Gotham Diary:
On the Eve
16 September 2014
Whatever I expected David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism to be, I got a great deal more, although the book could not possibly be more concise. It’s the sort of study in which Surprise! is immediately followed by Of course! On page after page.
The British Empire — what a melancholy old ruin! In a way, not: the Empire itself has completely vanished, but its monumental remains, especially in England, are everywhere, as are the various equine rituals and parade uniforms that still surround the Royal Family. There are no actual ruins. But the hardy relics and the extinct politics dissolve in a faded notion of grander times. The worst part of the legacy is the suggestion that England — and I do mean England — saw its best days as the hub of a world-wide accumulation of highly various dependencies. This is rubbish. It’s true that England was more formidable, better-equipped than any other sovereignty to steer international currents in a preferred direction. At home, though, imperial England was a land of much wretchedness. Only a weak-minded nostalgiac would choose to live in England then rather than now.
Throughout the course of the Nineteenth Century, the English establishment underwent a series of temblors that weakened its foundations. The crown, for example, passed completely into the vapor of a parliamentary monarchy: indeed, today’s ruler is the Queen in Parliament. On a different schedule, the wealth and position of all but the greatest landowners suffered catastrophic dissipation. The old ruling class hung onto a few vestiges of authority after World War I, but the sequel finished them off. The House of Lords, as understood in Victoria’s day, no longer exists. As for the Church… You can look at all of this as decline, if you must, but it seems like peaceful evolution to me.
If it looks like decline, that is because of the Empire. The Empire was quite a show. That’s Cannadine’s point. While the old pomposities were dying out in England, new and much shinier ones were being developed in and for the Empire. It’s hard not to think of one of those science-fiction movies in which the last remnant of a tribe besieged by toxic conditions manages to escape, and to flourish anew, on another planet.
Most of Cannidine’s book sketches this dream of Empire, of old glories given new life. Only the final two chapters, “Limitations” and “Endings,” deal with the part that is now most familiar — the part most certain to be taught in schools. There was resistance to the imperial adventure from the beginning, and that is canker that Cannadine astutely keeps out of sight. Any well-read person today knows all about the enemies of Empire, the people who thought that it was unfair, pretentious, boring, bogus and shoddy. What is The Jewel in the Crown but the picture of a worm in the rose? But if we know that, the Empire builders did not, or were at least scrambling to prevent it, and it is their hopefulness, more than anything else, I think, that Cannadine wants us to understand. That would explain one ongoing surprise of Ornamentalism: Cannadine’s apparent willingness to the take Viceroys and the Lords-Lieutenant and their courts at face value, as if they really were the powerful grandees that they appeared to be. In fact, of course, their power was largely limited to the world of those who already believed in Empire, who had Gone Out to make something happen in Australia or India or Nigeria that could no longer be made to happen in the British Isles.
Another surprising point is the unity of the imperial system throughout that farrago of territories. To be sure, the Army was the same everywhere, and the bureaucracy followed a standardized model. At the same time, neither of these institutions was expressly or essential imperial. What was imperial was the elaborate array of honors that were created to reward the Empire’s higher servants. A profusion of medals and decorations bespangled the chests of men — British and native alike — who had done little to nothing by way of displaying military valor. These honors placed every significant player in the Dream of Empire not only within relation to everyone else but in subordination to the monarch, who was the fount of all honor. At the very moment when the folks back home were learning to venerate a figurehead, the Queen-Empress (Victoria) and the King-Emperors (her son, grandson, and great-grandson) occupied the center of a lively and highly personal court of honor in which, just as in the Middle Ages, the ruler and the bigwigs drew strength from mutual esteem.
Not to mention mutual credulity: they believed ardently in what they were doing. This was something that the critics of Empire could neither imagine nor support. As it happened, the critics wrote all the good books. Then again, that is what critics do: they complain. But the Empire never made any sense in level prose. It expressed itself in rituals as formulaic as those of any great faith. If you wanted to read about the Empire from the inside, you would need some sort of liturgy. Ornamentalism gives us a very good idea of what it would look like.
The common understanding is that the Empire was allowed to wind down when it became insupportably expensive, or, rather, when England could no longer go on paying for it. I’m no longer so sure. I think of Churchill in his mid-Thirties “wilderness,” boring everyone to death with his arguments against Indian independence. Even his fellow conservatives, members of the party of Disraeli, who had made Victoria Queen-Empress in Parliament, would have nothing to do with him. That he genuinely believed in Empire cannot be doubted. Although unusually, extraordinarily gifted, Churchill was every inch an English aristocrat, so orgulous and full of himself that he really didn’t require his own peerage. He was alive to the linkages between the hierarchy of England and the constellation of God Calls Me Gods.
***
But the tide floods in the opposite direction. No more (hereditary) House of Lords; no more fox-hunting. The old ruling class of England has finally been as sidelined as those of its neighbors on the Continent. Now, Scotland. I take neither side in the debate about Scottish Independence, which may very well be settled on Thursday. But I’m haunted by the premonition that, if Scotland pulls away, the Queen will pass from this world without a successor. As I say: peaceful evolution.