The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age

Turkey

At the two ends of Asia two old empires maintained their independence, with reduced territories, through the age of European expansion. China was a riddle, but Turkey in a sense even more so, because it lay partly in Europe, and the question had never been settled of whether Turkey was, or might become, a European entity. The ‘Eastern Question’ that haunted Europe through the nineteenth century and down to 1914 was in effect the same. Turkey was weakening, its Christian subjects in the Balkans were rebelling, some of the Powers wanted to despoil it: others – in turn France, Russia, Britain, Germany – wanted to preserve it under their own tutelage, and therefore to supply it with a kind of certificate of European naturalization. What stands out from the confused record is the very subjective character of Europe’s opinions about the Turks, always biased by political interest, and more often than not oblivious of whether Turks wanted to be Europeans or not.

Katib Chelebi, the Turkish essayist of the early seventeenth century, had judicious views about men’s need to familiarize themselves with other societies.¹ Yet he himself displays little knowledge of other lands, and scarcely alludes to Europe; and the hairsplitting scholastic debates he censures among his contemporaries reveal how the Turkish intellect was failing to develop, at bottom because Turkey, like Spain too merely military and religious, was failing to grow economically and technically. Its mentality was turning defensive and static; by the end of that century it was no longer a menace to southern or eastern Europe. To the northwest it and its Moorish auxiliaries had never been more than a nuisance, if an unpleasant one. There were Turkish prisoners in 1626 at peaceful St Ives in Cornwall, and long after the corsairs ceased to haunt the English Channel they lurked in wait for trading ships in the Mediterranean. Public appeals for money to ransom captives from ‘their fierce and tirannous dealing’2 were frequent. In 1662 the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral was writing to Archbishop Sancroft about this laudable purpose,³ in 1670 the Earl of Bedford was subscribing £5.⁴ A century later released or escaped prisoners on their way home were still a recognized object of charity.⁵

By the later eighteenth century Europeans could contemplate Turkey with more detachment. Religious excitement had ebbed on both sides. Turks were familiar figures, only outlandish enough, like Muscovites or Hebrideans, to look picturesque. Turkish costume made an attractive fancy-dress at carnival time. George II dressed up as a sultan at a Hanover fête in 1740, with one of his mistresses as a sultana.⁶ The real Sultan was a despot, but absolute monarchy was the form of government admired by most of the leaders of thought in Europe. Shakespeare had talked of the cruelty of ‘stubborn Turks and Tartars’,⁷ but both names were taking on the half-playful overtones they still have today; unlike Hun, the name of a vanished race, still terrific because only existing for imagination. The drums and cymbals of the janissaries, that once appalled Europe, were incorporated into its orchestra; a ‘Turkish Rondo’ could be the most graceful of compositions. Pasha Selim in Mozart’s II Seraglio was a true man of the Enlightenment, a devotee of reason, resisting more successfully than Count Almaviva the temptation to abuse his power over a woman.

Mozart’s ‘Albanians’ in Così fan tutte had no difficulty in winning a pair of young Italian hearts. There is a reminder here that in physical aspect Turks might be indistinguishable from Europeans; they had been mixing with peoples of Caucasian stock since long before their irruption into Europe. The reigning dynasty had practically no Turkish, and some European, blood. Murad Ill’s favourite wife, the mother of his eldest son, was a Venetian; Mahmud II in the early nineteenth century had a French mother. Western renegades were still turning Turk, and many such men achieved prominent positions, as in the army during the Crimean War when the most successful commander was Omar Pasha, a Croat from Hapsburg territory.

So far as all this went, it should not have been harder to think of Turkey as part of Europe than, today, as part of that more nebulous region, ‘the West’. Turks, however, were a minority in their European provinces, and the Ottoman empire had a long tail of non-Turkish dependencies stretching away into Asia and Africa. If Europe’s proximity tended to jerk it forward, Africa’s, with the steady tribute of Negro slaves, always dragged it back. In the opening crisis of the Eastern Question in 1791,8 when Pitt risked war with Russia in order to protect Turkey and with it (according to British strategic theory) the overland route to India, he had to argue that Turkey was deserving of help and protection. Opponents strenuously denied this. Turks were a people ‘wholly Asiatic’, declared Burke. ‘What had these worse than savages to do with the Powers of Europe?’⁹ A milder version of his thesis, expressed some years later, was that ‘there will always be some boundary, to European cultivation of intellect’, and that natural frontier was the mind of Turkey.¹⁰

Turkey was repeatedly involved in the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, most dramatically by General Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Turbans were for a time the rage among ladies in Paris, and the most colourful section of the First Consul’s guard was his squadron of Mameluke cavalry. The Turkish ambassador in Paris at this time seemed to a young Irish lady ‘of very imposing aspect, majestic in his air, and beautiful in his features’, though capable of fits of rage in public. He and his suite spoke good French, and adapted themselves wonderfully to French manners: they were as assiduous with ladies ‘as if their own were not slaves’.¹¹

Turkey, however, had no part in the general peace-settlement of Europe in 1814–15, and during the next decade the Balkan risings started, first with the Serbs and then the Greeks. The Sublime Porte was baffled. It knew nothing about nationalism; it had always been tolerant, if contemptuous, of other faiths, and until near the end non-Muslims were never conscripted into the army, as Muslim and other colonial manpower might be into a European army. Too confused and distracted to stick to any line of policy, it alternated between fits of torpor and fits of violence. Massacre became, not in the European provinces only, part of the routine of administration. The struggle in Greece during the 1820s was peculiarly atrocious on both sides (rather like the Indian Mutiny with the roles reversed), and Western sentiment about Greece as the cradle of European civilization, and Byron’s death at Missolonghi, helped to fix public attention on it.

No governments were eager to assist Balkan rebels. They had too many similar rebels of their own, in Ireland, Poland, Catalonia, Italy, Belgium. None of them had any feeling that it was wrong, or undignified, to leave Europeans under Asian rule; and the Balkan nationalities looked scarcely more civilized than their masters. ‘The Ottoman empire was an essential part of the balance of power in Europe,’ Wellington affirmed in Parliament during the Greek struggle.12 Ultra-conservative after 1815, the Tsars thought instinctively of the Sultan (and of the Shah, likewise plagued with malcontents)¹³ as a brother-monarch. But even they could not forego for ever the popularity that would accrue to them from crusades against the infidel. Most of the Balkan Christians belonged to the Orthodox Church, so their sufferings made a special appeal to the Russian people. Religion was three quarters of the ordinary Russian’s patriotism, and nine tenths of the Turkish peasant’s. The Crimean War of 1854–6, when both Tsar and Sultan were under heavy pressure from their fanatics, was almost a war of religion strayed out of its proper century.

Official England continued to adhere to the policy of bolstering up the Ottoman empire. It was coming to have far bigger stakes in Asia than in Europe, and unlike Russia it had (until shortly before 1914) no designs on Turkish territory in Asia. Also the Sultan’s informal status of Caliph or leader of all Muslims made it worth while in Muslim India to give publicity to Britain’s protection of Turkey. A ludicrous resemblance can be detected between this propping up of the Commander of the Faithful by Britain, assisted in the Crimean War by France, and the propping up of the Holy Father by a French garrison after 1848 in Rome. Both policies had bitter critics. Middle-class England took religion more seriously than its government did. Bright in 1854 recalled Burke’s words of 1791, and denounced as bad even for the Turks themselves ‘the miserable and lunatic idea, that we are about to set the worn-out Turkish Empire on its legs’.14 A cartoonist caught a more plebeian facet of British opinion in his Crimean War drawing of a jolly Jack Tar, pipe in mouth, taking a ride about the hills on the shoulders of a Turkish soldier, with another tied behind him on a rope as a spare mount.¹⁵

A cartoon of 1877, after Britain had risked war to protect Turkey once again from the Russians, drew an opposite picture – Disraeli on a tightrope with a fat smirking Sultan squatting on his shoulders.¹⁶ Massacres of Bulgars and Armenians revived half-forgotten memories of older Ottoman savagery, and the phrase ‘Unspeakable Turk’ was repeated. Gladstone talked fiercely in his Midlothian election campaign in 1880 about how the Turks ought to be cleared out of Europe altogether, bag and baggage, bashaw and bashi-bazouk; as he was then in opposition no doubt his stirring words ought to have been taken in a Pickwickian sense only. Abdul Hamid II, Sultan from 1876 to 1909, was known in England and denounced in sermons as Abdul the Damned. Among the figures of Victorian pantomime were sultans with huge moustachios and scimitars,¹⁷ and the man in the street probably thought of Abdul Hamid as one of them. He concentrated on keeping the Asian provinces intact, and played on his attributes as Caliph. In this sense the empire towards the end was growing more instead of less Asiatic.

Imperial calculations decided official England not to see too many motes in the Turkish eye, but various factors assisted it. There had never been war between the two countries. Turkey’s religion was bad, but to good Protestants not much worse than the Catholicism of Spain or Naples. Its government was bad, but not very much worse than Russia’s. In time of war its army always commanded respect, as the British did, not by cleverness at the top but by doggedness down below. A young Anglo-German serving as a volunteer in the defence of Plevna in 1877 – the Sevastopol or Verdun of the Turkish army – was deeply moved to see ‘to what heights the sons of a proud and devoted nation can rise’.¹⁸ Its empire had once been resplendent, and an Englishman such as Burton could feel an admiration for it, and something like admiration for some of its methods. Like Tsarism in Asia it had rough and ready ways of making itself felt by disorderly subjects. England could not do quite the same, Burton admitted, but might learn from them at least the value of a ‘just, wholesome, and unsparing severity’, calculated to infuse ‘fear instead of contempt’.19 From unsparing severity to massacre is only a few imperial strides.

