Chapter VII: Asquith at Downing Street (3)

“_8th March._—Called on Margot in Downing Street, and finding her alone stayed on for an hour. We talked among other things of Conny Lytton’s imprisonment and the doings of the suffragettes, from whom she gets numerous threatening letters, not all of them anonymous, menacing her with bombs and even the murder of her children. She got one only the other day and has to be guarded by police. There were two at the door as I came in and every caller has to be scrutinized, and I had been kept waiting five minutes for this in the hall before I was allowed upstairs. ‘Even my brothers,’ Margot said, ‘have to submit to this.’ I told her of a letter I had received about Conny from her sister Betty, and she expressed great concern and asked what she could do to make her comfortable at Holloway. Could she send her things to eat, or what? I told her there was nothing to be done except to keep her in hospital, where she would be well looked after, but I advised her strongly to cease the war with the suffragettes if she could; there was nothing so demoralizing for a country as to put people in prison for their opinions. This could be seen in Ireland, where nobody felt it any longer a disgrace to be in gaol. She said: ‘I suppose they will get what they want in the end, though I don’t suppose it will do them any good. Henry says that it all depends on the Cabinet, where there is a majority in favour of the suffrage, but he does not see how women could be kept out of Parliament if they got the vote, and that would never do. From this we went on to Francis Thompson and other pleasanter themes till the hour went by, and her doctor calling, I said good-bye. I am very fond of Margot. Years do not change her nor the deceitfulness of politics.

“_10th March._—Father Tyrrell and George Wyndham came to luncheon with me, and we had an interesting discussion on poetry, literature, and religion. We talked about the proposed new ‘Life of Newman,’ which is being brought out by Wilfrid Ward. Tyrrell doubted whether it would be a sincere one as to Newman’s attitude towards Papal Infallibility, and he told us how a letter from Newman to Lord Emley, dated 1870, had recently been destroyed, in which Newman had spoken strongly against it. It was untrue to say that Newman had never had a doubt since he joined the Church. Newman, he agreed with me, had never really argued out the fundamentals on which Christianity is based, the existence of God and the reality of a revelation. Newman’s attitude is epitomized in his ‘History of My Religious Opinions’: ‘I believe in God because I believe in the existence of myself and in my consciousness of right and wrong, all the rest is a matter of development,’ or words to that effect. Tyrrell to-day was in his most attractive, least aggressive mood.

“After this I went on to Farm Street, which had been so long Father Tyrrell’s home, and sat an hour with his once fellow Jesuits, Fathers Gerard and Pollen. Father Gerard showed me his ‘History of Stonyhurst,’ where we had been at school together, and gave me a little play, an extravaganza he had written for the centenary of the College. He talked also of Alfred Russel Wallace and his opinions, which he thought illogical, and of W. H. Hudson, and of various matters of natural history, which has always been his hobby.

“_11th March._—John Dillon came to lunch and we discussed Persian, Turkish, and Egyptian affairs, about which he has been worrying the Government in Parliament. We talked also about old times in Ireland, when we two worked together. ‘It is astonishing,’ he said, ‘how all the doings of that time are forgotten. There is hardly a young man in Ireland now who has any knowledge of what the Land League accomplished, or who Michael Davitt was, or what was the Plan of Campaign. The ten years that followed the Parnell split were a political blank. It has left a gap in our history.’ I asked him whether George Wyndham’s Land Bill had done good or harm? ‘Something of both,’ he said, ‘the people who have taken advantage of it had become better off, but it has not stopped the decrease of population nor the emigration. One thing it has not changed, the ill-feeling towards England is stronger than it ever was.’ ‘As long as that is the case,’ I said, ‘things are going right.’

“_12th March._—I was premature in thinking I had converted Margot in the direction of peace with the Suffragettes. She writes in strong language about them: ‘I personally think the women criminal as they threaten people’s lives and incite the rotters in the street to storm anything and anybody. They are hysterical, full of vanity, and too idle to promote their cause in an intellectual way. . . . Let them have the vote after a general election approves of it, but let us be in peace till then.’ I am answering: ‘You must not be angry with me for what I said in favour of the Suffragettes. I have no brief for them, nor do I take much interest one way or another in their cause. I should be against them if I thought there was the smallest chance of woman rule in England, but there is none, no more than there is danger of “the Yellow Peril” in Europe, or the “Negro Peril” in America. Women have never ruled men anywhere and never will except indirectly by being better and kinder and less selfish than we are. You are one of these, and if I talked as I did it was because I was afraid you might focus on yourself the resentment of some foolish women who would do you an injury in anger at having been treated criminally for a political offence. I know how violent ideas work in enthusiastic people’s minds. That is my chief interest in the quarrel. So absolve me. The whole woman’s movement is not worth a curl of your brown head, which may God protect from evil.’

