Part 2 — CHAPTER VII (continued 2)

“1st Feb.—Terence Bourke has been with me for the last two days. He is now quite with me about the reform movement in the East and the Future Independence of Egypt. There is better news from Persia, where it is reported that the Shah’s army has been defeated by the Constitutionalists, and the three Russian officers in his service are flying for their lives. Browne is issuing a useful pamphlet about the revolution there.

“5th Feb.—I have moved to London for some weeks, to Chapel Street. Cockerell dined with me, very happy, he tells me, at Cambridge, enjoying the life there and acquiring influence with the undergraduates.

“9th Feb.—In the afternoon came Brailsford, with whom I discussed Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, and Somaliland. He thinks Grey is practically selling both Turkey and Bulgaria to Russia, as he sold Persia. Brailsford is making a good fight for them in the ‘Daily News.’

“13th Feb.—There is another crisis in Constantinople, an attempt by Kiamil Pasha, the Grand Vizier, to bring about a reactionary coup d’état. He has dismissed the Ministers of War and Marine, and appointed new ones. If the Parliament does not insist on his dismissal the Constitution will go to ruin, as it went thirty years ago, at least so I read the telegrams.

“17th Feb.—The crisis at Constantinople has passed off well, the Committee of Union and Progress, with its great majority in Parliament, having forced Kiamil to give in his resignation. This will be an excellent example, and was absolutely necessary if they are not to lose what had been gained by the revolution. The ‘Times,’ however, and ‘Pall Mall’ and other financial papers are very angry, just as they were angry when Sherif Pasha had to resign at Cairo in 1882. There are finance schemes at the bottom of it all now as then, and precisely the same arguments are used about military pressure having been put upon the Chamber, the pronunciamento it is called.

“25th Feb.—Morley has produced his Indian Bill in the Lords, a great flourish of trumpets about a very small matter. Morley will not be at the India Office long enough to set the reforms really going, and his successors and the Anglo-Indian officials will take care that these are neutralized in detail, as they easily can be. If Morley had been serious he would have brought in his Bill three years ago when he had an all-powerful Radical House of Commons behind him, but he did absolutely nothing, nor would he have done anything but for the boycottings and assassinations. Then he tried the first sham reform, a council of tame landlords, suggested to him by the Anglo-Indian officials, and now he puts forward this other sham suggested by Gokhale. They will lead to nothing. Still the East is awake and moving.

“Conny Lytton has been arrested with other suffragettes, and is to-night in Holloway gaol. She has led a hermit’s life at home for the last fifteen years, seldom going away from her fireside, nor from her mother’s wing, now she suddenly takes up this suffrage question in its most violent form.

“I hear from Lady C. that the poor King is really very ill, though they do all they can to hide it. The present attack they say dates from his visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm at Berlin, caused by wearing a Prussian uniform too tight at the throat.

“1st March.—I have been reading Newman’s ‘Loss and Gain,’ which I read years ago, but had forgotten. In style I think it quite perfect, having the same sort of quiet humour one finds in Jane Austen’s novels, but even more subdued. The characters are admirably drawn, and justify themselves in speech and action in a way so many novelists miss, including Meredith; thus it continues to interest one in spite of its strangely out-of-date controversial Theology. Newman’s mind, at any rate in his Oxford days, seems never to have faced the real issues of belief and unbelief, those which have to be fought out with materialism, yet the book was published less than a dozen years before Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species.’ What a gulf separates us from that time, the epoch of undoubting belief in the literal inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. It seems difficult to realize the time when the best and sanest minds in England were arguing about the Apostolical Succession and the Councils of the early Church, unconscious of the wider issues about to be opened, just as they were at Constantinople about the Procession of the Holy Ghost, while Sultan Mahmud was hammering at the gates.

“5th March.—Chapel Street. Frank Lascelles lunched with me, and we had a pleasant talk about old times. He has seen much lately of the King, having been at Sandringham and Windsor, and constantly asked to meet his Majesty at dinner and play bridge with him. He gives the same account of the King’s short temper that Lady C. did, and of the language he uses to his partners when the cards go wrong. I asked him whether the King was a good player, and he said, ‘Oh no, when he has a good hand with his dummy he knows how to make the best of it, but he has no knowledge of where the unseen cards should be.’ The King is off to-day to Biarritz, and I gather that there is something seriously the matter with his throat. Frank talked highly of the King’s knowledge of Foreign politics, and of his tact and skill in dealing with them. Cromer was Frank’s subordinate in Egypt in 1879, and he told me that meeting Cromer the other day, he had remarked, ‘I suppose we shall be having the Emperor William talking again in a few days, it seems impossible to make him hold his tongue.’ Frank’s reply hit Cromer hard: ‘Yes, as impossible as it is to make you hold yours.’ Cromer deserved it, for he has been talking a deal of nonsense since he returned from Egypt about things he does not understand. Lady Cromer has become a suffragette in opposition to her lord.

“Next we talked about the Sackville case, which is just now much in the papers. I asked him what his recollection was about Lionel West’s having ever acknowledged his marriage with Pepita, and he said that he had never heard him acknowledge it, though, of course, they were together at the Paris Embassy. If he had acknowledged it Frank would have taken his own wife to call on her. But there was never question of it. Lionel was the most secretive of men. Some years ago he had written to Frank to ask him what his memory was on the point of such acknowledgment, and Frank had answered him in the sense just given. On the other hand, there were one or two curious facts within Frank’s recollection. Pepita died at Arcachon during the Commune, while Lionel was in charge of the Embassy at Paris, and Frank was with him when he received the telegram announcing her death from Lord Lyons, who was at Bordeaux, which was as follows: ‘Votre pauvre femme vient de mourir. Vos enfants vous appelent.’ Lionel asked him what he ought to do. Could he leave Paris? It was agreed that certainly he ought to go. Lionel was terribly overcome, for he was devoted to her, and Frank saw him off to the Orleans station in a private brougham they found in the street, for there were no cabs on hire—as an affair ‘de vie et mort.’ This would seem to show that Lord Lyons recognized the marriage, but nobody actually knew. John Bidwell once put the question plainly to Lionel, and his answer was ‘the person most interested in knowing knows the whole facts.’ Another curious incident, taken in connection with the present case, which is being tried at Madrid, of a page in the entries of the marriage register having been torn out, is this: It happened also while Lionel was in charge at Paris. Sir Richard Wallace had been married at the Embassy, and Lionel one day looking through the Register, found the entry recording it and tore out the page, saying, ‘the marriage is an irregular one, and ought not to be here.’ Atlee, who was Librarian in charge of the Archives, was shocked at this, and insisted that Lionel should restore the page and write an acknowledgment of its having been torn out. My own impression from all this is that Lionel wished to make a legal marriage with Pepita, but knew of her previous marriage, and perhaps went through some form of marriage with her secretly, wishing to legitimize the children one day, at least in France—that in order to secure this he got the page of the Madrid register torn out which would have been evidence against them, indeed of his own first marriage. It is certain that he entered his later children as legitimate. Afterwards, however, when he had become Lord Sackville, the succession to the title and estates became a matter of importance, and as his chief love was for his daughter Victoria, whom his marriage could not legitimize in England, for she was born before the secret marriage, and whom he had married to his nephew, he changed his mind and wished to destroy all trace of it and, to make matters surer for his nephew, Victoria’s husband, got him to restore the torn out page recording Pepita’s first marriage to its place in the Madrid register. This, I think, is the only possible solution of the puzzle consistent with Lionel’s honourable character, the love he bore to Pepita, and the love he bore to Victoria. It would account, too, for his nephew’s part in the affair, for there would be nothing dishonourable in restoring a missing page to its proper place. The truth about the double marriage was probably told by Lionel to his brother Edward and Edward’s son, the present peer, and it was agreed between them to say nothing about it, and trust to chance, as the case could not legally arise during Lionel’s lifetime. I expect all this will come out when it is tried in the House of Lords. Meynell, however, whom I saw later in the day, declares that the burden of proof will lie with those who deny Lionel’s marriage. I am of opinion that the nephew and Victoria will be able to retain their possession of Knole and the title. But it is a most interesting problem.

“8th March.—Called on Margot in Downing Street, and finding her alone stayed on for an hour. We talked among other things of Conny Lytton’s imprisonment and the doings of the suffragettes, from whom she gets numerous threatening letters, not all of them anonymous, menacing her with bombs and even the murder of her children. She got one only the other day and has to be guarded by police. There were two at the door as I came in and every caller has to be scrutinized, and I had been kept waiting five minutes for this in the hall before I was allowed upstairs. ‘Even my brothers,’ Margot said, ‘have to submit to this.’ I told her of a letter I had received about Conny from her sister Betty, and she expressed great concern and asked what she could do to make her comfortable at Holloway. Could she send her things to eat, or what? I told her there was nothing to be done except to keep her in hospital, where she would be well looked after, but I advised her strongly to cease the war with the suffragettes if she could; there was nothing so demoralizing for a country as to put people in prison for their opinions. This could be seen in Ireland, where nobody felt it any longer a disgrace to be in gaol. She said: ‘I suppose they will get what they want in the end, though I don’t suppose it will do them any good. Henry says that it all depends on the Cabinet, where there is a majority in favour of the suffrage, but he does not see how women could be kept out of Parliament if they got the vote, and that would never do. From this we went on to Francis Thompson and other pleasanter themes till the hour went by, and her doctor calling, I said good-bye. I am very fond of Margot. Years do not change her nor the deceitfulness of politics.

