Sunset in Bangalore BOOKS

SIMON RAVEN

It's revolting,' said Stubbs, no other word for it.'

`I don't know,' I said, `I'm told they've always done it.'

'That's not the point,' Stubbs said. 'The point is that they ought to know better than to do it in front of us.'

The time was April 1947; the place the Officers' Training School in Bangalore (Southern India). 'We' were British cadets who were just about to pass out and pass on; 'they' were an intake of Indian cadets who, now that the R ij was packing up, were coming in to replace us. That morning Stubbs had passed a couple of Sikhs who were walking along (oh horrors) hand in hand.

`They can do as they like when we're gone,' Stubbs angrily concluded, 'but until then they can jolly well behave themselves.'

I was sharply reminded of this long-forgotten incident while reading the first chapter of Alan Sandison's new book, The Wheel of Empire (Macmillan, 30s). By way of introduction to his main theme (`the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Fic- tion'), Dr Sandison is considering the motives and attitudes of Victorian and Edwardian im- perialists. Imperial development was at first in- spired (as he deposes), and the more sordid elements of self-interest concealed, by a mis- sionary fervour to do good in the name of God; but even so there was a lot of guilt about com- mercial exploitation and the use of force, and this guilt became more unsettling than ever when nineteenth century rationalism began to topple Christianity. Clearly, if there was no God then there was no mission (no 'Great End') and the whole thing was quite without excuse.

But the best antidote to doubt is work, and to this the empire-builders had turned with a resolute 'moral self-sufficiency' which, in the absence of a Great End, was now 'at once more important, more necessary in a psychological sense, and much more difficult to sustain.' Since fewer and fewer people could believe in a Christian God and a missionary duty imposed by him, the conception of duty must now de- pend on naked will-power; and in order to pro- vide some sort of moral incentive, official function and prestige had to be seen as, in themselves, moral ends. Hence arose an ever- increasing insistence on 'cold administration and control,' on formality, hierarchy, con- formity; hence, also, a debased notion of mis- sion, which was now held to consist in 'keeping them in their proper place'; and hence, finally, the resentment of my fellow cadet at the open and therefore 'insolent' display of nasty because 'native' social custom.

Historically, then, the record appears un- attractive. In the early days of Empire, if we accept Dr Sandison's account, a crusading righteousness prevailed which does not invite our sympathy; this was later replaced, as a motive power, by the sheer assertion of char- acter, the end no longer being to bring enlighten- ment to the ruled but merely to show off the moral excellence of the rulers; and this in turn degenerated at the last into 'cold administra, tion' through a formal code of routine respomes.- But although in political terms all this is

doubtless deplorable, there are other ways of looking at it. As the stuff of fiction, for example, it answers very well indeed, providing sub- stance, background and theme for such masters as Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, and for two lesser but interesting writers. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. What we must re- member, Dr Sandison says, is that these writers (with the partial exception of Buchan) were not primarily concerned with the political or social rights or wrongs of it all; they were concerned to take man, to confront him with chaos and hostility, and to see how he got on from there. Empire, in their fiction, becomes an arena in which man must prove himself; the countries to be ruled (the intractable and unknown peoples to be administered, the terrible natural features to be tamed) represent the alien wilder- ness of the universe itself, on which man, proud man, seeks to impose order by his skill and knowledge, and so to win his place in the scheme of things.

Each of the four novelists whom Dr Sandi- son discusses has a different approach. Rider Haggard is less eager that his heroes should dominate than that they should strive to dis- cover an existing principle of order (God, per- haps, or some reassuring system of natural selection) and so excuse themselves (and him) from the obligation of imposing one. But of God there is no sign, and as for natural selec-

tion, since this is selection from accidental variations it gives no cause for confidence.

Haggard's position, therefore, comes rather to resemble that of the early empire-builders at the time of religious disillusion : for where they had believed in a God who would act through them, he had sought for a God who would act for him; but now both he and they are deprived of any hope of divine assistance and must face up to reality . . . alone.

And this, of course, is the situation which both Kipling and Conrad were to write about —the situation of man who, knowing that he is alone and has no God to advise him or give sanction. must make his own plans and forge' his own morality to sustain him in their im- plementation. It is man versus nature, with no quarter asked or given; and Empire (let me re- peat with Dr Sandison) is the milieu for the dramatisation of the conflict.

So while many critics have accused Kipling of writing, unrepentantly and with relish, about 'wog-bashing,' what he is really writing about, Dr Sandison contends, is the response of the human spirit, unaided, to the challenge of natural anarchy and all the evils which this comprehends. What liberals see as unjustifiable aggression, Kipling sees as the triumph of

human resource and intellect. True, the ques- tions to be asked and answered by Kipling's heroes are somewhat limited. What is to be done here and now? About the horse-lines, the bearers, the water? Most intelligent people con- sider this sort of thing ratherunedifying, as they do Kipling's fascination with practical tech- niques and ruehanical methods. But as Dr. San- -dison puts. i3, 'through devotion to actualities ounimirserves- identity'; and a lifetime of -such del Riots' can amount -to. 'salvation,' not because there is a reward to come, nor even because anything has beeoachieved, but because by consistent endeavour one may attain to moral integrity, 'realise selfhood' and nourish 'self-consciousness.'

