Part 2 — CHAPTER III

CROMER BEGINS TO MAKE MISTAKES

My visit to Gros Bois that autumn on my way Eastwards was a sad one, Princesse Berthe having died in the course of the summer, and there were no visitors and none of the bright talk I had so long enjoyed there.

“We arrived at Sheykh Obeyd on the 12th of November. That same evening Sheykh Mohammed Abdu called and gave us a full history of his adventures after leaving Newbuildings. At Oxford he had found a number of Arabic manuscripts known by name only at the Azhar, and among them the correspondence of a certain Arab philosopher, El Sebaïn, with Frederick the Great. He is going to have a number of them copied with funds supplied by the Awkaf (the Ministry of Endowments). He then went to Switzerland and on to Algeria and Tunis. He drew a black picture of the state of things in French North Africa, compared to which he said the sufferings of native Egypt at the hands of the English were as light to darkness. In Algeria the whole administration is directed in the interests of the European Colonists at the expense of the natives. For these there is hardly any legal protection, and absolutely no liberty. There is neither freedom of the press nor even of speech, espionage is worse than at Constantinople, nor is the state of things better in Tunis than in Algeria. It had been proposed to him at Tunis to ask an audience of the Bey, but he had been informed by the Austrian Consul General that permission would have to be first asked of the French Resident, who would have sent a Frenchman to be present at it. The Mohammedans of Tunis had said to him, ‘Your journals in Egypt complain of their lot under the English, but all we ask of Providence is to be given five years of your régime as a respite from the hell of our own.’ The Mufti told me these details because I had seen it published in the ‘Figaro’ that he had expressed himself as entirely pleased with the condition of things for his fellow-Moslems under French rule. His account accords with all I have heard from other quarters about Tunis, and with what I remember of Algeria in 1873. There is no doubt that the English régime in Egypt is exceptional in the history of such régimes, which are in their essence tyrannies and oppressions, and I think I may take some credit to myself for having made it exceptional by forcing Egyptian rights upon English public attention in 1882, and by keeping up the publicity whenever these rights have been freshly attacked. In France and Tunis no single voice is raised by any Frenchman against his countrymen’s iniquities in North Africa, and crime is heaped upon crime, and so it would be here in Egypt if the European colony were allowed to have its way. Fortunately for Egypt there is practically no English colony, and our officials live under fear of criticism in the London press and parliament, otherwise we should have a purely military government at Cairo. Already, in answer to what I published in the ‘Manchester Guardian’ last summer about the abuses prevalent in the Ministry of Justice at Cairo, a move is being made by Cromer to get the Kourbash reintroduced, but I think we shall be able to prevent this, or at least to make it impossible for Cromer to do it on the sly.

“Finally the Mufti told us the latest doings of the Khedive. He has now gone in wholly for money making and speculation. He has got Cassel (the King’s friend) to lend him half a million sterling for various schemes without interest, and he is projecting a building venture at Ghizeh, for which purpose an exchange of land is being proposed with the Awkaf, all to the Khedive’s advantage. Abdu, however, as Mufti, has a veto on such transactions, and he will not allow any swindling of the public purse. He has seen the Khedive lately, who is ostentatiously friendly, but Mohammed Abdu knows he is intriguing to get him deprived of his Muftiship. The Khedive will not tolerate anyone who does not fear him. The unfortunate Minshawi was, it seems, basely sacrificed by Abbas, who had commissioned him to find the stealers of his cattle, but who denied it when questioned by Cromer.[4] There is also a quarrel, in which the Khedive is concerned, about some emerald mines on the Red Sea coast. Cromer, to his credit, stoutly discountenances all speculative mining.

“22nd Nov.—Rowton, poor fellow, is dead at his house in Berkeley Square.

“23rd Nov.—Yesterday I sent the French edition of our ‘Pilgrimage to Nejd’ to Mohammed Abdu to amuse him during Ramadan, and later he came to see me. Speaking of Midhat Pasha, of whom an account is given in the book, he told me Midhat was a man he had never liked in spite of his sympathy with the constitutional cause at Constantinople which Midhat had championed. Midhat, he said, was a hot head, and very imprudent, especially in his cups, for he had a habit of drinking, and this was the cause of his ruin. While Wali at Damascus Midhat had attended a large dinner given at Tarablus, and had made a speech, in which he had described himself as the destroyer of two Kings (alluding to Abd el Aziz and Murad). This was reported to the Sultan, and was the cause of Midhat’s disgrace. As a reformer he was shallow and Europeanized in the worst sense, nevertheless his fall had been a real misfortune, and his end a real tragedy.

“Mohammed Abdu has had another talk with the Khedive, who told him the whole history of his not having kept his appointment with us at Crabbet in the summer. The reason was precisely what I suspected. When the visit was first proposed no objection had been made by the Englishmen appointed to dry nurse the Khedive during his stay in England, but the very morning of the Sunday when he was getting ready to start for Crabbet, Cassel, whose guest he was, on behalf of the King in London, spoke to him about it, and told him that his going to see me would offend the King, that it would be interpreted at Court as meaning that he had not been satisfied with the King’s reception of him. Cassel’s words had been, ‘I do not say that you ought not to go, but if you do it will be understood in this sense.’ The Khedive sent the explanation as a message to me through the Mufti, but not for publication; he wishes me to see him as usual, but I shall not go, and have told Abdu to say that since the King has commanded the Khedive not to see me, and the Khedive has thought fit to obey, I, as the King’s subject, am still more bound to obedience.

“24th Nov.—The papers give an account of Dora Labouchere’s marriage at Florence to a son of the Minister Rudini. I am glad she has made a good alliance, it will please her old father who deserves to be pleased.

“2nd Dec.—The Mufti called to-day and gave me an account of what is going on at headquarters in the matter of judicial reform. He had an interview with Cromer yesterday, having been sent for to talk the various projects over. Cromer asked him his opinion of the plan of perambulating judges, and the Mufti said its value would all depend upon whether these were appointed by the Government or by the Court of Appeal. If the latter good men would be chosen, if the former not. McIlwraith was then sent for, and in the Mufti’s presence received a lecture from Cromer on the necessity of consulting the best native opinion, and especially the Mufti’s. He is satisfied now that they will adopt a reasonable scheme. He expostulated also against additional power being put into the hands of the police in its present corrupt condition. He tells me the Khedive is very angry with him for having insisted on his paying the full price, £20,000, in his deal with the Awkaf, and that he is doing what he can to get him deprived of his position of Mufti. Abdu, however, is so firmly established now that it is of little importance what the Khedive intrigues against him, and it seems really as if at last his influence would become what it ought to have been from the first, the supreme one in Egypt. He is in high spirits, and I congratulated him on becoming Grand Vizier. Cromer supports the Mufti now. The Khedive is very foolish, for he allows real evils to go on unchecked and intervenes only in trifles.

“7th to 9th Dec.—A short outing in the desert, in the hills behind Cairo, exploring the cleft of Wadi Dijleh, where vultures still have their roosting place, both the great vulture and the Egyptian. They are getting rare now in Egypt, owing to our sanitary arrangement which forbids the leaving of carcases, which were their food. The black and white Egyptian vultures used to be as plentiful as domestic fowls; ‘Pharaoh’s chickens’ Frank travellers called them. When the French in 1801 had Suliman el Halabi impaled for the assassination of General Kléber, the sentence passed on him by their Court Martial was that he was to remain impaled until the vultures had devoured him. I have been reading Jabarti’s Chronicle, which is intensely interesting. It shows the French invasion of Egypt to have been a wanton and most criminal proceeding, absolutely ruinous to the still prosperous country. Cairo was almost completely destroyed by them, and when they evacuated, it was left as a prey to the Bedouins to its complete destruction. Yet the French are at this moment raising a monument at Cairo to Kléber and the rest of them, inscribed: ‘To the heroic Martyrs of Civilization who died during the campaigns of Egypt and Syria.’

“On our way back to Sheykh Obeyd we followed the Mokattam range to its extreme edge overlooking Cairo. The view of the vast city, half Oriental, half European, approached thus as we approached it suddenly from the desert, is, I think, the most astonishing in the world. We arrived after several days’ wandering in an absolute waste, the last mile of the way being waster than all the rest, and difficult for camels to cross, for the heights have been blasted with dynamite, and all is a labyrinth of holes and heaps, I suppose to prevent a surprise by artillery, the whole plateau being uninhabited and unvisited, except by kites and vultures, a sheer naked wilderness of stones, nor could one possibly guess the existence of life anywhere within miles of it, until gradually one began to hear the roar of the city below. It is not until one is actually within twenty yards of the cliff’s edge that one gets the slightest hint of the living world spread out close beneath one’s feet, the immense city of Cairo, with its citadels and towers, and walls, and minarets stretching away for miles, the splendid ancient city, and beyond it modern Cairo, with its turmoil of tramways, railroads, and other modernities, and yet further still the Nile and the Nile Valley, seven miles across and green as a spinach bowl, with the yellow desert, far away in Africa with its Pyramids. The immediate foreground is dazzlingly white, a huge stone quarry, where men in gangs are at work like ants, quarrying the white limestone of which modern Cairo is being built. The sudden contrast brought tears into my eyes as sudden wonders are apt to do.

