THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART III
IT was Benton Fletcher, one of the “identities” of Egypt, equally well
known as an artist who does valuable work in connection with excavations
and does delightful landscapes, which are the fashion with “winterers”
in Egypt, who first put into my head the idea of visiting that matchless
country. Egypt is literally matchless; there is no country in the world
which has such a winter climate, and no country in the world which has
monuments so ancient and so perfect, so close together and so
accessible. Every monument which is not in an oasis is on the Nile, and
the Nile in Egypt is like a railway in other countries.
Fletcher not only worked up my enthusiasm to the point of going there,
but met us on our arrival in Cairo, and initiated me in the secret
beauties of the Arab city. But for him _Oriental Cairo_ would never have
been written.
I was also much influenced by the photographs published by Leo Weinthal
in _The African World_ and _Fascinating Egypt_.
We sailed from Naples to Alexandria in the November of 1907. We did not
delay an hour there, but took the next train to Cairo.
At Alexandria Egypt is Roman, and the monuments which have yet been
excavated are not, with the exception of one marvellous late tomb, very
interesting. But Alexandria is an unexcavated Pompeii, and when some
Schliemann among its leading merchants decides to devote his energies
and his fortune to excavating the vast mounds which still bury Roman
Alexandria, we may expect finds of astonishing interest. In the desert,
about thirty miles from Alexandria, is the city of St. Menas, an early
Christian Pompeii, where there has already been excavated a wonderful
Basilica founded by the Emperor Arcadius.
Except for a few articles in the _Queen_, I did little writing in Egypt
beyond taking copious notes. But these I did more completely than I ever
had done before, and as my secretary was with us, they were typed out
every evening, and are now bound together into a sort of diary-journal
of our entire visit. To make them more complete as journals, I took
eight hundred photographs, and certainly bought as many more, and as
complete a collection of postcards as I could form. Therefore I was in a
very sound position for writing my various books upon Egypt after I had
returned home. The first book I wrote upon our visit was _Egypt and the
English_, consisting partly of what we saw while we were staying in
Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Assuan, the Fayyum, the Great Oasis, and while
we were journeying up the Nile to the second cataract, and down the Nile
to its Rosetta and Damietta mouths, and over the Desert Railway into the
Sudan; and partly of the result of my inquiries about the political
condition of Egypt. When the book came out, many reviewers took up the
attitude that what I said was too alarmist, but when Mr. Roosevelt
repeated it to the letter, the Government took the warnings seriously,
and appointed the best possible man, Lord Kitchener, to take the place
of Sir Eldon Gorst, whose policy of scuttle and kowtow may have been
dictated by the Government which appointed him.
I knew that my facts were sound, because I had not only sucked as much
information as I could out of British officials and editors, and the
Leader of the Egyptian Bar, but also from the leading Syrians and
Armenians, who see much more behind the scenes than the English, because
Arabic is their business language, and the Arabs associate with them
freely in private life. Among Syrians especially I had repeated
conversations with Dr. Sarrûf and Dr. Nimr, the proprietor and editor of
_El Mokattan_, the most important Arab paper in Egypt, to whose opinions
Lord Cromer had always attached the greatest importance, and they had
told me how to meet such of the Nationalist leaders as spoke English.
These were actual Egyptians, so _Egypt and the English_ did give native
opinion both directly from the mouths of Egyptians, and indirectly
through Syrians and Armenians.
[Illustration:
HALL CAINE
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
I wrote _Egypt and the English_ for a commission to write _Queer Things
about Egypt_. The then chairman of Hurst & Blackett, when he saw the
political chapters in the book, considered them so interesting and
important that he asked me to hold over the humorous chapters for
another book. Which I did. But in the interval he sold the business of
Hurst & Blackett to my old friends Hutchinson & Co., who published my
real first success, _The Japs at Home_. They were quite ready to take
another book on Egypt from me, and we decided to make these chapters the
nucleus of that book to be published under the original title of _Queer
Things about Egypt_. This book gives the humours of the native city in
Cairo, and the humours of travel on the Nile. The parts of the book
which attracted most attention were those which dealt with Arab life in
Cairo in the native quarters round the Citadel, and with Arab
architecture and art, so Hutchinson asked me to do another large volume
on Egypt, devoted entirely to _Oriental Cairo—the City of the Arabian
Nights_. For that part of Cairo is almost as much an Arab City of the
Middle Ages as was Granada in the days of the Moors, and the stories of
the Arabian Nights were made into a book by a Cairene in the sixteenth
century.