“10th March.—Father Tyrrell and George Wyndham came to luncheon with me, and we had an interesting discussion on poetry, literature, and religion. We talked about the proposed new ‘Life of Newman,’ which is being brought out by Wilfrid Ward. Tyrrell doubted whether it would be a sincere one as to Newman’s attitude towards Papal Infallibility, and he told us how a letter from Newman to Lord Emley, dated 1870, had recently been destroyed, in which Newman had spoken strongly against it. It was untrue to say that Newman had never had a doubt since he joined the Church. Newman, he agreed with me, had never really argued out the fundamentals on which Christianity is based, the existence of God and the reality of a revelation. Newman’s attitude is epitomized in his ‘History of My Religious Opinions’: ‘I believe in God because I believe in the existence of myself and in my consciousness of right and wrong, all the rest is a matter of development,’ or words to that effect. Tyrrell to-day was in his most attractive, least aggressive mood.

“After this I went on to Farm Street, which had been so long Father Tyrrell’s home, and sat an hour with his once fellow Jesuits, Fathers Gerard and Pollen. Father Gerard showed me his ‘History of Stonyhurst,’ where we had been at school together, and gave me a little play, an extravaganza he had written for the centenary of the College. He talked also of Alfred Russel Wallace and his opinions, which he thought illogical, and of W. H. Hudson, and of various matters of natural history, which has always been his hobby.

“11th March.—John Dillon came to lunch and we discussed Persian, Turkish, and Egyptian affairs, about which he has been worrying the Government in Parliament. We talked also about old times in Ireland, when we two worked together. ‘It is astonishing,’ he said, ‘how all the doings of that time are forgotten. There is hardly a young man in Ireland now who has any knowledge of what the Land League accomplished, or who Michael Davitt was, or what was the Plan of Campaign. The ten years that followed the Parnell split were a political blank. It has left a gap in our history.’ I asked him whether George Wyndham’s Land Bill had done good or harm? ‘Something of both,’ he said, ‘the people who have taken advantage of it had become better off, but it has not stopped the decrease of population nor the emigration. One thing it has not changed, the ill-feeling towards England is stronger than it ever was.’ ‘As long as that is the case,’ I said, ‘things are going right.’

“12th March.—I was premature in thinking I had converted Margot in the direction of peace with the Suffragettes. She writes in strong language about them: ‘I personally think the women criminal as they threaten people’s lives and incite the rotters in the street to storm anything and anybody. They are hysterical, full of vanity, and too idle to promote their cause in an intellectual way. . . . Let them have the vote after a general election approves of it, but let us be in peace till then.’ I am answering: ‘You must not be angry with me for what I said in favour of the Suffragettes. I have no brief for them, nor do I take much interest one way or another in their cause. I should be against them if I thought there was the smallest chance of woman rule in England, but there is none, no more than there is danger of “the Yellow Peril” in Europe, or the “Negro Peril” in America. Women have never ruled men anywhere and never will except indirectly by being better and kinder and less selfish than we are. You are one of these, and if I talked as I did it was because I was afraid you might focus on yourself the resentment of some foolish women who would do you an injury in anger at having been treated criminally for a political offence. I know how violent ideas work in enthusiastic people’s minds. That is my chief interest in the quarrel. So absolve me. The whole woman’s movement is not worth a curl of your brown head, which may God protect from evil.’

“An Indian gentleman, Mr. Khaparde, called on me with a letter of introduction from Hyndman. Here is a genuine Nationalist of a very different type from Gokhale and Lajpat Rai. He is in England now for the first time to do what he can in favour of his friend Tilak, who has been deported to Mandalay. He brought Tilak’s case before the Privy Council but, of course, without result, and he is now trying to get a petition signed in favour of his friend’s release, and present it in Parliament. He spoke very openly in an extreme national sense, saying that everyone in India now was for eventual independence, even the moderates, though people dared not say all they thought. ‘Even the Mohammedans?’ I asked, and he said there was no real difference of opinion between them and the Hindoos, ‘in a revolt they would all be with us. They hate English rule, perhaps more than we do, because, except in the West, it was they, not we, who had been deprived of power by the English. The Moderates,’ he said, ‘were swayed by motives of personal interest, but they had no following in the country. Gokhale found it to his advantage to play the English game or he would not be where he is. As for Lajpat Rai, his arrest had been a blunder, for he was a man of no importance, the real leaders of the riots being still at large.’ He said he found our people here in England very different to what he had imagined them. He had been brought up with the tradition of their being full of good qualities, liberal, hospitable, and kindly, he found them entirely engrossed in money-making, and it was impossible to get them to take any interest in Indian questions. His visit to England had convinced him that it was useless to appeal to any sense of justice, there must be more than talk in India before any change could come about and violence there would be. He was scornful about Morley’s reforms, they would be useless except to the few hangers-on to the Government who would get places and pay. They would never have been given at all but for the bombs, and the reforms were not intended now to be effective. The Indian Government had got all it wanted—special powers of arrest and imprisonment and of putting down the freedom of the Press. I asked him whether this would stop the revolutionary movement. He said on the contrary, it would accelerate it, they would work on all the same in secret and more effectively. Khaparde has adopted European dress but still wears his red turban; he has great intelligence and his ideas are precise and strongly expressed. He is to come again.

“16th March.—Poor Peploe Brown is dead. Yesterday his servant Fred called on me and gave me a long account of his master’s illness and death. It was a pathetic story told in that odd cockney language ‘Fwed’ was famous for. I had never heard exactly about Peploe’s early life, for great talker as he was, he never spoke of it to anyone, and Fred had only learned it from a brother who came to him in his last days, for all that he had ever said to Fred was that ‘God had been hard to him in his youth.’ It appears that forty-six years ago, being a young lieutenant in the army, he had married a girl he loved and who loved him, but almost in their honeymoon she had been taken with a fever and died. This destroyed his life. He left the army, wandered about the world, took up painting and adopted Bohemian ways. For the last twenty years he had occupied a studio in York Place, where he died. He had squandered all his money and lived there in the greatest poverty. I knew him through his fellow-painter, Molony, who had made friends with him many years before at Madrid. He was the kindest of men, and when Molony grew old he nursed him and took great care of him notwithstanding Molony’s somewhat scornful protests, who used to swear at him as ‘that damned fellow Peploe.’ About the time Molony died he himself got a return of malarial fever which attacked his spine (much as my case was), and for the last twelve years he has been practically paralysed and has remained day and night sitting in his armchair, never going to bed or lying down, and often at a loss how to get a meal, for he could not sell his pictures. He could not have lived but for his servant Fred’s good care, who for the last fifteen years had done all for him with wonderful devotion, coming each morning at a very early hour to the studio and staying on till eight or nine at night and never a day off during all those years. There was no bed for him in the studio. Peploe spent his lonely nights reading, sometimes Fred said for thirteen hours at a time, though he was almost blind and had to use microscopic glasses applied to his single valid eye. Being alone at night he had had a number of contrivances arranged to put out or light the gas, or to call for help if needed, for he was an ingenious mechanician. Last Christmas he was taken with a strong bronchitis and a violent attack of what Fred called ‘his lightning pines’ (pains), but Fred nursed him through it till the late snow and cold had brought it back. He had been left to sleep one evening, and when Fred and the brother came back in the morning they had found him sleeping still, but he was dead. It was then discovered that during the forty-six years since his wife died, and in spite of growing poverty and difficulties of every kind, he had kept all the things that had belonged to his dead wife, her clothes, garments of the days of crinoline, her jewellery, her ornaments and the furniture of the house where they had lived, stored in a magazine for which he had religiously paid rent, also that he had worn her photograph next to his heart, and they found it on him when they found him dead. A number of his smaller treasures they buried with him in his grave, but the poor old clothes and the furniture in the warehouse will be sold. He had sat all these years under his ‘Magnum Opus,’ an immense picture in the style of Murillo, representing the Adoration by the Shepherds at Bethlehem, at which Molony used to mock in its unfinished state because the angels, represented as sitting in the clouds, with their harps not having yet been filled in, left the expanded fingers in the grotesque attitude that schoolboys use in ridicule, though this had been altered now and the picture with infinite labour finished. It had been bought of him out of charity by a former friend, Lord Bute, who had been kind to him in many ways, but Lord Bute unfortunately had died, leaving the picture there. Lady Bute was now taking it away to put in her chapel. I asked the faithful Fred what had been done for him. ‘He had nothing,’ he said, ‘to leave me, poor gentleman, but he was generous and good to me. I am by trade a mender of china, I mean to set up in a small business, but I cannot get over the loss. I have been with him seventeen years and never a day off. I do not know now where to turn.’ [I took two statuettes of camel riders, which Brown had modelled in his later years, off Fred’s hands, they are very perfect of their kind, and had been given him with other odds and ends from the studio by the brother. Fred brought them to me a few days later and left me promising to come again, and I promised I would help him to set up his business, but he never reappeared.]

