OMDURMAN AND FASHODA
From this point my more violent activities in life may be said to have
ended. My health had suffered seriously from the extreme hardships of my
journeys, hardships which hitherto I had borne with easily, but which
now at my age of fifty-six had taken their revenge on me. The next two
years were for this reason an unhappy period of my life, and this,
though I do not often make mention in it of my sufferings, is reflected
in my diary.
We left Sheykh Obeyd on the 19th April. Four days before, on 15th April,
I had gone to wish the Khedive good-bye. He received me pleasantly, as
always, with pretty speeches about my friendship for him, and the good
report of me he heard from everyone. He asked about my journey to Siwah
and the attack made on me. I made rather light of it with him as a
_ghazu_ (an accident of travel), but he said he had heard it was the
doing of the Senussia. About the state of affairs between Greece and
Turkey he said things could not be going worse. The Sultan was ruining
the Empire, the end could not be far distant. “But where can we look,”
he asked, “for another chief? In Arabia there is only your friend Ibn
Rashid, and he is little more than a Bedouin.” With Sheykh Mohammed Abdu
too I had a farewell talk.
“_17th April._—Abdu brought me news that war was declared between Greece
and Turkey. We agreed that it was better things had come to actual war.
Personally I think that it would be no loss for the Ottoman Empire if
the Greeks should be able to hold their own in Macedonia, though I do
not expect it, for a defeat of the Turkish army would bring about a
revolution at Constantinople, and even a European war would do no harm.
‘When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own.’ The Ottoman
Empire cannot be made to last in Europe, and as soon as the remnant of
the provinces there are lost the better it will be. I expect, however,
to see the Turks advance on Athens, when the Powers would doubtless
intervene to stop the fighting, which they could do by pressure at
Constantinople. Then there may be a second chance for the establishment
of a better order of things on the Bosphorus, for it would be too great
a scandal to allow the Sultan and his palace clique to go on for another
twenty years on a new lease of absolute power; possibly the victorious
general might become the leader of a constitutional change in Turkey,
but we shall see.”
“_1st May._—Back in England, where we arrived at the end of the month.
The Greeks have been smashed badly by Edhem Pasha in Thessaly; they seem
to have run away rather than fought, which would be more creditable to
them if they had not been the aggressors in the quarrel. I am sorry, on
the whole, as the Turkish victory is strengthening the Sultan’s hand at
Constantinople, and will put back the clock of reform. There is little
chance, I fear, of Edhem’s coming forward as a revolutionist, but I am
nearly dead to politics as, indeed, to all else but the horses and the
sunshine.
“_8th May._—The Greeks are again beaten and in retreat, and the Turkish
army will now advance on Athens and dictate its terms of peace. The
Sultan is entirely rehabilitated in public opinion, for the world adores
military success, and he will probably now go on in triumph till he
dies.
“_18th May._—Newbuildings. On the 13th George Wyndham came to spend the
day with me and stopped the night. He was full of his journey to South
Africa and of his South African Commission, where he has played the part
of advocate for Rhodes and his gang, and is still playing it. With this
I am of course in little sympathy, but George and I know how to differ
without quarrelling. He told me much of the inner working of the great
intrigue and promised more some day. We also talked about the Henley
edition of my poems, and about his own ‘New Review.’
“_3rd June._—George was here yesterday. The South African Committee is
virtually, not virtuously, over, and no one in his senses can doubt that
Chamberlain was privy to the raid, not indeed at the last moment but in
its initial stages. I asked George whether it was not so. ‘Chamberlain
has denied it,’ he answered diplomatically.
“_15th June._—Drove to Bramber and dined with Button in his newly
purchased old house there, St. Mary’s, which he has furnished with bric-
à-brac, and had the little meadow behind it laid out in miniature
avenues. We talked of old political times. He tells me that at the time
Wolseley started for Egypt in 1882, the Rothschilds had the _whole_ of
their working capital in Egyptian securities, and were in such a fright
about the Domains lest Arabi should flood the country and destroy the
property pledged to them, that they got Wolseley to hurry on the
campaign at all costs to prevent his cutting the canals. Button had this
from Wolseley himself at the time, and it agrees with what he (Button)
told me then.
“_17th June._—Hyndman came to breakfast with me in Mount Street, and we
discussed the state of Europe, Africa and Asia. He knows a great deal
and told me many curious things, among others the genesis of the English
connection with the Suez canal. He assures me that it was not
Beaconsfield’s idea, but Greenwood’s, who was at that time Editor of the
‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ and on whose staff Hyndman was. Greenwood conceived
the plan of the Government buying the shares, and after consulting with
his colleagues on the paper went to Lord Derby to suggest it. Derby
approved and sent him on to Beaconsfield, who at first was much
disinclined, but eventually agreed, giving the job to the Rothschilds, a
quite unnecessary waste of commission as the shares could have been
bought with Treasury Bonds in the ordinary way. He told me much, too, of
his dealings with Lord Salisbury at election times, and about French and
German socialism. He stayed two hours with me.
“_20th June (Jubilee Sunday)._—The streets decked out with scaffolding
and red cloth. London architecture lends itself to these disguisements,
as there is nothing to lose by being hidden.
“_21st June._—Alfred Austin’s ‘Jubilee Ode’ is published in the ‘Times,’
and as good as a thing of the kind can be, and I have written to tell
him so. When he was first made Laureate I did not write, because I
really could not have said anything about his poetry that would have
pleased him, but to-day I am able to do so with a good conscience. We
are old acquaintances of something like forty years’ standing, and
personally I am pleased at his success.
“_22nd June._—The Queen’s Jubilee Day—the evening and night of which I
spent on Chanclebury Down, camped among the thorn bushes near the top of
the Ridge, a beautiful but rather hazy evening, quite warm, no moon,
little parties of country people out on foot, others in vans, but not
enough of them to injure the solitude. At half-past nine rockets began
to be fired away at Shoreham, and a light appeared on Leith Hill, then
illuminations at Shoreham and Brighton, and precisely at ten bonfires
were lit up. I counted ninety-seven of them, and there were probably
more, for the clump hid part of the horizon. It was an inspiriting
sight, and we tried to make out our own bonfire at Newbuildings, which
lies in a straight line between Chanclebury and Leith Hill.
“_26th June._—The day of the Jubilee Review at Portsmouth. A Jingo
apotheosis which contrasts strangely with my recollection of Portsmouth
seventeen years ago, when our military and naval glory was at so low an
ebb that even I felt humiliated.
“_27th June (Sunday)._—I am at Swinford on a visit to Austin. Austin is
naïve about his position and dignity as Poet Laureate. He assured me
that he had made it a condition in accepting the post that he was not to
write Odes to order. I asked him how he had written his Jubilee
performance, suggesting that it must have been troublesome to manage. On
the contrary, he told me, he had done it without more effort than just
to fix his mind determinedly and reverently on Her Majesty, waiting till
the inspiration came, ‘and (after a pause) it came.’ He showed me a
letter from the Queen’s private secretary, thanking him for the verses,
and saying that Her Majesty thought them very pretty, but when he went
to present them at Windsor, she did not ask him to recite them. A letter
from Lord Salisbury was in the same sense; however, Austin is so loyal
that he even apologized for depreciating Victorian architecture. In the
afternoon we all sat talking on the lawn, Lady Paget and Lady Windsor
being of the party, and it was suggested that each of us should give his
idea of Heaven. Mine was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with
running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then
to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved
best, ‘Are you there?’ and for her to answer, ‘Yes, are you?’ and so
turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years.
