LITERATURE AND POLITICS
“_2nd Jan._, 1905.
“This is the first day I have been able to write. I have had a terrible
time of depression, the climax being when news came in from the desert
that Suliman’s pretty Bedouin wife Aïda had died suddenly of smallpox.
This is so miserable a thing that I still cannot bear to think of it.
From the time Suliman married her I have had a little sentiment about
her. She was old Dahil Allah’s daughter, a tall, straight girl with
beautiful eyes and a sweet pathetic voice. Suliman was very choice with
her and he covered her veil with coins. She was a happy sight, leading
out her flocks to pasture, and, later, with her children. She had always
a pleasant word of greeting for me, and she used to make me little
ornamented head stalls and camel ropes of wool each year for my camels.
This year when I came back I was distressed to find that for some reason
she had been driven with her sheep out of our enclosure and that she was
camped in a wretched place outside among the mounds of Heliopolis. I
went with Suliman to see her. Her pretty clothes were soiled and ragged
and her youth had faded sadly away from her. Perhaps it is best she
should be dead. She kissed my hand and held it awhile and I asked after
her children. She was to go away with them two days later, to Wady
Hárbelamá, taking the flocks to the new pasture which is plentiful this
year after the rain in the hills, and I promised to ride a little way
with them on the morning of the _rahala_ (flitting) and to pay them a
visit later at their new camp, but it was a damp sunrise when they
started, and I did not go out till too late. Aïda was taken ill only two
days after their arrival at Hárbelamá, and seven days later she was
dead. Poor old Suliman is partly paralysed. What now will he do?
“_3rd Jan._—Port Arthur capitulated yesterday after a pretty stubborn
defence, 5,000 men of the garrison left. How foolish our stupid English
generals must feel when they see the strongest fortress in the world
taken, fort after fort, by storm by the Japanese. This will probably end
the war, for with all their talk the Russians will know now their case
is hopeless.
“_4th Jan._—To-day I insisted upon being put upon my mare, and carried
to the outer enclosure, where we have a tent pitched. Miss Lawrence wept
and said it would cause her death as well as mine, but it all went off
well. I lay all day long enjoying the fresh air and the sun, and paid a
little visit on my way back to the tomb of Sheykh Obeyd, where Salem, my
Egyptian servant, has been saying prayers ever since I have been ill to
the saint, and I stopped at the tomb to recite a _fatha_.
“_10th Jan._—I have been taken out every day to the tent and it has done
me good. My illness has been very unfortunate. Suliman’s three young
children have sickened of the smallpox and the youngest has died. If I
had been well I should have gone out to him, for he must be in want of
provisions, though he has the milk of his goats. Smallpox is the one
thing that terrifies the Bedouins, and they fly from it, a visitation in
the natural world before which all are powerless. I sat yesterday for an
hour with the Mufti in his garden. There was with him one Mohammed Bey
Talaat Harb, a very intelligent man who is writing a history of the
Arabs from Mohammed to the present day. The fall of Port Arthur is
universally rejoiced in here as a triumph of East against West. It
appears now that 48,000, not 5,000, Russians surrendered. The Khedive
has made overtures of peace lately to Mohammed Abdu.
“_12th Jan._—I have been reading FitzGerald’s translations from Calderon
which are rather poor stuff, more Calderon’s fault than FitzGerald’s,
only two of the plays were worth translating, ‘The Mayor of Zalamea’ and
the merry little comedietta at the end of the volume which reminds me
pleasantly if not very closely of the Madrid of my youth, forty years
ago. The rest of the plays are dull, with little of wit or passion.
FitzGerald’s blank verse, too, though good in its way, makes heavy
reading; perhaps it would be better on the stage, but why does he
misaccentuate the names of his characters, scanning “Álvaro” as
“Alváro,” “Huán” as “Iúan,” “Otañéz” as “Otáñez,” “Guillén” as
“Guìllen,” “San Lúcar” as “San Lucár,” and so on. It seems trouble
thrown away to translate and be so very slipshod.
“_21st Jan._—Mohammed Abdu has gone to the Soudan to look after various
matters connected with Mohammedan interests.
“_25th Jan._—A short desert journey with Neville to visit Suliman and
take him provisions. We found Suliman’s other wife watching for us on
the hill-top and presently we came upon his two little tents pitched in
a hollow near the high gravel ridge three or four miles east of the
Nahiadeyn, a nice little spot, the scene of the tragedy of Aïda’s death.
We found her poor black shirt cast away at some distance from the tent,
doubtless on account of the infection, and the camp had a squalid look
in the lonely wilderness, the flocks being away at pasture and the rain
of two nights ago had run through both tents, round which a little
trench had been dug. Poor Suliman was sitting like Job in his sorrow on
one of the gravel hillocks, and hobbled feebly to meet us. His palsy has
grown on him and he can hardly walk, his left arm powerless. He smiled a
little and said the conventional _hamd ul illah_ (Praised be God!) when
he had narrated his sufferings. The elder boys are now past the worst of
the disease, but nothing can make up for Aïda. We left our sack of
provisions with him and money to buy clothes for his children. One can
do nothing really in a case like this, an accident of desert life and
the ‘act of God.’
“_27th Jan._—There has been something in the nature of a revolution in
Russia. I wish I could think it could succeed, but unless the soldiers
make common cause with the people I do not see how this can be. The
armed power of modern troops is so great that a mob, however determined,
has no chance. Russia, too, is so immense a country, and the towns in it
are so small and far apart that cohesion between them is difficult. The
mass of the peasantry has little in common with the townspeople and
cannot and will not help them. It is all a question of the army’s
fidelity to orders.
“_19th Feb._—Mohammed Abdu has returned from Khartoum. He is pleased
with what he saw there; says the Government is better managed than in
Egypt, that the people are content, especially in the matter of the
slave trade, and that the education at the College is being sensibly
given. The Soudanese criminal code is simpler and better than the
Egyptian. Wingate’s rule is mild, and there is good feeling between the
English and the Soudanese.
