declines, induced by the Indian climate, quoting more and more frequently from John 14, Job 19, and Luke 10, in neat, memorizable texts. They recite parts of the catechism at a moment's notice. Each finally succeeds in converting his native servant to Christianity, and then slips, with touching smiles, into a Clarissa-like deathbed finale. It is all perfectly terrible. But in terms that its ever-increasing audience in its own day could understand and appreciate, this sort of thing was fine publicity at home for British India, and for the Church Missionary Society abroad. Mrs. Sherwood wished little English children to think of converting the heathen in India as an admirable lifework, but if this lesson did not "take," she was not the woman to overlook other possibilities. Her English readers might as well learn some of the Hindostani words most commonly in use—dobie, kamsamah, punkah, goreewallah, kitmutgar, and so on. She translates each

THE

BURDEN

OF T H E

MYSTERY

one in a footnote at the bottom of the page. Anyone setting up an English household in India would have to know them, and they lent atmosphere to the story. Generations of writers about India have, unfortunately, since Mrs. Sherwood's day, relied too heavily on the same device for achieving "color," and without the painstaking and somehow oddly touching little footnotes. We can understand how Edward Lear felt when he wrote his famous poem " T h e C u m m e r b u n d " published in Nonsense Songs: She sat upon her Dobie,She heard the Nimmak hum,When all at once a cry arose: " T h e Cummerbund is come!" T o o many novelists, alas, never took the hint.

Mrs. Sherwood, however, was much lionized at the Presidency in Calcutta because new arrivals from England had heard much of Little Henry. "Such religious persons as came out that year ( 1 8 1 j ) to India, were all anxious to find out the author, supposed to be a man." The English edition was brought to Calcutta by the wife of a Baptist missionary, and, Mrs. Sherwood tells us, the little volume passed f r o m hand to hand in the small religious society there. " I t was lent to me, and I must say it brought tears to my eyes." It did the same for her many readers at home. N o t only missionary zeal but the future gospel of empire was watered by such tears. She wrote in 1825 another story of the Indian scene, but a more worldly one this time, The Lady of the Manor. This has no out-and-out missionary flavor, but is still a novel of purpose, a species of conduct-and-etiquette book combined. It delivers itself, with a primness all its own, of certain lessons regarding the behavior of young English ladies who come out to the east. The wholesome English standards of the heroine, Olivia, are undermined by her life in her semi-orientalized uncle's Indian household. (He is not exactly a nabob, but an Old Indian, or Qui H a i ) . Olivia finally marries—oh, shame!—for "worldly advantage."

T H E BURDEN OF THE M Y S T E R Y

43

Ladies in Exile. The problem of the Englishwoman in India fascinates every novelist who writes about that unhappy country. These "improving" writers of the earliest years of the century, while using India as a fresh and piquant setting for the lessons with which they catered to the popular taste for the didactic in fiction, also managed incidentally to pose certain questions destined to be of perennial interest to novelists of empire in the following decades. The disintegration of female character and personality in hot climates is one of these. The treatment of it becomes more complicated as the century advances in psychological sophistication. At first, like Olivia, the ladies in exile are merely passive, unresisting victims of bad example and bad climate. They stop dressing for dinner, they give up their music, embroidery, and water colors. If they were frivolous at home, they become doubly so in India. William Brown Hockley's novels describe this process as seen in the thirties and Sir J . W. Kaye does it for the forties. By the fifties, they are often pictured as ruthless little husbandhunters, flirts, and jilts. Florence Marryat, in several pieces about India for Temple Bar in 1867, divides her sisters into "the very gay, the very religious, and the very inane." Life in India for them is both boring and dangerous. Their husbands are away for long periods of time and "strange men do not have to have permission to call," as they would in England. They may call on whom they please. The round of balls and dinners and dancing, and the enervating weather "drains the mind of all desire to improve itself." G. O. Trevelyan agrees with her pronouncements in his interesting "Letters from a Competition Wallah" in Macmillan's Magazine in 1863. He too feels that "the ladies, poor things, get the worst of it." Without plenty of work, India is unbearable. The women are bound to suffer more than the men from "languor and depth of ennui of which a person who has never left Europe can form no conception." Because of the climate they must spend the hours from eight to five indoors. "Good novels are limited in

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y numbers, and it is too much to expect that a lady should read history and poetry for six hours every day." Trevelyan, indeed, is very tolerant; he has every sympathy with the poor creatures on the day when the "book-club has sent nothing but Latham's Nationalities of Europe and three refutations of Colenso . . . and the post brings only a letter from your old governess." Only a very brave or a very stupid woman, he concludes, can endure India for long without suffering "in mind, health and tournure. If a lady becomes dowdy, it is all up with her." It is possible, of course, for a lady to be both brave and stupid, and perhaps this is why Kipling's exiled women do so well for the most part. He is hard on the spoiled and the mischievous (Mrs. Gadsby and Mrs. Hauksbee, respectively) and so is Maud Diver, whose books, however, also abound in the brave and the stupid of her sex. Pamela Hinkson's Golden Rose features them too, and most novels about the Mutiny have at least one upright, leatheryfaced spinster or well-weathered soldier's wife with a heart of gold and not too much imagination. Perhaps Bromfield's fine Scottish nurse, Miss McDaid in The Rains Came, is about the best of this kind. The brave and the stupid among Frenchwomen do not come out to Indo-China, if we may believe the novelists. (It is not a common Gallic combination anyway, but rather a feature of Anglo-Saxondom, if one may ever be justified in making such racial generalizations.) An old resident and colonial expert, Eugène Pujarniscle, gives us most unflattering pictures of French and other European ladies at Hanoï. They are as bad, or worse than, Bromfield's Mrs. Hoggett-Eggbury in The Rains Came. They are "dames" while the native girls are "femmes" and they are the cause of many happy and fruitful and generally pleasant relationships of colonial Frenchmen with "les brunes," he explains in Vhiloxène ( 1931 ). De Vogüé in Les Morts qui parlent ( 1901 ) feels that young French wives, no matter how devoted, should be left at home. Let the English take their women out; they can risk it; "elles ont le diable au corps." But French girls would be

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y homesick so far from France. Daguèrches in Le Kilometre 83 ( 1 9 1 3 ) seems to bear him out; French colonial women cannot stand the climate of Siam-Cambodge, and they get jealous, if not of other women, then of a man's work. (Kipling's The Gadsbys provided a pretty useful pattern for unhappy colonial tangles in all languages—that of the child-wife who wants to be "first.") If your really nice "jeune fille" like Selysette Sylva in Farrère's Les Civilisés ( 1 9 0 5 ) does by any chance live in Saigon, she is under the decorous family supervision that she would have in France, and she had better not fall in love with corrupted, though courageous, young colonial officers like Jacques Fièrce. It will make them both unhappy. Altogether, it is better that she should stay at home and mind her children and her " f o y e r " if she is married, and if she is a "jeune fille" then let her seek a husband elsewhere than in the insidious atmosphere of Saigon or Hanoï. This atmosphere is even more seductively presented by French writers than its Indian equivalent by the British. Of course it is all on a much smaller scale; there is less vastness and more of the "mysterious East." The dark leafy streets, the strings of harbor lights, the charming "brunes," the impassive and intriguing native "boys," the psychological mysteries of opium and cocaine, one is often glad to exchange for these ail the odors of jasminecum-cowdung-smoke, all the dusty and brilliant sunsets and dawns, all the saris and sun helmets of British India. But as the century wears on, English sophistication increases and Edwardian morals tend to loosen up what the Indian atmosphere had not already got to work on, in the English female character. French literature, too, had made sin fashionable. More and more the exiles come out brazenly to seek for husbands (England is full of superfluous women), or if already married they are discontented and pass from "flirting" or "playing with fire" in the nineties (in the vocabulary of Alice Perrin and Flora Annie Steel) to the activities of the coldly promiscuous vixen of the twenties and the high-class siren of the thirties, like Bromfield's Lady Esketh. Sometimes they take to solitary drinking. As the type of

46

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

amorous adventuress comes to be taken more and more for granted in modern fiction, India comes more and more to be used as a playground for her exploits. So in modern times this character is the downright predatory female, unscrupulous, treacherous, tragic in varying degrees, and sometimes repentant, joining forces with the missionaries, the nursing nuns, or the "sensible" people, but usually too late. Typhus and cholera take a high toll of these sirens, whose role is played over and over again as one corner of the triangle that gives shape, or merely incident, to countless novels of Anglo-Indian life. In Indigo Mrs. Macbeth is "fluttery" and elopes with Captain Ponsonby. The lady may be merely unstable and undecided, like Barbara Wingfield-Stratford's Beryl in India ( 1 9 2 0 ) , and not really vicious at all, but brewing trouble for others nevertheless. But "tough" or not, she has come a long way from Mrs. Sherwood's comparatively decorous and ladylike Olivia in 1825. Less in the sanctimonious vein of Mrs. Sherwood and more in the line of Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales is another early and exemplary story about India called The Young Cadet; or, Henry Delamere's Voyage to India. This was written by Mrs. Hofland (Barbara Hoole) about 1827-28, and illustrates again the easy use of Indian material by those who felt that chatty and persuasive books loaded with information and instruction could not fail to please the young. But here we have no exhortations to convert the heathen and no censoriousness about wayward young ladies. Everything has a sunny, sensible Church of England atmosphere. The book tells about Henry's travels in Hindostán, his experiences in the Burmese War (the first one, 1 8 2 4 - 2 6 ) , and his impressions of the wondrous caves of Elora. It is dutifully based on books of travel, histories, and the authentic reminiscences of Captain Snodgrass, who took part in the Burmese campaigns. But its real interest lies in the glimpses it affords of English views on the subject of the budding Empire, and the clear connection it makes between large families at home and dominion abroad. Younger Sons. This aspect of imperial expansion accounts for

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

the beginnings of many an Indian career more distinguished than that of Henry Delamere. The background is usually stated for us in Chapter I: " ' Y o u have indeed a numerous and lovely family,' said Mr. Wingrove to Mr. Delamere, as his lady and her eight children were quitting the dining-room, 'but you must frequently feel great anxiety on the subject of providing for so many in such a manner as their birth and education entitle them to expect.' " Here, in essence, we have the classic problem, posed with neatness and propriety by our capable authoress. What to do with too many younger sons? India, in many cases, became the answer. It relieved the pressure. Younger sons are often the heroes of novels about India, all through the century. They could not inherit the land, and it was getting more and more difficult to place them well at home and more and more expensive to train them for the professions. So, in the early nineteenth century novels they are often the traders and adventurers, with or without benefit of a connection with the East India Company. Toward the middle of the century they begin to be "competition-wallahs," young hopefuls of a rejuvenated and democratized Indian Civil Service, to which for a long time Indians themselves might not aspire. Oakfield in Arnold's novel of 1853 is reluctant to believe that "the English message to India is civil-engincering simply," but Middleton of the Civil Service is among the most admirable people in an Indian scene where the high moral expectations of Arnold allow him to find very f e w people admirable at all. (The younger sons in the regiments, of whom Vernon is an example, he finds pitiable indeed. They are "wretchedly blackguard." But presumably Arnold did not know the gallant Hodson of "Hodson's Horse," like himself a younger son, an old Rugbeian, and in India at about the same time.) Not all Competition Men are agreeable fellows in the eighteen fifties, however. John Lang's Too Clever by Half ( 1 8 5 3 ) , almost exactly contemporary with The Newcomes and Oakfieli by the way, has some very disagreeable ones indeed, and one at least is

48

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

also a younger son. This is, in fact, one of the most disagreeable books about India to be found in this period, an ugly blend of Samuel Warren at his worst, with the facetiousness of Dickens and the archness of Thackeray at less than their best. H . S. Cunningham does not quite commit himself on the younger son question in his amusingly satirical novel, Chronicles of Dusty pore, a Tale of Modem Anglo-Indian Society ( 1 8 7 5 ) . It stands out as one of the few humorous novels on the too sad Indian question, in its own or any period of the century. A book which can poke f u n at British rule and those endearing little British foibles in the very decade in which Disraeli, that great romantic, made the Queen into the Empress of India, is a rare phenomenon indeed. Cunningham, perhaps the best of the links between Thackeray and Kipling, makes one of his New Civilians, or Competition Men, jeer at the Old Regime. It consisted, according to the modern view (but perhaps not Cunningham's necessarily) of "all the stupidest sons of the stupidest families of E n g land for several generations, like the pedigree wheat, you know, on the principle of selection; none but the blockheads of course would have anything to do with India." Y o u n g Oakfield's friend Middleton in Arnold's novel tells the hero that a good officer is a blessing to his District; the new system was placing many younger sons as District Officers in the fifties. But Cunningham, in the book we have just mentioned, does not find Boldero admirable at all. Other D.O.'s of the same overzealous kind appear in W . W . Hunter's The Old Missionary. This was published in 1897, but is set in the fifties after the Mutiny. In fact it would seem that the D . O . did not become a hero and martyr until Kipling got hold of him and made him one of the noblest of the Sons of Martha. Hunter allows us to see the admirable qualities of these bumptious young men, but they arc impatient of government red-tape and f u l l of ideas about schools, law, public works, tramways, and so on. Old Lieutenant-Governors of the "early time" find them very bothersome. According to Trevelyan in his letters to Macmillan's

