The Lure of Adventure

...The Lure of Adventure Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire By Martin Green Basic 429 pp $15 00 Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "Mohandas Gandhi", "The Writer and Politics" Tms is the second volume of Martin Green's tnology The Lust for Power, whose general theme is the decline and fall of imperialism as a concept dominating the Western mind In the first book, The Challenge of the Mahat-mas, which I reviewed in these pages ("A Gandhian Criticism of Culture," NL, October 10, 1978), the author studied the predicament of men of culture in the modern world Their towers of humanist values had become more vulnerable than ever before with the rise of national and international powers that were hostile to everything implied by the humanities Nor could humanists themselves offer an effective challenge, since their activities as scholars were dependent on the structure of power Green remarks early in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire that the "profound excitement" of imperialism "has been a major motive power in world history for the last four hundred years Even the expressions of passionate dissent and organized resistance to that excitement partook of it " He is undoubtedly right The strange links between the Fabian Society and the British Colonial Service are a matter of history, and Lenin's attacks on imperialism were the prelude to a ruthless re-creation, in the nameof Socialism, of the old empires of the Tsar and of the Chinese emperors, as Estonians and Tibetans can testify "Only the work of Tolstoy and Gandhi, and the pacifist-anarchist tradition of thought and action which thev subsumed, seem to me really opposite in tendency, and really powerful " With these words m his new book, Green summarizes much of the argument of The Challenge of the Mahat-mas But there is a further aspect of his study of Gandhi and Tolstoy that serves as a takeoff point for his present discussion In the current world situation, Green had suggested, men of culture could neither stand aloof, since the ivory towers were already besieged, nor continue in their traditional role as clients to those who held power Their only alternative was to respond to the challenge of the Mahatmas, to find a way to make their particular skills and disciplines serve the cause to which he felt history committed the humanists the cause of rigorous good in preference to destructive evil This response is what Green attempts to define here To help destroy the imperialist frame of mind, he urges humanist scholars to turn aside from high culture and seek m more popular fiction the influences that actually shaped their world The modest dimensions of this enterprise must be stressed He has nothing to recommend for creative artists, and evidently assumes that art—or "literature" as he calls it, to distinguish it from the kind of writing he discusses—will continue on its own way regardless of the kind of cultural politics he is indulging in He is appealing, rather, to critics and to pedagogues, as he makes quite clear when he recommends to English teachers that the study of adventure fiction become a "center of the curriculum " This may lead, through an understanding of the nature of imperialism, to a final dissolution of the imperial frame of mind Seen in this way, Green's seems a Quixotic venture, imperiled—if one may judge from the Paul Scott cult and the recent runaway success of M M Kaye's Raj romance, The Far Pavilions—by the power of nostalgia to establish the mental structures of the past Indeed, Green's enthusiasm in presenting his thesis is itself a manifestation of that nostalgia Nevertheless, it one is willing to suspend iiidgment on its academically messiamc aspects, this study can be considered a fruitful critical expedition into those areas of writing that were virtually terra incognita to literary historians before 1940, when George Orwell published his pioneer essay on "Boys' Weeklies" m Horizon Orwell, however, merely foraged on the edge of the territory He was interested m many areas of subhterature ("good bad books" as he called them), but he wrote nothing about the novels Not so Green He explores more thoroughly than any previous writer the relationship between the cult of adventure that dominated the reading of boys in the high imperial age and the dominant ideologies of the time "This is the paradigm of 19th-century education in Europe," he tells us "a layer of adventure images, upon which in higher education a layer of almost opposite ideas was laid," meamng of course the central ideas of 19th-century liberalism Green distinguishes carefully between romance and adventure Romance is the literature proper to the twilight of the feudal age and to the later resurgence of the anstomilitary caste Adventure is the genre of what he calls "the modern world system," and he sees Daniel Defoe as its first and perhaps purest practitioner By "modern," it should be noted, he does not mean contemporary—he means the world of the merchant, and eventually of the industrialists and financiers whom we call capitalists Initially, the identification of the bourgeois with the adventurous seems a contradiction in terms Yet the Merchant Adventurers and the Company of Adventurers Trading to Hudson's Bay were not named in vain Merchants adventured in the sense that they took risks with premeditation, and, becoming inevitably involved in original situations, prided themselves on their ability to turn the unexpected to profit In this sense, Robinson Crusoe, with his infinite resourcefulness, was the model tor true adventurers But, as this book makes clear, the adventure of the bold mcichant, so appealing to Deloe, could not hold the field without adulteration lor the simpie reason that it was not the sole force sustaining imperialism Only in the early stages of the British Empire did the mercantile ethos remain supreme Perhaps the turmng pomt came in 1759, when Robert Ckve, a merchant's clerk, turned into a military gemus and transformed adventure into romance by defeating the jeweled chivalnc armies of the Indian potentates at Plas-sey From this moment, the power of the East India merchants declined India became a province of military leaders and of civil service proconsuls who despised the merchants (now contemptuously called "box wallahs") Walter Scott, to whom Green devotes as much attention as to Defoe, reflected this historic shift "He genuinely liked both the modern world adventures and the old world romances, and tried to satisfy both the military and the mercantile castes " Henceforth both the Empire and the popular literature of its ruling caste showed a combination of the mercantile, reflected in the emphasis on resourcefulness, and the aristomilitary, reflected in the basking in borrowed glory one finds in Henty books for boys, like With Give to India In Conrad, as Green shows, the irony bred of a diminishing imperial confidence eroded the glory of adventure (Incidentally, Green belittles Conrad, and with what I feel is some justice talks of the cult of him as "a kind of stupidity ") Nonetheless, from Defoe to Kipling the literature of adventure had shaped the minds not merely of English schoolboys passing into the imperial caste, but of serious readers and writers—the intelligentsia of our age Here Green makes perhaps his most extraordinary claim of all "Intellectually and aesthetically, England's readers and writers after 1918 were nearly all the children of Kipling, as Eliot and Orwell came to acknowledge " I suppose it depends on one's assessment of literary influence, yet I would say these same readers and wnters were as much the children of Oscar Wilde, to whom Orwell also made his acknowledgments In saying this I am of course accusing Green of oversimplification in the maintenance of his thesis But I am suggesting as well how complex is the relationship of a massive phenomenon like imperialism to the arts of its age For Wilde, too, in his oblique way was moved by romance toward adventure, although it was the kind of adventure that ended in disaster Only writers as unconcerned with popularity as Thomas Hardy and Henry James managed to avoid the lure of adventure...