Austin’s idea was to sit also in a garden, and while he sat to receive
constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea, and
a British victory by land. He talked to us a good deal about Irving, and
told us that Irving had begun life as a boy of all work in the family of
a solicitor in Cornwall, where his father and mother were butler and
cook. The solicitor put the boy into his law office as a junior clerk,
but dismissed him because he paid no attention to business, only to
play-acting in office hours.
“_6th July._—A letter from Joseph Potocki telling the ugly news of the
burning of the Countess Branicka’s stud and stables; one hundred and
thirty horses perished, including two colts they bought from us last
year. It is said to be the vengeance of an English groom dismissed for
theft. Her daughter Sophie is engaged to marry Prince Strozzi.
“_12th July._—My new room at Newbuildings which I call the ‘Jubilee
Room’ is finished, and looks already part of the old house. It was built
without plan, elevation, or sketch of any kind, Thorpe and I working it
out together as we went on.” [The Jubilee Room was more than a room,
being a separate building with two stories. Thorpe, a plain stone and
bricklayer born and bred in the parish, a painstaking, conscientious man
working slowly, but with a complete knowledge of his trade and its older
traditions. The panelling inside was done by my estate carpenter,
Dench.]
“_15th July._—The South African committee has published a report,
certainly the most scandalous ever jobbed. It absolves Chamberlain in
these words: ‘Neither the Secretary of State for the Colonies nor any of
the officials of the Colonial office received any information which made
or should have made them or any of them aware of the plot during its
development.’ It may be noticed that this pronouncement carefully avoids
what undoubtedly happened, namely that Chamberlain’s attitude to Rhodes
and Beit was practically this: ‘Manage the matter your own way, but
remember I am to know nothing about it.’ Rhodes is condemned publicly in
the report, but will be let off all punishment. He will not even be
struck off the list of the Queen’s Privy Councillors. I hear that the
Queen personally assured the Emperor William when the raid happened that
none of her Ministers were cognisant of the affair, and this assurance
given by the Queen accounts for the strange attitude of Sir William
Harcourt and other Radicals on the Committee who have signed the report.
The whole of our public life is rotten, and will remain so till we have
received a serious defeat in war. The Queen is at the bottom of half the
Imperialistic mischief we do abroad. She is pleased at the title of
Empress, and likes to enlarge her borders. I should not be at all
surprised if she was really in the Jameson affair with her Ministers,
indeed this is the best explanation of the extraordinary manœuvres of
the Government, and the connivance of the official opposition.
“_24th July._—Our annual Arab stud sale at Crabbet. Brilliant weather;
an immense gathering; 320 persons sat down to lunch; a good many of
these, foreigners and colonials; a successful but tiring day.
“_27th July._—To London and lunched with George, whom I found triumphant
over the issue of the debate on South Africa last night. He considers
the triumph of the Rhodes group, which is his own triumph, due to
superior ability in the Parliamentary management, the skill with which
they split the Liberal opposition, the capture of old Harcourt, the
forcing of Chamberlain’s hand into open support of Rhodes and the
bamboozling of the stupid M.P.’s. With regard to Chamberlain, George
admires him as the grandest specimen of the courageous, unscrupulous
schemer our politics have ever seen. He says that Chamberlain was not an
accomplice of the actual armed raid made by Jameson—though he certainly
was in the political intrigue—and he (Chamberlain) would not deny
it—against the independence of the Transvaal. He described Chamberlain’s
speech and the menace he (Chamberlain) threw out to Dilke if any one
should dare propose the cancelling of Rhodes’ position in the Privy
Council. Chamberlain did not name Dilke, but his eye, while speaking,
travelled along the benches of the Opposition, so that it was clear to
all what his meaning was. It was a base threat, and he would certainly
have followed it up if the Radicals had dared accept his challenge.
George triumphs in all this, but to me it is pitiful to see a young man
like him, the heir of all the ages, connecting himself with such a
scoundrel crew. The whole Cabinet is now the duumvirate of Balfour and
Chamberlain, but I told George he would find one day that Arthur would
be the victim of some base trick in order that the other might reign
alone.”
In August I made a driving tour through the West of England and South
Wales. The day before starting I received a letter from Edward Malet
breaking the silence of fifteen years. It was very cordial and expressed
regret for our troubled relations in the past. I have answered it in a
way which I hope may bring about a renewal of our friendship. The
occasion of his letter was the discovery among his mother’s papers of a
number of MS. poems he thought were mine. In reality they were Lothian’s
as I can see by the handwriting, and also by internal evidence—poems of
dates between 1861 and 1864, the time Schomberg and I were most together
and most with Lady Malet. I need not give a full account of this
journey. We passed through Petworth and Rogate, where I found Hugh
Wyndham, just retired from diplomatic work after his forty years’
career. Then by Bishop’s Waltham to Salisbury and Stockton, stopping for
a couple of hours at Wilton on my way. This time I found Sidney, now
Lord Pembroke, at home with his family of boys at cricket, much as I
found the former generation thirty years ago. “Wilton is the paradise of
England with its three rivers, eternally beautiful and unchanged while
its owners change and perish. One passes by and finds Herberts living
there, happily idling their lives away, as one finds swallows year after
year nesting in a village, and one imagines them to be the same
Herberts, as one imagines the others to be the same swallows. At
Warminster next day I stopped to bait and dined at the ordinary at the
Anchor Inn, it being market day among the farmers with whom I talked
agriculture and the price of mutton. But when they found I was not there
to buy lambs they lost interest in me. I found to my surprise that of
the ten farmers dining with me five drank water only, the rest cider.
Our meat was roast ducks carved by a chairman at the head of the table,
and at one moment I was half afraid they were going to make speeches.” I
spent my Sunday, 8th August, at Mells, where I found a company of
“Souls,” then on to Bristol where I put up for the night at an odd place
of entertainment called “The Bath,” kept by a Dr. Shaw and his wife, a
pretty woman, who had been long in India, and who was the attraction
evidently of the guests, mostly retired Anglo-Indians, patients as well
as guests, as indicated by the menu cards, which were marked with
medicines as well as wines. Bristol is the refuge of such broken-down
officials, who live at its cheap lodging-houses. The next day, crossing
the Severn Channel by the tunnel to Cardiff and St. Fagan’s, where I
spent the inside of a week delightfully with the Windsors in their
romantic castle, which is such a perfect thing, an old Carolan house set
in the _enceinte_ of an older castle wall, spoilt by nothing modern, the
object of my pilgrimage, and back, still driving through the romantic
country of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Caerphilly,
Caerleon, Chepstow, and the Forest of Dean, where I camped close to what
is called the Devil’s Chapel, and thence by Berkeley Castle, Easton
Grey, Broad Hinton, and Savernake, Hurstbourne, Minley, and so home. It
had been a journey of 385 miles, made in nineteen days with my four Arab
mares, not one of which had tired or been off her feed for a single day,
and trotted in gamely, eager to be at home. The journey had done me
good. My journal of this tour is extremely interesting, but once more it
is impossible to give it a place here, as it would lead me too far along
the pleasant byways of social life and away from the prescribed high
road of public things.