“18th March.—There has been a debate in Parliament on the military danger from Germany, and Frederic Harrison has a long letter about it in the ‘Times.’ I agree with him that the danger is a very real one of invasion and ruin within no great number of years, only he does not draw the inference I draw, namely, that we should hasten to divest ourselves of our overgrown overseas Empire and devote our naval and military resources to the defence of our own shores. We shall not do this, and we shall perish, as the Roman Empire perished, by trying to hold too much. I am myself the extremest of all possible Little Englanders and would cheerfully return to the ‘spacious’ days of Queen Elizabeth when we held not a foot of land outside the kingdom.”

[This is the point at which Harrison and I diverged from what had for twenty-seven years been a common political sympathy about foreign affairs into antagonism, his path being towards war with Germany, mine towards a gradual shedding of our “white man’s burden” in Egypt and India.]

“I saw George Wyndham in Park Lane. He is pessimistic about the prospects of a German invasion, and thinks it is certain to happen in a few years. The only thing we can do is to go on building ships. Speaking of the plan revealed to me by Usedom in 1866 of bringing Holland into union with Germany and claiming the Dutch Colonies, he told me he had heard the same a good many years ago from Vitelleschi.

“19th March.—Professor Browne came to luncheon. He has made a wonderful fight of it about Persia, but is beginning to be hopeless, as Russian armed intervention seems imminent. He is losing his influence, too, with the Foreign Office. Grey at first listened to him, but is now less willing. ‘Grey,’ he said, ‘is so ignorant, that he hardly knows the Persian Gulf from the Red Sea.’

“26th March.—Things are going badly both in Persia and the Balkans. As soon as the snow melts, both countries will be occupied, the one by Russia, the other by Austria. Grey has thrown over the Persian Constitutionalists, and has declared that the Russians may do what they like at Teheran.

“29th March.—I have been reading Stead’s book about himself and Madame Novikoff, poor stuff as literature, a paste and scissors collection of articles of the last thirty-five years; nevertheless I have managed to extract from it certain historical facts of importance, as also to fix the date of Madame Novikoff’s visit to Crabbet. It must have been September or October 1876. She was not at that time a really pretty woman, but was lively and anxious to please, singing Russian songs and making the most of herself. I paid her some attention at first, and wrote a song for her to sing to one of her Russian airs, but she ended by boring us before her week’s visit was out. She was too intent on her own particular politics to be interesting in any other way. As to these she no doubt began by being an enthusiast, but she also made a business of it later. Her advocacy of Ismaïl Pasha’s claims in 1885 can hardly have been political. She and Stead were pretty well matched. I find in the book one important letter which I wish I had had when I was writing my ‘Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt.’ It is from Gladstone, written a few days after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and reveals how entirely that great moralist had thrown himself into the fury of blood-shedding in that least just of wars. After thanking his correspondent for her congratulations he says: ‘We and the whole country are in a state of rejoicing, and I hope of thankfulness to Almighty God who has prospered us in what I feel and know to be an honest undertaking. . . . Whether the England of 1882 deserves to be regarded by some in Russia with a jealous eye, or whether we, too, have been labouring in the common interests of justice and civilization a little time will show. We certainly ought to be in good humour, for we are pleased with our army, our navy, our admirals, our generals, and our organization! . . . It is hardly more than seven weeks since we determined to send some 35,000 men to a distance of say 3,000 miles, and it has pleased God to give us a quick result.’

“This, be it recollected, in regard to a military adventure undertaken in the interests of the Stock Exchange, and a battle at which 20,000 of the half-armed peasantry of the Nile had been slaughtered.

“2nd April.—There is a telegram in the papers, ‘Riots at Cairo, the garrison under arms on account of new Press Law’! I should not be surprised if what has happened in the Balkans may have had some connection with it. There Servia has had to accept the terms imposed on her by Austria—backed as Austria was by Germany—while Servia failed of her expected backing by Russia, a German triumph and a corresponding defeat for England. There has long been a connection between Egyptian Nationalists and German policy. It is clear now that Germany is all-powerful in Europe, and that a great slap has been given in the face to our Foreign Office, and the King and Hardinge and Grey, who has played his cards badly. I am only sorry for the sake of reform prospects in Turkey, which are likely to be jeopardized.

“3rd April.—Rothstein came to see me, and we discussed the whole state of Europe and Asia, where his views coincide closely with mine. He looks upon Grey’s diplomatic defeat as absolute, and Germany’s position as unassailable in Europe. Grey’s (or what is the same thing, the King’s and Hardinge’s) attempt to get together a Coalition with Russia and France against the Central German Powers, he regards as an immense error of calculation, Grey being unaware first of Russia’s military helplessness, and secondly of France’s entire unwillingness to fight. Of this Aerenthal and Bülow have taken full advantage, and have not only gained their end in Servia, but have done it in such a way as to make it clear to all the world that their will is law, and that they care not a brass button for either Russia or England. This cannot but react on Constantinople, and it is probable now that the Turks will have to make terms with Austria, perhaps even an alliance, and leave English influence aside. I confess I do not see what else they are to do. It is clear England cannot and will not give them military help, and they are forced back on Kaiser Wilhelm’s good will if they are to preserve Macedonia or even Constantinople. Rothstein, however, assures me that no farther advance will be made by Austria yet, as Germany will not be ready with her navy for some years. Then the war with England will certainly be.”

This remarkable forecast of the situation marks the point at which Grey’s incredible mistakes in diplomatic dealing with Europe and at Constantinople began to declare themselves. That he should have been ignorant of Russia’s impotence and have sacrificed to her alliance all his relations with the East, was a cardinal mistake which led to his subsequent gambler’s folly of joining France and Russia in the great war.

“Rothstein had hardly gone when letters came from Farid Bey at Cairo and Malony at Teheran. Malony’s account of the Persian revolution is more cheerful than any I have yet read. He considers the whole of Persia to be now on the Constitutional side, even Teheran, where the Shah has a few troops. He does not think the Shah can maintain himself even there. Farid complains of new press laws and laws prohibiting meetings. He urges me to raise my voice once more in the Egyptian cause.

“George and Sibell dined with me and Saleeby and his wife, a fortunate combination, and we had a very pleasant evening.

“11th April (Easter Sunday).—The news of the day is that Swinburne is dead. ‘The greatest lyric poet of the English tongue,’ is my judgment of him, and perhaps ‘our worst prose writer.’ Beyond being a poet, he was almost nothing. He never enjoyed his life, wasting his youth on drink and his old age on Theodore Watts. Mrs. Morris says he never was in love with any respectable woman, but Lady C., who knew him well, says that he was once when quite young. His most respectable connection was probably Ada Menken. It was a poor life as far as action was concerned. As a poet, however, he will live when nearly every other of our age is forgotten, for he was a prince of harmony and rhyme and created an entirely new kind of lyric verse. He was seventy-two last week and died of a rapid pneumonia. He ought certainly to have been Laureate after Tennyson, but the old Queen refused to appoint him because in one of his poems he had fulminated against the Emperor of Russia, and she said that after that it was impossible he could be in her household service. The last thirty years of his life have been stultified in a suburban villa at Putney with Watts-Dunton, who had used him as an advertisement for his own literary trash.

“Last night Belloc looked in on me very woebegone because he had made a rash vow of total abstinence from liquor during the whole of Holy Week, and it was the last day of his sufferings, which he said were beyond endurance. ‘It has its uses, however,’ he said, ‘if only to make one realize how flat the brain becomes when cut off from wine. There are moments when I find myself thinking and arguing almost like a teetotaler, but I will make it up to-morrow after Mass as soon as ever I have received Communion.’ I tried to make him break his vow, but in vain, and he went home sadly. [N.B. He wrote the most amusing of all his books, ‘A change in the Cabinet,’ during that temperate week.]

“13th April.—From Blanche Hozier I get a letter, one of the best she ever wrote. In it she describes her doings at Dieppe, where she has established herself in a home of her own. It also encloses a pretty scrap from Clementine at Blenheim, where she is very happy with Winston. Blanche has a real genius for letter writing, women being far better letter writers than men, they chatter more naturally and are less self-conscious. I am reading ‘Pepys’s Diary,’ the unbowdlerized edition, which is extraordinarily good and has something of both these qualities, but is without grace and is coarsely fibred.

“14th April.—There has been a counter revolution at Constantinople, and Abdul Hamid has once more got the upper hand. A mutiny of soldiers against their Young Turk officers, joined in by the less liberal Ulema and a reactionary mob, has upset the Committee of Union and Progress, and has forced Hilmi Pasha, the Vizier, and the Ministry to resign. Constantinople is in full reaction.

“18th April.—The Young Turks are marching, it is said, on Salonika from Constantinople.

“19th April.—Frederick Ryan, late Editor of the ‘Egyptian Standard,’ has returned from Cairo, and came to-day with the latest news. He is an intelligent young man of the same Irish type as Malony, good, modest, and sincere. He tells me there is a complete split now between the Khedive and Farid Bey, and the Press Law is directed mainly against the Khedive’s opponents. Abbas has lost what little popularity he had with the old-fashioned Ulema by his attempt to misappropriate the Awkaf revenues of the Azhar. The students struck for an increase of their bread money needed by the immense rise of prices. All the Cairo newspapers protested against the Press Law except two Ryan complains of the lack of business capacity in the management of the Egyptian newspapers. They are also now without a capable leader. Mustapha Kamel died of cancer in the stomach and suffered tortures.

