Benevolence and kindness are the principal characteristics of both sexes. During the whole period of our stay in Turkey we never saw even a child ill-treat a hapless animal.
Travellers, especially women, are seldom sufficiently conversant with the laws of a country to be able to expatiate with much accuracy on such matters. Turkish laws are said to be bad; perhaps they are so, but certainly there are few cities in Europe where the streets can be so safely traversed, both by night and day, as those of Constantinople.
Turkish manners, also, are peculiarly agreeable. Turks are not ashamed to show that they wish to please—that they wish to be courteous; happily they have not yet adopted that brusquerie of manner that is becoming so prevalent in the West.
The fault is perhaps an overabundance of ceremony and etiquette. Even in their own houses, in the seclusion of home, the master of a family is treated with a respectful deference which would astonish many Christian sons, who unhappily often now only look upon their father as the purse-holder, out of whom they must wring as much money as possible.
In the Selamluk[1] no person seats himself without the permission of the master of the house; in the harem the same etiquette is observed, the hanoum, or first wife, reigning there supreme.
We had often heard that Eastern women enjoyed in reality far more liberty than their Western sisters, and in some respects this is certainly true; but in point of fact the liberty they possess in being able to go in and out unquestioned, to receive and pay visits where they choose, does not at all compensate for the slavery of the mind which they have to endure, from being cut off from the education and mental improvement they would gain by association with the other sex.
Mental imprisonment is worse even than bodily imprisonment, and by depriving a woman of legitimate ambition, by taking from her the wish for mental culture, she is reduced to the condition of a child—a very charming one, probably, when young, but a painful position for her when, youth having departed, the power of fascination decays with the loss of beauty; and though in some instances it is well known that the natural talent of the woman has had the power of retaining her husband’s heart, still it too often happens that, after very few years of love and admiration, he turns to one still younger and fairer to charm his hours of leisure.
Not only did we constantly see Madame R—— and her charming daughter Nadèje, and the wives and relatives of the ministers, &c., whose acquaintance we made, but we had the honour of being invited to pay visits to most of the members of the imperial family; and the more we saw of the Turkish ladies the more we liked the kindly, gentle-hearted women who received us with such friendly hospitality.
In the royal palaces there was of course more splendour, more gold, more diamonds, more slaves—especially the hideous black spectres, who are often so revoltingly frightful that they look like nightmares. But in all essentials a description of a visit to one harem serves to describe the receptions at all.
During our visits to their wives the pashas often requested permission to enter the harem, and we were delighted to make the acquaintance of F—— Pasha, a statesman distinguished throughout Europe by his enlightened views, his generous nature, and by the improvements his wise legislation has effected for his country. Successive visits, both to his lovely palace on the Bosphorus and to us on board the yacht, turned this acquaintance into a friendship which we valued as it indeed deserved.