In 1914 the world had an orderly, well-policed appearance, by comparison with a hundred years earlier. Under the surface things were more in a state of flux than at any earlier time. Political and economic relations between Europe, which had wrought the transformation, and the rest of the world, might seem fixed for good, but were really very unstable; their feelings about each other were a chaotic medley. Europe itself had been rapidly altering, partly through its involvement with the world, and had become a stranger to itself. Contradictions in its nature had always been more strongly marked than in any other, less complex, civilization; they were intensified by the advent of perpetual change as a condition of its life, and were often shown on a magnified scale in its behaviour outside its own borders. Whole healthy races were wiped out, while at home, as if by a compulsive atonement, morbid humanitarianism spurred doctors and hospitals to keep alive deformed infants or idiots.
Europe’s estimate of its fellow-continents was sinking, on the whole, as the nineteenth century went on and knowledge of them grew more realistic, or seemed to because new distortions of vision went unnoticed. Its estimate of its own effect on these others showed signs of drooping too. Colonizing countries did their best to cling to a conviction that they were spreading through the world not merely order, but civilization; which implied that other peoples were not civilized yet, but were capable of becoming so. Speke’s diary of 1855 in Somaliland closed on a note of faith that human nature there did not gainsay ‘the hope entertained by every Englishman – that of raising his fellow-man in the scale of civilization’.1 Shortly after writing these words he was nearly murdered in a mob attack on his camp. Such an attack threw doubt on the willingness of backward peoples to accept the blessing offered them. So in another way did the bomb thrown at the Viceroy of India at Delhi in 1911; the only difference was that Somalis were rejecting British medicine without trying it, Indians after lengthy dosing with it. Doubt crept in also about whether European civilization really was good for those exposed to it. Burton saw the Arabs corrupted by contact with Aden;2 the least objectionable inhabitants of British India, in British eyes, were those least touched by the white man’s learning There remained a final stage, to be reached by 1918, of doubt whether European civilization was much good even for Europe.
At home Europe was shuffling away from forms of society based on compulsion towards new ones founded on assent. Abroad it was acting in the opposite spirit. Whether empires were agencies of civilization or of exploitation, they rested on power, and all attitudes towards backward countries or ‘native’ peoples were deeply imbued with the sensation of power, of imperial dominion. It was Britain’s mission, said the writer of a book on the North-West Frontier who styled himself ‘a man of peace’ by preference, ‘to spread amongst these savages the power of that great civilizer the Sword’.3 Here was another lurking contradiction. It was very often argued that possessions like India could only be safely governed by the methods they were already accustomed to: by personal authority, the will of the strong man. One must ‘stand on the ancient ways, the ways familiarised to the natives of India by centuries of use’, Colonel Malleson wrote: abandonment of these for an impersonal rule of Western law led straight to the Mutiny.4 But for Europeans to reign as despots, however benevolent, was more likely to bring them down to the political mentality of their subjects than to raise these to a Western plane.