“20th April.—The Young Turks under Enver Bey have again got the upper hand and have marched to Constantinople. There is news to-day, though not certain, that the Sultan has abdicated and fled. This will be a splendid triumph. A revolution to be effective must have a basis of force, force which everybody is afraid of and is bound to acknowledge, otherwise it degenerates into mere chaos. I think they will be well advised to bring Abdul Hamid to open trial; it would be dangerous to leave him at large, or even alive in prison.

“23rd April.—Things still unsettled at Constantinople except that the Young Turk Party is in power. It is not yet decided what the Sultan’s fate is to be. Enver has declared that Abdul Hamid cannot be allowed any longer to reign, though his life will be respected. I fancy the Kaiser Wilhelm is intervening on his behalf. They may be obliged to consider German wishes. Otherwise in cases of this kind ‘stone dead has no fellow.’

“24th April.—An order has been given for the occupation of Tabriz by the Russian army, the excuse being that the Shah has broken his promise of allowing food to be supplied to the besieged townspeople. The Russians will now certainly occupy Teheran and Northern Persia and administer it in imitation of our English way in Egypt. Massacres, too, are announced in Armenia and at various places in Asia Minor, which may lead to intervention in Turkey. However, let us hope for the best.

“Later.—The Young Turk army has stormed Yildiz, though with what result to the Sultan is not known.

“29th April.—Abdul Hamid is at last formally deposed and has been sent as a prisoner to reside at Salonika. Reshad Effendi has been proclaimed Sultan Mohammed V in his stead.

“30th April.—Lloyd George has brought in a Budget of a rather Socialistic kind, with a beginning of taxing land values and of things more drastic.

“1st May.—To Cambridge, where I am staying with Browne at his villa in Trumpington Road. The garden is large, one of those pleasant suburban gardens which run a long way back, but the house is of the plainest Philistine order—very clean, very handsomely furnished, but everything in it commonplace, Browne being the least æsthetic of men. He has made me, however, extremely comfortable, and is in all things else extremely sympathetic. A nightingale is singing close to us.

“He is writing a history of the revolution in Persia, which will include a life of Seyyid Jemal ed Din, as to whom I have promised to write a monograph. We had several clever young men at dinner, one of them, Mozley, a young Don, Editor of the ‘Cambridge Review,’ and Somerset, Editor of the ‘Granta,’ also Cockerell and his wife, and Angela Mackail; also another interesting young man, Malory, and Haddon, the anthropologist. Browne is, of course, in despair at the Russian march on Tabriz, and believes the English Government has the idea of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as well as Persia.

“2nd May.—Spent the day with Cockerell, going with him to the Fitzwilliam Museum where he showed me Rossetti’s MS. of the ‘House of Life.’ He has asked me for a MS., if I have got one, of ‘Esther.’

“3rd May.—Back to Chapel Street.

“7th May.—All the past week has been glorious at Newbuildings which is in full Spring beauty. On looking into the bathroom yesterday I heard a twittering and there were three of the swallows hatched there last year, siting together in last year’s nest. They must have been the same, as they were not frightened at my coming in, and the fact of there being three of them also shows it, for if they had been strangers looking for a place to build there would not have been more of them than a pair.

“Yesterday I watched for an hour the throwing of an oak, one of seven old ones they are cutting at the end of Newbuildings Wood. I wonder whether oaks have any sense of pain, perhaps a little, but it must be very little, just when the sap is rising. Woodcraft is the most fascinating of all rural work.

“14th May.—I have written a valentine for Nellie Hozier:

An Out-of-Date Valentine

New is the morning, child,

Sunrise for thy heart.

Evening, how near its close,

Sunset for my heart.

Life in its fulness yours,

Mine but an ending.

Loyal we yet may be

Love’s cause defending.

I have my wisdom, child,

You your youth’s glory.

Each shall find wealth in each,

In each a story.

High be our fortune’s aim,

He who would win it

Offerings large must bring

To Fate each minute.

Zealous is Love for love,

Grudge not love’s kindness.

Ill ’tis for joy to wait,

Light lost is blindness.

Ends life as life began,

Heart which would meet heart.

Run we and outstrip Time,

Child, be my sweetheart.

“20th May.—Meredith is dead after a two days’ illness, and there is talk of his being buried in Westminster Abbey. The papers say more about him than they did about Swinburne, though as a poet he was really far inferior to him. With the exception of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Love in a Valley,’ Meredith wrote no verse that was quite first rate, or even much of it readable, and his novels were not, in my opinion, really great. I never could read quite through any of them. They contained, of course, a number of good things and the style was original and natural to the man, but as stories they had little point, and though he sketched out his characters well at starting he had not the art to give them strong dramatic action, nor had he sufficient knowledge of human nature to make their doings credible. He was without a grain of tragic power, still he had a vast number of readers and I see no reason why he should not be buried in the Abbey. Politically I was for the most part in agreement with him, and we interchanged letters on such subjects more than once. I see in the obituaries that the fact of his having been a tailor’s son at Portsmouth is evaded by the paraphrase of his having been ‘born in Hampshire.’ Only the ‘Daily Graphic’ gives a photograph of his birthplace at Portsmouth. According to Meynell the fact of his tailoring parentage was the secret trouble of his life.

“It has been glorious weather all the week, and I never saw the view of the downs from the Hilly Seven Acre field so beautiful. But the ash-trees, checked by the frost of 1st May, are not yet in leaf. Most of them are still quite bare while the oaks are in full plumage. Nightingales are rarer this year than usual, probably because it was so bad a breeding season last Spring.

“I have been reading Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ again after forty years and do not find my opinion of them much altered. The early part, before he went to Paris and grew famous, is wonderful as a work of art and justifies itself as a young man’s confession, for in spite of its crudities, it is beautiful. But the rest is ugliness unredeemed. I fancy my own memoirs, if they are ever read, will give the same impression, though my youth has been prolonged beyond all measure and his ended very early. It was reading Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ about the year 1866 that first determined me to write mine and at the same time to have a more satisfactory life to make record of.

“21st May.—Meynell came to dinner and gave me an interesting account of his intimacy with George Meredith and of Meredith’s romantic devotion to Mrs. Meynell. It began in this way. Some fifteen years ago Meredith had told a mutual friend of theirs that he was curious to know who ‘Autolycus’ was who wrote the literary criticisms in the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ and hearing it was Mrs. Meynell, wrote her a very characteristic letter complimenting her on her style of writing and inviting her and him to pay him a visit. ‘You will find,’ he said, ‘my daughter to receive you, she looks at literature through an eye glass.’ It happened soon after that an address was being presented to Meredith by the Society of Authors, and Meynell and his wife joined them and went down from London to Burford Bridge where Meredith met them, and when the presentation was over drove her back with him to his house on Box Hill, while Meynell walked. During the drive Meredith asked her whether she was not the author of a certain book, to which Mrs. Meynell, who has a talent for silence, said simply, ‘No,’ at which he expressed himself disappointed, and then whether she was not Francis Thompson’s sister, to which she again said, ‘No,’ at which he expressed himself doubly disappointed. Nevertheless they speedily made friends and from that time for two or three years he wrote to her, both letters and verses (these have not been published) and professed a special devotion. It was a great interest for both of them and was continued, as said, for several years. Thus Meynell came to know him well, amongst other things his secret trouble about his parentage, which cast a shadow over the novelist’s life. The trouble was that his father had been in trade, in fact a tailor, a fact which in his later years he kept jealously concealed, though his first novel, ‘Evan Harrington,’ published anonymously, had been founded on that very theme. His father had been the well-known naval outfitter at Portsmouth and his grandfather’s name had been Melchisedech, as in the novel. Mention is to be found of him in Marryat’s ‘Peter Simple,’ and again in Hardy’s letters to Nelson, where Hardy mentions that he had lodging at Portsmouth with ‘the tailor Meredith.’ It is curious that having attained to the eminence where he was he should have allowed so small a thing to annoy him. Meredith’s life latterly was a very lonely one, though he had many friends he had nobody to be quite devoted to him. He had talked of me to Meynell and had once said, which I am glad to hear, ‘Blunt is one of the few honest men we have in public life.’ He and I had much sympathy on many matters, and I bear him the reverse of a grudge in that, being Chapman and Hall’s literary reader, he was the cause of my first little volume of mixed verse and prose being refused publication. He was entirely right, for the volume, except some of the sonnets, was worthless. That must have been in 1867, Robert Lytton having recommended me to send it to Chapman who was then his publisher. It was a fortunate refusal.

“29th May.—Newbuildings. It has been a week of glorious weather, the last of a long drought, but now there have been two days of rain. Our only trouble is that the caterpillar has fallen on the oaks, and half the leaves are devoured. This is always the result of frosts at the time the leaves are first unfolding, for the young grub needs a certain cooking of its food, and the frost does this for it, burning the young leaves. It is the same with the apple blight, which is also upon us. Both apple and oak, however, have a natural regrowth of leaves in July and August, which renews their vigour, giving them a second Spring.

“30th May (Whit Sunday).—At Newbuildings. Meynell is here. He has just been for Joan of Arc’s canonization to Rome. He saw Monsignor Stonor there, and asked whether he had been to the ceremony. ‘No,’ said Stonor, ‘why should I go? She was a Frenchwoman.’ The subject of modernism, he said, is now never mentioned at the Vatican. ‘The Pope is a worthy, good man, but his pronouncements are all dictated to him by the Cardinals, and he is allowed no initiative.’ I showed him a passage in my diary in 1892 relating to Manning’s Modernist sympathies in the last years of his life, and he told me that what I had put down was quite correct, and about his death. Vaughan had been his creature, but latterly the Cardinal had grown to dislike him.

