CHAPTER I

MY

DIARIES

Part

One

BOOKS BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

_PROSE_

THE FUTURE OF ISLAM 1882

IDEAS ABOUT INDIA 1885

THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES

I THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT 1907

II INDIA UNDER RIPON 1909

III GORDON AT KHARTOUM 1911

IV THE LAND WAR IN IRELAND 1912

V MY DIARIES PART I. [THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA] 1919

VI MY DIARIES PART II. [THE COALITION AGAINST GERMANY] 1920

_POETRY_

LOVE SONNETS OF PROTEUS 1880

THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND 1883

IN VINCULIS 1889

A NEW PILGRIMAGE 1889

ESTHER AND LOVE LYRICS 1892

GRISELDA 1893

SATAN ABSOLVED 1899

SEVEN GOLDEN ODES OF ARABIA 1903

POETICAL WORKS. A COMPLETE EDITION 1914

[Illustration: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

1861]

MY DIARIES

Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888-1914

By

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

With a Foreword by Lady Gregory

PART ONE

[1888-1900]

[Logo]

NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1921,

BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

_Published, December, 1921_

_Second Printing, March, 1922_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This edition of MY DIARIES is a full and complete reprint of the much

sought after London edition of 1919-1920. Mr. Blunt has himself passed

the proofs as well as the Foreword by Lady Gregory.

I owe a special word of thanks to my friend, Osmond Kessler Fraenkel,

Esq., for great assistance in seeing these volumes through the press.

Mr. Fraenkel is also in a large part responsible for the indices.

A. A. K.

PREFACE WRITTEN FOR THIS EDITION BY LADY GREGORY

A few Sundays ago I was staying with Mr. Blunt at Newbuildings Place,

that ancient and beautiful manor house which has been a best loved part

of his inheritance, as I have been used to do perhaps once in a year

when chance or business draws me from Ireland to London. We were out of

doors all the morning, he in his pony chair, in the beautiful oak woods

that cover some five hundred of his Sussex acres. Our midday meal was

set out nearer the house yet still under blossoming trees. Peacocks came

to be fed and among them a Spanish lamb, black-spotted, using its

sprouting horns to butt at the watch dog in whose companionship it had

been reared. And as we talked “the Squire,” (for so he is known to his

people) told me, and with pleasure in the telling, that these volumes of

his “Diaries,” being sold out in England were now being printed in

America, an honour new to him, for his work is not yet so widely known

there as at home. But he said, and he was a little troubled with regard

to this, that a new preface had been asked of him that would give

something more of a biography, even of a confession, than is to be found

in the text of the “Diaries” and “I am not at present” he said “in a

mood for writing this.” I did not see him again, but after my return to

Ireland not many days later, a home-coming hastened by news of

troublesome events near by, a letter came from him reminding me of our

talk and asking me to “do him a great kindness” and myself write the few

needed words. I felt such a request from my friend of forty years an

honour and not to be refused if I could but accomplish it, but there is

much to say in a short space and it is sometimes harder to say less than

more.

“I have lived my life in full” he said the other day and he had written,

as I remembered, in the preface to the complete edition of his verse,

“No life is perfect that has not been lived, youth in feeling, manhood

in battle, old age in meditation,” and that very same day someone said

to me in London when I spoke of him “His life has been lived for

freedom.” That full life of his has, more happily than many, found its

record not only in public action but in the intensity of lyrical

expression—as an earlier poet has said “outward to man—inward to the

Gods.” He tells in these diaries in vigorous prose of the circumstances

that have in the last 30 years surrounded him, of talks with friends,

and the gossip of Parliaments, of gatherings for shooting or for tennis

or for the sales of his famous Arab Stud. They were written in early

mornings not only where Eastern travel accustomed him to rise with the

rising of the sun but through London seasons, and visits to great

country houses in fine society, for he was many sided; a man of fashion,

rider to hounds at home; rider also on the camels of the desert; attaché

at the court of a King of Greece, a Queen of Spain, an Emperor of the

French at the time of that Emperor’s supreme vain glory, translator from

the Arabic; painter, architect and sculptor (as is shown in his greatest

effort, the beautiful monument at Crawley, the recumbent figure of his

brother); politician outside Parliament; revolutionist and helper of

revolutions.

A brief summary of his earlier history, before I knew him, has been

given me by a friend of his and mine:

“The English books of reference tell us that Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

was born at Crabbet Park in Sussex in the year 1840. His father was a

squire possessed of some four thousand acres mostly of forest land; a

justice of the peace, a Deputy Lieutenant of that county, and master of

the local foxhounds, who had served in the Peninsular campaign and had

carried the colours of the Grenadier Guards under Sir John Moore at the

battle of Corunna where he was wounded, and remained through life a

follower of the Duke of Wellington, the object of his political

devotion.

“Mr. Blunt’s sole hereditary connection with letters, it is interesting

to learn, was that the family estates in Sussex lay closely adjoining

those of the Shelleys and that his great grandfather was fellow justice

of the peace to Percy Shelley’s father and that they sat as Magistrates

on the same Bench at the County town of Horsham, also that his father

was a contemporary at Harrow School of that other great poet Byron, and

acted as “fag” to him there according to English public school fashion

for a year, memories that are cherished in the family traditions.

“Left an orphan while yet a child, he had been brought up a Catholic and

had received his education under the Jesuits at Stonyhurst and later at

Oscott, but pursued his education no further. He was never at an

university, but at the early age of eighteen was given, by one of his

guardians connected with the Ministry of the day, a post in the

Diplomatic Service and was sent abroad the same year as attaché to the

British Legation at Athens and afterwards by way of Constantinople to

Germany, where he went through a mental crisis connected with the

Darwinian discussions of the day, allusions to which will be found in

the diaries.

“From Frankfort he was transferred in 1863 to Madrid and in the

following year to the Paris Embassy, just then at the full height of the

short lived glory of the Second Napoleonic Empire. Here the romantic

follies of his youth began and with them the first outpourings of his

poetic faculty followed by a diplomatic exile to the remoter posts in

the service—to the Legations of Portugal and the River Plate. On his

return to Europe he married Lady Annabella Noel, the only daughter of

William Earl of Lovelace and of Ada Byron, that child of romance to whom

the poet Byron addressed those pathetic lines: “Ada, sole daughter of my

house and heart”; and the year after on the death of his elder brother

he left the diplomatic service and settled down to a country life on his

ancestral acres. There he and his highly gifted wife busied themselves

for some half dozen years, she with painting, he with sculpture, and in

secret with those verses which afterwards were to become so celebrated

as “The Sonnets of Proteus,” and both in the rebuilding of their family

home, Crabbet Park, a work for which they were their own sole

architects.

“In 1875 tiring of too inadventurous a life at home, a sudden impulse

started them on a series of romantic horseback journeys in Spain,

Algeria and Asia Minor, and eventually in that still wilder wandering in

Mesopotamia, Persia and the as yet quite unvisited regions of Central

Arabia.”

It was in 1881 that my first meeting with him and Lady Anne took place,

at Cairo, when they were living in the garden they had bought on the

desert edge of Heliopolis; and at that meeting my husband had told us

how some years before at a bull fight at Madrid he had been struck by

the extraordinary good looks of the young matador awaiting the rush of

the bull in the arena and asking who he was heard he was an attaché from

the English Embassy, Wilfrid Blunt. That fine poem of his on the dying

bull fighter Sancho Sanchez shows perhaps the hidden root of that

adventure:

“Meaning was there in our courage and the calm of our demeanour,

For there stood a foe before us which had need of all our skill,

And our lives were as the programme, and the world was our arena,

And the wicked beast was death and the horns of death were Hell.

“And the boast of our profession was a bulwark against danger

With its fearless expectation of what good or ill may come,

For the very prince of darkness shall burst forth on us no stranger

When the doors of death fly open to the rolling of the drum.”

I will quote again from the summary: “At the time of his arrival at

Cairo Mr. Blunt was still in the good books of the Foreign Office and in

personal correspondence with Mr. Gladstone as an authority on Oriental

matters and had just published his first prose work “The Future of

Islam.” But overborne by his strong natural sympathy for liberty he

espoused the cause of Egyptian Nationalism, and when the quarrel between

England and the Egyptians came to hostilities at the bombardment of

Alexandria he refused to abandon the cause that he had taken up, with

the result that when after the defeat of Tel el Kebir the Egyptian

leader Arabi found himself a prisoner of war threatened with death at

the hands of a court martial, he succeeded in rousing popular feeling in

England to shame at their betrayal of an honourable cause, the first of

freedom in the East, and secured his release and honourable exile.