“An Indian gentleman, Mr. Khaparde, called on me with a letter of introduction from Hyndman. Here is a genuine Nationalist of a very different type from Gokhale and Lajpat Rai. He is in England now for the first time to do what he can in favour of his friend Tilak, who has been deported to Mandalay. He brought Tilak’s case before the Privy Council but, of course, without result, and he is now trying to get a petition signed in favour of his friend’s release, and present it in Parliament. He spoke very openly in an extreme national sense, saying that everyone in India now was for eventual independence, even the moderates, though people dared not say all they thought. ‘Even the Mohammedans?’ I asked, and he said there was no real difference of opinion between them and the Hindoos, ‘in a revolt they would all be with us. They hate English rule, perhaps more than we do, because, except in the West, it was they, not we, who had been deprived of power by the English. The Moderates,’ he said, ‘were swayed by motives of personal interest, but they had no following in the country. Gokhale found it to his advantage to play the English game or he would not be where he is. As for Lajpat Rai, his arrest had been a blunder, for he was a man of no importance, the real leaders of the riots being still at large.’ He said he found our people here in England very different to what he had imagined them. He had been brought up with the tradition of their being full of good qualities, liberal, hospitable, and kindly, he found them entirely engrossed in money-making, and it was impossible to get them to take any interest in Indian questions. His visit to England had convinced him that it was useless to appeal to any sense of justice, there must be more than talk in India before any change could come about and violence there would be. He was scornful about Morley’s reforms, they would be useless except to the few hangers-on to the Government who would get places and pay. They would never have been given at all but for the bombs, and the reforms were not intended now to be effective. The Indian Government had got all it wanted—special powers of arrest and imprisonment and of putting down the freedom of the Press. I asked him whether this would stop the revolutionary movement. He said on the contrary, it would accelerate it, they would work on all the same in secret and more effectively. Khaparde has adopted European dress but still wears his red turban; he has great intelligence and his ideas are precise and strongly expressed. He is to come again.

“_16th March._—Poor Peploe Brown is dead. Yesterday his servant Fred called on me and gave me a long account of his master’s illness and death. It was a pathetic story told in that odd cockney language ‘Fwed’ was famous for. I had never heard exactly about Peploe’s early life, for great talker as he was, he never spoke of it to anyone, and Fred had only learned it from a brother who came to him in his last days, for all that he had ever said to Fred was that ‘God had been hard to him in his youth.’ It appears that forty-six years ago, being a young lieutenant in the army, he had married a girl he loved and who loved him, but almost in their honeymoon she had been taken with a fever and died. This destroyed his life. He left the army, wandered about the world, took up painting and adopted Bohemian ways. For the last twenty years he had occupied a studio in York Place, where he died. He had squandered all his money and lived there in the greatest poverty. I knew him through his fellow-painter, Molony, who had made friends with him many years before at Madrid. He was the kindest of men, and when Molony grew old he nursed him and took great care of him notwithstanding Molony’s somewhat scornful protests, who used to swear at him as ‘that damned fellow Peploe.’ About the time Molony died he himself got a return of malarial fever which attacked his spine (much as my case was), and for the last twelve years he has been practically paralysed and has remained day and night sitting in his armchair, never going to bed or lying down, and often at a loss how to get a meal, for he could not sell his pictures. He could not have lived but for his servant Fred’s good care, who for the last fifteen years had done all for him with wonderful devotion, coming each morning at a very early hour to the studio and staying on till eight or nine at night and never a day off during all those years. There was no bed for him in the studio. Peploe spent his lonely nights reading, sometimes Fred said for thirteen hours at a time, though he was almost blind and had to use microscopic glasses applied to his single valid eye. Being alone at night he had had a number of contrivances arranged to put out or light the gas, or to call for help if needed, for he was an ingenious mechanician. Last Christmas he was taken with a strong bronchitis and a violent attack of what Fred called ‘his lightning pines’ (pains), but Fred nursed him through it till the late snow and cold had brought it back. He had been left to sleep one evening, and when Fred and the brother came back in the morning they had found him sleeping still, but he was dead. It was then discovered that during the forty-six years since his wife died, and in spite of growing poverty and difficulties of every kind, he had kept all the things that had belonged to his dead wife, her clothes, garments of the days of crinoline, her jewellery, her ornaments and the furniture of the house where they had lived, stored in a magazine for which he had religiously paid rent, also that he had worn her photograph next to his heart, and they found it on him when they found him dead. A number of his smaller treasures they buried with him in his grave, but the poor old clothes and the furniture in the warehouse will be sold. He had sat all these years under his ‘Magnum Opus,’ an immense picture in the style of Murillo, representing the Adoration by the Shepherds at Bethlehem, at which Molony used to mock in its unfinished state because the angels, represented as sitting in the clouds, with their harps not having yet been filled in, left the expanded fingers in the grotesque attitude that schoolboys use in ridicule, though this had been altered now and the picture with infinite labour finished. It had been bought of him out of charity by a former friend, Lord Bute, who had been kind to him in many ways, but Lord Bute unfortunately had died, leaving the picture there. Lady Bute was now taking it away to put in her chapel. I asked the faithful Fred what had been done for him. ‘He had nothing,’ he said, ‘to leave me, poor gentleman, but he was generous and good to me. I am by trade a mender of china, I mean to set up in a small business, but I cannot get over the loss. I have been with him seventeen years and never a day off. I do not know now where to turn.’ [I took two statuettes of camel riders, which Brown had modelled in his later years, off Fred’s hands, they are very perfect of their kind, and had been given him with other odds and ends from the studio by the brother. Fred brought them to me a few days later and left me promising to come again, and I promised I would help him to set up his business, but he never reappeared.]