Not only individuals but whole groups of conquerors, or administrations, might be perverted in this way, from the first Europeans who issued forth to their latest successors or supplanters, the Americans. Europe habitually looked on its clashes with Afro-Asia as a distinguished Anglo-Indian saw the scrimmage with the Malays of Perak in 1875 it was a clash between civilization and ‘wild aborigines’.5 Viewed from the other side things might look exactly the reverse. It was thus that the American seizure of the Philippine islands appeared to the patriot leader President Aguinaldo when he called on his countrymen to resist ‘the dominion of force, accompanied by the repugnant barbarity of primitive times … Do not hope for compassion or consideration.’6 ‘The innate cruelty of the southern Latin races,’ says the historian of Chittagong, writing of the Portuguese expansion, ‘and the inflamed lust of seamen in foreign ports, made the entire Feringhee race a terror and abomination to the people of lower Bengal.’7 There were always some Europeans, from Las Casas onwards, who thought that these men were right, and Europe wrong. Diderot asked himself what made the Spaniards treat their new-found brothers in the Americas like wild beasts. ‘ Est-ce la soif de l’or, le fanatisme, le mépris pour les mœurs simples? ou est-ce la férocité naturelle de l’homme renaissant dans ces contrées éloignées … ?’8
Panic fear of those myriads of alien beings must have been the chief cause, Diderot charitably concluded. But similar cruelties were often repeated against men like the Australian blackfellows, too few and ill-armed to inspire fear. Herbert Spencer collected many testimonies of them, and pointed out how self-flattering was the bent of mind that had led Europe to attach the meaning ‘cruel and bloodthirsty’ to the word savage, originally signifying only ‘wild or uncultivated’. Ferocity was now ‘ always thought of as an attribute of uncivilized races’, whereas oftener than not it was European ferocity that provoked them to retaliate.9 Things that could not be done in Europe under any government calling itself civilized went on being done in colonial territories. A British governor in the West Indies, Sir Thomas Picton, was removed in 1803 on a charge of allowing torture to be used; but torture, more or less abandoned in Europe until well on in the twentieth century, lingered clandestinely if not openly in Western practice outside, or was always liable to recur. It was noted by a social psychologist as a proof of how weak are men’s acquired habits of self-restraint, in unfamiliar circumstances, compared with their instincts, that American soldiers fighting their first Asian war in the Philippines were so ready to torture prisoners.10 ‘The old century is very nearly out,’ W. S. Blunt was writing in his diary in December 1900, ‘and leaves the world in a pretty pass … All the nations of Europe are making the same hell upon earth in China … So ends the famous nineteenth century in which we were so proud to have been born.’11
It was through warlike encounters that Europeans and others formed their vividest conceptions of one another, and colonial armies were among the principal meeting-points of European officers and men with native troops. Out of such experiences grew the maxim laid down by Malleson: ‘There is only one true method of fighting Asiatics. That mode is to move straight on.’12 By attacking at once, always, against any odds, the European would convince both himself and his opponent of his superiority, and undermine the will to resist. It would not be hard to trace a connection between this thesis and the military doctrine of 1914–18, especially among the grand colonizers the French and British: the insensate faith in the offensive à outrance, to hypnotize and paralyse the enemy by asserting the firmer will and higher morale of the attacker. It began then to dawn on infantrymen that machine-guns and barbed wire were not so easily hynotized as half-armed Asiatics. Their generals in the rear, many of them with minds still farther away in the Asian or African campaigning-grounds of their youth, could not be got to see the point.
A rough and ready but tenacious habit grew up of classifying peoples, not in India alone, as ‘martial’, or ‘non-martiaľ, and of paying more respect (or less disrespect) to the first. Townsend Harris thought a parade of the Siamese army a very ludicrous sight;13 Westerners saw many like it round the world, which were too apt to put burglarious thoughts into their heads. In the presence of other peoples nearly all Europeans tried to look martial; though Asia learned that some Western countries were too small to be truculent, and Siam employed a number of Danes among its foreign advisers. Japan was demonstrating before 1900 that a nation long unused to war could learn quickly enough to fight. Fifty years later China and Israel, more surprisingly still, were to do the same. But at the beginning of this century the roll seemed to have been called and closed: there might be some peoples everywhere who could fight bravely, but most of these had been shattered, like the Zulus; there were none outside Europe except Japan and the US that could fight a modern war effectively.