“11th Dec.—More interesting talk with Abdu. The Khedive is still very angry with him about the £20,000 of Wakf property, and is revenging himself upon the Mufti by trying to get up a new quarrel with him on religious grounds connected with the proposed savings’ bank, which gives offence to old-fashioned Moslems, as allowing depositors to receive interest on their money, a thing forbidden by their religious law. Abdu, as Mufti, has issued a fetwa on the subject, recommending a change in the wording of the decree which institutes the Bank, but the Khedive has taken up a high religious line against him, condemning the thing altogether, this, although the Khedive puts his own money unscrupulously out at interest everywhere, and makes no secret of it. Cromer, however, supports Abdu, so that he is in no actual danger from the intrigue. In all this, as in much else, the Khedive acts absurdly, allowing real evils to go on without protest, and intervening only in trifles.

“20th Dec.—The Ramadan fast is over to-day, a thing for which I am always thankful. How much more comfortable the world would be without its feasts and fasts. As I lie here on the roof watching the birds, who care for none of these things, I realize what a long way humanity has wandered out of the region of common sense. Three quarters of our man’s miseries come from pretending to be what we are not, a separate creation superior to that of the beasts and birds, while in reality these are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.

“20th Dec.—Herbert Spencer is dead, poor old man, at the age of eighty-three, and another death announced is that of Henry Stanley (Lord Stanley of Alderley) at seventy-six. About Stanley, Blanche Hozier sends me an excellent account of his character, written by her mother, who was his sister. ‘I do not think,’ she writes, ‘that he has been a sad man, for he has had joys of his own, being at one with his God, from whom he takes all willingly without repining, and in this submission there is great content, and he loved nature and real sport, and Oriental learning, and order and obedience, and he had a fair estate to rule over, and he enjoyed improving it in his own way. No, I think he had been a happy man. He is dying in his small, frugal room he had from a boy, when I was so much with him before I married. Alderley has been a beloved place for many generations. God bless those who go out and those who come in.’ I consider that a most touching account and most true. He was one of the best and least selfish of men, a sincere Moslem without parade. The last time I saw him I remember he was rather hurt with me because I said something implying a disbelief in the divine ordering of things in the world. In his domestic life he was unfortunate, his Spanish wife, Fabia, being socially impossible and mad. Yet he was kind to her, though she weighed like a mill-stone round his neck, and he spent half of his time with her at Alderley. He told me once that he had consulted the Grand Mufti at Constantinople as to whether he might avail himself of his Moslem right and put Fabia away, but he never had the heart to do so, nor would he do anything which might cause a scandal to his religious profession. He did an enormous deal of good to those about him whatever their beliefs, and helped to the best of his power in Parliament all Orientals who were suffering wrong. For this he got scant thanks and no credit. His deafness made public life almost an impossibility, and his many eccentricities and strange manner and appearance caused him to be more laughed at in the House of Lords than listened to. Yet he achieved from time to time success by his insistence for the causes he took up. Personally I had a great regard for him, indeed affection, and we remained for forty-three years firm allies.

“23rd Dec.—I have finished Jabarti, whose Chronicle is as good as Stowe’s, and written much in the same style, and with certain characters of men he had known as good as Plutarch’s.”

Jabarti was by birth a Somali and by position an Alem of the Azhar at Cairo, who, finding himself there from the middle of the eighteenth century till well into the nineteenth, in a position of knowledge, though he took no part in public affairs, kept an accurate Chronicle of Egyptian events, relating all with strict impartiality. His history includes the episode of Bonaparte’s invasion, as seen through Egyptian eyes, and is of the utmost value. He continued keeping it till the year 1820, when he was waylaid as he was riding home one evening on his ass from Shubra and murdered—it has been asserted—by Mohammed Ali’s order.

“25th Dec.—I am glad to see that Stanley was buried according to the Mussulman rite, in his Park at Alderley, in presence of the Imam of the Turkish Embassy and one of the Secretaries, as well as of members of his own family.

“The Mufti came in the afternoon with Minshawi Pasha, the same who played an honourable part at the time of the bombardment of Alexandria, saving many Christian lives at Tantah, near which he lives. The English Government gave him a decoration after the war for his humanity, but Cromer has since persecuted him as a partisan of the Khedive. He is very rich, and has recently given a large sum of money, £14,000, to the Mufti for various Mohammedan purposes. The Mufti is still being worried by the Khedive, who has been putting pressure on a number of the Sheykhs of the Azhar to denounce him on grounds of impiety in the form of an ardahal (petition) precisely as Mohammed Ali did against the Sheykh El Saadat of Jabarti’s time. He tells me that in spite of all he has gone through in his life, he has never lost but two friends, having made it a principle always to forgive.

[1904]“8th Jan., 1904.—Greville, manager of the Bank of Egypt, came to luncheon and brought news that war between Japan and Russia is nearly certain. I have not myself seen how it could be avoided. The occupation of Manchuria by Russia with her seizure of Port Arthur makes the position of Japan in those waters too dangerous for her to acquiesce without fighting, and it became a question between trying conclusions now, and waiting to be swallowed up at leisure. The present moment is favourable to Japan because the English Government has promised to help Japan if a third power intervenes to help Russia. Of course, it is a great risk but of the two Japan seems to be choosing the lesser, if not the less imminent danger. I wish her all possible success, she being the representative of Oriental independence against the European Powers. If she succeeds in beating the Russians at sea, she may be able to get the hegemony of China and so frustrate altogether the Western invasion. Neither China nor Korea has the least chance of being able to stand alone against Russia and would be gradually absorbed, as would Japan too if she fails in the war.”

It had been part of our plan for the winter that Auberon Herbert should spend it with us at Sheykh Obeyd, but for one reason and another though he came to Egypt he had established himself the other side of Cairo, at Helouan, and it had been a matter of much correspondence between us how we were to meet, as neither of us liked going through the town, and it was at last decided that we were to have a rendezvous in the Mokattam Hills behind Cairo some ten miles away, at a certain hour on a certain day, a plan which was attended with an almost certain risk of our not meeting at all, for, though we knew the hills well, he had no knowledge of them, nor was there any definite landmark. The result was as follows:

“9th Jan.—To Wady Abensur, which Europeans call Wady Hof, and encamped just above the great Sudd at noon, having left Sheykh Obeyd at 6.30. I then sent Mutlak down in the direction of Helouan to meet Auberon and Salem Aweymer on my delûl to look for him in the valleys, as he had proposed to walk from Helouan and the valleys are so intricate here that I was sure he would not find us. At half past two I also went in search of him on my mare and rode almost to Helouan and then back up the main valley and I was just on the point of giving it up when I heard a shout behind me. Auberon had been found, having wandered away up another valley, Wady Melag, and presently he appeared with Salem, as extraordinary a figure as one well could see. He was clad in grey flannels, without a coat, and was carrying a lantern in one hand and a staff in the other, with a wallet full of stones strapped to his back, like the pictures of Christian with his bundle of sins in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I had the greatest difficulty in getting him to mount the camel, though it was already late and the road along the edge of the valley is a dangerous one to be in after dark and I was anxious to be back at the tent. However, at last he mounted and we arrived just at nightfall, and he stopped to dine with us and set to like a famished man, which he was, for he had been wandering in the valleys since eleven and had brought nothing with him but some coffee and milk in a bottle. He stayed on with us talking afterwards, interestingly on many subjects, including that of Herbert Spencer, whose influence over him as a young man he described as immense. Spencer had given him for the first time solid ground on which to stand, though he had since gone further than Spencer in certain directions. On one subject, however, he talked as it seemed to me not quite sanely, namely the stones he was carrying in his wallet. He turned these out for us to examine. They were quite common bits of limestone, flakes from the cliffs with which all the valleys about here are strewn, but he insisted in seeing in them carved faces of grotesque personages, with big noses and helmets, and declared them to be the work of primitive men who had formerly inhabited the valleys. He chose me out a few of the smaller ones and made them over to me with much earnestness to examine at my leisure, handing me also the small sum of five piastres as a present to those who had found him in the valley. Then taking up his wallet and his stick and lighting his lantern he set out, in spite of all remonstrances, in the direction he had come. I sent Suliman with him as far as the Sudd, but he would not allow him to go a yard further, saying it would spoil his night’s walk. It appears to be his habit to spend his nights in the neighbourhood of Helouan with his lantern looking for these stones, and he told me he had been accosted in the dark on one occasion and nearly attacked by a man with a nabut. I think he runs great risks, for the hills are frequented by convicts escaped from the prison at Toura, and I told him so, and as he nevertheless persisted in his midnight tramp, I made him write on a scrap of paper that he absolved me from all responsibility in case of accidents.”

This proved to be the last time we met. Two days later I heard from him, that having wandered all night he had found himself at daybreak in an unknown country but had made his way down to the Nile and so got back to his hotel. He died the following year.

“17th Jan. (Sunday).—The Mufti has been to Alexandria where he has seen the Khedive, who received him, as his way is, with smiles and jokes, though he had been doing his best to get Cromer’s consent to depose him. The Khedive has a new grief against him, his having issued fetwas to certain Mohammedans from the Transvaal in answer to these three questions:

“1. May a Moslem in a foreign country eat meat not killed according to rule?

“2. May a Moslem in a foreign country wear a hat?

