Chapter XV: Last Year of the Nineteenth Century (3)

“_6th Sept._—To Paris to see the International Exhibition, a fatiguing affair. I went through the Pavillons Etrangers, of which incomparably the best is the Spanish, most of the others are cluttered up with the rubbish of modern manufactures, and even the English Pavilion, which represents a Victorian Gothic country-house, has a certain vulgarity, but here in the Spanish section there is an incomparable dignity. By a stroke of genius worthy of her days of splendour, Spain, ignoring altogether the nineteenth century, even to its bric-à-brac, shows us a mere empty house with tapestries on the walls, tapestries the most magnificent ever shown, and in two small glass cases in the centre of the room, the armour of Charles V, and the dress worn by Boabdil el Chico—absolutely nothing more. The beautiful Morris tapestries in the English House looked tawdry after these.

“_7th Sept._—To Vincennes with Wagram where we breakfasted, and saw the horses paraded before President Loubet. A Fourth Prize of 1,000 francs has been awarded to us for Mesaoud, and one of 500 francs for Bozra. All the superior prizes, however, have been got hold of by the Sultan, under the name of Muzaffer Pasha, and with the help of his own Inspector of Studs, Fuad Bey, and of one Hector Passega, manager of the Ottoman Horse Show, both of them being judges here, has manipulated the jury and swept the board. There was only one first-class stallion in the Ottoman show, sent from Bagdad, and that has been left out of the prize list. The others are rather ordinary beasts, the First Prize being taken by a small black stallion, whose colour is his chief recommendation. Only one is fit to show at all with ours; however, it does not much matter, as we have had many admirers of a serious kind, and have already sold one mare, Makbula, to Count Strogonoff for 10,000 francs.

“To-day is Berthe’s wedding-day, and I have written her a sonnet. Giovanni Borghese and Madame de Jaucourt, a friend of the Prince of Wales, have come. After dinner, there were fireworks in the park, and a crowd of people from the neighbourhood.

“_8th Sept._—With Berthe in her new automobile to Paris for the day, going at about fifteen miles an hour. It is certainly an exhilarating experience, quite new to me, and if the machine could be made cheaper (hers cost £800, and an ordinary one £400) would doubtless take the place of horses and carriages. In France it is already much used, but in England, where the roads are neither so broad nor so straight, I doubt whether they will become popular until the mechanism has been simplified and cheapened very considerably. We went a round of the Colonial shows of the popular kind, representing Marchand setting fire to African villages, and French generals bombarding the Madagascans. Then to the Petit Palais with its splendid bric-à-brac, and alongside it the Grand Palais, a modern monstrosity forming together a caricature of the nineteenth century. On the one side a huge show of everything hideous the century has produced; on the other, giving its eclectic fancy for ages gone by.

“_9th Sept._—Paid a last visit to the Horse Show, where we have taken four medals and prizes, 1,000 francs, 800 francs, 600 francs, and 500 francs. The printed list calls them _recompenses_ it being not even pretended that the judging is according to merit, the medals being awarded to the exhibitors rather than to the beasts. As a rule those who sent most animals got most prizes.

“_10th Sept._—Back to Newbuildings, taking Alexandre with me for some English shooting. He is a nice young man, extremely well educated and full of ideas, which he expresses fluently in somewhat imperfect English. ‘In France,’ he said to-day, talking of duels, ‘when men quarrel and one receives a _gifle_, he is expected to beat himself.’

“_22nd Sept._—Politically much has happened in the last week. Kruger has abandoned the Transvaal, and the Boer army, though never yet beaten in battle, seems to have broken up into small bands, so that our Government has some ground for saying the war is over. On this, Parliament has been dissolved. I shall take no part whatever in the new elections, as neither political party has the slightest claim on my sympathy. It is difficult to say between Rosebery and Chamberlain which would be the more dangerous in power.

“_1st Nov._—I left home on Monday for Egypt, this being Thursday. London, when I passed through, was in an absurd uproar on account of the return of the City Volunteers from South Africa. People have become idiotic over this war, to the extent that they really think something chivalrous and noble has been achieved, while we have been making ourselves not only detested, but a laughing-stock the whole world over. I found George getting ready for a speech he is to make at Dover. He talked very scornfully of Rosebery and the Imperial Radicals, who had dished the chances of their party by supporting the war, and had put his own party in power for another fifteen years. ‘There will be a reaction, of course, some day,’ he said, ‘but they won’t profit by it. Rosebery will have to join us altogether, as Burke did Pitt, or be left out permanently in the cold. He talked of his own prospects of promotion, which he said had been a little injured by his candour in admitting defects in the conduct of the war, though he had saved the Government by the line he took last Spring. ‘But it does not matter,’ he said, ‘politics are a long game, and I shall not lose in the end by telling the truth.’ As it was, he had some chance, he said, of being shifted to Ireland, and he said I must write and tell him what I thought of it if it came to pass. I said the Irish remembered he was Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s great-grandson, and it would be something to start on, but would not carry him far. George’s political hard work has aged him and he is much greyer than I am, though only thirty-seven. Hampden, who expresses Chamberlain’s ideas about the war, said to-day, ‘It looks as if the only way of ending it will be to deport all the Boer women and hang all the Boer men. Roberts will come home and leave Kitchener behind him to do the butcher work.’ He argued quite seriously that this was not only necessary but implied nothing disgraceful to us as a nation, yet Hampden was a Gladstonian Radical M.P. of the most advanced non- intervention type twenty years ago, and is now a respected Liberal nobleman and ex-Governor of a Colony.