‘Oh, the difference of man and man!’ cries Goneril, comparing dull husband with dashing lover. In the nineteenth century mass armies and mammoth cities and pseudo-democracy were blurring individual features, but the European could console himself by exulting in the differences of race and race. What these precisely were was not easy to state, and races even more than nations melted into one another by every gradation. Hence the importance given to the crudely obvious distinctions of colour. The European in considering the Chinese character should recollect that the Aryan and the Yellow races are physically and mentally distinct.’14 But behind all this lay the fundamental criterion of strength or courage, of which war was the grand test. Generally speaking, the lighter the skin the sharper the sword. Warlike prowess had been a cardinal virtue of other societies too, though very seldom so exaggeratedly as in Europe, and intercourse with Europe heightened regard for it, and for the freedom that it might preserve. Nations that remained independent, however precariously, could look down on their fallen neighbours, as Persians were inclined to do on Indians. Armenia was partitioned between Turkey and Russia, yet an Armenian in England could boast to George Borrow that his countrymen were less debased and spiritless than the Jews, because they still had a homeland, and sometimes still took up arms.15
In Rolfe’s perversely brilliant novel of 1904, Hadrian the Seventh, a new pope arranges the affairs of mankind by promoting a redivision of the world among the virile peoples, those capable of conquest and government. He allots a good share to Japan, and all the western hemisphere to the US, while France and Russia are blotted out.16 This being a Catholic work Italy figures among the chosen; more often Anglo-Saxons or Teutons thought of it and other southern countries as an inferior part of Europe, shading off into Afro-Asia. In Conan Doyle’s novel of 1913, The Poison Belt, a table of ranks among the races, an order of fitness to survive, is implied in the sequence in which they succumb to the mysterious etheric poison that the planet has swum into. Africa and the Australian aborigines are speedily extinguished, followed by India and Persia, while in Europe the Slavs collapse sooner than the Teutons, and southern France sooner than the north, after ‘delirious excitement’ and a ‘Socialist upheaval at Toulon’.17
In Aryan India ‘varna’ meant both colour and caste, or the main four-fold division of society; and in the European mind the affinity between race and class is equally palpable. If there were martial races abroad, there were likewise martial classes at home: every man could be drilled to fight, but only the gentleman by birth could lead and command. In innumerable ways his attitude to his own ‘lower orders’ was identical with that of Europe to the ‘lesser breeds’. Discontented native in the colonies, labour agitator in the mills, were the same serpent in alternate disguises. Much of the talk about the barbarism or darkness of the outer world, which it was Europe’s mission to rout, was a transmuted fear of the masses at home. Equally, sympathy with the lower orders at home, or curiosity about them, might find expression in associations of ideas between them and the benighted heathen far away.
Aymará Indians in Bolivia seemed to Bryce to be existing in conditions ‘no more squalid than that of the agricultural peasantry in some parts of Europe’.18 When Robert Blatchford and his friends inspected a workhouse school in England and the children crowded round them, fascinated by their clothes and watch-chains, ‘It made me think of what I had read about savages crowding round white men who have landed on their shores.’19 Higher up the scale the relative positions, the social intervals, were the same. There is an exquisite scene in Proust where the Comte de Bréauté-Consalvi meets the highly polished but middle-class young narrator in a grand salon, and is all agog at this extraordinary novelty of a meeting with a plebeian, which will furnish him with a brilliant topic of conversation in his own circle – and fixes him with a beaming monocle and encouraging exclamations, ‘just as if, in fact, he had found himself face to face with one of the “natives” of an undiscovered country on which his keel had grounded, and from whom he hoped by a display of friendly interest to obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for his glass beads’.20
Empire widened the real gulf between the classes at home, but also provided them with a spurious fraternity. Mrs Rapkin the Cockney landlady in Anstey’s novel, The Brass Bottle, asked whether she had ‘an Oriental gentleman – a native, you know’, lodging with her, was indignant at the thought of a ‘blackamoor’ in her house. A relative of hers let rooms once to ‘a Horiental – a Parsee he was, or one o’ them Hafrican tribes – and reason she’ad to repent of it’.21 She as well as the natives she looked down on was being laughed at by Anstey’s educated readers. In England the educated as a rule felt less fear of their lower classes than in most Continental countries, and could afford to be tolerantly amused by them; to see the Cockney feeling superior to the Horiental was very diverting. In public, amusement had to be smothered, as time went on and official nationalism fostered the myth of all Britons, or all Germans, being brothers; class superiority was then transformed into patriotic, or still better into racial superiority, that all could share in. The more democratic Europe became or pretended to become at home the more supercilious it was abroad.
Another connection of ideas might be traced between Europe’s simple notion of the right way to rule natives, or to fight them, and some of its less liberal notions about the right way to impress on women the superiority of men. All such elements in social psychology evolve in clusters, in continual association and interaction. Sex in any case formed an important area of contact between societies. Impressions of foreign lands owed much to men’s impressions of their women, and vice versa, and also of the way their men and women behaved to each other. But in many regions women were invisible, or at any rate inaudible. This veil of secrecy hanging over the domestic life of a great part of the world helped to invest all life there with a forbidding quality. It could also conjure up speculations about mysteries of sex better known to old, exotic, vicehaunted races than to enlightened Europe. Sex being for Englishmen especially a thing that respectable folk ought not to know too much about, they were willing to credit foreigners, Frenchmen in Europe and a fortiori Hindus or Japanese, with secret lore probably acquired from nameless orgies.