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y Magazine in 1863, the natives feel that the new Competition Men are of "another caste," having less savoir-faire than the old Haileybury crowd. Trevelyan himself is rather snobbish about them. He inclines to agree with the up-country magistrates who regard these young men as parvenus in a service where birth and breeding have hitherto been all in all. They lack the "physical dash and athletic habits" so essential to young men who may have to rule over an Indian province as large as Saxony. If they cannot drive a "series of shying horses and ride across country" they are useless. Your Competition Wallah has not been brought up in the tradition of field sports, poor fellow, and is not of the true "imperial race." The individual members of this race, Trevelyan reminds us must be "men of their hands" to command the necessary prestige. Ideas about building tramways are not enough. Younger sons from many of those "numerous and lovely" families which Mrs. Hofland holds up for our regard are always among the more daring soldiers. Before Kipling, they are more attractive heroes than their civilian brothers. They appear dashingly in many novels about the Mutiny, the Afghan or Sikh or Burmese wars. They are exemplary and talkative in the Henty books, of godlike stature in Flora Annie Steel's books, desperately silent and incredibly gallant as the subalterns and captains of Kipling's Own. The younger son is cut loose from home. He is reckless because he has little to lose; defiant because he has probably been underestimated and misunderstood at home. He excels at taking risks. Often he is a disappointed and world-weary but lovable roué, or a sentimental, mysteriously "broken" man, like Louis Bromfield's Tom Ransome in The Rains Came ( 1 9 3 7 ) . Sometimes he is living down a dark past, because an older brother has "inherited" and he himself has spent his patrimony in riotous living in England where his extravagance has got him into trouble. But Mrs. Hofland's Henry Delamere is not of these. For his edification, and that of the good lady's young readers, Henry's father holds forth on the history of the East India Company, of

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y Hindostán, of Tamerlane, Hyder Ali, and Tippoo Sahib. It is all very Maria Edgeworth. But the low rumble of imperial ambition begins to be heard in odd ways under this demure surface. Father fairly smacks his lips over the "extension of British power in Asia" and the virtuous way in which it is being used. He is probably thinking of the 1813 act to limit the Company's trading monopoly, and of Lord Hastings' upright administration as GovernorGeneral, when he says contentedly that British plundering of India is at an end now, and the bribery of officials too: "India will be no longer the nurse of luxury, the reward of enterprize, the temptation to extortion and tyranny, which it has been in days past. A new and better order of things has sprung up, and will increase, arising from equitable laws duly administered, regular trade properly pursued and proportioned; and above all, from that sense of humanity and self-subjugation, commanded by our religion, which is now taught with most happy effect to the higher classes of society throughout British India." The Church of England was a going concern by this time in India. But after the many sight-seeing tours which Henry manages to make before and after his participation in the war to subdue those "contemptible" Burmese—who have somehow persisted in their determination to make trouble for the English—he is obliged to admit that native superstitions and idols still hold sway and that "there are in fact few, very few converts to Christianity, but there is a general amelioration of prejudice." Just what he means by this is not clear, except that he is hopeful. It is better to go slowly with attempts at conversion, he adds. In this conclusion most missionaries, in and out of novels, would probably agree with him. Mrs. Steel, Maud Diver, Louis Bromfield, and E. J . Thompson certainly do. Apropos of the conqueror's uneasy sense in India of something amiss, something vaguely hostile and aloof in the native attitude, the book is interesting. Henry feels the Burmese attitude of resentment keenly. They are lying and deceitful, he writes his people at home, and furthermore they "treat us with that contempt it is no part of John Bull's character

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

ji

to bear." T h e r e is the basic difficulty! Like so m a n y of the large problems t h a t beset the conqueror in India t h r o u g h o u t the c e n t u r y , this one is recurrent and perhaps eternal. Mrs. Hofland had the luck, or the insight, or the common sense, to touch on several of them in her unpretentious little book about H e n r y . Beside this d o m i n a n t problem of racial mistrust and m i s u n d e r standing the smaller problems of the younger son and the m a r riageable miss in India seem of minor importance. Y o u n g e r sons and marriageable misses have their difficulties in English life and English fiction all through the nineteenth c e n t u r y , against domestic and continental settings of all sorts. Their dilemmas are merely b y - p r o d u c t s of empire, and India merely serves to i n t e n sify their troubles. But one question of some real importance t o the spread of empire is raised b y both Mrs. Sherwood and Mrs. Hofland when they write about India: t h a t is the question of the missionary. In the Lord's Vineyard. For besides the military activities of the Governors-General, the decline of J o h n C o m p a n y , and the steadily g r o w i n g predominance of British economic advantage in India at India's expense, it should be noted t h a t the men of G o d were also at work. They were among the best trail-blazers f o r empire d u r i n g these long, so-called " q u i e t " years before the storm of the M u t i n y broke about astonished English ears. Unlike the military and mercantile men contemporary w i t h them, the missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, British and foreign, sit f o r their portraits quite early in the c e n t u r y . T h e y were more closely associated with Indian life in concrete and visible ways than Governors-General or officials of the East India C o m p a n y could possibly be. They were present on occasions of sickness and birth and death. Their knowledge of native conditions was gained f r o m a personal daily struggle against these conditions. While Mrs. Sherwood and Mrs. Hofland were w r i t i n g their bland little books, stirring together Evangelical or Anglican f e r vor with pedagogy and moral etiquette and social observation into that odd m i x t u r e which entranced such a large public, the mis-

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y sionaries, like Mrs. Sherwood herself, were not idle. They were up and doing in India by 1801 when the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Church Missionary Society took over the excellent schools started by Danish missionaries in the eighteenth century. By 1 8 1 3 , when James Stephen (father of Sir Leslie) became a power in the Colonial Office, and imports of Lancashire cotton goods were beginning to undermine India's principal industry, all sorts of workers in the vineyard were permitted in the Company's territories. Commerce, politics, and evangelism have always been comfortable bedfellows in England's overseas possessions, and the East India Company was nothing if not realistic. It kept everybody happy, or at least placated, by the sensible device of contributing to Mohammedan and Hindu temples at the same time, and by giving sturdy backing to the establishment of the Church of England in India. It did not neglect other denominations either, but by 18 j 2—Dalhousie's time, that is, and Thackeray's and Arnold's —the Anglicans had outstripped all other denominations and held a comfortable lead. But of whatever persuasion, the missionaries rose on the wave of Christian humanitarianism that followed the French Revolution and became extremely busy in jungle and desert, making straight the pathway for additional gods—the telegraph, railway, irrigation and sanitation projects, famine control. As these other gods began to spread throughout India, the missionary became a more effective social worker. In return for this, he has always lent a helping hand to conquest. In fiction he becomes less fanatical and more practical as the century wears on. He and his wife or his sister—they needed to suffer in pairs for the most part—no longer sit in the verandah reasoning with little children or converting native bearers. They tramp or bicycle along the dusty roads, like Alden in Thompson's Fare-well to India, or Mr. and Mrs. Nair in Maud Diver's Far to Seek. They are inured to filth, ridicule, discouragement, and climate, and they are willing to cooperate with almost

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y any agency that is making headway for the native good against these powerful forces. Sometimes they are conscientious spinsters like Miss Williams in Golden Rose. The woman's rights movement that grew into the cause of suffrage, and the general nineteenth century emancipation of English "superfluous" women that sent the toughminded ones into medical schools and settlements sent them also out to India. There they slaved as medical missionaries or nurses in health centers, or as hospital supervisors, or as teachers in mission schools. The backward state of women in India, the suffering of the child wives, the aspiration of the " n e w " Indian woman, the frightful condition of thousands of undernourished children— all this made India a field especially engaging to female interest and sympathy and sacrifice. Flora Annie Steel's novels speak for the force of this appeal. The missionaries' situation in India was, if possible, more equivocal and difficult than in Africa or Australia. They were up against conflicting sets of ancient, deeply rooted faiths which grew up again, like the jungle, the minute one looked away. Hinduism and Islam are more than faiths; they include a way of life, a system of education, morals, politics, and manners. People nurtured for centuries in these traditions could not be pushed about spiritually like children or the "naive" races of darkest Africa and aboriginal Australia. English and European missionaries of all sects found them baffling. The Anglo-Saxon sense of humor wavers and breaks before them. The articulate Indians are likely to be sophistical and disingenuous; they disappoint you and turn out not to have been converts at all. The uneducated and inarticulate are dead weight. They are so childishly bewildered, or so deeply oppressed by caste and starvation as to be practically inaccessible to missionary efforts. But they respond to social work. So, while we have many "good" missionaries in fiction about India, we have those who are so much at a loss or so thick-skinned

54

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

that they are the butts of the gentle, or not too gentle, cynicism aimed at all their kind. Bromfield neatly balances his "good" ones, the Smileys, against his " b a d " ones, the Simons. Kipling does not give missionaries much space, but in "The Judgment of Dungara" (Plain Tales) he makes hilarious game of the defeat of their assurance by one wrong step. Christine Weston in Indigo is skeptical about them. Her Scottish pair could not compete with India's antiquity and fertility, and it is the French Catholic priest, Father Sebastien, bigoted though he may be, who comes to the best terms with the country and its people. He is tranquil and tolerant and does not expect too much of human nature. (The Catholics, as both French and English novelists agree, made in general a better job of converting the "heathen"; what they had to offer was more ceremonious and colorful than the Protestant inducements to Christianity, and they were more patient and understanding with backsliders.) Forster's Passage to India is concerned with larger questions, but he has one former nurse in a Native State, "a stupid woman," say that she is all for chaplains and all against missionaries. Natives after all should not get into heaven, she says; the kindest thing for them was to let them die, then if the missionaries have got hold of them they might indeed slip into heaven somehow, whereas a chaplain— But she is a stupid woman, and Forster allows her to be interrupted at this point. Though Forster was no missionary, his amusement at the "philosophical" mind of the Maharajah whom he visited with Lowes Dickinson in 1 9 1 2 gives us the clue to what must have been many a missionary's exasperations and despairs. This Maharajah, who loved Dickinson and philosophy, keeps asking Dickinson, "Where is God? Can Herbert Spencer lead me to him, or should I prefer George Henry Lewes? Oh when will Krishna come and be my friend? Oh Mr. Dickinson!" And Ackerley's Maharajah of Chhokrapur in Hindu Holiday ( 1 9 3 2 ) is obsessed by the same large questions and the same positivist Victorian reading which held wide sway in India among people of his kind, an inheritance

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

JJ

from Macaulay no doubt: "Is there a God, or is there no God?" rapped out his Highness impatiently. "That is the question. That is what I want to know. Spencer says there is a God. Lewes says no. So you must read them, Mr. Ackerley, and tell me which is right." This is the same Maharajah who turned the car around in order to behold a mongoose on the left side of the road, because that was a good omen. And E. J . Thompson testifies in one of his novels that the English missionaries have not paid enough attention to the superstitions and the Ghosts (bhuts) that are so important in India, and have overlooked the rich confusion of native deities. His hero Alden has kept his sanity only by occasionally exploring the jungles and by interesting himself in "the quaint and often very engaging beliefs of the heathen." Le Kilomètre 83 is also emphatic about French neglect of native beliefs in Siam. Of the actual services rendered to Empire by the missionaries, less is made in the novels than one might expect. But it was a real service. Their work among the "depressed" classes whom the higher castes of natives and many English officials would not bother about, their heroic labors in hospitals and schools, did much throughout the century to delay the mounting antagonism against England. But ironically they played their part in furthering the Indian nationalist movement against England, by helping the industrializing and educational forces that were opening up India to the West. Of the missionaries in fiction before Mr. Thompson's broadminded Robert Alden, not many are well educated enough to see the value of taking native beliefs into account or realistic enough not to claim too much success with their "converts." But W. W . Hunter, himself an Indian Civilian and a historian and publicist who knew a great deal about Bengal, wrote his novel The Old Missionary (1890) about an actual Reverend James Williamson of the Baptist Mission who was apparently an exception to all the rules. He worked among the Bengal Hill tribes in that "early time of promise" shortly after the Crown took over from the Company.

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y He came originally from Cumberland and was a veteran of Trafalgar. He is a noble, patriarchal figure of great reputation among the hillmen. But "real Christianity," he says, can only grow up among the native converts in the second generation. He has been of great service to the British Empire in keeping the hill tribes from revolt at times that were critical for England, and in making with other tribes certain peace agreements that have been advantageous to England. This singular old warrior is also interested in scholarship and in the native dialect. He is making a dictionary of the hill language, with the help of a native Sanskrit scholar and an Oxford philologist. As a youth he has been fascinated by Cook's Voyages, and presumably, in these earlier days before the rise of strenuous professionalism among missionaries as well as other people, many a man of God had been drawn by just such reading to a life of adventure and globe-trotting mixed with Evangelism. The Reverend Mr. Williamson had soon discovered however, that Evangelism alone would accomplish little in India, and so, like many a less intelligent man after him, he had become a medical missionary. He does Empire a final good turn, at the end of his career, by settling a dispute between Jesuits and Scottish Presbyterians as to which shall move into a certain factory settlement in lower Bengal. Both groups want to keep their hold on it. Through sheer force of faith, judiciously mingled with diplomacy and knowledge of the native mind, the missionary persuades half of the people to migrate to new homes, and the Presbyterians are victorious. The old man is strenuous and fanatical, but also very practical about his work. After his saintlike death he becomes a kind of legend in the district, something like Mrs. Moore in Forster's Passage to India, after the people hear of her death at sea. But men of his kind are rare, both in life and in fiction. In the early novels of the century the missionaries are either detestable, as in Mrs. Sherwood's stories, or frankly fantastic and impossible, like the Spanish priest who tries to convert a Brahmin princess in The Missionary ( 1 8 1 1 ) by Lady Morgan. (Lord