“3. May a Shafeite at prayer range himself in the same line with a Hanafite?

To all these three questions Mohammed Abdu had answered in the affirmative, and the Khedive, though he himself eats and wears a hat and says no prayers when in Europe, affects to regard the decision as atheism. Cromer, however, supports the Mufti; it is a queer position.

“22nd Jan.—The Mufti was here to-day for his usual Friday’s luncheon in the garden under the bamboos. He has a new worry in the death of one of the chief Azhar Sheykhs, which will be the cause of fresh trouble with the Khedive as to his successor. Fortunately, His Highness, ‘our young man,’ the Mufti calls him, is to start on a journey in the direction of the Tripoli frontier, which will give everybody about him a little holiday and the Mufti hopes himself to be off then to Khartoum, where he promises me to find out what the real state of feeling in the Soudan is towards the present régime. We had a long and interesting talk about the Mameluke days in Egypt, as also about the condition of the Jews in Arabia before the coming of Mohammed, and other matters of Eastern history in which he is very learned. I know no society so pleasant as his or so improving, it is all the society we have here as we see nothing of Europeans. We are in a kind of Coventry now with the English officials, but no matter, as long as Egypt is not annexed to the British Crown I shall go on with my opposition.

“He talked, too, about the Khedive’s commercial propensities which he indulges without regard for his political position. He has taken to hiring and reletting the ferries over the canals, and he has been trying to get a concession of the fishing rights in various places at the expense of poorer people. Cromer has taken him to task for this and has told him that he must choose between being a Khedive and being a tradesman, in which Cromer is in the right. All the family of Mohammed Ali have been keen traders and Abbas cares for nothing now, Abdu says, but money making.

“23rd Jan.—The reason of Gorst’s return to Europe is explained. He went to try and get the French Government to agree to an abolition of the Caisse de la Dette, and has been at Paris seeing M. Delcassé with that object. I have written to the Editor of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ about it, explaining how very necessary it is to preserve the Caisse de la Dette as a check upon financial extravagance here. What our people specially want just now is liberty to spend all the Egyptian money they can get on the Soudan, which is an English, not an Egyptian interest. There is a scheme of railway making between Souakim and Berber, and also between Khartoum and Abyssinia, the Cape to Cairo line, and there is an ultimate plan of great irrigation reservoirs to supply Manchester with Soudanese cotton. It is only the Caisse de la Dette which stands in the way of Egypt’s being made the milch cow of our African Empire. I hear, however, that the French Government has refused to consent to the abolition.”

[N.B. These were the first negotiations with the French Government, which resulted some months later in the Agreement known as the Entente Cordiale, whereby France gave England a completely free hand in Egypt in return for a free hand given her in Morocco.]

“4th Feb.—My letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’ is published, and comes in pretty opportunely, though I understand the French Government has definitely refused to waive its rights on the Caisse de la Dette. It appears that there was really a proposal into which Gorst entered of some gigantic operation in the Soudan, a concession of Government lands on a vast scale for twenty millions to Cassel, with irrigation works, and a Government guarantee which required the consent of the Caisse; also it was said an attempt was made to abolish the Caisse altogether, a huge scheme of developing the Soudan at the expense of Egypt. Fortunately this has been put a stop to by the French Government, and the whole thing has fallen into the water. The Khedive was certainly mixed up in it, and from what I can understand Cromer did not altogether approve. Mohammed Abdu says that Gorst has been playing into the Khedive’s hands of late financially, and there is talk of his leaving the Egyptian service.

“11th Feb.—The Russo-Japanese War has begun, and some Russian ironclads have been sunk in Port Arthur.

“There is a split between George Wyndham and Redmond over the Catholic University. As far as my politics are concerned I should be sorry to see entire harmony between Ireland and England, for then we should have the Irish as Imperialist as the worst of us.

“14th Feb. (Sunday).—The Mufti lunched with us and talked about Egyptian history. He said that the Circassian Mameluke system in its later development had an immoral foundation, but such had not been the case with the earlier Mamelukes, who were principally those slaves brought into Egypt by Salah ed Din (Saladin). Nothing had ever exceeded the crimes of the later Mamelukes, Ottoman and French alike. It was common with these to try the sharpness of their swords at the armourers’ shops on the passers by, by cutting off their heads or cutting them in two at the waist. Good Mohammed Abdu sitting here on my sofa in his turban telling these tales looked for a moment like a very terrible Turk making passes as he spoke with an imaginary sword. He also cited a good saying of Seyyid Jemal ed Din, ‘Justice is found where equal forces meet,’ meaning thereby that unless the strength of the ruler is opposed by the resisting strength of the ruled, there will always be tyranny. This in allusion to the passivity of the Egyptians under wrong.

“There has been a new scandal at Cairo, the Khedive having invited his Hungarian mistress to a Court Ball. The wives of the Consuls were offended at this, and would have made a public matter of it, but Cromer appeased them.

“24th Feb.—Cockerell has arrived from England to spend some weeks with us.

“26th Feb.—Everything is going splendidly in Manchuria, and there really seems to be a chance of the Russians being driven finally back into Siberia. Their sea power seems broken, and there is a good chance of the Japanese being able to cut their railway line, and so starve them out at Port Arthur. It is not likely there will be much sympathy with the Russian Government, though they are trying to get up a cry of ‘Christian civilization in danger.’ Apart from all special knowledge of the rights and wrongs of an international quarrel between nations, I think it a wise rule to give one’s good wishes to the power which is fighting nearest home, that is to say, nearest its own capital and seat of Government. It is preposterous that a Government should claim rights of any kind a thousand miles away from home.

“29th Feb.—Took Cockerell to call on the Mufti, whom we found in bed with influenza, but he conversed with his usual wisdom. Talking about a proposal made by Ali Yusuf at the General Assembly to create Parliamentary Government in Egypt, I objected to the word creation, seeing that parliamentary Government had been won in Egypt twenty-two years ago, but Abdu says its revival now is only an intrigue, and that he had opposed it, though ineffectually, for it was put to the vote and carried by a majority. In this I think he was wrong, for, intrigue or not, a parliament is the best chance there is in Egypt of getting rid of English dictation. Cromer has declared such a proposal to be beyond the competence of the Assembly. Abdu tells me that Gorst has been certainly helping the Khedive in his commercial speculations, and there has been a quarrel between him and Cromer on the subject. It is not expected that he will retain his post here of Financial Adviser.

“4th March.—There has been a good debate about the Somaliland war, more or less in accordance with my programme, published on the 10th February in the ‘Daily Chronicle.’ Ritchie reproduced some of my arguments, and Willy Redmond rubbed them in. The campaign will now be allowed to drop.

“10th March.—The following is a story current about Gorst’s quarrel with Cromer. It appears that last winter, or rather the winter before, a lady, a friend of the King’s, came to Egypt and received what she considered scanty attention at Lady Cromer’s hands, whereas Gorst made himself agreeable to her, and an intrigue was started between them favoured by the King, to whom the lady had complained, according to which Cromer at the end of the year was to be retired, and Gorst to have his place at the Cairo Agency. It was supposed that Cromer would be willing either to join the Government at home, or perhaps take the Paris Embassy. The King was dissatisfied at the time with Monson the actual Ambassador at Paris, because, being poor, Monson did not, in the King’s opinion, represent him with sufficient dignity. At any rate Gorst was promised Cromer’s succession, and counted on it (an arrangement which I had already heard of) as also that eventually Cromer’s son Errington was to have the place in reversion. Cromer, however, himself does not seem to have been told about it, and when the time came for the change refused all offers inducing him to budge, and was very angry when he learned what had been going on. Matters, moreover, have been further complicated by money transactions with Cassel. Cassel had lent His Highness half a million at 2½ per cent. to speculate with, while Gorst as Financial Adviser granted Cassel concessions. All this made up an elaborate intrigue, but it has been upset by Cromer who has put his foot down, and now declares he means to stay on indefinitely in Egypt. The Khedive, so Mohammed Abdu says, has been lectured, and told to choose between being a Khedive and being a tradesman. Gorst has had to leave Egypt, and is now through the King’s influence being provided with a post at the Foreign Office, as Assistant Under-Secretary, with the promise of an Embassy some day. Errington has been packed off to the Legation at Teheran, and the lady is to come no more to Cairo. I must say that I think old Cromer is to be sympathized with, and I am glad the intrigue failed, though Gorst has been personally friendly with us here, but these money speculations at the Finance Office are intolerable, and Gorst deserves his disappointment. Yesterday Dormer (who is in the Finance Office), came to luncheon, and added his share of information. Gigantic financial operations are in progress. A concession of all the Egyptian State railways is being given to a company of which Rivers Wilson is head. For this the Company is to pay forty-two millions sterling down. The present income from the railroads is sixteen hundred millions, so that the company at actual rates will get three per cent. for its capital, with prospect of indefinite extension. Cassel, too, has been in treaty for a concession of all the Government lands in Upper Egypt for some other prodigious sum. We suppose the idea is to convert and pay off the whole public debt, and so get the Caisse de la Dette and all other restrictions abolished. For the present, however, the French Government holds out against all changes.