Altogether, to Englishmen of army and empire affiliations Turkey seldom appeared so unpleasant as to Nonconformist or Radical. Another phrase was in vogue, ‘The Turk is a gentleman’. As a conquering race Turks had acquired much of the temper and outlook of an aristocracy, and the more so, as a people, because they had no hereditary nobility to monopolize these attributes. They disdained all base mechanical employments leaving them to Greeks, Jews and such underlings. Their own chosen existence was divided between spirited action and leisured repose. To Kinglake, himself a man of imperial views, Greeks, including those now independent, were about as ‘oriental’ as Turks, and sometimes less attractive, full of those habits of petty fraud and greed that Turks were notably free from. As a gentleman the Turk might be said to be standing by his convictions, clinging to his dignified indolence even now when the bailiffs were gathering round his door; a sturdy refusal to change with the times that must have touched nostalgic chords in a Europe where the old ruling classes were being seduced by the moneybags into City directorates or alliances with Jewish heiresses.

On the other hand there could be no denying that Turkish administration, even when not oppressive, was corrupt and inefficient. One Russian envoy smoothed his path by collecting private information about the ministers he had to deal with, and threatening to reveal it to their sovereign.²⁰ Britain was able to gauge the results of Turkish rule by seeing them in a number of areas taken over from it: the Ionian islands, Cyprus, Egypt. In Cyprus the old regime had been ‘a curse to the people and a curse on the land’. Commissioner Wauchope gave the new one a good start by hanging a Turk for murder, a procedure heretofore unheard of.²¹ In Egypt after the occupation in 1882 British officials felt they were wrestling with the outcome of ‘centuries of unremitting misrule’,22 It has to be added that in both cases the new authority came under criticism for continuing the flogging policies of its predecessor.²³ But if the Ottoman empire was to be kept going it would obviously have to pull itself together, and Englishmen were forever vexing the dull ear of the drowsy Turk with admonitions of the need for reform and progress; admonitions that after 1857 their Indian princes were usually spared. The man who talked loudest and longest was the Great Elchi or ambassador Stratford Canning, and he found it, as he told his brother, ‘uphill work. Such roguery, corruption, and falsehood and deep anti-social selfishness …,’²⁴ He was a man equal to thirty hours’ deskwork at a stretch, but to activate Turks was beyond even his energy.

Like twentieth-century Americans these Englishmen overlooked the difficulty in Asia of reform without revolution. England had almost forgotten its own revolution. About what kind of reform was called for there was not much clarity. Parliaments and elections were the cure-all of British philosophy, but realists judged them beyond the capacity of Spaniards, let alone Turks, and were in no haste to introduce them in India. What they wanted to see at Stamboul was a modernized, efficient autocracy, something very much like a governor-general’s at Calcutta. This might not seem too much to hope for. After all this empire did hang together for nearly five centuries after the capture of Constantinople, a long time by either Eastern or Western clocks. Nearly every Asian monarchy during the nineteenth century threw up some ruler who tried to reconstruct it, and at Stamboul this ruler was Mahmud II. In 1826 he put an end to the usurpation of power by the praetorian corps of janissaries by having them massacred. Foreign envoys hastened to congratulate him on this statesmanlike coup. In 1839 there was issued the Khatt-i-Sherif, or imperial rescript, tracing a programme of reform.²⁵ But the inertias of the old order were too heavy. Subsequently the Young Turk party tried to push things forward. Few of them cared about parliamentarism, as liberals in the West fancied. They were ‘by no means friends of European civilization’, Nubar Pasha the Egyptian politician remarked to a German diplomat in 1877; ‘they wished to reconstruct Turkey … with the material resources of civilization, but in the spirit of the past’.26 This was exactly what the ruling élite in Japan was doing, as some of the Young Turks must have been aware.

What was possible in Japan might not be practical politics in Turkey, with its unwieldy size and unyielding religion. In days gone by it had borrowed from a Western technology still elementary, but now an Asian country had to learn a great deal more to survive. Gunpowder had been a novelty congenial to the Turk; steam was a different matter. A foreigner at Stamboul in mid-century noticed his distaste for the steam paddle-boat lately introduced, as a threat to the good old ways: ‘Every paddle-wheel which churns the waters of the Bosphorus, produces, by its revolutions, others almost imperceptible, but no less certain, in his social and political state.’²⁷ Karl Marx on the Bosphorus would have been visited by the same thought. Wherever modernity spread, the true Turk seemed to vanish, a later observer wrote;²⁸ he seemed to be doomed to extinction by poverty, the effects of conscription, and the ‘inconceivable spread’ of syphilis.²⁹ Modernism had many aspects, and the East had a heavy price to pay for what it learned from the West.

Tourists in the Near East

Well acclimatized in Europe in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth tourism was spreading to the Near East. Italy and Spain were growing humdrum, and it was time to go farther afield in search of the glamorous medley of rags and ruins that the tourist had learned to expect. Antiquarians studying ruins seriously helped to make Greece a stepping-stone. One of these, Gell, stumbled on the chronic paradox that a lax despotism like the Turkish allowed a surprising degree of ‘personal liberty, both of word and action’. Mentally all was darkness, he added, except where European residents had ‘awakened some sparks of intellect’.³⁰ Byron had a vivid sense of the romance of the East when, dressed for the occasion in a ‘staff uniform, with a very magnificent sabre’, he stood face to face with Ali Pasha of Janina among the wild Albanian mountains. The Pasha’s foreign physician, who had some Latin, was their interpreter; it was often by such roundabout means that East and West exchanged thoughts. They have not often confronted each other in the persons of two such men, both fated to perish before many years were past not far from where they now stood. Ali, whom his young friend well knew to be ‘a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties’, was very civil. Byron liked all the Albanians, as a warrior race and the handsomest in the world, with plenty of bad qualities but no mean ones.31

It was another dramatic confrontation when the author of Eothen abruptly appeared before a pair of Bedouin in the desert and without a word seized their water-flask and took a deep drink: their first sight possibly of a white man, ‘and for this ghastly figure to come swiftly out of the horizon, upon a fleet dromedary’³² might well make them gape. The West has found a certain pleasure in astonishing the East with its unexpectednesses and eccentricities. When Kinglake and an officer returning overland from India passed each other in the desert, stiff and silent on their camels, with a slight nod,³³ each must have felt agreeably conscious of how they were mystifying their attendants, denizens of the garrulous East.

Kinglake was one of the last Romantics, seeking between desert sands and stars the visionary world that in the West had faded into common gaslight. He journeyed in search of impressions, not of Blue Book facts, and was the most brilliant of all English travellers at catching them. Eothen taught a generation of tourists what to see, or to fancy they saw. When Thackeray was invited in 1844 by the P. & O. Company to join a Mediterranean cruise everyone on board was struggling for the ship’s copy.³⁴ Thackeray by contrast was an unromantic mid-Victorian, whose concern was with the march of progress and common sense, and whose dislike of squalor and ignorance was never lulled for long by any amount of picturesqueness, whether in Turkey or in Ireland. Two universes were close together when Thackeray watched the Sultan of the day, Abdul Mejid, on his way to the mosque, looking like a young French roué, with a clever dissipated face, almost too enervated by the pleasures his mother and courtiers, kept him plunged in to be able to sit on his horse.35 Thackeray and his party felt they were contemplating ‘the last days of an empire’, borne down by ‘weakness, disorder, and oppression’.³⁶ He too counted on steam, ‘the civilizing paddle-wheel’, to sweep the old rottenness away.³⁷

His very minor but not unamusing brother-novelist Albert Smith was there a few years later, an energetic solo traveller with a knapsack of his own designing; another matter-of-fact chronicler, who laughed at the tourist eye that saw romance in every kind of dullness and dirt as the Scottish wizards ‘turned cobwebs to tapestry’.³⁸ He laughed too at the ghoulish tales of heads chopped off and palace charmers sewn up in sacks and thrown into the Sea of Marmora. Improvement was coming in, he thought, chiefly because foreigners were being employed, like the Mr Taylor in charge of the gun-foundry who ‘gave the Turkish workmen a good character for intelligence and a wish to oblige’.³⁹ The higher classes, from the Sultan down, were in European dress, surmounted by the newfangled fez. To Burton this westernizing meant degeneracy, not progress, and he derided ‘the pert and puny modern Turk in pantaloons, frock coat and Fez, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned, and ill-bred, body and soul’.⁴⁰ Peoples long sunk in stagnation like Turks or Spaniards decay most thoroughly at the top, and it was the governing class, not Mr Taylor’s workmen, who were putting themselves into pantaloons.

About that same time a young Englishman named Whittall, with an ancestry of merchants settled at Smyrna, was starting a business career of fifty years in Turkey. At the end of it he modestly confessed that he had no more than an imperfect understanding of the country, along with a good deal of liking for it. He went all over the interior, not as most visitors did only from one semi-foreign port to another. ‘The Oriental mind is so very differently constituted to ours that it is impossible to fathom it completely at all times.’⁴¹ We are always more or less in the dark about all our fellow-creatures and about ourselves, but it is among foreigners that we grow conscious of our ignorance. Whittall knew of a respectable Turk who, when the Greek revolt was inflaming popular feeling against Greeks in all the provinces, rescued several from being lynched, at the risk of his own life.42 It is a consoling memory to set against the fearsome slaughter that flared up over and over again until the cancered empire finally collapsed.