“Lady Gregory writes that Yeats has read my play ‘Fand’ to his company
and that they are anxious to act it, and perhaps it will be put on the
stage in April. Yeats, she says, has declared that if I had begun to
write plays when I was thirty, I should now have a European reputation.
I fear it is too late for that now, also Gilbert Murray has written in
praise of it and Mackail.
“George Meredith has been appealing for funds to help the revolution in
Russia, and I have subscribed £10, and yesterday came news that the
Grand Duke Serge had been blown up with a bomb, so I am subscribing
again. Assassination is the only way of fighting a despotism like that
of Russia. It shows that the revolutionists mean business. I have taken
my place for Europe by the steamer of the 11th March.
“_28th Feb._—I see in the papers that George has got into trouble with
his Irish policy, as I feared he would, over the Dunraven programme. His
defence in the House of Commons reads well, but there is something
behind. To the best of my knowledge, though I do not know it from
George, the sudden policy of conciliation he adopted two years ago, was
at the suggestion of the King who, when he came to the throne, was
anxious to be able to go to Ireland and have a loyal reception. Also he
has great regard for Continental opinion, which he knows well, and he
was ashamed of the disgrace of there being a part of his United Kingdom
where he was not welcome, otherwise I cannot account for the sudden
accession of official fervour in the matter. George, however it began,
certainly became converted to views not very distinguishable from Home
Rule, as I have often discussed them with him, only he was not prepared
for Dunraven’s sudden announcement of the programme. I believe, too,
that he is quite justified in saying that an elected general council was
not in his plan. Where he made the mistake was in his too hasty and not
happily worded repudiation of the manifesto by writing to the ‘Times.’
He would have done better to have expressed his sympathy with it while
saying that in its present form it was not compatible with the Unionist
policy. For his views were so well known that his rather bald
pronouncement read both to friends and enemies like a sudden
recantation, and it has prejudiced his later explanations. I fear it
will harm his political position, though to me personally his retirement
from the Government could only be a gain. What will probably happen is
that he will be shifted later to some other office in the Cabinet. It is
a thousand pities he did not leave Ireland after passing his Land Bill
and take the War Office when it was offered him. It is impossible for
any one to win in the long run as Irish Chief Secretary.
“_1st March._—I hobbled out this evening to the tomb for tea, the garden
looking lovely in the perfect light which I suppose I shall never see
again after this month. There is a gigantic scheme of building a garden
city over the whole desert round here, which will be the end of Sheykh
Obeyd’s solitude, with its jackals and its foxes and its doves and
kites, and its long-eared owls and its night ravens, but I am consoled
by the thought that I shall not see it again.
“_2nd March._—I see that George has made a second speech in Parliament
about his Irish policy, far better than the first. This time a quite
frank statement, reading the letters which passed between him and
MacDonnell. It restores him to the position of an honest statesman,
though probably not politically. He can hardly any longer do much good
in Ireland amid the yelping of the Ulster pack, and the counter yelping
of Healy and Sexton; even his optimism can scarcely carry him through
another year there.
“_9th March._—I am laid up again with the malarious fever and other
troubles, and feel like a hare headed first by one greyhound and then by
another. I was to have left for England to-morrow but Milton, the Cairo
doctor, who was called in, declared it impossible, so my journey is put
off till the 18th. George has resigned. I was afraid they were going to
give him Milner’s place at the Cape, which would have plunged him deeper
than ever in the slough of Imperial politics, but they had already
appointed Selborne, so George is free.
“_12th March._—Mukden has been taken by the Japanese and the Russian
army under Kuropatkin seems on the point of capitulation. It is the
biggest thing that has happened in war since Sedan, but it is more than
this, it is the first great victory of the East over the West since the
Ottoman conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and may
change the whole face of the world’s history for as many centuries to
come.
“The inquiry into the attack made on our fishermen at Dogger Bank has
turned out pretty much as I expected, the Russian admiral is hardly
blamed for his ‘mistake,’ and nobody will be punished. We have had our
ears boxed very prettily and everybody is pleased, including it seems
the British public, which has as much sense of its dignity as a clown in
a circus; however, the Japanese have done the fighting so effectually
for us that the Russians cannot raise much of a crow.
“_15th March._—Harold Spender of the ‘Daily News’ has been here, come
out to study the Egyptian question. Cromer delights in men of this sort
and has been cramming this one with his confidences. He has told him
that he wants the whole Army of Occupation withdrawn, that he can depend
for order on his native police, that he would like a native
administration, but can’t find any Egyptians fit for responsibility,
etc., all which the good man has swallowed and admits it as an axiom
that England has come to Egypt to stay. Mohammed Abdu happened to come
in while Spender and his wife were with us, and stopped to dine, and has
given Spender another picture of the position, but I fear it has been
casting pearls before swine.
“_17th March._—I left Sheykh Obeyd this morning, as it seems to me for
ever. The place is very dear to me with its perpetual sunshine and its
wild beasts and birds. Woe is me, who will look after them all when I am
gone? Mohammed Abdu came to see me off at the Cairo station and we
stayed on talking to the last minute with sad farewells.” [I never
thought to see him again when we parted, but it was not I, it was he
that died within the year.]
“_24th March._—Venice. The last week has been a terrible experience of
fever and pain, and but for some fresh milk found for me at Brindisi, I
could hardly have got through, and for being met here by the good
Cockerell, who came out from London to see me home, and Van Someren, an
English doctor, who has put me to bed, saying that if I go on to England
as I am it will mean that I shall die in the train. He allows me no food
of any sort, only Vichy water with a tea-spoon of brandy in it twice a
day, so here I am stuck fast.