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

Castlereagh is the only person known to have liked this warmly colored but inconsequential semi-Gothic effort by that ebullient Irish spirit, who did other kinds of fiction much more effectively.) In modern novels like E. J . Thompson's or Edmund Candler's, the missionaries are beginning to come into their own as civilized and well-rounded though often disillusioned and weary human beings, not very different from the teachers or the doctors who toil and wilt in the great nightmare of India. But in the fiction of the middle years that come between the very early and the modern novels, the missionaries are pictured as poor and shy and provincial and "worthy," with a distressing taste for making up to influential people—the comfortable bureaucrats or the gracious wives of Residents of Native States, who play lady bountiful and are wise and winning in an aroma of eau-de-cologne and general elegance. In the historical novels, like those about the Mutiny, the missionaries are handled rather perfunctorily as part of the scenery and the properties in a drama that really belongs to the military characters involved. In romantic books like Flora Annie Steel's, the missionaries are too mystical and exalté for the ordinary reader. Many o f the most sympathetic ones in all these novels are Scottish, wanderers and adventurers by nature, who took time out from being expert Presbyterians to be expert gardeners also. Around their compounds the desert blossoms, and they make a great point of raising all the flowers that are hardest to raise in tropical climates. In fact, not only the Scots but—unless the novelists mislead us completely—missionaries of all nationalities in India are fanatical gardeners. A passion for horticulture is meant to be, apparently, one of their attractive traits, a redeeming feature in the eyes of possibly unsympathetic readers who might feel that these hardworking liaison-officers between jungle and Empire would do better to stay at home and mind their own business. Yet all that these crisp bright gardens seem to accomplish is to accentuate for the reader the stubborn perversity of the missionary mind. One can see the gardens more charitably, of course, as part of the great

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

Homesickness Cult or complex that thrives so richly among Europeans in India; the nostalgia of exile is deepened and at the same time assuaged by the smell of mignonette or wallflowers or stock. But the same obstinacy that insists upon making Christians out of Hindus and Moslems, insists also upon making primroses and pinks grow where no self-respecting pink or primrose should. It is an involuntary gesture of defiance against the whole East to make the simple, cheerful little plants that do best in cottage gardens at Home thrive in a climate completely alien to them. But people who feel justified in wanting to uproot and transplant whole races from the faiths on which their civilization has rested for ages have to be hardy and obtuse; difficulty of any sort, horticultural or spiritual, is a challenge. These tidy English flowers blooming after the monsoon rains speak the missionary mind; they symbolize its qualities wherever it is found. It docs not like jungle gardens of the kind that Mrs. Lyttleton, the courageous Englishwoman in Indigo, allows to run wild on her property, preferring cottage tulips to jasmine, and cottage tulips it will have, come flood, famine, drought, or cholera. Some novelists ask us to find this imperviousness touching, or quixotic, or "crotchety" in a Dickensian sort of way. Others imply that it is quaint and funny. Some pay grudging tribute to the hardihood and courage, however misplaced, of these singletrack minds in India. Only a few are so churlish as to suggest that it is downright officious. But whether presented as quaint or picturesque or sentimental or thick-skinned, the missionaries are generally dependable walk-on characters, always good for local color. And they are quite rightly given their due as part of the great " l i f t " that missions in general gave to the prestige of Empire. The Lord's cause was also that of the Raj. The French, with their usual adaptability, provided the kind o f Catholic missionaries in Indo-China who could make a success of their job without arrogance. In many and many a novel about French engineers or scientists or soldiers in "Siam-Cambodge" the missionary-priest is a sympathetic character, often able to

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

59

help bridgebuilders, explorers, or financiers to avoid disastrous clashes with native superstitions. He understands these, and the native dialects as well, something many of his English confrères have not bothered about. He pours oil upon the troubled waters, making allowances for what the climate can do to white men in the way of susceptibility to opium, loose women, and other "moral microbes" that may beset them. Your typical English or American missionary is a hard and selfless worker; his French colleague never makes the mistake of being overzealous or "pressing" too hard, and he has the advantage of a finer degree of psychological insight into people in general and natives in particular. He may be a bit of a schemer, but he is never obtuse. He is typical of the entire difference of attitude toward colonial situations that makes such a wide cleavage between English and French colonial policy. Even in English novels where French "religious" figure now and again, as in Pamela Hinkson's Golden Rose ( 1 9 4 4 ) , the French nuns have built up the most efficient nursing orders, profiting by a calm and shrewd knowledge of the native mind and an appreciation of the natives as people. Half and Half. Another character that proved of perennial interest in novels about India throughout the century, was started on his way even earlier than the missionaries. This is the half-caste or Eurasian, or, as he is more often called nowadays, the AngloIndian. He has always been a difficult and uncomfortable byproduct of empire. In the eighteenth century stories about the old-fashioned Nabobs, he is taken more or less for granted. The cheerfully earthy minds of the time were not squeamish about Anglo-native alliances and their resulting troops of brown children. There were a few such alliances in the early history of the Thackerays in India. But with the rise of Evangelical and middleclass morality, the attitude changed. To be sure, a certain amount of liberal feeling about the dark races prevailed after the antislavery campaigns of Wilberforce and his cohorts, and after the equalitarian doctrines of the French Revolution had swept a few dark-skinned little orphan boys or beautiful and virtuous Indian

6o

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

maidens into the novels of such large-minded radicals—often Unitarians or Quakers—as Amelia Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Bage, or Thomas Holcroft. But by 1834 when William Brown Hockley is lamenting the situation of these hybrids in The Widow of Calcutta, the Half-Caste Daughter a?id Other Sketches it is clear that Rousseau and St. Pierre and all the "Noble Savages" have lost ground. Colonel Berners is about to welcome his child who is returning from England, but alas! " H i s daughter was a half-caste! However gifted by nature,—by an education which wealth had spared no cost to perfcct,—by loveliness, or by intellect—still a half-caste subjected to all the stain and stigma under which that unhappy race withers,—under which its very virtues become the instruments to render that stigma less tolerable." The stigma has not been removed for the little Indian boy, Chandranath, in Maud Diver's Far to Seek ( 1 9 2 1 ) . He is rescued from bullies at school by Lance, son of Desmond (Miss Diver's favorite hero), and by Roy, himself of mixed English and Indian blood. But it is the right kind of Indian blood and that makes the difference. Chandranath, it seems, is not of the right " j a t . " Even R o y , the son of an Indian princess, is advised by Lance not to talk to the other boys about his mother. Kipling, in one of his gentler and more touching stories, " W i t h out Benefit of Clergy," can allow nothing but a tragic ending for his ill-starred pair—the young English officer and the beautif u l Mohammedan girl—even though the tale was written in the early years when he was still able to see such unblessed unions as simply a part of India's great human panorama. He becomes progressively less sympathetic with them and more censorious as time goes on, and his work is increasingly dominated by the gospel of Empire. For Somerset Maugham, the Anglo-Malay alliances, in many a fine short story, produce sharp dramatic situations, but they must of necessity be developed in a furtive and sultry moral atmosphere that leads to violent and tragic endings.

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

61

Such an ending overtakes George Orwell's more modern hero in Burmese Days (1935). In modern fiction the half-caste is still amazingly stereotyped. He might as well be the weak and wily misfit of Flora Annie Steel's books. Miss Murgatroyd in The Rains Came is pitiable perhaps, but uneasy, over-ingratiating, vaguely repulsive to almost everyone. So is the tougher and more complicated Thelma in Hitrec's excellent Son of the Moon ( 1 9 4 7 ) . So is the foreman Boodrie in Indigo, even when seen through the eyes of the French boy Jacques, who has no color prejudice when it comes to Indians in general. As in the case of the successful French missionaries, the French, like the Dutch, feel less called upon than the British to draw the color line in their colonial possessions. The tolerant attitude toward Annamese or Cambodian liaisons with French officers or engineers is merely one example of the generally casual and easygoing view which prevailed in all parts of the French Empire of which the French novelists have written so colorfully. In Algeria, Madagascar, Malaya, the South Seas, or wherever the young Frenchman may find himself, no ugly whispers or pointing fingers ruin his peaceful little idylls with "les brunes" of whatever shade or caste or tribe. These romantic episodes, though they may end on a nostalgic or wistful note, are cheerful and comforting and natural enough while they are going on. Perhaps Rousseau and Bernardin, or merely Loti and Gauguin, had something to do with this attitude. In this respect the French novels of empire have a refreshing freedom from the tensions and inhibitions of the Anglo-Saxon code. A more relaxed atmosphere breathes through them. The edifying and pedagogic novels, then, managed to raise, all unwittingly, some problems and themes and characters larger than themselves and destined to a longer life in better books. Most of these books were to be wholly preoccupied with India, instead of with a moral edification which the Indian setting was merely

6ι

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

supposed to drive home or to coat with a little glamor. The frivolous ladies engulfed by their Indian ennui, the relegated younger sons, the zealous men of God, the Eurasians—all were to survive this prelude to empire and carry over into the days of empire itself and the books about it. As a setting for further conquest, India did not yet interest the general public at home, but as a setting for lessons in Evangelical morality it did. Blood and Thunder. The novels combining blood-and-thunder history with the adventures of a rogue-hero were a more romantic vehicle for bringing a savor of oriental novelty to middle-class readers. Scott, himself responsible for the great vogue of historical novels, did not disdain this more sensational off-shoot of the genre. Richard Middlemas, the noble bastard, but a proud, unpleasant, and tricky fellow nevertheless, makes Scott's The Surgeon's Daughter ( 1 8 2 7 ) into a melodrama of an eighteenth century adventurer in the service of the East India Company. In order to win his Scottish sweetheart, this not very genial rascal must spend three years of probation as a doctor. And what likelier proving ground for character, and for the knack of picking up a fortune, than India? She came to serve this purpose for generations of writers who were to feel, as Scott did no doubt, that intrigue and mystery, with a smattering of historical fact for substance, could be nowhere more easily combined than in the kingdom of Mysore, which the Company had determined to snatch from the usurper Hyder Ali by military force. It was a formula that "had everything," including trained elephants who crush people, unscrupulous potentates living in more than Oriental splendor, and the innocent Scottish maiden who is snatched at the eleventh hour from the zenana of Tippoo Sultan. This was a recipe that served well a variety of writers from William Browne Hockley and Colonel Meadows-Taylor to their more sophisticated descendants like Talbot Mundy. Hockley and Taylor, whose books flourished from the 1820s to the 1840s, were able to take advantage of the vogue of the criminal hero. Widely popular in English fiction since Defoe, this daring figure was re-

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

*3

vived in the thirties by Ainsworth and Bulwer. Hockley's The Memoirs of a Brahmin; or, The Fatal Jewels ( 1 8 4 3 ) and his earlier Pandurang Hart; or, Memoirs of a Hindoo (1826) purport to let the rogue or criminal tell his own story. Against an Indian background such a villain-hero need not be romanticized or sentimentalized after the fashion of Bulwer's and Ainsworth's highwaymen, who so aroused and annoyed Thackeray. His background absolves him at once of cheapness and sentimentality. He may hold the reader's interest and credulity without having to engage his sympathy, since all manner of villainy must obviously be possible in India, where it is at such a safe distance as to be inoffensive. Many of these books about criminals were a strange compound of claptrap, research, and a dash of Gothic horror to add spice to the mixture. But Meadows-Taylor's Confessions of a Thug ( 1 8 3 7 ) was a good deal better than that. It became a genuine Victorian thriller of classic dimensions, providing an authentic Indian theme for many mystery stories, even, as Edmund Wilson believes, for Dickens's unfinished Edwin Drood. It mixed India and its horrifying cult of Thuggee so thoroughly into the materials of the Victorian adventure story, the thriller, and the detective story that it will probably never be outgrown or worn out. These novels did a service to Empire in publicizing the heroic efforts of British soldiers and administrators to root out the criminals; they were a talking point for the advocates of British rule as a pacifying and purifying force in its dominions. Meadows-Taylor was the first serious historical novelist about India and surely one of the first serious-minded adventurers in what became practically the land of his adoption (he spent forty years there). He was far ahead of his time in seeing the necessity of learning native languages, and by sheer integrity, sagacity, and courage became the first "career man" in India to take the native seriously and respectfully as a civilized being. That he did so, we know through his autobiography and novels. Recently published letters show that he was not well-informed about India

64

THE

BURDEN

OF T H E

MYSTERY

as a w h o l e . B u t he gives a l i f t to E n g l i s h prestige o f the b e t t e r k i n d . H e was, f u r t h e r m o r e , i n d e p e n d e n t o f C o m p a n y p a t r o n a g e . A t eighteen he w a s assistant police s u p e r i n t e n d e n t over a large district, t a k i n g p a r t in r u n n i n g d o w n T h u g s and robbers, a n d in several m i l i t a r y expeditions. So his t r i l o g y o f novels about I n d i a n h i s t o r y carries m o r e w e i g h t t h a n m o s t . H i s e x c i t i n g n a r r a t i v e o f a T h u g ' s career, told as t h o u g h b y the p r o t a g o n i s t h i m s e l f , is f a r b e t t e r t h a n the o r d i n a r y r u n o f

first-person

c r i m e stories, w h e t h e r

set in E n g l a n d or India. D u r i n g several " p l a c i d " V i c t o r i a n decades it satisfied the reader's thirst f o r v i o l e n c e . A n d m u r d e r , so the V i c t o r i a n s believed, is cleaner than sex. O n e of M e a d o w s - T a y l o r ' s other novels, Secta

(1872),

was

a b o u t the M u t i n y .