“_4th Sept._—For the last three weeks there have been high doings in
India on the Afghan frontier, and to-day expeditions on a large scale
are announced. This is closely connected with our absurd policy at
Constantinople. The position to-day with Russia protecting the Caliphate
at Constantinople, France in alliance with Russia and Germany also in
the coalition against us, justifies all I wrote and did in Egypt sixteen
years ago. Dined at my club and had some talk with Nicholas O’Conor who,
heaven help us! is now Her Majesty’s ambassador to the Emperor of all
the Russias.
“_25th Sept._—To Saighton, where I find a house full of friends and
acquaintance, Dick Grosvenor, Edward Clifford, Gatty, Henry Milner and
Lady Clifden, etc., with nothing for a vegetarian to eat [Lady Windsor
had persuaded me to become a vegetarian], and I dined off two mushrooms
and a raisin; nevertheless a pleasant evening, George laying down the
law about Shakespeare, Ronsard, Brantôme, and a number more.
“_27th Sept._—At Saighton. Played lawn tennis with George. Spent the
evening with him, arguing with some heat the eternal question of the
right of savage nations to existence. George, who represents the general
sense of modern Imperial England, denies them any such right at all. I
am sick of their arguments from Darwin and the survival of the fittest.
“_29th Sept._—Back to London and wrote going up in the train a piece of
verse for Gatty’s translations, the hymn beginning:
If this dark valley of distress and tears
So green appears.
“_1st Oct._—Shooting at Newbuildings with Charles Wyndham, Scrope, and
Evershed. Scrope is a nice young Yorkshireman, very understanding about
horses, but in poor health. He gave us a naïve account of the Jameson
raid as narrated to him by his brother, who took part in it. It seems to
have been a regular drunken frolic. Jameson had up I forget how many
wagon-loads of drink the week before he started, including, I remember,
thirty-six cases of champagne which he distributed to his men, with
leave to get drunk for three days. There were among the men a number of
loafers brought up from Cape Town, some of them waiters from the
restaurants, who had never been on horseback before, and the whole force
was more or less drunk when it started. Jameson had told off three men
to cut the telegraph wires, but they were in such a condition that they
mistook a barbed wire fence for the telegraph and cut off a hundred
yards of it and carefully buried it instead of the other. When they got
near Johannesburg, Jameson could not find the way and picked up Boers to
show it them, who of course led them wrong. Scrope’s brother and others
knew the road but were not listened to. As to drunkenness, I can well
believe the story, for I remember how, on a journey in South America in
1868, some English men of the party riding with me took for all
provision on the road, a gigantic demi-john of spirits, which they
strapped to the back of a horse and drove in front of them.”
I left England in October once more for Egypt, still in bad health,
indeed in worse, for I had foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded into
becoming a vegetarian as well as the teetotaler I had been for fifteen
years, and the life at Sheykh Obeyd, delightful to those in health, was
too primitive to be suited to an invalid. On board the ship that took us
to Alexandria I found Walter Harris, the “Times” correspondent in
Morocco, who told me a good deal about his life at Tangiers where he has
a garden four miles from the town. He talked also about the war in
Thessaly where his brother was killed last summer while helping the
Greeks. The Greeks had abandoned the brother when wounded, after robbing
him of everything. They had behaved abominably during the war. The Crown
Prince of Greece himself told Harris that he had seen the Evzoni throw
paraffin on the Turkish wounded and set them on fire.
I found all well at Sheykh Obeyd, except that the desert round us was
beginning to be cultivated and enclosed. The day will come when we shall
be caught in a network of gardens and country houses, though so far no
great harm has been done. People argue with me and say, “But your
property must be increasing in value,” as if that was any consolation
for losing the solitude. Foxes are still plentiful in the garden and I
have twice seen a very large wolf, old and grey, who, they tell me, has
been here all the summer, frightening the boys who cut the grass for the
horses. Salem says the wolf pursued him one evening and tore his shirt
and Suliman that he had taken two of his lambs from his tent outside our
wall. He comes and howls under our window after nightfall. There are
certainly two sorts of wolves here besides jackals, unless, indeed, the
intermediate size is a cross between wolf and jackal. Our present guest
is of the big desert kind.
“_23rd Nov._—I have been reading Froissart’s ‘Chronicles.’ He must have
lived a happy life, if what his biographers tell of him is true. The age
of chivalry, brutal as it was in its fighting aspect, seems to have been
sweetened by a good deal of romance, but to this Froissart hardly
alludes, and, tells only of battles and sieges, which were most of them
ignoble proceedings. Edward III’s idea of war seems to have been to raid
the French towns everywhere, except just where the French army was. Both
Cressy and Poitiers were fought by the English because they could not
get away from the pursuing French, and the victory in both cases was won
by the skill of the English archers on the one side and foolish
generalship on the other. As a rule, it was only the unarmed fighters on
foot that were killed, the knights and squires surrendered to ransom as
soon as they were knocked off their horses. This was all their chivalry
of war.
“_26th Nov._—Sheykh Mohammed Abdu came to see me, and told me the
political and court gossip. The latest is about a trial in which a young
man is being prosecuted for insulting and libelling the Khedive in
verse. The true movers in the matter, Abdu assures me are Moharram Pasha
Shahin and Sheykh el Bekri in conjunction with Sheykh Abul Huda at
Constantinople, and it was done to please the Sultan. Cromer, however,
has mixed himself up in it, and in order to obtain a verdict, or rather
to screen some persons implicated who are favourable to English policy,
has had the Egyptian Procureur of the native courts replaced by Corbet,
an Englishman. The Khedive is still on bad terms with the Sultan, and
the poem was written to please his Majesty, but by an unfortunate
mistake in the printing, one of the insulting epithets applied to the
Khedive is ‘Turk,’ so that it has given almost equal offence at Yildiz.
“In India, the Afridis I am glad to see are still gallantly maintaining
themselves against General Lockhart, and our troops are getting nicely
‘punished’ in their turn. It is clear from their accounts that but for
the superior fighting qualities of the Sikhs and Ghurkas the white
regiments could not be got to continue the campaign. Lockhart has had to
encourage them publicly not to be ‘downhearted.’ There is talk in
England of conscription for the army, and our people will soon begin to
understand that they can’t have the amusement of empire without paying
the price. The British Empire is a structure that might crumble at any
moment, the sooner the better, say I.
“_29th Nov._—We have a guest with us, Nasr el Mizrab, nephew of that
Mijuel el Mizrab, who was Lady Ellenborough’s last husband. He is a
well-spoken man and has travelled more than once with Frankish explorers
in the Syrian desert, Russians and Germans, buying horses for them of
his Anazeh kindred.
“_9th Dec._—Young John Evelyn has come to stay with us. His father sent
him to me on his way up the Nile, saying that he wished him ‘to learn
Arabic, to keep a diary, to acquire habits of observation and self-
reliance and not to imbibe Jingo principles, also to marry early.’ I
find the young man excellently disposed to all these things except the
last.
“_21st Dec._—I am starting on Christmas Eve for Jebel Attaka near Suez,
as I think I am well enough now for desert travelling. Eid, Suliman’s
young Howeyti cousin, who travelled with us last March to Siwah, and was
so good a desert man, is dead. He had joined in a ghazu in the summer
beyond Akabah, and, on his way home, being parched with thirst, drank of
a well whose property it is to kill the drinker in fourteen days. He
reached home alive, but died soon after.