“The public action taken by Mr. Blunt in opposition to the Foreign

Office, his first appearance in English political life, brought him into

close connection with the leading politicians of the day and amongst

others Parnell and the other members of the Irish Party and he joined

the new group of Tory Democrats founded by Lord Randolph Churchill at

that time in opposition which eventually succeeded in overthrowing the

Government at the election of 1885. His fearless action with regard to

Egypt ended his friendly relations with the Foreign Office and resulted

in his exile from Egypt and he was forbidden to enter that country for

some three years; and came to be regarded as the ‘_enfant terrible_’ in

politics just as Samuel Butler was in art and literature.”

I wrote to him a little while ago asking if he had any letters of mine

written from or to Egypt at the time of Arabi’s rebellion for, I said,

it seemed to me I had made my education in politics there. And he

answered “You talk of having made your political education in Egypt, and

so too did I with you, for before that eventful year 1882 I had never

played a public part of any kind or written so much as a letter to _The

Times_ with my name to it and we made our education together over it.”

All that story is told in his “Secret History of the Occupation of

Egypt”; and he records that among his most important supporters there

were Lord Houghton “who in early life had been an enthusiastic advocate

of freedom in the East, and Sir William Gregory, an old follower of

Gladstone and well known Liberal and who sent more than one powerful

letter to what was then the leading journal of Europe (_The Times_)

giving the Nationalist side. . . It is hardly too much to say that

Gregory’s letters and mine, especially his, were largely the means of

obtaining a respite for Egypt from the dangers that threatened her.” But

after the war had been formally declared and at London evening parties

“everyone was rejoicing over the bombardment of Alexandria” Wilfrid

Blunt was almost alone in openly taking the part of the Egyptians;

though Lord Houghton, while declaring himself for victory,

characteristically told him that if he did go to Egypt he must bring

back Arabi with him “and you must both come and dine with me.” When

after Tel el Kebir the short war was over, and Cairo had fallen and

Arabi had surrendered, a rumor went round that he and his officers,

prisoners of war in English hands, were to be put to death, and a

private letter of Mr. Gladstone’s confirmed this possibility, some men

of honour and good feeling held up their hands in horror yet saw no way

to compel the Ministry to abide by justice and custom and avoid this

disgrace. But Mr. Blunt found a way and within two or three days he had

engaged Counsel to act for the Egyptian rebels’ defence. He wrote to me

at the time, “I have taken the precaution of sending out a couple of

lawyers to see what can be done. We are the rear guard of a beaten army

where there are plenty of blows and no glory to be won. Egypt may get a

certain share of financial ease but she will not get liberty, at least

not in our time, and the bloodless revolution so nearly brought about

has been drowned in blood.”

When the expenses of the defence of the prisoner began to be very heavy

some subscriptions were sent towards it by, amongst others, Lord

Wentworth, Lord Wemyss, Frederic Harrison, Admiral Lord Mark Kerr, Lord

Randolph Churchill, A. W. Kinglake, George Meredith, and General Gordon

(who wrote with his, “I suppose Government will not pay it. Arabi

himself will repay it within a year’s time”). But with a splendid

generosity Mr. Blunt took the whole burden upon himself, paying if I

remember aright a sum of £3,000. It was not his last service to Egypt,

and that passionate denunciation of the Imperial Government in “The Wind

and the Whirlwind,” though it went past the ears closed to any but an

official voice still stands as an indictment and a prophecy. Here are

some of his lines:

Oh insolence of strength! Oh boast of wisdom!

Oh poverty in all things truly wise!

Thinkest thou, England, God can be outwitted

For ever thus by him who sells and buys?

Thou sellest the sad nations to their ruin.

What hast thou bought? The child within the womb,

The son of him thou slayest to thy hurting,

Shall answer thee “An Empire for thy tomb.”

Thou hast joined house to house for thy perdition.

Thou hast done evil in the name of right.

Thou hast made bitter sweet and the sweet bitter,

And called light darkness and the darkness light.

Thou art become a by-word for dissembling,

A beacon to thy neighbors for all fraud.

Thy deeds of violence men count and reckon.

Who takes the sword shall perish by the sword.

The Empire thou didst build shall be divided.

Thou shalt be weighed in thine own balances

Of usury to peoples and to princes,

And be found wanting by the world and these.

Thy Empire shall be parted and thy Kingdom.

At thy own doors a Kingdom shall arise,

Where freedom shall be preached and the wrong righted

Which thy unwisdom wrought in days unwise.

Truth yet shall triumph in a world of justice.

This is of faith. I swear it. East and West

The law of Man’s progression shall accomplish

Even this last great marvel with the rest.

Thou wouldst not further it, Thou canst not hinder.

If thou shalt learn in time thou yet shalt live.

But God shall ease thy hand of its dominion,

And give to these the rights thou wouldst not give.

The nations of the East have left their childhood.

Thou art grown old. Their manhood is to come;

And they shall carry on Earth’s high tradition

Through the long ages when thy lips are dumb.

The wisdom of the West is but a madness,

The fret of shallow waters in their beds.

Yours is the flow, the fulness of Man’s patience,

The ocean of God’s rest inherited.

I think when London fashion turned against him for his support of the

Egyptians who fought for freedom, his good looks were a positive

annoyance to his enemies. All had not the good humour of Lord Houghton

who said to me in his whimsical way “The fellow knows he has a handsome

head and he wants it to be seen on Temple Bar.” Those good looks on the

other hand and perhaps his love of horses softened the sternness of

magistrates who visited him according to their duty when he was picking

oakum as a prisoner in a cell of Galway gaol. For in the Land League

days, turning from the East he had taken up the cause of “the

Westernmost of all European nations and the most Christian,” and had

held it an honour to be “the first Englishman put in prison for

Ireland’s sake.” He was condemned to two months of that prison life for

holding a meeting of protest “against the denial of the right

universally claimed by our countrymen to speak where grievances exist.”

Lady Anne, devoted and heroic, Byron’s granddaughter, Ada’s daughter,

lingered near the gaol until work on his behalf called her to England.

He took his punishment with a gallant spirit. Bereft of books he found

pleasure in watching the seagulls as they hovered overhead, and the

jackdaws and sparrows on the look out for scraps of prison food; talking

of horse flesh with the visiting justices, even finding a solace in the

oakum-picking “the unravelling of an old tarred rope with a good healthy

smell”—(I still possess a strand of this smuggled from the cell, and

acting as a marker to my copy of his prison poems “In Vinculis”); even

hiding a bit of rope on Saturday to begile the tedium of the unoccupied

Sabbath; but finding his chief hardship in those January nights, being

given but scanty covering as he lay on the plank bed that he found

harder than the naked ground of any of his Eastern encampments. But with

a hidden scrap of pencil he wrote sonnets on the blank leaves of his

prayer book, and some of these are a cry from one who feels real

suffering:

“God knows, ’twas not with a fore-reasoned plan

I left the easeful dwellings of my peace

And sought this conflict with ungodly Man

And ceaseless still through years that do not cease

Have warred with Powers and Principalities.

My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,

Was as a sister, diligent to please

And loving all, and most the human clan.

God knows it. And He knows how the world’s tears

Touched me. And He is witness of my wrath,

How it was kindled against murderers

Who slew for gold, and how upon their path

I met them. Since which day the World in arms

Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.”

An “_enfant terrible_” of politics indeed, he has kept to the resolve

recorded in the first page of these Diaries of “pleading the cause of

the backward nations of the world” in and out of season. He has never

given up his right of protest against injustice in Egypt and elsewhere,

denouncing the floggings and hangings of the villagers of Denshawai in

1905; calling out against the hanging of Dingra, the Hindoo political

assassin, in 1909; against the Italian massacres of Arabs in Tripoli in

1911; against the hanging of Roger Casement in 1914; and against the

“lawyers arguments” used in the British Cabinet to urge and justify the

late war. An unusual and gallant record for a Sussex gentleman of many

acres, of inherited wealth and ease.

The story told in these Diaries from year to year, sometimes from day to

day, the “humour, the charming good temper that flickers into all

corners of life” through its pages makes a richly woven background, a

tapestry of rich colour, for the adventure of that personal life, the

“life of love, the romance of travel, the delight in woods and fields

and skies, the pride of ancestry and race” ascribed to him by one who

knew him; the many gifts, the mastery of living, that seem to belong to

the heroic ages of the world, that show him out as one of Plutarch’s

men.

A. GREGORY.

JUNE 12, 1921.

FOREWORD

In issuing this, the fifth volume of my “Secret History” series, at the

present moment, I feel that, with much that is only too trivial in the

diary (a thing not written for publication) there are certain passages

in it for which apology is due from me for their too plain speaking in

what will be thought by some an unpatriotic sense. The fault is perhaps

not wholly mine, rather the change which has been wrought in the public

mind and heart of England by the heroic efforts made by her sons

unselfishly in the war.

