I cannot yet either analyse or classify in a satisfactory way your methods of thinking, since in changing from country to country even the words alter their meaning. In Servia, Liberal means Conservative, and Freemason on the Continent has quite a different meaning from what it has here; so that the interpretation I would give to an opinion might fail to cover my real meaning.
Do not think that this evening’s pessimism is due to the fog nor to my poor dinner. It is the outcome of disillusions which every day become more complete. It seems to me that we Orientals are children to whom fairy tales have been told for too long—fairy tales which have every appearance of truth. You hear so much of the mirage of the East, but what is that compared to the mirage of the West, to which all Orientals are attracted?
They tell you fairy tales, too, you women of the West—fairy tales which, like ours, have all the appearance of truth. I wonder, when the Englishwomen have really won their vote and the right to exercise all the tiring professions of men, what they will have gained? Their faces will be a little sadder, a little more weary, and they will have become wholly disillusioned.
Go to the root of things and you will find the more things change the more they are the same; nothing really changes. Human nature is always the same. We cannot stop the ebb or flow of Time, however much we try. The great mass of mediocrity alone is happy, for it is content to swim with the tide. Does it not seem to you, that each of us from the age when we begin to reason feels more or less the futility and uselessness of some of our efforts; the little good that struggling has brought us, and the danger we necessarily run, in this awful desire to go full speed ahead? And yet, this desire to go towards something, futile though it be, is one of the most indestructible of Western sentiments.
When in Turkey we met together, and spoke of the Women of England, we imagined that they had nothing more to wish for in this world. But we had no idea of what the struggle for life meant to them, nor how terrible was this eternal search after happiness. Which is the harder struggle of the two? The latter is the only struggle we know in Turkey, and the same futile struggle goes on all the world over.
Happiness—what a mirage! At best is it not a mere negation of pain, for each one’s idea of happiness is so different? When I was fifteen years old they made me a present of a little native from Central Africa. For her there was no greater torture than to wear garments of any kind, and her idea of happiness was to get back to the home on the borders of Lake Chad and the possibility of eating another roasted European.
*****
Last night I went to a banquet. It was the first time that I had ever heard after-dinner speeches, and I admired the ease with which everyone found something to say, and the women spoke quite as well as the men. Afterwards I was told, however, that these speeches had all been prepared beforehand.
The member of Parliament who sat on my right spoilt my evening’s enjoyment by making me believe I had to speak, and all through the dinner I tried to find something to say, and yet I knew that, were I actually to rise, I could not utter a sound. What most astonished me at that banquet, however, was that all those women, who made no secret of wanting to direct the affairs of the nation, dared not take the responsibility of smoking until they were told. What a contradiction!