“_23rd Dec._—Had an audience with the Khedive and took Walter Harris
with me. The talk was principally about the Turco-Greek war, as to which
Harris gave us some curious details. The King of Greece himself told him
that the reason that he left Vasos in Crete was so as to bring about a
blockade of the Piræus. ‘I should then,’ the King said, ‘have been able
to tell my people that but for the intervention of the Powers I would
have marched with a hundred thousand Greeks to Constantinople. As it
turned out, we were not prevented by the Powers and so had to make a
war, for which none of us had bargained.”
Abbas afterwards told us of his cousin Prince Aziz’s attempt to go to
Nejd. The Prince had got as far as Sherm, a small port in the Sinai
Peninsula, intending to cross over from there to Moelhi, and then on to
visit Ibn Rashid, but the Khedive had stopped him by telegram. He was
afraid of being compromised in Constantinople by the visit, and was also
unwilling that so light-headed a member of the Khedivial family should
be the first to visit Nejd after the conquests of old days. Aziz is now
at Nakhl, where he is being detained by the Egyptian governor of the
fort.
“Lunched with Rennell Rodd, and called afterwards on Riaz Pasha and on
Gorst. Harris was to have started with me to-morrow on my desert trip,
but has been prevented.”
The desert trip was a bit of exploration connected with a map I was
making of the country between Cairo and the Red Sea. I returned from it
on the last day of the year.
“_12th Jan._ 1898.—News has come of the death of Mohammed Ibn Rashid at
Haïl, ‘in his bed,’ they say after a seven days’ illness. If truly in
his bed, he may rank as one of the most uniformly successful of Arabian
monarchs. For five and twenty years he has reigned in Nejd, warring
every spring upon his neighbours and always victoriously. He has not
once been defeated in the field, and has reduced every tribe in
succession to his obedience. His only misfortune has been that he has
left no son, and his inheritance will probably be disputed between Abdul
Hamid, son of Hamoud, his first cousin once removed, and Hamoud Mattaab,
his nephew. Both, they say, claim ‘the seat,’ and are appealing to
Constantinople for support. This may bring the Turk into Nejd, for the
Sultan was never so powerful in the desert as now. Still, it is a far
cry to Haïl.
“The Soudan campaign is being pushed on, and British soldiers are being
sent up the Nile, on a pretext of defence against an attack by the
Khalifa. How anybody can be green enough to believe these official tales
I cannot understand. The true reason is the advance of the French
expedition [under Marchand] to the Upper Nile at Fashoda, and so the
desire to be beforehand with them at Khartoum. The sending of British
troops is not at all because they are needed, for our English regiments
are inferior in every way to the Egyptian ones for such work, but to
gratify the English Government, and especially the Queen, who considers
the glory of her reign tarnished by the death of Gordon and who wants it
avenged. If Egyptian troops alone recaptured Khartoum it would be a
reproach to the British army, which was defeated in its attempts to
relieve Gordon there. They like, too, to be able to say that the British
military Occupation is necessary to Egypt for its frontier defence—only
another false excuse in the long list of false excuses for staying in
Egypt begun twenty years ago.
“_21st January._—Gorst and his two sisters and Captain Fitzclarence
lunched with us. Gorst has given me a list of the people reported to
have been killed at Siwah on the 20th April of last year in a local
fight. It includes several of my friends there, including Hassuna, but I
feel sceptical about the whole story.
“_22nd January._—A visit from Cogordan, the French Minister here. We
talked about the Soudan expedition. He tells me Kitchener will be in
command of forty thousand troops including those recently taken over
from the Italians at Kassala, and the ten thousand English who were in
Egypt. Of the Marchand expedition he disclaimed its importance, and
laughed at the talk that a French flag will be found flying at Khartoum.
“_26th January._—Old Charles Villiers is dead, the father of the House
of Commons. I remember him at Frankfort as long ago as the winter of
1860-61, dining at our Legation with the Malets. He impressed me at the
time as the most wonderful and delightful talker I had listened to. He
seemed to take an interest in me too, and drew me out till I talked a
deal of boyish nonsense. The recollection of his wit and charm is strong
with me still.”
Here follows another six days’ journey in the Eastern desert on
_deluls_, travelling fast and map-making as we went, as I was anxious to
complete my survey of the country north of the Kalala range. It was
bitter cold on the upper plateaux, and the hard life nearly finished me,
and hastened my return to England.
“_15th February._—The papers report the Queen’s speech on the opening of
Parliament. It contains, perhaps, more than the usual number of
insincerities. Politics in England are in a hopeless condition, and will
remain so until the Empire begins to break up, when it will be too late
to say or do anything. I shall not be sorry if I live to see it. The
British Empire has done so much harm to so many nations and peoples that
it deserves to perish, and we English will be better off as a Nation
shorn of our dependencies than now. It will hurt our pride, but injure
no true interest.
“Prince Osman is dead. He was riding to the Pyramids on his camel, and
fell off suddenly; they say apoplexy. He was the cleverest and most
amusing of the Khedivial family, if not the most reputable; a brother of
Princess Nazli, and first cousin, once removed, of the Khedive. He had
been brought up at Paris, and was always a bit of a _boulevardier_, very
pleasant and good-natured, and with an extraordinary knowledge of the
events, political and social, of his time, a fat Falstaff in appearance,
but like the others of the Khedivial family, with a certain bodily
hardihood and endurance on camel back; my oldest friend among them, and
I am sorry to lose him.
“_25th February._—Anne and Judith lunched a few days ago with Bill
Gordon, who told them that the real reason for his uncle’s resigning his
post as private secretary to Lord Ripon in India was as follows. When
Ripon was appointed to India it was resolved by the Cabinet that he
should break up the gang of permanent officials who form the Simla ring,
and it was on this understanding that Gordon accepted the post. A
special point to be attacked was the treatment of Ayub Khan (the Emir of
Afghanistan) as to which Government had evidence showing our English
officials to have acted unjustly and tyrannically. Gordon had drawn up a
special memoir on the subject which was to be acted on immediately upon
Ripon’s landing at Bombay, but Ripon was no sooner on shore than the
officials got hold of him and persuaded him to let the matter rest.
Gordon, upon this, threw up the appointment, for he saw his chief was
too weak to carry the policy through. A Viceroy of India needs to be a
man of iron to hold his own and Ripon was every good thing except that.
“There is talk of Cromer’s going to the Foreign Office. What the Tories
want now is a strong man to carry out their policy of violence, and
Cromer will suit them. I care little how things go, for the time of
reasoning is past. There will be no change till the Empire breaks up and
Cromer may as well sit on the Imperial safety valve as another. I had a
long talk to-day with Mohammed Abdu about this and other matters.
“In Paris Zola has been condemned to a year’s imprisonment for bringing
forward the Dreyfus case. This is an event of great significance, for it
means that in France as in Germany and Russia, militarism reigns
supreme. It will be so in England, too, before many years are over, and
then good-bye to liberty of any kind. If the nations of Europe will only
cut each other’s throats in a Thirty Years’ War there might be some hope
for the world, but they are too cowardly for that. All they dare do is
to swagger hideously, and talk about their honour. It will be with them
as it is with the Spaniards who are ruled by military pronunciamentos.
With regard to the Dreyfus case, when I was at Gros Bois last autumn, I
asked Wagram the truth of it. He told me that it was to please the
Austrian Government that the case had been tried privately, that justly
or unjustly condemned, Dreyfus was an _affreux canaille_, and had made
some confession of guilt, but I see little difference in point of
canailledom between these wretched military spies and their wretched
military superiors, who employ and pay them. Spying, whether by a paid
agent or a paying agent, demoralises those that indulge in it, and the
military code of to-day recognizes every treachery and every baseness as
lawful. What nonsense to talk about military honour! There is no such
thing. Can one conceive any greater blackguard than the _soidisant_
Esterhazy unless it be his military backers, Pellieux and the rest? On
our side the Channel, too, we have some pretty blackguards to show
lately.