“In the evening I looked in on the Mufti and recounted to him the whole story of the Gorst-Cromer quarrel. I always tell him everything, and he tells me everything, and so between us we know everything. He said that the account fitted in with all that he had himself heard and noticed during the past year. The Khedive, when he was in London, had attempted to open the question of Cromer’s retirement at the Foreign Office, but had been stopped, and Cromer this winter had spoken to him (the Mufti) impatiently of Gorst, so that he was quite prepared for what I had to tell him, and he knew all about the financial intrigues which Gorst had encouraged the Khedive in. Gorst had allowed the Khedive, for instance, to purchase the large Mariout property of the Government for a very trifling sum, and had helped him in other ways to make money, more or less at the Government’s expense. He was much amused at the lady’s part in the intrigue. It had come round to him through a friend who happened to be on board the ship that took the Khedive last summer to Constantinople, that His Highness had boasted to his fellow travellers that a certain high English personage had promised to get rid of Sheykh Mohammed Abdu for him. Abdu had talked the incident over with his friend, Mustapha Pasha Fehmy.

“15th March.—It is now decided we are all to go to Damascus on Thursday. Anne and I, Cockerell and Miss Lawrence and Mutlak, to look for horses. To-day the Mufti called. He had talked of going with us to Damascus, but has reflected that it would not do. ‘If you and I,’ he said, ‘were to go together to Damascus the Sultan would go mad. He would think that we had come to proclaim the Arabian Caliphate.’

“17th March.—I have written to George Wyndham to get him to stop the Somali campaign, and to provide for the safety of the ‘friendly tribes,’ on the Arab principle of paying blood money so as to end the feud between them and the Mullah. ‘The British forces should then retire to the seaports and leave the interior strictly alone. If there are any friendly chiefs who feel themselves too much compromised they should be given handsome pensions and invited to live at Berbera under English protection. The rest of the tribes will very soon come to terms with the others, only don’t leave British garrisons anywhere in the interior, and forbid all travelling and sporting expeditions by our officers for some years to come. You should consult Zoheir’s Ode in the Moallakat as to peacemaking by payment.’”

We left the same day for Damascus and arrived at Beyrout on the 20th by sea from Port Said.

“21st March (Sunday).—By train to Baalbek, a slow business, the pace being but little, if at all faster than formerly by diligence, which used to run between Beyrout and Damascus, and was so capitally horsed. We travelled from Zahleh with a respectable man and his wife, Christians of the place who, finding we talked Arabic, gave us a good deal of information. The country of the Lebanon is very prosperous now, entirely, so he told us, through the emigration there has been to America, the emigrants coming back with money made there in trade. Every cultivable acre of land is taken up and prices have gone up prodigiously. He pointed out to me a property in the Bekaa which had been bought as derelict forty years ago by Dervish Pasha for £6,000 and which is now worth £60,000 or £70,000. The taxation is not excessive, certainly not as compared with Egypt. There is a yearly tax of 4 per mil. on the capital value of all land, and 12½ per cent. is taken on the gross produce besides being paid in kind. Certainly, the people look prosperous, new houses and new plantations of mulberry trees everywhere, children with rosy cheeks, and men and women well dressed. He puts the population of the Lebanon at 150,000 Christians, 100,000 Moslems, and 40,000 Druses, with as many more Druses in the Hauran. I had no idea of such prosperity.

“At Baalbek we went to the ruins which I had never seen. They are, I think, the most splendid in the world. They have been to a certain extent remis à neuf for the Emperor William when he was here, and there is an absurd tablet commemorating the event of his visit, evidently of Constantinople origin, with the names of the Emperor and the Sultan side by side. Otherwise the repairs have been sensibly done. There are the usual American tourists here, fortunately not more than half-a-dozen, the most senseless type of human nature, being quite insensible to beauty or decorum and with the manners of shopboys, who ramble through the gardens of the ancient world with as little knowledge of their value as beasts have, defiling all and trampling all. Yet I noticed that one of them, a thick-set porker with pendant chaps, little cunning eyes, and a bullet head, after discussing the East in the language of Wall Street, and with comparisons drawn from the gutter of his financial mind, was able to give a sensible account to a neighbour who questioned him on the subject of the licensing laws of his own New England State. A proof that in its own environment there is no race entirely without value. They should be kept at home, for they have no business in these ancient lands.

“22nd March.—On to Damascus by the new railway which is carried down the wooded valley of the Baradah, very beautiful and very unlike any other. The railway twists and twirls dangerously in and out among the villages, and rounds sharp corners with no outlook 50 yards ahead; there have been many accidents, a single line, and the trains rock prodigiously. Here we are at a hotel, the Hotel d’Orient, a quiet place where few tourists go, but hotels are novelties still at Damascus.

“23rd March.—To the Consulate. Richards, who is in charge of it, confirms the prosperity of the Lebanon and says that most of the emigrants return with money from America, some few are Mohammedans, the greater number Christian. The country is quite undisturbed and safe. He sent a kavás with us to visit our house in the Kassab quarter, which we bought in 1881, and certainly never should have found without help. (I had forgotten even the name of the street where it was.) When we came to the door I recognized it so little that I was sure the kavás was mistaken. The little low door into the street had a chink opened when we knocked, but there were only women inside, the man, our tenant, having gone to market to sell his wheat. The kavás, however, got hold of a watchman and so we were admitted. A funny little place it was, but nice inside with an inclosure of about an acre walled round and planted with lucerne, and a fine old stone wall, shutting us in from surrounding gardens. Lady Ellenborough used to live next door, and the house belongs now to her stepson, a son of her husband Mijwel, who lets it, and on the other two sides lies the great garden, called Bostan el Basha, belonging to Sheykh Hassan el Attar, a chief of the Damascus Ulema. Ours is almost the last house at the extreme north-eastern end of Damascus on the road to Palmyra. The name of the street is Shariah Musjid el Kassab. In the afternoon we went there again and this time found the whole family of our tenant assembled. Sheykh Saleh Tillo and his three sons. They are well-off people and the rooms are richly furnished with good carpets and pillows, and one or two really handsome inlaid chests, besides china and glass, some old, some new. We are pleased with our little house and feel inclined to make a part of it habitable for ourselves and spend six weeks in it every year, but there would be a difficulty about getting possession. The rent they pay is only eleven pounds a year.

“From there we went to the Maidan quarter and drank coffee with Ahmed Ibn Jamil, a horse dealer, whom we had known in Egypt, but he showed us no good horses.

“I find very little change in the town since I was here last except on the north-western side, where the railroad has caused some building, and a big barracks has been put up. The rest of the city is much what I remember it in 1880, not at all Europeanized. The bazaars which were burnt down in Midhat Pasha’s time have been rebuilt and are as busy as ever. There are no modern shops or Frank innovations, or by-laws, or other Christian tomfooleries; things are made too uncomfortable for Europeans for there to be any resident foreign merchants. Newspapers of all kinds are forbidden, the post is unsafe and irregular, and at the Central telegraph office there are no printed forms. We were given with difficulty a sheet of notepaper to write a message on.

“24th March.—Visited the Ottoman Bank and reopened my account there, finding £12 still to my name, which had been lying there for 23 years. The house has been all these years in the care of the British Consul, who has been changed many times in the interval, the consular dragoman having been put in charge of it who, through lapse of time, had come to consider the property his own. There has been a wonderful flight of storks over the city, travelling in front of a storm from the south-west, many hundreds of them on their annual migration.

“26th March.—A night of tempest and a day of rain, but in the evening, the weather having cleared, I walked with Cockerell to Salahieh, the new quarter of the town where houses are being built, we were glad to see on good Turkish models with overhanging stories made of wooden frames filled in with plaster, cheap, practical, and pretty. Richards gives an excellent character of the present Turkish Waly Nazim Pasha as honest, sensible, and pacific, but he is building a huge Government house in European taste which must disfigure that quarter of the town. The view from Salahieh is among the first half-dozen great views of the world, the others being perhaps the view over Cairo from the top of Mokattam, (2) the harbour of Rio Janeiro seen from Corcovado, (3) the Lake of Geneva from the hills above Lausanne (4) Constantinople, from the Tower of Galata and (5) the Red Sea with Mount Sinai from the summit of Kalala. All these will stop one’s breath for wonder and bring tears to one’s eyes.

“27th March.—We spent the day in the bazaars, which are the best and cheapest in the world. It is a pleasure buying in them because the sellers are so amiable and do not worry travellers to buy. Everything is astonishingly cheap and one might live comfortably with one’s family in Damascus on £100 a year. A man can dress himself well for £1 from head to foot, a woman for 10s., a child for 2s. 6d., house rent is one tenth what it is at Cairo.