BATTLE

PIUCES

T h e t u r n i n g p o i n t in n i n e t e e n t h c c n t u r y I n d i a n affairs w a s the M u t i n y , or S e p o y R e b e l l i o n , o f 1 8 5 7 , a n d the t a k i n g o v e r o f India b y the C r o w n in 1858. A f t e r these c r u c i a l e v e n t s , there is a decline in t h e n u m b e r o f novels in w h i c h I n d i a w a s o n l y casually treated or used f o r incidental episodes. A f t e r the M u t i n y , I n d i a

and

A n g l o - I n d i a n l i f e are treated as themes in their o w n r i g h t . T h e M u t i n y also started, quite n a t u r a l l y , a g r e a t stream o f historical n o v e l s that m a y n e v e r r u n quite d r y . T h e y are m o r e seriously historical than the r o g u e - a n d - a d v e n t u r e r

school o f

picaresque

o r i g i n p u r v e y e d b y H o c k l e y or even b y T a y l o r in his f a m o u s s t o r y a b o u t T h u g g e e . T h e y are m o r e serious because the M u t i n y had p r o f o u n d l y shaken British official c o m p l a c e n c y a b o u t India, so s h a k e n it, indeed, t h a t s y m p a t h e t i c t r e m o r s w e r e f o r the first t i m e f e l t " a t H o m e . " T r o u b l e d and b e w i l d e r e d b y these r u m b l i n g s u n d e r the f o u n d a t i o n s o f imperial s u p r e m a c y

( m o r e even t h a n

b y thè C r i m e a n W a r , u n p o p u l a r as t h a t w a s in m a n y q u a r t e r s ) , a c u r i o u s p u b l i c was a n x i o u s to read novels t h a t w o u l d p a i n t the I n d i a n scene realistically, and s o m e h o w m a k e clear to t h e m the disastrous events that had t a k e n place there. T h e imperial race at

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

6$

bay for months behind slender defenses, outnumbered by infuriated enemies—how could such things be? The full-length, full-dress historical novel was rapidly growing in power and prestige as a literary form. The glorious tradition of the Waverley Novels, carried on by Bulwcr and Kingsley and Reade, was being both strongly reinforced and drastically altered from the fifties and sixties onward, by the professional historians at the universities. Kingsley himself was one of them, and was able to demonstrate in Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake how fortunately history and fiction might be fused. The current of intellectual fashion flowing steadily from Germany throughout the Victorian years set firmly away from Scott and toward the new "scientific" history. But it also gave new importance to the life of the ordinary people as a background for reigns and battles. It stressed the vital principles of organic growth and of continuity underlying and tying together all periods of the past. The slow, obscure development of British institutions, reexamined in the light of the " n e w " history, was seen to be providentially free and right. Great interest also began to surround Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic racial origins and to throw a fresh and favorable light upon the national past. A newly literate middle class, bent upon improving itself, read history and historical fiction as never before. What more natural than that the Mutiny should come in for its share of serious consideration in novel form? It was, after all, the Epic of the Race, as many novelists remind us. It held all possible emotion, all possible triumph. And it did come into its own. But the time lag between much empire fiction and the events it chronicles is often long, and novels about the Mutiny did not spring up immediately, while "Clemency" Canning, Dalhousie's successor, was still repairing some of the damage. The new ideas about history had time to germinate. They made it possible for novelists to rationalize England's position in India in some ingenious ways, but it took time. Going back over the colonial as well as the domestic past of their country, historians and novelists

66

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

use much scholarly and patriotic hindsight. The early blunders and depredations of John Company, the many wars and annexations of their own nineteenth century years, could be given, in the new light of historical continuity and organic growth, the aspect of parts in a slowly and majestically developing whole of British colonial policy. The vast Anglo-Indian tangle need not be viewed, except by the eye of prejudice, as having arisen from the low doctrine of expediency and "grab" and of covering one mistake with another. In fact, it need not be seen as a tangle at all. Its apparent chaos could be called by another and nicer name —complexity, and there was virtue in that; the New History had lent an almost mystic sanctity to whatever was complex. Nothing in history, the nineteenth century discovered, is simple, everything is in transition; vast social forces of which our forefathers could have no knowledge alter the whole perspective of the British past, including the colonial past and the Anglo-Indian past, particularly. For one of the new forces that the modern historians had uncovered among their race doctrines was the valuable one concerning Anglo-Saxon supremacy. It could be usefully applied to Anglo-Indian relations. The prophets Carlyle and Ruskin, romantic politicians like Disraeli, historians like Gardiner and Freeman and Froude, all fostered this race doctrine for reasons of their own; but in so doing they played into the hands of the empire-builders. Out of the historians' quiet studies, down from the university libraries and lecture platforms, the glorification of certain predominantly Anglo-Saxon traits was seeping into the fabric of Victorian fiction. The divine right of Britain to rule large portions of the earth became firmly based, during those rather self-conscious AngloSaxon years, on a general belief in racial honesty and directness, strength and ruggedness, independence and capacity for leadership. These "racial" qualities are stressed as a matter of course in Bulwer's and Kingsley's historical novels, in the belated romanticism of the Young English group, and sometimes even in the more thoughtful stories of George Eliot and Meredith, and in Arnold's

THE

BURDEN

OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

67

essays. ( O n l y the light-minded, like T h a c k e r a y and Trollope, scoffed a little and parodied them once in a while.) N o wonder that the novelists about India in general, and the M u t i n y in p a r ticular, made good use of them. U n d e r their influence, and w i t h the support of the intellectuals, the whole A n g l o - I n d i a n past, begins to brighten up as w i t h a n e w l y washed f a c e . E v e n the M u t i n y comes out looking cleaner. U n d e r the pen of a fluent writer aware of the mood of his day, it was made to assume the pleasing disguise of one of those regrettable b u t also inevitable mistakes that will occur in the large, c o m p l e x , vital, mystic, over-all pattern of British dominion in India f o r India's good. T h e M u t i n y novels did not really flourish until Disraeli made the Queen's Indian E m p i r e the romantic center of gorgeous i m perial dreams in the 1 8 7 0 s . T h e y had their

flowering

somewhat

later, w h e n K i p l i n g made India a fashionable department of the N e w Realism in the eighties and nineties, and when his o w n popularity was so great that it swept almost anything about India along w i t h it. Stories about the M u t i n y took on a new lease of l i f e once more f r o m 1 9 1 0 - 1 2 , at the time of the C u r z o n Delhi D u r b a r . A l l eyes were turned to this great spectacle being staged in the East, and only a f e w f o u n d it dubious, haunted by " a kind of intangible and immaterial m o c k e r y r u n n i n g under the s h o w . " In his novel Λ Farewell to India ( 1 9 3 1 ) , Thompson suggests that this alien pageant estranged almost as m a n y Indians f r o m the British R a j as the M u t i n y itself had done, though in a more subtle w a y . O f the early or Disraeli g r o u p of M u t i n y novels, one of the best is George T o m k y n s - C h e s n e y ' s The Dilemma,

published in

1 8 7 6 , the very year of the R o y a l Titles A c t b y which Victoria was made Empress of India. T w o other notable ones belong to the K i p l i n g era, a second edition of Meadows-Taylor's Seeta ( 1 8 8 7 ) and Flora A n n i e Steel's On the Face of the Waters

(1896-97).

A m o n g those produced in the D u r b a r years, the titles indicate what might

be called " s t a n d a r d

brands":

Slipped

Moorings,

The Keepers of the Gate, The Price of Empire, The Devil's

Wind,

68

THE BURDEN OF THE M Y S T E R Y

and so on, ad infinitum. It is significant that an Old Reliable like G. A. Henty's In Time of Peril, originally published in the Kipling era, 1881, was reissued in 1 9 1 1 , floating on the tide of renewed interest in India and the Mutiny that accompanied the Durbar. This whitewashing of the Mutiny in the long, cleansing perspectives of the "new" history, flattered the imperial complacency of the seventies and reassured the more anxious consciences of a later generation that was beginning to ask awkward questions even before 1914. To the scholarly novelist it provided at all times the most congenial material. He could revel in the minutiae of documentary research to give well-authenticated "color" to his battle scenes and incidents, and he could build up his fulllength portraits of heroes like Nicholson to a satisfactory size. They were serious heroes. With benefit of Carlyle, the eighteenth century gallantry of Colonel Newcome is gradually replaced by the more sombre heroism of the Kipling Sahib. A Carlyle-conditioned public, even if it no longer read Cromwell or Frederick, understood about heroes and Great Men, on whose initiative and courage grave issues still depended. The flag snatched from the fallen comrade, the gallant charge in the nick of time, these are the stock in trade of the Henty books and their kind. For more sophisticated raconteurs, there are the critical decisions and plans made in the leader's tent in the heat of an Indian night and carried out next day by a handful of devoted expendables. Or there is the psychological drama of conflicting emotions, the Great Man torn between love and will-to-victory, perhaps, or between his duty to his men and his soldierly ambition and thirst for personal glory. There are a thousand gambits. In short, the Mutiny was ready-made for the novelists. LIGHTENING

THE

BURDEN

But another group of historians found good copy in India. The novelists of manners and social comedy found congenial material in the lighter side of British rule in the East.

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

69

Around the middle of the century, although Mrs. Gore, L a d y Charlotte Bury, and Lady Blessington—those hardy veterans— were still turning them out, the popularity of the "silver f o r k " novels was worn thin. These novels purveying "fash'nable f a x " to the uninitiated, the vulgar, and the curious, had had their day. Thackeray made great f u n of them, with their maneuvering mothers, peers and parvenus, dukes and diamonds, though he did not disdain to use many of their ingredients in his own stories. But in his own panoramas of Victorian manners he was catering to a generation socially more secure than the one which had avidly absorbed these rakish and extravagant doings of the Regency. One should not be ungrateful; but it is impossible not to speculate on what Thackeray might have done had his sharp, sad view of fashionable life and behavior not been limited to the London scene. What fine and revealing novels of Anglo-Indian manners he might have left us, if not based on personal recollection, then reconstructed f r o m family anecdotes and a long tradition of Thackerays in India! His letters show that he dallied with the notion of someday taking his daughters out to India for a visit. But in the novels he gives us only fleeting glimpses, seen nostalgically through a haze of memory, not of Victorian India, but of the older and simpler India of Colonel Newcome of the Bengal C a v alry, who fought under Wellesley at Argaum, and of Mr. Binnie, who remembers "when Lord Hastings was satrap over us." We could forego any additions to his Major Gahagans and the O'Dowds, those highly farced, rollicking Irish people, pieced together from his step-father's Indian stories perhaps, who lead a noisy, superficially comic existence against the sketchy background of Indian military cantonments. But if only he had directed his shrewd and somewhat weary gaze upon the whole Anglo-Indian colony in London, a little world apart, living in its own past, preserving its own social tradition and jargon, we might have gained f r o m it a whole varied gallery of Anglo-Indian Old Soldiers, disillusioned consuls and disappointed strategists, those professional "viewers-with-alarm" of every move in Indian affairs

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y made by the Colonial Office. Thackeray's peculiar blend of sentimental-sardonic observation could have dwelt upon them and their families in London or in the watering places most favored by retired empire-builders, and reaped a rich harvest. From the chat of Heavyside, de Boots, and Fogey in the window of Bays's in The Newcomes, we get the atmosphere of what might have been. But the theme is not developed. It remains only one thread of many in that enormous rag bag of a novel. Many of Thackeray's contemporaries, like I. T. Prichard and John Lane, were novelists of manners in a minor way, and when they were Anglo-Indians too, as Sir John Kaye, H. S. Cunningham, or Sir George Tomkyns-Chesney were, they made the most of their observation of the ways of their fellow countrymen in exile. It was almost too easy to do, certainly far easier than justifying the ways of the English to the Indians in terms of a "long" view of the Mutiny. Social observation of only a superficial kind sufficed to chronicle the pastimes, snobberies, professional and marital jealousies of the small British station, the Club, or the vacation resort in the Hills. These writers of "manners" novels with far smaller talents than Kipling's had exploited this sort of thing long before he became famous, though he generally gets the credit of being the pioneer in the field. Long before his advent, the Evangelically edifying books, the books about half-castes, the books about younger sons, even the books about the Mutiny in their lighter moments (Tomkyns-Chesney's The Dilemma) had used the obvious social-comedy material that came so readily to hand in India, for satirical or admonitory purposes. After all, the English in India formed little islands of a highly stratified but homogeneous kind. Subject to certain pressures from an "unknown civilization surging up against them," English people were pretty sure to behave in certain well-established ways that soon became stereotyped in fiction. Because they were aloof and lonely, they found security and reassurance in making their places of exile as nearly like England as possible. That these ways sometimes did them little credit is merely a reflection of

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

71

their whole attitude. To misunderstand the natives of a subject continent, to neglect or ignore their languages, beliefs, customs, and to maintain at all costs the manners, morale, and standards of " H o m e " while doing a strenuous job of work as magistrates, collectors, district officers, soldiers, teachers, engineers, and missionaries, involved many Anglo-Indians in a double life. Its moral inconsistency was no less disturbing and enervating for being, for the most part, only dimly perceived or uneasily felt. From this uneasiness under the white man's burden, the distractions were many. Polo, gambling, drinking, tiger-hunting and pig-sticking for the men; music, water colors, and a little languid housekeeping for the women; dances, dinners, flirting, and unlimited gossip for both sexes—these are the pastimes that Victorian novelists of manners chiefly chronicle for us. Arnold, serious minded and conscience-stricken, deplores them in the fifties in his Oakfield, Edward Thompson and Ε. M. Forster deplore them in the nineteen twenties; but a host of second-string novelists preceding Kipling, and of course Kipling himself, made excellent copy out of them. Your first-class tiger hunt is the pièce de résistance of practically any Anglo-Indian novel of manners, and the dashing Desmonds of Maud Diver's books are broken men, indeed, when their gambling debts oblige them to part with their best polo pony. Kipling's Maltese Cat, in which the horses do the talking, shows what the new realism could do with the stern and rugged business of an interregimental polo match. The novels about Indo-China lead us to believe that many of the same diversions prevailed in the French colonial circles, with somewhat less emphasis on "le sport" as a means of escape, and rather more on liaisons with "les brunes" seasoned with an exotic whiff or two of opium. The damp tedium of Far Eastern life, for the more intellectual and educated Englishman and Frenchman alike, is sometimes relieved by the pursuit of archeological interests, as in Malraux's La Voie royale. Seeking ancient shrines and idols and the ruins of temples in the jungle is a more intellectual pastime than polo, and just as dangerous. Many novelists make the

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y most of it. Some of them also allow their characters, the more studious at any rate, to distract themselves by collecting native folklore, legends, and superstitions. This is one way to "understand" the native problem better, and Kim made it a thoroughly respectable pastime at the turn of the century. Mr. Thompson's missionary heroes do a good deal of it, and fraternize, besides, with native priests—not in a patronizing spirit but because they like them. More of this might have done much to bridge the great gulf between English and Indians. There was a large gulf, too, between the French and their Far Eastern subjects. The French, though generally more successful than the British with the great mystery of the native mind, are not always complacent about it. They, too, have their moments of self-criticism and bafflement. The natives of Siam-Cambodge are children, one of Daguèrches's characters points out, but "vous, les Français, vous ne savez pas élever les enfants!" The French, he says, spoil the natives until they go too far, and then stun them with unexpected blows because they have taken liberties. It does not make sense. And Claude Farrère, in his once famous novel of 1905, Les Civilisés, shows up the decadence of the younger inheritors of the old heroic tradition of the conquerors in IndoChina; among other sins, they have become lax with the natives. Jean Marquet's restrained and effective little book, De la rizière à la montagne ( 1 9 2 0 ) , is, however, an indictment of what the other extreme will do with the native problem. Laid in Annam in 190J to 1908, it is a record of brutalities and stupidities committed by officials in all the branches of the colonial administration upon the small and helpless native in the rice fields. It is not a pretty picture. Brooding on their own difficulties in the humid Far East, the French, like the English in India, often become convinced that all is vain where it is not vile, and drift into dilettantism or cultivate a taste for opium.