“_9th March._—Left for England. Mohammed Abdu came to wish me good-bye.
I was suffering with great pain so that I felt almost dying. Two years
ago under like circumstances I should have made him my profession of
faith, but to-day no, though I was moved at parting with him as though I
were saying last words to a dearest friend, but I feel now there is no
reality in it all. The Moslems of to-day who believe are mere wild
beasts like the men of Siwah, the rest have lost their faith. Still less
does Christianity appeal to me. I do not wish to live again. I only wish
for the extinction of the grave. I am going home alone, Anne staying on
for another six weeks in Egypt. I have telegraphed to my servant, David,
to meet me at Venice and see me slowly home. My sole idea now is to be
for a week with George in Mount Street, and then to be nursed by Cowie
at Newbuildings. It was fortunately quite calm weather on my voyage up
the Adriatic, and at Venice I found an invitation waiting me from Lady
Paget at Bellosguardo in Florence where I stayed two nights, and then
on, arriving in London on the 23rd March, where I found George Wyndham
established in my rooms in Mount Street, which I had lent him; there was
room for us both there, and his cheerful influence did me good.
“_24th March._—George is taking a less practical part now in politics,
being up to his eyes in literature, but he walks home most nights with
Arthur Balfour from the House and hears a good deal of what is going on.
He tells me Lord Salisbury does not intend resigning, and though he has
made over the Foreign Office temporarily to Balfour, he still keeps
interfering with affairs there not altogether to Arthur’s pleasure. In
talking about the scramble for China, I had remarked that I should have
thought an alliance with Japan was the obvious English policy. He said,
‘Yes, but it looks as if Japan had been squared by Russia.’ [This is the
first mention I can find in my diary of what was afterwards to develop
into the Anglo-Japanese alliance.]
“George’s new edition of Shakespeare’s poems is just out, and he is busy
editing a new weekly paper, ‘The Outlook,’ started as a ‘raft’ on which
to save the fortunes of Henley and the other writers wrecked in the ‘New
Review.’ Gladstone is dying of cancer, poor old soul, and it has been
agreed to soothe his last days with morphia as he cannot live long.
“_29th March._—Lady Gregory came to see me and talked much about
Ireland. She has now become a strong Nationalist, and has been busying
herself about the demonstrations for ‘’98.’ If I were well enough I
would go over for them in May.
“George is much put out at the inaction of our Government in China,
where there is a combination of Russia, France, and Germany against us,
and at the general failure of Lord Salisbury’s policy as a check to the
British Empire. He asked me why I wished ill to the British Empire. I
said, ‘because we had done too much harm in the world, and though the
other nations of Europe also do harm, they are not able to do it so
effectively as we do through their lack of knowledge, and of those
qualities that make of Englishmen an administrating race, also because
the _Empire_ is a poor cockney affair invented hardly twenty years ago
to the ruin of our position as an honest _Kingdom_ at home.’ I remember
well the disgust of George’s father and of other old-fashioned Tories,
when Disraeli first foisted on them the Queen’s brummagem Imperial
title.’
“_31st March._—‘The Chronicle’ has a sensational but probably true
account of an ultimatum sent by the American President to Spain on
account of Cuba. It seems likely to lead to war. If so I hope that Spain
may be able to hold her own, not that Cuban independence lacks my
sympathy, but because between Spain and the United States I am obliged
to be on the side of the older and more barbarous country. The Yankees
as the coming race of the world would be worse even than ourselves.
“_1st April._—At five to-day Lady Gregory brought me the poet Yeats, an
Irish mystic of an interesting type. He is tall, lean, dark, good
looking, of the same type of countenance as John Dillon’s, very narrow
between the eyes and short-sighted. We talked much about the ‘’98’
demonstrations of which he is organizer, and of the coming doom of
England, and we talked also of another mystical poet and patriot,
Russell, (A. E.), with whom Yeats was a fellow student at Dublin.
Russell, in order to subdue his will, became cashier in a haberdasher’s
shop, where he acquired repute as an accountant, but always spent his
Sundays and holidays in the Wicklow Hills, writing poetry and seeing
visions. Russell has now been removed to a higher sphere as political
organizer. Both believe in ghosts and fairies and in the transmigration
of souls, and have magic powers of seeing the future and of prophecy.
“Yeats experimented magically on me. He first took out a notebook and
made what he called a pyramid in it which was a square of figures, then
he bade me think of and see a square of yellow as it might be a door,
and walk through it and tell him what I saw beyond. All that I could see
at all clearly was that I seemed to be standing on a piece of green,
rushy grass, in front of me a small pool from which issued two streams
of very blue water to right and to left of me. He then bade me turn and
go back through the door, and told me I should see either a man or woman
who would give me something. I failed to see anything but darkness, but
at last with some effort I made out the indistinct figure of a child,
which offered me with its left hand some withered flowers. I could not
see its face. Lastly he bade me thank the person to whose intervention
the vision was due, and read from his notebook some vague sentences
prefiguring this vision. The performance was very imperfect, not to say
null.
“_5th April._—Arthur Balfour made his statement in the House to-day of
the Government’s China policy. George tells me the speech was
‘statesmanlike,’ but I gather from him that it was no very pronounced
success. Indeed, how should it be? The British Government has leased
Wei-hai-wei, which seems to be a sort of second best to Port Arthur, but
of no very practical value for coercing Pekin as it cannot easily be
connected with it by land. I should have thought it would have been
wiser either to make an alliance with Japan and war with Russia, or else
to let the whole thing severely alone, but George thinks Japan has
already been squared by Russia.
“_6th April._—I had a bad return of pain which lasted all night until
twelve to-day when I took an infinitesimal dose of morphia, which at
once stopped it and raised me from the depths of misery to the state of
happiness of a schoolboy just loosed from school.
“_9th April._—There is an announcement in the papers of ‘A great British
victory in the Soudan—Gordon avenged.’
“_11th April._—Saighton. I came here for the Easter holiday, arriving in
a miserable plight of pain, but to-morrow Sibell (Lady Grosvenor) is to
take me to Holywell to be bathed by the miraculous fountain there for my
cure. Some Vandals, calling themselves the Town Council, are claiming
the well which they want to let to a soda water company at £500 a year,
but George intends to oppose this in Parliament. There is nobody here
but the family, including little Percy and Bendor, the latter grown into
a very nice young man. George has been entertaining Mr. Cecil Rhodes at
my rooms in Mount Street while I was away, using them, I fancy, as a
place of secret communication between the Government and Rhodes, whom
they dare not publicly avow.
“I see the old Tichborne claimant is dead, asserting his rights to the
last. Certainly there was something about the man not wholly vulgar. I
saw a good deal of him at Buenos Ayres in 1868, and, though a mountain
of flesh and of no very refined clay, he seemed to me a gentleman born,
gone down in the world, rather than a mere plebeian. Richard Burton, who
was there at the same time, and who travelled across the Pampas with him
in the Mendoza diligence, believed in him as authentic at the time, and
so we all did. I remember seeing him once involved in some vulgar
dispute in a café, while playing billiards, and he seemed to me to
behave as a gentleman would have done under somewhat trying
circumstances, and now they have buried him with considerable pomp and a
coffin plate recording his baronetcy, attended by the licensed
victuallers who supported him as a show in his last days.