“_1st April._—The régime of starvation reached its climax yesterday. I
was reduced to such a point of weakness that I could hardly turn in my
bed and began to have visions, so I rebelled and insisted on a new-laid
egg and I am now reviving. Button has returned to Venice, having been
away, and has taken charge of me.
“_6th April._—Still no change, but the doctor is fairly out of his
reckoning and I am determined at all risks to move on homewards,
convinced that my best chance with the fever is to get away from the
Mediterranean. I have been a fortnight here in bed.
“_18th April._—Chapel Street. On the 8th I made the venture, and, thanks
to Button, successfully. I was carried out just as I was, undressed, in
bed on a stretcher, and placed in a gondola and from there into the
train, where a first-class carriage had been prepared on purpose and so,
still all the way in bed, and helped with morphia, to Boulogne and so to
Folkestone and London. It is pronounced now that I have Malta fever.
“_13th May._—Easter has come and gone and I have been a fortnight at
Newbuildings in beautiful weather but hardly any better.
“George, who promised to come down here to see me before making his
final apologia about Ireland, seems to have been captured by Arthur
Balfour at Clouds and brought over to a position of mere party
obedience.
“_30th May._—George writes proposing to come to see me. I am glad of
this. There is news to-day of a great naval victory by the Japanese.
“_8th June._—I have been back in London seeing doctors, but to no
profit, as I still suffer continual pain and grow no stronger. George
has been several times to see me, and has explained to me all his Irish
story. He has sacrificed himself to party necessities and his devotion
to Arthur Balfour.”
The next month is without record in my Diary. I had hardly got down to
Newbuildings when I began to be seized with a pain in the nape of my
neck, which gradually increased in violence till it became a perpetual
agony, preventing me from taking any rest whatever either day or night.
It is no exaggeration to say that for a full six weeks I did not get one
minute’s sleep, in spite of all the drugs that could be given me.
Neither could I lie down nor even rest my head upon a pillow, and if for
an instant I lost consciousness it was only to be awakened by the
sensation as of a spear transfixing me from shoulder to shoulder through
the spine, an indescribable agony. With this, continuous fever and
drenching sweats. I had a bed made up for me in the hall, but could not
actually lie down on it, and remained day and night propped up, my
forehead resting on a band fastened to the bed head against which I
leaned it, or I would wander from room to room and from chair to chair
on the ground floor, followed by my nurse. I remember one especial
night, when a new nurse had come who did not understand my ways. In my
wanderings from room to room I had sunk into the big high-backed chair
which stands in the hall, and she, thinking I should rest awhile, had
left me there. After a while I fell as I have described into a momentary
unconsciousness, and in the same instant awoke with a pain so great that
I howled aloud, and the sweat ran from me in streams. It was to me then
as to a wild beast in a trap, caught by its steel teeth and held a
prisoner, which knows that it cannot escape its doom. I could not move,
I could do nothing for myself. I had an absolute certainty that all for
me was over. “No man,” I said to myself, “ever came back from a depth of
physical despair so deep as this and lived.” The nurse came to me with
some conventional words of inquiry, and anger seized me, and I cursed
her for a fool. The anger gave me strength to stamp my foot and rise. I
think it saved my life.
With my nurse Lawrence it was otherwise. Her handling soothed me. She
would take me sometimes to the room on the ground floor which had been
Cowie’s, and where she died. I used to imagine that there my pain was
easier. But I was mad with the pain and the drugs, and the long lack of
sleep. It was accepted by all then that I could not recover, and Dr.
Haig, who had been brought to me by Judith for an opinion, gave me not
three days to live. All thought my lungs were affected, and my weakness
was such that it seemed to me at times that a single cough would have
been my end. It would have shattered and destroyed me. Nevertheless I
did not die, though emerging as one who had passed through the Valley of
the Shadow of Death.
“_8th July._—I have been again to London to try and get relief from pain
by Swedish treatment, and have seen many friends who have come to me in
Chapel Street. George has given me an interesting account of the
difficulty the Government finds in keeping George Curzon in order. He
was very near bringing on an Afghan War, but was prevented. He resents
having a nonentity like Brodrick placed over him at the India Office,
but Brodrick is backed by the Cabinet.”
From this time till the 20th of May the pain I have described continued,
and then I went down to Newbuildings. Almost the only entry is of 28th
July.
“The great event transcending all others is that Mohammed Abdu is dead!
A terrible personal loss to me, and a public one quite incalculable for
the world of Islam. We cannot help fearing there has been foul play, as
the death was very sudden, and the Mufti had many political enemies.”
On the 20th of September I was moved to Brighton, where I gradually
recovered the power of sleep, and began to find life tolerable, though
still helpless to leave my bed, except for an occasional short drive,
propped up with pillows. I find in my Diary, 16th October, a note of the
death of Lady Currie, who had been Violet Fane, the best of our living
women poets, to whom many of my earlier sonnets had been written. I had
been able, too, in spite of my illness, to get the first volume of my
Egyptian Memoirs into print, and had been in correspondence with
Frederic Harrison about them, who pronounces them “of extraordinary
interest and importance, but impossible to publish at present.”[5]
“_26th Oct._—With George I have had much interesting talk, as he has
been with me at Newbuildings. He showed me a letter he had received from
Chamberlain, saying that he (Chamberlain) had always looked on George as
one of his strongest supporters in the Cabinet, and asking him to join
him in his Tariff Campaign. On this George consulted me, and I of course
advised him to have nothing to do with Chamberlain, and he has answered
him that he cannot take any part in the campaign, though in terms that
ought not to leave Chamberlain his enemy. Another interesting letter he
read me was from Lord Hugh Cecil, which shows him rather at a loss what
political line to take, as he may be unable to retain his seat at
Greenwich except with the support of Liberal voters, and he hints that
he may have to join Rosebery. This would be a great pity. I look on Lord
Hugh as one day destined to lead the Conservative Party, and should like
to see him and George acting together. This George will probably
endeavour to bring about. George considers Arthur Balfour to have been
very unwise in not dissolving this autumn, as his chances at the coming
election are getting worse and worse. We talked also about George
Curzon. The quarrel between him and Kitchener, is, he says, entirely a
personal one. He, George, advised Curzon not to go back to India last
year, and it is a pity he went. He cannot understand his having been so
foolish as to have made the Thibet Campaign, and to have stirred up
trouble in Afghanistan. What Curzon will do on his return to England is
a problem. He thinks he would do best by taking a peerage with a seat in
the Lords. He asked me what I thought ought to be done in India. I told
him the practical thing would be to reduce expenditure. With Russia
beaten in the field and revolutionized at home, the Indian Army might be
greatly reduced.