“2nd June.—I am at Newstead Abbey, brought here by Beauclerk, who is a country neighbour and friends with Lady Chermside and her sister, who own it. He tells me that his father was once offered Newstead Abbey and a part of the estate for £6,000; then, in 1860, old Webb bought it of Wildman, to whom Byron had sold it. Webb had had two sons, but the elder, a charming young man, had committed suicide while an undergraduate at Cambridge, and the younger had emigrated to Australia at the age of twenty-four. So he left Newstead to his daughters, the eldest, Geraldine, having married Sir Herbert Chermside, a retired General, the same Chermside who was in Egypt and Governor at one time of Suakim. The sisters lived together there, the younger, Ethel, who is unmarried, sharing the ownership of the property in a sort of way, one managing everything indoors, the other everything out of doors. They are both pleasant and conversible, and proud of their family possessions, as they may well be, and of its connection with the poet. They have made me very comfortable in rooms overlooking the garden.

“I forgot to say that Meynell, who dined with me last night in London, narrated to me the true version, as he heard it from Meredith, of Meredith’s quarrel with Rossetti. They were at breakfast one morning, and had a dispute about a trifle, and Rossetti, resenting something that Meredith had said, told him that if he said it again he would throw a cup of tea in his face. Meredith thereupon repeated it, and Rossetti threw the tea, and Meredith left the house at once and sent for his effects during the course of the day. I have been reading ‘Evan Harrington’ coming here in the train, but as far as I have got, it does not alter my opinion of these novels. I fail to take any interest in the characters. They are cleverly sketched, but act very much at hap-hazard. They are not comic enough to make one laugh, and not tragic enough to make one weep. They bore one before one is half through with their doings. There is a good deal of subtle observation and happy phrasing, but it is strange that anyone should call them great novels. Yet I find people comparing Meredith with Shakespeare and all the heavenly host!

“3rd June.—I have spent the day very pleasantly, the morning with Miss Ethel Webb, who, in spite of a rugged exterior, is a nice woman, more conversible, I think, than her sister, though both are good talkers. Having that department under her special charge, she showed me everything outside. Certainly Newstead is a splendid domain, through the abundance of its water and the lie of the land about it. The trees are mostly sycamores, to me a new feature, the soil being unsuited to oaks. The celebrated oak sown by Byron only a hundred years ago, is already dying. I have recommended its being pollarded as the best chance of prolonging its life, but the soil is gravel and sand. Yews grow better than any other tree on it, and the tank, which is overshadowed by them, is one of the most beautiful features of a garden I ever saw. Miss Webb pointed me out the place in the garden wall where there had been a postern gate opening formerly towards the forest. This has been built up, she tells me, for centuries, yet her dogs sometimes scratch at it, recognizing it as a doorway still. We sat in her rock garden in the sun, for the wind was cold, and she told me she had acquired the power of making birds understand her, and that the blackbirds and thrushes give her warning of the approach of strangers when she is there alone, as she often is, not wishing to be disturbed. The outside walls of the Abbey have been much spoiled by restoration, done in Wildman’s time, who spent £100,000 on it, so that it is difficult to make out quite what is old and what is new, and the windows have been plate-glassed, and otherwise bedevilled, but it is still a splendid possession, much larger and more important than I had at all imagined, and one can well understand how the sudden inheritance of it by Byron and his mother turned their heads, and helped to give him that exaggerated pride of birth and position which was his weakness. Inside, too, the house is a noble one, in spite of horrible tampering with the stonework of the Gothic lower story; all, however, might be made good with whitewash. The cloisters are less injured, and need nothing but to be let alone. Upstairs, wicked architectural things have been done, but the great drawing-room is magnificent, one of the finest state rooms to be found anywhere, and the long corridors are also fine. The main front has the advantage of looking south. Byron’s own little bedroom, with its simple furniture, is most interesting, unaltered since his time, but that has been told in the guide books, so I need not describe it. Beauclerk has returned from his manœuvring, and we walked again in the garden. He starts for Central Asia next week, to remain away a year. He is a very attractive young man, with, I am sure, an excellent heart. The feeling of the house is strongly against Lady Byron in the old family quarrel.

“4th June.—Back to London early, much pleased with my visit to Newstead and the good ladies, my entertainers there.

“Sabunji came to dine with me. I had not seen him since 1895, I think. He has become the type of what he doubtless was till the other day, a Yildiz Palace spy, a little furtive old man dressed in black with a black skull cap on his head, a jewel in his shirt front and another jewel on his finger. He has come to London, I imagine, on some business of intrigue, and to me partly to find out what my opinions are, partly to get my help in a publishing project he has in hand, a ‘History of all Religions.’ I got a deal of useful information from him about men and events at Constantinople. He tells me he continued to hold his place at Yildiz and draw his pay or pension till a month ago, but he is now deprived of it in common with the rest of the Palace employés. His position with the Sultan Abdul Hamid, which had been originally that of Reader for him and précis writer of the European Press, had latterly become one of tutor to the young Prince Burhan ed Din, the Sultan’s favourite son, whom he describes as very clever, and knowing French, English, German, and Italian, besides Turkish, Persian, and a little Arabic. The fact of his loss of income by the Sultan’s deposition naturally colours Sabunji’s views, and he is gloomy about the prospects of Turkey under the new régime. I asked him about the revolution of last year, and the counter-revolution of two months ago. As to the first, he says the Sultan was in complete ignorance till it happened, and this, doubtless, was the fact. The counter-revolution was got up not by Abdul Hamid or Burhan ed Din, but by an intrigue between Az ed Din (son of Sultan Abdul Aziz, who is heir to the present Sultan according to the law of succession), and the Russian Embassy, the latter being jealous of the influence the English Embassy had acquired under Kiamil Pasha. The German Embassy had nothing to do with it, nor was it true that the Sultan had distributed money to the troops to make them revolt against their officers. The Sultan had given money for the foundation of a Madrasa (public school) which had been handed over by the Ulema, who had received it for the Madrasa, to the troops. This sounds like an excuse. What probably is true is that there was a strong reactionary party at Stamboul, which appealed to the soldiers on religious grounds. Sabunji declares that this feeling was so strong that it was intended to have a general massacre of Christians, and that this was only prevented by the rapidity of the march on Constantinople from Salonika. Had the massacre taken place there would have been European intervention and a partition of Turkey. He declares that there was a settled plan for the partition already agreed to, according to which England was to get Syria as well as Egypt; France, Tripoli; Italy the Albanian coast; Austria, Salonika; and Germany, effective administration of the railway line from Broussa to Bagdad, with ten kilometers on either side of it, while Russia was to get the northern part of Asia Minor. [Compare text of the secret treaties afterwards discovered at St. Petersburg and published 1917.] He says, too, that there was an intrigue between Izzet Pasha and the Khedive Abbas for getting Abbas acknowledged Caliph, and that the English Government favoured it, intending to use the Khedive as a first step towards an Arabian Caliphate under English protection. This, of course, is the old idea which he (Sabunji) with many others, held in 1881, as shown in my ‘Future of Islam.’

“9th June.—Chapel Street. Met Cunninghame Graham in the Park and talked with him of Grey’s speech at the Imperial Press Conference, which will need, I think, a manifesto from some of us to the Mohammedan world, for I read it as announcing a definite intention to retain Egypt. ‘English policy,’ Grey says, ‘is to keep all we have.’

“It is a question now for the Ottoman Empire to make up its mind whether in the coming conflict it is to side with England or with Germany. On the whole an alliance with Germany would probably be the lesser risk of the two, seeing how Egypt and now Persia have been betrayed by England, and how India is held by us in permanent bondage, also England’s power is apparently on the wane, while Germany is increasing.

“Lady Gregory came to luncheon, and we went after it to the Court theatre together. She has just been for three weeks at Venice, staying there with Lady Layard. She gave an amusing description of the arrival one day at luncheon while there of two little ‘maids of all work’ rather shabbily dressed, which proved to be Queen Alexandra and her sister the Empress of Russia, who had arrived together on a yachting cruise, and had come to call without ceremony. The Empress, Lady Gregory says, looks now much the older of the two, for the Queen is extraordinarily well preserved, whether by nature or art. They stayed on chattering the little banalities of Court conversation for half-an-hour with the German accent Lady Gregory imitated well. At the theatre we found Yeats, who talked to us between the acts. He told me he had been converted to my use of the Alexandrine metre for plays in verse, but that he had such a difficulty in finding rhymes that a rhymed play would take him two years to write. The pieces we saw given were ‘Devorgilla’ and the ‘Playboy of the Western World.’ The ‘Playboy,’ I fancy, must have been a bit bowdlerized from the original version, or else it was not very intelligible to an English audience, but certainly here in London it seemed a very harmless bit of broad farce which could shock no one. The Irish of it was such that a good deal of the dialogue was difficult to catch. I found it immensely amusing and quite admirably acted. The principal girl’s part was done by a sister of Sarah Allgood, who had been engaged to Synge. Of Sarah Allgood herself I thought less, she was more conventional. The house was half empty, and there was little encouragement given to the actors. Yeats is beginning to get fat and sleek; he has cut his hair and his cheeks have a pink colour, and he is well dressed, as a prosperous theatrical manager should be.