“_12th April._—I have been to St. Winifred’s well at Holywell. After a
very bad night of pain I nevertheless made up my mind not to put off the
visit. Fortified with a dose of morphia I set out with Sibell and
George. We went by train from Chester, passing not far from Hawarden,
where the G.O.M. lies dying, and the sands of Dee. We were fortunate in
our day, which, though wild at starting, turned into a perfect spring
afternoon. Sibell had written to Father Beauclerk, the Jesuit at
Holywell, to expect us, but he was away. I was glad of it, as thus I was
free to bathe as a plain pilgrim without religious supervision. I
suppose no pilgrim ever washed there with less Christian faith and at
the same time with so little of the mocking spirit. I have a belief in
holy places and holy people quite apart from all religious creeds, and I
felt a great confidence in the Saint that she would do me good. We
arrived at the best moment of the day, at one o’clock when everybody was
away at dinner, so that we were alone and there was no difficulty in
that sweet old place in supposing ourselves back in the fifteenth
century. The girl in charge of the gate gave me two towels, and I had
brought a nightgown with me, and so plunged in. It was cold work, though
the water, they say, is 52 degrees, but I did the traditional three
journeys through the water up to my armpits, going down into it by steps
and up the opposite side, and then took a complete dip over my head in
the outer tank and knelt on St. Bruno’s stone. I was quite alone while
doing this, except for George. Then, when I had dressed, we sat awhile
together in the sun, and went on to the inn for luncheon, where Sibell
was, and so home in the afternoon to Saighton. The buildings of the well
are still almost perfect, the shrine just as it was put up in Henry
VII’s time, not a stone of the pavement renewed nor anything of the
modern kind except some wooden dressing sheds and a few stupid scrolls
with texts hung up inside the shrine.
“_13th April._—I have had no pain all day, thanks to St. Winifred, a
long night of sleep and to-day no pain. I spent the afternoon with
Sibell, talking about the chances of life and death and of a world
beyond. The longer I live, the less I believe in any such, at least as
far as my own living again goes. I feel that I have worn out my vital
force and that eternity can bring me nothing but a dreamless sleep. All
the same, I believe in St. Winifred and her Well, and include her in my
canon prayer as my patron saint, which I have a right to do, seeing that
I was named after my great-grandmother, Winifred Scawen.”
My miraculous cure thus wrought did not last long. I had no sooner
turned my back to St. Winifred and Saighton than my pains began again,
and I began to think that the Saint had made a fool of me. I saw new
doctors in London, but they were unable to help me, and after lingering
on there until the 6th of May I went down to Newbuildings to bear my
troubles alone. “The world,” I wrote, “is only meant for those who are
in health, and the maxim of our forefathers was a sound one, that a
dying man should keep wholly out of sight.” This was the last entry in
my diary before the crisis came. On the following Sunday, after a night
of great suffering, I broke a bloodvessel, and for a week or more lay in
danger of death, nursed by the careful hands of the good Cowie, our
housekeeper, and of Sydney Cockerell, who had just entered on his duties
with me as my private secretary. Between them and my hospital nurse,
Miss Lawrence, who then first undertook my charge, they saved my life.
Then I recognized that St. Winifred had only deferred her benefits, and
that, as in the case of most miracles, she had chosen a natural road of
cure. However that might be, the cure, though it nearly killed me, was
an indisputable one. The pain from which I had been suffering so long
had left me desperately weak, it is true, in body but clear in mind, and
able once more to take an interest in life, and at the end of three
weeks to resume my diary. The first entry I find in it contains the
following:
“_28th May._—To-day Mr. Gladstone is being buried in Westminster Abbey.
“_6th June._—Cockerell is a treasure, arranging my books and getting me
others. He is full of interesting recollections of Morris. _Apropos_ of
the lovely little Kelmscott volume, containing ‘The Nightingale and the
Cuckoo,’ he assures me that Morris had never heard the nightingale sing,
and that he used to complain of it; also what seems even more
incredible, that he had not read the poem through, and was waiting to do
so for it to be in print. The proof-sheets came the day he died, and he
never read them. We are putting the new bookplate into our Kelmscott
books, where it looks a natural part of the volumes as the bookplate was
cut by the man Morris employed for his armorial designs. Cockerell has
been of the greatest use to me, arranging my papers and giving me new
interests in life. I have written several Sonnets and an inscription in
verse for the table Mrs. Morris gave me; my mind is vigorous and clear.”
[The table here referred to was the dining-table used by Morris and his
family when they lived at the Red House, and given to me by Mrs. Morris
when she was dispersing her furniture on leaving her house in
Hammersmith.]
In the meantime Anne and Judith had returned from Egypt. They had been
lingering on at Paris, but had been hastened back by my illness, and
were now in London, having taken a house there for Judith’s London
season.
“_19th June._—Burne-Jones is dead. This is a vast misfortune. He was to
have painted Judith as one of the figures for his last picture, ‘The
Vale of Avalon,’ but that will never now be. According to his wish he is
to be cremated, and then buried at Rottingdean. It is an honour for
Sussex that it should hold his ashes.
“_5th July._—Percy Wyndham, who has been down to see me, tells me that
he had spent the afternoon with Burne-Jones two days before he died.
Burne-Jones was in the highest possible spirits, playing at ‘Bear’ with
Pamela’s children. Later, however, a friend had dined with him, to whom
he had talked gloomily of the prospects of the world and of the human
race. The friend had remarked that no one should have such pessimistic
views who was not an atheist. To which Burne-Jones had exclaimed, ‘Thank
God, we are not that.’ He had been taken ill suddenly in the night, and
had died in half-an-hour. With Madeline, too, I have had much
conversation about Burne-Jones. She had written me a beautiful letter
about him and Morris, and had asked me to write a sonnet for her about
them. ‘I should like it better,’ she says in it, ‘than anything else you
could possibly do for me, and you are the only person almost who could,
if even you can, and I will wait no matter how long for it, and if I
depart from this life from pure old age while waiting, well, I shall
hope that then I shall be even better able to appreciate it in my future
and next development than now. But, for the sake of the world, a sonnet,
something beautiful about them, ought to be written. Such writings act
as beautiful reflectors to the divine light (that immortals such as
those two were) have left to the world, in the beauty of their work, it
directs the eyes of those that knew them not, to see and know them, for
the world in some ways is so dark that even the Divine Light needs a
reflector or glasses to guide the eyes, the spiritual eyes, darkened
eyes I had rather say, for it is the darkened eyes in the human race,
not the darkened world that prevents them seeing and knowing the
glorious divine light and beauty that is in this world, only few see it,
either in Nature or Art. Some are blind, hopelessly blind, others have
films on their eyes, but they can be removed. At first they only see
trees as men walking, but finally they can see, see and so live, but
they at first require glasses and reflectors, and artificial means of
help, and, to my mind, Poetry can be and is the art of all others that
helps us most in this world to see. Each divine art acts as a guide and
reflector to the other; Poetry helps Music, Music Poetry, both cast
light and concentrate it on the other arts.’ This suggested the sonnet I
have since published, and which begins; ‘Mad are we all, maids, men,
young fools alike and old.’