Egypt and North Africa

Egypt broke away from the empire early in the nineteenth century, under its governor Mehemet Ali, an Albanian of humble birth, and its Turkish upper class. Stirred up by Bonaparte’s brief tenure, and in need of resources to enable it to challenge Stamboul, Egypt was the theatre of a thorough-going experiment, the first in all the East, in westernization by decree. Mehemet Ali built a new army of Albanian mercenaries and Egyptian conscripts, drilled by foreign officers. One of these, the Frenchman Sève, embraced Islam and went by the name of Sulaiman Pasha.⁴³ Mehemet also tried to build a modern industry based on State monopolies. Three young men he sent to Britain to study at the Nasmyth engineering works did very well there, and one later went back to marry an English girl and start a business.⁴⁴ In both his military and his economic ambitions Mehemet bore a resemblance to Peter the Great; he was likewise an inexorable despot and flogger.

There was much debate among foreigners, sharpened by rival interests, as to whether the new Egypt was a bona fide imitation of Europe, or a grotesque travesty of it. France chose to regard Mehemet, as it had formerly done the Turks, as its protégé, and took him to what a nation editorially calls its heart. Englishmen were always less pleased than Frenchmen to see natives dressing up. ‘Can you tell me what all this row is about,’ asked one of Kingston’s midshipmen, ‘between us and these wide-breeched, red-capped niggers, the Egyptians?’⁴⁵ The reason was partly that Palmerston detested Mehemet, though Sir John Bowring whom he sent on a mission of inquiry in 1837–8 formed a different opinion of him. He tried to get the Pasha to abolish slavery, a stumbling-block to any goodwill from Britain; but black slaves from Egypt’s colony of the Soudan formed part of the revenue.

Egypt failed to get beyond a certain point, which may be proof that no similar attempt in Turkey or any other country with the same historical foundations could succeed. The cost to the scanty population was crippling. On the surface, by the time tourists began to arrive, there was bustle and newness. Thackeray found Alexandria looking ‘scarcely Eastern at all’,46 and the Nile at Cairo lined with foundries and steam-mills as well as palaces. As at Stamboul he felt no regrets for the past. He had no magicians or exotic dancing-girls to regale his readers with, he admitted, but instead was delighted to meet with honest British enterprise, along with ‘manliness, bitter ale and Harvey Sauce’, novelties that the forty centuries looking down from the Pyramids ought to be better pleased with than General Bonaparte ‘running about with sabre and pigtail’.⁴⁷ Burton dissented. ‘The land of the Pharaohs is becoming civilized, and unpleasantly so …’ He was disgusted with a host who sat on chairs, ate with a fork, and talked European politics.⁴⁸.

The man who knew the country best was Lane, who went there first in 1825, plunged into native life, and in 1836 produced his encyclopaedic account of Egyptian life and manners. No admirer of Mehemet Ali, he found much to like in his subjects: a general cheerfulness, hospitality, unusual temperance and frugality, scrupulous cleanliness among the higher classes, and the lower not less clean than in Europe.⁴⁹ In point of intellect they seemed to him better endowed than most; unfortunately their faculties were eroded by the influence of climate, religion, and oppression.⁵⁰ No one could help seeing the oppression of the fellah or peasant by the Turk whose Western fripperies he had to pay for. Thackeray had ‘a sickening feeling of disgust’ at the brutal treatment of these Egyptians, ‘a tall noble handsome race’, by their masters, and all their masters’ hangers-on, the Negro slave worst of all. ‘The whip is in everybody’s hands.’⁵¹

Impenetrably disguised as Abdullah the Mecca-bound pilgrim, Burton could hear Egyptians talking as frankly about Europeans as Europeans did about Egyptians; and he knew everything about the East, except perhaps that he knew nothing about ordinary men anywhere. It was to him ‘ unintelligible’ that even Egyptians employed for years under European roofs should have ‘the liveliest loathing’ for Western ways. All foreigners were detested, except that ‘somehow or other, the Frenchman is everywhere popular’. (Englishmen have always found this unintelligible.) Yet Burton managed to believe that Egypt longed for Western rule, and wanted it hot and strong. ‘This people admire an iron-handed and lion-hearted despotism; they hate a timid and a grinding tyranny.’52 In reality they had developed a sullen kind of passive resistance of their own, ‘refusing to pay their taxes until they have been severely beaten’;⁵³ in the Mameluke and Ottoman times there had been not a few peasant revolts.⁵⁴

Yet their reputation with Westerners continued to be one of servility, and in the British epoch this had a malign effect on methods of administration. One of those who worked them out, Colvin, quoted with approval Milner’s verdict on ‘a nation of submissive slaves, devoid of the slightest spark of the spirit of liberty’, and likely long to remain so.⁵⁵ The longer the better, a candid European bondholder, for whose benefit the peasant was being taxed and sometimes flogged now, might have added. Colvin saw no anomaly in the fact that in 1882 Egyptians banded round Arabi Pasha to resist the British occupation. ‘Then, as now, politically blind, they followed blind leaders’, instead of waiting for true Hampdens or Washingtons to appear to them.⁵⁶ By this date any Afro-Asian people really had only a choice between blindness or slavishness, and whichever it chose the Western response was the same.

Tripoli remained Turkish until seized by the Italians in 1911 after the bombardment that often served as baptism into Western civilization; the rest of Muslim north Africa, the Maghrib or West of the Islamic world, had drifted away from the Ottoman empire, only to follow the same downward course and end in the maw of the French empire. It was an unsavoury region where African savagery seemed to blend with Muslim fanaticism, especially in the interior, which was a chaos of tribal war, blood-feud, slave-raid, and the wild rituals of Dervishes and Marabouts, outlandish superstitions varnished with Muslim orthodoxy. It might well seem marked out by Providence for European knowledge and laws to blow through like fresh air.

So the French thought when they entered the field in the 1830s. Their first objective, the port of Algiers, was easily taken, but pushing inland into Algeria they ran into desperate resistance, tribal and religious. Its leader Abd-ul-Qadir earned a measure of respect by his long, exciting struggle, much like Shamil Bey’s at the same period in the Caucasus; and the story of the French lighting fires to suffocate Algerians hiding in caves was often told. Browning put one of his dramatic monologues into the mouth of a follower of Abd-ul-Qadir,57 but it is a stilted exercise in rhyme, very different from the poetry that he and many others wrote in praise of Italy’s struggle for freedom. In the pacification of so nightmarish a land even French ruthlessness could seem justifiable.

To a British officer inspecting the country in 1857 it appeared that the conquerors were getting on quite well with the inhabitants. ‘The French certainly have the knack of this kind of thing’; he contrasted it with the rudeness of the British that offended their Turkish allies in the recent Crimean War.⁵⁸ France was far closer geographically to Algeria, and could feel more intimately connected with it, than Britain with any colonial region. No English writer made a character like Daudet’s ‘Nabob’ – a French profiteer from north Africa, drawn from life – the central figure of an important novel.⁵⁹ In the Kabyle mountains resistance had continued: this officer watched the final phase of the conquest there, and like others gave very high praise to the Berber hillmen for a defiance ‘almost unparalleled for temerity and audacity’.⁶⁰ He judged them, moreover, a far more orderly and industrious people than the loafing Moors of the plains.⁶¹

In north Africa even ramshackle Spain, looked down on by Europe for its backwardness, could pretend to a civilizing mission, with the approval of a radical like Emilio Castelar⁶² as well as of pushing generals and of the Church. General O’Donnell, premier in 1859 picked a quarrel with Morocco and led a campaign in person. It was a bungled affair, but served to make him Duke of Tetuan and allow Spain for a histrionic moment to recapture the elation of bygone crusades. Morocco instead of heeding the warning went back to sleep, and presently the French came.

In the Arab lands eastward from Egypt the West saw one more illustration of the blighting effect of Islam, and of Turkish misrule: two words as regularly coupled as ‘feudal anarchy’ or ‘female depravity’. Interest was keenest in the desert tribes, scarcely under any rule, and supplying material for the perennial argument about man in his natural state. They inspired opposite feelings, both of them strong in Burton, that man of contradictions who believed in empire and order but hated tameness and sameness. Much that he saw in the Arabs on his surreptitious way to Mecca repelled him; hereditary ‘greed of gain and revengefulness’, ‘the screaming Arab voice, the voluble, copious, and emphatic abuse, and the mania for gesticulation’.63 Any such mannerisms were liable to awaken in taciturn upper-class Englishmen the same distaste that noisy Latins did. Yet he had an instinctive sympathy with the Bedouin spirit of chivalry and contempt for manual labour; ‘there is degradation, moral and physical, in handwork compared with the freedom of the Desert’.⁶⁴ The West suffered from a chronic misgiving as to whether all the discipline and the toil it imposed on itself and its bondsmen were not a worse vanity than the curling pipe-smoke of the East.

Persia

England failed to conquer Afghanistan, and thought it in consequence, as Englishmen thought Scotland in the age of Bannockburn, intractably barbarous. Afghans, it was true, when not fighting invaders were fighting one another, and in no gentle style. A Scotswoman who did medical work at Kabul in the early years of this century and described the scene in the form of a novel chose as its hero no Afghan but a Panjabi, who had risen to be minister and who was, as she saw him, toiling to bring order out of chaos and old night.⁶⁵ No British woman in India would have made an Indian (except a religious saint) the hero of a book; only beyond the Khyber Pass was such a friendship possible.

Farther east yet the last new Islamic kingdom of traditional pattern came into existence in the 1860s in Kashghar when an adventurer named Yaqub Beg made himself master of eastern Turkestan, which had revolted from China. Because of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in middle Asia a good deal of curiosity was felt about him.66 He and his son met foreign representatives with a ‘studied expression of gravity’, ‘an air of self-conscious dignity’;⁶⁷ their visitors were more likely to be impressed by Yaqub’s calibre as a disciplinarian, and one Englishman declared appreciatively that he had never seen a population more ‘quietly-conducted’ or ‘submissive-looking’.⁶⁸ Before long the infant State was overthrown, not by the Russians, whom Yaqub feared, but – to add ignominy to the decline and fall of Muslim power in Asia – by the Chinese, themselves tottering towards collapse.