_Egypt and the English_ was published in 1908, _Queer Things about
Egypt_ in 1910, and _Oriental Cairo_ in 1910.
In 1908 I also wrote, and Hurst & Blackett published, _The Tragedy of
the Pyramids_, which has been one of the most successful of my novels.
It was written as a counterblast to Hall Caine’s _White Prophet_, which
at that time was running as a serial in the _Strand Magazine_. I
considered that Caine was giving an entirely incorrect impression of our
army in Egypt. The book is now in its ninth edition, and was an
imaginary picture of the revolution which would have overtaken Egypt, if
Sir Eldon Gorst’s scuttle and kowtow policy had been persisted in. I had
a great deal to say about the Senussi in this book—the battle of the
Pyramids was fought against a great host of invading Senussi. The
British public had then heard little of the Senussi. But in the
Turko-Italian war the Senussi have proved a far more dangerous enemy to
Italy than the Turks, as they are very hardy and move with great
rapidity. They are said to own many zawia, or convents, in Egypt, and to
have established a network of wells at twenty-four hours’ distance from
each other all over the great desert of the Sahara—also to have
twenty-five thousand swift camels accumulated against any invasion of
their country, which is almost conterminous with the great desert. Boyd
Alexander, the famous explorer, is considered to have fallen a victim to
his intrusion upon their territory, which they openly forbid to
Christians, on pain of being assassinated. But their Prophet refused to
join forces in any way with the Mahdi when he had possessed himself of
the Egyptian Sudan.
_The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ was published in 1909, _Queer Things about
Egypt_, and _Oriental Cairo_, in 1910, the same year which saw the
publication of _The Moon of the Fourteenth Night_, the romance which I
wrote in collaboration once more with Eustache de Lorey. As it had so
much of the travel-book about it, it was not brought out in the form of
a novel. It was, in fact, the biography of a dashing young French
attaché, who is still alive, pretty faithfully told. He had no objection
to our using it if we killed him off in the book, to throw the girl’s
relations off the track, in case they should try to kill him in real
life. The public never realised that it was actually reading a romance
of real life, that there had been such a person as Bibi Mâh, that the
escapades of Edward Valmont were not imaginary, but episodes in a career
of gallantry. The book comes very near to being a journal of life in the
Persian capital at the beginning of the revolution.
In the autumn of 1908 we went back to Italy to spend the six cold months
in Rome, hoping that we should have one of those winters which you
sometimes get in Rome, as full of sunshine as spring—only cold when you
are in the wind and out of the sun. Yoshio Markino spent that winter
with us at 12 Piazza Barberini. I got my friend Percy Spalding, one of
the directors of Chatto & Windus, to give him a commission to do the
illustrations for _The Colour of Rome_, and as I knew Rome so well, I
conducted him to nearly all the beauty-spots which furnished the
subjects of his illustrations. I showed him many others which did not
appeal to him, for Markino will not begin a picture until some _motif_
in the locality has appealed to his artistic temperament. He is an
artist to the finger-tips. His fidelity is all the more extraordinary
when you take into consideration his method of painting a landscape.
In those days he had written nothing but a short chapter in _The Colour
of London_, and _The Colour of Paris_, but he used to show me the
letters he wrote to Spalding and Ward, of Chatto’s, about the book,—most
brilliant some of them were, and I saw that he was a born writer. I
suggested to him as early as this that he should write his life in
Japan—I had not then grasped what a story he had to tell of his life in
England.
He felt the cold in Rome very severely. He used to consume quantities of
the childish substitutes for fuel provided in Roman hotels.
In that first visit which he paid to Italy, he was not much interested
in the architecture or the art, just as he never visited the Louvre
while he was in Paris painting _The Colour of Paris_. And the scenes of
historical events interested him little more, though often they played
an important part in the history of the world. He was absorbed in the
novel lines of buildings; the gay colours of Italy; the strangeness to
him of the atmospheric effects of Rome; the subtle and ceaseless humours
in the life of the Italian poor. And their clothes delighted him, with
their gay, faded colours, their rags, and the fine abandon with which
they were worn.