“_18th March._—There has been a debate in Parliament on the military danger from Germany, and Frederic Harrison has a long letter about it in the ‘Times.’ I agree with him that the danger is a very real one of invasion and ruin within no great number of years, only he does not draw the inference I draw, namely, that we should hasten to divest ourselves of our overgrown overseas Empire and devote our naval and military resources to the defence of our own shores. We shall not do this, and we shall perish, as the Roman Empire perished, by trying to hold too much. I am myself the extremest of all possible Little Englanders and would cheerfully return to the ‘spacious’ days of Queen Elizabeth when we held not a foot of land outside the kingdom.”

[This is the point at which Harrison and I diverged from what had for twenty-seven years been a common political sympathy about foreign affairs into antagonism, his path being towards war with Germany, mine towards a gradual shedding of our “white man’s burden” in Egypt and India.]

“I saw George Wyndham in Park Lane. He is pessimistic about the prospects of a German invasion, and thinks it is certain to happen in a few years. The only thing we can do is to go on building ships. Speaking of the plan revealed to me by Usedom in 1866 of bringing Holland into union with Germany and claiming the Dutch Colonies, he told me he had heard the same a good many years ago from Vitelleschi.

“_19th March._—Professor Browne came to luncheon. He has made a wonderful fight of it about Persia, but is beginning to be hopeless, as Russian armed intervention seems imminent. He is losing his influence, too, with the Foreign Office. Grey at first listened to him, but is now less willing. ‘Grey,’ he said, ‘is so ignorant, that he hardly knows the Persian Gulf from the Red Sea.’

“_26th March._—Things are going badly both in Persia and the Balkans. As soon as the snow melts, both countries will be occupied, the one by Russia, the other by Austria. Grey has thrown over the Persian Constitutionalists, and has declared that the Russians may do what they like at Teheran.

“_29th March._—I have been reading Stead’s book about himself and Madame Novikoff, poor stuff as literature, a paste and scissors collection of articles of the last thirty-five years; nevertheless I have managed to extract from it certain historical facts of importance, as also to fix the date of Madame Novikoff’s visit to Crabbet. It must have been September or October 1876. She was not at that time a really pretty woman, but was lively and anxious to please, singing Russian songs and making the most of herself. I paid her some attention at first, and wrote a song for her to sing to one of her Russian airs, but she ended by boring us before her week’s visit was out. She was too intent on her own particular politics to be interesting in any other way. As to these she no doubt began by being an enthusiast, but she also made a business of it later. Her advocacy of Ismaïl Pasha’s claims in 1885 can hardly have been political. She and Stead were pretty well matched. I find in the book one important letter which I wish I had had when I was writing my ‘Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt.’ It is from Gladstone, written a few days after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and reveals how entirely that great moralist had thrown himself into the fury of blood- shedding in that least just of wars. After thanking his correspondent for her congratulations he says: ‘We and the whole country are in a state of rejoicing, and I hope of thankfulness to Almighty God who has prospered us in what I feel and know to be an honest undertaking. . . . Whether the England of 1882 deserves to be regarded by some in Russia with a jealous eye, or whether we, too, have been labouring in the common interests of justice and civilization a little time will show. We certainly ought to be in good humour, for we are pleased with our army, our navy, our admirals, our generals, and our organization! . . . It is hardly more than seven weeks since we determined to send some 35,000 men to a distance of say 3,000 miles, and it has pleased God to give us a quick result.’

“This, be it recollected, in regard to a military adventure undertaken in the interests of the Stock Exchange, and a battle at which 20,000 of the half-armed peasantry of the Nile had been slaughtered.

“_2nd April._—There is a telegram in the papers, ‘Riots at Cairo, the garrison under arms on account of new Press Law’! I should not be surprised if what has happened in the Balkans may have had some connection with it. There Servia has had to accept the terms imposed on her by Austria—backed as Austria was by Germany—while Servia failed of her expected backing by Russia, a German triumph and a corresponding defeat for England. There has long been a connection between Egyptian Nationalists and German policy. It is clear now that Germany is all- powerful in Europe, and that a great slap has been given in the face to our Foreign Office, and the King and Hardinge and Grey, who has played his cards badly. I am only sorry for the sake of reform prospects in Turkey, which are likely to be jeopardized.

“_3rd April._—Rothstein came to see me, and we discussed the whole state of Europe and Asia, where his views coincide closely with mine. He looks upon Grey’s diplomatic defeat as absolute, and Germany’s position as unassailable in Europe. Grey’s (or what is the same thing, the King’s and Hardinge’s) attempt to get together a Coalition with Russia and France against the Central German Powers, he regards as an immense error of calculation, Grey being unaware first of Russia’s military helplessness, and secondly of France’s entire unwillingness to fight. Of this Aerenthal and Bülow have taken full advantage, and have not only gained their end in Servia, but have done it in such a way as to make it clear to all the world that their will is law, and that they care not a brass button for either Russia or England. This cannot but react on Constantinople, and it is probable now that the Turks will have to make terms with Austria, perhaps even an alliance, and leave English influence aside. I confess I do not see what else they are to do. It is clear England cannot and will not give them military help, and they are forced back on Kaiser Wilhelm’s good will if they are to preserve Macedonia or even Constantinople. Rothstein, however, assures me that no farther advance will be made by Austria yet, as Germany will not be ready with her navy for some years. Then the war with England will certainly be.”