If there is some hope for personal salvation, however, there is very little that anything per- manent or worth while can be built on a large scale. Kipling's heroes may teed the natives this year and stamp out cholera the next, but soon enough (he indicates) the blind power of nature will bury all. The notion that human beings can ever establish complete control is an illusion, designed to conceal the chaos which it cannot end. Conrad is even more conscious of this underlying chaos, even more conscious, therefore, of the importance of the illusion, and even more insistent on the virtues of the prac- tical competence which locally at least can

sustain it. The real, the only possible, victory for Conrad consists in allying such practical competence with personal decency towards those who are to be helped.

Thus he is rather more concerned than is Kipling with the fate of those whom the im-

perialists are ruling: like Kipling, he knows that ultimately, nature being what it is, there is no hope for them; but since he has a larger heart he finds this truly saddening, whereas Kipling, at times, seems to find it a source of adefinite satisfaction. In the end, however, and whatever the qualifications, Conrad as well as Kipling is more interested in what holds the individual together than in what holds—or fails to hold— society together. In so far as the individual tries to serve society (or Empire), his effort is seen more as establishing his own honour than as being of benefit to a world which is, in any case, doomed. The approach, one might say, is literary and not political.

This is not quite the case with John Buchan. Unlike the other three authors whom Dr San- dison considers, Buchan really did believe, with religious intensity, that a durable and massive political achievement was possible through im- perial methods. He was as well aware as Kip- ling or Conrad of the bottomless chasm which lay just beneath civilisation's brittle surface, but unlike them he thought that human knowledge and determination could so far strengthen this surface that it would be able to bear the weight of the Golden City. When this did not prove to be so, when, indeed, the cracks in the surface appeared ever more wide and more volcanic, he put the blame on man's failure in love. If only men loved God and each other more, they would have tried much harder. The service of Empire was the service of God; and man had deserted it. Or so he saw the matter. What had really happened, of course, was that, by Buchan's time men had simply become cold and formal administrators dependent on a petrified code. All they were now capable of was (so to speak) nagging away about Sikh cadets who held each other's hands.

Yet it was Buchan, far more than those he

blamed, who had failed in vision. As a novelist, he had started from the wrong end: he had started with the institution and not the men who served it. He had assumed, in his ignorance of these men, that they could and would respond

to the demands of a Christian God who, for most of them, had long since vanished; worse, he was trying to write about the theoretical qualities which an Empire requires in its ser- vants, not about the qualities which were actually in supply. His approach, in short, even in his novels, was that of a political idealist. This brings us right up against the main thesis (a timely one if not altogether new) of Dr San- dison's book. For what he has been telling us,

in his well argued but very stodgy prose, is this: that for a true novelist the value of an Empire or any other institution lies not in its political aspirations but in its function as a frame- work for the attitudes and actions of individual men. Buchan, who did not realise this, wrote relatively poor novels: Conrad, on the other hand, whose paramount interest was in personal honour and integrity, wrote novels of classic greatness. Or again, Haggard, who was for ever fussing about systems and principles, is an in- different novelist (albeit, and like Buchan, a fine story-teller): whereas Kipling, whose con- cern was with private action and endeavour, has written fiction which, though no match for Conrad's, is of abiding quality.

From all of which it follows that it is quite beside any possible point 'to accuse Conrad of `reaction' or Kipling of 'Jingoism' on the ground that they condoned `injustice,' exploitation,"in- equality,' etc. etc. They were not concerned with the politics; as novelists, they simply accepted Empire as a fact and used it as a bril- liant setting against which they could demon- strate the moral and other qualities of lonely men who had an immediate, definable and prac- tical task to perform.

And another thing. So far from vaunting the triumph of the Imperial enterprise, Kipling and Conrad anticipated the causes of its failure. They saw (unlike poor Buchan and with no sur- prise) that religious faith, in Empire or any- thing else, had gone for ever; and they saw that without it neither will-power, decency nor pro- fessional competence, nor all three together, could survive much longer against the colossal odds imposed by the destructiveness of nature and the malignant folly of the human race. Though celebrating the occasional and isolated moral victory, they knew and made plain that the Imperial idea was already declining into a narrow official code of pendantry and snobbish- ness : that code which would finally expire, within my own hearing just twenty years ago at Bangalore, in a prudish and insular complaint about a pair of affectionate Sikhs.