We were in Rome collecting materials for my book on _How to See Italy_,
and I was writing the _Tragedy of the Pyramids_ mostly in bed, before I
got up in the morning. Between five and eight a.m. is a favourite time
for writing with me. I seldom begin later than 5.45; I have a cup of tea
brought to me at 6 a.m. I also wrote a good deal in periodicals about
the great earthquake at Messina. The Italian papers were naturally full
of details, which had not been telegraphed to England, and we used to
get wonderful cinema films, which made one quite an eye-witness of the
events. In Italy you can go to the cinema for twopence.
I was about to make a tour of the earthquake scenes in South Italy and
Sicily, and to go on to Malta, where my son was then quartered, when I
was suddenly called home by the alarming illness of my father, who was
given up by the doctors, though he recovered and lived for nearly two
years afterwards.
We re-visited a few favourite spots, such as Pisa and Lucca, on our way
up, as we did not hope to see Italy again for some time.
As it chanced, it was little more than a year before we were back in
Italy again, on the most interesting tour which we have ever spent in
that country. I had a commission from Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. to write
for them _How to See Italy_, which was destined to be so popular, and
there were forty-five cities in Italy which I wished to visit or
re-visit before writing this book. I wrote it for the Italian
Government, as Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. were aware, and they had offered
me many facilities. They had the blocks made for the illustrations. I
went over their entire collection of photographs in making my choice,
and where no photograph existed, they sent their special photographer to
take one. Also they allowed me to travel about on their lines wherever
my wish took me free of charge, so I was able to wander about Italy in a
way in which the expenses would ordinarily have been too great for any
book.
Markino went with us again on this journey, which lasted from July to
November. This time I had got him a commission from Constable & Co. to
illustrate a book by Miss Potter, which was published under the title of
_A Little Pilgrimage in Italy_.
We visited all our cities, starting from Genoa, and proceeding to
Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Perugia, Deruta, Todi, Siena, St. Gimignano,
Passignano, Monte Oliveto, Asciano, Chiusi, Città della Pieve, Assisi,
Foligno, Spoleto, Spello, Bevagna, Montefalco, Trevi, Clitunno, Gualdo
Tadino, Gubbio, Urbino, Rimini, Ravenna, San Marino, Ancona, Loreto,
Terni, Narni, Orvieto, Viterbo, Ferento, Bagnaja, Monte Fiascone, Rome,
Tivoli, Milan.
As soon as we had left the mountain heights of Arezzo and Cortona, the
Etruscan eyries from which the Romans marched down to their red fate on
the shores of the lake Trasimene, we learned how hot mid-Italy can be in
midsummer. Even on the rock of Perugia, fifteen hundred feet above the
sea, you could not walk on the sunny side of the street without an
umbrella on account of the risk of sunstroke, and the heat was almost
unendurable as we drove across the hills the thirty or forty miles to
Todi, a little city which the Gods of the Middle Ages have kept to
themselves.
Perugia was always defiant, from Etruscan times. With a man like Duke
Frederick of Urbino to rule and lead its fierce citizens, Perugia would
have been more potent than Urbino, or Rimini, or Mantua, or Ferrara,
perhaps a city of the first rank, like Milan or Florence. Its rock made
the whole city a citadel, and it sits astride the road from Rome to the
Alps, with the fertile Vale of Umbria to provision it.
The Vale of Umbria below Assisi is only rivalled by the shores of Lake
Trasimene in the beauty of its women—we know them from the pictures of
Raphael, Perugino, and Pinturricchio. I wish I could put its magic into
words—the nobility of its farm-houses, the soft grace of its orchards
and olive-gardens, its antique hermitages.
Summer in the Vale of Umbria was perfect, and certain of its beauties
were such as could only be seen in summer, like the translucent sources
of the Clitumnus, which, with their lawny banks, remind you of the
Twenty-third Psalm. I would rather go and see them, below the tall
poplars which are a landmark across the plain, than the graceful little
Roman temple above them, which is a landmark for travellers.
Foligno is only a walk from exquisite Spello, a city which is a hill
covered with Gothic houses. Foligno and the cities on the hills round it
are rich in great pictures by small masters; but Spoleto is, after
Perugia, the prize city of Umbria. It is rich in monuments of all ages;
in its walls it has prehistoric masonry of three ages; it defied the
assaults of Hannibal; you can still see the house of Vespasian’s mother,
and other Roman monuments of the classic age; it is rich in the
handiwork of the forgotten centuries which followed; it has a church
built like a pagan temple in the fourth century after Christ; it has the
most stupendous aqueduct in Italy, carried across a valley from the hill
of Groves, on arches two hundred and fifty feet high; and a unique
cathedral, planted in the valley, like its other great church; it was
the capital of the only King of Italy who bore the title before Victor
Emmanuel. Standing on the hillside, embosomed in groves, looking over
the plain, in an amphitheatre of mountains, Spoleto is a place which
never leaves the memory.
