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by S. Francis Perera

Now that the colonial age has receded into the past, it should be easy to assess it with cool detachment. There is much that we decry in the colonial age, but there were a few Englishmen who arrived in this country in that age whom we cannot help but admire.

The great majority of the Englishmen who arrived in the colonial bandwagon were here to bolster the imperial edifice. But the few who came to serve the people should not be forgotten.

These latter fell under the spell of the scenic beauty of the land, and the essential goodness of the indigenous people. Of these one of the most memorable is W.S. Senior-that many faceted genius.

Walter Stanley Senior, the poet, educationist, humanist, nature lover and mystic was that rara avis, a man who identified himself with this land and its people.

Of him it may be said that he not only gave of his best, but went farther and poured out his spirit in the service of a land alien to him.

One appreciates him not only for his stirring qualities, but also for the lyrical verse, in which he expressed his rapturous love for Sri Lanka.

So captivated was he with this island's natural beauty that he claimed it to be superior to that of England. Here is how he expressed his preference:

And when the English climate's chilly, and English clouds are grey, You will see in a sudden vision... Anuradhapura and the old king's bathing pool...

My soul it will break with longing, it can never be goodbye

His was love at first sight-for Sri Lanka. As the years passed and Senior gained a better understanding of the people his love grew stronger. On his arrival here, so he wrote to a friend, he found the common people plunged in apathy.

He was shocked to find the English-speaking section of the population living, as it were, segregated from the rest, and aping their white masters - not the best representatives of their race.

They spoke English, a pidgin brand of it, and showed utter contempt for the history, culture and manners of their own people.

But in spite of the sedulous aping of their ways by this cotorie of Sri Lankans they were not welcome into the circle of the expatriate Englishmen.

They of the ruling race lived apart. They had their exclusive clubs, swimming pools, tennis courts, schools, hotels etc.

They spurned the advances of the 'imitation Englishmen' and made them the butt-end of their jokes. Rudyard Kipling in India could not stand the ersatz Englishmen in the sub-continent; he burlesqued them in his stories and poems.

Of course, Senior never for a moment condoned the prejudices of his compatriots in the colonies.

Senior was imbued with a noble sense of Britain's imperial mission. To him the Colonies were neither so many millstones round Britain's neck nor a dumping ground for surplus British goods. He was no crude materialist.

He visualized colonial religions being protected behind the shield of Pax Britannica; under British tutelage the colonies were to be led to self-government. The path to self-government was not strewn with roses. Civil-strife, poverty, famine etc...were to be eradicated.

It would be ridiculous to anglicize the indigenous people. They instead of being turned into ersatz Englishmen, were to be trained to appreciate their traditional culture and religion. These sentiments were implied rather than expressed in words.

Unlike the other expatriate Christian clergy of that time Senior was not hell-bent on proseletizing the 'native people'.

In fact he did not seem to believe that the conversion of the Buddhists and Hindus to the Christian faith was the need of the hour. They were to live in accordance with the tenets of their ethical codes.

Nowhere in his writings does he express a wish to convert 'the heathen'. Religion was a matter of conscience; the state should follow secular policies. It was enough if the British raj taught the people to be free:

And what is a people's purpose?

That the people should be free.

And again:-and would ye free a people

From a long and strong control?

And would ye keep your freedom

While the testing ages roll?

If ye fain would free the body

Ye must first make free the soul.

Your typical pro-imperialist Englishmen who arrived in Sri Lanka - or any other colonial territory - had a prodigious contempt for the local people, their culture and their achievements of the past. This he made himself familiar with the ways of the people as well as their long history.

His holidays were spent in the ruined cities marvelling the architectural remains, which told him of a grand and glorious past. His love for the country was enhanced by the study of the history of the Sinhalese.

He longed to see a cultural renaissance in his adopted land. If he could not have been born in Sri Lanka he would do the next best thing-call this land his foster mother. He had no patience with Sri Lankans who took their heritage for granted.

His poem, 'Call of Lanka' is a paean for an exquisite civilization, and also an appeal to Sri Lankans to awaken from their spiritual slumber to take their rightful place among other nations.

Let them not rest contented in the work of their ancestors but try to better it. Hear him.

My cities are laid in ruins,

Their courts through the jungle spread,

My scepter is long departed

And the stranger lords instead

Yet give me a bard, said Sri Lanka

I am living I am not dead.

Senior grieves that he can do but little to help his adopted land to rise again to her pristine eminence. He is not here to mark time or to make his fortune.