“I am becoming converted to the Sultan’s mode of government; though it is a wearisome tyranny for the rich, the poor are happy under it and are more fortunate in the circumstances of their lives than any population in Europe, and there is less discontent. The people in the streets here are all well dressed and fat and healthy, many of them have beasts to ride and there are very few beggars, food is plentiful, and all the small industries flourish. Our European factory system is unknown. Except for military conscription, an evil which they share with all the peasantries of Europe, they have nothing to complain of, and do not complain. I find an immense practical advance since twenty-five years ago. On the other hand the educated and wealthy classes are treated like children. No man may travel as far as Beyrout without a passport, or to Europe without special leave or leaving a deposit behind him of £100, or if he takes his wife with him, £200 more. No newspapers are allowed to enter the country, or any to be published of more value than a childish sheet of local news. What is extraordinary is that nearly all the Government offices in Syria are filled with political exiles from Constantinople. Nazim Pasha, the Governor, is the same person I remember head of the police at Constantinople during the Armenian massacres, and who was made a scapegoat of to save the Sultan’s face. The military commandant is a Young Turk, and so are nearly all the functionaries, that is to say, they were Young Turks, but now dare not express any opinions. Constantinople has been emptied of late years of its political notabilities, and as the Sultan will not allow them to go to Europe they are sent in exile to the various provinces, the more dangerous of them being provided with Government appointments to keep them quiet. The wonder is that they do not combine and rebel, but in fact the population is not with them, and except sporadically, there is no discontent. Such is the impression I have formed of the present régime at Damascus. Peace has been made with the Druses and with all disaffected communities.” [This state of things helps to explain the rapidity with which the revolution, four years later, of 1908, spread through the Ottoman provinces, when it had once declared itself at Constantinople. Nazim was Commander-in-Chief against the Bulgarians later and was assassinated in 1913 at Constantinople.]

“After luncheon I went with Cockerell to see the great Mosque, which is being rebuilt, and in better taste than any rebuilding on a large scale we have seen in Europe. It is a splendid piece of architecture, and the view from its minaret is superb; only the tomb of Saladin has been badly restored, it is said by a Russian Prince in Constantinopolitan taste, the ancient wooden sarcophagus having been removed by him; also it is still adorned with ribbons placed there by the irrepressible Emperor William. We are to leave for Egypt again to-morrow morning.

“28th March.—By train to Beyrout. We had for travelling companion, Ali Pasha Abd el Kader, the old Algerian Emir’s second son, with whom we had much talk. He is more of a Circassian in appearance than an Arab, and is not unlike the late Sultan Abdul Aziz. He is a great personage in Syria, and at all the stations where we stopped he was greeted by acquaintances, who kissed his hand, for he holds a semi-religious position here. He would not agree to my proposition that the people of Damascus were prosperous or contented, but did not give his reasons. He is a fat and heavy man, without great intelligence, but possessed of a certain dignity. His elder brother, Mohammed, whom we knew in 1880, lives now in Constantinople; another brother, he told me, was in Morocco, taking part in the war there, but none of them are allowed to go to Algeria. He has had news, he said, of an arrangement which had been come to between France and England for the partition of Morocco. He had travelled in France and England, but speaks no European language.” [This news, casually given me by Ali Pasha Abd el Kader, was the first I received of the Anglo-French Convention, afterwards known as the Entente, whereby the two Governments agreed to divide Egypt and Morocco between them, the first step of the coalition between England, France, and Russia against Germany, the initial cause of the Great War of 1914.]

“31st March.—Returned to Sheykh Obeyd yesterday. The Somali War has been stopped, but whether through my letter to George Wyndham or otherwise, I do not know.

“3rd April (Easter Sunday).—Dined with the Mufti, and discussed the affairs of Islam. He told an amusing story of an episode which had happened to him while an exile at Damascus. There was in London at that time (1883) a certain Rev. Isaac Taylor, who had conceived the idea of bringing about a union between the English reformed Church and Islam upon a basis of their common monotheistic creed. In this he was encouraged by the old Persian, Mirza Bakr, who carried the idea to Syria, and made Propaganda for it, to a certain extent obtaining Mohammed Abdu’s sympathy, who, with others, drew up a letter to Taylor, which he signed with two more of the leading men of the Damascus Ulema. Taylor was of course delighted, and had the letter at once published, as being the general opinion of the Mohammedan learned of Damascus, and arguing from it that the union between Christian and Moslem was on the point of accomplishment; and as such it came to the knowledge of the Sultan. No names had been mentioned in the published version, but the Turkish Ambassador in London was at once telegraphed to, and ordered to find out those of the five signatories, and thus, without suspecting the danger, Taylor let the Ambassador know, and all five were expelled from Syria. Abdu, however, before leaving Damascus protested, and had the opportunity of arguing the matter out with the authorities, and it transpired that the reason of the Sultan’s alarm had been the idea that if England should be converted to Islam the English Sovereign would ipso facto become the most powerful personage in it, and the Caliphate would naturally devolve on Queen Victoria to the Ottoman prejudice.

“5th April.—Lunched with Carton de Wiart, who gave me a deal of information about official doings, not much to the credit of the English administration [I do not transcribe them here]. Cromer, according to him, has become very slack and careless since his new marriage, and no longer takes the trouble to master the details. He is largely under the influence of his Secretary, Boyle, who, in his turn, is under the influence of the Nimr brothers, the Syrian editors of the Mokattam newspaper, who provide him with the bulk of his information on native affairs. Cromer at the same time has become very obstinate, and nobody dares contradict him. I asked him about the Khedive, and he confirmed to me all that Abdu had told me about his speculations with Cassel, and he gave me a curious instance of His Highness’s lack of the sense of what is due to his position where money matters are concerned. It appears that on the property he bought some time ago from the heirs of Halim Pasha there was a certain disreputable house let at a high rent, the payment of which was much in arrear. It was desirable to close the house, but the Khedive, in his eagerness to get in the money due, kept it open to its frequenters for six months on his own account, putting in a man from his Daira (Estate Office) to receive the profits. Cassel’s is a very bad influence for him, as he encourages him in all his irregularities.

“He talked also about Cromer’s quarrel with Gorst. Cromer disapproves his intimacy with Cassel, and had been also displeased because the Khedive went to Gorst’s wedding. Gorst has left Egypt now, but in Carton’s view will return at the end of a year or so, and get Cromer’s place. I also went with Cockerell to the Museum, and had an interesting talk with Maspero.

“10th April.—We have left Sheykh Obeyd for England. Yesterday I wished Mohammed Abdu good-bye. He has written a letter to Tolstoy which Anne is translating for him into English (see Appendix). News has come of the Anglo-French Agreement about Morocco and Egypt. I have been long expecting it. As to Egypt the terms might have been worse, for the political status is untouched, but it will be a bad day for Morocco. Here there will be a rush of speculators, and Abdu has given me the detail of the 100,000 feddans conceded to Cassel.

“15th April.—We landed at Genoa on the 14th, and came on the following day to Turin, where we are staying at the Palazzo della Cisterna with the Duke and Duchess of Aosta. On landing, I found a copy of the ‘Times’ containing Cromer’s annual report with a long despatch from Lansdowne explaining the Anglo-French Convention. Cromer’s report is in the usual First Chapter of Genesis style, and nobody would guess from it what wars and rumours of wars there have been at Cairo. Cromer publicly laments Gorst’s departure, and no hint is given of the Khedive’s misdoings, or of any of the tragi-comic events of the winter. Yet Cromer would doubtless be indignant if it were said of him that he was not a scrupulously truthful official narrator.

“Lansdowne’s despatch is a very important document, as it puts all the dots upon the i’s of the Convention. It is clear now that the two Governments understand it as a division of spoils, not quite yet complete, but to be so in the near future. The French are to have the same footing in Morocco that we have taken in Egypt, and as certain clauses in the arrangement are to last for thirty years, the final partition of Turkey is evidently foreseen in it, and so the permanent incorporation of Egypt into the British Empire; at least this is how I read the despatch and Convention taken together. One thing is clear, viz., that the Anglo-Egyptian Government will now have a free financial hand for both spending and borrowing, and that the old economy will be abandoned in favour of a forward financial policy on the Indian model. Egypt will be run for the Soudan. The best one can say is that Egypt might have been annexed, or formally protected, and that the chapter of accidents still remains open to prevent this last misfortune. For Morocco it hardly could be worse, seeing what French methods are.

“Poor old Queen Ysabel of Spain is dead at the age of seventy-three, and is to be buried at the Escurial. It is just forty years since I first saw her at Madrid, but the recollection of her and her Court remains a vivid picture in my mind, while so much else is forgotten. It gives me the image of a great, fat, colourless, blue-eyed, good-humoured woman, with arms like rounds of raw beef. Beside her, her husband Don Francisco de Assiz, a little stiff man in a much embroidered coat, and the two royal children, the Ynfanta, a thin anæmic girl of thirteen, and her brother, the little Prince of Asturias, a child of six (he afterwards was King), all four personages sitting on great gilt chairs in a row, having their hands kissed by a long procession of Spanish Grandees and Officers, the child fast asleep. We of the Diplomatic Corps had to stand just opposite the throne and watch the besa-manos for an hour or more together, thus it is all photographed upon my memory.

“16th April.—We are at the Palazzo della Cisterna, which has been thoroughly furbished up since I was here three or four years ago, but it is still a somewhat gloomy house, as few of the windows look out on open spaces, and many are filled with opaque or coloured glass. We have been given, however, a cheerful apartment of half-a-dozen small rooms looking out on some chestnut trees in their first leafage filling the square acre plot which is the Palace Garden. Here blackbirds are singing gaily, though the day has turned to rain. We were handed over on arrival by the porter, a splendid apparition in scarlet, to the Marquese de Torregiani and his wife, Lord and Lady in waiting. He a Florentine brought up as I was by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst, she an American who has never been in America. These have made us very comfortable. The Princess is looking her best with her two boys, Amadeo and Aymon, charming children, with pretty manners, and talking already three languages, Italian, English, and German. French they have not been taught as they are expected to pick it up naturally later from their parents who talk it en intimité. The Duke was not at luncheon as he is still crippled by a broken leg, but he was wheeled in afterwards. In appearance he is altered greatly for the better, as he no longer affects the coiffure of the Emperor William, and he made himself very agreeable talking of horses and travels, and the Japanese War, as to which I was glad to find we were agreed.

