I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
that the word “Imperialism” is a clumsy version of my meaning. But
no other word came nearer; “Militarism” would have been even more
misleading, and “The Superman” makes nonsense of any discussion that he
enters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word “Caesarism” would have been
better; but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will
perceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean
to discuss.
This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory
of the patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in
England has very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism
I wish to sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes’ and
Kipling; but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is
an insolent creation of English harshness and rapacity. Imperialism,
I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness, but by English
softness; nay, in a sense, even by English kindness.
The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the
most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales
is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles
who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British
Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic and
irrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strange
optimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to show
that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to
say that no one shared it more than that gigantic English
sentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end of “David
Copperfield” is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending,
but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British
happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be
embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily,
or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and
Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them
with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes
contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of
a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only
objection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose
heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me
no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should
still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and
apathy of England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness in
distant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven
Dials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the
veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel
that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
Surbiton are “new”; they are expanding; they are “nearer to nature,”
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only
objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not
young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing
with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies
when you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys
who have lost their last music of real things by getting out of the
sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decadent
genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr.
Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the exception that
proves the rule. For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind,
but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely
because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a
past--an Asiatic past. He might never have written “Kabul River” if he
had been born in Melbourne.
I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak
and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind
of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which
it can only share. It is a love of living with one’s inferiors. The
notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a
dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape
and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and
conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire
in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people, and
therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The
English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and therefore
their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distant
and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the
uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them;
much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If
ever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should
leave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting
Australian armies against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculpture
against French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me of
concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism as
commonly understood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other
peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own. But it
is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiable
delusion partly in order to show how different it is from the deeper,
more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced to
call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get to
the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast
back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of
human intercourse.
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