But the Muslim country apart from Turkey that touched Western imagination was Persia. Europe’s oldest extant drama is called The Persians; this was the people that had sought to conquer Greece, had defeated Roman legions, and sacked Delhi a century before the British sacked it, after ruling north-west India twenty-two centuries earlier. To Shakespeare Isfahan had not seemed impossibly remote, at any rate from Illyria.⁶⁹ Comparative philology was showing that old Persian was akin to Greek. So was Sanskrit, but Indians were of much darker complexion, as Persians like Turks had always been very conscious: in Persia the European was among people who often looked very much like himself, in other words looked handsome, well-built and intelligent. It was realized that in matters of culture Persia had been, even when politically weak, the grande nation of the entire Muslim East; from its capital, as from Paris, polite letters and polished manners spread on every side. Now in the West too Persian miniatures were collected, Persian poetry was translated, Hafiz was spoken of in the same breath with Horace, Goethe wrote imitations of him; in 1854, five years before Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam first dawned, Tennyson was struggling to learn Persian and taxing his eyesight over the elusive script until he saw Persian letters ‘stalking like giants round the walls of his room’.⁷⁰ Omar Khayyam was a revelation to England: it put into exquisite words the doubts lurking behind the façade of religious faith, the weariness of effort and empire that beset the devotees of work, competition and power.

Yet Persia like the rest had fallen on evil days, and those who saw it from within were more conscious of decrepitude than of the qualities that had made it great. It was caught between the Turks to the west and the Uzbegs and Turkomans to the east and north, and at home Persians were often at odds with a medley of tribal minorities. A Turki dynasty, the Qajar, was reigning in the nineteenth century. One ruler, Nasr-ul-Din (1848–96) got himself known in Europe by making a tour and publishing his journal of it. A woman who saw him in London disliked his ‘coarse bad face’71 but he was the Shah who tried to give the country a new lease of life by incorporating in the old framework as much modernism as it would hold – which was not enough. At the theatre at Berlin in 1873, during an interval in an ‘extremely wearisome’ ballet called Sardanapalus put on for his benefit, he was seen plying Bismarck with a stream of questions. ‘He is thirsting for information,’ a German noted, ‘and prides himself on being the Peter the Great of Persia.’⁷²

Persia’s growing feebleness, and then by 1914 its oil, made it another cockpit of rivalries, which sharpened the eyes of political visitors. There was also some quality of the Persian air, even now, that whetted observation and literary faculties, and many of the accounts written about the country retain their interest. Last in the eighteenth century to arrive was Sir John Malcolm, sent from India on a mission in 1800 when Persia was becoming a counter in the French wars. He was making a careful study of the country and its ‘extraordinary inhabitants’, he reported from Shiraz. ‘The men appear to me all poets.’ Officials were not too poetical to embezzle funds extorted from the public for the mission’s transport. The Shah was chiefly concerned to inquire how many princes there were in the English royal family – in his own they were legion – and how they were treated.⁷³

Eight years later there arrived young James Morier, the diplomat who was to publish in 1824 the best-known and wittiest of all descriptions of Persia, Hajji Baba of Ispahan. He was born with an oriental spoon in his mouth, his father being consul at Stamboul. His novel stamped its picture of Persia on the Western mind for the rest of the century. It was a marvellously graphic delineation of an Eastern régime and society with one foot in the grave, an Arabian Nights comedy where the fishmonger of yesterday might be the minister of today and the bastinado’d jailbird of tomorrow. Under thin disguise Morier brought in the ministers of the day, and the Shah, Fath Ali, whose stupendous beard still deluges us in his portraits, so it is scarcely surprising that the book was banned in Persia for a century. It left out, of course, many things little in evidence at that low ebb of Persia’s chequered fortunes, including the consciousness of a proud national tradition that, once acquired, no nation ever seems altogether to lose. Out of such resources a regeneration of Persia by the Persian people was to have its painful beginnings before the end of the century; something that could no more have been guessed from Hajji Baba than the Spanish struggle against Napoleon from Gil Blas.

E. O’Donovan was in north Persia in 1879–80, as Daily News correspondent. He was a resourceful and well-armed traveller, but he found the going hard, and his impressions were almost unrelievedly dismal. The frontier town of Astarabad that he entered by, a neat enough little place today, on the edge of the Caspian, was then ‘full of hopeless dirt and neglect’, and part of the area inside its crumbling ramparts was jungle infested by wild boars.74 Teheran was nondescript, ‘a strange mixture of the Eastern and Western styles’. He witnessed a royal procession there, coachmen who looked more like scullions driving the harem favourites in old coaches, with apes and baboons capering about them.⁷⁵ Hajji Baba in London found public ceremonial equally ridiculous, no doubt.⁷⁶ Local governors had carte blanche to take what they could, and at one place where O’Donovan heard ‘sad tales of misgovemment and extortion’ a merchant had lately been buried up to his neck in a dungeon with ice packed round his head as a persuasive.⁷⁷ At Kuchan, north of Meshed, the governor was a Kurdish chief, who honoured the traveller with a banquet in semi-European style. A long table was set out in his courtyard with snowy cloth and French as well as local wine and arrack; but just as the Irishman was constructing a Kurdish pun on mushrooms, which were being eaten, the bench opposite him gave way and the emir and his officers rolled together on the gronnd, where they ‘kissed each other with fervour, swore undying devotion, and seemed in no wise inclined to resume their positions at table’.78

Above all O’Donovan depicted a general state of insecurity, a government energetic in robbing its subjects but impotent to protect them. He joined a caravan of pilgrims making for the holy shrine at Meshed five thousand strong, with an armed escort and a four-pounder gun. On the premises of the courteous governor there he was shown a heap of Turkoman heads, stuffed with grass, that were dumped in a cellar. Payment for these marauders’ heads represented a regular part of a frontier commandant’s income.⁷⁹ Readers at home might well conclude that to such a land, with clocks centuries behind Greenwich time, there could be no greater blessing than the Union Jack. This was the conclusion reached by W. S. Blunt, later an uncompromising anti-imperialist, when he travelled in the East in the 1870s and viewed the misery of countries like Persia: surely England had ‘a providential mission’ to set them right, he thought – until he saw India.⁸⁰

E. G. Browne went out from Cambridge in 1887, a young scholar destined to be the leading Western authority on Persian literature. When he wrote his Year among the Persians he had no political moral to point, or hint, yet his colours were about as gloomy as O’Donovan’s. Before long he met an uncle of the Shah, that eager questioner of Bismarck, who as governor of Shiraz for four years had cut off seven hundred hands, and walled men up alive.⁸¹ It is at Shiraz that the tomb of Hafiz stands amid its enchanted rose-gardens. Browne had an eye for the plebian wretchedness that underlay patrician refinement, the shocking conditions for instance in which the famous Persian rugs were made.⁸² He thought it quite understandable that common people objected to the railway and tramway contracts that would enrich only the ministers who gave them and the foreigners who got them. Europeans tended to suppose ‘that the interests of the Shah and of his subjects are identical, when they are in fact generally diametrically opposed’.⁸³

In religious debate Browne was upset by a ‘dreadful’ note of passion, still more by the sight of heretics of the new Babi sect being executed.84 We may interpret this odium theologicum as a twisted outlet of embitterments and frustrations in Persian life. When these could be forgotten there was much more in social intercourse than the traditional Persian fine manners. Dinner-parties had a charming unrestraint, and scintillated with brilliant talk. This realm of wit and fantasy, this escape from the plane of base reality to that of poetry and opium pipes, so fascinated Browne that when summoned back to his university he had to make an effort to uproot himself from his ‘dreamy speculative existence’. Teheran on his way back looked depressingly Westernized.⁸⁵ How stolid suburban Cambridge looked one can only guess.

Curzon’s book on Persia came out in 1892, a few years before he was made Viceroy of India. He saw Persia in Churchillian fashion, as an arena where the mastery of Asia was to be decided; he prepared for his tour with Churchillian thoroughness, turning over all the two or three hundred books in European languages.⁸⁶ Probably none of them did more to fix his ideas than Hajji Baba; in 1895 he wrote a foreword to a new edition of the novel, recommending it as a still faithful inventory of the ‘unchanging characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people’.⁸⁷ His concern as he rode about the country filling his notebooks was with facts about Persia’s trade, resources, politics, just as later on he was passionately interested in India, but not much in Indians, mere clay to be moulded on the potter’s wheel of empire. The poverty he saw made him fear that the people would do nothing to resist a Russian entry; they could not be worse off. ‘A Persian is a coward at the best of times.’⁸⁸ He agreed with an estimate that population had sunk from ten to six millions between 1850 and 1873, through famine and cholera;⁸⁹ he might have reflected that Ireland had been undergoing a similar fate. He thought well of the Shah, but disapproved of his erratic enthusiasms, for example for buying skates or bicycles and making his grandees career about the park on them.⁹⁰