“_7th Nov._—To London yesterday for a new consultation and X-rays. It is
now pronounced that I am to remain on my back in bed for at least three
months, a terrible sentence. Meynell and Cockerell dined with me.
Meynell read us ‘Modern Love,’ and expounded it to us as Meredith had
expounded it to Mrs. Meynell. According to this the last two stanzas
mean that the wife, ‘Madam,’ commits suicide so as to leave the poet
free to marry ‘My Lady.’ Cockerell thinks that to have been an
afterthought, and that the poem really ended before the two last
stanzas, and that the wife eloped with her lover. Meredith, Meynell
says, seems to have persuaded himself that his wife, in real life, left
him for some such altruistic motive, but this must have been self-
delusion, as she certainly lived with her lover till her death.
“_16th Nov._—I have become reconciled to my fate, the more so because
the rest has done me good, the pain is less and I have lost all
inclination to get up. Numbers of friends have been with me. Yesterday I
saw Ross, Oscar Wilde’s friend, who was with him in his last hours. I
was curious to know about these and he told me everything. Ross is a
good honest fellow as far as I can judge, and stood by Oscar when all
had abandoned him. He used to go to him in prison, being admitted on an
excuse of legal business, for Ross managed some of Mrs. Wilde’s affairs
while her husband was shut up. He told me Oscar was very hardly treated
during his first year, as he was a man of prodigious appetite and
required more food than the prison allowance gave him, also he suffered
from an outbreak of old symptoms and was treated as a malingerer when he
complained of it. Ross’s representation got attention paid to these
things, and in the last eight months of his imprisonment, Wilde had
books and writing materials in abundance and so was able to write his
‘De Profundis.’ I asked him how much of this poem was sincere. He said,
‘As much as possible in a man of Oscar’s artificial temperament. While
he was writing he was probably sincere, but his “style” was always in
his mind. It was difficult to be sure about him. Sometimes when I called
he was hysterical, at other times laughing. When Oscar came out of
prison he had the idea of becoming a Catholic, and he consulted me about
it, for you know I am a Catholic. I did not believe in his sincerity and
told him if he really meant it, to go to a priest, and I discouraged him
from anything hasty in the matter. As a fact, he had forgotten all about
it in a week, only from time to time he used to chaff me as one standing
in the way of his salvation. I would willingly have helped him if I had
thought him in earnest, but I did not fancy religion being made
ridiculous by him. I used to say that if it came to his dying I would
bring a priest to him, not before. I am not at all a moral man, but I
had my feeling on this point and so the matter remained between us.
After he had been nearly a year out of prison he took altogether to
drink, and the last two years of his life were sad to witness. I was at
Rome when I heard that he was dying and returned at once to Paris and
found him in the last stage of meningitis. It is a terrible disease for
the bystanders, though they say the sufferer himself is unconscious. He
had only a short time to live, and I remembered my promise and got a
priest to come to him. I asked him if he would consent to see him, and
he held up his hand, for he could not speak. When the priest, an
Englishman, Cuthbert Dunn, came to him he asked him whether he wished to
be received and put the usual questions, and again Oscar held up his
hand, but he was in no condition to make a confession nor could he say a
word. On this sign, however, Dunn allowing him the benefit of the doubt,
gave him conditional baptism, and afterwards extreme unction but not
communion. He was never able to speak and we do not know whether he was
altogether conscious. I did this for the sake of my own conscience and
the promise I had made.’ Wilde’s wife died a year after he left prison.
She would have gone to see him at Paris but he had already taken to
drink, and Ross did not encourage her to do so. Ross made £800 by the
‘De Profundis.’ He had intended to pay off Oscar’s Paris debts with £400
of it and devote the rest to the use of the boys, but just as he was
going to do this the whole sum was claimed by the bankruptcy court and
the affair is not yet settled.
“_26th Nov._—Button Bourke came last night to dine with me. He told me a
curious story about the death of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon the
Third’s son. He, Button, was at that time ‘Daily Telegraph’
correspondent with Chelmsford’s staff in South Africa, to which the
Prince was attached. The Prince was bored with the staff duties and got
Chelmsford to allow him to go out with the scouting parties. On one of
these expeditions to survey the line of march, they fell in with the
Zulus, who surprised them while they were having their lunch. Cary, who
was in command of the scouts, gave order for a _sauve qui peut_ and all
rushed to get on their horses. The Prince had a habit of vaulting into
his saddle, but the girths having been loosed, the saddle turned round
with him and he fell and was speared by the Zulus after running forty or
fifty yards. Cary and the rest had meanwhile ridden away and returned to
camp with the news. He had met Grenfell on the way and had told him that
they had been attacked by a large force of Zulus and that the Prince had
been shot. Five other men had lost their lives. The next morning Button
had gone out with Grenfell and others to look for the bodies and had
found them, first coming upon a Boer, who had been one of the scouts,
then they found the Prince’s body, pierced with spears through the eye,
the heart, and other parts, but with no shot wounds. Upon this Cary was
tried by court martial for cowardice in the field, Button acting as his
‘friend’ on the occasion. His defence was that he had never learnt to
ride as a boy, that he had then served in a West Indian regiment where
the officers were not mounted, and that until he had come out to South
Africa he had never been on horseback, that they had all scrambled on to
their horses as they best could and that, he being unable to manage his
horse, had been run away with and had not even been able to look behind
him, all his thought being how not to fall off. Button told me that this
line of defence was strictly true, but that he knew it would not be
accepted as an excuse, seeing that the court martial was chiefly
composed of Hussars, and so it had resulted, Cary was condemned and
would have been shot but for the fact that Chelmsford’s rank in South
Africa was not that of Commander-in-Chief, but only that of Commanding-
in-Chief, which last gave him no power to confirm a death sentence and
the case was referred to England. There, the Lord Chief Justice, I think
it was, finding that there was no record in the papers submitted to him
that the evidence had been given on oath, tore them up, and Cary was
sent back a free man to his regiment. Button and Grenfell had heaped up
stones on the spot where the body was found, and this enabled the
Empress Eugénie afterwards to identify the place and build her monastery
there.
