Chapter IV: 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.”