“_15th July._—Wotton. I find Evelyn with strong Spanish sympathies in
the war that is going on, on the same grounds with mine. The papers
announce the news of the surrender of Santiago de Cuba on honourable
terms, and there is great talk of peace being made, but I doubt its
being near. Spain has less to lose than America by going on with the
war, her colonies being practically already gone, and Europe being
almost certain to prevent a Yankee invasion of Spain. The financiers who
inspire the Press call out however, for it, and would have it made at
any price, as it is injuring trade.
“_2nd August._—Bismarck is dead. My only personal recollection of him is
of meeting him at old Lord Brougham’s in Grafton Street. Lady Malet, who
was Brougham’s stepdaughter, some say his natural daughter, asked me to
tea alone, to meet him, and he came and stopped talking with us very
pleasantly for an hour. He had been an old admirer of Lady Malet’s when
they had been together diplomatically at Frankfort, and they were still
on very intimate terms. This may have been in 1862. My memory of him is
of a tall rather thin man, with agreeable manners, and talking English
perfectly. At that time somewhat of an Anglomane, he was still
unrecognized by the general public of Europe as a great statesman.
Indeed, he was laughed at in Germany for his reactionary, out-of-date
opinions, and was not a little unpopular with the masses. If he had
failed to win at Sadowa, he would certainly have been torn to pieces by
the Berlin mob. Lady Malet had always the fullest faith in his genius.
“_9th September._—On Monday the 6th news came of the defeat of the
Khalifa and the taking of Omdurman, and with it of Hubert Howard’s
death, my only friend there and almost the only one on our side to lose
his life. The slaughter of the Dervishes seems to have been premeditated
and ruthlessly carried out. When I was at Bramber the other day Button
told me that ‘a heavy butcher’s bill’ had been ordered, as it was
intended to make the avenging of Gordon a chief feature of the business.
Telegraphic communication with England was on this account stopped (the
excuse being that the wires had been broken by a storm) lest any order
of moderation should come, and as far as I can read the despatches since
received, there must have been a wholesale massacre of the wounded and
fugitives. The figures given to-day are ten thousand counted corpses,
sixteen thousand wounded, who have crawled away to the river or the
desert, and three hundred or four hundred more killed in the town of
Omdurman after the fight, and only three thousand to four thousand
prisoners!!! As Button told me, ‘the performances of Tommy Atkins in the
way of killing at Atbara (a few days before the fight at Omdurman),
passed everything ever heard of. He was like a raging wild beast.’ One
may be pretty sure that orders were given to spare none.
“All this has moved my bile to the point that I have written in protest
to the ‘Times,’ but I doubt if they will print my letter. The whole
country, if one may judge by the Press, has gone mad with the lust of
fighting glory, and there is no moral sense left in England to which to
appeal. It is hideous but unmistakable.
“Hubert’s death is pitiful. There was nothing in the world to take him
there, for he was not in the army, nothing but a boyish whim. He dined
with Anne and Judith in London almost the night before he started, and
told them he was determined to fight. He was a delightful boy, with a
ringing, merry laugh it did one good to hear, and he had considerable
abilities, and the best of hearts, and he ends in a blind alley of
Omdurman a paid servant of the ‘Times.’
“_10th September._—My letter to the ‘Times’ is printed, which is more
than I expected. I am curious to see whether it raises an echo anywhere,
but as yet no voice has spoken in any London paper, except that Miss
Gordon protests in her brother’s name against his being ‘revenged.’ A
queer Christian country ours! On the other hand there has been an
outbreak in Crete, a Moslem mob has risen against a party of English
marines sent by the Admiral to raise the custom dues, and some have been
killed, and the British Vice-Consulate has been burnt, and Cretan
Christians massacred, Edhem Pasha and the Turkish garrison looking on.”
One characteristic letter was written to me at this time, apparently by
a parson; it says, “By a curious coincidence an answer to your letter in
the ‘Times’ of yesterday is given in one of the Psalms for this
morning’s service, viz., Psalm lviii, verses 10-11: ‘The righteous shall
rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his footsteps in the
blood of the ungodly, so that a man shall say, Verily, there is a reward
for the righteous, doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth.” A
more important letter, however, was to follow from no less a personage
than Herbert Spencer. Spencer was not at the time known to me
personally, nor had I at that time ranked myself among his disciples,
and the letter came to me as a surprise. It reached me 4th October.
“_4th Oct._—A most interesting letter has come to me from Herbert
Spencer on the subject of my letter about Omdurman, and mentioning also
an article on my poem, ‘The Wind and the Whirlwind.’ [This article, I
afterwards learned, was by Francis Thompson.] Spencer has long looked
out, he says, for a poet who should write a poem, the main lines of
which he sketches in his letter and he asks me to undertake it. (It was
to be a dialogue in Heaven after the manner of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ between
God and Satan, Satan complaining that mankind has surpassed him in
wickedness, sacrificing to Thor and Odin while nominally sacrificing to
Jehovah.) I wish I could think myself capable of doing this with any
effect, but I am too hopeless of getting such a subject listened to at
the present moment and too little believing in the divine government of
the world.”
This led to a correspondence between me and the philosopher and
eventually to my undertaking to write a poem, “Satan Absolved,” more or
less on the lines suggested. In a second letter, dated 6th October,
Spencer writes: “My beliefs are pretty much as pessimistic as those you
express. . . . Did I think that men would remain in the far future
anything like what they now are I should contemplate with equanimity the
sweeping away of the whole human race.” [For the first letter see
Appendix III.]
“_12th Oct._—A visit from Mrs. Meynell and her husband, and Francis
Thompson at Newbuildings. I had invited them to come for the night, but
Meynell had explained that this was impossible, ‘the poet (Thompson),
having an inconvenient habit of setting his bed on fire.’ They came
down, however, for the day. I met them at the station, a very lovely
day, and as we drove through the woods Meynell pointed out to me that
‘the poet of nature’ was wholly absorbed in the ‘Globe’ newspaper he had
brought down with him in the train, such being the way with London
poets. Thompson, though born in Lancashire and speaking English with a
broad provincial accent, is a true Cockney. He is a little weak-eyed,
red-nosed young man of the degenerate London type, with a complete
absence of virility and a look of raptured dependence on Mrs. Meynell
which is most touching. He is very shy, but was able to talk a little
when the general conversation was not too loud, and he seems good-
hearted and quite unpretending. He has written no poetry, Meynell tells
me, now for some years, being cured of his morphia. But Meynell thinks
the fountain may some day break forth again. Meanwhile, he gets a living
by literary criticism in the ‘Academy’ and other journals. When we all
went out after luncheon to the woods, I found him quite ignorant of the
names of the commonest trees, even the elm, which he must have seen
every day in London. I pointed one out to him, and he said, ‘I think, a
maple.’ On the whole, however, I liked him, for he was quite simple and
straightforward. Only, it was difficult to think of him as capable of
any kind of strength in rhyme or prose. Meynell has greatly improved
conversationally with years, and has become a most agreeable man. Thanks
to him, the visit was a pleasant one and they all went home in spirits.