“_6th Nov._—On board the P. and O. _Valetta_. Among the passengers is a Mr. Seton Karr, a lion shooter, who showed me photographs of his victims in various parts of the world. These amateur killers for killing’s sake, who compass the four continents of the earth at vast labour and expense only to destroy, are a pitiful feature of the age we live in. What have the lions and elephants in Africa done to Seton Karr that he should travel 20,000 miles, and spend a fortune to extinguish their race? Men of his stamp, though he seems a very worthy man, need to be put under restraint, far more than half the lunatics in our asylums. They do a thousand times more harm. There is no pretence with him of science, missionary work, or Imperial politics, and in so far he is respectably sincere. His work of destruction does not injure his moral nature, but he is a dangerous criminal all the same, and ought to be straight- waistcoated. I see that my letter to the ‘Times’ of last winter has had the effect of causing regulations to be issued in Egypt which, if carried out, will do something towards saving the small wild birds there from extinction at the hand of European gunners. If this succeeds, the British occupation will have done something to justify itself in the eye of whatever force rules the world.

“I have been reading Mrs. Browning’s letters. They are interesting in many ways, but on the whole poor literature, lacking, as they do, all wit. They are gossiping, too, in not the best sense, and commonplace, far inferior to her poems, for which I have the highest admiration. There is nothing in them which makes one love the writer, and very few of them would be worth preserving if not written by so famous a poet. Browning stands out well in the volume, and the few scraps that are given of his writing show the superiority of the man, as an intellectual power, over his wife. Her enthusiasms are poor stuff in prose. There are a few meagre allusions in them to Robert Lytton, and one, a pretty one, to Anne, but the whole series written in Italy is infected with the sentimental vulgarity of the Anglo-American colony, which had its headquarters in Storey’s rooms in the Palazzo Barberini, and which so nauseated me thirty and more years ago at Rome. Browning himself was not exempt from it, though this does not appear in the volume, for I remember him in his later years, a gossipy diner-out in London and teller of second-rate funny stories. He did not on these occasions show to advantage, though beyond question he was a thinker of a very high order, the most intellectual poet we have perhaps ever had.

“Another volume I have skimmed is Watts Dunton’s absurd romance, ‘Aylwin,’ a thing of the lowest order of childish melodrama. Kipling’s ‘Stalky’ is the third volume. Here, at least, we have vigour and wit, though it is brutal in its realism and displays the seamy side of our British schoolboy life without mercy. It needed courage to print it. Kitchener, I fancy, has served in some sort as his model. Lastly, I have read Tourgueneff’s ‘Smoke,’ which is excellent.

“_7th Nov._—A day of great enjoyment. We landed at Alexandria and came on by special train to Cairo, arriving at sunset, a light wind blowing from the north, which puts one in the gayest of spirits. There are few things more beautiful than the Delta at this time of year, or where one sees more life from a railway carriage window. The appearance of plenty and happiness does one good after the squalor of Europe. The country districts are still quite untouched by our Western ugliness. On the whole journey from Alexandria I did not see a European or a European dress, yet the fields were full of people, with their buffaloes and donkeys and camels crowding the country roads, men, women, and children gathering cotton in manifest enjoyment of their lives. How different from our own agricultural England, where one may travel for miles without seeing a living being and where all labour is done silently, except at hay and harvest times. The splendid wealth, too, of the crops, especially the maize, delights one. Then there are the birds, I counted nine kingfishers, some blue, some pied, and as many hoopoes, besides numbers of spur-winged plovers, which are far more brilliant than our English ones, and kestrels, kites, hen harriers and other large birds, to say nothing of the flocks of smaller ones. I was met by my mare and Mutlak at the station, and rode through the moonlit garden, which was alive with cicalas and so enjoyed its whole beauty. Then, after a drink of fresh milk with Mutlak and a cup of his scented coffee, we got on our mares again, and rode out into the desert. It was as light as day with the full moon, and we were able to canter our mares with their unshod feet noiselessly on for some miles till we came in hearing of dogs barking, which showed us where Suliman’s tent was. It was set behind a little hillock surrounded by sheep and camels, and we had some difficulty in waking them, but Aïda (his favourite wife) heard us, and looked out and then Suliman. Here, too, seemed an abode of happiness as good as is to be found in the world. It was eleven before we got back to Sheykh Obeyd, and we must have ridden ten miles.

“There are three bits of news. Aared has revolted from Ibn Rashid in Nejd; the Sultan is building a railway from Damascus to Medina, and a French company has bought up a tract of land beyond Kafr Jamus to build a new town near us like Helwan, Heaven forbid! There are three fox earths in our stable yard, and I heard the jackals cry outside my window between one and two.

