"I am always surrounded by hypocrites and parasites," he said to me one day; "I am weary of these everlasting laudations and this endless sneaking. They all want to take advantage of me, all seek to gratify their private interests; and all that come to my ears are base lies and mean dissimulations. Believe me, the truth, be it ever so bitter, would please me better than all these empty compliments to which they feel bound to treat me. I want you to speak frankly and openly to me; you are my superior in years and experience; you are at home both in the East and in the West, and there is much I can learn from you." This candid speech, of a sort not very usual with Oriental potentates, naturally encouraged me still more, and during the hours spent in confidential tête-à-tête with Sultan Abdul Hamid I could touch upon the tenderest and most delicate points of the home and foreign politics of his court and the characteristics of his dignitaries. The Sultan always surprised me with his sound remarks. He bitterly complained of the untrustworthiness of his first ministers, called them not very complimentary names, and from the confidences of this apparently mighty autocrat I caught a faint glimmer of his impotence and utter loneliness. Once when I called his attention to the ignoble conduct of his chief courtiers, he appeared to be specially excited, and cried, "Do you think I do not know every one of them, and am not aware of it all? Alas! I know but too well. But whence can I procure other and better people in a society which for centuries has wallowed in this pool of slander? Only time and culture can do salutary work here; nothing else can do it." And, indeed, contrary to all previously conceived notions, the Sultan had admitted into his immediate surroundings such young people as had distinguished themselves in the schools, and were in no way connected with the leading families. His object was to create a circle of his own round him, and like these confidants at home, he wanted me, abroad, to show him my friendship by sending him at least twice a month a report written in Turkish about public opinion in Europe; about the position of the political questions of the day; about the condition of Islam outside Turkey, and to answer the questions he would put to me.
I readily promised my services, but soon realised that with all his apparent frankness, these confessions of a monarch brought up in strictly Oriental principles were not to be taken in real earnest, for when one day, in the heat of conversation, I made some slightly critical remarks, and ventured to question the expediency or the advisability of certain measures and plans of his Majesty, I noticed at once signs of displeasure and surprise on his countenance, and from that time little clouds have darkened the horizon of our mutual intercourse. And how could it be otherwise? Potentates, and above all Orientals, are far too much accustomed to incense; the coarse food of naked truth cannot be to their taste; and when an absolute ruler is superior to his surroundings, not only in actual power but also in intellectual endowments, an adverse opinion, no matter how thickly sugared the pill may be, is not easily swallowed. From the very beginning of his reign Sultan Abdul Hamid has never tolerated any contradiction; apparently he listened patiently to any proffered advice, but without allowing himself to be shaken in his preconceived opinion; and when some Grand-Vizier or other distinguished himself by steadfastness to his own individual views, as was the case, for instance, with Khaired-din Pasha, Kiamil Pasha, Ahmed Vefik Pasha, and others, they soon have had to retire. True, through his extraordinary acuteness the Sultan has mitigated many mistakes resulting from his defective education. In conversation he hardly ever betrayed his absolute lack of schooling, although he was not even well versed in his own mother-tongue. He said to me frequently, "Please talk ordinary Turkish!" His excellent memory enabled him to turn to good account a thing years after he had heard it, and his flowery language deceived many of his European visitors. But, taking him altogether, he was a great ignoramus and sadly needed to be taught, though in his sovereign dignity and exalted position of "God's Shadow on Earth," he had to fancy himself omniscient. Thoroughly convinced of this, I have, in my subsequent intercourse with the Sultan, exercised a certain amount of reserve; I learned to be ever more careful in my expressions, and when the Sultan noticed this I replied in the words of the Persian poem—
"The nearness of princes is as a burning fire,"
which he took with a gratified smile. In a word, I was a dumb counsellor, and I much regret that the European diplomats on the Bosphorus did not look upon my position in this light, but laid all sorts of political intrigues to my charge; and that my relations to the Sultan, who had me for hours together in his room—and when I was there kept even his most intimate chamberlain at a distance—necessarily gave rise to a good deal of speculation. The long faces, the frowns, the despairing looks which the court officials in the Sultan's immediate vicinity showed me, and the way they measured me when after a long audience I crossed the hall or the park, often startled me and made me feel uncomfortable. These simple folks took me for the devil or some magic spectre personified who had ensnared their sovereign, and was leading him, God only knows whither. There were but few who had a good word for me, and many were quite convinced that at every visit I carried away with me into the land of unbelievers quantities of treasures and gold. When later on through my intercourse with the Moslem scholars and Mollas at court I had made a name as a practical scholar of Islam, and became conspicuous on account of my Persian and Tartar conversational powers, they were still more astonished, and the head-shaking over my enigmatic personality became even more significant. They