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

73

WORK

But your true colonial hero was no idler and no dilettante. The cult of the hero was not all that empire owed to Carlyle; it owed him the Gospel of Work as well. Among the dominant traits of the dominant Anglo-Saxon temperament, as novelists picture it, is the capacity f o r Work. It became part of the racial cult of the British in India. They rule there, we are led to believe, by a sort of divine right of Anglo-Saxondom, but God did not give England the Indian Empire for police purposes merely. European society and its examples must lift Asia from degradation, but can only do so by incessant toil. " W e have enemies enough to conquer in the shape of Time, and Space, and Jungle," says Mr. Middleton in Arnold's OakfielJ, "to employ us for the next halfcentury; roads, canals, possibly railroads, mining, getting more and more land brought under cultivation, this is our first obvious, elementary d u t y . " In Dalhousie's time, when Thackeray was writing about India in The Newcomes, these things were being done, though Thackeray did not write about them. Only prosaic engineers like John Brunton, who built the Sind Railway between Karachi and Kotru on the Indus, and left a matter-of-fact little diary about it for his grandchildren (published in 1 9 3 9 ) , kept contemporary records of these things. High-minded novelists like Arnold saw the need for them. But only the neoromantics of the late Victorian N e w India, like Kipling, really wrote them up in spectacular fashion and made the sons of Martha exciting to a whole new generation of readers. But long before Kipling, Carlyle was propped on the solitary dinner table of many a strenuous and conscientious young man in India during the long hot evenings. He was not an English monopoly either; as French colonial novels testify, he found his way into French Indo-China and Africa also. Toward the end of che century there is a tendency to replace him by Nietzsche. But they both preached effort for effort's sake, and fortified the

74

THE

BURDEN

OF T H E

MYSTERY

loneliness of m a n y an empire-builder too serious f o r polo and too censorious (or too " R u g b y " ) f o r flirting. W h a t came to be called the Kipling Sahib is built upon them both. He is the terse, direct man of action, as Carlyle's O d i n and C r o m w e l l and A b b o t S a m p son were also. Disraeli and R u s k i n may have been the romanticists of empire, but the gospel of C a r l y l e , the great Victorian preacher of "silence" and " a c t i o n , " was a gospel that suited admirably the time and temper of strong, b u t sometimes confused, colonial administrators. K i p l i n g , a f t e r all, should not get the entire credit f o r having taught a whole generation that power and effectiveness are somehow connected w i t h keeping y o u r mouth shut. T h e C a r l y l e influence upon the colonial hero, in fiction as in real life, is observable in his fanatical devotion to w o r k . T h e clipped speech, the pregnant silence, the penetrating blue-eyed gaze are there too. ( T h e heavily tanned Englishman in India must be blond to start w i t h ; a f a i r skin shows the sunburn better and also bespeaks the " N o r d i c " A n g l o - S a x o n blood.) G i v e n these prerequisites f o r heroism, he is off to a good start. B u t he must, before all else, be able to w o r k . A c c o r d i n g to C a r l y l e , and to K i p l i n g also, he need not achieve single deeds of a conspicuous kind, but he must be capable of long, grueling, unrewarded toil, selfless and tireless and exacting. So partly through his o w n naturally energetic temperament and partly through the m e r g i n g of his influence with Carlyle's and Nietzsche's, K i p l i n g bequeathed to a generation of colonial heroes f o l l o w i n g his o w n a f a i t h in frenetic labor as the true foundation of all colonial heroism. A l l the best heroes of colonial fiction are prodigious workers, but more especially in India. W o r k is a panacea f o r the miseries of the climate, f o r homesickness, f o r the restlessness of the exile; ceaseless activity brings a welcome physical exhaustion that m a y still the nagging question at the back of the mind, " W h y are w e in India at all? W h a t are w e doing h e r e ? " If one is only tired enough one does not think too much. T h e insidiously disintegrating forces of Indian life will not take cffect if one fights them b y embracing difficulty f o r its o w n sake à la Nietzsche, and by using

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y them as a moral punching bag or character developer, à la Carlyle. Bridgebuilders and famine fighters, District Officers and military commanders, missionaries and teachers, dampen the pages of Anglo-Indian novels with sweat, blood, and tears, but mainly with sweat. They fight off the haunting sense of futility with ceaseless and exhausting work. If they stop working anywhere in the course of the story, the reader knows they are doomed to go down under the climate, drugs, drink, gambling, or promiscuity. They haven't a chance. Perhaps the Evangelical groundwork of much of the English structure in India (with Carlyle and Nietzsche as reinforcement), had something to do with this almost masochistic passion for work. Empire-builders in fact and fiction never rest. These people sweat and suffer and make a virtue of it. "See," they seem to say, " w e did not want this burden of India laid upon us. N o one can say we asked for it. N o one can say we enjoy it. We are renouncing Home and happiness for it. There is virtue in renunciation. We see our duty and do it. If we do not have a good time doing it, it will be that much better for us. Nothing that one enjoys can give one much heavenly credit." There was also a feeling of expiation and atonement in all this: the greater the suffering, the less trouble from one's conscience. The ancient cruelties are constantly being wiped out, cleansed by the sweat of martyred exiles. "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon-day sun," and a certain number of not very rugged dilettantes from Home, in fiction, at least, thought this was all pretty silly. But these characters in the novels about India are people we are not supposed to like. They are fretful and complaining. They cannot take it. "It was all so vast and there was such endless work for everyone," whines Sir Rowland in one of Alice Perrin's polite Anglo-Indian novels of the early 1900s, and the tired reader is more than half inclined to sympathize. But not quite; it would not be cricket. For Sir Rowland's hard-working host, Commissioner Fleetwood, is an exemplary person. He and his family give themselves and their children whole-heartedly to their duty and "their great

76

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

foster-mother India." They and their kind, Fleetwood reflects, are "hallmarked with hereditary faculty for work in exile." (A good deal of this mysticism about inherited colonial talent in families crops up solemnly from time to time in these stories.) This veritable rage for work extends also to French novels about the Far East. This is partly Kipling's fault. The mythmaking quality of the Kipling hero was most obvious among his own people. As Robert Graves in his autobiography pointed out, "between 1887 and 1 9 1 4 all professional soldiers belonged only to one regiment, Kipling's Own. . . . Anglo-Indians adapted themselves to fit the picture which Kipling had made of them, learning from him that emotional constraint and that sense of imperial brotherhood with which he had endowed them." But the leaven worked abroad too. André Maurois has testified in Prophets and Poets that "between 1900 and 1920 Kipling appealed to the rising generations in France as few French writers were able to do." His books provided French colonial fiction with a new type, the type of the great colonizer, creator of empires, leader of men, builder of roads, civilizer, the man of effort and will. French politicians at home were giving this new type a lift, with exhortations to expansion in the East. This new sort of Frenchman is of sterner stuff than any hero of the literature of "exotisme," or any captain of industry and finance under the Third Napoleon. He has refreshed the French novel with strong, simple, generous feelings, struggles, and ideas, and has given the tired Frenchman a reassuring, revivifying, attractive, and sometimes astonishing picture of himself in a new role, that of the strong and relatively silent conquistador—not as silent as his stoical British competitor, of course, but for a Latin, pretty terse. Very often, like his English counterpart, he has read Carlyle and Nietzsche too, with the addition of his countryman Bergson's Creative Evolution. The combination of these assorted prophets makes a gospel of forwardlooking vitalism by means of which to rationalize his own activities in Siam and Cambodia. Thoroughly Latin though he remains, this Frenchman in many

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E MYSTERY

77

novels before World War I is scarcely to be outdone by any Kipling Sahib in crispness of speech, in the ability to take as well as give orders, in his scorn for the woman who mixes in man's work in a man's colonial world, in his implied or explicit idealization of action, responsibility, discipline, force, and war. H e is, in short, a quite authoritarian fellow, sometimes with disagreeable fascist touches, all too premonitory of Things to Come. H e is "le type Français qui ne désespère pas, qui ne bavarde pas, qui agît, qui aime la vie; et cette conception nietzschéenne doit plaire à la jeune génération." These heroes, remembering Carlyle, whom they read faithfully, think little of the political chatter that goes on at home in France. One of them paraphrases Carlyle thus: "Les actes du Parlement, en somme, sont peu de chose, nonobstant le bruit qu'ils font. Q u e l est l'acte du Parlement, quel est le débat à St. Stephen's, aux hustings ou ailleurs, qui ammena un Shakespeare à l'être?" But what the French as well as the English admire in this rather sinister compound of qualities, is the passion for hard work. Daguèrches's laborious engineer Touranges (Le Kilomètre 8)), engaged in bridgebuilding in Siam, might be any Son of Martha as praised by Kipling. H e is more articulate than many of Kipling's laconic heroes, but takes the same pride in the bridge that has finally been built over the treacherous yellow river: " C ' é t a i t plat comme une table, et cela portait tout le bouquet resplendissant du ciel. . . . E t je savais que c'était solide, durable, pas en toc. . . . J'étais content, c'était nôtre oeuvre." H e belongs to the Aristocracy, the rank of Worker par excellence, because he has an intelligent view of his work and takes pride in doing it perfectly. For this reason he refuses to regard the coolies, as do some of his colleagues with sentimental humanitarian hang-overs from the Revolution, as his brothers. " J e suis aristocrate, mon cher, j'ai rang d'ouvrier et ceux-là, non." O f course this respect for work, stressed in so much English and French colonial literature of the Far East, came originally from the intensely practical discovery in real life that work was highly neces-

7»

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

sary in order to survive at all in the colpnial scheme of things. The worse the climate, the more necessary it is. And when it comes to a question of relative humidity, the Indian climate yields nothing, apparently, to that of Siam-Cambodia.

THE

MYSTERY

In all these English novels about India, and in the French ones about Indo-China, diverse as they are, the note of puzzlement prevails. India is everlastingly tempting material to the novelists; they cannot leave it alone. They are always trying to find the answer, to put the pieces together; and they always fail. Where they have all the answers, as Kipling apparently did, one may be sure there is something wrong. His bouncing virtuosity, his gentlemanly, sporting stress on The Game and The Law, his evocations of thick Indian atmosphere, form a kind of screen for the fact that his view of India was limited, sheltered, and slick. Perhaps that was a good thing. To see too much, from too many angles, does not make for a vigorous, compact story. The authors about India who try to see all around everything get lost in the fog, and maunder. Perhaps it is better to oversimplify than to maunder. Only great writers like E. M. Forster manage not to do either. For the lesser ones, India is too much, but they remain fascinated by it. A very few first-class writers like L. H. Myers refuse to deal with the modern Indian scene at all. The Root and the Flower (1934) is a triumphant justification of this refusal. For the lesser fry, the Great Puzzle remains, and they wrestle with it over and over again. Beginning with the edification stories of the early nineteenth century, complacent though they sound, the puzzle is stated. How can the heathen be so obtuse? How can he dislike the English so much? W h y will he not be clean, honest, and hard-working? In the mid-century, the attempts at lifting the burden of the mystery take on a slightly different idiom. Why is India so different from what we had thought it? W h y will the natives not understand that we are in India for India's good? Some

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E

MYSTERY

79

authors push the whole thing off the table and simply use India for copy. Historical pieces, adventure stories, boys' books, detective stories and thrillers are often satisfactory results of this evasion of the mystery. And India was always good for interludes in long and untidy novels like The Newcomes, where a little AngloIndian autobiography served to shift the scene and provide for entrances and exits, to say nothing of the rise and fall of fortunes. Only in more recent times does the tone of the questioning change again. Why, in fact, are we in India at all? Does the good we have done balance the bad? When, if at all, shall we leave India to the Indians? Is the whole business perhaps dishonest and futile? Is any mutual liking and understanding at all possible between Indian and Englishman? The modern novelists brood endlessly over these dilemmas, producing by the way some fine satire on English or French hypocrisy and pretention, airing many old grudges that stem from Home, not from India at all, and, like their predecessors, settling nothing. Their best by-products are perhaps some fine studies in disintegration. Here, psychopathology has been a bonanza. A good neurosis plus the Indian climate has served many a modern novelist well. In the great endurance contest presented by the conquerors versus the conquered, the winner was predictable from the beginning. India could hold out longest, and has. These novels about India are the running record of a great defeat. In the course of this record, large-scale tragedy in the grand manner is not possible; each novelist has of necessity carved out his small piece of manageable material from the always too vast background that India presents. But one tragic link does connect all the novels, of whatever time and type they may be—the ultimate waste of spiritual energy. No matter how crisp and worldly, how sentimental and banal, how jaunty and practical, how doctrinaire and intellectual the novelist and his characters may be, somewhere along the line a genuine effort to endure, a striving for courage, within the Indian scene or against it, is demanded, and is doomed from the beginning, like the British in India themselves. The