The period the volume travels over in English public life—1888 to

1900—was in truth anything but a noble one, and judged by the high

standards now professed in Downing Street and echoed by the universal

popular voice, proclaiming international right and a respect for the

weak nations of the world, may deserve the worst that I have said of it,

and yet my telling be resented as an untimely reminder of lapses the

country would wish to forget. It includes the Matabele and Boer wars,

and the wars on the Nile, where England led the way in the white

scramble for Africa. There is a special danger for me of displeasure in

regard to Egypt, which forms so large a topic in the text, as it becomes

more clear that among the many contributory causes leading to the final

catastrophe of the great World War of 1914, our obstinacy in retaining

Egypt, notwithstanding all our promises, must be counted as one of the

foremost. It will be reproached to me that I have sought to excuse

Germany by showing that there were others primarily guilty and not only

the Central Empires. I regret this the more because I know how many of

the noblest there are amongst us who are consoling their sore hearts,

wounded in the war, with the thought that at least the quarrel was

thrust on England by no fault of hers, and who cannot but be disturbed

by my reminder of the broader truth which teaches that our own Imperial

ambitions were also a reason of the quarrel. Yet the truth of history

needs to be told, and not only in Blue Books, where the essential facts

are travestied, but by individual testimony such as mine, recording the

words of statesmen in out of office hours, when they have spoken their

naked thought to me in very different language. I cannot believe but

that it is a service rendered to my fellow countrymen to do this at a

moment when we are endeavouring to reconstruct our ruined world on a

basis sounder than before, to disabuse them of an illusion, even a happy

one, obscuring their clear vision.

Nor must it be imagined that, because the period treated here shows

England the chief sinner among the white Empires in their dealings with

the weak nations of the African world, my sympathy is more with the

others. As masters of alien races both France and Italy, to say nothing

of Portugal and Belgium, have shown themselves far worse and less

scrupulous oppressors than we have been, or in Asia than Russia was

under the Czars, while, as for Germany, it was less the will than the

opportunity of evil that limited its lawless ventures. I have no love

for the German race or its ideals, having an ancient bone to pick with

Prussia dating from as long ago as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,

when, young and enthusiastic, I made a vow of boycotting the whole

Teutonic race (a vow which I have kept), but this does not blind me to

the fact that as active aggressors in deed as well as word, it was not

at Berlin that the first steps were taken in the direction of world-wide

conquest. The will was there, theatrically displayed at intervals in

Kaiser Wilhelm’s not quite sane pronouncements, and to my knowledge had

been there before his day; but Germany’s plunder of the weak had been

small in act compared to ours, or even to that of France, during the

past half century, while in each and all of the great Empires there had

been the same ominous growth of militarism and contempt for the old

rules of international right where the defenceless peoples were

concerned. The only difference between Berlin morality and ours in

Downing Street had been that we had been careful to preserve our outward

attitude of forbearance and respect for moral right, while Berlin had

been shameless in its anti-human logic. Also that as an Empire we were

already sated like a lion surrounded with the carcasses of its prey,

while Germany was alert and hungry. Well might we want peace! Almost as

well might Germany prepare for war!

These things, which need to be remembered, will be found more plainly

indicated in Part II of the present issue, which will be published in

the course of the summer, and complete my contribution of _Mémoires pour

servir à l’histoire de mon temps_, and, as I think, discharge my true

patriotic duty as a nineteenth century Englishman.

W. S. B.

_Xmas_, 1918.

_P.S._—It has been suggested to me, as an appropriate addition to the

value of the present volume, that I should place in the Appendix a

transcript of a yet earlier diary kept by me during the first months of

the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. There is so much in these that stands

in close relation with the war just over, that I have agreed, and so I

print them here.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE vii

PART I

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

CHAPTER

I. A VISIT TO GREECE IN 1888 1

II. EGYPT UNDER TEWFIK, 1889 22

III. BRIGANDAGE IN EGYPT 40

IV. THE YOUNG KHEDIVE ABBAS, 1892 TO 1893 62

V. THE VEILED PROTECTORATE 84

VI. CROMER’S HEAVY HAND 108

VII. A SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1894 140

VIII. A VISIT TO TUNIS AND TRIPOLI 153

IX. POLAND AND ARMENIA 175

X. THE ADVANCE ON DONGOLA 193

XI. THE JAMESON RAID 211

XII. SIWAH 242

XIII. OMDURMAN AND FASHODA 277

XIV. “SATAN ABSOLVED”—THE BOER WAR 302

XV. LAST YEAR OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 336

APPENDICES

I. MY PARIS DIARY OF 1870 381

II. MEMORANDUM AS TO THE EVACUATION OF EGYPT 406

III. MR. HERBERT SPENCER TO MR. BLUNT 410

INDEX 413

PART ONE

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

PART I

1888 TO 1900

CHAPTER I

A VISIT TO GREECE IN 1888

The year 1888 saw the close of my activities in English public life. How

this came about was described in my volume, “The Land War in Ireland.”

It told how, having fought my battle for Nationalism there and lost it

(for my imprisonment had failed to win me the seat in Parliament which

alone would have justified me in English eyes for the part I had played

in the Celtic quarrel) I resolved to look no more to action at home but

to seek in other ways what I still felt to be my mission in life, that

of pleading the cause of the backward nations of the world, and

especially those of Asia and Africa, from their slavery to Europe. I

knew myself to be regarded as a beaten man, and for the moment my

depression was extreme.

Socially, as well as politically, I needed rehabilitation. My

“unpatriotic” vagaries, for such they were looked upon, had estranged me

from most of my personal friends, my blood relations and those I loved

best; nor could I content myself with my new political acquaintances or,

with the strong instinct I had of the claims of kinship, shift my heart

at once to a new hold and break permanently with the society in which I

had been bred. All my relations and nearly all my intimate friends were

in the Tory camp, and I had no natural footing in any other. With the

exception of the Carlisles and the Harcourts, I was at home in none of

the great Whig houses, and in my own county of Sussex I stood absolutely

alone in my opinions. Nothing can be conceived more dispiriting than the

attempts at social entertainment made that Spring in London by the few

Liberal peers who had declared for Home Rule, unwilling followers of

Gladstone. I went with my wife to one of these, at Spencer House, but we

found ourselves among strangers and did not go to another. At Crabbet it

mattered less, for I was Lord there of my own Manor, cock on my own

dunghill, yet I had been shocked by the incongruity of being met at my

door on my return from Kilmainham by a deputation consisting of three

Irish M.P.’s and Langridge, our local cobbler and only Radical. It

revealed the full nakedness of the land for me at home, on any lines but

those of silence and abstention. And thus the summer passed. I occupied

myself once more with my Arab horse breeding, I wrote verses and enjoyed

my physical life in the green Sussex woods as in former days, but with

the sadness a sense of failure brings. I left off keeping my journal, so

little there was of happy interest to record, so much that was unhappy.

An unfortunate family quarrel about this time, in which I was

constrained, unwillingly, to take a part, added to my bitterness in

regard to the public situation, and a gap of four months occurs in the

entries. It was not till quite the end of the summer that I was able to

rouse myself into any more profitable line of thought than that of vain

regrets and hopes made void.

By the middle of autumn, however, tired of inaction, a longing seized me

once more to visit Egypt and those desert lands in which so many of my

winters had been spent. With the Arabs I had a second home, less

estranged from me than the other, and I should find myself, I knew, in

that “rut of centuries” which is so soothing to the Japhetic soul

troubled with Europe’s ephemeral ills. Thus, on the 9th of November my

journal is resumed, and shows me on my way eastwards with my wife and my

daughter Judith, now taken for the first time abroad with us, at Paris,

enjoying, for a few days, something of my old life with my cousin,

Francis Currie, whom I had not for some years seen.

“_10th Nov._—Bitters and I breakfasted together this morning and took

one of our familiar walks in the afternoon, visiting Richelieu’s tomb at

the Sorbonne and the Panthéon and the Hôtel de Cluny. The tomb is a fine

thing in the best style of French sculpture. We also stopped and looked

at the new monument to Gambetta [by Aubé, then an unknown name to me]

which I like better than I could have thought possible. It has good

proportion and a certain movement and originality which have merit. We

could not have produced anything half so good in England. They are

pulling down the sheds on the site of the Tuileries, leaving the

Carousel open to the garden. This has a poor effect, but it leaves a

fine opportunity of rebuilding to Boulanger, or whoever else succeeds to

the French throne.

“_11th Nov._—Hearing that Lady C. was in Paris, I called on her, and

through her persuasion was introduced to her friend Lacretelle, the

painter, whose brother, a prominent deputy, was intimate with Boulanger,

and he invited me to call upon the _brave général_. Lady C. had already

made Boulanger’s acquaintance, and had spoken to me about him when I had

seen her in London. Her description of him reminded me not a little of

Napoleon III, ‘very amiable, but rather dull, not at all like a soldier,

and with a hand the most disagreeable to touch of any she remembered.

She could not explain in what the repulsion consisted.’ Nevertheless,

she seemed impressed with him. He is floated financially, she tells me,

by Mrs. Mackay the American, and if war comes, he may yet achieve his

fortune.”