“Another naval smash has befallen the Russians. Admiral Macaroff blown up in his Flagship the Petropaulowski.

“I have been reading Lafcadio Hearn’s books lately which have increased my interest in the Japanese. His explanation of Buddhism is I suppose as lucid as is possible, though it passes European wit to understand it entirely. He makes out the case well between Buddhism and the monotheistic religions, but not I think as between Buddhism and materialism, the latter occupying far sounder metaphysical grounds. The weakness of Buddhism lies in this, that while accepting the eternity of matter it insists also on the eternity of mind. This may or may not be the truth, but it is a mere theory resting on no evidence or probability. The Buddhist doctrine of the composite nature of the soul is just as much a fancy as the Christian one of the soul’s simplicity. Both exaggerate the importance of mental phenomena, which as far as our experience goes are confined to an infinitesimally small fraction of the material universe, and only seem of importance to us, because in ourselves they so strongly predominate. The idea of a soul as something possible, apart from an organized body, is a superstition like all the rest, and when expounded by the Buddhist teaching, and put to the test of practice becomes equally unthinkable, whether it is complex or simple. To me as a pure materialist the soul cannot be logically distinguished from sensation, and when the organized body ceases finally to feel in death, the soul also ceases. The Buddhist theory of the transmigration of souls, of being born again to a series of new lives, rests on a fallacious reading of what birth is as well as what death is. It is just as much a mistake in physics to suppose the soul enters a new body at birth as to suppose it leaves an old one at death. Birth is simply the continuation of an organic form by its dividing itself into two. In the case of a tree this may occur by a seed growing up, or more simply by a branch bending down and taking root. The seed, however, and the root are in reality portions of the parent body extending and multiplying itself. Peg down a branch of a lemon tree and you will see it sprout; sever the branch and you have two lemon trees. Or again in the case of sexual generation of two bodies prolonging themselves together. There is no real solution of continuity, no real beginning of a new body. Death is simply the wearing out of the original organism, or of such part of the organism as has failed to multiply or extend itself. If there are no offshoots from the parent stem the whole organism perishes. If there are offshoots it continues to be alive in these. The Japanese idea of Mr. So-and-so’s child dying, and its soul being recreated in the womb of Mr. What’s-his-name’s wife is to ignore the physical reality that the new infant is no new organism, but a joint continuation of his two parents. There is no room for Mr. So-and-so’s child’s soul to creep in. Thus the whole doctrine of transmigration is to my mind absurd. We have had great discussions on these points with the Princess who is interested in Buddhist philosophy.

“18th April.—The Princess has given me a Buddhist catechism to read, and I have been much interested in it, though it seems to be almost as dreary a religion as our Western Christianity. Both take the same dark view of life in this world, that it is an evil thing, and that we are to reject all happiness if we are not to be more miserable, consoled only by the dim prospect at the end of it of an unreal bliss in Heaven or in Nirvana, of which there is no visible certainty. I would rather believe in the Mohammedan heaven if I could, which at least is a tangible possibility of happiness, but annihilation, of which there is much more inherent probability, is, after all, more comforting than either of them to those who have lived; an eternal, dreamless sleep without waking. I have it in my mind to write a short treatise in development of this thought, to be called ‘The Religion of Happiness.’

“In the afternoon there was a grand parade of all the Duke’s horses in the royal stables, which have been made over to him by the King, and which are kept up as no stables are that I have ever seen. He must have quite forty animals, most of them English weight-carrying hunters in the prime of life, and obtained at high prices, with as many men in livery to look after them. He cannot spend less than £10,000 a year on his hobby. In the morning we had been to see the two children ride in the riding school, which they did wonderfully, considering their age. They are courageous boys, thoroughly well brought up, and with the prettiest manners in the world. The Duke has been most amiable, going the round of the stables with us himself, wheeled in his chair.

“At dinner to-night I was interested to meet the Marchese di Guiccioli, grandson of the husband of the famous Contessa of Byron’s days. I should have liked to ask him what view the family took of this episode, but refrained. He told me his family had left Ravenna early in the last century, and had since lived in Venice. He is Prefect here in Turin at the present moment, an intelligent man with much manner of the world, reminding me a little of Sir Henry Layard, and like him, a good talker. After it we discussed French poetry, especially Victor Hugo’s, and the Princess quoted several of the best pieces of the ‘Legende des Siècles.’ In the morning she had taken me to the studio of the sculptor Canonico, to see a bust he has made of her. It is good, better than anything we could get done in England. Canonico is an intelligent young fellow, much absorbed in his work, and talking fluently about it. He has done several excellent busts of children, and two of our gracious King and Queen, rather painful performances, and a terrible Pietà on a gigantic scale for a cemetery, as is the taste just now in Italy.

“19th April.—We left for England, and crossing Mont Cenis in floods of rain, reached home on the 20th.

“21st April.—The news is that Winston Churchill has just seceded from the Tory party, and has been invited by half-a-dozen constituencies to stand as an independent Free Trader at the elections.

“23rd April.—At Park Lane I found both Sibell and George Wyndham, and took George to lunch with me at the St. James’s Club. In Ireland he has got into slack water with his Land Purchase, and his Catholic University scheme is tied up. He wants to see Redmond, and I am to arrange a meeting between them in Chapel Street. He has acted on my suggestion about Somaliland, and has got the Prime Minister on his side and also Arnold-Forster, and the war for the time is stopped. They have not, however, yet withdrawn all the troops to the coast, nor made a final settlement on my plan with the tribes, but he is working for both and hopes to manage it. The chief obstacle lies in the Foreign Office, which began the war, and does not like acknowledging a failure. From this we passed on to India and George Curzon and the Japanese War, where we are at one. George is getting sick of office, and longs to be away writing poetry. He recited to me a sonnet he had just made, a very good one, and told me as a great secret that he had been asked by Rowton’s executors to write Disraeli’s Life, but has been obliged to decline, as he cannot spare the time. I asked him why his party should wish to stay in office for another year? He said there were two or three things they had to finish first, the re-organization of the army and the reconstruction of South Africa, then they would be glad to go.

“26th April.—Saw Redmond at the House of Commons. The Land Purchase, he says, is going on well, more estates sold than the Government have money for, but it was lucky they got the Bill through last year, as this year it would have been impossible. He gave me the history of O’Brien’s secession from the Irish Party. I found him not very keen about meeting George, though friendly towards him. ‘Wyndham,’ he said, ‘may be quite ready to do everything for us, but he has no power.’ I asked about the King, who has just gone to Ireland. ‘We all think him friendly to us,’ Redmond said, ‘and perhaps we may get Home Rule through him. But I don’t myself believe that we shall get it except indirectly, and a bit at a time. Meanwhile all is going well.’

“Elsa Wagram is engaged to marry the Prince de la Tour d’Auvergne.

“4th May.—Saw George and arranged with him about a lunch with Redmond next week. He tells me he believes he has succeeded now in getting a final end put to the Somali Campaign. There has been a last splutter there, the bombardment of a small seaport, Illig, but the army is to be withdrawn, and the occupation of the country to be confined strictly to the Coast towns. This is something accomplished. Strict orders have been sent out to Swain the Consul General, that he is not to interfere with the tribes.

“The victory of the Japanese at Yalu is now fully confirmed. We talked also about George Curzon and the Tibet War. My relations with George Wyndham are very pleasant ones now, as he consults me on all his political affairs, and as Arthur Balfour consults him I am beginning to have a practical influence on public events.

“9th May.—Yorke Powell is dead, which grieves me. It is only a day or two since I heard from him. He was the most sympathetic of men, and my memory of him runs back to 1863, when I first met him, he being a boy, with his mother in the Pyrenees. They were friends of Madame Bertrand de Lis at Madrid, hence our acquaintance. He was fond of Spain and France, and the East, and of much else that I loved. I lose much by his death. I have written to George in the sense of our conversation of yesterday, urging him to get the Tibetan expedition withdrawn, now that Russia has been so smashed up in Manchuria, proposing also a scheme of settlement for Egypt.

“10th May.—Dined with Lady Gregory, Yeats, Gilbert Murray, and Robert Gregory. Yeats is just back from America, where they have made a great fuss with him, and he takes himself very seriously in consequence. Though doubtless a man of genius, he has a strong touch in him of the charlatan, and his verse is thin stuff, not so good as his prose. Gilbert Murray is worth ten of him as a poet, and is bringing out his ‘Hippolytus’ this month at a London theatre. I walked home with Murray as far as Hyde Park Corner. I like him, though he is rather dry in his talk, a sayer of the obvious rather than of the exquisite, the antipodes in this to Yeats, who is brilliant in conversation and full of affectation, while Murray, in spite of his poetic gift, is dull. Yeats talked to me about getting George Wyndham to grant them a patent at Dublin for their new theatre. This I readily agreed to see to.

