212 ORIENTALISM man is plodding, industrious, Baconian, precise. Cromer’s case is of course based on British solidity as opposed to a French seductiveness without any real presence in Egyptian reality. Can it be any matter for surprise (Cromer continues] that the Egyptian, with his light intellectua) ballast, fails to see that some fallacy often lies at the bottom of the Frenchman’s reasoning, or that he prefers the rather superficial brilliancy of the Frenchman to the plodding, unattractive industry of the Englishman or the German? Look, again, at the theoretical perfection of French administrative systems, at their elaborate detail, and at the provision which is apparently made to meet every possibie contingency which may arise. Compare these features with the Englishman's practical systems, which lay down rules as to a few main points, and leave a mass of detail to individual discretion. The halfeducated Egyptian naturally prefers the Frenchman’s system, for it is to all outward appearance more perfect and more easy of application. He faits, moreover, to see that the Englishman desires to elaborate a system which will suit the facts with which he has to deal, whereas the main objection to applying French administrative procedures to Egypt is that the facts have but too often to conform to the ready-made system. Since there is a real British presence in Egypt, and since that presence—according to Cromer—is there not so much to train the Egyptian’s mind as to “forin his character,” it follows therefore that the ephemeral attractions of the French are those of a pretty damsel with “somewhat artificial charins,” whereas those of the British belong to “a sober, elderly matron of perhaps somewhat greater moral worth, but of less pleasing outward appearance.” Underlying Cromer’s contrast between the solid British nanny and the French coquette is the sheer privilege of British empiacement in the Orient. “The facts with which he [the Englishman] has to deal” are altogether more complex and interesting, by virtue of their possession by England, than anything the mercurial French could point to. Two years after the publication of his Modern Egypt (1908), Cromer expatiated philosophically in Ancient and Modern Imperialism. Compared with Roman imperialism, with its frankly assimilationist, exploitative, and repressive policies, British imperialism seemed to Cromer to be preferable, if somewhat more wishywashy. On certain points, however, the British were clear enough, even if “after a rather dim, slipshod, but characteristically Anglo 

Orientalism Now 213 Saxon fashion,” their Empire seemed undecided between “one of two bases—an extensive military occupation or the principle of nationality ffor subject races].” But this indecision was academic finally, for in practice Cromer and Britain itself had opted against “the principle of nationality.” And then there were other things to be noted, One point was that the Empire was not going to be given up. Another was that intermarriage between natives and English men and women was undesirable. Third—and most important, I think—Cromer conceived of British imperial presence in the Eastern colonies as having had a lasting, not to say cataclysmic, effect on the minds and societies of the East. His metaphor for expressing this effect is almost theological, so powerful in Cromer’s mind was the idea of Western penetration of Oriental expanses. “The country,” he Says, “over which the breath of the West, heavily left an enduring. mark, can never be the same as it was ‘before. me In such respects as these, noneth eless, Cromer’s was far from an original intelligence. What he saw and how he expressed it were common currency among his colleagues both in the imperial Establishment and in the intellectual community. This consensus is notably true in the case of Cromer’s viceregal colleagues, Curzon, Swettenham, and Lugard. Lord Curzon in particular always spoke the imperial lingua franca, and more obtrusively even than Cromer he delineated the relationship between Britain and the Orient in terms of possession, in terms of a large geographical space wholly owned by an efficient colonial master. For him, he said on one occasion, the Empire was not an “object of ambition” but “first and foremost, a great historical and political and soctological fact.” In 1909 he reminded delegates to the Imperial Press Conference meeting at Oxferd that “we train here and we send out to you your governors and administrators and judges, your teachers and preachers and lawyers.” And this almost pedagogical view of empire had, for Curzon, a specific setting in Asia, which as he once put it, made “one pause and think.” T sometimes like to picture to myself this great Imperial fabric as a huge structure like some Tennysonian “Palace of Art,“ of which the foundations are in this country, where they have been laid and must be maintained by British hands, but of which the Colonies are the pillars, and high above all floats the vastness of an Asiatic dome.!?