“_29th Nov._—Button again dined with me and with him Philpot, my doctor.
Button told us that war with France over this Fashoda affair was
narrowly prevented by Monson through one of the old-fashioned diplomatic
tricks. Lord Salisbury had drawn up an ultimatum, and instructed Monson
as Ambassador in Paris to deliver it. Monson, however, who knew the
ultimatum, if formally delivered, would be refused, and who wished to
prevent a war, gave Delcassé, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs,
warning confidentially through one of the secretaries of the Austrian
Embassy of what was impending, and that if Delcassé should see him put
his hand into his breast pocket he would know that the limit of English
patience was reached, and that the ultimatum would be handed to him.
When therefore the next day their discussion had reached the limit Lord
Salisbury had laid down, Monson gave the signal, and Delcassé, who also
wished to avert war, gave in, and allowed the dispute to remain at the
point it had reached, and so between them the thing was arranged.” [I
received confirmation of this story later as exact from a near relation
of Sir Edmund Monson.]
Anne left for Egypt yesterday.
“_10th Dec._—George tells me that he has received an answer from
Chamberlain to what he wrote some weeks ago, to the effect that
Chamberlain quite understands his position, and thinks him right not to
come forward on any political platform just now. Arthur Balfour resigned
office on Monday. He had told George of his intention a week before.
“_31st Dec._—On Xmas Day Margot had the charity to dine with me. And so
the year has gone by. I have ceased to worry about public affairs.
Margot is the best and kindest of women.
“My article on Ridgeway and his theory of the origin of the Arabian
Horse is out in the ‘Nineteenth Century.’
“Looking back on the past year I see it as physically _une année
terrible_, but it has brought me many consolations. During the last six
weeks in London I have seen more friends, and more of them than in the
preceding six years. I have ceased to worry myself about public affairs.
I shall never, now the Mufti is dead, go again to Egypt, nor even, I
think, across the Channel. If I recover I mean to live out my few
remaining years as much as possible with my friends here in England, and
enjoy the little things of life at home. My friends, and I have had very
many of late to see me, now, I perceive, look on me as wise. It is all
old age can reasonably aspire to in the way of happiness.
“_9th Jan._, 1906.—Parliament was dissolved yesterday, and the new one
will be elected by the end of the month.
“I have been reading Winston Churchill’s life of his father. It is
wonderfully well done, and on the whole a very fair statement of Lord
Randolph’s career. He under-estimates, however, Randolph’s Home Rule
dallyings in 1885. To me, Randolph always talked at that time as a Home
Ruler, though not prepared to declare himself one as yet. Lord Salisbury
was his difficulty, but he hoped to convert him, but all he could get
Lord Salisbury to do was to declare against coercion, and when he had
been himself a few weeks in office he fell into the way of thought held
by his party. Randolph’s annexation of Burmah destroyed my confidence in
him as an anti-aggressionist, and his Home Rule talk did not survive the
General Election of that year.
“_17th Jan._—‘Astarte’ has been published, and I am surprised to find
what good literature it is. Since I saw it last, two or three years ago,
it has been almost entirely rewritten, and is now really admirable in
style. Indeed, Ralph has invented a new form of prose, or rather,
perhaps, re-invented it, for it reminds one of Hazlitt and his
contemporaries. I have written to congratulate him, but I expect he will
come in for plentiful violence of counter-attack in answer to his own
violence.
“The excitement of the General Election is not yet over. Arthur
Balfour’s defeat at Manchester has amused me greatly, and Gerald’s at
Leeds, and Alfred Lyttelton’s at Warwick. With these three front Bench
men gone, George Wyndham will remain leader of the Tory opposition, for
even Hugh Cecil has been submerged in the general deluge. What a
_débâcle_! As to the future, people talk of violent democratic changes.
I do not believe in them, the new Cabinet is a Whig Cabinet. The Liberal
Party will split up into two camps, Whig and Socialist, and in their
wrangles things will continue to drift on much as they are. He who lives
longest will see most.
“_29th Jan._—The elections are over, giving the Liberals a clear
majority over all other sections of some 89. This is immense. The Tories
keep no more than 156 seats. The Labour Party have got 51. All the same
I don’t expect to see any very revolutionary legislation. They will
probably get into difficulties before long over South Africa or Foreign
policy, and Redmond will get his chance of upsetting them as he upset
Balfour. Arthur Balfour is to have a seat in the city. Anne writes from
Sheykh Obeyd that she is selling those acres of land near the Railway
station for £300 an acre. [This was the beginning of the great land boom
in Egypt when extravagant prices were realized, only to go down as
rapidly.]
“_30th Jan._—King Christian of Denmark is dead, an old man. I remember
him in 1862 when he came to Frankfort with his two daughters, Alexandra
and Olga, and they had luncheon at the English Legation. They were very
unimportant personages then, the girls badly dressed, and their father
quiet and unobtrusive. I was a little hurt in my feelings, as the
spoiled child of the house, when Lady Malet asked me to give up my place
in her carriage to the Danish Prince when we were going to some review.