“11th May.—Lunched in Park Lane. George promised at once to befriend the Abbey Theatre as I was sure he would. Then we got on to Eastern politics. George told me he had been adverse all along to the Tibet expedition, and would be glad to stop it now if he could. On all these matters he declares Arthur Balfour to be quite sound, and he explained to me the standing Committee in the Cabinet on Foreign Affairs, and how well it was working in the way of preventing Departmental extravagances. I told him there was one thing that needed reform more than all, that was that instead of promoting an official who had caused an unnecessary war as they always do, he should be punished. I am glad to see him taking an interest in foreign affairs, and if he could one day be Foreign Secretary, my life’s hopes would be fulfilled.

“18th May.—I have been reading Herbert Spencer’s autobiography, an astounding document, one of those that console the least of us that he is not a great man, comic too, and reminiscent of Happy Thoughts, and the author of ‘Typical developments.’ Burnand must have known Spencer to have written it.

“30th May.—To the Lyric Theatre with Cockerell to see Hippolytus. I expected to find it dull, and perhaps vulgar, in spite of the beauty of the poetry as translated by Murray, but it was all the contrary. I have never seen a tragedy like this, not even Salvini’s Othello, or Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini. Hippolytus stands upon a higher and nobler plane. It has dramatic effects one does not dream of when reading it, not that the acting was more than moderately good. Most of those on the stage were amateurs, and rather clumsy, but I think this added to the effect. Even the few professionals were sobered into a kind of good taste. With the exception of Theseus and a nurse nobody was vulgar, and the messenger (Granville Barker), who recites the catastrophe, was admirable. Everybody enunciated well, a thing more necessary in verse than prose, and the chaunting chorus seemed to me in its place. The slow movement for the first act is an artistic preparation for the rest, and throughout it is the piece that enthralls, no cleverness of the actors. Compared with Shakespeare the superiority lies in the workmanship quite as much as in the tragic atmosphere. The piece has an ordered sequence no play of Shakespeare’s possesses. There are none of Shakespeare’s vulgarities, his appeals to the gallery, his wearisome Elizabethan jokes. The rhymed verse, too, I find more effective than blank verse, at any rate than the very best, and a vast amount of Shakespeare’s is mere wind. The climax of Hippolytus is tremendous, the catastrophe the most powerful thing in dramatic literature. At the end of it we were all moved to tears, and I got up and did what I never did before in a theatre, shouted for the author, whether for Euripides or Gilbert Murray I hardly knew. Nobody cared to call for the actors, this I consider the most complete feature of the triumph. Percy and Madeline were there with Dorothy, also Carlisle, sitting almost next to me, and his son-in-law Roberts, and Mackail, and his wife. Murray with his family in a stage box, and a full house behind us. When it was over I went to tea in Belgrave Square.

“31st May.—To Cambridge on a visit to Browne, whom I found with Sheykh Hassan Towfik, the recently installed Arabic tutor. With Sheykh Hassan I had a long talk in Browne’s rooms at Pembroke, and found him a most interesting man, who had already gained much influence with such of the undergraduates as were studying Arabic for employment in Egypt. (His sudden death a few days afterwards was a great misfortune.) Then on to Babraham where I dined and slept.

“6th June.—Lunched with George and Sibell, he very full of the Montem at Eton, to which he had gone on Saturday, an honoured guest with George Curzon. The pair are to be given Doctor’s degrees at Oxford. ‘I like honours and dignities,’ said George. He talked, too, with enthusiasm about Rodin and Paris, from which he had just returned.

“7th June.—I have it from the same source from which I originally heard it, that Eldon Gorst is certainly to succeed Cromer at Cairo in two years’ time. I wrote to Mohammed Abdu to tell him this, and of the probability of a new régime being started at Cairo.

“15th June.—Dined with George Wyndham, and among others Dunraven, a pleasant party, with much talk about Ireland. Both George and Dunraven enthusiastic in their praises to me of William O’Brien. Who would have thought it possible fifteen years ago, and to me, but Time has strange revenges.

“17th June.—A large dinner in Park Lane. I had some talk with Lord Percy after dinner about Arabian matters, he being Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He is an intelligent young man, but without genius it seemed to me, or special wit, inferior for instance to Winston Churchill. There were also at dinner Lord Manners, a Dowager of Westminster, Percy and Madeline Wyndham, with Dorothy, Charles Gatty, Paget, a young Mahaffy, and Hugh Lane. George much bored between two dowagers.

“20th June.—Madeline Wyndham’s birthday dinner, always to me the pleasantest of anniversaries. Each guest’s name, there were twenty-two of them, was written on a card with a heart and wings. I had some talk after dinner with Bendor about South Africa and the land he bought there three years ago. It consists of 60,000 acres close to the Basuto frontier, and he is letting it in 300 acre lots to farmers he is bringing out from England. He has six thoroughbred stallions there from the Eaton Stud, and spoke in high praise of the Arabs, wanting me to go out and see it all.

“24th June.—To see Dr. Andrews, of the Natural History Museum at Kensington, who showed me fossil bones of primaeval horses, and other ancient beasts, also the new Okapi stuffed. It is a miniature Giraffe, striped on the hind quarters like a Zebra. Andrews is a queer, rough little man, but a good fellow, who knows his trade, and mocks at conventionalities. Lunched afterwards with Amir Ali and his English wife. He has retired from the Indian service, and is domiciled now permanently in England, bringing up his children at schools and universities as Englishmen.

“28th June.—To Yeats’ Irish play, ‘Where there is Nothing,’ a very poor piece, without either wit or sense.

“30th June.—Gave a scientific luncheon to Andrews, Lydekker, Cockerell and his scientific brother from America, to discuss the origin of the horse. This we did pretty thoroughly, deciding that it was quite possible the Arab was a separate wild breed, that there might be aboriginal wild horses in Africa, and also on an island in South America, Chiloe. Lydekker considers both the existing Prevalsky horse and the Tarpan to be wild breeds, though probably crossed with feral stallions. Andrews believes that a heavy horse of the shire type existed once wild in the Thames valley. All agree, I think, that the origin of the wild horse was multiple. Andrews attaches much importance, as indicating a separate wild origin for the Arab, to the depression found in their skulls to receive the tear gland as also to the high setting on of their tails level with the croup.

“2nd July.—Good old Watts is dead, full of years and honour. His pictures this year at the New Gallery were almost as good as ever they were, and he was well and in good spirits down to a few days before his end. He was a great painter—on the whole the greatest in England since Reynolds.

“Another death is that of Stanley, the explorer, who has left £135,000, got by doing dirty work for the King of the Belgians on the Congo, a charlatan, who has had the cheek to express a wish he should be buried in Westminster Abbey.

“6th July.—Lunched with Margot, at her house in Cavendish Square. On the doorstep I found myself with Coquelin père, to whom Margot gave an effusive welcome. We had an amusing meal, Margot making her little girl Elizabeth recite some verses of Stevenson’s about a butterfly, which the child did prettily, dressed up in a Velasquez costume with stiff hoop and petticoat. Coquelin good-naturedly suggested that ‘perhaps Mademoiselle would be shy,’ but Margot would not hear of it, ‘There is no shyness,’ she said, ‘in this family,’ nor was the child at all embarrassed. Coquelin then gave a little entertainment of his own, imitating an Englishman’s account of him, Coquelin, in absurd Anglo-French.

“13th July.—Lunched with George. He is dying to be out of office, and live an irresponsible life away from politics, which he declares to be an abomination. He says that I am the only person who has learnt the secret how to live. We are to spend next Saturday to Monday together in Worth Forest, where I have seen deer lately. They seem to have come originally from Buckhurst, where the Park fence had been allowed to get out of repair, and they have spread themselves over the whole Forest district as far west as Shelley’s Plain and Leonardslee, a distance of some twenty miles, and are to be found in small herds in all the great woodlands. It is a reoccupation of the Forest by its ancient inhabitants (not by strangers), where they do no harm, and so are preserved by everybody, except the German Count Münster at Maresfield, who complains that they interfere with his chasse. This comes of Harvey Pechell’s snobbery in bequeathing Maresfield, an old Shelley property left him by his wife, to the Prussian Ambassador, because he had been socially polite to him.

“16th July.—George has been with me in Worth Forest occupying a tent we have pitched. He declares he will take five years holiday after the General Election. We have ridden all over the Forest in Tilgate and Smith’s Charity, talking always of past days, and the glories of the Crabbet Club, and devising schemes of an ideal life in woods, with a pleasant society of men and women on Boccaccian lines, which we are to call the Fellowship of the Holy Ghosts, but George returns to his parliament to-morrow.

“9th Aug.—Went by appointment to see Winston Churchill at his rooms in Mount Street. He is astonishingly like his father in manners and ways, and the whole attitude of his mind. He has just come in from playing polo, a short, sturdy little man with a twinkle in his eye, reminding me especially of the Randolph of twenty years ago. He took out his father’s letters which I had left with him six weeks ago, from a tin box, and read them to me aloud while I explained the allusions in them, and gave him a short account of the political adventures of the early eighties in which Randolph and I had been connected. There is something touching about the fidelity with which he continues to espouse his father’s cause and his father’s quarrels. He has been working double shifts this session in Parliament, and looks, I fancy, to a leadership of the Liberal Party, and an opportunity of full vengeance on those who caused his father’s death. I promised to let him see extracts from my diaries of 1884-1885.