He will work willingly hand in hand with the sons of the soil to raise the land to a higher level civilization:-

I offer a voice O Lanka,

I a child of an alien isle,

For my heart has heard them and kindled,

My eyes have seen these and smile,

Tis but for a little while

It is given only to a few to delve into the future and warn us of dangers lurking ahead, or to cheer us with tidings of better times to come. Senior was a seer blessed with transcendental vision.

There were coarse jingoists who believed that British rule in Afro-Asia would be perpetuated. The British Empire would last forever.

With Britain as the hub of the wheel of Empire, British influence would spread throughout the Empire, and even beyond its boundaries.

Britain would be like a pleasure-garden to which treasure would pour from her colonies for the delectation of the master race. Like that of ancient Rome the writ of Britain would prevail throughout the world.

Such a view was wholly repugnant to Senior. He looked forward to a time when Britain's tutelage would be of no further use.

Sri Lanka would be free, and Sri Lankans would have forged the institutions suited to their genius. They would then work out their own destiny:

Slow tutelage, how slow! But sure the goal;

Lanka have patience, thou shalt win thy soul.

W.S. Senior was a man with a feeling for the finer things of life. Next to life he loved nature. But it was not the paganic worship of Nature to which Wordsworth was prone.

However, he spared no pain to see, to admire and understand nature. His deep insights to nature bear testimony to his powers of observation.

When in the mood he would wonder by himself to a jungle glade, climb to the summit of a precipitous hill walk along the banks of a stream or travel to an out of the way archaeological site.

Senior was one of the few westerners to notice that in the tropics there is hardly a twilight worth talking about.

Day merges into night with the intervening twilight-if any-hardly perceptible. The barbet is the last of the ornithological choir to stop singing. With the barbet's song, according to Senior, the curtain falls on another day.

It is no exaggeration to say that Senior had toured in nearly all parts of the island even in the remotest ones. He did not disdain to visit any part to which the compass pointed. But of all places he liked Haputale best.

The semi-rural place with its bracing climate, and with its tea-plantations had a way of drawing him to itself from time to time.

A good part of his prose writings dwell on the town-its ethereal beauty and its resemblance to the English countryside. Apart from the beauty and the tranquillity of the place there was a personnel if not sentimental reason.

That reminded him of his native Yorkshire. Haputale to Senior was Yorkshire writ small-though the prevailing colours were much brighter and immensely varied.

He was drawn there as though by a magnet; and when he was there he withdrew to an isolated spot to commune with nature.

From the lofty heights of Haputale he gazed at the panorama unfolded before him. He burst into song on seeing the shimmering plains in the distance:-

O I have seen

Besilvering Lanka's plains of palm,

Vast placed moonlight; and have felt

Almost the earth's enigma melt

In that immeasurable calm.

In the end Haputale claimed him for his own; his ashes at his request lie interned there in a churchyard. But that was yet to come. His activity filled life had not run its course.

Senior's sensuous love for the natural beauty of Sri Lanka did not rob him of his love for England. But alas! The serene beauty of rural England had long ago been swamped in the tide of industrial progress.

Since England became the workshop of the world natural beauty and art had been bartered away for material prosperity. The beauty of the rural landscape immortalized in the paintings of John Constable had by now vanished from the face of England.

The unsophisticated gentry and peasantry of whom graphic pen-portraits are preserved in the novels of Mrs. Elsie Wood and Thomas Hardy seemed no so unreal. England was no more the land for men with the aesthetic sensibility.

Senior could not fit in, as it were, to a land where everything seemed dry, drab, dull and dreary. Nevertheless, now and again, he was subject to fits of homesickness. Poetry was the medium through which he best expressed his heart's yearnings:

Ceylon is a dream of beauty,

She is as fair as a lily light,

She is full of the glamour of glory.

She has won my heart outright;

But I miss the bells of England

The English air tonight.

Though Senior was many-faceted and endowed with many talents his health was not what it should have been.

It should be borne in mind that he rendered so much service, and kept on adding to the sum total of human happiness, in spite of being subject to frequent attacks of ill health.

Senior was to have made Sri Lanka his permanent home, but he found that the climate did not agree with him.

In the end though he went back to England he left his heart behind-metaphorically at first and subsequently literally. At his expressed wish his ashes were brought to Sri Lanka and buried at the Haputale churchyard.

It may be because of this wish of his that some fellow-countrymen referred to him as the renegade Englishmen. As the epitaph on his tombstone says, as far as he was concerned, it could never be goodbye-to Sri Lanka.

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