Now he dies senior monarch of Europe and progenitor of our Queen and of
half the royal and Imperial houses.
“_8th Feb._—George Wyndham has been to see me and we talked of ‘Astarte’
which I had lent him to read. He has done this carefully, and criticized
it with his usual insight. There is no doubt it is a very original piece
of prose, almost a work of genius, but singularly ill-arranged as an
argument. Moreover the diatribe against the Murrays turns out to be
entirely without justification. Murray has published in a monthly review
a dignified answer in which he shows not merely that all Ralph says in
his preface about his dealings lately with himself over the new edition
of Byron is incorrect, but he also quotes letters from him acknowledging
the kindness of the Murrays for three generations to his family.
“_9th Feb._—Frederic Harrison was here in the afternoon. He still has
hopes of his Byzantine play, ‘Theophano,’ being acted in London, but I
doubt any manager taking it as it is purely spectacular, and could not
be put on the stage without great expense. The managers tell him it is
superb, but so far have refused it. He talked of ‘Astarte,’ refusing
still to believe the main fact.
“There are strange tales current of the goings on at C——, where ladies
were invited by the hostess, with express designs upon their virtue.
They were invited without their husbands, and given rooms near those of
their intended lovers, and if they locked their doors at night the other
ladies staying in the house would refuse to speak to them. I daresay
there are pretty free doings at C——, but the boycotting of the virtuous
ladies next morning does not sound to me as according with the ways of
society, even in the most advanced set.
“_10th Feb._—There is an article in to-day’s ‘Tribune,’ by Principal
Morgan on Haeckel’s philosophy, which interests me, because Haeckel’s is
precisely the argument I made out for myself forty-five years ago when I
was at Frankfort as a boy of twenty-one, asserting the eternity of
matter and the natural origin of mind as an ‘accident’ of matter in the
metaphysical sense of the word ‘accident,’ and the consequent lack of
any necessity of an eternal creative mind. I wrote a paper, which I have
still, dated 1861, giving this argument briefly. I wrote it in answer to
a paper shown me by Count Usedom asserting that God could be discovered
in Nature, and I developed it later in my correspondence with Dr.
Meynell, published anonymously in seventy-six, under the title, ‘Proteus
and Amadeus.’ In 1861 Haeckel had, I believe, published nothing. This is
curious.
“_13th Feb._—George looked in and gave me the latest political news. On
Thursday they are to have a party meeting at Lansdowne House, where
three resolutions will be proposed and voted on, the first two
unimportant, the third to raise the Tariff question in an aggressive
form. George is beginning, he says, to lean towards Protection, which
probably indicates that Balfour also leans that way.
“_19th Feb._—George was with me for an hour and a half yesterday,
confiding to me his political secrets. He has been constantly with
Arthur Balfour during the last week, and is not at all satisfied with
Arthur’s present attitude. George knows more than Arthur of public
opinion, and sees that his vacillations have done him harm. He described
to me the meeting at Lansdowne House, where Balfour accepted
Chamberlain’s programme. Chamberlain spoke first, then came the Duke of
Devonshire, who had read the correspondence with Chamberlain as he came
up to London in the train. He declared himself in accord with every part
of the Unionist creed except Tariff Reform, remaining a Free Trader. At
the end of all Hugh Cecil spoke, his speech short but excellent, showing
great courage. He asked whether as a Conservative Free Trader he would
be allowed to stand as a Conservative at the elections, without having a
Tariff Reformer started against him. He put the case well and with
humour, and made the meeting laugh, and he was listened to. Arthur gave
him no certain answer. As to Ireland, Arthur has gone right round to the
extremists again, coercion and all the rest, with Walter Long as his
prophet. George’s own relations with Long are curious. During the whole
of his tenure of the Irish Office Long was one of his steadiest
supporters, indeed admirers. They were very intimate, and Long professed
to take George as his guide and master in Irish affairs. They are still
quite cordial, calling each other by their Christian names, but George
has told him that during the coming session he means to take his own
line about Ireland, and that Long must answer for himself if the late
Government there is attacked. He tells me in great confidence that he
has received indirect overtures recently from O’Brien who, he says,
seems more in accord than anyone else with his policy, Redmond and
Dillon having coalesced. Also Dunraven has made him advances, and
yesterday he had met Sir Anthony Macdonnell, and talked with him on the
most friendly terms. It was their first meeting since George left the
Irish Office. All this encourages him to take a line of his own about
Ireland. He means to strike in early in the new Parliament, making
religious education his special subject. ‘I am much mixed up,’ he said,
‘with High Church people, through Sibell and others, and take an
interest in it, though not much myself of a believer. Opportunities of
attacking the Government are sure to come.’ He fears Hugh Cecil will not
be able to get into this Parliament, and he expects trouble for the
party. Chamberlain is to lead the Opposition till Balfour gets a seat,
and he should not be surprised if he got them into difficulties.
Chamberlain, though the public does not know it, is becoming senile, and
talks inordinately. George is looking the picture of health, having put
himself on a _régime_ of meat and drink. We touched upon old times and
my campaign in Ireland, and I told him how nearly I had won the campaign
against Balfour in 1888 while I was in prison. At my trial in the Four
Courts, eleven out of the twelve jurymen were for me; had I secured the
twelfth I should have won my case, had I won my case I should have won
the Deptford election, and had I won the Deptford election I should have
upset Balfour, his coercion policy being so distasteful to his party.
George agreed that it was so, and that it was a touch and go moment. He
and Balfour had always considered the decision in the Four Courts as the
first solid foundation of their policy under the Crimes Act. Everybody
connected with it on the Government side had been rewarded.