“_9th Nov._—Mohammed Abdu called to-day. He has seen the Khedive, who came back from England highly pleased with the civility shown him by the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Government, but as I had told him would be the case, there had been no talk of Egyptian politics, though those at Constantinople had been mentioned. He sent me messages of thanks through Abdu, and said he had intended going to Crabbet according to my invitation, if his illness had not prevented him. Mohammed Abdu praised him for his power of making himself agreeable when he chose, as he had done in England, but said he had been most indiscreet afterwards, having told everything that had happened there to the editor of the ‘Mokattam,’ who had straightway published it.

“George, according to a telegram, has got the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland. I am glad of it for him as a step in his ambition, but it is a thankless task, if he thinks to reconcile Ireland to English rule.”

During the rest of the month my diary is mostly filled with an account of explorations made in the eastern desert, interesting in themselves, but not of sufficient importance to be here transcribed. We were back at Sheykh Obeyd the first week of the month.

“_10th Dec._—Oscar Wilde is reported dead. He was without exception the most brilliant talker I have ever come across, the most ready, the most witty, the most audacious. Nobody could pretend to outshine him, or even to shine at all in his company. Something of his wit is reflected in his plays, but very little. The fine society of London and especially the ‘Souls’ ran after him because they knew he could always amuse them, and the pretty women allowed him great familiarities, though there was no question of love-making. Physically, he was repellant, though with a certain sort of fat good looks. There was a kind of freckled coarseness in his colouring I have seen at times in other Irishmen. I was never intimate with him, though on superficially cordial terms when we met. He had been two or three times at our Crabbet parties and was a member of our Club, but only attended one regular meeting. The last time I saw him was at that brilliant luncheon party at Asquith’s in Upper Grosvenor Street which I have already described. His poetry, though nothing very wonderful, was good, especially his ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ as was also a protest he wrote on leaving prison against prison treatment, and if he had then begun a decent life people would have forgiven him, but he returned to Paris and to his dog’s vomit and this is the end. I see it said in the papers that he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, a strange ending, and yet not strange!

“_22nd Dec._—The old century is very nearly out, and leaves the world in a pretty pass, and the British Empire is playing the devil in it as never an empire before on so large a scale. We may live to see its fall. All the nations of Europe are making the same hell upon earth in China, massacring and pillaging and raping in the captured cities as outrageously as in the Middle Ages. The Emperor of Germany gives the word for slaughter and the Pope looks on and approves. In South Africa our troops are burning farms under Kitchener’s command, and the Queen and the two Houses of Parliament, and the bench of bishops thank God publicly and vote money for the work. The Americans are spending fifty millions a year on slaughtering the Filipinos; the King of the Belgians has invested his whole fortune on the Congo, where he is brutalizing the negroes to fill his pockets. The French and Italians for the moment are playing a less prominent part in the slaughter, but their inactivity grieves them. The whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all! So ends the famous nineteenth century into which we were so proud to have been born.

“_25th Dec._—Christmas Day. I have embodied some part of my feeling in a letter to the ‘Times,’ if they will print it (‘The Shame of the Nineteenth Century’). The Boers have shown themselves alive within the last week and have won two battles, capturing over 500 men, and are now in full march forward into Cape Colony. The railroads are cut behind them and Kitchener seems pretty well bewildered. There is something like a panic in London for the last week of the old century.

My old friend and neighbour here, Sheykh Hassan Abu Tawil, at last is dead. I went to see him four days ago and found him lying speechless with his eyes closed, in the little closet he used as his sleeping room. He looked the picture of frail, worn-out humanity, with a Job-like Eastern patience on his fine old countenance, over which the flies were crawling as they doubtless crawled in his childhood in the tent where he was born. He died last night at midnight, and we heard the women wailing a short mile away at daybreak, while we were breakfasting on the roof. Now they have buried him, walking in beautiful procession, men and women, past our gates to his grave in the desert. These country funerals are touching things, with the flags flying and the chaunting and the wailing, dignified, and with something in them of triumph as well as grief, which mitigates the ugliness of death. Old Sheykh Hassan has gone to his grave, full of years, the last of the old-world Arab Sheykhs of Lower Egypt. His tribe, the Aiaidé, were all tent-dwellers when he was young, a wicked, turbulent lot, whom he has controlled with a mild humanity much to his credit. With me he has always been on more than friendly, on affectionate terms, and I grieve for him as sincerely as his own people. It is a link broken for me with a pleasant past which will not be joined again, for the fashion of the old world passeth fast away at Sheykh Obeyd and we shall soon be engulfed in the town.

“_31st Dec._—I bid good-bye to the old century, may it rest in peace as it has lived in war. Of the new century I prophesy nothing except that it will see the decline of the British Empire. Other worse Empires will rise perhaps in its place, but I shall not live to see the day. It all seems a very little matter here in Egypt, with the Pyramids watching us as they watched Joseph, when, as a young man four thousand years ago, perhaps in this very garden, he walked and gazed at the sunset behind them, wondering about the future just as I did this evening. And so, poor wicked nineteenth century, farewell!

END OF PART I

APPENDICES