8o

T H E BURDEN OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

effort is so admirable, and in the end, so ineffective, the peculiar colonial brand of gratuitous personal courage so spectacularly, pathetically wasted. This fruitless gallantry is perhaps not tragic, merely pathetic. The more naive novelists do not see that it is fruitless; the others know it is, and play it up deliberately. This is not a question of period. John Lang in the i8jos and H. S. Cunningham in the 18 ios are as callously cynical about the equivocal position of the British in India as any bright young man of the 1920s bent on exposing the weaknesses of his grandiloquent countrymen in the best Evelyn Waugh manner. Again, W. D. Arnold in 1853 is as worried about the English preparation of India for selfgovernment and about the deep British misunderstanding of the native mind as E. M. Forster and Edward Thompson are in 1924 and 1930. It is a question of the author's temperament and insight, not of the lapse in time between the age of John Company and the age of Indian Nationalism. These novels are more valuable as historical and social documents than as works of art. On the aesthetic side, their residue is small. From whatever approach—social, historical, psychological —the various authors may try to seize India, she eludes them, leaving in their hands only a few bits and pieces of good local color and "atmosphere." So the novelists too, like their own characters, and like the Anglo-Indians themselves on whom the characters are based, are baffled and beaten. They have all, as the native students said to Alden, in A Farewell to India, "striven nobly against great odds and ends." But the odds and ends that make up India have won. Anglo-Saxondom and racial, sahib mentality have not availed ; the gospel of "everything is all right when seen in perspective" which the New History contributed, has not availed; even Carlyle-plus-Nietzsche and the gospel of work have not availed. For underneath all the high-sounding phrases and soul-searchings and speculations that the more thoughtful novelists present, faithfully and realistically enough, they present also a much simpler

T H E B U R D E N OF T H E M Y S T E R Y

81

question; even the more frivolous novelists imply it. It is basic, and common to all these books. It is the quite rudimentary and —under the circumstances—quite childish question asked aloud or under his breath by every Anglo-Indian: "When, oh when, shall I go H o m e ? " The recent past has answered, " N o w ! "

3· Places in the Sun: Africa

T

THE

GREAT

OPEN

SPACES

O E M E R G E f r o m the damp and distressful fiction about baffled Englishmen in India and decadent Frenchmen in the steaming jungles of Cambodia and the swampy rice fields of A n n a m is to breathe with relief a purer air. Perhaps not purer morally. The high, sunny plateaus and golden deserts of A f r i c a were the scene in which the Gospel of Grab for the sacred right of the Solid Block led to more bloodshed, chicanery, and political throat-cutting than any comparable scene in the world in modern times. But the novels about it make it all sound, if not " n i c e r " than India, at least more wholesome. It is higher and drier. The clear, astringent atmosphere makes all the skulduggery look more open and aboveboard. Dark deals, perpetrated by all the European powers scrambling for their colonial place in the sun, look less dark in fiction that is bathed in brilliant sunlight. For the fine flower of the "expansion" novel really blossomed in the sunbaked A f r i c a n ground. Germany, coming late but vigorously to the race f o r empire after Bismarck's "conversion" to a colonial policy, naturally falls foul of Britain in the days of Salisbury and J o Chamberlain, and France in the days of Etienne, Jules Ferry and Gabriel Hanotaux. "Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?" asked Fabri in his little book in 1879. The answer in fact and in fiction was a ringing affirmative for thirty years. So the novels about A f r i c a have the element of competition that was lacking in the Indian background. The explorers of all three nations, the promoters, the missionaries, the great chartered companies, the railways, the steamship companies, all fought it out f o r A f r i c a . There is a youthfulness and vigor about the novels

P L A C E S IN T H E

SUN

8}

that tell the story of the struggle, which is lacking in books about India. For Europe, Africa was a new frontier; the novels that grow out of it stress action rather than brooding and contemplation. The British in India represented an old colonial effort, growing rather tired in an age-old continent. There is nothing drooping or worn-out about any nationals in A f r i c a . N o ancient colonial hierarchy will protect the tired there. Novels based on this new world are not going to be filled with peaceful sentiments of brotherly love, international understanding, or tolerance. Nowhere in African colonial fiction do we find English, French, and German settlers, adventurers, farmers, miners, engineers, or missionaries joining forces or living side by side in adjacent territories without hostility, bitterness, jealousy, and grievances of all sorts. The quarrels and rivalries of their homelands are faithfully carried over to their places in the African sun. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? All three countries wanted too much. As Leonard Woolf observed in 1 9 1 9 : " I t is a curious fact that an empire, unless it is in solid blocks, is f o r the imperialist not strictly empire. The dream of the German is of a Mittel-Afrika stretching in a solid block from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Nothing would satisfy M. Etienne and his supporters but a solid block of French territory stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea. . . . While Rhodes and his followers, with that originality which characterizes the Englishman, decided that the destinies of Britain required a solid block from the Cape to Cairo, running from south to north and therefore, necessarily, making all the other nations' solid blocks— which ran from west to east—impossible." Large-scale greed like this on the part of nations makes for a kind of land-hunger on the part of nationals. The people in these books are greedy, contentious, rancorous, touchy, particularly on the subject of boundaries and fences. There was room f o r them all, but no one would yield an inch or concede a shred of compromise. Perhaps this was natural enough, since one of their chief

84

PLACES IN T H E SUN

reasons for coming to Africa at all was that they suffered from claustrophobia at home. In this new country they recover from their claustrophobia very quickly. They are intoxicated by space. The world has stretched in space and time to an extent unimaginable in Europe; days and distances are no longer on the European scale. Colonials try hard to make people at home understand this, but they never do. These African colonials are, after all, the uprooted people. They have "come out" to settle down and stay, not to serve a limited period of time as part of a military or civil bureaucracy, as their brothers do in India. They may have come merely to make their fortunes in gold or diamonds, but when they do, the chances are they will remain. Africa will claim them. They will take root in its soil, renouncing forever the bourgeois comfort of French provincial towns, the terraces of the Rhineland, the quiet midland parsonages or the crowded industrial towns of England. They have made the decision, cut the knot, taken the definite step. Whether finally successful or not, they have made the Byronic gesture of defiance and shaken the dust of Europe from their heels. A huge continent has received them, and they trumpet its glorious bigness in many novels. They use the language we are accustomed to hear about the ranges of the American West and the desert horizons of the southwest. Coming back from our East coast, Westerners say, "There's no room there, you know. It's so free here." In the same way the first nineteenth century novels about Africa stress the "colossal plenitude," the "large freedom" of the dark continent, and the authors yearn for it when they go back to England. As early as 1845 Captain Marryat was writing in this way in his glorified boys' book, The Mission; or, Scenes in Africa. G. A. Henty was not much concerned with accuracy when he took his young colonists to Natal with Buller and to Pretoria with Roberts in the eighties and nineties, but these superior scout trips filled with manly dialogue do allow Henty's young empire-builders, of the "every-inch-a-Briton" school, to feel that Africa is a lot more

P L A C E S IN T H E S U N spacious than they had expected, and that when one has finished chasing those rascally and perfidious Boers out from behind their kopjes, it might be nice to get a farm and bring the family out from England. Olive Schreiner is more romantic and rhapsodic about the general starlit vastness of Africa in her Story of an African Farm, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, and other African stories. She is sorry in a rather superior way for the poor lady who had just come out from England and who breaks down at her first glimpse of the limitless miles of bush: " O h , it's so terrible! There's so much of it! So much!" Contemporary with these novels, and even earlier, actual travel books stress the same theme, and it is a natural one for the novelists to expatiate upon. The early Boers were accustomed to space and solitude; in fact this was a kind of mania with them. They began to feel stuffily constricted if they could see the smoke of any neighbor's chimney, no matter how many miles away. The memoirs of their generals on commando in the Boer War—Smuts, Denys Reitz, and others—glory in the roominess of their surroundings even in days of great danger and hardship. The missionaries of all nationalities and sects, who had a much better time in Africa than in India, if we may judge by their own accounts, enjoyed the free, casual travel by Cape cart in the wide plains and bush country. So did the naturalists like Mary Kingsley, explorers like Sir Harry Johnston, and hunters like F. C. Selous, who shot the last white rhinoceros. And novels can scarcely better some of the finest modern autobiographical writing about Africa by people who suffer from a bitter homesickness for its bright distances: Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa ( 1 9 3 8 ) , Peter Rainier in My Vanished Africa ( 1 9 4 0 ) , and Beryl Markham in West with the Night (1942)· Kipling, of course, is intoxicated not only with the size of Africa, where he developed a hearty hatred for "Brother Boer" and enjoyed life with Rhodes at Groote Scbuur on Table Mountain; he is enraptured in Africa even more than in India with the size of empire itself, in the expansion of which geography col-

86

PLACES IN T H E SUN

laborated in such a gratifying way. The purpose of this whole work, as he tells us in Something of Myself, was to disclose to the provincial English "a vast, vague conspectus . . . of the whole sweep and meaning of things and efforts and origins throughout the Empire." This capacious, if somewhat muddled hope, he did something to fulfill in one of his Boer War stories, "The Captive" (Traffics and Discoveries), in which the American inventor is impressed with the British general's ideas of size and of time. America "owns a lot of real-estate" but these British flutter around the atlas choosing "stray continents." The American likes Africa so well that he decides to settle there: "I'm pleased with this country—it's big. Not so many folk on the ground as in America. There's a boom coming sure . . . and I guess I shall buy a farm near Bloemfontein and start in cattle-raising. It's big and peaceful —a ten-thousand-acre farm." All the novelists, of whatever nation, are clear on the inspirational value of this African vastness. They fancied that this heroic colonial society in a continent of heroic proportions could breed only men of heroic stature and large ideas. It is perhaps a pathetic fallacy that their belief in size as a virtue should have extended from nature to man. But so it was. "It's a good thing to have lived in the wide distant spaces of the world. A man couldn't easily be mean or small where life is so simple and so large. . . . It lifts a man away from the fret of life, and sets his feet on the heights where lies repose." Thus Sir Gilbert Parker in his The Judgment House of 1 9 1 3 , a novel about a Rhodes-ish character and the Boer War. And in Mrs. Sarah Gertrude Millin's The Jordans ( 1 9 2 3 ) , dealing with the same themes, we have: "That's what I think is so grand about it, all this bareness. A man's a man here. He means something. He can stretch himself. He can lift himself. The Americans call their land God's country. But what would they say to this, where everything is still as it was at the beginning of creation and no human being has put his mark?"

P L A C E S IN T H E SUN

87

A n d many better and more modern novelists, like Francis Brett Young in his City

of Gold

( 1 9 3 7 - 3 9 ) and Stuart Cloete in his

trilogy, The Turning Wheels, The Hill of Doves, and Watch for the Dawn

( 1 9 3 9 ) , show us at least a few of their more admirable

characters whom the largeness of the South African veldt has redeemed from weakness or strengthened in their already simple and generous view of the world. It is an easy transition to make. In the figure of Rhodes and in the novels about him, the novelists have a living proof, so it seems to them, of this connection between the illimitable African landscape and the illimitable ideas of empire generated by a physically large, and also large-thinking man, Rhodes himself. Size redeems him, as it did so much else that was greedy and unscrupulous in the process of establishing European supremacy in Africa. He was a fanatic, but imperialism bred many of them. Like other isms, it has had an embarrassment of fathers, mostly Victorian and mostly fanatics too. Carlyle and Disraeli were among them. A n d gentle Ruskin, himself a fanatic, if not worse, on many subjects, was certainly fanatical on the subject of England's imperial size and her sacred duty to spread out and be "mistress of half the earth." His Slade lecture enjoined her in the most unabashed and flowery terms to grab all she could and to found her "motionless navies" as fast and as far as possible. This famous lecture of February 8, 1 8 7 0 , was still echoing through Oxford when Rhodes kept his irregular term-times there in the intervals of diamond-mining at Kimberley. He was enchanted by it and the enchantment lasted his lifetime. "Mistress of half the earth"! These were romantic and significant words on which Rhodes' grandiose plans and enterprises were largely based. Scarcely anything had to be changed in putting him into a novel. H e was a "natural." For the most part he is simply transferred "as is" into the pages of fiction. He was stranger and more preposterous than the average

novelist's

hungriest dream. If the novelist wants to register admiration, he merely has to "step u p " the mixture a little, and make Rhodes

88

PLACES IN T H E SUN

into a kind of superman. If he wants to sneer—and a few did— all he has to do is a quiet bit of deflationary puncturing of that huge image. Rhodes is fair game either way. Morley Roberts in The Colossus (1899) wants to have it both ways, admiring and sneering. Rhodes understands the mystery of the veldt as well as the "very Boer" does, and the mystery of the Anglo-Saxon race and its message even better. But he fancies himself in the pretentious role of Pathfinder and Pioneer. He is the incarnation of the "sombre and powerful genius of the English nation." But he was out "to square the least we want with the most we can get" and did not much care how he did it. An all-British Africa was his simple plan. He dislikes women but uses them. He is the "biggest real-estate agent on earth," the "colonizing, grabbing instinct made concrete." Sarah Gertrude Millin, who did not wholly dislike him, drew a fair picture; in her novel of South Africa, The Jordans ( 1923 ), in which he figures only remotely, her characters are divided in their minds about him, as indeed she was herself. He is a "practical romanticist" but he could also be romantic in a schoolboyish way, and some of his ideas were childish. One of these was his notion about the Rhodes Scholarships he founded. Much influenced by Kipling as he was, "he assumed that every year a regiment of Stalkies would get his scholarships. But when it came to the point there were no Stalkies. And so the best that was possible was done among the ordinary young men who did not know that they were the inheritors of a romantic tradition." The more conventional books about him, like Parker's The Judgment House ( 1 9 1 3 ) and Gladys Skelton's Dominion ( 1 9 2 5 ) , deal in almost unqualified admiration. Parker feels there was something wild and gallant even about the Jameson Raid, and the Skelton book takes the line that Rhodes was "betrayed" by it, and by an Edwardian siren. He is a bold bluffer, schemer, gambler, but according to his admirers he had to be. What is a little rigging of markets compared to the great ends to be gained? A more dispassionate and impersonal portrait appears in Francis

P L A C E S IN T H E

SUN

89

Brett Y o u n g ' s fine historical novel of South A f r i c a , The City Gold

of

( 1 9 3 9 ) . In the early days of the Rand Rhodes appears "less

like a human being than a force of nature," and his giantism in all respects is impressive. " T h e scale of this odd y o u n g man imposed respect." H e keeps reappearing throughout the course of Y o u n g ' s long chronicle, g r o w i n g older but always quoting R u s kin, always concerned f o r some new idea, some backward look at history and A n g l o - S a x o n predominance to justify present happenings. Y o u n g communicates, one feels, something like a real sense of Rhodes' range and energy. H e was a portent, a symbol, and Y o u n g is neither sentimental nor angry about him. But f o r Y o u n g , as f o r lesser novelists, he was the epitome of the English colonial infatuation w i t h size—the size of A f r i c a itself and of their destiny in it. J. R . Seeley in The Expansion

of

England

( 1 8 8 3 ) had derided the historians w h o wrote "as if the England of w h i c h histories are written were the island so-called, and n o t the political union named after the island, which is quite capable of expanding so as to cover half the globe." H e and Ruskin and Rhodes all spoke the same large language.