Sherlock Holmes must have been in Persia about the same time, crossing the country on his way back from Tibet before he ‘looked in at Mecca’,⁹¹ and it would be instructive to have his opinion of Persian police. It was not long before Persia was being crossed by another traveller well known to the novelreading public, ‘Pierre Loti’, who started from the Gulf and made his way northward over the massif to Teheran and the Caspian. A naval officer and an aesthete, he was a combination less eccentric in France than he would have been in England. Absorbed in exotic suggestion and sensation, he tells us brilliantly how Persians looked, not how they lived; his most lyrical flight is about the vacant ruins of Persepolis that had haunted his imagination from boyhood.92 By the end of the century the West was experiencing a certain drying-up of human sympathies and concernments. Where he came closer to earth Loti was thinking either about Persian women or, equally as a good Frenchman, about British villains. When Europe’s national hatreds, its equivalent of the theological hatreds of Persia, exploded in 1914 France and Britain were to be allies, but solely by diplomatic accident. Loti was coming from India, and commiserated with the unhappy Hindu groaning under British rule (now directed by Curzon). And while Englishmen found Persians in dread of invasion by France’s ally Russia, Loti found them indignantly anticipating aggression from Britain, and determined to sell their lives dearly.⁹³

For Loti, Persia’s charm lay in not being the noisy bustling vulgar West, but an idyllic survival from older ways. He wanted its inhabitants to harmonize with his own sentiments, to feel happy because they had no thumping machinery around them. In the towns, all blank windowless walls except in the jostling bazaars, he was too much a European not to be chilled by the absence of life, especially after sunset, and too much a Frenchman not to suffer gnawing curiosity about the women, invisible in their mantles. At Isfahan he foolhardily bribed a tradesman to let him climb a ladder and peep over a garden wall. He beheld three ladies engaged, as Persian ladies should be, in gathering roses. ‘Je les espérais plus jolies …,’⁹⁴ In this city he was refused lodgings, as an infidel outlander, by a hostile mob, and charitably taken in by Prince D., the Russian consul-general, and Iris wife, the only resident Europeans, whose establishment gave him ‘European comfort in an Oriental setting’⁹⁵ – an ideal union that Isfahan today offers to all travellers with purses. Nearing the frontier he felt that European proximity was spoiling his innocent Persians, making them tipsy, impudent, thievish.96 It was part of Europe’s changing mood by this time to wonder more often whether its influence on other people was not doing them more harm than good.

Wilson – the later Sir Arnold – was in southern Persia in the seven years before 1914, and his letters and diary bring before us a young cadet from India full of interest in his surroundings and brimming over with devotion to the Curzon-and-Kipling imperial ideal then at its apogee. Persians were feeling the attraction of other Western ideals, and a struggle for constitutional reform and an elected Majlis or parliament was under way. It became a struggle also to defend the national independence against Britain and Russia, suddenly turned allies. In the abstract Englishmen might believe in parliamentary government for all, but oil, then as now, mattered more than ideology. They always wanted to have it both ways, however, and liked to think that their new Russian friends got on better with Persians only because Persians thought them ‘no better than themselves’, whereas they recognized England as on ‘a different plane of civilization’.⁹⁷

‘I like Persians, of all classes,’ Wilson wrote, ‘even nomads and robbers: they are … easier to work and live and play with than Indians …’⁹⁸ This was probably the feeling of most Europeans who knew the two countries. Because they had kept their national existence, Persians did not suffer from a humiliating sense of inferiority, and sometimes looked down on Indians for their tame submission to the foreigner. But Wilson had no patience with their political aspirations. ‘The majlis will not work,’ he wrote positively, ‘it has no roots.’ He dismissed Browne, who was writing in England in defence of the constitutionalists, as a well-meaning ‘visionary’.⁹⁹

Asia was always wrong, when it copied the West and when it did not. Nationalism in India helped to prejudice empire men against popular movements in neighbouring countries; and they were apt to be very distrustful of politicians even in their own countries as wiseacres and windbags. Politicians in Persia were for Wilson, who saw half the truth about them, ‘charming French-speaking frock-coated grandees’ imposing on gullible foreigners.100 He liked the frank Bakhtiari tribesmen who were being enlisted by the oil company as guards. They might look like ‘stage assassins’,¹⁰¹ but were untainted by the nonsense of politics and asked no sophistical questions about British intentions. Increasingly empire men found common ground with both feudal potentates and with hill-folk and desert-dwellers, as against the townsman who had got more education than was good for him.

W. H. Shuster was an American, employed with four others in 1911 to straighten out Teheran’s tangled finances. It was a time when some Americans still thought hopefully of helping to make a better world, rather than an American world, and Shuster was an idealist. His job would have been a hard one at the best, but his worst obstacle was the Russian determination, acquiesced in by Britain, to prevent reform. In the same fashion, he might have recollected, Catherine the Great blocked reform in Poland in order to paralyse the country until it was ready for partition. He admired the courage of the Majlis party, whose leaders, all men from the upper classes, were winning national support.¹⁰² He as well as they were being vilified by the Russians, as W. S. Blunt noted sympathetically in his diary.¹⁰³

When Russia dropped out of the Great War after the Revolution a British force entered western Persia from Iraq to counteract the advancing Turks there and in the Baku oilfield. It was led by General Dunsterville, Kipling’s Stalky, a personification of the empire spirit at its full maturity, with all its virtues and all its limitations. He too had taught himself what to expect in Persia by reading Hajji Baba,¹⁰⁴ and was sure the new politics need not be taken seriously. There was no real patriotism,¹⁰⁵ so no good army could ever be formed; conversely it was very easy to organize an intelligence service and take Persian breath away by well-timed displays of information. British officers had acquired a flair for secret-service work, so much a part of colonial administration. Dunsterville saw the wealthier classes at their worst when famine raged at Hamadan. While he did his best to provide relief work on the Indian model, they remained perfectly callous to horrors that would have appalled anyone ‘not endowed with the wonderful apathy of the Oriental’. Well-fed mullahs ordered the execution of wretches driven by hunger to cannibalism.106

His logic, contained no way of escape for the Persian masses whom he pitied, except foreign rule. For them to rise against their tormentors would make things worse. Revolutionism of every shade, Bolshevik or Persian, plebeian or aristocratic, was for him synonymous with anarchy, social dissolution, moral collapse. A revolutionary was quite literally a degenerate, a creature without human instincts. His only good word for the Russians streaming homeward from the front was when they saved the English from being ambushed by Persian irregulars: ‘even the revolutionary soldiers proved themselves to be “white men” in this matter.’¹⁰⁷ At the end of the war there floated before men like Dunsterville or Curzon, who became Foreign Secretary, an afterglow of the old idea of Britain’s mission, the vision of a grand Pax Britannica stretching from the Mediterranean to India.¹⁰⁸ It was a vision that Britannia no longer had strength to turn into reality; and its intended beneficiaries might have wondered why a country which had just lost a million men in a war nobody knew the meaning of should be offering to bestow Peace on the tranquil East.

The Oriental Scene : Despotism, Hubble-Bubble, Harem

Kinglake set out on his travels to contemplate ‘the splendour and havoc of the East’.¹⁰⁹ His phrase summed up a dual conception of fabulous wealth in the midst of once-great cities in decay and once-proud nations in tatters. Men who talked about the Orient had in mind as a rule what was then called the ‘Near East’ and is now, grown somehow less familiar and more distant, the ‘Middle East’. In other words it was the Islamic world, from Morocco to Turkestan, the realm of minaret and muezzin, bashaw and bulbul, camel and veil and palm. It was the East that Christendom had known for ages, fought a hundred wars with, and in earlier days learned a good deal from, though it preferred now to think itself the heir of Greece and Rome alone. Conscious of this Old World at his elbow, the Westerner felt his identity by contrast with it: it was his shadow, his antithesis, or himself in dreams. He felt in it as Curzon did a ‘wonderful and incalculable fascination’.110

The Arabian Nights enshrined this spell and formed one of Europe’s grand passions. Here was a vista of life comic and irresponsible, and by turns romantic, mysterious, sinister. To its own denizens a realm of necessity or destiny, to Western fantasy this Orient was one of freedom, where man could expand beyond all common limits, with the unlimited power that Napoleon dreamed of there, unlimited luxury, palace and princess, magic and adventure; all those inordinate things that orderly modern man had to renounce and live as if born. Kinglake wrote, with a bit in his mouth. If, as we are now told, our dreams are necessary to our mental equilibrium, Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient may have helped to preserve it through the century when it was leading humanity’s plunge into the unknown.

The East appeared absolved from ordinary laws of rationality because it knew no civil law except the caprice of the stronger. A European, even if not encouraged to think himself ‘free’ as Englishmen were, expected to be decently, sensibly governed under some fixed code, as Prussians were. It was some consolation to him to reflect that if he had little freedom the East had no security, that society there, with no stable ranks or dignities, was a haphazard whirligig of ups and downs, entertaining in fiction but unbearable in fact. Beckford’s novel Vathek of 1787 may be seen as an orientalized version of the old Faust legend that Goethe rediscovered in the same age of violent change, as the Elizabethans had done in theirs. It drew on the forbidding aspects of the East, the violence of the arbitrary will released from any curb, when this was looked at seriously instead of comically. When a Greek secretary of a Turkish embassy suddenly disappeared it was assumed at least half-seriously that he had been strangled and his head sent to Stamboul.¹¹¹

Rulers like Mehemet Ali accused of tyranny might have protested that every government in Asia was condemned as either detestably cruel or nervelessly feeble. They might have said too that Westerners in the East, private individuals as well as colonial officials, were not always slow to adapt themselves to its arbitrary ways. Its inhabitants had to be dealt with highhandedly, it was often alleged, because that was what they were used to, as its horses were used to ponderous bits and saddles. ‘The practice of intimidation thus rendered necessary is utterly hateful to an Englishman,’ Kinglake wrote,112 but he was a greenhorn, and he discovered that Lady Hester Stanhope, domiciled in Syria, met her requirements by employing a band of fierce Albanian retainers, who ‘inspired sincere respect amongst the surrounding inhabitants’, to levy contributions on them. She instructed him that ‘a downright manner, amounting even to brusqueness’, was the best way with orientals, and that no Englishman got on so well with them as ‘a good, honest, open-hearted, and positive naval officer of the old school’.¹¹³ Readers at home came naturally to feel that colonial government must be run on the same no-nonsense lines to inspire respect.