“22nd June.—George Wyndham came. He is rather out of it just now in Parliament as he takes no very strong interest in the Budget dispute, believing the Radical bark to be worse than the bite. I do not expect the Lords will reject the Budget, as some of the extremists would have them do. In regard to the land they would be on firm ground, for the Radical view on the land question is essentially unsound, unless the full Socialist doctrine be admitted, la propriété c’est le vol.

“To the Tate Gallery, which has revived in me many old memories. The Vernon Collection, which I remember in Marlborough House when I first came to London in 1856, and used constantly to visit, the early pre-Raphaelite pictures, most of which I saw about the same time hung in the Academy, and numbers more. It is wonderful how they have improved with age, or is it with pictures as it is with a sonnet, which seems better if one has once known it by heart and half forgotten.

“24th June.—Some Persians called on me, introduced by Rothstein, poor helpless people, knowing hardly a word of any language but their own and Russian. They had come to London to try and enlist English sympathy for their Constitutional cause.

“28th June.—Halil Hálid and Meynell dined with me. Halil has been with Mukhtar Pasha since his stay of three days in England as Extraordinary Ambassador, but he had very little to tell me, being affected with pseudo diplomatic reserve, except that the question of Egypt was not raised or mentioned by Mukhtar. Cromer, he tells me, still influences the Foreign Office and was put to sit next to Mukhtar at a dinner given to the Marshal.

“3rd July.—We had our Arab sale to-day. Bidders few, but the financial result not unsatisfactory.

“A most important thing has happened in connection with India. Sir Curzon Wyllie has been assassinated by a young Indian at the Imperial Institute. The ‘Manchester Guardian’ and other Liberal papers are endeavouring to persuade themselves that the assassination is not political; but this is nonsense. It has quite obviously been planned as part of a new departure and almost certainly by Krishnavarna, whose ‘Indian Sociologist’ of last week contains clear indications of what might be expected. The whole English Press is united in its religious horror at the crime, forgetting how it applauded exactly such crimes in Italy fifty years ago, and in Russia the other day. Krishnavarna’s position is precisely the same as Mazzini’s then was, whom we all now justify since his plan of assassination led to the liberation of Italy, and if ever people had excuse for means of this kind it is the people of India.

“8th July.—Gallifet is dead. I remember him well in Paris in the sixties when he used to play tennis at the court in the Tuileries Gardens, a good looking sabreur, with an irresponsible tongue. His wife was one of the pretty women of the second Empire, but he had no respect for her, and I have heard him crack his garrison jokes about her without reticence. She had her lovers, and he his mistresses, but made no concealment of his contempt for her. All the same he was a gallant fellow and has died in deservedly high repute with his fellow-countrymen, for what he was, a true French aristocrat of the old-fashioned fighting and love-making eighteenth century days.

“I went to a party at Button’s house at Fulham where his sister Eva was entertaining, a garden party with tea out of doors. Button has made a very beautiful place of it with his marble columns and gateways and well-heads, like a villa at Pompeii. What especially helps the effect is that there are broad walks crossing each other covered with paving stones, the squares enclosed by them being of grass. If I were a millionaire I would certainly buy the whole en bloc. Most of the Wyndham clan were there.

“9th July.—To an evening party at Stafford House, a really charming entertainment of, perhaps, 200 people, which in those immense rooms looked like a family party, where I met a number of people I had not seen for years, with a few foreign guests, among them Pierre Lôti. The last is a diminutive dapper little Frenchman, very correct in his get up, with scarves and decorations, and a rather aggressive pose. Remembering his joint letter of two years ago written to me, with Mme. Adam, I got the Duchess to introduce me to him, but found him less amiable than I had reason to expect. We spoke of Mme. Adam and Mustapha Kamel, but his tone about them was not enthusiastic, and gave me the impression that there must have come a coolness between him and Mustapha since the day when they were photographed together. I mentioned having read Mustapha’s letters to Mme. Adam recently published, which are really very pretty, and in which the photograph is reproduced, but my remark brought no response at all. Perhaps their publication had displeased him. Then we were separated by other claimants on his attention. He did not impress me favourably.” There was much else of an amusing nature connected with this party but which I cannot transcribe here.

“10th July.—Good old Lord Ripon died last night at half-past eight in the evening. One of the few honest men in public life, and the only Whig who ever showed real sympathy with Eastern liberty.

“I am reminded by having met Pamela Plowden last night of the beautiful lines Harry Cust once wrote to her, and which I think have never been published except in an ephemeral ‘Book of Beauty.’ I transcribe them here.

Beautiful face!

Is your heart broken that you look so sad?

Is there no heart on earth that once made glad

Your heart, to hearten yet your flower of grace?

Is God untender towards you? Or can Man,

Loving such dear eyes,

Or, save despairing

For too much caring,

Grudge his uncrownedness in the race he ran,

And squandered life and lived and lost the prize?

They pay the worthiest cost

Whose lives for you were lost.

“13th July.—Spent the day at Caxtons with Professor Osborne, head of the Natural History Museum at New York, and his daughter. He is a highly intelligent man, a pupil of Huxley’s and is writing a book on horse history. He has read my controversy with Professor Ridgeway on the origin of the Arab horse in Arabia and takes my side in it, holding the Arab to have been the descendant of a distinct wild breed in the Peninsula. He wants the United States Government to start an Arabian breeding stud in some of the dry districts of the Western States.

“16th July.—Late on Tuesday night I got a telegram from Meynell saying that Father Tyrrell was dying at Storrington, and this morning the ‘Times’ announces his death. His loss is a great one, both personally to me and to the world at large, though perhaps for himself it is a happiness. Miss Petre has very sensibly written to the ‘Times’ announcing the fact of his having died at her house, and giving the details of the last rites administered. It seems to have been a paralytic stroke, for he had lost the power of speech, and I fear his ecclesiastical enemies will hold this to be a judgment of Heaven upon him, but it will save him at least from the reproach of having ‘recanted his errors’ in the face of death. I have telegraphed to Miss Petre and shall certainly, if permitted, attend his funeral as an act of sympathy with a persecuted man who was also, I am glad to think, my friend.

“Later. I drove over to Mulberry House. Miss Petre had gone out to the monastery, but her sister, Mrs. Powell, took me into the garden house and showed me the poor body. It was laid out in the tiny cell which had been his sleeping place, hardly more than a cupboard, ten feet, perhaps, by five; there was scarcely room to squeeze in between the very narrow bed and the wall. There lay the dead heresiarch, as sad a little shard of humanity as ever my eyes saw. I could not have recognized it as the man I had known so brilliant in his talk, so full of combative life, or indeed, hardly as a man at all. The face was shrunk and the features seemed to have fallen in though he had been only thirty-six hours dead, for he died at nine yesterday morning, and the body with its poor small fingers was more like an accidental handful of shapeless clay than anything that had been alive. Pious hands had clothed him in surplice and stole, as befitted the priest he was, and there were two tapers lighted at his head. I knelt a minute or two beside him and recited a ‘De Profundis’ and kissed the hem of his garment, or rather the stole, and rose and went out, moved, as one could not help being moved, to tears of pity. It was so utter an ending. I had some talk with Mrs. Powell, a vigorous, unemotional woman of fifty, who gave me the details of his death and of how the Archbishop was raising objections to his being buried as a Catholic with full funeral rights. Her sister was out on this very business at the monastery, but would be back immediately and she urged me to await her. I occupied the half-hour which elapsed in paying a visit to Mrs. Lucas, Meynell’s married daughter, who has taken rooms in a farm house, Chantry’s, just outside the village. When I came back I found Miss Petre had returned and she received me in her room upstairs. I had been prepared to find her altered by this sudden misfortune, but she met me with her usual cheerful smile and without a trace of sadness on her face. There was no paleness on her cheeks or trace of tears, and she talked at once in her open, straightforward way about all that had happened and was happening. She is a wonderfully wise, courageous woman, for it is certain that Father Tyrrell’s death must be a terrible grief to her, and loss in every way. She talked of him simply as a child might talk, but with the wisdom of a woman, the courage of a man. What she told me is this: Three months ago there had been some question of Father Tyrrell’s health and he had seen a doctor, some kidney trouble, but the doctor thought little of it. It was while he was staying at Clapham, nor did he think much of it himself. He came back to Storrington for his summer holiday at the end of last month. She thought him overworked, for he was writing a final apologetic, added to his great daily correspondence. It was not till a week after, that one day he complained of his head, while at dinner, and rose to leave the table and, as I understand, fell. Still, for a day, she did not recognize it as serious. ‘I am naturally of a sanguine disposition,’ she said, ‘and thought he would recover. He complained of violent pains in the head, and could not speak plainly, but I did not recognize it for what it was. Then he got worse. I was with him for forty-eight hours without leaving him before anyone came to help nurse him. He suffered terrible pain continuously till he died.’ Three doctors have since declared him to have had Bright’s disease and the stroke to have been a consequence, the breaking of a blood vessel on the brain. She repeated to me what there was in her ‘Times’ letter about his having received the last sacraments. ‘I sent it,’ she said, ‘because I knew there would be all sorts of stories told, and I thought it best to let the truth be known at once.’ She was pleased when I told her how wisely, in my opinion, she had done. ‘It was, perhaps, fortunate,’ she said, ‘that he could not speak, as it spared him explanations, and enabled his friend Abbé Brémond, to administer the sacraments and give him absolution, also it will at least prevent any false account of his having at the last moment made recantation of his opinions.’