This resulted in my being taken (15th Nov.) by Lacretelle to see the

General at his house near the Barrière de l’Etoile. The moment of our

visit was that of the very height of his popularity, when it was

believed in Paris that he was about to repeat the adventure of Prince

Louis Napoleon in 1851, when France, tired of her constitutional

_régime_ and a Republic which had brought her no credit, was ready for

“a Saviour of Society,” who should restore to her something of her

military glory. This might be effected either by a restoration of the

monarchy, or by Boulanger’s proclaiming himself Dictator. The thing

seemed possible enough, especially in Paris, where the idea of a _guerre

de revanche_ against Germany had still many adherents. I, as member of

the acting Committee of the Peace and Arbitration Society, was

interested to find out how far the General, if he succeeded, was likely

to prove a serious danger to the peace of the world, and it was with

that view principally that I hailed the opportunity of an interview.

Lacretelle, the deputy, though personally friends with the General, was

a strict Republican of the Victor Hugo school, and opposed to ideas of

war for any purpose, and he had assured me that the popular hero was in

reality no swashbuckler, though he gave himself the airs of one for

popularity’s sake with his principal supporters, Royalists and

Bonapartists, who affected to quarrel with the Republic for having

agreed to a cession of the lost provinces when peace was made with

Germany in 1871. England, however, was at that date regarded in France

as the chief enemy, and Alsace-Lorraine was already beginning to be

forgotten in favour of Egypt. The following is the account my diary

gives of the visit, but I wrote a much fuller and better one to the

“Times,” which was published in it a few days later:

“_15th Nov._—With Lacretelle at 10 o’clock to call on General Boulanger.

He lives in one of the streets beyond the Barrière de l’Etoile, and we

found the house crowded. Not only were the two anterooms full, but the

staircase also, men of every rank of life, from the priest to the

decayed soldier and the artisan, a few women, too. After waiting nearly

an hour, we were let in by special favour, most of the suppliants (the

mulatto button boy who did the honours of the waiting room told us)

having no chance whatever of an audience. The General’s reception room

is on the second floor, a singular room, as you go down half-a-dozen

steps to the level of the floor when the door to it is opened. It is a

very large place with a single table at the far end of it and some Louis

XIV chairs. The General, who was at the far table in a snuff-coloured

morning dress, not uniform, came forward to receive us (Lacretelle has

just been painting his portrait for the Salon) and gave us each a hand,

and when he heard who I was, led me with some pomp and made me sit on a

gigantic Louis XIV chair beside him. Lacretelle began to compliment him

as “l’homme du destin,” a bit of flattery which the General took very

much as a matter of course, saying that there were moments when people

were obliged to act, and that the wave was rising now, and that whether

he liked it or not it would carry him on to whatever was intended—just

the same words of pleasant fatalism I remember in Arabi’s mouth seven

years ago at Cairo.

“The General is a man of about fifty, fair-haired, turning gray, a fresh

complexion, a good but not especially military figure, a very pleasant

voice, and a quite frank manner. He gave one the impression at once of

simplicity and sincerity and of a sort of manly self-reliance which is

doubtless his power. There was nothing of the _général de café chantant_

in what I saw of him. After a little desultory conversation I asked him

to allow me to put him a serious question. ‘It has been much debated,’ I

said, ‘in our Peace Societies, how the quarrel between France and

Germany could be settled without war. Is it possible to arrange for the

neutralization of the ceded Provinces?’ To this he replied, that such a

solution might possibly be in the future, but that he could not say now

it was his own; the German Government had made it impossible by their

policy in Alsace-Lorraine for any inhabitant of the Provinces to do

otherwise than call himself a Frenchman; the only way one had of knowing

the opinion of districts was by the ballot, and the Provinces had

universally elected deputies who demanded restoration to France; while

this was the case neutralization was hardly a practical question; still

he did not say it might not become one. As for war, he, Boulanger, knew

war too well to take the responsibility of rushing into it without

absolute necessity. War is so largely a matter of chance, _chose

aléatoire_, that a man must be a traitor who would risk the fortunes of

his country on it; therefore I must not doubt him when he told me he was

a man of peace. Lacretelle then explained to him my connection with

Arabi and Egypt, and his manner became extremely cordial, and he told me

that he had English or rather Welsh blood in his veins through his

mother [her name, Lacretelle told me, was Griffiths] and begged me when

I returned to Paris to come and see him again. I said I would do so and

that I might be able to influence public opinion in England somewhat in

his favour, at which he was much pleased and we parted the best of

friends. Lacretelle tells me that he has never heard him talk so well or

so amiably to a stranger, especially an Englishman, as he hates the

English in common now with all Frenchmen. My impression of the General

is that he is honest, that he is able, and that, the circumstances of

France being what they are, he will succeed.”

I had called at the Embassy on arriving in Paris, hoping to find Lytton,

who had just been named Ambassador there, but he was unfortunately away

delivering his Rectorial Address at Glasgow. “Bitters tells me that

Lytton is doing very well here, having made friends with the Press and

leaving all real business to Austin Lee.”

Another interesting new acquaintance whom I made during my few days at

Paris was Louise Michel, then so popular with the extreme Socialists,

almost as notoriously so as Boulanger with the army. This, too, I owed

to Lacretelle and his wife and to a certain Madame Dorrian (_née_

Princess Merstcherska), who took me with her to call upon Louise, with

whom she is great friends—a most interesting visit. This is the account

of it:

“_14th Nov._—We drove to Neuilly where Louise lives in a miserable house

on the fifth floor. Her apartment consists of two very small rooms only,

without even an ante-room, and when we opened the door I thought we must

have come to the wrong place. It resembled a concierge’s box both in

appearance and smell, crammed full with four people, three dogs, five

cats, a cage of monkeys and a parrot, all screaming at the tops of their

voices, and though the rest were silenced the parrot continued its

shrieking the whole time we were there. The family party consisted of

Louise and another woman, a young man and a fourth person whose sex I

forget. They were engaged as we entered on a meal. A deal table, without

cloth plates or utensil of any kind but a bottle of wine and some

glasses, was covered with roast chestnuts which they were peeling and

eating. Louise rose to receive us, a gray-haired woman of about fifty

with a wild but honest and kindly face, dressed in a ragged gown of

rusty black, guiltless of linen. Her forehead is retreating, her

features large, her face colourless, its expression that of a

‘believer.’ It might have been a French country priest’s. She spoke

hurriedly, with an excitement which was evidently habitual and was not

altogether coherent. She seemed not to hear the fearful screams of the

parrot or the yelping of the dogs, or perhaps these excited her, as

noise excites the hearing of some deaf people. The Princess kissed her,

calling her by her Christian name, and Louise seemed pleased to see her.

When Louise was in prison the Princess used to visit and read to her.

She tells me Louise is the best of women, giving away everything she

possesses to the poor, and serving as midwife to the women of her

quarter. She is certainly not a prophet of the sort that goes clothed in

purple and fine linen. The Princess explained who I was and how I, too,

had been in prison in Ireland, and Louise began to talk about the

prospects of Socialism. She said a revolution was certain and near in

Germany, and next year would see one too at Paris. She was under the

impression that England was mined with Socialism and when I told her how

little that was true was visibly distressed. She then read us one of her

poems and tore out of a book and gave me the manuscript of one beginning

‘Nul souffle humain ne se trouve sur ces pages,’ and invited us to go

with her to a meeting to take place that evening at Belleville, which we

promised to do, but later I made the Princess explain to her that it was

impossible I should really go, as I have no mind to be mixed up in a

free fight, or to be arrested by the Paris police. But it was difficult

to make her understand. She imagined that as I had been in prison I must

necessarily be ready for everything. ‘Why should he hesitate,’ she said.

‘There will be no danger, we shall all have revolvers.’ I like the

woman, as she is evidently honest and of an unselfish kindly heart.”

This is the programme she gave me of the meeting:

Grand Meeting Internationale

à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de l’execution des anarchistes de

Chicago.

Ordre du Jour.

Primo Les Crimes de la Bourgeoisie &c. &c.

Avec Le Concours d’Orateurs Socialistes Révolutionnaires.

Et de la Citoyenne

Louise Michel.

Here is also the full text of her verse:

BOUCHE CLOSE

Nul souffle humain n’est sur ces pages,

Rien que celui des éléments,

Le cyclone hurlant sur les plages,

Les legendes des océans,

Les sapins verts sous les nuées

Tordant les branches remuées

Comme les harpes dans les vents.

Sous les coraux ou sous les sables

La nature parfois ouvrant

Dans les tourmentes formidables

Un cercueil, ville ou continent,

Et l’être ayant la bouche close,

Feuille de chêne ou lien de rose

Tombant au gré de l’ouragan.

LOUISE MICHEL.

14 _Novembre_ ’88.

Souvenir à M. Wilfrid Blunt.