That all Eastern government was hopelessly corrupt, as well as arbitrary, was a tenet not very incorrect, and not confined to empire men. A Prussian who had worn uniform as well as a socialist, Engels studied Asian armies and criticized them scathingly. No efforts of foreign instructors to lick the Persian army into shape could make head, he wrote, against ‘the cupidity and corruption of the Orientals’ and ‘Oriental ignorance, impatience, prejudice’.¹¹⁴ Another part of common opinion was that the East was senile and worn out, the West brisk and youthful. Kinglake could scarcely credit even the authorship of the Arabian Nights to ‘a mere oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry – a mental mummy’.¹¹⁵ In Anstey’s novel The Brass Bottle the Jinn whom the hero unluckily liberates, a being ‘at once so crafty and so childlike, so credulous and so suspicious’,¹¹⁶ is an epitome of the Westerner’s Oriental. He is very old and far behind the times, having been shut up in his bottle by Solomon, and he has a plethora of old saws and adages to illustrate the obvious. In popular mythology and the cinema Orientals have continued to converse in sententious proverbs, revealing thereby their inability to say anything original.

Such threadbare wisdom might be respectable enough when it fitted in with sound conservatism. Dunsterville knew his Sa’adi, and held that Persians could find all the guidance they needed in their own poets, without turning to any Bolshevik ranters. ‘They look feebly for enlightenment to the West, when all that we have worth knowing, except modern science, we have got from the East.’117 Most of what the West had been learning in the past century was a sealed book to its Stalkies, who could find the East congenial because its ideas were even more old-fashioned than their own.

Europeans uneasily conscious of the price they were paying in never-ending instalments for their boasted progress saw other redeeming features in the down-at-heel East. Loti recalled the noise, the ugly scuffling life, that enveloped Europe’s railway-stations, and rejoiced that Persia had been ‘spared by the scourge of progress’, left in ‘happy immobility’.¹¹⁸ Eastern ability to stand aside from time, to bask in the passing moment, was often envied. Societies which leave sordid labour to slaves, women, and donkeys will be rich in leisure, if in little else. The Arabic term kaif found its way into Western dictionaries: it denoted something there was no Western word for, what Burton called ‘the pleasant languor, the dreamy tranquillity, the airy castle-building’, Asia’s counterpart of Europe’s restless ambition.¹¹⁹ Thackeray ran into a London acquaintance who had settled in Cairo for the sake of ‘an indulgence of laziness such as Europeans, Englishmen at least, don’t know how to enjoy’, ‘a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life’.¹²⁰

Europe’s active sectors were not ready yet for leisure, but they were studying comfort, and this was a department of life that well-to-do Muslims (unlike well-to-do Hindus) were neither too idle nor too indifferent to cultivate. All Turks drank coffee, as all continental Europeans did, and Muslim Asia and Britain were the two borrowers from China of tea. Kinglake found it ‘a glad source of fellow-feeling between the Englishman and the Asiatic’.¹²¹ Another aid to well-being was the Turkish bath, which the Turks had received from the Romans and now restored to Europe as the more intellectual Arabs received and restored Aristotle. No traveller who meant to write could afford to miss the Hamam at Stamboul.¹²² Carpets too the East brought to perfection, because it sat on them. ‘We are going to have a Turkey!!! carpet in the dining-room,’ Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to a friend. ‘Ottomans’ entered French drawing-rooms in the eighteenth century, ‘divans’ were in the smoking-rooms of all Europe in the nineteenth. Sherlock Holmes kept his tobacco in a Persian slipper, and children ate Turkish Delight.

But it was at bedtime that the East really seemed to make itself comfortable. If the East half envied, half despised the West’s diurnal activity, the West had the same mixed sensation about the East’s nocturnal existence. Beardsley’s drawing of Ali Baba was a wonderful evocation of the pampered Oriental as Europe saw him, plump, sensual, cynical, heavy of thigh and jowl, with narrow eye and spirited moustache and begemmed turban.124 A Muslim was a man with or in pursuit of four wives, and with a taste for having women about him that were fat, who in pious hours licked his lips over the rewards promised him in paradise –

Harems well stocked, and banquets every day.¹²⁵

His women had no souls; what could they do in such a paradise even if they got there ?

Translations were being made for connoisseurs of old Arab and Indian manuals on sex and on aphrodisiacs, some of which first began filtering westward in the days of the Crusades.¹²⁶ It was plausible to allow the East, with its licence and its leisure, an advantage over the West in these matters at least. A French savant recommending Turkish stimulants in 1686 argued that ‘the greatest passions of Orientals are those which they hold towards their women’.¹²⁷ A hot climate was often said to make both men and women more ‘libidinous’ than they were in the chilly north.¹²⁸ Scott’s pseudo-oriental heroine Zarah, whose mother was a native of an ‘Eastern clime’, owed to it her ‘fierce torrent of passion’ and her confused ideas of morality, as well as to an irregular upbringing in a strolling circus.¹²⁹ Lane extolled the Ghazawee entertainers as ‘the finest women of Egypt’,¹³⁰ and the Cairo belly-dancer was to succeed the Indian nautch-girl as a stock figure of the Westerner’s Orient.

Nothing would go right in Turkey, Palmerston once priggishly told a Pasha, until polygamy was abolished. ‘Ah! milord,’ rejoined the Pasha, ‘nous ferons comme vous, nous présenterons l’une et nous cacherons les autres.’¹³¹ In practice, while the ordinary man in the East could only afford one wife, the man of means in the West indulged himself with a plurality of women. He divided his life as it were into an Occident and an Orient, the latter being the sphere of the illicit, the fleshly, the old Adam, where Old Testament patriarchs and Turkish pashas disported themselves side by side. Goldsmith’s London beau was ‘strongly prejudiced in favour of the Asiatic method of treating the sex … it was impossible to persuade him, but that a man was happier who had four wives at his command, than he who had only one’.132 Boswell communed with himself in the same simple arithmetic with his usual frankness. That celebrated beauty Miss Gunning had ‘as fine a seraglio figure as 1 could wish to see’, he notes. At the theatre ‘I could not help indulging in Asiatic ideas as I viewed such a number of pretty women’.¹³³ At service with Dr Johnson in Lichfield cathedral he reassured himself about some recent peccadilloes as simply ‘Asiatic satisfactions, quite consistent with devotion and with a fervent attachment to my valuable spouse’.¹³⁴ Johnson himself was not a stranger to day-dreams about a harem, and the same was true in private it may be supposed of many a strait-laced middle-class Victorian who took a stoical pride in his monogamy as part of the self-discipline and self-denial that made him the backbone of his country and of civilization.

The harem image appealed to an instinct of possession and domination as well as of mere pleasure. In Christian convention a man talked of his mistress, but it was agreeable at times to think of himself, like his Turkish neighbour across the Danube, as master. An earlier generation of Europeans in the East, the Nabobs among them, did adopt its domestic arrangements. A Frenchman of the later eighteenth century who had been robbed in Arabia of his precious collection of manuscripts sought consolation by collecting a harem in India instead; a hobby ‘so luscious and fascinating in theory, but so irksome and cloying, as well as dangerous in practice’.¹³⁵ Some tried it in later years, like the acquaintance Kinglake met at Smyrna, a man of roving fancy who had dropped anchor there because on any whim he could ‘give orders to his slave-merchant for something in the way of eternal fidelity’.¹³⁶

Most travellers were content with speculation. When Thackeray’s party cruised by the grated windows of the palace at Stamboul, close enough to hear ‘whispering and laughing behind the bars – a strange feeling of curiosity came over some ill-regulated minds …’137 By the 1850s, so true is it that money opens all doors, tourists were being shown round the interior when the inmates were absent.¹³⁸ Baron Munchausen enjoyed the unusual distinction of having been shown round in their presence, by the Grand Signior himself.¹³⁹ Byron’s Don Juan went one better by making free with some of these inmates,¹⁴⁰ and Scott’s court dwarf Hudson, who had been a captive on the Barbary coast, bragged of ‘wild work’ in the Moroccan emperor’s seraglio.¹⁴¹ Here was a Western fantasy at the opposite pole from that favourite of opera-writers, the ‘escape from the seraglio’, where the Western hero rescued the heroine from her gilded cage. A more modest but less fanciful exploit was that of a Frenchman in Russian service who visited the harem of a Crimean chieftain, disguised as a European lady. He had a ticklish time ‘ among so many beautiful women, very scantily clothed’, and very inquisitive about his costume.¹⁴² Stay-at-homes had to make do with what imagination could supply. Odalisques multiplied in the art galleries. There was a vogue of poses plastiques, and tableaux such as ‘The Sultan’s favourite returning from the bath’ were popular.¹⁴³ In Vanity Fair an Eastern traveller with a black servant devises a charade at Steyne House concerned with a Turk, a slave-merchant, and the unveiling of a ravishing slave-girl.¹⁴⁴