“Mary Milbanke is with me at Newbuildings. She is much enlivened and improved by her trip to the West Indies last winter. I am very fond of her, having acted as a parent to her from the time she was a child.

“14th Aug.—Fernycroft. I drove here, starting on the 11th, with Miss Lawrence and the two boys, Alfred Kensett and Harry Holman, taking tents and camp equipments with us. We went by Fernhurst and Midhurst, and nearly had an accident going up the steep hill at Holly Coomb, for we were overloaded, and it was only by putting the four horses we had been driving in pairs together with the four in hand harness we had with us that I managed with a rush to get at full gallop to the top. There had been heavy rain and the road was much broken up by it, and it was touch and go whether they could do it. Holly Coomb is a romantic place with great oak woods, where they used to boast in former times that they could kill a woodcock every day of the year.

“I have had a long talk with Meynell, who is staying here, about Roman politics and Catholic prospects. He tells me the true cause of quarrel between the Vatican and France is that Combes has all along intended to do away with the Concordat, and that Merry del Val is young and imprudent. The first quarrel raised by Merry as to the French President’s visit was so ill-chosen that it raised protests everywhere in the Catholic world and so had to be abandoned. The other quarrel has been forced upon the Pope. The Bishops of Laval and Dijon had two or three years ago been denounced at Rome, the one for immorality with a Carmelite Abbess, the other for being affiliated to a Freemasons’ Lodge. He had been seen in plain clothes coming out of a house where the Masons were holding a meeting, and at Rome his action was connected with the story of there being a secret plot, supported with much money, for the dissemination of Masonic ideas among the French priesthood. Young men had been educated for the purpose in the seminaries, and it was supposed the Bishop was one of them. On being summoned to Rome the Bishop refused to go and declared a higher allegiance to be due to the French Government. He is now excommunicated. As to the other’s immorality it has been condoned whether proved or not, and he has been given an archbishopric in partibus at Rome and thus made his peace. Meynell thinks it will lead to a rupture of the Concordat. The French Government mean to appropriate the churches in France and lease them back to the Catholic communities, but Meynell doubts whether these will be disposed to pay a rent reckoned at £2,000,000. I am inclined to think that the quarrel will eventually be of advantage to the faith, but Meynell doubts.”

Here follows an account of a driving and camping tour ending at Clouds. My arrival there is thus described. We had camped the night before on the down above Wylye.

“5th Sept.—We had arranged that I was to wait in camp till nine for George Wyndham who was to ride from Clouds in the early morning; and sure enough at 8:30 I heard the sound of galloping hoofs and presently a view holloa and they arrived, George and his son Percy, both bareheaded, and with them Dorothy, and I gave them tea in my tent. It was a joyous meeting on a joyous morning, for George has cast his official cares to the winds and is in his most expansive mood. Then we all went on to Clouds, my four horses pulling double with the excitement of the galloping outriders. There are two terrible hills on either side of Hindon, and these we raced up at a gallop, the team going gallantly and out-pacing the riders, all except George, who was well mounted and led the way. What a morning! We spent the day discussing the Japanese victories and international questions and building by-laws and religion. The elder Percy was curious as to the exact extent of my beliefs. He asked me whether I believed in nothing at all supernatural. I answered ‘Yes, I have a small belief in the evil eye.’ This was hailed as a great pronouncement.

“6th Sept.—A day of galloping on the downs to Whitesheet Castle, and this afternoon I read them my version of Lebid’s ‘Ode’ and my play ‘Fand.’ I am satisfied with ‘Fand’ and believe it has even acting capabilities. We had some discussion what to call it, a drama or what, George maintaining that it should be called a tragedy, because it ends in the hero going back to his wife.

“I asked him about Somaliland and what instructions had been given to Swain. He told me he had pressed my views of pacification by blood payment, and had no doubt Swain’s instructions for peace had been stringent because all the military men were furious against him. As to Thibet, Lhassa is to be really evacuated, another triumph of our joint influence. We also talked about Egypt. I gave him my views of a new régime there based on Mohammed Abdu’s letter. He said they were quite aware that the present state of things at Cairo was unsatisfactory, but the great obstacle to any change was Cromer, who was entirely satisfied with all as it is. George had met the Khedive Abbas at a dinner party in London, where the Khedive had treated him with obsequious politeness. This had given him a contempt for him.

“8th Sept.—George has left us, and with him the life of the party. He is egotistical but not, I think, selfish, monopolizing attention to his own talk and his own ideas. Some people resent this, but on me it has a stimulating effect, rousing me to repartee; thus I am always happy in his company, almost as his mother is who adores his self-glorifications, which are a schoolboy’s in simplicity.

“10th Sept.—Left Clouds. On my way back through Wilton I passed the statue which has been put up there to George Pembroke. It is on a colossal scale but very like him. It feels strange that I should have known him as a boy.

“17th Sept.—Chapel Street. To-day I signed the settlement, making over Crabbet to Judith, thus ending my reign there after thirty-two and a half years of it, though I still retain the Lordship of the Manors of Worth and Oram, with Worth Forest, Springfield, and Newbuildings. It is rather a leap in the dark but has not been taken without reflection. George also signed the settlement and also Eddy Marsh, as witnesses. George starts to-morrow, with his son Percy, for Frankfort in order that he may learn German. He is a charming young man and George is immensely proud of his good looks. For himself, his one thought now is to get back to poetry.

“18th Sept.—Dined with old Philip Webb at Caxtons and discussed Tolstoy’s ideas with him which I quarrel with on two points. (1) His belief that the world is improving in the direction of justice and (2) His view that religion of any kind makes people unselfish.

“23rd Sept.—Anne has left for Egypt. I am to follow in six weeks. Herbert Bismarck is dead; his wife, Maggie Hoyos, was a nice, simple girl when I used to go and see them at Paddockhurst, some fourteen years ago. I see in the papers that she threw herself on her husband’s coffin at the funeral; their marriage had been a very happy one.

“28th Sept.—Dined in Belgrave Square, George being with us, having returned from Germany. He has just published a letter in the ‘Times’ repudiating a programme put out in his absence by Dunraven of a kind of Home Rule for Ireland. I know this kind of Home Rule to be in accordance with his views, but he gets out of the difficulty by declaring, that it is absolutely contrary to those of the Unionist Party, a distinction which has so far escaped the criticism of opponents.” This was the first mistake made by George Wyndham in his management of his Irish policy and the beginning of great trouble for him, though he did not at the moment foresee it. His short run to Frankfort was the first real holiday he had taken during his three years at the Irish office, and he had given orders not to be disturbed during his absence by having letters forwarded to him. He was consequently unaware until his return that Lord Dunraven, with whom he had been acting in concert, had launched their scheme of ‘Devolution’ on the world and without due reflection he had written his letter to the ‘Times,’ an unfortunate blunder which cost him his political career.

“1st Oct.—Sir William Harcourt is dead, the last of the great 1880 Liberals. I am sorry he did not live to see the return of his party to power and the revival of the Harcourt earldom in his own person. He lived just long enough to inherit Newnham. The last I saw of him was some three months ago when I found him in his carriage in Green Park and exchanged a few words with him. He was always pleasant and kind to me and allowed me full liberty of laughter and plain speech, though he never, I think, quite forgave me my gibes at ‘Paradise Lost.’ (I had called Milton once ‘a bombastic windbag.’) This was touching a sacred subject to him, but perhaps I exaggerate the incident. Politically he was straighter than most of his fellow politicians, and when he condoned the Jameson Raid at the inquiry, I believe it to have been out of loyalty as a Privy Councillor to the Queen. His domestic life was very beautiful, and at home he was adored.

“10th Oct.—Alexandre de Wagram is here for a day or two’s shooting. To-day our last beat was the Sprinks Plantation, where we got seventy-two pheasants, all driven high overhead. The light happened to be favourable and the shooting very good. For myself I got twenty-five birds down at one stand with only thirty cartridges, the best I ever did in my best days.

“13th Oct.—Oliver Howard and his wife arrived here last night having gone to a wrong station and wandered in flies for several hours. She is a very pretty but rather captious little person, which perhaps accounts for Oliver’s going to South Africa.

“I am working out a scheme of small holdings here with a bungalow cottage and ten acres each at moderate rents, in pursuance of an article I published on the by-law tyranny in the last ‘Nineteenth Century Review.’

“24th Oct.—An extraordinary incident has occurred. The Russian fleet issuing from the Baltic, and bound for Japan, has at midnight attacked the English fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank, sunk one or two of their craft, killed two fishermen and wounded others. The newspapers treat the affair as a mistake, or panic on the part of the Russian officer in command. I do not take this view. The Russian aristocracy is immensely irritated just now against us English and is in the condition of mind when a man slaps another’s face, without regard to the consequences. I am a man of peace, but under the circumstances were I in Arthur Balfour’s place, I would stand on no ceremony, but should order out the Channel fleet, and bring the Russian squadron into Spithead. The commanding officer was in all probability drunk at the time, but that is no excuse. [I wrote in the same sense to George and he answered me briefly thus: ‘Many thanks for your letter on the North Sea outrage; it was a shocking affair. We cannot contemplate the high seas of the world becoming a vast imitation of a running camp poker saloon.’]