CHARACTER

BUILDING

T h e French too were hypnotized by the size of their colonial empire, second largest to Britain's even though it consisted of the " b a d lands" of the world. T h e heroic societies that grew u p in the various parts of French West A f r i c a had a different atmosphere f r o m the British. " U n e colonie française, c'est encore la France," was the French idea. But despite certain differences in colonial theory, in actual practice the French colonial suffered f r o m m a n y of the same obsessions as the British. T h e y had to have their myths. If they had no exact equivalent for mythmakers like Rhodes, they had representative heroes of their o w n , not promoters on the grand scale, but soldier-organizers like Galliéni in Madagascar, L y a u t e y in T o n k i n , and explorers like Coppolani in Mauritania.

9°

PLACES IN T H E SUN

The emphasis was on the soldier-hero because the 1890s had a decided military flavor at home and also in the colonies under the forward policy of Etienne and Hanotaux. The soldier might theoretically be merely the forerunner of the trader and entrepreneur, but it was he who made Africa romantic to the French at home. It was conquest in terms of military success that they heard about—the grab itself, not the laborious organization of what had been grabbed. The French needed Algeria and their West African possessions not for surplus population, as the British and Germans did, but for surplus capital. Except for Algeria, the colonies were not regarded as places in which to settle large numbers of transplanted Frenchmen. The garrison, therefore, was the colony, and hence the emphasis on military virtues and triumphs. Very soon, however, much French fiction about the colonies set out to correct this, and to emphasize the administrators and organizers. In fact, French novelists, compared to the British, excel in giving these more workaday officials their due, and they certainly excel in what might be called the literature of the native mind. As regards the obsession with size, claustrophobia of national proportions has never attacked the French mind as it has the English and the German. Perhaps this is due not so much to the declining birth rate as to the strength of that French principle of "centrality," of organization by compact provinces, each with intense local feeling, but still attached to the one great metropolitan center, Paris. Curtius believed that this was part of the French national genius for harmony and balance. But though they were not making for the great open spaces as consciously as the British and the Germans, many French colonials, particularly those in Algeria—which was almost a "département" of France itself— appreciated African spaciousness when they got there. So it seems, in the novels of their two most enthusiastic writers about Algeria, Louis Bertrand and Robert Randau. These two vigorous regional writers, by far the best that French fiction has to show for Algeria, are full of eloquence on the sub-

PLACES IN THE SUN

91

ject of Algerian spaciousness and what it does to people. Their characters are shown, over and over again, affected by "cette ivresse d'espace" as well they might be, since their adopted country is several sizes larger than all of France itself, and a prolific and profitable producer of sheep, oil, wheat, and wine. The settlers, wagoners, farmers, squire-proprietors of these novels are simply bouncing with verve and virility and joie de vivre, mostly because the country is so big. The heat of the sun, the intensity of quivering light, the interminable plains, the immense horizons seem to intoxicate them more personally and specifically than their English counterparts in South Africa or Tanganyika or Kenya. At least they are more vocal about their reactions and seem to get more fun out of them. They are also convinced, as many English writers were, that these great spaces cannot but have a beneficial effect on human nature. Making the Great Trek with the Boers and fighting the Zulus made a man out of John Oakley, the condemned convict who escaped and finally married a Boer wife, in Young's They Seek a Country. The High Veldt does wonders for the character. After innumerable hardships, "the consciousness of strange freedom, a sense of confident power, of bodily and spiritual expansion" overtakes John Oakley. He had been no more than a boy until now, but suddenly Africa makes him feel masterful and able to face the still doubtful future with confidence. In Young's The Crescent Moon, the Scotsman McCrae has wandered all over Africa, as much for the sense of power it gives him as to make a fortune. He has hunted elephants and poached ivory and found gold and copper to prove to himself that he could do all these things. Stuart Cloete in Watch for the Dawn dwells on the mystery of African spaciousness, "Our Africa is a wide country, none knows how wide"; this is a personally invigorating thought. The French, however, need to make their connection of African nature with human nature for a number of rather special reasons. They are in a position to look with some detachment at their old

P L A C E S I N T H E SUN world at home, to reexamine what it stands for, what it has meant to them, in the light of the new values they have found. France herself stands out in a perspective that is often revealing. It seems to the more thoughtful of the Algerian "broussards" that their old world has reached an apex of civilization, a degree of complicated culture, not only in the arts but in the art of living, such as the world has not seen before. But France has paid a heavy price for this perfection. She has lived too much in the mind, and has forgotten the primitive virtue of the soil and the people who work it. She has exalted reason and intellect, and has forgotten that force and violence are sometimes necessary and valid. In Les Déracinés, le roman de l'energie nationale ( 1897), Maurice Barrés suggested as much. Charles Maurras with his Action française (1899), and Ernest Seillière with his romantic and mystic views on expansion, Philosophie de l'impérialisme ( 1 9 0 3 - 7 ) , said the same things even more emphatically, with reactionary, authoritarian, and royalist implications. These writers, backed by the vitalism of Bergson and whatever French readers could pull out of Nietzsche that was useful for colonial purposes, lurk behind most of the French novels about Algeria, and about Madagascar as well. A revived nationalism in politics and art, a regenerated army, a new discipline embraced voluntarily by the younger generation, a glorification of war for its own sake—all these, the novelists believe, are good and necessary. A colonial heroic society built on these foundations will show the people at home how it should be done; it will furnish an example. By regenerating themselves to an effective, sound, and virile way of life in the colonies, these French colonials will help to regenerate France herself. After 1870 there seemed to most Frenchmen no doubt that she needed it. This complex of defeat underlies much of the French colonial fiction. Regeneration was not merely a philosophical idea. Decadence and "softness" had led to humiliation and defeat; a new affirmation of "hardness" was required to lay the ghost of national inferiority. The colonies made the opportunity for this affirmative

P L A C E S IN T H E S U N

93

gesture. The novels about them oppose aestheticism and pessimism; they show the colonies, particularly Algeria, to be the school for action and energy, of national rehabilitation. T o flourish in them is an act of faith in oneself and in the mother country. Atonement for and redemption from defeat may be found in that act. So the heroes of novelists like Bertrand, Randau, de Vogüé, Pierre Mille, and Ernest Psichari glorify energy, sometimes to the point of ruthlessness. They praise the abnegation of self, the willing submission of personal ease and comfort to the higher good of the colonial cause; the strenuous discipline of a spare and ascetic life in military service; dangerous living à la Nietzsche, and courage built up from facing the chances of decisive physical conflict at every moment. So the obsession with African space assumes an urgency for the French writers that one does not find in their English contemporaries. Space and spareness in Algeria made the field, the theater with a sometimes grandiose setting, for the drama of national regeneration. England has no African novels to compare with Bertrand's Sang Jes races ( 1 8 9 9 ) , Robert Randau's Les Colons ( 1 9 0 7 ) and Les Explorateurs ( 1 9 0 9 ) , or with de Vogüé's Les Moris qui parlent ( 1 9 0 1 ) and Ernest Psichari's L'Appel Jes armes ( 1 9 1 3 ) . Nor have they anything to equal the African experiences of André Gide or Isabelle Eberhardt. C. S. Forester's The African Queen ( 1 9 3 5 ) , that masterly story of a missionary's sister and a little Cockney who make the almost impossible journey down the Ubanga River in an old motor launch to blow up a German battleship on Lake Nianga, is the story of only a small-scale regeneration by comparison with the national scope of these French novels. The French are more concerned and more doctrinaire about national salvation than the English, in those years before World War I, needed to be. English voices, however, were not lacking, especially around 1870 and again at the turn of the century and the Boer War years, to intimate that England was slipping. N o actual defeat

94

P L A C E S IN T H E SUN

had yet affected her, but the German threat of more modern and terrible warfare from across the channel begins to be felt. Ruskin, in the same Oxford speech of 1870 that so thrilled Rhodes, threatens and congratulates his countrymen in the same breath. Invoking the favorite nineteenth ccntury mysticism of "blood" and race, he says "We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey." He could have been thinking, "See what is happening to a degenerate and dissolute France!" Meredith in Beauchamp's Career (1874) is concerned about England's backward navy and about the harsher air blowing from the continent toward England. That good old Anglo-Indian Sir George Tomkyns-Chesney is aware of it too, and envisages a possible invasion of England by Germany in his grim little piece in Blackwood's Magazine for May, 1 8 7 1 , called "The Battle of Dorking." This is not quite decadence and defeat, but the explorer Stanley and his ilk at this time kept preaching, "If we do not go forward, we shall go back!" Perhaps England is softening. It appeared so to many patriots when Britons did not spring to arms at once, in answer to Kruger's ultimatum. If England was to inherit half the earth, she should not be so backward in claiming her inheritance. " 'England is losing her great characteristics,' says Stanley, in his Autobiography, 'she is becoming too effeminate and soft from long inactivity, long enfeeblement of purpose, brought about by indolence and ease, distrust of her own powers and shaken nerves. It is at such times that nations listen to false prophets, cranks, faddists, and weak sentimentalists.' " Contemporary with Wells's scientific romances, which suggested as fantasies various gadgets that the Germans might only too easily apply in real life, there sprang up in the nineties a whole small literature of alarm, as one might call it. " A n almost oriental luxury had gone far to weaken the fibre of that strong and opulent middle-class who had been the backbone of England,

P L A C E S I N T H E SUN

9S

the entrenched Philistines," remarks Gilbert Parker in The Judgment House, writing about the effect of the Boer War at home. In 1894 the popular writer William Le Queux in The Great War in England in 1 Í 9 7 dedicated the book to Lord Harmsworth because he suggested the subject. This time it is the French and the Russians who are going to bomb London and spread panic throughout the kingdom. There are battles on the Mersey, massacres at Eastbourne, slaughter at Glasgow, and other assorted horrors. The Empire totters. N o one is prepared. "England had calmly slept for years, while military reforms had been effected in every other European country. Now she had been suddenly and rudely awakened." W. Laird Clowes in The Captain of the Mary Rose (1894) takes an armor-clad cruiser through "the great naval war with France," and George Griffith in The Angel of the Revolution, a Tale of the Coming Terror, deals with "aerial navigation" which enables a vast secret society to "decide the issue of the coming world war." All in all, the burden of this "alarm" literature is that England may be growing the seeds of decay beneath the surface, where they do not show. Indifference, sloth, softness of the kind that had been France's downfall, might lead to England's collapse too. Her moral fiber is not what it was. In all this kind of writing the colonies are noticeably brought in to point the moral. In the hour of impending defeat the outposts of empire spring to the rescue, as they were actually to do in two World Wars. Volunteer», in Mr. Le Queux' story, come from Australia and Cape Town; native regiments come from India; Canada mobilizes a volunteer regiment. The day is saved. The implication might be that the virtues of the fresher, younger, more unspoiled colonials, such as France was building up in her colonial domain, were the virtues of British colonials too. They will save an aging mother country as surely as the Frcnch-Algerians will regenerate France in time for her next crisis.