From Paris we travelled on by Marseilles to Greece, where my wife had a

family interest through her grandfather Lord Byron’s death there in

1827; how glorious in those romantic days! how disappointing in its

results to-day! We had interests, too, in a long promised visit to her

relations the Noels in Eubaea, and I was curious to see the changes

which should have come about in the thirty years which had elapsed since

I first knew Athens as a member of the English Legation in the days of

King Otho.

“_20th Nov._—We arrived by night at the Piraeus and landed in the early

morning, Frank Noel having come from Achmetaga to meet us. It is thirty

years almost to a month since I first drove up the road to Athens, and I

find little change. The suburbs have extended somewhat, and the olive

groves have shrunk, and the hills are even barer than before, but

nothing marks the progress of the age unless it be the overthrow of the

fine old Venetian walls of the Acropolis. I regret these as much as if

they had pulled down the Parthenon itself. I wandered in the town for a

couple of hours, looking for houses I used to frequent, and for friends

I used to know, but all of these last were gone. Our diplomatic set at

Athens in 1859 was certainly a distinguished one. At the Russian

Legation we had Ozeroff for Minister with Staal for First Secretary, now

Ambassador in London, and Nelidoff for attaché, now Ambassador at

Constantinople. Haymerlé, afterwards Prime Minister at Vienna, was

Austrian Secretary. At our own Legation we had that good Irishman, Sir

Thomas Wyse, with William Eliot, afterwards Lord St. Germans, for First

Secretary. Drummond, Digby, and myself attachés. I was the youngest of

all the Corps diplomatique, only eighteen years old, and a favourite on

account of my youth. The Dufferins were spending the winter there of

’59-60, he little over thirty, his mother, with whom he had been

travelling in Egypt, the most delightful of women. We used all to ride

out, a merry party, twice a week, following a paper chase, of which I

was generally the leader on an old white horse, which, in memory of

Shelley’s lines, I called Apocalypse.”[1]

We used to gallop through the olive groves, armed with revolvers, as

robbers were still common in the mountains round, just as described by

Edmond About in his “Roi des Montagnes” and “La Grèce Contemporaine,”

while one met retired bandit chiefs in the best Athens society. King

Otho wore the Albanian _fustanelle_, and that and the costume of the

Islands, with its immense balloon-like calico nether garments and red

cap, were the common dress of the young Greek bloods. The king’s footmen

are the only wearers of the _fustanelle_ to-day.

On the 22nd we paid our visit to Achmetaga, for me a romantic spot, for

I had spent some weeks in Eubaea in 1860 in merry company in Frank

Noel’s father’s time. Edward Noel had come to Greece soon after the War

of Independence in the year 1830, and had purchased a good many thousand

acres in the island, mostly mountain and forest land, of a Turkish Aga,

who was leaving the country on Eubaea being made over to Greece. He had

paid only £2,000 for the whole, and it must be now worth, with its

magnesia mines, ten times that price. The value of land (Frank Noel

tells me) is still rising, and agricultural Greece is prospering. The

peasants are everywhere purchasing their holdings. They have few debts

and are saving money. This is due in part to the general advance of the

country, in part to the abolition of the land tithe for which a tax on

yoke oxen has been substituted. The peasantry round here are an

excellent race, sober, hard-working, cheerful, with many pristine

virtues. Such is Frank Noel’s testimony. Eubaea, unlike the rest of

Greece, is well wooded with pines on the hillsides, and plane trees by

the river banks. “I measured the largest of these last while I was there

and found it 53 feet in girth, with a circumference round the extreme

circuit of its boughs of 170 yards, the finest single tree I ever saw,

as it is perfect without break or blemish more than a few bare twigs on

the extreme summit.” Returning by road to Athens on 2nd December we

slept a night at Chalcis and another at Thebes. The journey was made in

lovely weather and along a carriageable road. At Chalcis they were

talking of widening the channel between the island and the main land,

and of making of it a large naval station for warlike purposes. To do it

they will destroy the old Venetian tower which is now a chief ornament.

We heard the details of this plan from Admiral Mansell, a fossilized

English naval officer who has inhabited Chalcis for the last twenty-five

years. Both there and at Thebes we were entertained by Greek friends of

the Noels.

During the following days at Athens we enjoyed something of the society

of Edmund Monson, our Minister there, at the Legation, afterwards

Ambassador at Paris, and of Rennell Rodd, afterwards Ambassador at Rome,

the latter a budding diplomatist with a small talent for verse, but no

great originality, as to whom I shall have more to say in the course of

this volume. All that I need quote from my journal is that on the 3rd

December I had an hour’s interesting talk with the then Prime Minister,

Tricoupi, on Greek politics, and the ambitions developed later in the

direction of territorial expansion at the expense of Turkey.

“_3rd Dec._—Tricoupi is a hard-headed man without any special graces of

manner, but he talks straightforwardly and to the point. We discussed

finance, agriculture, road making, free trade, peasant proprietorship,

debts public and private, the shipping trade, the Corinth Canal, and,

lastly, foreign politics and Greece’s prospects in the Ottoman

inheritance. On this last point he said that it was impossible for any

Greek politician not to look to an extension of territory, and that if

Greece did not go forwards she would go back and lose her independence

at the hands of either Austria or Russia. They were quite content to let

things alone as long as the Ottoman Empire survived, but they must

prepare for the future. The Turks were no longer an enemy, but the

others were. I asked him where he would draw the line of Greek claims

northwards, and he said they could no longer claim the line of the

Balkans, but in Macedonia would ask for a boundary as far north as

Seres, beyond Salonika, and in Thrace as far as Adrianople. The exact

limit, however, could hardly, he thought, be settled without a war with

the Bulgarians. Then the conqueror would fix his own limit.

“I asked him about Albania. He said that Southern Albania, which was

Christian, would revert to Greece, but Mohammedan Albania, on the

extinction of the Sultan’s power, would find itself isolated and might

accept a personal union with Greece under the crown, after the model of

Hungary with Austria. I told him I doubted the possibility of this.

Otherwise I agreed with him in his view that it was necessary Greece

should put forward her claims or prepare to put them forward. Also I am

of opinion that if England is to have a policy of the future it should

be to help Greece rather than Bulgaria. Greece would be always under the

influence of pressure from a naval power in the Mediterranean, whereas

Bulgaria must remain under pressure of the Continental powers.

“With regard to Greek progress there is no doubt things are improving,

though slowly. The revenue has tripled since 1858, when the financial

Commission sat, and this without oppressing the peasantry. On the

contrary, Tricoupi has lately abolished the land tax, a really great

measure, and the peasants, in spite of recent bad harvests, have money

to buy their holdings whenever they are not already the owners. He has

had the sense to put heavy duties on manufactured imports; and he gives

no facilities to the peasantry for borrowing. The country is certainly

improving. Only the rascality of the officials remains unchanged.

Tricoupi was silent on this head, though he hinted that all was not

quite satisfactory. Noel tells me the Constitution is worked by a vast

system of jobbery. If so, it differs little from other Constitutions,

notably those of France and Italy. On the whole, I find Tricoupi a

superior man. All give him a perfectly clean character.

“_4th Dec._—To Corinth alone, to see the Canal. Good luck took me in the

train with Mme. Türr whom I had known an extraordinarily pretty woman

twenty-two years ago, when I was staying on Lago Maggiore with the

Usedoms at the Prussian Legation in Italy. Türr was at that time

negotiating co-operation between Bismarck and the Hungarians, or had

been doing so, but Bismarck, Mme. Türr tells me, threw them over. Now

Türr is President of the Corinth Canal Company, and his wife, a fat

good-natured woman, lives at Kallimaki on the Isthmus. She was daughter

of Mme. Bonaparte Wyse, wife of my old chief at Athens whom she calls

her father, but old Sir Thomas always repudiated the parentage of her

and her brother, who were born after his separation from his Bonaparte

wife. With her, in widow’s weeds and looking the picture of woe, was a

little Greek lady, Mme. P——, and we three are now in the Hotel at

Isthmia, the General being away at Paris, and are having a very amusing

time, Madame P. having recovered her spirits, and giving us her ideas

about Socialism, Eastern politics, and Zola’s novels. She was a Greek,

born at Alexandria, but has lived most of her life at Paris. I was sent

with an employé to see the Canal works. They are monumental.

“_5th Dec._—On to Nauplia, having spent twenty-four hours very agreeably

with these two women. Madame P. has given me a deal of political

information. She says every serious person in Greece has been obliged to

abandon the _grande idée_ (that of inheriting Constantinople from the

Turks). She herself does not think Salonika can be saved from Austria,

which is making a successful propaganda there with the Jews and other

non-Hellenic inhabitants. The Bulgarians must eventually join Russia,

and the Servians too, seeing that they are Slavs. The Roumanians will

not do so willingly, but the two great Empires will divide the spoils.

The Albanians will be merged either in Greece or elsewhere and lose

their nationality.