In an analogous fashion Europe prided itself on having the only reputable religion, just as it had the only decent kind of family life, but it might credit lower religions with access to abnormal realms grotesque or depraved. Indian fakirs might be able to throw ropes into the air and climb up them, with what purpose in view was never asked. With all his disdain for the Negroes of Haiti, Prichard was half-prepared to believe that some of them might have occult powers beyond the white man’s ken; but only evil powers, only black magic.22 In general Christianity was closely woven into the fabric of European ascendancy. It was the creed of the white man, of the conqueror, and doctrines of Election led easily towards a philosophy of chosen nations or a chosen race, a Herrenvolk. It might be bestowed on men of other colours, and it was indeed part of Europe’s beatific vision of itself that it was the bearer of the true faith to the heathen; but all bishops and nearly all priests would continue to be white, as officers in colonial armies were. A man should be grateful to Heaven, Richard Hopkins had written in 1586, for making him a Catholic ‘and not a Jewe, Moore, Turke, or Heretike’, free from infection of Lutheranism and ‘all other damnable Sectes, and opinions’.23 Sects and opinions mattered less now, but to be grateful to Heaven for making him a white Christian was still an obvious duty.
All the other religions, like nearly all the kingdoms they gave their blessings to, were in a more or less decrepit condition when Christian Europe came on them like the strong man of Scripture ready to run his race. Islam was sunk in superstition or dogma, Buddhism venerated a Dalai Lama. The spectacle of their degraded state filled all Europeans with the complacent sense of betterness that Protestant countries felt in a lesser degree over Catholic. Their own priests had been put in their place: mullah and lama and Brahmin had not, and it is priestcraft, not doctrine, that makes a religion ridiculous. Europe could feel that it stood alone in combining piety with good sense. ‘Is it not marvellous,’ a Victorian wonder-book asked after detailing the sloth and greed of Burmese monks, ‘that a whole people should … submit to be thus scandalously cheated?’24
Towards the end there were hints of a shift of view. For one thing native priestcraft might in some cases be enlisted as a supporter against colonial nationalism – just as Christian bishops and patriarchs in the Ottoman empire, when French Revolution ideas spread there, were made to exhort their flocks to loyal obedience to the Sultan.25 In a less calculating way, when events like the Indian famines brought home to Europe the excruciating poverty of so much of the world it was consoling to think that India or Tibet in their rags and misery enjoyed a fund of spiritual comfort withheld from the affluent West. It is always a symptom of qualms of conscience when the rich like to be assured that the poor are more blessed than they are. Here and there in the West, as reason and religion drifted apart, there was a stirring once more of something akin to the fascination of Asiatic deities for Hellenistic Greeks.
If in most ways the West found less and less to praise, as time went on, outside its own boundaries, others found more and more to hate, if also to admire or envy, in the West. Europeans through whom Europe manifested itself to the world were a motley throng: elegant diplomats, buccaneers, hymn-singing missionaries, drunken seamen, and alongside them all the faceless soldier in uniform, the human machine marching in step that Afro-Asia had never known before. To a people like the Chinese it must have seemed as if a band of freaks had broken loose from some bizarre madhouse. (To William Hickey at Canton the Chinese were ‘the best pickpockets in the world’,26 and not much else.) Europe’s great deeds in the world, like the African slave trade, must be placed to its corporate responsibility: they were acts of historical necessity, given the line of social and economic advance to which Europe was committed. A vast number of smaller, random crimes, as well as good actions, were the work of individuals whom Europe merely turned loose, gratuitous insult or injury to other races. One way or the other, contact with these was rude and forcible, and was setting them at odds with one another as well, for Europe was throwing the other continents together, sending Indian sepoys to China, Chinese coolies to South Africa, African slaves to Brazil. In one sense these peoples were being brought closer, in another sense more deeply divided.