This remarkable forecast of the situation marks the point at which Grey’s incredible mistakes in diplomatic dealing with Europe and at Constantinople began to declare themselves. That he should have been ignorant of Russia’s impotence and have sacrificed to her alliance all his relations with the East, was a cardinal mistake which led to his subsequent gambler’s folly of joining France and Russia in the great war.

“Rothstein had hardly gone when letters came from Farid Bey at Cairo and Malony at Teheran. Malony’s account of the Persian revolution is more cheerful than any I have yet read. He considers the whole of Persia to be now on the Constitutional side, even Teheran, where the Shah has a few troops. He does not think the Shah can maintain himself even there. Farid complains of new press laws and laws prohibiting meetings. He urges me to raise my voice once more in the Egyptian cause.

“George and Sibell dined with me and Saleeby and his wife, a fortunate combination, and we had a very pleasant evening.

“_11th April (Easter Sunday)._—The news of the day is that Swinburne is dead. ‘The greatest lyric poet of the English tongue,’ is my judgment of him, and perhaps ‘our worst prose writer.’ Beyond being a poet, he was almost nothing. He never enjoyed his life, wasting his youth on drink and his old age on Theodore Watts. Mrs. Morris says he never was in love with any respectable woman, but Lady C., who knew him well, says that he was once when quite young. His most respectable connection was probably Ada Menken. It was a poor life as far as action was concerned. As a poet, however, he will live when nearly every other of our age is forgotten, for he was a prince of harmony and rhyme and created an entirely new kind of lyric verse. He was seventy-two last week and died of a rapid pneumonia. He ought certainly to have been Laureate after Tennyson, but the old Queen refused to appoint him because in one of his poems he had fulminated against the Emperor of Russia, and she said that after that it was impossible he could be in her household service. The last thirty years of his life have been stultified in a suburban villa at Putney with Watts-Dunton, who had used him as an advertisement for his own literary trash.

“Last night Belloc looked in on me very woebegone because he had made a rash vow of total abstinence from liquor during the whole of Holy Week, and it was the last day of his sufferings, which he said were beyond endurance. ‘It has its uses, however,’ he said, ‘if only to make one realize how flat the brain becomes when cut off from wine. There are moments when I find myself thinking and arguing almost like a teetotaler, but I will make it up to-morrow after Mass as soon as ever I have received Communion.’ I tried to make him break his vow, but in vain, and he went home sadly. [N.B. He wrote the most amusing of all his books, ‘A change in the Cabinet,’ during that temperate week.]

“_13th April._—From Blanche Hozier I get a letter, one of the best she ever wrote. In it she describes her doings at Dieppe, where she has established herself in a home of her own. It also encloses a pretty scrap from Clementine at Blenheim, where she is very happy with Winston. Blanche has a real genius for letter writing, women being far better letter writers than men, they chatter more naturally and are less self- conscious. I am reading ‘Pepys’s Diary,’ the unbowdlerized edition, which is extraordinarily good and has something of both these qualities, but is without grace and is coarsely fibred.

“_14th April._—There has been a counter revolution at Constantinople, and Abdul Hamid has once more got the upper hand. A mutiny of soldiers against their Young Turk officers, joined in by the less liberal Ulema and a reactionary mob, has upset the Committee of Union and Progress, and has forced Hilmi Pasha, the Vizier, and the Ministry to resign. Constantinople is in full reaction.

“_18th April._—The Young Turks are marching, it is said, on Salonika from Constantinople.

“_19th April._—Frederick Ryan, late Editor of the ‘Egyptian Standard,’ has returned from Cairo, and came to-day with the latest news. He is an intelligent young man of the same Irish type as Malony, good, modest, and sincere. He tells me there is a complete split now between the Khedive and Farid Bey, and the Press Law is directed mainly against the Khedive’s opponents. Abbas has lost what little popularity he had with the old-fashioned Ulema by his attempt to misappropriate the Awkaf revenues of the Azhar. The students struck for an increase of their bread money needed by the immense rise of prices. All the Cairo newspapers protested against the Press Law except two Ryan complains of the lack of business capacity in the management of the Egyptian newspapers. They are also now without a capable leader. Mustapha Kamel died of cancer in the stomach and suffered tortures.

“_20th April._—The Young Turks under Enver Bey have again got the upper hand and have marched to Constantinople. There is news to-day, though not certain, that the Sultan has abdicated and fled. This will be a splendid triumph. A revolution to be effective must have a basis of force, force which everybody is afraid of and is bound to acknowledge, otherwise it degenerates into mere chaos. I think they will be well advised to bring Abdul Hamid to open trial; it would be dangerous to leave him at large, or even alive in prison.

“_23rd April._—Things still unsettled at Constantinople except that the Young Turk Party is in power. It is not yet decided what the Sultan’s fate is to be. Enver has declared that Abdul Hamid cannot be allowed any longer to reign, though his life will be respected. I fancy the Kaiser Wilhelm is intervening on his behalf. They may be obliged to consider German wishes. Otherwise in cases of this kind ‘stone dead has no fellow.’