“_6th Dec._—At Nauplia I find nothing changed since I was last here, not

twenty new houses built. The plain, however, which is the richest in

Greece, has become wonderfully well cultivated. I drove this morning

early to Mycenae to see how much of the ruins Schleimann had left. He

has made a sad hash of the town with his excavations, but the Gate of

Lions and the Treasury still stand (with Agamemnon’s coat of arms over

the entrance). What was most interesting, however, in the place is gone,

the ancient ruins virgin of all meddling for three thousand years. Back

to Athens by train in the evening. The last time I was here we were

travelling on horseback, there being no roads in the Morea except the

mountain mule tracks.”

This is all that is worth recording of our visit to Greece. On 8th

December we went on by sea to Alexandria, travelling in company with

Prince Osman Pasha on his way back from Constantinople, where he had

been with his uncle the ex-Khedive Ismaïl, now practically a prisoner in

his own palace on the Bosporus. “He gave me a deal of information about

Constantinople affairs. There is much sympathy there for the Mahdists,

the Sultan having refused to take part against them at Suakim. It is not

believed now that the English occupation of Egypt will be permanent.

Osman Pasha is a most intelligent good fellow, better worthy of his

Khedivial rank than the rest of his race. He narrated to me amongst

other things his experience in educating his daughters, which has only

resulted in making them unhappy. It was impossible, he said, to find

them educated husbands; nearly everybody now at Constantinople has

abandoned the practice of polygamy, only half-a-dozen among the men of

rank he knew having more than one wife. He named the Grand Vizier,

Kiamil Pasha, as one of the few who continued it; the Sultan is of

course an exception, but he does what no other Sultan has done for

generations; when his women are with child he marries them. Among the

common people of the Turks all are monogamists. This may be in part from

poverty.”

During my stay that winter in Egypt I was obliged to be very careful how

I meddled with politics, even in conversation, for, though Lord

Salisbury had given me leave to return there notwithstanding Sir Evelyn

Baring’s unwillingness, I was under a certain obligation to avoid any

kind of publicity in my sympathy with the National cause. I did not

therefore remain more than a few days at Cairo on arrival, but went on

to my country place at Sheykh Obeyd, ten miles outside the town, where I

got the little garden house ready for my wife and daughter to inhabit, a

beautiful retired place on the desert edge far from European intrusion,

standing on the old pilgrim camel-track where it branches off to Syria,

and little frequented except by the Arab horse merchants, who bring

their horses for sale each spring to Cairo. There we lived in seclusion

and very happily for the three winter months, building and enlarging the

house and recovering the garden from the neglected state into which it

had fallen through the roguery of those left in charge. These, getting

news of my imprisonment in Ireland, had imagined that my career in life

was over and that they might treat the garden as their own, economising

the cost of its watering and using it as a run for their cattle. It was

a labour of love for me restoring its prosperity and arranging for its

future better management. It was only little by little that my peasant

neighbours came to pay me their polite visits of congratulation, and

then I found that there was much hidden sympathy with me among them,

repressed only through fear of the government, to which they knew I had

been opposed. My journal, however, of that winter contains little in it

that is politically worth transcribing. It is a record of conversations

with my peasant neighbours and, as they began to hear of my arrival,

with the obscurer members of the old National Party, which still looked

to the possibility of their old chief Arabi’s recall to Egypt, and who

came furtively to see me under the guidance of Arabi’s old body servant,

Mohammed Ahmed, the same who had faithfully preserved and delivered to

those who were defending him at his trial his master’s political papers

and so saved his life. (See “Secret History of English Occupation of

Egypt.”) He had been the first to come to me now, and finding him out of

employment I had put my garden under his charge, a fortunate

inspiration, for he was a man of integrity and energy and speedily

acquired great influence in the neighbourhood and so restored to working

order the lands entrusted to him. To these Arabist visitors from Cairo

were gradually added other sources of native information, the most

important of whom were my old friends Aarif Bey and Mohammed Moelhi,

nephew of my other friend Ibrahim Moelhi, both of whom were now much in

the confidence of the Ottoman High Commissioner at Cairo, Mukhtar Pasha

Gazi. We saw, too, something of Osman Pasha and his sister, Princess

Nazli, both of them persons of the highest intelligence and knowledge of

affairs, while from the Greeks we obtained much secondhand information

of their view of things through Frank Noel, who had come on to Egypt

with us. Nor were we wholly cut off from the English official world. We

did not think it necessary to call on Baring, but I found my connection,

Colonel Charles Wyndham, in command of a regiment of the army of

occupation, and Anne her cousin Hugh Locke King. From all these sources,

though I hardly stirred from the solitude of my country retreat during

the winter, I was able to gather a sufficient knowledge of the situation

to be able to piece it together now for the purposes of the present

narrative. The political situation in Egypt at the time, as I came to

understand it during the four months that I was at Sheykh Obeyd in the

winter of ’88-’89, was briefly as follows:

The failure of the Drummond Wolff Convention at the last moment, after

it had been already agreed to by its negotiators, through the refusal of

the Sultan under French and Russian pressure to ratify their signatures,

had left affairs in Egypt diplomatically “in the air.” Not only had

further negotiations for evacuating the English garrison been brought to

a standstill, but every section of native opinion had been checked and

disorganized. Instead of a new beginning having been frankly attempted

on lines preparatory to Egypt’s restoration to self-government, all had

been left in precisely the same confusion from which the Convention had

sought to rescue it. The Khedive Tewfik was still occupant of the Vice-

regal throne, but commanding no respect in the country, and dependent

for his maintenance on English support which might at any moment be

withdrawn, leaving him to deal as he could with the Soudanese menace

threatening his frontier at Wadi Halfa. Weak and discredited he was,

without personal authority, and he enjoyed less consideration than

Mukhtar the Sultan’s Commissioner. Baring, in whom all real power was

vested at Cairo, was for the moment without settled policy beyond that

of waiting events, a kind of marking time with no definite instruction

as to the future of England’s connection with the Nile Valley, except

that Lord Salisbury, feeling that he had done what honour required in

fulfilment of English promises of evacuation, was resolved now to leave

things where they were, including the garrison of occupation.

As to the National Party, whether represented by the former Arabists or

by any other group, their condition was one of patriotic torpor; as a

party they had ceased to exist, being without leaders and without

organization. They were disappointed in the hopes raised at the

commencement of the Wolff mission that Tewfik would be replaced as

Khedive by Prince Halim, or some other member of the Khedivial family

unconnected with the misfortunes of 1882, who should restore their lost

constitution of that year, and make good Lord Dufferin’s promises. In

default of these and of Arabi’s recall, impossible under Tewfik, what

poor hopes they had turned mostly towards the Sultan. But undoubtedly

the popular man among the Egyptian fellahin that winter was the Mahdi,

or rather his successor the Khalifa Abdallah and his fighting

lieutenant, Osman Digna, who carried on a perpetual guerilla warfare in

the neighbourhood of Suakim. The popular imagination amongst the

fellahin credited these with heroic qualities, and it was confidently

believed that the Dervish forces would before long overrun Upper Egypt,

and that they were already driving the Belgian Congo Company out of

their territory in Central Africa, that they would rid Senegal of the

French, and, as the issue of a holy war against all infidel intruders,

that they would even reconquer the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

News came while I was there that Emin Pasha, to rescue whom Stanley had

been sent by King Leopold on his filibustering expedition to the Nile

sources, had made his submission to the Mahdists and that Stanley

himself had been slain. From the Eastern desert, too, news reached me

through the Bedouins of an interesting kind. It was to the effect that

my former friend Mohammed Ibn Rashid, taking advantage of a quarrel

between the two sons of Saoud Ibn Saoud with their uncle Abdallah, had

marched with an army to Riad and made himself master of the whole of

Nejd, an event of high importance in Peninsula Arabia. I listened to

these stories and found my interest in the East once more supreme over

the petty hopes and fears of Western politics, and recovered in this way

and in the routine of my daily life in my garden, the peace of mind I

had left behind me on leaving England. I find the following description

in my diary of my life at Sheykh Obeyd.