All the drowsy syrups of the world could not restore it now, any more than Othello, to the old unthinking tranquillity. A mood of resentment against the all-powerful Westerner was spreading everywhere; things happening in one corner might set up vibrations in another far away. King Theebaw of Burma is said to have heard one day when deep in his cups of the battle of Isandhlwana in Zululand, and to have wanted to order a march on Rangoon forthwith.27 Many others who longed for the downfall of the West were dreaming of a simple expulsion of the trespasser, a return to the past, as Theebaw was or as most of the rebels of 1857 in India were. Early in this century a Frenchwoman travelling in Mongolia was astonished by an outburst from a quiet lama working as a merchant’s clerk about the coming return of Gesar, the invincible hero of Mongol and Tibetan legend, to ‘lead the millions of Asiatics who, today, are drowsing … we shall throw back into the sea those insolent Whites … we shall invade their countries in the West, and everywhere the cleansing army will have passed nothing will remain, no, not even a blade of grass !28 It would be ironical if this hero’s name was indeed, as has been conjectured, derived from Caesar’s; but such apocalyptic visions of revenge, clothed in ancient myth, haunted many lands, and men with no flesh-and-blood leaders as yet looked back to shadow-figures of the past.
In more awakened lands and minds another ambition was stirring, of taking over Western knowledge and acquiring Western power, as Japan was already doing. The two stages were analogous with the two that Europe itself had been going through; first the peasants and artisans turning their backs on capitalist industry, then the working class trying to take it over and socialize it. In both cases the second threat was the more alarming one. Japan’s rise was a portent, watched with uneasiness by the West even though down to 1914 European predominance seemed secure and still growing. Twenty years before, Curzon was warning the Japanese against national vanity and dreams of stepping into Britain’s shoes in the Far East.29 But Europe could not close its ranks against this threat, as it could do against the earlier, more primitive one. In 1900 its troops marched side by side to crush the Chinese peasantry; in 1902 Britain signed an alliance with the Japanese militarists in order to baffle a European rival, Russia. As 1914 approached Germany was cementing a similar alliance against the same rival with Turkish militarists, and laying plans to stir up colonial revolt against Britain, beginning with India. Meanwhile violence outside Europe was about to come home to roost. In 1911 General Bernhardi cited the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 among instances of the British ruthlessness and contempt for international law that Germany must be prepared to encounter in Europe.30
Hitherto the earth’s peoples had not on the whole learned much from one another, except in very material matters. Europe had found new things to eat, and taught new ways to fight. Relationships had been too arbitrary, too dependent on force. Muslims and Hindus for similar reasons had not learned much from their thousand years of living together in India, or men and women from their still longer cohabitation. Nor had Europe, with all its exploring of the world, learned much more about itself. It was a long time now since ‘the completely developed “Europeanism” of Montesquieu’,31 but the deepening of a surface uniformity into a real common consciousness had made little progress. A multitude of fresh impressions and sensations crowded what may be called Europe’s mind, but from the majority of Europeans they were shut out by prejudice, stupidity or ignorance.
Englishmen more than others insulated themselves when abroad from both what was bad and what was good in their environment. On his eastern travels Byron found that he had to wait hand and foot on his servant Fletcher, and ended by sending him home, tired of ‘the perpetual lamentations after beef and beer, the stupid, bigoted contempt for everything foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language’.32 At home Englishmen preserved through all their national doings up and down the world an impregnable insularity. English literature reflected this in an indifference, nearly as complete as Mrs Rapkin’s, to everything beyond the British Channel and St George’s Channel, those natural frontiers of civilization. A tiny handful of Englishmen tried to follow Indian affairs and lend a helping hand to their Indian fellow-subjects;33 the man in the street was satisfied with such items of interest as the ‘wild Indian’ exhibited in 1824 at Bartholomew Fair.34
‘If only,’ Ruskin exclaimed in one of his tirades against John Bull’s absorption in his own comforts and profits, ‘we English, who are so fond of travelling in the body, would also travel a little in the soul !’35 Exploration of this kind was at least growing less rare by the end of the century, and with it interest, which had never been altogether lacking, in the arts and ideas of other regions, recognition that Europe and civilization were not one and the same thing. One symptom was the first appearance in 1904 of the popular series of translations entitled ‘The Wisdom of the East’; it was edited by an English translator of Chinese poetry and an Indian scholar, and had for its object ‘to bring together West and East in a spirit of mutual sympathy, goodwill, and understanding’. In 1911 a Universal Races Congress was held in London, another faint prelude to the quest for world harmony. Three years later the wisdom of the West was abruptly and violently called in question. Between its two great wars Europe passed through a long crisis of doubt and self-distrust that owed much to declining confidence in its position in the world, and deepening uncertainty about what the world thought of it.’ Fascism was in one aspect a convulsive effort to shake off this mood, to restore the legend of virility by hysterical and suicidal violence. Loss of empire has set Europe free to begin finding a better confidence, inspired by a new consciousness of itself and a new relationship with its neighbours, and to recollect in tranquillity its adventures across the seven seas.