“_24th April._—An order has been given for the occupation of Tabriz by the Russian army, the excuse being that the Shah has broken his promise of allowing food to be supplied to the besieged townspeople. The Russians will now certainly occupy Teheran and Northern Persia and administer it in imitation of our English way in Egypt. Massacres, too, are announced in Armenia and at various places in Asia Minor, which may lead to intervention in Turkey. However, let us hope for the best.

“_Later._—The Young Turk army has stormed Yildiz, though with what result to the Sultan is not known.

“_29th April._—Abdul Hamid is at last formally deposed and has been sent as a prisoner to reside at Salonika. Reshad Effendi has been proclaimed Sultan Mohammed V in his stead.

“_30th April._—Lloyd George has brought in a Budget of a rather Socialistic kind, with a beginning of taxing land values and of things more drastic.

“_1st May._—To Cambridge, where I am staying with Browne at his villa in Trumpington Road. The garden is large, one of those pleasant suburban gardens which run a long way back, but the house is of the plainest Philistine order—very clean, very handsomely furnished, but everything in it commonplace, Browne being the least æsthetic of men. He has made me, however, extremely comfortable, and is in all things else extremely sympathetic. A nightingale is singing close to us.

“He is writing a history of the revolution in Persia, which will include a life of Seyyid Jemal ed Din, as to whom I have promised to write a monograph. We had several clever young men at dinner, one of them, Mozley, a young Don, Editor of the ‘Cambridge Review,’ and Somerset, Editor of the ‘Granta,’ also Cockerell and his wife, and Angela Mackail; also another interesting young man, Malory, and Haddon, the anthropologist. Browne is, of course, in despair at the Russian march on Tabriz, and believes the English Government has the idea of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as well as Persia.

“_2nd May._—Spent the day with Cockerell, going with him to the Fitzwilliam Museum where he showed me Rossetti’s MS. of the ‘House of Life.’ He has asked me for a MS., if I have got one, of ‘Esther.’

“_3rd May._—Back to Chapel Street.

“_7th May._—All the past week has been glorious at Newbuildings which is in full Spring beauty. On looking into the bathroom yesterday I heard a twittering and there were three of the swallows hatched there last year, siting together in last year’s nest. They must have been the same, as they were not frightened at my coming in, and the fact of there being three of them also shows it, for if they had been strangers looking for a place to build there would not have been more of them than a pair.

“Yesterday I watched for an hour the throwing of an oak, one of seven old ones they are cutting at the end of Newbuildings Wood. I wonder whether oaks have any sense of pain, perhaps a little, but it must be very little, just when the sap is rising. Woodcraft is the most fascinating of all rural work.

“_14th May._—I have written a valentine for Nellie Hozier:

AN OUT-OF-DATE VALENTINE

NEW is the morning, child,

Sunrise for thy heart.

Evening, how near its close,

Sunset for my heart.

Life in its fulness yours,

Mine but an ending.

Loyal we yet may be

Love’s cause defending.

I have my wisdom, child,

You your youth’s glory.

Each shall find wealth in each,

In each a story.

High be our fortune’s aim,

He who would win it

Offerings large must bring

To Fate each minute.

Zealous is Love for love,

Grudge not love’s kindness.

Ill ’tis for joy to wait,

Light lost is blindness.

Ends life as life began,

Heart which would meet heart.

Run we and outstrip Time,

Child, be my sweetheart.

“_20th May._—Meredith is dead after a two days’ illness, and there is talk of his being buried in Westminster Abbey. The papers say more about him than they did about Swinburne, though as a poet he was really far inferior to him. With the exception of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Love in a Valley,’ Meredith wrote no verse that was quite first rate, or even much of it readable, and his novels were not, in my opinion, really great. I never could read quite through any of them. They contained, of course, a number of good things and the style was original and natural to the man, but as stories they had little point, and though he sketched out his characters well at starting he had not the art to give them strong dramatic action, nor had he sufficient knowledge of human nature to make their doings credible. He was without a grain of tragic power, still he had a vast number of readers and I see no reason why he should not be buried in the Abbey. Politically I was for the most part in agreement with him, and we interchanged letters on such subjects more than once. I see in the obituaries that the fact of his having been a tailor’s son at Portsmouth is evaded by the paraphrase of his having been ‘born in Hampshire.’ Only the ‘Daily Graphic’ gives a photograph of his birthplace at Portsmouth. According to Meynell the fact of his tailoring parentage was the secret trouble of his life.

“It has been glorious weather all the week, and I never saw the view of the downs from the Hilly Seven Acre field so beautiful. But the ash- trees, checked by the frost of 1st May, are not yet in leaf. Most of them are still quite bare while the oaks are in full plumage. Nightingales are rarer this year than usual, probably because it was so bad a breeding season last Spring.

“I have been reading Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ again after forty years and do not find my opinion of them much altered. The early part, before he went to Paris and grew famous, is wonderful as a work of art and justifies itself as a young man’s confession, for in spite of its crudities, it is beautiful. But the rest is ugliness unredeemed. I fancy my own memoirs, if they are ever read, will give the same impression, though my youth has been prolonged beyond all measure and his ended very early. It was reading Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ about the year 1866 that first determined me to write mine and at the same time to have a more satisfactory life to make record of.