“_3rd Jan._ 1889.—I left Cairo on the 27th, escaping like a bird out of

the hand of the fowler and am established here at Sheykh Obeyd. It has

been a blessed change, and though I have been here all these days alone,

I have not for a moment felt otherwise than happy. I have been getting

the place ready for habitation by the others, and it is quite

comfortable already in an Oriental way. The house is merely the old

gardener’s house with two rooms added, four in all, and an open

_salamlik_, which I use as sitting room. I have had the floors covered

with two inches of clean white sand after the Nejd fashion, and I spread

my carpet over it and sit there. For more furniture I have had in a man

from the village to make bedsteads, divans, and seats (_gufass_) which

he does out of our own palm branches newly cut at the rate of four

shillings, two shillings, and seven pence halfpenny a piece. The village

carpenter has put up a few screens for more privacy, and the whole

furnishing for the family will cost about two pounds. My room is like a

lantern with windows facing East, North, and West, and from my bed I can

see the first glimmer of the false dawn, which makes the owls hoot and

the jackals cry. Then, with the real dawn, crows begin to pass overhead,

and I get up and go outside the garden wall where I sit at the desert’s

edge and wait for the sunrise. At this hour one sees all the wild life

of the place, foxes, ichneumons (_nims_), jackals, and birds in great

variety, kites, kestrels, doves, and occasionally a woodcock at flight

from the marshes to the garden where he would spend the day. There are

night ravens, too, which have their home in the _lebbek_ trees next the

house, and now in winter time a flock of rooks with their attendant

jackdaws. This is a rarity in Egypt as rooks are never seen south of

Cairo. There are two foxes which live inside the garden, and I see them

most days; they sleep generally in the day time behind some cactuses or

at the foot of a palm tree, and they often jump up as I walk round, and

trot away. They come sometimes within a few yards of my feet, being

accustomed to the work-people, and not afraid of me because I wear an

Arab dress. I have given orders here that there shall be absolute _amân_

even for wolves, and the hyenas which sometimes make their way over the

garden wall. I superintend the labour now, mark out the work, and pay

the wages, pruning the trees with a pair of garden nippers. This is a

delightful occupation.

“_20th Jan._—I don’t know how sufficiently to describe the delight of

the life here. Anne and Judith and Cowie (their maid), have joined me

here, and we are idly busy all day long. The whole of the garden (30

acres) has now been weeded and dug twice. The irrigation engine has been

repaired, and watering will begin regularly next week. Day has gone by

like day, each full of interest. This morning we began pulling down an

outhouse to clear the land for a new building; thirty men and boys have

been working at the job in high good humour, and certainly they are

neither lazy nor unintelligent. In the midst of the demolition a large

cobra jumped out and put up his hood in the middle of them, but they

knocked him over with their picks before he could do any harm. He

measured exactly six feet in length, and by general advice he was cut up

at once into four portions and thrust down the throat of a sick camel

they had with them, for a cure.[2] Four other smaller snakes were also

killed, but these were of a harmless kind. They tell me a horned viper

was also seen in the garden, a fortnight before I came, but this is

unusual except in the extreme heat of summer. Lizards, of course, are

plentiful. I have seen one with rudimentary legs only, making its way

along the ground as snakes do, its feet hardly helping it.

“_22nd Jan._—We have begun a new wing to the house, building with the

ordinary sun-dried bricks, contracted for at the rate of 8 piastres to

the cubic metre. There will be three rooms upstairs and three

downstairs, and the whole will cost about £80. Also I bought a new

engine for irrigation, and I am restocking the garden with young orange

plants, and in two or three years, if things go well, it will be a

better property than when I bought it seven years ago. I could be quite

content to spend the rest of my days in this pleasant work.

“_29th Jan._—To-day two three-year-old colts and a filly arrived at the

garden, which I have bought of Ali Pasha Sherif, all three of the

Viceroy Abbas I’s stock, one colt and a filly, a Jellabi, the other a

Seglawi Ibn Soudan. This last ought to be valuable some day for our stud

in England. [This was ‘Mesaoud,’ so celebrated afterwards as our most

successful sire.] Ali Pasha’s horses are the only ones of pure Arabian

breed in Egypt, and there are certain points about them superior to all

others, perhaps. He has an old one-eyed Seglawi named Ibn Nádir, which I

consider the finest horse, taking him all round, I ever saw, white, with

immense strength and breeding combined, long and low, with splendid legs

and hocks, a fine head and neck, tail always carried. Our colts arrived

as the noonday gun was being fired from the citadel at Cairo. They had

been brought round by the desert entrance through Zeyd’s precaution to

avoid the evil eye. He also sacrificed a lamb on the threshold of the

garden and sprinkled their foreheads with blood. I like these old Mosaic

rites and superstitions. Similarly on Friday the first stone of our new

house was laid, and another lamb was slaughtered on the corner-stone,

and the blood made to flow over it with a _Bismillah errahman errahim_.

It is possible that the blood of bulls and of goats do not wash away

sin, but it must be pleasing still, at any rate more so than the godless

rites of our own stone-laying with a champagne bottle. The work-people

were then feasted, and a heavy shower of rain came down to bless the

building. Zeyd is in the seventh heaven at all these high doings, and is

encamped with the horses under the great fig tree. The work-people have

a merry time here, men and women working together, and there are one or

two pretty girls among them who have a deal of attention paid them. They

wear no veils while at work, but are quiet and well behaved.” Zeyd, here

spoken of, was a Bedouin from Nejd, who had attached himself to our

service, a man of imagination, a poet and, like all the Nejd Bedouins,

an enthusiast about horses. He was a constant pleasure to us for this

reason though repeatedly in trouble through his little respect for

persons and the inconsequence of his tongue. He was also of value to us

as a centre of Arabian gossip, including political news, sometimes of

importance.

“Zeyd tells me that when he was at Damascus in 1887 he learned that the

French Government had written a letter to Ibn Rashid and had sent it to

Haïl through Mohammed Ibn Abdul Kader, the Emir’s eldest son. It

contained an offer of alliance, and to make Ibn Rashid independent of

the Sultan under French protection. Ibn Rashid, however, had forwarded

the letter to Constantinople, and Ibn Abdul Kader had been hauled over

the coals by the Sultan, but had excused himself, saying that as a

French subject he could not disobey the order of his government.

“_10th March._—There is certainly just now a movement going on in Egypt

in favour of Arabi’s recall, and I have received notices of it from

various quarters with a list of those who would act with Arabi in

forming a Nationalist Ministry. Also Ahmed Minshawi Pasha has sent one

of the principal Sheykhs of Tantah to consult me on the matter, Sheykh

Abdul Mejid, and a message has come from a number of ex-officers from

Arabi’s army who wish to see me, but I have declined this, as it could

do no possible good and might make trouble; the Egyptians have not

spirit in them to revolt and if they did it would not profit them. I am

glad all the same to find that Arabi is not forgotten.”

One visit only I record that winter of any great interest now. This was

one I paid with Lady Anne to Zebehr Pasha, Gordon’s old enemy in the

Soudan, now held a prisoner in Egypt. During the troubles at Cairo which

had followed Gordon’s death he had been arrested by Baring by an

arbitrary act of authority and sent on board a man-of-war to Gibraltar,

and there detained at the Queen’s pleasure for two years on no legal

charge, for none was brought against him, and there he might have

remained for the rest of his days had it not been for the interest

excited in his case by Lord Ribblesdale who had made friends with him at

Gibraltar and brought his case before the House of Lords. In 1889 he was

newly returned to Egypt, and was now once more a State prisoner of the

Khedive, occupying one of the minor palaces on the banks of the Nile. It

is thus that I describe our breakfast with him.

“Zebehr Pasha is a really charming man who entertained us with the

greatest honour at breakfast. He is lodged in the Ghizeh palace where he

is a State prisoner, though allowed to go about to a certain extent in

Cairo, under the charge of a certain Cashmiri Abderrahman Effendi.

Zebehr is a tall, slight man, with long _effilé_ hands, and a face of

the profoundest melancholy. His complexion is brown, and his features

show a cross between the Arab and the Berberi, the Arab predominating,

and a smile of great beauty. He was dressed in Egyptian uniform loosely

made, shivered much, though it was a bright sunny day, and complained of

the cold. He has a bad cough, and I should think would not live long.

State prisoners have a way of dying in Egypt. We talked on most

political subjects, but he avoided giving an opinion on the actual

position in the Soudan; perhaps he was afraid of the Cashmiri. ‘It is

the Government’s affair not ours,’ he said. Of Gordon he spoke with

hearty respect, and of Sir John Adye, and of several other English

officers he had known, but he had no good word for Baring, who was a

financier, he had heard, not a politician. He told us Emin’s history and

Osman Digna’s. He spoke highly of Arabi, said that he had been present

at a conversation between him and Dervish Pasha in which Dervish had

offered Arabi £250 a month if he would go to Constantinople, but Arabi

had replied that even if he were willing, there were 10,000 men would

stand between him and the sea. He said that he had been very much

misrepresented about this conversation in the English papers, and had

never spoken a word but what was honourable to Arabi. He could not

advise Arabi to come back to Egypt except as Minister; this, however,

Tewfik would never have. All our conversation was in Arabic, which he

speaks purely, being easy to understand. When I told him the English

Occupation would not last for ever he smiled incredulously.

“He took us round the garden, an uninteresting French garden laid out in

pebbled walks and rockeries, and imitation lawns. It and the palace cost

Ismaïl, they say, several millions, and the building is in ruins

already. Then we had breakfast and Zebehr was delighted because I ate

with my hands; he would have nothing to do himself with knives and

forks. ‘I am only a wild man,’ he said, ‘and use the instruments God

gave me.’ And he turned angrily upon the Cashmiri, who was pretending

that he could not manage without European ways. Before going I asked him

if I could do anything for him, and he said: ‘No, we two are in the same

position, the Government does not regard us favourably. We cannot help

each other,’ and he laid his hand affectionately on my arm. He

complained, however, how badly he had been treated in money matters, and

I said that the day might come when I could do something for him. Our

visit was, I fancy, the greatest pleasure, poor man, he has had for many

months. He came down to put us into our carriage and insisted upon

paying the driver his hire.”