“_28th Feb._—I see Dick Fox of Bramham is dead. I first made
acquaintance with him and his brother George on my seventeenth birthday,
when, with my own brother Francis, we ascended Monte Rosa. We were a
young party, two of us being eighteen, one seventeen, and one sixteen.
We did the ascent to the top and back to the Riffelburg in twelve hours.
On our way down, while climbing along the narrow snow ridges between the
two summits, Dick, who was just in front of me, slipped. He had hurt his
foot the day before, but had concealed the fact from his elder brother
that he was lame until we had well started. We were too young and
careless to have ourselves bound together with ropes, which were not so
generally used then as now; and away Dick slid, followed by a guide who,
in trying to catch him, lost footing too. It looked like inevitable
death for both of them to me, who was immediately behind them. It
happened, however, that just where the slope down which they were
hurried was turning over to a sheer precipice of several thousand feet,
the snow beneath them bedded, and they lay there not daring to move till
our other guide cut steps in the ice down to them, and so rescued them.
It was a wonderful escape. George Fox, the elder of the two, became a
Catholic, and was disinherited by his father, the old Squire of Bramham,
for his change of religion, and Dick became the heir. He passed his
whole life fox-hunting, and died when he could no longer ride.
“_9th March._—George was again yesterday full of his parliamentary
plans. He is taking the lead in Opposition now, which he does well,
though I hate most of his public politics. His private ones are very
different. I gave him my idea of a policy of education, and he said he
would follow it when the question came forward in the House. What I
thought he might say is this: ‘It is right and proper that education
should be compulsory to the extent of the three R’s, writing, reading,
and arithmetic, for this the State should pay, but no child should be
compelled to go beyond this, or to attend school after twelve years old.
The State school should be undenominational, inasmuch as the three R’s
can be taught without involving any religious question. Beyond the age
of twelve each denomination should provide its own education, History,
Literature, and Science being unteachable without involving religion.
Such secondary schools should not be compulsory.’ This would certainly
be enough in the country schools, and would help to keep labourers on
the land.
“_18th March._—There has been a new life of Richard Burton published,
and much discussion of his character in the papers. I will try and
recollect my own impression of him. I knew his wife when she was an
unmarried girl, having met her several times at the house of her aunt,
Monica Lady Gerard, at Mortlake, in the fifties or early sixties. At
that time she was a quiet girl enough, of the convent type—at least so I
remember her—fair-haired and rather pretty—very different from my
recollection of her in later years. When I next met her it was at Rio
Janeiro in the autumn of 1867, where I spent some days in her company on
my way to the Legation at Buenos Aires. Her husband was Consul then at
Santos in Brazil, and he was travelling somewhere in the interior of
Brazil, and had left her at Rio during his absence. She had developed
into a sociable and very talkative woman, clever, but at the same time
foolish, overflowing with stories of which her husband was always the
hero. Her devotion to him was very real, and she was indeed entirely
under his domination, an hypnotic domination Burton used to boast of. I
have heard him say that at the distance of many hundred miles he could
will her to do anything he chose as completely as if he were with her in
the same room. Burton’s sayings, however, of this kind, were not to be
altogether depended upon, and he probably exaggerated his power.
“A few months later Burton himself turned up, but without his wife, at
Buenos Aires, the announcement of his arrival having been made
beforehand with some parade in the local newspapers. The great
traveller, it was stated, had the project of making a new exploration of
Patagonia and the western Pampas and of ascending the highest summits of
the Andes, including Aconcagua, then a virgin peak, and paragraphs were
from time to time printed as to the preparations being made beforehand
for so great an adventure. On his arrival, however, it was soon
abundantly clear that there was nothing very serious in the plan.
Burton, in spite of his naturally iron constitution, was no longer in a
physical condition for serious work, and though he talked about it for a
while to all who would listen, the expedition was gradually let drop by
him and ended by becoming a matter of joke among his friends. I remember
what I think was my first meeting with him, at Mrs. Russell’s house in
the autumn of 1868, where we had both been asked to dinner and with us
the notorious Sir Roger Tichborne, in whose company Burton had arrived
and with whom he chiefly consorted during his two months’ stay at Buenos
Aires. They were a strange, disreputable couple. Burton was at that time
at the lowest point I fancy of his whole career, and in point of
respectability at his very worst. His consular life at Santos, without
any interesting work to his hand or proper vent for his energies, had
thrown him into a habit of drink he afterwards cured himself of and he
seldom went to bed sober. His dress and appearance were those suggesting
a released convict, rather than anything of more repute. He wore,
habitually, a rusty black coat with a crumpled black silk stock, his
throat destitute of collar, a costume which his muscular frame and
immense chest made singularly and incongruously hideous, above it a
countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel,
treacherous, with eyes like a wild beast’s. He reminded me by turns of a
black leopard, caged, but unforgiving, and again with his close cut poll
and iron frame of that wonderful creation of Balzac’s, the ex-gallérien
Vautrin, hiding his grim identity under an Abbé’s cassock. Of the two
companions Tichborne was distinctly the less criminal in appearance. I
came to know them both well, especially Burton, his connection with the
Consular service bringing him to us at the Legation, and I have sat up
many nights with him talking of all things in Heaven and Earth, or
rather listening while he talked till he grew dangerous in his cups, and
revolver in hand would stagger home to bed.
“On the first occasion, however, of our dinner at Mrs. Russell’s my
curiosity was excited more towards Tichborne than towards him. He had
already laid claim to the Tichborne baronetcy and was commonly called by
his title, and his business at Buenos Aires was to collect evidence,
proving his identity for the lawsuit he was about to bring for the
family estates. Burton at that time, it is worth recording, more than
half believed in him as being what he pretended, his wife’s connection
with the Catholic world probably disposing him to take an interest in
the result. I too had something of a similar interest. I had been at
school, not indeed with the real Roger Tichborne, but with his younger
brother, Alfred, who had been a boy of about my own standing and whom I
knew well. When, therefore, I was told I was to meet ‘The Claimant’ at
the dinner I brushed up my recollection of Alfred so that I might be
prepared to see or not to see a likeness between them. Alfred at the age
of sixteen had been a rather nice looking boy with a round, good-
humoured face, across which, a very notable feature, his thick eyebrows
met. Without being stupid he was a quite unintellectual boy, and had
passed by seniority into the highest class of the school without, I
think I may safely say, having learned a dozen words of Latin or Greek.