took me for a deposed Indian prince, a Turkestan scholar exiled by the Russians, but most often for a dangerous person whom it had been better for the Sultan never to have known. To the European circles of Pera I was likewise a riddle. Sometimes alone, sometimes in company with Hungarian academicians, I used to search in the Imperial treasure-house for remains of the library of King Mathias Corvinus, captured by the Turks in Ofen and brought over to Constantinople. I discovered many things, but I was branded as a political secret agent of England. A well-known diplomatist said, "Ce savant est un homme dangereux, il faut se défaire de lui." But the good man was mistaken. I was neither dangereux nor secret agent of any State; for, in the first place, my self-esteem revolted against the assigned rôle of dealer in diplomatic secrets; and, moreover, what Cabinet would think of employing a secret agent outside their Legation, maintained at such great expense? I do not for a moment wish to hide the fact that in my conversations with the Sultan about political questions I always took the side of Austro-Hungary and England; that I was always up in arms against Russia, and launched out against the perfidy, the barbarism, and the insatiable greed for land of the Northern power. More anti-Russian than all Turks and the Sultan himself, I could not well be, and the more I could blacken Russia politically the better service did I fancy I rendered to our European culture. To obviate any suspicion, the Sultan once wanted to invite me to a court dinner together with the Russian Ambassador Nelidoff; however, I begged to be excused. Of the various ambassadors I have only attended a public court dinner with the Persian Ambassador (Prince Maurocordato), the plenipotentiary of Greece, and with Baron Marshal von Bieberstein, and these diplomatists were not a little surprised to notice the attention with which the Sultan treated me.
For several years I thus enjoyed the Sultan's favour and occupied this exceptional position at his court. As long as the Grand Seigneur saw in me a staunch Turcophile and defender of Islam, who, led by fanaticism, palliated all the mistakes and wrong-doings with which Europe charged all Oriental systems of government; as long as I regarded Turkey as an unwarrantably abused State, and European intervention as unjustifiable at all times, he gave me his undivided confidence and astonished me by his unfeigned candour.
Many years of experience in Turkish society had taught me that the Sultan is regarded as an almost Divine being, and consequently this extraordinary affability was all the more surprising. He treated me, so to speak, as a confidential friend, talked with me about State concerns, and the interests of his dynasty, as if I had been an Osmanli and co-regent of the empire. He conferred with me about the most delicate political questions, with a candour, which he never displayed even before his Grand-Vizier and his Ministers; and consequently my letters to him from Budapest were free and unrestrained, and such as this sovereign had probably never received before.
Now, if there had only been questions of purely Turkish interests, internal reforms and improvements, there would have been no occasion to shake the Sultan's confidence in me, but Sultan Abdul Hamid's mind was always busy with foreign politics, and because in regard to these I could not always unconditionally agree with him, this was bound to lead in process of time, if not to an absolute rupture, at any rate to a cooling of our former warm friendship. For some time the Egyptian Question was the chief point of discussion. The Sultan often complained to me about the unlucky star which ruled over his foreign politics; that he had lost so many of the inherited provinces, that the loss of the Nile-land, that precious jewel of his crown, was particularly grievous to him, and that the faithlessness of the English troubled him above all things. As a matter of course he vented his wrath especially upon the English Government; and although he was not particularly enamoured of any of the European Cabinets, nay, I might say, hated and feared them all alike, it was the St. James's Cabinet which, whether Liberal or Conservative, had always to bear the brunt of his ire. He was on very bad terms with the two English Ambassadors who shortly before and shortly after his accession to the throne represented the Cabinet of St. James's in Constantinople. Once, Lady Layard sent me for presentation to the Sultan, a picture of herself in a very valuable frame, and when I delivered it on the occasion of an evening audience the Grand Seigneur, generally so completely master of himself, became quite excited, and pointing to the portrait he said to me, "For this lady, whom you see there, I have the greatest respect; for during the war she has tended my wounded soldiers with great self-sacrifice, and I shall always feel grateful to her; but as for her husband," he continued, "I have torn him out of my heart, for he has shamefully abused my confidence." Thereupon he tore at his breast as if he would pull something out, and slinging his empty hand to the ground, he tramped excitedly on the floor, as if he were demolishing the heart of the absent delinquent. This act of passionate emotion I have noticed more particularly among Turkish women, and there are many traits in the Sultan's character which speak of the harem life. I tried to pacify the angry monarch by reminding him that Layard, as ambassador, had but done his duty in delivering the message, and that those gentlemen alone were to blame who had allowed such confidential communications to become public property. I quoted, moreover, the Koran passage which says, "La zewal fi'l sefirun" ("The envoy is not to be blamed"); but it was all in vain, the name of this deserving English diplomat had quite upset the Sultan; he was unwilling and unable to distinguish between the actions of the statesman and of the private gentleman.