To Thackeray the East was fully as vicious as it was comic, and in Cairo he picked up revolting rumours about harem life,¹⁴⁵ which may quite well have been true of some rich mansions but cannot have been more typical of Cairo than the wicked Lord Steyne’s conduct of London. Wives there may have been as much open to censure as husbands. ‘ Innumerable stories of the artifices and intrigues of the women of Egypt have been related to me,’ writes Lane.¹⁴⁶ Burton thought them rather too well protected by law; he was long enough in the East to imbibe some of its notions about how women as well as men ought to be governed. ‘The fair sex is so unruly in this country, that strong measures are necessary to coerce it.’¹⁴⁷ Suspicions of dark doings in the depths of the seraglio were liveliest at Stamboul. In a novel by the Hungarian writer Jokai a high official fled from the capital and up the Danube to save his life from persecution and his daughter from being seized on.148 In 1880 questions were asked in Parliament about a female said to have escaped from the Sultan’s palace and been given up by the British embassy – this was denied – to be strangled.¹⁴⁹

In its treatment of its own working-class women, to say nothing of those employed in the mills it built in Asia, the West had not much to boast of; but one of its commonplaces was that Eastern women aged quickly because of over-work as well as climate. They were ‘complete beasts of burden’, said Byron in Albania.¹⁵⁰ Here was another reason for thinking of the East as a place where, in the words of Mustard Pott the retired bookie in Wodehouse, ‘women are kept in subjection and daren’t call their souls their own’.¹⁵¹ Feminists were indignant over their lot, and the spectacle may have helped to set them thinking about the far from complete liberty and equality of women in the West. Lady Psyche in Tennyson’s Princess, lecturing on the history of woman’s hard usage, having denounced the Salic Law

And little-footed China, touch’d on Mahomet
With much contempt.¹⁵²

Western man, on the contrary, uneasy about the emancipation of women going too fast, had fits of wondering, like Burton, whether the domestic discipline of the East might not have something to be said for it. Turks ‘manage these things better than we do’, declared Byron.¹⁵³ ‘You ought to live in the East,’· the cynical uncle in Goncharov’s story tells his love-lorn nephew. ‘They still tell women whom to love there, and if they disobey, drown them.’¹⁵⁴ Schopenhauer defended the Oriental view of the inferiority of women as far more rational than the Gallic, chivalric woman-worship of the West, which only spoiled women and made Asia laugh, as Greece or Rome would have laughed.¹⁵⁵ Germany was coming late on the scene, resentful of French pretensions, half inclined to turn away from time-honoured European standards it had taken no part in framing.

While Europeans meditated about invisible Eastern beauties, Easterners were intrigued by the novel visibility of Western beauties. Persian painting was infected with Western sexappeal in its vulgarest forms, which can be studied in Fath Ali Shah’s collection of pictures of dancing-girls and female acrobats, one of them standing on her hands.156 The greatest hit of a Western circus at Stamboul in 1849 was a young lady who flew round the ring on a horse in a very scanty dress.¹⁵⁷ For amateurs with money the West had richer treats. One of the brilliant Cora Pearl’s lovers was a Khalil Bey, an old gentleman who turned up in Paris in the 1850s and astounded even the Second Empire by his lavish style of living and loving.¹⁵⁸

Christianity and Islam

To the age of faith Mahomed had been Anti-Christ; to Voltaire’s the arch-fanatic, for the cult of reason formed itself against the background of Turkish as well as Spanish and Italian unenlightenment. Then he was the hypocrite, the wily impostor. Carlyle in his 1840 lectures on Heroes set out to free him from this charge, and historical scholarship moved in the same direction. But ‘Mahomedanism’ as practised continued to provoke dislike or derision more often than not. Reformation and purification had begun, with the Wahhabis in Arabia, but were making slow progress in most lands, and there was still a load of primitive superstition as well as another load of fossilized scholasticism. A great deal was heard about wild Dervishes, the fanatical warriors of the Soudan who killed Gordon, or the ‘dancing dervishes’ who performed on Fridays at Stamboul, gyrating like tops in their conical hats. To that downright Englishman Albert Smith they looked ‘inexpressibly sly and offensive’, and he longed to ‘hit them hard in the face’.¹⁵⁹ Another tourist attraction of Stamboul was the noise of the ‘howling dervishes’.

Englishmen and other Europeans in the nineteenth century had a peculiar combination of rationalism and piety, two things each needful to them at home and still more in their empires, but liable to fall out, as they did over Moses and geology and that other ‘Eastern Question’, the age of the earth. Here again, like Voltaire’s generation, they benefited by being able to set their enlightenment against the dark backcloth of the East. When Curzon dismissed ‘the sterile nonsense that passes for philosophy in the East’,160 he was giving vent to the same robust scepticism that the eighteenth century felt towards Europe’s own outworn creeds and orthodoxies. Such men could tuck their respectable Christian beliefs, along with any doubts they might have about them, into the back of their minds, and feel up-to-date and rational by spurning the absurdities of less progressive regions – Spain, Africa, Islam.

Unreconciled to loss of empire, Muslims clung the more unshakeably to their religion and their anti-Christianism as the badge of what they had once been and dreamed of being again. At Medina in 1853, when war was blowing up between Russian and Turk, Burton heard talk of how the frightened Tsar was offering submission and vassalage to the Sultan, but the Sultan was insisting on his accepting Islam also, and proclaiming a jehad, and an Arab contingent was to be formed, and the spoils of Europe awaited the true believers.¹⁶¹ Muslims above all who had fallen under infidel sway, as in India, were resentfully turning their backs on the new world and retreating into an inner world of dream and dogma. Colonial governments were so careful not to intrude on it that missionaries complained of their work being held back and hampered in countries like the Soudan, and especially where Muslim rulers were being preserved, as in northern Nigeria or some of the Indian States.¹⁶² Conversion of Muslims was admittedly so arduous that there was no great eagerness to attempt it. As late as 1925 an Anglican commission pointed to the ‘startling’ fact that of five thousand missionaries in India scarcely one hundred were making Muslims their quarry.¹⁶³

The consensus of opinion was that Islam was hopelessly sterile and stationary, that its devotees had walled themselves up in a mental prison from which they could neither escape nor be rescued. Oriental fatalism was an obtrusive symptom. Controversy between free will and predestination was one of many things the two religions had shared; now the West, by launching on its career of Progress, had plumped for free will, and in the mirror of the East it could see the image of what it had escaped from, the stupor and paralysis of the human faculties. Stories were told of Turkish soldiers who neglected to take cover because there was no sheltering from the destined bullet, or from the Pen that wrote down whatever was to happen before the creation of the world.

Politically all this might serve Europe well, as in India. And Europeans might be willing to admit that in the very primitive comers of the world where Islam was still spreading, it was an improvement on the old paganism. Winwood Reade welcomed its advent in odd parts of Africa on this ground.164 More unaccountable was the conversion to Islam of one or two Europeans, including a British peer – who might as easily have been exþected to sprout wings and turn into a fairy, like the peers in Iolanthe. Lord Stanley of Alderley made himself the spokesman of Muslim feeling in India and Malaya. On his estates in Wales, where Anglicanism and landlordism were coming under fire together, he continued to be ‘an ardent supporter of the Church of England’.¹⁶⁵

NOTES

1. Katib Chelebi, The Balance of Truth, trans. G. L. Lewis (1957), pp. 29–30.

2. R. Hakluyt, Voyages (Everyman edn), Vol. 3, p. 40. cf. the sad experiences in the later seventeenth century recorded in Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. E. H. W. Meyerstein (Oxford, 1945), pp. 54 ff.

3. J. H. Srawley, Michael Honywood, Dean of Lincoln (1660–81) (Lincoln, 1950), p. 19.

4. G. S. Thomson, Life in a Noble Household, 1641–1700 (1937), p. 362.

5. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. W. K. Wimsatt and F. A. Pottle (i960), p. 125. Special certificates were furnished to such men in Scotland.

6. W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges (1855): ‘George the Second’.

7. The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1.

8. See M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question (1966), Chapter 1.

9. John Bright quoted this passage in his speech in the House of Commons on 31 March 1854.

10. Sir W. Gell, Narrative of a Journey in the Morea (1823), p. 217.

11. An Irish Peer on the Continent, ed. T. U. Sadleir (1920), under dates 3 January and 14 February 1803.

12. Lord Eversley, The Turkish Empire (3rd edn, 1924), p. 270.

13. N. V. Rłasanovsky, Nicholas I and Officiai Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (University of California, 1959), p. 219.

14. See note 9.

15. John Leech’s Pictures of Life and Character, from Punch (n.d.), p. 117.

16. Reproduced in R. S. Lambrick, A Historian’s Scrapbook (1932), p. 60.

17. J. W. Sherer, Havelock’s March on Cawnpore (1857), p. 323 (Nelson edn, n.d.).

18. Captain F. W. von Herbert, The Defence of Plevna, 1877 (1895), PP· 233–4 (1911 edn).

19. R. F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), pp. 14–15 (Everyman edn).

20. W. T. Stead, Truth about Russia (1888), p. 274. The Russian was Ignatiev.

21. W. Baird, General Wauchope (Edinburgh, 1900), pp. 58, 64.

22. Sir A. Colvin, The Making of Egypt (1906), p. 383 (Nelson edn, n.d.).

23. See W. Baird, op. cit., p. 60; George Bernard Shaw, Preface to John Bull’s Other Island (1906).

24. Letter of 5 February 1843, in S. Lane-Poole, The Life of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, K. G., p. 21 (one-volume edn, 1890).

25. See Sir H. Luke, The Old Turkey and the New (new edn, 1955), Chapter 3: ‘The Era of the Tanzimat’.

26. Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe Schillingsfuerst, trans. G. W. Chrystal (1906), Vol. 1, pp. 200–201.

27. A. Smith, A Month at Constantinople (1850), pp. 53–4.

28. Sir J. W. Whittall, Frederick the Great on Kingcraft (1901; second part is on Turkey), pp. 186–7.

29. ibid., p. 166.