NOTES
1. In R. F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), p. 333 (Everyman edn).
2. ibid., p. 308.
3. W. P. Andrew, Our Scientific Frontier (1880), pp. 54, 74.
4. Colonel G. B. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1892), p. 59.
5. Sir R. Temple, India in 1880 (3rd edn, 1881), p. 418.
6. Proclamation of 13 February 1899; English text in R. B. Sheridan, The Filipino Martyrs (1900), p. 183.
7. S. Murtaza Ali, History of Chittagong (Dacca, 1964), p. 56.
8. Diderot, ‘Sur les cruautés exercées par les Espagnols en Amérique’, in Fragments (1772).
9. H. Spencer, The Study of Sociology, p. 211 (15th edn, 1889).
10. Graham Wallas, The Great Society (1914), Chapter 5.
11. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (1932 edn), p. 375.
12. G. B. Malleson, op. cit., p. 249.
13. C. Crow, Harris of Japan (1939), pp. 79–80.
14. C. Bigham, A Year in China, 1899–1900 (1901), p. 214.
15. G. Borrow, Lavengro (1851), Chapter 50.
16. F. Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh (1904), Chapter 21.
17. A. Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt (1913), Chapter 2.
18. Lord Bryce, South America. Observations and Impressions … (1912), p. 123.
19. Dismal England. By the Author of ‘Merrie England’ (R. Blatchford) (1899), p. 209.
20. M. Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (Phoenix edn, 1930), Vol. 2, pp. 169–70.
21. ‘F. Anstey’ (T. A. Guthrie), The Brass Bottle (1900), p. 38 (Penguin edn).
22. H. H. Prichard, Where Black Rules White (revised edn, 1910), Chapter 9.
23. R. Hopkins, An Exhortation to Good Life (1586), p. 227.
24. Anon., Ten Thousand Wonderful Things (n.d.), p. 266.
25. See an article in Middle Eastern Studies (1969) by R. Clogg on the Dhidhaskalia Patriki, or ‘Paternal Teaching’, of Patriarch Anthimos (Stamboul, 1798), with translation of text.
26. Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. A. Spencer (9th edn, n.d.), Vol. 1, p. 220.
27. Colonel W. F. B. Laurie, Our Burmese Wars and Relations with Burma (1880), p. 397.
28. Alexandra David-Neel, translation of The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling (1933: 1st edn, Paris, 1931), Introduction, pp. 34–5. On the derivation of ‘Gesar’ see Preface by Sylvain Lévi.
29. G. N. Curzon, Problems of the Far East (1894), Chapter 12.
30. F. von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (1911), p. 236 (trans. A. H. Powles).
31. D. Hay, Europe, the Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh, 1957), p. 122.
32. Letter of 14 January 1811, in The Letters of Lord Byron, ed. R. G. Howorth, pp. 38–9 (Everyman edn).
33. A good proportion of them were Quakers. See J. H. Bell, British Folks and British India Fifty Years Ago: Joseph Pease and his Contemporaries (Manchester, n.d. (1891)).
34. Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes (Vol. 3, 1825), p. 31.
35. A lecture of 1857, in A Joy for Ever, p. 100 (1906 edn).