We went straight from it to most famous cities—Gubbio was not its equal,
except when the sunset fired the façade of its city hall, six hundred
years old and three hundred feet high; and Urbino, on its dizzy height,
crowned with the fantastic palace of Duke Frederick, is a prosaic place
beside it; Ravenna, for all its mosaiced churches, built by Justinian
and his successors, when the first millennium was half spent, has no
glory of site, nor has Rimini; Ancona has only its site and its glorious
Byzantine cathedral, on a green hill between two seas.
We wandered from town to town such as these; we drove all day from
Rimini to San Marino, the castled eagle’s nest, which is still an
independent Republic; we went to Loreto on the Virgin’s day, and saw
peasants, who had come in ox-carts from the recesses of the Apennines.
We stood below and above the stupendous waterfalls of Terni, the most
stupendous in Europe. But we saw no naturally nobler city than Spoleto.
All that summer we wandered about the byways of Tuscany, Umbria, Latium,
and the March of Ancona. We hardly ever saw an English face. We stayed
for the most part in humble native inns. It was a hot summer, even for
Italy, but we were not frightened by the heat from going where we meant
to go, nor by the fetish of malaria, for we stayed a week at Ravenna in
September. We never enjoyed ourselves more in our lives. We tested an
Italian summer fairly on the hot plains and sun-baked hills. I needed
the experience to write _How to See Italy_.
It was a guide-book on a new principle. While I was writing of the
cities and scenery of Italy, generally I grouped them in provinces, but
I devoted other chapters to the hobbies of travellers. I told the lover
of paintings where all the best paintings in Italy are to be found, and
which places have the richest galleries. I did the same for the lovers
of architecture, sculpture, mosaics, and scenery. I told the traveller
how to see all the principal sights of Italy by rail, without going the
same railway journey twice, and I tried to convert English travellers to
the delightful native inns of Italy, and I gave them the prices of inns
all over Italy.
The idea of the book was, briefly, to enable any one to see at a glance
which parts of Italy he ought to visit in pursuit of his special
studies. And I had three special chapters on the changes in Rome, which
have made all the old books on Rome out of date.
When we reached London in the late autumn, I found a sad change in my
father, who had reached the great age of eighty-six. He had lost much of
his memory, and very often did not care to speak. He gradually failed,
until one night between Christmas and the New Year he passed away quite
peacefully, holding my hand.
I sold the house on Campden Hill—Phillimore Lodge—in which he had lived
for nearly fifty years, to Sir Walter Phillimore. The estate was so
burdened with legacies, made while he was a much richer man, that I
should have lost by accepting my inheritance if I had not sold all the
real estate.
I had no wish to live there. For years it had been my intention to leave
London when I no longer had my father to consider. I wanted to go to
some rural spot just outside London, where I could have pleasure in
being at home in the summer months, because I like going abroad in the
winter, and you must make use of your house some time during the year.
At Addison Mansions we were only at home for a month or two in some
years.
I set about looking for a new house almost immediately, and after nearly
taking an old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen Road, finally settled on
the Avenue House, Richmond, which stands in the north-west corner of the
old Green, with its front windows looking down the Avenue, and across
the Green to the Old Palace, and its back windows looking over the old
Deer Park and the Mid-Surrey Golf Club to the trees of Kew Gardens. In
the winter we can see a mile or two of grass and trees from those
windows, and the river when the tide is high. The house suited me
perfectly; it had a charming old-fashioned garden, with ancient trees, a
cedar of Lebanon, a mulberry, and an arbutus, which covers itself with
flowers and fruit, among them, besides two great wistarias and many
flowering laburnums, lilacs and hawthorns. I added rockeries in the
Sicilian style, and various features of a Japanese garden.
The house had the further advantage of being only a few minutes’ walk
from the railway stations, from golf at Mid-Surrey, and from one of the
most beautiful reaches of the Thames.
Here I have written the present book, _The Unholy Estate_, _The Curse of
the Nile_, and my parts of _Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in
England and Australia_, and _Weeds_; and I was here when _How to see
Italy_ was published.
I was sorry in a way to say good-bye to Addison Mansions, which had been
my home during the most interesting years of my life. I liked the rooms;
I should have liked to transport them to Richmond.
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