30. Sir W. Gell, op. cit., pp. 211, 220.

31. Letter of 12 November 1809, in The Letters of Lord Byron, ed. R. G. Howorth (Everyman edn), pp. 25–7.

32. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen (1844), Chapter 21.

33. ibid., Chapter 17.

34. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1845), p. 118 (1888 edn).

35. ibid., pp. 127–9.

36. ibid., pp. 147–8.

37. ibid., p. 109.

38. A. Smith, op. dt., p. ix.

39. ibid., pp. 57, 90.

40. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), Vol. 1, p. 99 (Bohn Library edn).

41. J. T. Whitall, op. dt., pp. 164–5.

42. ibid., p. 157.

43. See on this Frenchman W. Connely, Count D’Orsay (1952), pp. 429–30, 439·

44. James Nasmyth, Engineer, ed. S. Smiles (new edn, 1885), pp. 271–3.

45. W. H. G. Kingston, The Three Midshipmen (2nd edn, 1873), Chapter 7. These Egyptian soldiers surprise them by their dogged courage.

46. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey, p. 255.

47. Ibid., pp. 271–2.

48. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1., pp. 17, 35,

49. E. W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), pp. 267, 269–70 (1890 edn).

50. Ibid., p. 255.

51. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey, p. 292.

52. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1, pp. no-12.

53. E. W. Lane, op. cit., p. 273.

54. A. N. Poliak, Feudalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Lebanon, 1250–1900 (1939), p. 66.

55. A. Colvin, op. cit., p. 27.

56. Ibid.

57. ‘Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr’ (1842).

58. H. M. Walmesley, Sketches of Algeria during the Kabyle War (1858), p. 116.

59. L. Daudet, Le Nabab (1877).

60. H. M. Walmesley, op. cit., pp. 259 ff. cf. Engels on the Kabyles: ‘the bravest, most tenacious, and most wary skirmishers the world ever saw’ (Engels as Military Critic, ed. W. H. Chaloner and W. O. Henderson (Manchester, 1959), pp. 89–90).

61. H. M. Walmesley, op. cit., pp. 18–23, n8.

62. There are several essays on this theme in the collection by E. Castelar, Recuerdos y Esperanzas (Madrid, n.d.).

63. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1, p. 247, Vol. 2, p. 17.

64. ibid., Vol. 2, p. 10; cf. p. 118.

65. Lillias Hamilton, A Vizier’s Daughter (1900).

66. See my article ‘Kashghar and the Politics of Central Asia, 1868–1878’, in Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. XI (1956).

67. H. W. Bellew, Kashmir and Kashghar (1875), pp. 300, 357.

68. ibid., p. 237.

69. Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5; Act 3, Scene 4.

70. Hallara Lord Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1897), Vol. 1, P· 374·

71. M. K. Waddington, Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife, 1883–1900 (1903), p. 302.

72. Hohenlohe Schillingsfuerst, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 91.

73. J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm (1856), Vol. 1, pp. 123,126,133.

74. E. O’Donovan, Merv (1883), pp. 52, 54.

75. ibid., pp. 79 ff.

76. See The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828), James Morier’s less entertaining sequel to his earlier novel.

77. E. O’Donovan, op. cit., p. 73.

78. ibid., pp. 114 ff.

79. ibid., pp. 130, 139.

80. W. S. Blunt, Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt (1907), pp. 9, 12, 59, 62. He visited southern Persia in 1879.

81. E. G. Browne, A Year among the Persians (1893), p. 107.

82. ibid., p. 441.

83. ibid., p. 90.

84. ibid., pp. 270, 517.

85. ibid., pp. 535, 551.

86. G. N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (1892), Vol. 1, pp. vii-viii.

87. ibid., Vol. 1, p. ix.

88. ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 219, 277. cf. A. Vambéry, The Story of my Struggles (Nelson edn, n.d.), p. 187, on ‘the unexampled cowardice’ and disorganization of the Persian army; he reckoned one Turkoman worth ten Persians.

89. G. N. Curzon, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 492.

90. ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 397–9.

91. See ‘The Empty House’, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

92. ‘Pierre Loti’, Vers Ispahan (1904), p. 119 (Nelson edn, Paris, n.d.).

93. ibid., p. 80, etc.

94. ibid., p. 216.

95. ibid., p, 183.

96. ibid., p. 274.

97. Sir A. Wilson, S. W. Persia (1942), p. 287.

98. ibid., p. 197.

99. ibid., pp. 89–90.

100. ibid., p. 95.

101. ibid., p. 52.

102. W. M. Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (1912), pp. 175–6.

103. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (1932 edn), e.g. pp. 618, 786.

104. L. C. Dunsterville, The Adventures of Dunsterforce (1920), p. 13·

105. ibid., pp. 153–4.

106. ibid., pp. 80, no.

107. ibid., p. 54.

108. See A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its Enemies (1959), p. 184.

109. Eothen, Chapter 1.

110. G. N. Curzon, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 12.

111. T. U. Sadleir, op. cit., 14 February 1803.

112. Eothen, Chapter 24.

113. ibid., Chapter 8.

114. ‘Persia and China’ (May 1857), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (collected articles, Moscow,? 1960), pp, 111. Unlike Curzon and Vambéry, Engels did not accuse the Persians of cowardice. As to corruption, Shuster had to admit that even tried patriots succumbed to Persian habit once in office (op. cit., p. 3).

115. Eothen, Chapter 6.

116. ‘F. Anstey’, The Brass Bottle (1900), p. 218.

117. L. C. Dunsterville, op. cit., pp. 91–2.

118. Loti, op. cit., p. 94.

119. A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1, p. 9.

120. Notes of a Journey, pp. 303–4. cf. A. Vambéry, op. cit., p. 129: ‘A prominent feature of the Oriental character is an extraordinary serenity and an easy-going, contemplative turn of mind.’

121. Eothen, Chapter 12.

122. E.g. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey, p. 124; A. Smith, op. cit., pp. 73 ff.

123. September 1813; see M. Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1803–1850 (Oxford, 1965), p. 230.

124. No. 117 in The Best of Beardsley, ed. R. A. Walker (n.d.). It belongs to 1897.

125. P. G. Hamerton, Poems (1859), pp. 185–9: ‘Al Jannat’ (Paradise). cf. Voltaire’s Sultan in Zaïre (1732), Act 1, Scene 2:

‘Je sais que notre loi, favorable aux plaisirs,
Ouvre un champ sans limites à nos vastes désirs …

126. A. H. Walton, Stimulants for Love (1966), Chapter 2.

127. ibid., p. 109.

128. E. W. Lane, op. cit., p. 274.

129. Sir W. Scott, Peveril of the Peak (1822), Chapters 47 and 49.

130. E. W. Lane, op. cit., p. 348.

131. Sir M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872 (1911), p. 206.

132. The Citizen of the World (1762), p. 267 (Everyman edn). Europe has also, however, thought of homosexuality as a prevalent vice of the Muslim East.

133. Boswell: the Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. C. Ryskamp and F. A. Pottle (1963), pp. 55, 65.

134. ibid., pp. 293–4.

135. Raymond, preface to translation of the Seir-Mutaquerin (1789; new edn, 1902).

136. op. cit., Chapter 5.

137. Notes of a Journey, p. 131. For earlier impressions of the palace at Stamboul see N. M. Penzer, The Harem (1965).

138. A. Smith, op. cit., p. 97.

139. R. E. Raspe, Baron Munchausen. Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785), Chapter 9.

140. Don Juan, Cantos 5 and 6.

141. Peveril of the Peak, Chapter 36.

142. Memoirs of the Comte de Rochechouart, 1788–1822, trans. F. Jackson (1920), p. 119.

143. P. Fryer, Mrs Grundy. Studies in English Prudery (1965 edn), p. 273. In the eighteenth century ‘Turkish beauties’ was a cant phrase for buttocks (ibid., p. 40).

144. W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848), Chapter 51. cf. Chapter 9, ‘The King’s Harem’, in W. Knighton’s book on Oudh before its annexation, The Private Life of an Eastern King (1855).

145. W. M. Thackeray, Notes of a Journey, pp. 278–9.

146. E. W. Lane, op. cit., p. 236.

147. A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1, p. 175, n. 1.

148. M. Jokai, Timar’s Two Worlds (English edn, Edinburgh, 1930).

149. Hansard, 3rd Series, Vol. CCLV, Cols. 1,572, 1,842 (1880).

150. The Letters of Lord Byron, p. 26.

151. P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939), Chapter 14.

152. 1847; part 2.

153. Cited in P. Quennell, Byron in Italy (1951 edn), p. 237.

154. Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1846), trans. I. Litvinova (Moscow, n.d,), p. 191.

155. Essay ‘On Women’, in Selected Essays, ed. E. B. Bax (1926). He thought Hindus and even Hottentots more sensible than Europeans about women.

156. See the collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

157. A. Smith, op. cit., pp. 87–8.

158. W. H. Holden, The Pearl from Plymouth (1950), p. 98.

159. A. Smith, op. cit., p. 108.

160. G. N. Curzon, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 493.

161. A Pilgrimage, Vol. 1, pp. 291–2.

162. See Report of Commission VII of the World Missionary Conference, 1910: Missions and Governments (Edinburgh, n.d.).

163. The Call from the Moslem World, preface by Right Rev. S. Donaldson (1926), p. 25.

164. The Martyrdom of Man (1872), pp. 234 ff. (Thinker’s Library edn). G. Simon, The Progress and Arrest of Islam in Sumatra (1912) complains that the active spread of Islam, in regions like central Africa as well as Indonesia, is the Christian missionary’s worst obstacle (p. xxii).

165. Dictionary of National Biography.