P L A C E S IN T H E

96

SOIL

SNUFFING

AND

ROME

SUN

LA

GRANDE

England and France, then, both celebrate A f r i c a n roominess, w i t h the added complication in French novels of roominess leading to a national and personal renaissance. A f r i c a n size and sun and air lead to physical well-being and to the leveling of stupid English caste barriers in Forester's The African

Queen

(1935),

but they do it more self-consciously in the hands of French novelists, and f o r more people. Randau and Bertrand m i x with it t w o other themes that are seldom found so m u c h elaborated in E n g lish novels of A f r i c a — t h e themes of " t h e Soil" and " t h e forefathers." Randau set out to make his novels show how the French race takes on new vigor in contact with " l ' A f r i q u e rude." There is a " t r u c u l e n t f e c u n d i t y " about the A f r i c a n soil w h i c h affects the novels about it, he believes. T h e torrid plains, Randau's hero Cassard muses, the strong Algerian effects of light and shadow, will produce a different and more p o w e r f u l literature than that of France w i t h its "European sentimentalities." T h e violence and breadth of the Algerian landscape will produce a new kind of painting. N e w ideas of f o r m , line, color, and light, will make a stronger and more virile a r t — a n art that will be "impérieusement solaire." It is more virile because it is closer to the soil. Algerian self-sufficiency depends upon the soil, and perhaps that is one reason for the constant glorification of it in these novels. "Emancipons-nous!" is the constant c r y , which never comes out of English A f r i c a . France is " p a y s de l'idée: l'Algérie pays des néo-latins de l'action," a contrast w h i c h the English writers are never driven to. According to R a n d a u , French women as well as French men have become effete. T h e native FrenchAlgerian product is sounder because nearer to that mystic soil. Randau's heroine, Hélène, is an Oriental barbaric charmer w h o likes good strong colors; she wears pink underwear with brick red ribbons run through it, uses plenty of strong heliotrope per-

PLACES IN T H E SUN

97

fume, and is given to walking, "les hanches ondulantes." Imported French maidens could learn from her example. The English are merely merchants, says Randau contemptuously, the Germans merely soldiers in their colonies; they do not appreciate African earth, "la terre à labours, la brousse à défricher." The French have a different ideal, and though Randau does not mention it, this may have been based partly on Barrés' regenerative doctrine in Les Déracinés. According to this, the particular locality within France, the province, became very important indeed. Not only provincial life, but colonial life, so felt the young Frenchmen in Africa at the turn of the century, must be built in Barrés' manner on the counsels of the soil and the forefathers. Real colonial achievement, "la grande France," must rest on "an ancient sentimental background formed of a common fund of legends, traditions and habits, acquired by the inhabitants of the same locality through a long line of ancestors." Maurras, also, in Quand les Français ne s'aimaient pas, and many other pieces, had helped to spread the belief in the "mystique" of French historical and territorial characteristics, her races, provinces, archives, legends. O f course this was the era of regionalism in the naturalistic novel and its "earthiness." Zola's La Terre, Hamsun's Growth of the Soil had made the barnyard fashionable. The cycle of the seasons, man's conflict with the land and his passion for it, were newly popular themes. In England, along with Hardy's Wessex, real counties became important to the novelists, and Sussex, Somerset, Wiltshire, and others became the specialty of individual authors who celebrated the particular brand of earthiness peculiar to each locality. The French had their provinces to celebrate, and carried over the home brand of regionalism into their African colonies more decisively than the English, as part of the whole "regeneration" program in their literature. The restorative powers of soil-snuffing are eloquently dealt with in Randau's novels. Close contact with nature in the raw, the energizing results of hard physical labor close to the Algerian

9

8

PLACES IN THE SUN

earth, these are his prescriptions for salvation. He and his characters have little sense of humor and a great flow of rhetoric, but they are aggressive boosters of a new and wholesome cause. It is a cause heartily supported not only by Carlyle and Kipling, but by Nietzsche too. The conquering gestures of Randau's colonials are not at all cramped by the fact that their favorite philosopher is a German. Their unity comes, Randau trumpets happily, from a "race rouge primitive, commerce carthaginois, colonization romaine, art byzantin, mystique arabe, kabbale juive, politique anti-sémite." But his Algerians stemming from this remarkable mixture are "brutale, avide, pratique, franche, ayant naturellement en horreur les sentimentalités européennes et l'idéal classiciste qui anémient la France." Expansion of Algeria over all North Africa is their watchword. It is a sacred and noble thing to dedicate oneself to, and pessimism and humanitarianism must go down before that dedication. "Is there a pessimism of strength?" asks Nietzsche, "an intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fulness of existence?" And all good Carlyleans are familiar with Nietzsche's "highest affirmation . . . a yea-saying" to all kinds of existence. "This mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest." Out of this affirmation, this exercise of what was to be later called "strength through joy," Randau's heroes, and Bertrand's also, speak and act. We scarcely need the testimony of Randau's Cassard to the effect that Zarathustra is the very best reading for the Algerian environment, with its cult of the "Übermensch." Cassard has the profoundest respect for this "optimist of humanity" who is "incompris des puffistes et snobs et dont les oeuvres les réconfortaient singulièrement aux heures de trouble." Unlike many of his Nietzschean confreres in France, however, Randau does not identify the traditions of the French Revolution and the Declaration of Rights with that sentimental humanitarianism so hated by all the regenerators of French national energy.

P L A C E S IN T H E

SUN

99

In fact his explorer Andréotti in Les Explorateurs ( 1 9 0 9 ) hopes to extend French rule in Africa "sans trahir les plus pures traditions de notre Revolution." Like most of these spiritual kin of Carlyle and Kipling—and they had some odd relatives!—he feels sure that an intellectual aristocracy will always rule. Politics is a method, not a science. All history is pillage, though he would make the pillagers as inoffensive as possible. A f t e r Andréotti is killed by natives at Koar, Cassard is reluctant to return home to the civilized life of France. A kind of primitivism, an approximation of D. H . Lawrence's "mindlessness" overtakes him, as it did many Frenchmen of his period and of the twenties later on. Africa breeds in them a fear of thinking, at least with the mind; it is safer to think with the blood. N o intellectual sensation can equal "la griserie de l'espace doré par le sol saharien, ou aux terreurs de la forêt aux eaux ténébreuses." He must go on, for—like Stanley—he feels that to stop is a form of dying. He is ready to say with Baudelaire, "Puisse-je user du glaive et perir par le glaive." Louis Bertrand is also a Nietzschean and a soil-snufïer, but he develops side by side with the gospel of Earth another colonial doctrine that the French novelists share with the British—the doctrine of the inheritance from Rome, the "atavisme romain." Under the glare of the African sun, sowing and reaping their wheat, cultivating their vines, driving their mule-drawn wagon trains, Bertrand's transplanted Spaniards and southern Frenchmen of Mediterranean stock will build the farms and cities of a new and sound civilization. These people of Bertrand's are "néo-Latins" and as conscious of their racial descent as the British colonials of their AngloSaxon inheritance. But the British have two pasts to lean on, as it were—the Anglo-Saxon "mystique" and the Roman Empire "mystique," and this "atavisme romain" they share with the French. Both were power cults. There is something in the colonial impulse that makes this return to national and racial pasts imperative, and the novelists, French and British, build heavily on

ΙΟΟ

PLACES IN T H E SUN

its romantic appeal. Perhaps contact with older races stimulated Europeans to justify their historic right to dominion and power over subject races. Dominion involved so much humbug and opportunism and double-dealing that the more tender-minded colonial begins to cast about for ways and means to clear his title to empire. History proves very useful. Whether French or British, he likes to return through the mists of time to the early days of his race and country. The longer the racial past the better. Kipling had stretched it back for England to Saxons and Romans, and his influence, almost as powerful in France as in Britain, prevails in many of these African novels. He wants England to "make plain the meaning of all [her] thousand years" and attempts to be her spokesman to this end in such evocations of her Roman past as Puck of Pook's Hill, and on such suggestions of her Saxon past as "Young Men at the Manor," "The Recall" and "The Way through the Woods." Ruskin and Rhodes, and Kipling himself of course, believed that only one race approached God's ideal type, namely, the Anglo-Saxon. The French believed as firmly in their Mediterranean culture and "néo-latinisme." Both were to bring about the best possible fulfillment of the great "mission" in the African colonies of each nation. Each was divinely appointed and providentially the best equipped to spread civilization, peace, and justice in Africa. Each considered that "Rome la Grande" played an important part in this equipment. So it is not surprising that Bertrand's novels are as authoritarian and by implication as reactionary as Kipling's. His Le Sang des races (1899), Pépête le bien aimé (1904), La Concession de Mme. Ρ et it grand ( 1 9 1 2 ) , and the rest, all hold the French, and the Latin peoples generally, to be heirs to the traditions of order and authority, not only of the Catholic Church but of the Roman Empire. He has attempted in these books, he tells us, "to compare the present and the past, and to show, under the differences of time and environment, the secret continuity of a tradition or an ideal, and the perpetuity of a race." He is fascinated, as Flaubert was, with ancient Carthage, to which his neo-Latins have a special

P L A C E S IN T H E SUN

ΙΟΙ

claim. He invokes the traditions of "Rome la Grande" in an African setting. But the British, too, like to think of the Roman tradition as their exclusive inheritance. Public school and university training in classics and ancient history, and advances in archeology, had enabled the British colonial to invoke the same gods as his French competitors. It is strange to recall that Somerset Maugham once wrote a novel that underlines this resemblance. His Alec McKenzie, a soldier-explorer like Randau's Andréotti, is concerned with adding new territories to the map of Britain's colonial empire in the best Rhodes manner. Bronzed and silent, the hero of The Explorer (1907) returns from his final success in "adding another fair jewel to England's crown." He is proud of being English because Drake and Raleigh and Nelson were English, but also because he thinks of Rome: "His pride in the great empire which had sprung from that small island, a greater Rome in a greater world, dissolved into love as his wandering thoughts took him to green meadows and rippling streams." Both nations, their novelists believe, are like the ancient Romans. They are by nature empire-builders, conquistadors, organizers and administrators, destined to be so, not from greed, but by the stern compulsion of the "laws" of racial character. The French have the closer connection with Rome by virtue of the racial bond, whereas the British have to fall back upon the "sturdy Saxon" for their race doctrine, and can tie up with Rome only by calling attention to the close parallel with her in imperial size and imperial administrative efficiency. The novelists of both countries, like their politicians at home, use this Roman atavism to justify the less romantic doctrine of expediency actually practiced by colonists and their "consuls," "pro-consuls," and "satraps." The very use of these terms shows how the classical parallel stuck in the public mind and was kept alive by popular novelists. For both nations this reclaiming of the past justified emphasis on hardiness, joy in conflict and danger and difficulty,

102

PLACES IN T H E SUN

aggression, and hard work. The French called these the Roman virtues; for the British, too, they were Roman, but they had to do double duty—they had to be Anglo-Saxon as well! Carlyle and Nietzsche, Saxon and Roman, were convenient, if rather grotesque companions in all this bizarre "theory" behind much colonial doctrine and the fiction built upon it. The dignity attached to the Roman urbs and ciiis gave the French their uncontrollable passion for "travaux publics," especially for the building of roads, strictly handmade by native gangs of workers pressed into service by the conquerors. All that is needed to make the Roman parallel complete, as one flippant fictional Frenchman remarks, are a few more arenas and combats of assorted wild animals; these would achieve the truly Roman atmosphere. Even without them, he concludes happily, "Romains, vous dis-je, nous sommes Romains!" His interlocutor smiles indulgently but seems quite pleased with the idea. Rudbeck however, in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson ( 1 9 3 9 ) , builds a road out of sheer restlessness and is disillusioned with what it has done for the district. Rhodes, we are told, rather cherished the resemblance of his profile to that of certain imperial Roman heads on coins. He was wont to sit in "consular" attitudes (and were they not also AngloSaxon attitudes, as Lewis Carroll might have said?) forbidding, inscrutable, blinking silently and sleepily, dreaming his magisterial dreams of the world for England. But despite the happily " R o m a n " resemblance, he was the Saxon type of conquistador, as the novels about him make abundantly clear. He is better than his French counterpart de Lesseps, his admirers tell us, because he was a Saxon and not a " K e l t " like the famous Frenchman and therefore less excitable. The British will have it both ways. He was a "greater Lesseps" not only by virtue of the Saxon strain but because he was more ^c/^i-Roman by virtue of his inscrutability and the massiveness of his Cape-to-Cairo vision. So the drive to conquer vast areas under a large and ultra-hot sun on the outsize continent of Africa led Europeans to some

P L A C E S IN T H E

SUN

103

strange wishful thinking, and to the evolution of some odd pseudo-historic " p o w e r " myths of racial prestige. The phenomenon of size itself led to an assumption of vitality, both of them to power, and power to force. Everything grew very big in A f r i c a , and very Roman too. don't

f e n c e me

in

The Germans had little time or need to revive old racial sagas and shibboleths with which to reinforce their belated colonial exploits. T h e y do not go in heavily f o r soil-snuffing or f o r the forefathers, nor are they much concerned before 1 9 1 4 with the re- or de-generation of national character and its redemption in the colonies. T h e y had scarcely achieved a national character to redeem. Flushed with victory and the prosperity of the great commercial expansion of the years following unification, they looked around in the early eighties and perceived that France and England had both outstripped them in A f r i c a . But the speed with which Germany caught up may be explained not only by native efficiency but by the intelligent cutting of corners. Latest comer of all in the grand colonial rush, she came profiting by the lessons to be learned of all the rest. A f r i c a n size and space repeat their dizzying conquest, this time on men athirst f o r Lebensraum. The result is reflected in German colonial novels, many of which, especially those of Hans Grimm, are f a r superior to anything in this genre that came out of England or France. As Grimm put it in 1934, "Where a gate is thrown open, begins human destiny." The gate was thrown open in Lüderitzland, "Deutsch-Süd-West," Togoland, and the C a m eroons. T h e gate to Lebensraum was A f r i c a . Most of the available colonial fiction coming out of Germany has been, since 1 9 1 8 , one long appeal f o r space, f o r elbowroom that can be achieved only through the restoration to Germany of her colonial possessions. Of all Europeans, the Germans have had the worst case of claustrophobia, and this is apparent in their

104

PLACES IN T H E

SUN

colonial fiction long before 1 9 1 8 . Out of it has been built up a substantial part of the national hatred for England which is, after all, based on jealousy. England had preempted all the best habitable places of the globe and had been pouring her surplus population into Canada, Australia, and A f r i c a , her younger sons and career-men into India, f o r generations before Germany became a competitor. But in some of the p r e - 1 9 1 8 German colonial novels one can still find a more or less disinterested liking f o r A f r i c a itself. This liking is based, as in the case of the British and French, on the sense of space f o r its own sake. Gustav Frenssen, to be sure, brings up as early as 1907 in his Peter Moor's Fahrt nach Südwest, the inevitable contrast and competition of English and German colonial achievements, and Frieda von Billow's still earlier novels of the nineties are full of it. But they are not yet pleading a case, not accusing the whole world of complacent connivance at a monstrous wrong done to Germany. They still have time to look around the wide horizons of A f r i c a and feel, as Peter Moor did, that only through long weeks of hardship endured in the campaign against the Hereros has he begun to appreciate their vastness. Sometimes the immensities of the starlit A f r i c a n nights merely make him homesick. ( " A c h A f r i k a ! W a r ' ich zu haus!") But when he talks to German settlers he finds this is what they love. Y o u can trek a hundred miles here, they tell him, and no one tells you what you can or can't do. Y o u have no worries about neighbors or landlords or the hangings in the living room, or about wages and daily bread. Space is the great thing; it produces freedom from all the petty worries of home in a crowded Germany. A f r i c a n space is more than that for the greatest of Germany's colonial novelists, Hans Grimm (born i8y