“_21st May._—Meynell came to dinner and gave me an interesting account of his intimacy with George Meredith and of Meredith’s romantic devotion to Mrs. Meynell. It began in this way. Some fifteen years ago Meredith had told a mutual friend of theirs that he was curious to know who ‘Autolycus’ was who wrote the literary criticisms in the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ and hearing it was Mrs. Meynell, wrote her a very characteristic letter complimenting her on her style of writing and inviting her and him to pay him a visit. ‘You will find,’ he said, ‘my daughter to receive you, she looks at literature through an eye glass.’ It happened soon after that an address was being presented to Meredith by the Society of Authors, and Meynell and his wife joined them and went down from London to Burford Bridge where Meredith met them, and when the presentation was over drove her back with him to his house on Box Hill, while Meynell walked. During the drive Meredith asked her whether she was not the author of a certain book, to which Mrs. Meynell, who has a talent for silence, said simply, ‘No,’ at which he expressed himself disappointed, and then whether she was not Francis Thompson’s sister, to which she again said, ‘No,’ at which he expressed himself doubly disappointed. Nevertheless they speedily made friends and from that time for two or three years he wrote to her, both letters and verses (these have not been published) and professed a special devotion. It was a great interest for both of them and was continued, as said, for several years. Thus Meynell came to know him well, amongst other things his secret trouble about his parentage, which cast a shadow over the novelist’s life. The trouble was that his father had been in trade, in fact a tailor, a fact which in his later years he kept jealously concealed, though his first novel, ‘Evan Harrington,’ published anonymously, had been founded on that very theme. His father had been the well-known naval outfitter at Portsmouth and his grandfather’s name had been Melchisedech, as in the novel. Mention is to be found of him in Marryat’s ‘Peter Simple,’ and again in Hardy’s letters to Nelson, where Hardy mentions that he had lodging at Portsmouth with ‘the tailor Meredith.’ It is curious that having attained to the eminence where he was he should have allowed so small a thing to annoy him. Meredith’s life latterly was a very lonely one, though he had many friends he had nobody to be quite devoted to him. He had talked of me to Meynell and had once said, which I am glad to hear, ‘Blunt is one of the few honest men we have in public life.’ He and I had much sympathy on many matters, and I bear him the reverse of a grudge in that, being Chapman and Hall’s literary reader, he was the cause of my first little volume of mixed verse and prose being refused publication. He was entirely right, for the volume, except some of the sonnets, was worthless. That must have been in 1867, Robert Lytton having recommended me to send it to Chapman who was then his publisher. It was a fortunate refusal.

“_29th May._—Newbuildings. It has been a week of glorious weather, the last of a long drought, but now there have been two days of rain. Our only trouble is that the caterpillar has fallen on the oaks, and half the leaves are devoured. This is always the result of frosts at the time the leaves are first unfolding, for the young grub needs a certain cooking of its food, and the frost does this for it, burning the young leaves. It is the same with the apple blight, which is also upon us. Both apple and oak, however, have a natural regrowth of leaves in July and August, which renews their vigour, giving them a second Spring.

“_30th May (Whit Sunday)._—At Newbuildings. Meynell is here. He has just been for Joan of Arc’s canonization to Rome. He saw Monsignor Stonor there, and asked whether he had been to the ceremony. ‘No,’ said Stonor, ‘why should I go? She was a Frenchwoman.’ The subject of modernism, he said, is now never mentioned at the Vatican. ‘The Pope is a worthy, good man, but his pronouncements are all dictated to him by the Cardinals, and he is allowed no initiative.’ I showed him a passage in my diary in 1892 relating to Manning’s Modernist sympathies in the last years of his life, and he told me that what I had put down was quite correct, and about his death. Vaughan had been his creature, but latterly the Cardinal had grown to dislike him.

“_2nd June._—I am at Newstead Abbey, brought here by Beauclerk, who is a country neighbour and friends with Lady Chermside and her sister, who own it. He tells me that his father was once offered Newstead Abbey and a part of the estate for £6,000; then, in 1860, old Webb bought it of Wildman, to whom Byron had sold it. Webb had had two sons, but the elder, a charming young man, had committed suicide while an undergraduate at Cambridge, and the younger had emigrated to Australia at the age of twenty-four. So he left Newstead to his daughters, the eldest, Geraldine, having married Sir Herbert Chermside, a retired General, the same Chermside who was in Egypt and Governor at one time of Suakim. The sisters lived together there, the younger, Ethel, who is unmarried, sharing the ownership of the property in a sort of way, one managing everything indoors, the other everything out of doors. They are both pleasant and conversible, and proud of their family possessions, as they may well be, and of its connection with the poet. They have made me very comfortable in rooms overlooking the garden.

