Talking of books
'Azure main' and all that
Benny Green
Any man who announces his intention of compiling "a big, ornate, frank but affectionate book about Victoria's empire," is bound to be suspected by a cynical age of being rather less frank than affectionate, especially if he has a past record in these matters, Nobody who saw it will forget in a hurry James Morris's extraordinary gesture of urbane truculence a year or two back in the Guardian, when he ended a distinctly dusty review of a book by that accomplished debunker Brian Gardner with the remark, "What a nasty surprise for Mr Gardner to wake up this morning and find me reviewing his book." Perhaps not such a big surprise after all, for Morris had already published the central panel of his imperial triptych, Pax Britannica, an altogether remarkable work so brilliant of its kind that I really cannot imagine anybody ever surpassing it. But for five long years we have been leVt in a state of painfully suspended animation at that moment of apogee when Victoria presided over the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. Belatedly there now appears the first panel in the design, Heaven's Command (Faber £4.95), which takes us from" I will be good " down to that triumphal 'processional sixty years later, the schema of Morris's intent being hammered home with Joycean ebullience by the use of an edited version of the opening paragraphs of Pax Britannica as the closing ones of Heaven's Command. What have we here, a latterday edition of Deeds That Thrilled the Empire, to be distributed from the pulpit of that ghostly Sunday School down_ at the far end of Memory Lane? An uncritical portrait of an Empire whose benignity shines ever brighter with the bogus light of illusion even as the reality shrinks .clown the perspective of the past? One more pretty little red-whiteand-blue cameo to hang on the vast wall of Victorian social history?
Not quite; Morris is far too perceptive for that. On the contrary, there are moments when the lip of his fastidious derision positively curls round the paragraphs, at the murderous complacency of Charles Trevelyan in the Irish Famine, at the frenzied cruelty of the extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines, at the squalor of the grab for Africa. It is true that he ends with the reflection that the British "remained as a whole a good-natured people.
But I suspect that neither disgust nor aprroval have too much relevance to Morris's creative urge, and that at the wellspring of his intellect there is quite a different order of curiosity driving him on. The question he asks is neither Churchill's "How did we get it", nor G. M. Young's "What did we do with it?", nor Brian Gardner's "How did we lose it?", nor even George Dangerfield's "Was it ever ours to lose in the first place?". The question Morris keeps asking, in book after book, is "What was it really like?" In his prologete he says that he often "wondered what it felt like to be British before the decline began," and his trilogy is really a creative investigation into the psychological condition of the British in being able to fling ' Civis Romanus Sum' and Veccavi. in the world's face and not have to count the cost.
There is one other reason why Heaven's Command falls outside the normal considerations of history, or travel, or the enchanting amalgam of the time which Morris has perfected, and that is that it is an unqualified delight to read. I will not belabour the point, but will instead let Morris belabour it for me. Of a road outside Cape Town: . , . It wound carefully through the foothills by exquisitely calc,ulated gradients, its bends never abrupt, its camber always gentle. Fine stone walls protected its curves, its stone culverts were meticulously mortared, and now and then crossed, by way of a strong, unobtrusive bridge, one of those rushing torrents of hock. Through that untamed landscape it rah like a coiling thread of rational judgement.
Of cast-off regimental colours . . . They were carried in solemn parade to the regimental church — where, hung high above the memorial chapel, and slowly disintegrating into spindrift down the years, they remained forever in cobweb sanctity.
Of an outpost church on Sunday morning . .... Europeans in the front pews, Africans, or Indians, or Chinese, or plain aborigines behind: and Lady Dicehurt envies Mrs. Duncebury her pearls, and young Tom Morris sniggers at Mrs Timbury's hat, and down they all kneel in familiar discipline, two or three hundred gathered together in the name of Empire, while the chaplain's Oxford English echoes among the memorials: and when the time comes the choir, rising to its feet with a swishing of starched surplices and a, faint emanation of gumdrops, launches into ,one of the full-throated anthems of Anglicanism.
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