Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

VIII.—SEMIPHILOSOPHIC FINALE

One day I stopped on the quay to watch a cheering transport steam down the Bosphorus. An old Turkish lady who happened to be passing stopped to watch it too.

“Poor things! Poor things!” she exclaimed aloud. “The lions! You would think they were going to a wedding!” And then turning to me she suddenly asked: “Can you tell me, effendim, why it is that Europe is against us? Have we done no good in six hundred years?”

The attitude of Europe was the crowning bitterness of the war. In the beginning, Europe had loudly announced that she would tolerate no change in the status quo. How then did Europe come to acquiesce so quickly in the accomplished fact? Why did Germany, the friend of Abd ül Hamid, and England, the friend of Kyamil Pasha, and France, the friend of everybody, raise no finger to help? I am not the one to suggest that Europe should have done otherwise. There is a logic of events which sometimes breaks through official twaddle—a just logic drawing into a common destiny those who share common traditions and speak a common tongue. I make no doubt that Austria-Hungary, to mention only one example, will one day prove it to her cost. Nevertheless, I am able to see that there is a Turkish point of view. And my old lady’s question struck me as being so profound that I made no pretence of answering it.

I might, to be sure, have replied what so many other people were saying: “Madam, most certainly you have done no good in six hundred years. It is solely because of the evil you have done that you enjoy any renown in the world. You have done nothing but burn, pillage, massacre, defile, and destroy. You have stamped out civilisation wherever your horsemen have trod. And what you were in the beginning you are now. Your enemy the Bulgarian has advanced more in one generation than you have in twenty. You still cling to the forms of a bloody and barbaric religion, but for what it teaches of truth and humanity you have no ear. You make one justice for yourself and one for the owner of the land you have robbed. Your word has become a byword among the nations. You are too proud or too lazy to learn more than your fathers knew. You fear and try to imitate the West; but of the toil, the patience, the thoroughness, the perseverance that are the secret of the West you have no inkling. You will not work yourself, and you will not let others work—unless for your pocket. You have no literature, no art, no science, no industry, worth the name. You are incapable of building a road or a ship. You take everything from others—only to spoil it, like those territories where you were lately at war, like this city, which was once the glory of the world. You have no shadow of right to this city or to those territories. The graves of your ancestors are not there. You took them by the sword, and, like everything else that comes into your hands, you have slowly ruined them. It is only just that you should lose them by the sword. For your sword was the one thing you knew how to use, and now even that has rusted in your hand. You are rotten through and through. That is why Europe is against you. Go back to your tents in Asia, and see if you will be capable of learning something in another six hundred years.”

So might I have answered my old lady—had my Turkish been good enough. But I would scarcely have convinced her. Nor would I quite have convinced myself. For while it is a simple and often very refreshing disposal of a man to damn him up and down, it is not one that really disposes of him. He still remains there, solid and unexplained. So while my reason tells me how incompetent a man the Turk is from most Western points of view, it reminds me that other men have been incompetent as well, and even subject to violent inconsistencies of character; that this man is a being in evolution, with reasons for becoming what he is, to whom Dame Nature may not have given her last touch.

In this liberal disposition my reason is no doubt quickened, I must confess, by the fact that I am at heart a friend of the Turk. It may be merely association. I have known him many years. But there is something about him I cannot help liking—a simplicity, a manliness, a dignity. I like his fondness for water, and flowers, and green meadows, and spreading trees. I like his love of children. I like his perfect manners. I like his sobriety. I like his patience. I like the way he faces death. One of the things I like most about him is what has been perhaps most his undoing—his lack of any commercial instinct. I like, too, what no one has much noticed, the artistic side of him. I do not know Turkish enough to appreciate his literature, and his religion forbids him—or he imagines it does—to engage in the plastic arts. But in architecture and certain forms of decoration he has created a school of his own. It is not only that the Turkish quarter of any Ottoman town is more picturesque than the others. The old Palace of the sultans in Constantinople, certain old houses I have seen, the mosques, the medressehs, the hans, the tombs, the fountains, of the Turks are an achievement that deserves more serious study than has been given them. You may tell me that they are not Turkish because they were designed after Byzantine or Saracen originals, and because Greeks and Persians had much to do with building them. But I shall answer that every architecture was derived from another, in days not so near our own, and that, after all, it was the Turk who created the opportunity for the foreign artist and ordered what he wanted.

I have, therefore, as little patience as possible with the Gladstonian theory of the unspeakable Turk. When war ceases, when murders take place no more in happier lands, when the last riot is quelled and the last negro lynched, it will be time to discuss whether the Turk is by nature more or less bloody than other men. In the meantime I beg to point out that he is, as a matter of fact, the most peaceable, with the possible exception of the Armenian, of the various tribes of his empire. Arab, Kürd, and Laz are all quicker with their blades. To his more positive qualities I am by no means alone in testifying. If I had time for chapter and verse I might quote more than one generation of foreign officers in the Turkish service, and a whole literature of travel—to which Pierre Loti has contributed his share. But I do not hesitate to add that this is a matter in which Pierre Loti may be as unsafe a guide as Mr. Gladstone. For blind praise is no more intelligent than blind condemnation. Neither leads one any nearer to understanding the strange case of the Turk.

To understand him at all, I think one needs to take a long view of history. When we consider how many æons man must have lived on this planet and how short in comparison has been the present phase of Western civilisation, it does not seem as if we had good ground for expressing definitive opinions with regard to Eastern peoples. A hundred years ago there was no hint in the West of the expansion that was to come through the use of steam and electricity. Three hundred years ago communications in most of Europe were not so good as, and I doubt if life and property were more secure than, they are in Turkey to-day. For some reason the Turk has lagged in his development. He is to all practical purposes a mediæval man, and it is not fair to judge him by the standards of the twentieth century.