“_15th Oct._—All this week has been one of excitement over the quarrel
with France about Fashoda. A Blue Book has been published giving the
English case, and, imperial plunder being in question, all parties,
Tories, Whig, Radical, Churchmen, and Nonconformist have joined in
publicly extolling English virtue and denouncing the French. For myself
I see nothing in it more respectable than the wrangle of two highwaymen
over a captured purse, morally both sides are on a level. The English
position in the case is that there has long been a scheme of
appropriating the Soudan with all the Upper Nile to the Lakes—this, in
anticipation of the event which must some day happen, of the British
occupation of Egypt proper coming to an end, through European
intervention. The scheme has so far been disguised, and whenever
objection has been raised, the Egyptian claim to the old Soudan
provinces has been put forward and, as we have seen, the Egyptian army
has been made use of to do the rough work of re-conquest, only now and
then have there been indications given of the truth. In the present Blue
Book there is one where Lord Salisbury instructs Monson to declare at
Paris that ‘By the military events of last week all the territories
which were subject to the Khalifa passed, _by right of conquest_, to the
British and Egyptian Government.’ Yet all the _gobemouche_ press is
ringing the changes on our ‘legality.’ And what a strange plea of
legality as towards Egypt! What would be said in private life if a
guardian and trustee who had undertaken to manage the estate of a minor,
as we forced the Egyptian Government in 1884 to abandon the Soudan and
leave it derelict, and then, the opportunity having occurred, should
take possession of those derelict farms as belonging to nobody and
should do this with the approval of the whole world, moral and
religious! Yesterday, there was a great public meeting in favour of
universal peace, and our leading Nonconformists on the platform
applauded Lord Salisbury for having thus swindled Egypt and defied
France. We live in an odd age.
“Judith’s engagement to Neville Lytton was announced to-day.
“_16th Oct._—I think very seriously of the crisis between England and
France. It will likely enough lead to a war, for both sides being in the
wrong each naturally sees the other’s wickedness and so believes itself
right. The best road to an agreement between them would be that each
should give up its preposterous claim to the Nile Provinces. Lord
Salisbury, among his many reasons for renewing the Soudan campaign three
years ago, said that the destruction of the Khalifa’s power would make
it easier for England to evacuate Egypt. Let him keep that part of his
programme and France will be satisfied. Our people, however, want war,
fancying it is a favourable moment for dealing single-handed with
France. I hope we shall not be invaded in Sussex.
“_17th Oct._—To Saighton. Things look very warlike with France, and war
would certainly happen if the position in Europe were at all less
unfavourable to the French, but as it is their Government will certainly
not risk a fight if they can help it. The danger lies in the weakness of
their Government, in the long discredit into which France has fallen,
and in the ascendancy of the army. There may be a revolution any day and
representatives of the Bourbons and of the Bonapartes are announced as
being on the frontier.
“Arrived at Saighton. I have had it out with George about Fashoda. He
states the English case with brutal frankness. ‘The day of talking,’ he
says, ‘about legality in Africa is over, all the international law there
is there consists of interests and understandings. It is generally
agreed by all the Powers that the end of African operations is to
“civilize” it in the interests of Europe, and that to gain that end all
means are good. The only difference between England and France is which
of them is to do it in which particular districts. England intends to do
it on the Nile, and it makes no difference what the precise legal
position is. We may put forward the Khedive’s rights if it is convenient
or we may put forward a right of conquest, or a right of simply
declaring our intentions. One is as good as another to get our end,
which is the railway from Cairo to the Cape. We don’t care whether the
Nile is called English or Egyptian or what it is called, but we mean to
have it and we don’t mean the French to have it. The Khedive may be kept
on for some years as a sort of Indian Maharajah, but it will end in a
partition of the Ottoman Empire between England, Germany, and Russia,
France will be allowed North-western Africa. It is not worth while
drawing distinctions of right and wrong in the matter, it is a matter
entirely of interest.’
“This of course is the true thought of our Government, and has been for
at least ten years, but for the first time to-day it is beginning to be
avowed. George represents all that is most extreme, most outrageous, in
modern English politics, and it marks the decline of the higher
traditions to find one like him proclaiming and defending it. I shall
not write again to the ‘Times,’ I should only mar the effect of my last
letter, which has certainly been great, and do no good. The dispute
between France and England is a dispute between rival card sharpers, and
the very best thing that can happen is that they should beat in each
other’s heads.
“_18th Oct._—Worked all the morning at ‘Satan in Heaven’ [‘Satan
Absolved’]. George has gone up to London.
“_19th Oct._—Made my pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Holywell in drizzle
and fog, taking my nurse, Miss Lawrence, with me, and my crutches, which
I deposited at the Shrine, bound up with a nightgown and a label thus
inscribed:
“‘Set here in thankful token of a cure from long sickness after bathing
in St. Winifred’s Well. By her servant W. S. B. October 19, 1898.’
“The scene inside the shrine was the most interesting I ever saw in
Europe. Three men were being passed through the water stark naked, but
for a slight bathing drawer round the loins, and each time after passing
they knelt on the pavement, dripping wet and prayed aloud. A priest was
reciting ‘Hail Marys,’ and at the end of each ‘Hail Mary,’ ‘Holy
Winifred, still in an unbelieving age, miraculous.’ There were lighted
candles and flowers, and the fervour of these naked men, one a mere bag
of skin and bones, was tremendous. In the dim light of a foggy day
nothing at all congruous to the nineteenth century was visible. It was a
thing wholly of the middle ages, the dark ages, the darkest of the dark
ages, magnificent, touching—it brought tears to my eyes. I hung up my
crutches in a corner with other relics, and placed Sibell’s flowers
which she had sent as a thank offering on the altar, and knelt for some
ten minutes reciting the Penitential Psalms.
“Outside the shrine I found Father Beauclerk, a young, good-looking
Jesuit, but deaf and afflicted with some ailment, perhaps paralytic. He
told me that the Town Council of Holywell was about to try its power of
closing the Well, and so of preventing the bathing, which has gone on
here precisely as it is to-day since the rebuilding of the Shrine in the
reign of Henry VII, and doubtless for many hundred years before it. The
true legal ownership of the water seems in doubt. The Duke of
Westminster is Lord of the Manor, and granted some thirty years ago a
long lease to the Town Council, but by some accident never signed it.
The Town Council in its turn leased it to the Jesuits, who put up a
railing and established a charge of twopence a head for maintenance of
the place. This charge the Town Council holds to have barred the free
access of the public to the water. Otherwise the public right would seem
absolutely clear. Certainly no bather has been refused admission since
before the Norman Conquest. Father Beauclerk took me to see one Lambert,
an innkeeper, who gave me further particulars, and who agreed if
guaranteed in costs to contest the matter as a Holywell ratepayer and
habitual bather. He tells me religious feud is at the bottom of the
mischief. Father Beauclerk has been imprudent in making use of the Well
for purposes of conversion, and in running it as a religious show. This
has enraged the Nonconformists, who have determined to put down the
pilgrimage as a Popish nuisance. In order more completely to desecrate
the Shrine they propose to lease it to a Soda Water Company at £500 a
year, and close the Well on a plea of sanitation. Lambert himself is a
Protestant, but having been cured of sciatica by bathing there, is a
partisan of the Well. As an innkeeper, too, his interests are affected,
for the town depends largely on pilgrims for its prosperity. It is clear
that steps must at once be taken to save the Shrine, and I gave Father
Beauclerk a cheque for £20 towards legal expenses. He seems, however, to
be sadly unpractical, and we must put the conduct of the case into other
hands.
“_20th Oct._—Back to London, where I saw Treherne, the Anti-Scrape
lawyer, about St. Winifred’s, and also Cockerell. In the evening a
telegram came from George to say that the Duke of Westminster would take
action in the matter, so that relieves us of a great difficulty.”