“She went on to speak of their difficulties since with Archbishop Bourne, and she spoke strongly of the little moral courage existing in the world, and how all were afraid of undertaking independent responsibility. The Prior of Storrington was anxious to be kind, but he was without courage, and it seemed as though he would not dare give a Catholic burial, although he had administered extreme unction. I suggested that the Crawley monks might be more bold, and it is settled that we are to apply to them if others fail.

“17th July.—The ‘Times’ has the following: ‘At Mulberry House, Storrington, the Rev. George Tyrrell, aged 48, fortified by the rights of the Church. R.I.P.’

“Meynell arrived for the week-end. He has been to the Archbishop’s house in Westminster to discuss the case of Tyrrell’s burial. The Archbishop himself is away, having gone abroad to Rheims to take part in the ceremonials connected with Joan of Arc’s canonization, but he saw Butt the coadjutor. He tells me Miss Petre’s letter to the ‘Times’ has put them in a terrible fix. Bourne is himself much in sympathy with the Modernists, and especially with Father Tyrrell. He had once said, ‘I had rather my hand withered than lift it against Tyrrell’; nor is Butt otherwise than friendly. But the position is this: Tyrrell, though not technically excommunicated, was cut off from the sacraments until he would recant three propositions, which he had not recanted. If nothing at all had been said, the fact of his having on his death-bed received absolution and extreme unction might have allowed them to presume a recantation, but Miss Petre’s letter makes this difficult or impossible, and the Archbishop if appealed to must forbid Catholic burial. To me, however, it seems that in the first place Miss Petre’s letter to the ‘Times’ is not authoritative, however true what it says may be; secondly, burial not being a sacrament while penance and extreme unction are sacraments, it would be straining at a gnat to refuse the first, the rest having been swallowed. Meynell thinks that if the worst comes to the worst it would be best to bury him at Newbuildings where Abbé Brémond could perform the service, trusting to a change in ecclesiastical opinion for his subsequent translation to consecrated ground. Meynell cited it as curious that he should find himself connected with this case as he had been with that of Mivart. In Mivart’s case Meynell had appealed to Cardinal Vaughan, who left the decision to three of his canons, two of whom decided against Mivart’s being given Catholic burial, so Vaughan forbade it; but on Vaughan’s own death-bed he was troubled at the thought of this decision. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, ‘in the Mivart case.’ And, in fact, Mivart’s body has since been removed (it was done privately at night) and reburied according to Catholic ritual in consecrated ground. It is also curious that Bourne should be just now away at Rheims, officiating at Joan of Arc’s canonization; Joan of Arc, who was refused by the Bishops of her day burial at all, her ashes being scattered to the winds lest any relic of her should be preserved, and over the place of whose martyrdom were ecclesiastically inscribed the words ‘Heretic and Sorceress,’ yet she is to-day being worshipped on all Catholic altars. The same might happen, who knows, to Father Tyrrell. The Archbishop’s position is made more difficult because his leanings towards Modernism have delayed the sending a hat to him from Rome.

“The ‘Times’ announces the abdication of the Shah Mohammed Ali and the triumph of the Constitutional régime in Persia, which is acknowledged by the Russian and English Governments. This is a victory stolen out of the fire, and Browne may justly claim as his the whole success. But for him Persia would most certainly have been annexed by Russia, or rather put under Russian tutelage after the precedent of Egypt.

“18th July.—After luncheon I drove Meynell to Storrington, where we found Mrs. Powell. The present situation is that they have got a telegram from Brentwood, the Petre estate in Essex, to say that the priest there will bury Father Tyrrell; so they consider the matter settled, and Miss Petre has gone to Brentwood to make sure. The funeral will be on Wednesday.

“Mrs. Powell gave us a more detailed account of Father Tyrrell’s illness. He had had trouble with the kidneys for some time, but did not pay much attention to it, and his doctor did not consider it very important, though now, since his seizure, all agreed it to have been Bright’s disease. He spent the early Spring at Clapham, but when her sister returned from abroad he also returned to Storrington, but had left again for London till the end of June, when he once more came to Mulberry House for the summer. He had been greatly overworked and felt his quarrel with Rome more deeply than appeared on the surface. He was subject to violent headaches, when he would retire to his own room for twenty-four hours at a time, but in the intervals was cheerful and seemed full of life. His general health had improved latterly.

“20th July.—Tyrrell’s case seems to have been referred to Rome, and the burial service absolutely forbidden. It is announced to be at Storrington to-morrow, I presume in the parish graveyard, so I go back to Newbuildings to-night. Tyrrell’s little book of poems is in print at Elkin Mathews’, though not yet published. Meynell took me there and we saw it: ‘Versions and Perversions,’ with ‘To W. S. B.’ on the title-page. They gave us a copy of it not yet bound.

“I lunched with Harry Cust and his wife and George Leveson Gower, and Harry’s young nephew (Storrs), who has some place in Egypt, a very intelligent youth.

“John Dillon spent an hour with me, and we discussed India and the ethics of assassination. He said he had always been opposed to it, except where there were secret societies, which could not be maintained without it against members who turned traitor. I told him I would send him my ‘Canon of Aughrim,’ which he said he had never read. He will try and bring forward the case of the Egyptian press persecutions on Thursday, when they have the Foreign Office vote. There may be some chance of getting it discussed now that the Persian question seems in way of settlement. He says, however, that there are not three members in the House that interest themselves about Egypt—and this is true.

“I went down by the last train to Newbuildings, nor do I intend to return to London this summer.

“21st July.—The day of Father Tyrrell’s funeral. I drove over to Storrington, and arrived at Mulberry House half an hour before the contingent of mourners from London, and had some talk while waiting with Freddy von Hügel, now an old man much grizzled, and the most distinguished of the lay Modernists in England, and with his daughter, a devout disciple of Tyrrell’s. She was greatly pleased with his lines, ‘Two Chambers hath the Heart,’ when I recited them to her. The London friends having arrived, we formed procession some forty or fifty persons, to the grave, which was in Storrington parish churchyard, a pleasant place under the Down where Tyrrell had been in the habit of walking and reciting his breviary not twenty yards away from the Catholic Chapel, just outside the wall, symbolic, so I thought, of the position into which Tyrrell himself had drifted. Abbé Brémond read the funeral prayers in English, and then read an address he had very carefully composed for publication, a moderate and worthy presentment of his poor friend’s religious attitude towards either Church, the English or the Roman. Miss Petre was to me the chief interest at the grave. She was evidently much moved, and her face showed signs of weeping, but she stood there valiantly with her sisters and two little nieces following the prayers out of a book with them and giving the responses aloud. I shook hands with her when all was over, and she asked me into the house, but I did not care to face the crowd there, and drove straight home.

“23rd July.—The Foreign Office vote was taken yesterday, the whole time allotted to it being occupied discussing the Czar’s visit, so that Dillon could say nothing about Egypt. It is impossible to get any attention in the House of Commons either about foreign affairs or about India.

“24th July.—Dingra, the slayer of Sir Curzon Wyllie, has been condemned to death, having made no defence, beyond a dignified justification of his act as one of political warfare. When the judge, the Lord Chief Justice, had passed sentence on him that he should be hanged by the neck until he was dead, ‘Thank you, my lord,’ Dingra said. ‘I am proud to have the honour to lay down my humble life for my country.’ Also, before the sentence, he had said: ‘You can pass sentence of death on me if you like, it is perfectly illegal. You are all-powerful and can do what you like, but remember, we shall have our time.’ No Christian martyr ever faced his judges more fearlessly or with greater dignity. I discussed his case with Kháparde, who is here for the week-end, his first country visit in England. He is as full of admiration as I am of Dingra’s courage. We agreed that if India could produce five hundred men as absolutely without fear she would achieve her freedom. It was recorded in the medical evidence at the trial that when arrested, Dingra’s pulse beat no quicker than was normal, nor from first to last has he shown any sign of weakening.

“25th July (Sunday).—Kháparde (Mrs. Russell, Miss Cockerell, and Miss Nussey being here) gave us a most interesting account of his religious views. He is a Theosophist, having adopted their tenets as a young man, and he explained, better than I have ever heard it treated, their teaching of the relation between mind and matter. He is an admirable expounder, expressing himself slowly in English, but with extreme clearness and logical exactness, seizing at once the meaning of each question put to him, and evading nothing in reply. By birth he is a Mahratta Brahmin who has broken his caste. His father was a Yogi, and he gave us an excellent account of him and the high-minded simple life he led; how he passed his days sitting for the most part in the shade of trees in contemplation during his later life, though earlier he had been in Government service as Deputy Collector, or something of the sort. His grandfather had been a banker and rich, but dying his wealth had been lost, and the father had to reconstruct it and revive the bank. Kháparde himself was brought up in good circumstances, living on lands of his father’s own, with horses to ride, and a herd of cows. He had made his education in the Government College in Bombay, and while there had joined the Theosophists. He is now fifty-six. He reverences Mme. Blavatsky and highly esteems Mrs. Besant, though the latter, he says, has gone wrong lately on the political question. Under these ladies’ influence he learned to eat meat and drink wine, but later returned to his vegetarian food. His philosophy is extremely interesting, but it always surprises me that the doctrine of the eternity of the soul renewing itself by passing from body to body should be so absolutely believed as it is by men so enlightened in science. In reply to his exposition I set before him my own philosophy of the nothingness of man, a mere scum on the surface of our little earth. He acknowledges the truth of this, but supposes that in other worlds of the vast universe a higher kind of animal body exists into which our souls may transmigrate before they come to perfection. ‘Only a few souls, such as Jesus Christ or Buddha,’ he said, ‘can have attained to perfection on this Earth.’ Arguing on these lines he had a great success with our house party, his discourse having become a regular lecture, including Miss Lawrence and Miss Butcher and my grandchildren, who listened with open eyes fixed on his dark face and crimson turban. In the course of it his exposition between soul and body were so closely the same as those I had put into verse fifty years ago that I recited a stanza of it to him:

I am but by your union.