We left Sheykh Obeyd on the 8th of March and Alexandria on the 10th.

Here ends our winter’s stay in Egypt of that year.

“_13th March._—We are in the Gulf of Fiume, and our journey is nearly

over, on our way to Fiume to spend a fortnight with the Hoyos family

before returning home. The captain of our ship, the _Ceres_, is a

Dalmatian, and by his own account was much mixed up in past times with

revolutionary affairs. He tells me his two brothers emigrated to America

after 1848, and his son has recently been in prison for political

reasons. He talks of a social war as imminent in Europe, especially in

Germany, France, and Italy, and looks upon Bismarck as the deviser of

all evil, and on a revolt against him and military ideas as certain. He

believes, too, in the overthrow of the British Empire in India by the

Russians, who will be joined by the Indians. He has recently seen Arabi

in Ceylon. We touched at Corfu and Lissa, and the Ionian Islands,

terribly bare and scored with burnings. We saw them well, coasting close

under Zante, Ithaca, and Cephalonia. Corfu is a pretty town, little

changed since the British evacuation, though the people on board say the

place is in decline. Lissa we saw by moonlight. Admiral Tegethoff, who

won the battle there for Austria, did so against orders and against

rules. The Italian fleet was four times his strength, but his action was

fortunate and probably saved the Dalmatian coast to Austria. There are

three parties it seems in Dalmatia: a Philo-Russian, the most numerous;

a Philo-Austrian, the most wealthy and educated; and a Philo-Italian,

confined to a few sea-coast towns. The officers on board are all

Catholic and Philo-Austrian but radicals, and talk something very like

socialism without disguise. They are bitterly opposed to Russia. They

are all Dalmatians. They resent the union of Fiume to Hungary, but admit

that there is no National party in Dalmatia. The captain, Gelachich, is

a capital fellow, a native of Lessina.”

At Lissa we received news of the discomfiture of the “Times” in the

Parnell case, by far the most important incident at home since the

overthrow of Gladstone in 1886.

“_18th March, Villa Hoyos, Fiume._—We have been a week here staying with

Count and Countess George Hoyos and their children, governesses, and

tutors, a large cheerful party of the kind I like. The villa is like

Paddockhurst (their place in Sussex) in miniature. The Hoyos’ are of

ancient Spanish extraction, brought to Austria by Charles Quint, and she

is the daughter of Whitehead, the inventor of the torpedo, who,

beginning life as an engineer on board an Austrian Lloyd steamer, has

made a large fortune. He is an admirable sample of the self-made man,

quiet, unobstrusive, absorbed in his work, liberal to his men, open-

handed in all his ways. The Countess is a pretty woman, mother of pretty

daughters, he a well-bred man of much sense and information, a first

cousin of Hoyos the Ambassador at Paris and of that younger Hoyos who

was connected the other day with the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolph’s

death. This is what they tell me, or rather what she has told me about

that tragedy.

“The Crown Prince Rudolph was a very charming man and had had

innumerable successes with women, but had never been in love till at a

party last year he met a girl of seventeen, Mademoiselle de Wetschera,

daughter of a certain Baroness of that name, of no very honest

reputation. The girl, however, was charming, and when the Prince made

love to her fell desperately too in love. Their liaison had lasted four

months, and though the Prince talked somewhat strangely, nobody

suspected there was anything so serious in the case. Hoyos was a friend

of the Prince, not in his service but very intimate and in the habit of

going with him on his shooting excursions. He went down at the Prince’s

invitation to Meyerling, to shoot with him the following day, and they

passed the evening till nine o’clock very gaily, when the Prince went to

bed. Hoyos knew nothing of Mademoiselle de Wetschera’s being at the

shooting lodge. In the morning, however, he was called by the Prince’s

servant, who complained that his master’s door was locked, and they went

together, and after knocking in vain, broke it open, when they found the

two bodies together in the Prince’s bed. The girl was then recognized by

Hoyos, and seeing her to be ‘a member of society,’ his first idea was to

conceal her presence there. He accordingly carried her with the

servant’s help into a distant room, where they left her, undressed as

she was, locked up, till her relations should come. This was not till

the evening, when her uncle arrived, dressed the girl with his own

hands, and placed her in his brougham, upright, beside him, and so

conveyed her home, and she was buried with equal secrecy in the night.

With regard to the Prince, Hoyos also conveyed the news to the Emperor,

and it was tried to hush up the truth but in vain. The Crown Prince had

previously written to Sechenyi a letter, part of which only has been

made public; the unpublished part contained these words: ‘I am resolved

to die, since I am no longer worthy to wear the Imperial uniform.’ The

Countess says she knew the Crown Prince well, she had also met the girl

and liked her. She could not condemn them for their death, poor things.

“Another topic of conversation has been King Milan’s abdication in

Servia. According to the Hoyos’, Queen Nathalie has long been plotting

against her husband, hoping to become Regent for her son. She is a very

pretty, charming woman, but ‘a Russian, and therefore an intriguer.’ The

first hint her husband had of her designs was on his return from his

lost battle of Slivnitza in Bulgaria. He was dispirited and thought of

abdicating, and, when he told her, she was for his doing it at once.

This shocked him. Now she has gained half her object and the other half

she will gain soon by returning as Regent to Servia.” The battle of

Slivnitza here referred to was one of the earliest of the Balkan

internecine fightings after the independence of Servia and Bulgaria had

been enforced upon the Sultan by European pressure. It ended

disastrously for the Servians who, without much cause of quarrel, had

invaded Bulgaria and were routed with heavy loss. The Austrian Empire at

that time was believed to be in a very unstable position, held together

only by the personal popularity of the aged Emperor. We stayed ten days

with the Hoyos’ and while there were shown experiments in torpedo

practice by Whitehead, who had his factory adjoining the villa. I find,

however, nothing in my diary worth transcribing here, unless it be a

list of persons whose acquaintance we made, belonging to Viennese

society. This includes Count Zichy, governor of the town, and his

father, formerly Austrian Ambassador at Constantinople; Prince and

Princess Sanguscko, cousins of our friends the Potockis in Poland, and

joint owner with them of their famous Arabian stud; Count and Countess

Breuner, Countess Palffy and others. From Fiume we went on by Vienna and

the Orient Express to Paris, and so home to England, arriving there on

the 5th of April.

Here there is a long gap in my diary and nothing of any public

importance, except the record of a second interview I had with

Boulanger, who had come to London with the idea of making friends there,

and had made an appointment with me to see him at a house he had taken

in Portland Place. I write:

“_19th May._—On Wednesday I saw General Boulanger by appointment at his

house in Portland Place. He looks older and more worn than when I saw

him six months ago, but he talked cheerfully enough. I told him I had

been much taken to task by the leaders of the Liberal Party for my

avowal of sympathy with his cause (my letter to the ‘Times’ of last

year), and asked him to inform me on certain points which might

strengthen my position. The first point I put was whether he intended to

destroy liberty in France, to shut up the Chambers and make himself

Dictator? intentions commonly attributed to him. To this he said that

the idea was ridiculous. The French could never get on without talking,

and a Parliament in some form they must have. What he wanted was to do

away with the personal politics of the Chamber, which he could effect by

reforming it (the Revision). Frenchmen must be united into a National

Party instead of broken up into small groups. The power of the President

must be strengthened, but within limits. Those possessed by the

President of the United States will probably suffice. There must be the

Veto, but he would not say that in an old society like the French it

would do to assimilate the American régime too closely. He had no

intention at all of destroying liberty. Thus, in the matter of education

he was for full liberty for all creeds, not as at present when religious

education was persecuted. The French provinces did not want secular

education and it should not be forced on them, but he was not for this a

Clerical. He did not himself go to Mass, but he was determined everyone

else should do so who liked. If a man chose to go about in fancy dress

it was no concern of his neighbours. On my second point, peace and war,

he repeated what he had said to me last autumn about the hazards of war,

and his unwillingness to rush into hostilities. He could not ever

propose to disarm till the question of Alsace-Lorraine was settled. No

Government which did so could stand a fortnight. He believed, however,

that the question could be settled without war if Frenchmen were united.

He would then most gladly propose a disarmament. In this sense I might

say of him that his ultimate end was to bring about a disbanding of the

great armies of the Continent. This he authorized me to tell my Liberal

friends. He invited me cordially to come again any Tuesday, Wednesday,

or Thursday morning.”

I fear I did little towards helping the General in this or any other

way. Politics were at that moment repugnant to me, and I could not bring

myself to start on any new campaign. I never saw the General again.