“I forgot to say that Meynell, who dined with me last night in London, narrated to me the true version, as he heard it from Meredith, of Meredith’s quarrel with Rossetti. They were at breakfast one morning, and had a dispute about a trifle, and Rossetti, resenting something that Meredith had said, told him that if he said it again he would throw a cup of tea in his face. Meredith thereupon repeated it, and Rossetti threw the tea, and Meredith left the house at once and sent for his effects during the course of the day. I have been reading ‘Evan Harrington’ coming here in the train, but as far as I have got, it does not alter my opinion of these novels. I fail to take any interest in the characters. They are cleverly sketched, but act very much at hap-hazard. They are not comic enough to make one laugh, and not tragic enough to make one weep. They bore one before one is half through with their doings. There is a good deal of subtle observation and happy phrasing, but it is strange that anyone should call them great novels. Yet I find people comparing Meredith with Shakespeare and all the heavenly host!

“_3rd June._—I have spent the day very pleasantly, the morning with Miss Ethel Webb, who, in spite of a rugged exterior, is a nice woman, more conversible, I think, than her sister, though both are good talkers. Having that department under her special charge, she showed me everything outside. Certainly Newstead is a splendid domain, through the abundance of its water and the lie of the land about it. The trees are mostly sycamores, to me a new feature, the soil being unsuited to oaks. The celebrated oak sown by Byron only a hundred years ago, is already dying. I have recommended its being pollarded as the best chance of prolonging its life, but the soil is gravel and sand. Yews grow better than any other tree on it, and the tank, which is overshadowed by them, is one of the most beautiful features of a garden I ever saw. Miss Webb pointed me out the place in the garden wall where there had been a postern gate opening formerly towards the forest. This has been built up, she tells me, for centuries, yet her dogs sometimes scratch at it, recognizing it as a doorway still. We sat in her rock garden in the sun, for the wind was cold, and she told me she had acquired the power of making birds understand her, and that the blackbirds and thrushes give her warning of the approach of strangers when she is there alone, as she often is, not wishing to be disturbed. The outside walls of the Abbey have been much spoiled by restoration, done in Wildman’s time, who spent £100,000 on it, so that it is difficult to make out quite what is old and what is new, and the windows have been plate-glassed, and otherwise bedevilled, but it is still a splendid possession, much larger and more important than I had at all imagined, and one can well understand how the sudden inheritance of it by Byron and his mother turned their heads, and helped to give him that exaggerated pride of birth and position which was his weakness. Inside, too, the house is a noble one, in spite of horrible tampering with the stonework of the Gothic lower story; all, however, might be made good with whitewash. The cloisters are less injured, and need nothing but to be let alone. Upstairs, wicked architectural things have been done, but the great drawing-room is magnificent, one of the finest state rooms to be found anywhere, and the long corridors are also fine. The main front has the advantage of looking south. Byron’s own little bedroom, with its simple furniture, is most interesting, unaltered since his time, but that has been told in the guide books, so I need not describe it. Beauclerk has returned from his manœuvring, and we walked again in the garden. He starts for Central Asia next week, to remain away a year. He is a very attractive young man, with, I am sure, an excellent heart. The feeling of the house is strongly against Lady Byron in the old family quarrel.

“_4th June._—Back to London early, much pleased with my visit to Newstead and the good ladies, my entertainers there.

“Sabunji came to dine with me. I had not seen him since 1895, I think. He has become the type of what he doubtless was till the other day, a Yildiz Palace spy, a little furtive old man dressed in black with a black skull cap on his head, a jewel in his shirt front and another jewel on his finger. He has come to London, I imagine, on some business of intrigue, and to me partly to find out what my opinions are, partly to get my help in a publishing project he has in hand, a ‘History of all Religions.’ I got a deal of useful information from him about men and events at Constantinople. He tells me he continued to hold his place at Yildiz and draw his pay or pension till a month ago, but he is now deprived of it in common with the rest of the Palace employés. His position with the Sultan Abdul Hamid, which had been originally that of Reader for him and _précis_ writer of the European Press, had latterly become one of tutor to the young Prince Burhan ed Din, the Sultan’s favourite son, whom he describes as very clever, and knowing French, English, German, and Italian, besides Turkish, Persian, and a little Arabic. The fact of his loss of income by the Sultan’s deposition naturally colours Sabunji’s views, and he is gloomy about the prospects of Turkey under the new _régime_. I asked him about the revolution of last year, and the counter-revolution of two months ago. As to the first, he says the Sultan was in complete ignorance till it happened, and this, doubtless, was the fact. The counter-revolution was got up not by Abdul Hamid or Burhan ed Din, but by an intrigue between Az ed Din (son of Sultan Abdul Aziz, who is heir to the present Sultan according to the law of succession), and the Russian Embassy, the latter being jealous of the influence the English Embassy had acquired under Kiamil Pasha. The German Embassy had nothing to do with it, nor was it true that the Sultan had distributed money to the troops to make them revolt against their officers. The Sultan had given money for the foundation of a Madrasa (public school) which had been handed over by the Ulema, who had received it for the Madrasa, to the troops. This sounds like an excuse. What probably is true is that there was a strong reactionary party at Stamboul, which appealed to the soldiers on religious grounds. Sabunji declares that this feeling was so strong that it was intended to have a general massacre of Christians, and that this was only prevented by the rapidity of the march on Constantinople from Salonika. Had the massacre taken place there would have been European intervention and a partition of Turkey. He declares that there was a settled plan for the partition already agreed to, according to which England was to get Syria as well as Egypt; France, Tripoli; Italy the Albanian coast; Austria, Salonika; and Germany, effective administration of the railway line from Broussa to Bagdad, with ten kilometers on either side of it, while Russia was to get the northern part of Asia Minor. [Compare text of the secret treaties afterwards discovered at St. Petersburg and published 1917.] He says, too, that there was an intrigue between Izzet Pasha and the Khedive Abbas for getting Abbas acknowledged Caliph, and that the English Government favoured it, intending to use the Khedive as a first step towards an Arabian Caliphate under English protection. This, of course, is the old idea which he (Sabunji) with many others, held in 1881, as shown in my ‘Future of Islam.’

