Later on I also touched upon this subject in conversation with the Sultan. We were speaking about the comments made in Europe regarding the negligence in the fortifications at the entrance to the Black Sea, when the Sultan interrupted me and said, "Why should Europe criticise this? I have a house with two doors; what does it matter to anybody if I choose to close the one and open the other?" In a word, the Sultan has given me several irrefutable proofs that the persistent anti-Russian tendency of my publications was inconvenient to him, and that he would be better pleased if I attacked England or kept quiet altogether. Of course he would like best of all to banish pen and ink altogether from the world, and as it was impossible for me to support him in his absolute autocratic principles, a cooling of our mutual relationship was unavoidable.
The breach between us was made still wider by the publication of my pamphlet La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant quarante ans, Paris, 1898, in which I tried to refute the thesis—so constantly and erroneously advanced in Europe—that the Turks as a nation are incapable of being civilised, by comparing the state of their culture as it is now and as it was forty years ago. Naturally in a study of this kind I had to draw the connection between the progress of culture and the political decline of the land, and the question why, if the Turks are really advancing in culture, they should politically be overtaken by Rumania, Servia, Bulgaria, and Greece, I could only answer by pointing to the autocratic and absolutist tendencies of the Sultan. Only the court and the unconscionable clique reigning there are to blame for the present decline of Turkey. With this article I increased my popularity in Turkey, but at court they were, of course, anything but pleased. Nevertheless the Sultan invited me to pay him a visit; I did so, and the reception I had was highly characteristic. While the Padishah thanked me for the service I had rendered to the Turkish nation, the offended autocrat took my measure with angry looks, without, however, betraying his anger. It was interesting to watch the internal struggle of the offended tyrant, and I consider it only reasonable that henceforth he would have no more to do with me.
Thus ended my intimate intercourse with Sultan Abdul Hamid. The only benefit it has been to me was a rubbing up of my impressions of life in the Near East, a renewal of old relationships, and the editing of a few valuable old Slav manuscripts which I found in the treasure-house of the Sultan, and which were lent me for a considerable length of time. But the renewal of my acquaintance with the Orient was void of that charm which it had for me on my first visit. The East and myself are both thirty years older; the East has lost much of the glory of its former splendour, and I have lost the vigour of my youth. I fancied myself an elderly man who, after thirty years meeting again the adored beauty of his youthful days, misses the wealth of her locks, the fire in her eyes, the brightness of her rosy cheeks. Old Stambul, the Bosphorus, and Pera—everything was changed. The Sultan's mad love of extravagance, the unfortunate war of 1878, and above all the loss of Bulgaria—in fact nearly the whole of Rumania—had reduced the dominating class almost to beggary. Gone were the rich Konaks in Stambul, empty the once glorious yalis (villas) on the Bosphorus, and of the Effendi world, flourishing and well-to-do in my time, only a few miserable vestiges remained.
The Christian element, as compared with the Moslem, has increased enormously; the European quarter of the city is full of life and animation, and the Turk, always wont to walk with bowed head, now bends it quite low on his breast as he loiters among the noisy, busy crowds of the Christian populace. He is buried in thought; but whether he will be able to pull himself together and recover himself is as yet an open question.