One cannot altogether blame the Sultan either, when we think of the bitter experiences he so often has had to undergo; but in politics, justice and fairness have quite a different meaning from what they have in ordinary life, and Sultan Abdul Hamid most decidedly acted imprudently when, without taking into consideration England's most vital interests, he demanded of this State a policy which, on account of the altered general aspect of affairs, and on account of the growing insular antipathy against Turkey, had become impossible. That the Conservatives, in spite of all Mr. Gladstone's Atrocity-meetings, dared to appear with a fleet in the Sea of Marmora, to prevent Russia from taking Constantinople, has never been appreciated by the Sultan. He had always before his eyes the comedy of Dulcigno and Smyrna, instigated by the Liberal Government of England, and the occupation of Egypt appeared to him more perfidious than the challenge of Russia, and all the injury he had sustained from the Western Power.
In course of time the relations between the Porte and the Cabinet of St. James were bound to become cooler. Inter duos litigantes, Russia was the tertius gaudens; and when in addition to the previous coldness the Armenian difficulties arose, the two great European Powers completely changed places in Asia, for the Russian arch-enemy became the bosom friend and confidant of the Turkish court (not of the Turkish nation), and England was looked upon as the diabolus rotæ of the Ottoman Empire. With regard to the Armenian troubles Sultan Abdul Hamid's anger against England was not altogether unfounded; for although in London good care was taken to keep aloof publicly from the disturbances in the Armenian mountains, the agitation of English agents in the North of Asia Minor is beyond all doubt. The Sultan was carefully informed of this both foolish and unreasonable movement. Whatever the Hintchakists and other revolutionary committees of the Armenian malcontents brewed in London, Paris, New York, Marseilles, &c., full knowledge of it was received in Yildiz; the Armenians themselves had provided the secret service. As early as the autumn of 1890 the Sultan complained to me about these intrigues, and twelve months later he made use of the expression, "I tell you, I will soon settle those Armenians. I will give them a box on the ear which will make them smart and relinquish their revolutionary ambitions." With this "box on the ear" he meant the massacres which soon after were instituted. The Sultan kept his word. The frightful slaughter in Constantinople and many other places of Asia Minor has not unjustly stirred up the indignation of the Christian world, but on the other hand the fact should not have been lost sight of that Christian Russia and Austria in suppressing revolutions in their own dominions have acted, perhaps, not quite so severely, but with no less blood-thirstiness. That his drastic measures roused the public opinion of all Europe against the Sultan was no secret to him. He was aware of the beautiful titles given to him, "Great Assassin," "Sultan Rouge," "Abdul the Damned," &c., and once touching upon the Western infatuation against his person, he seemed in the following remark to find a kind of apology for the cruelties perpetrated in his name. "In the face of the everlasting persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world," the Sultan said, "I have been, so to speak, compelled to take these drastic measures. By taking away Rumenia and Greece, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish State body. The loss of Bulgaria, Servia, and Egypt has deprived us of our hands, and now by means of this Armenian agitation they want to get at our most vital parts, tear out our very entrails—this would be the beginning of total annihilation, and this we must fight against with all the strength we possess." In truth, notwithstanding all the evident signs of a total downfall the Sultan still nursed high-flown ideas of regeneration and security for his Empire. He often spoke of the cancelling of capitulations and of the certain advantages to be derived from his Alliance schemes. He has always placed great confidence in the Panislamic movement which he inaugurated, and which he certainly directed very skilfully. His agents traverse India, South Russia, Central Asia, China, Java, and Africa; they proclaim everywhere the religious zeal, the power and the greatness of the Khaliph; up to the present, however, they have succeeded only in making the birthday of the Sultan a day of public rejoicing throughout Islamic lands, and in preparing the threads wherewith to weave the bond of unity. One day, as we were talking about these plans, he denied them altogether, and pretended to be very much surprised. These schemes for the future were his particular hobby; he spoke of them only to his most intimate servants and court officials, and to no one besides, not even to his ministers. The latter he called fortune-hunters, who deserve no confidence. "How can I believe my ministers?" he said at one time. "When a while ago I sent for my police minister, he came into my presence quite intoxicated. I drove the swine out of the room and dismissed him next day." That he encouraged the evil, that with his strictly autocratic and absolutist ideas he prevented the growth of capable statesmen, that no clever politicians could possibly thrive under him—all this he would never realise, although I often hinted at it and reminded him of the Prophet's warning, "Ye shall consult one another." He was and always will be an incorrigible Arch-Turk, who in the shadow of his Divine reputation would have free disposal of all things; and when his First Secretary told him that I had been a protégé of the late Grand-Vizier Mahmud Nedim Pasha, the friend of Ignatieff, he said, turning to me, "Yes, Mahmud Nedim Pasha was a singularly clever man, a true Turk and Moslem, and a faithful servant to his master."