“_9th June._—Chapel Street. Met Cunninghame Graham in the Park and talked with him of Grey’s speech at the Imperial Press Conference, which will need, I think, a manifesto from some of us to the Mohammedan world, for I read it as announcing a definite intention to retain Egypt. ‘English policy,’ Grey says, ‘is to keep all we have.’

“It is a question now for the Ottoman Empire to make up its mind whether in the coming conflict it is to side with England or with Germany. On the whole an alliance with Germany would probably be the lesser risk of the two, seeing how Egypt and now Persia have been betrayed by England, and how India is held by us in permanent bondage, also England’s power is apparently on the wane, while Germany is increasing.

“Lady Gregory came to luncheon, and we went after it to the Court theatre together. She has just been for three weeks at Venice, staying there with Lady Layard. She gave an amusing description of the arrival one day at luncheon while there of two little ‘maids of all work’ rather shabbily dressed, which proved to be Queen Alexandra and her sister the Empress of Russia, who had arrived together on a yachting cruise, and had come to call without ceremony. The Empress, Lady Gregory says, looks now much the older of the two, for the Queen is extraordinarily well preserved, whether by nature or art. They stayed on chattering the little banalities of Court conversation for half-an-hour with the German accent Lady Gregory imitated well. At the theatre we found Yeats, who talked to us between the acts. He told me he had been converted to my use of the Alexandrine metre for plays in verse, but that he had such a difficulty in finding rhymes that a rhymed play would take him two years to write. The pieces we saw given were ‘Devorgilla’ and the ‘Playboy of the Western World.’ The ‘Playboy,’ I fancy, must have been a bit bowdlerized from the original version, or else it was not very intelligible to an English audience, but certainly here in London it seemed a very harmless bit of broad farce which could shock no one. The Irish of it was such that a good deal of the dialogue was difficult to catch. I found it immensely amusing and quite admirably acted. The principal girl’s part was done by a sister of Sarah Allgood, who had been engaged to Synge. Of Sarah Allgood herself I thought less, she was more conventional. The house was half empty, and there was little encouragement given to the actors. Yeats is beginning to get fat and sleek; he has cut his hair and his cheeks have a pink colour, and he is well dressed, as a prosperous theatrical manager should be.

“_22nd June._—George Wyndham came. He is rather out of it just now in Parliament as he takes no very strong interest in the Budget dispute, believing the Radical bark to be worse than the bite. I do not expect the Lords will reject the Budget, as some of the extremists would have them do. In regard to the land they would be on firm ground, for the Radical view on the land question is essentially unsound, unless the full Socialist doctrine be admitted, _la propriété c’est le vol_.

“To the Tate Gallery, which has revived in me many old memories. The Vernon Collection, which I remember in Marlborough House when I first came to London in 1856, and used constantly to visit, the early pre- Raphaelite pictures, most of which I saw about the same time hung in the Academy, and numbers more. It is wonderful how they have improved with age, or is it with pictures as it is with a sonnet, which seems better if one has once known it by heart and half forgotten.

“_24th June._—Some Persians called on me, introduced by Rothstein, poor helpless people, knowing hardly a word of any language but their own and Russian. They had come to London to try and enlist English sympathy for their Constitutional cause.

“_28th June._—Halil Hálid and Meynell dined with me. Halil has been with Mukhtar Pasha since his stay of three days in England as Extraordinary Ambassador, but he had very little to tell me, being affected with pseudo diplomatic reserve, except that the question of Egypt was not raised or mentioned by Mukhtar. Cromer, he tells me, still influences the Foreign Office and was put to sit next to Mukhtar at a dinner given to the Marshal.

“_3rd July._—We had our Arab sale to-day. Bidders few, but the financial result not unsatisfactory.

“A most important thing has happened in connection with India. Sir Curzon Wyllie has been assassinated by a young Indian at the Imperial Institute. The ‘Manchester Guardian’ and other Liberal papers are endeavouring to persuade themselves that the assassination is not political; but this is nonsense. It has quite obviously been planned as part of a new departure and almost certainly by Krishnavarna, whose ‘Indian Sociologist’ of last week contains clear indications of what might be expected. The whole English Press is united in its religious horror at the crime, forgetting how it applauded exactly such crimes in Italy fifty years ago, and in Russia the other day. Krishnavarna’s position is precisely the same as Mazzini’s then was, whom we all now justify since his plan of assassination led to the liberation of Italy, and if ever people had excuse for means of this kind it is the people of India.