When speaking of my renewed visits to Turkey and my personal intercourse with the Sultan, I made mention of my English sympathies; and I feel bound to say a word about the rumours then prevalent, which made me out to be a secret political agent of England, the more so since a member of Parliament, Mr. Summers, has questioned the Conservative Government regarding this matter. I have never at any time stood in any official relation to the English Government. My intercourse with the Conservative and Liberal statesmen on the Thames and on the Hugli (Calcutta) has always been of a strictly private nature, and, just as my utterances in the daily papers were taken notice of by the public, so my occasional memoranda to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been accepted as the private information of an expert, friendly to the cause of England—information for which nobody asked me, and for which labour therefore I could claim no compensation from anybody. This anomalous position of mine was touched upon by the Central Asiatic writer, Mr. Charles Marvin, in his Merv, the Queen of the World[2] issued, in 1881. He there blames the English Government for having neglected me, and for leaving me in poverty, in spite of all my services. As regards this, I must say that I had at one time a modest yearly income, while working with all my might for the defence of India, a possession from which England derived in commercial profits alone many million pounds sterling; but I never suffered actual poverty, and it never entered my mind to take steps to obtain material acknowledgment of my services. English statesmen least of all thought of making any such acknowledgment. They looked upon me merely as a writer in pursuit of a purely platonic object, and this English cynicism went so far that when I published, in 1885, my Osbeg Epic, the "Scheibaniade," entirely at my own cost, and asked for a subscription for twenty copies, the India Office declined the offer, although this work furnished so many data for the history of Baber, the founder of the Mongol dominion in India. The supposition, therefore, that my journalistic labours, although appreciated in England, ever met with any material recognition on the part of the Government, is altogether false. In after years I had an offer to enter the English service, but this I never entertained for a moment; and when on the Bosphorus I furthered English interests, I did so from the standpoint of European peace, as an opponent of the overbearing power of despotic Russia, and as a Hungarian whose native land has common interests with England in the Near East. Of course such motives bore no weight with the Sultan. He judges everybody by his own standard; and when I tried to defend myself against such accusations, and even one day quoted to him the saying of Mohammed, "El fakru fakhri" ("Poverty is my pride"), he took the remark with a diabolical smile, and turned the conversation into another channel.
I must confess the character of Sultan Abdul Hamid has always been a riddle to me. I strained every nerve to penetrate him, but all in vain. Brilliant qualities and incredible weaknesses were always at strife in him. The man and the ruler were constantly at war with one another, and in the same manner his Oriental views always came into collision with the ever more pressing demands of modern civilisation. Fear and suspicion were naturally at the bottom of this moral condition, and if from time to time he would have recovered himself, and listened to the dictates of his heart—for I did not find him heartless, as he is generally supposed to be—the instruments of his despotic arbitrariness kept him back, and made him commit deeds which in the eyes of the world were rightly condemned. In keeping with his own character was also the quality of the officials around him, who after the decline of the Porte acted as ministers of State. Divided into various cliques according to their personal interests, the secretaries, adjutants, chamberlains, court-marshals, body-servants, &c., have created quite a chaos of intrigues, plots, and calumnies round the person of their ruler, which he was quite able to cope with when in the full vigour of his manhood, and with his marvellous perspicacity could fathom at a glance. But even Sultan Abdul Hamid could not be expected to do superhuman things; physically never very strong, his nervous system at last grew perceptibly weaker, and in the thirtieth year of his reign he became very infirm. The reins of government fell from his hands, and gradually he sank from a ruler to being ruled over, and he fancied himself secure against all danger only in the mutual envy, malice, and hatred which he had provoked among those immediately surrounding him. In this terrible position the Sultan himself was most to be pitied, and this doleful picture of the so-called autocrat I have often had occasion to contemplate at close quarters. Great State cares, pressing financial troubles, the threatening grouping of the European Powers, and the fearful phantom of an internal revolution, all of which tormented the Sultan, left him neither rest nor peace. The Sultan's fear of Young Turkey was exaggerated, for in Turkey revolutions are not instigated by the masses, but by the upper classes, and since these were quite impoverished and dependent on their official position, a revolt against the Crown is not very probable nowadays, especially as the old party of the time of the forcible dethronement of Abdul-aziz exists no more, and the Osmanlis darkly brooding about the future of their land cannot so easily be roused from their sleep. If Sultan Abdul Hamid had been a little less despotic, and had taken account a little more of the liberal ideas of the more enlightened Osmanlis, he would have saved himself much trouble and many a sleepless night. But he is stubborn and firmly resolved to persevere with the régime of terrorism he has instituted. Hence his misfortune, hence his suffering. Indeed, the man had deserved a better fate. He is not nearly such a profligate as he is represented to be. He is more fit than many of his predecessors; he wants to benefit his land, but the means he has used were bound to have a contrary effect. I have received from Sultan Abdul Hamid many tokens of his favour and kindness, and I owe him an everlasting debt of gratitude. It grieves me, here, where I am speaking of my personal relations with him, to have to express opinions which may be displeasing to him, but writers may not and cannot become courtiers, and even in regard to crowned heads, the old saying still holds true, "Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas."
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Pp. 19-21.