With either soul or body lost

All perisheth. Then work ye on

Together, friends not corpse and ghost.

To live and be is my sole boast.

Learn this, alone ye nothing can.

Yet both together ye make Man.

“This he declared to be an inspired verse. Later he displayed great intelligence when I showed him my Arab horses, chestnut with four white feet and a blaze, being, he said, the favourite Indian colour, especially that dark chestnut (Feluka’s colour) which he recognized just as Mohammed Abdu had done as kumeyt.

“26th July.—Belloc tells me that the government is seeking an excuse to treat Dingra as a criminal lunatic instead of hanging him. That traitor Stead had a letter in yesterday’s ‘Observer’ urging this on the ground that it would punish him more. I have written to Dillon showing how dangerous a precedent it would be, as admitting the right of an English Government to inflict lifelong torture on its political enemies when it finds one brave enough to face death and defy them. Kháparde says that certainly Dingra would prefer death, because he would then at once re-enter life in a higher sphere of being, instead of having to wait twenty or thirty years in prison for it, with the risk of becoming deteriorated by the too long persecution.

“29th July.—The papers are full of flying feats, a Frenchman, Blériot, having flown across the Channel. How interested Robert Lytton would have been in this! He always maintained forty years ago that the true solution of the flying problem lay in a machine which should be heavier, not lighter than air.

“30th July.—There has been something of a revolution in Spain, caused by an unsuccessful piece of filibustering by the Spanish Government in Morocco. The people at Barcelona and Madrid refused to go on with the War there. It is an excellent symptom of anti-jingo feeling, and will do good everywhere, though it will also work to the profit of Socialism.

“1st Aug. (Sunday).—Belloc and Basil Blackwood came to luncheon; Belloc in one of his most talkative moods. He tells me Father John Pollen was with Tyrrell the day before he died. Belloc was at Mulberry House, too, though not inside Tyrrell’s room. There has been a great dispute in the papers as to the true facts, but Pollen’s visit is mentioned by none of the writers, unless it be as ‘the other priest’ who gave him absolution.

“15th Aug. (Sunday).—We have Professor Cockerell and his wife here for the week-end with Meynell and again Kháparde. Kháparde, who was born a native of the Berar province of Hyderabad, has told me the story of how the province was finally made over to the Calcutta Government on a perpetual lease in 1903.[7] Kháparde’s account is that when Curzon was at Hyderabad in that year he was invited to dine with the Nizam, he being on one side of the Nizam and Lady Curzon on the other, they got him to give a verbal promise that a lease should be granted, the Nizam being partly drunk at the time. In the morning he would have backed out of his promise, but Curzon threatened to depose him and forced him to sign the document desired. Thus Lord Ripon’s promise that the Berar province should not be taken was evaded by the officials. The Nizam is said to have been so angry at what had been done that he refused to take food for four days. Now there is a new intrigue, which has for its object to get hold of the two other Provinces, Arungabad and Parabhani, they being, after the Berars, the richest of the Nizam’s territory. I asked Kháparde his opinion of the Viceroys who succeeded Lord Ripon. Of Dufferin he said he was a diplomatist, who gave fair words but did nothing. On arrival he announced that he intended to carry out Lord Ripon’s policy, but he made no step in advance of the Municipal Councils, Lord Ripon’s first instalment of self-government. Lords Lansdowne and Elgin also did nothing, letting the officials have their own way. He holds Curzon to have had the ambition to make himself Viceroy for life of India, and to revive the state and splendour of the Mogul Emperors. The great Durbar of 1903 cost £5,000,000 sterling, though only £50,000 figured for it in the budget, the deficit being made up by charges credited to the Public Works Department. This was made easy by the arrangement according to which the provincial budgets are subject to approval and alteration at Calcutta, so that extra expenses can be charged on these if required by the Imperial Government. In Curzon’s time all the Councils were officialized, and the management centralized, so as to destroy their independence. He told how the famine accounts had been manipulated in 1900 in Berar and the Hyderabad state. During the famine no accounts were kept by those entrusted with the distribution of relief, the money wanted being drawn from a fund at Hyderabad, which consisted of the surpluses of six or seven years, paid from the Berars and kept there in hand, but when the famine was over those who had administered the relief were called together and were told to write out accounts, so much for one thing, so much for another, so as to make up the sum taken from the Fund; thus there was no real check at all upon the expenditure.

“I asked him about loyalty to the Crown. At this he smiled. There was at one time, he said, a certain feeling towards Queen Victoria, on account of her proclamation of 1858, but all that was long past. The Nizam was bitter about the Berars, and had no love at all for the Imperial Government or for the present King. The Duke of Connaught had good manners with the Indian princes; in this a great contrast with others, but his appointment as viceroy would not alter the situation now. As to the Mohammedans there would be no difficulty arising from them in a restoration of self-government, except in the Punjaub, where the feeling between the two communities, Hindoo and Moslem, was still very bitter.

“This afternoon we had quite a garden party, over twenty guests sitting down to tea in the Jubilee Garden. Among them Miss Frances Jennings, who came with one of the Meynell girls. Miss Jennings is a most interesting girl, pretty in the Burne-Jones way, with a rose-leaf complexion, strange blue eyes and flaxen hair. Meynell tells me she is of Welsh origin, but she herself said her father was from Cumberland, her mother from Devonshire. She came up quite young to the Slade School in London, where everybody, girls and boys, fell in love with her, and she having a romantic fancy for Olivia Meynell, became a Catholic, inflicted on herself all kinds of austerities, and wanted to be a nun. In the meantime her drawing at the Slade School became famous, and she went over to Paris to study art there. She was alone, and failed to find a lodging in an inn in the Quartier Latin, and was picked up by a charitable Englishman there, who has ever since wanted to marry her. Then she returned to England, and last Spring was found by her friends sitting outside St. Etheldreda’s church in the rain with severe influenza, and she has since been paralysed. I had some talk with her. She has all the look of a Saint, with strange unearthly eyes which seemed as if looking at spirits in the air, and a wonderful ecstatic smile and still more wonderfully sweet voice; her features rather irregular with a wide unshaped mouth, I can imagine her attracting a young man’s devotion. Kháparde has talked brilliantly all day.

“17th August.—My birthday of 69. They have done me the honour of choosing the day for Dingra’s execution, thus making of it an anniversary which will be regarded as one of martyrdom in India for generations.

“Another long talk with Kháparde. He is very angry with the Indian Government, which has just closed five Schools which he had founded in Berar, as seditious. He talked more plainly than he has yet done about the future of India. I asked him whether they could set up a form of Government there which would replace the English, and if so what would be its character? He answered that it could easily be done. First, they would redistribute the provinces, so as to make them coincide with ethnical conditions, each to be governed by a Provincial Council, which in its turn would send delegates to a Central Council. The Provincial Councils would have the management of all provincial affairs, while the Central Council would control the army, the posts and telegraphs, foreign affairs, and other matters called Imperial. Thus, in a way, the old Hindoo Empire and the Empire of Akbar would be refounded. Who should be the head of it would probably be determined by events; it might be a successful soldier, or it might be a President, as in the United States. All would be easy to arrange. He does not give English rule in India more than five to ten, at most twenty, years of survival. A revolution could be accomplished to-morrow if the funds necessary were forthcoming. Five million sterling would be sufficient. As to the army, it was a mere matter of money which side it would take. It was mercenary, and would go where its pay was most secure. It was not loyal for any other reason. As for the native Princes whose loyalty was constantly proclaimed, they hated English rule in their hearts; their loyalty was forced on them by the residents, who ordered all things in their name, by promises held out alternately with threats. One great hold the Residents had over them was this: in former times each independent prince had his treasure house where he stored up his wealth. Now the Residents insisted on their investing it in Government securities, so as to bind their money interests to the existing state of things. I showed him my notes of what Mademoiselle Gaignaud had told me in 1884 about Cordery’s threats to the Nizam. He assured me it was true. Since I was at Hyderabad, there had been a plot in Lord Dufferin’s time, according to which it had been intended to depose the Nizam, on the plea of unsound mind, and to replace him with a Regency, so as once more to get control of the State Funds; but this had been prevented by the Nizam’s appeal to his old minister, the Peshkar, who had him medically examined and pronounced him to be entirely sane before Cordery could get a contrary medical opinion. The plan of Governing by a Regency was a favourite one with our officials, as it threw all power without restraint into the hands of the Resident. As to Scindia, it was the same thing; none of the native princes were really loyal, in spite of their public professions and their subscriptions.