It was about all he could do to write in ungrammatical sentences an
English letter, and his time was spent in entire idleness and smoking so
incurable that he had been allowed at last to indulge it as an
alternative to his expulsion. I was consequently not prepared for
special intelligence in his pretended brother, but I looked out for the
eyebrows and there, without question, they were across Sir Roger’s face.
I treated him, therefore, as Burton did, in the light of a young man of
decent birth gone woefully to seed. His huge frame and coarse manner
seemed to conceal reminiscences of aristocratic breeding as authentic
perhaps, it was not saying much, as Alfred’s.
“With these two men I therefore spent much of my time during the next
few weeks but naturally more with Burton. (I unfortunately kept no notes
nor journals then.) My talks with Burton were of a most intimate kind,
religion, philosophy, travel, politics. I had hardly as yet visited the
East, but Eastern travel had interested me from the day I had read
Palgrave’s ‘Journeys in Arabia,’ and Burton was fond of reciting his
Arabian adventures. In his talk he affected an extreme brutality, and if
one could have believed the whole of what he said, he had indulged in
every vice and committed every crime. I soon found, however, that most
of these recitals were indulged in _pour epâter le bourgeois_ and that
his inhumanity was more pretended than real. Even the ferocity of his
countenance gave place at times to more agreeable expressions, and I can
just understand the infatuated fancy of his wife that in spite of his
ugliness he was the most beautiful man alive. He had, however, a power
of assuming the abominable which cannot be exaggerated. I remember once
his insisting that I should allow him to try his mesmeric power on me,
and his expression as he gazed into my eyes was nothing less than
atrocious. If I had submitted to his gaze for any length of time—and he
held me by my thumbs—I have no doubt he would have succeeded in
dominating me. But my will also is strong, and when I had met his eyes
of a wild beast for a couple of minutes I broke away and would have no
more.
“On matters of religion and philosophy he was fond, too, of discoursing.
There I could argue with him and hold my own, for he was not really
profound; and always at the bottom of his materialistic professions I
found a groundwork of belief in the supernatural which refused to face
thought’s ultimate conclusions. I came at last to look upon him as less
dangerous than he seemed, and even to be in certain aspects of his mind,
a ‘sheep in wolf’s clothing.’ The clothing, however, was a very complete
disguise, and as I have said he was not a man to play with, sitting
alone with him far into the night, especially in such an atmosphere of
violence, as Buenos Aires then could boast, when men were shot almost
nightly in the streets. Burton was a grim being to be with at the end of
his second bottle with a gaucho’s navaja handy to his hand.
“His visit to the Pampas ended tamely enough in his crossing it with
‘The Claimant,’ the two inside the ordinary diligence, to Mendoza and
thence on mules to the Pacific. As to Aconcaguá (he always insisted the
mountain should be pronounced with an accent on the last syllable) we
heard no more of it, after the appearance of a final paragraph in the
Buenos Aires ‘Standard’ making fun of it and him. ‘The great traveller
Burton, it is said, has just completed his final preparations for his
exploration of the Pampas and Andes. Among his latest acquisitions with
this object are, we understand, a small fieldpiece to be mounted on the
roof of the diligence in which he proposes to travel and a few torpedoes
for use in crossing rivers.’
“The Buenos Aires ‘Standard’ of those days was the creation of a
cheerful and irresponsible Irishman named Mulhall, to whose office I
used now and then to go for a quarter of an hour’s gossip about local
matters, when he would ask me to lend a hand with his ‘copy’ and turn a
‘paragraph.’ I am not sure that the paragraph just quoted was not one of
mine. Mulhall afterwards rose to eminence in the world as a
statistician, to the surprise, I imagine, of everyone who in 1868 knew
him at Buenos Aires.
“Such is my personal recollection of Burton when he must have been
forty-eight years old as I was twenty-eight. He seemed to me then
already a broken man, physically, nor did he impress me very strongly on
his intellectual side. For that reason, perhaps, I have never been able
to rate him as highly as have done most of his contemporaries, the
friends who knew him. I am aware that I saw him at his worst, but from a
literary point of view, too, he seems to me second-rate. His prose style
is certainly of a poor order, and his verse as bad. As an oriental
linguist he was no doubt great, and in his youth he had great powers of
simulating Eastern character in various disguises. His face was one that
lent itself to this, for it had in it little of the European, and there
must certainly have been a cross in his blood, gipsy or other. At the
same time in his talks with me, and also in his books, he showed little
true sympathy with the Arabs he had come to know so well. He would at
any time, I am sure, have willingly betrayed them to further English, or
his own professional interests. His published accounts of Arabia and the
Arabs are neither sympathetic nor true. His ‘Pilgrimage to Mecca’ is
largely made up with literary padding, and as a narrative reads to me
insincere. It certainly exaggerates the difficulty of the undertaking
which in those days was comparatively easy to anyone who would profess
Islam, even without possessing any great knowledge of Eastern tongues.
At Damascus, when I was there in 1878, he had left a poor reputation,
having managed to get into hot water with every native class—Turk, Arab,
Syrian, Christian and Moslem alike—though this I believe was greatly his
wife’s fault. She was indeed a very foolish woman, and did him at least
as much harm in his career as good. Her published Life of him, however,
which has the ring of a true wife’s devotion, redeems her in my eyes,
and it is a fine trait in his character that he should have borne with
her absurdities for the sake of her love so long.”