M. Volney corroborates this account of them:—"Their behaviour," he says, "is serious, austere, and melancholy; they rarely laugh, and the gaiety of the French appears to them a fit of delirium. When they speak, it is with deliberation, without gestures and without passion; they listen without interrupting you; they are silent for whole days together, and they by no means pique themselves on supporting conversation. If they walk, it is always leisurely, and on business. They have no idea of our troublesome activity, and our walks backwards and forwards for amusement. Continually seated, they pass whole days smoking, with their legs crossed, their pipes in their mouths, and almost without changing their attitude." Englishmen present as great a contrast to the Ottoman as the French; as a late English traveller brings before us, apropos of seeing some Turks in quarantine: "Certainly," he says, "Englishmen are the least able to wait, and the Turks the most so, of any people I have ever seen. To impede an Englishman's locomotion on a journey, is equivalent to stopping the circulation of his blood; to disturb the repose of a Turk on his, is to re-awaken him to a painful sense of the miseries of life. The one nation at rest is as much tormented as Prometheus, chained to his rock, with the vulture feeding on him; the other in motion is as uncomfortable as Ixion tied to his ever-moving wheel."[79]
2.
However, the barbarian, when roused to action, is a very different being from the barbarian at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is usually placid, hypochondriac, and unimpassioned; but, when the customary sedateness of his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are furious and uncontrollable. The individual seems possessed with all the ungovernable fury of a multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all natural and moral obligations, are forgotten or despised, till his rage subsides." A similar remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk on horseback has no resemblance to the Turk reclining on his carpet. He there assumes a vigour, and displays a dexterity, which few Europeans would be capable of emulating; no horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the indolence of which they are accused, no people are more fond of the violent exercise of riding."[80]
So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars; now dosing on their horses or their waggons, now galloping over the plains from morning to night. However, these successive phases of Turkish character, as reported by travellers, have seemed to readers as inconsistencies in their reports; Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The national character of the Turks," he says, "is a composition of contradictory qualities. We find them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing, liberal and sordid." What is this but to say in one word that we find them barbarians?
According to these distinct moods or phases of character, they will leave very various impressions of themselves on the minds of successive beholders. A traveller finds them in their ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised and startled to find them so different from what he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the prejudice which has slandered them to the European world. He finds them mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as becomes the children of a Tartar shepherd, kind and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the lowest classes sociable with each other, and the children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as playful as the fireside cat. Our traveller observes all this;[81] and seems to forget that from the humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from the cat to the lion, the most wanton and tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous tribes also have their innocent aspects—from the Scythians in the classical poets and historians down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of Basil Hall.
3.
2. But whatever be the natural excellences of the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy with the character of the Turks," he says, "which has led me to think so highly of their moral excellence, has not given me the same favourable impression of the development of their mental powers. Their refinement is of manners and affections; there is little cultivation or activity of mind among them." This admission implies a great deal, and brings us to a fresh consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century of their political existence when Thornton and Volney lived among them, and these authors report of them as follows:—"Their buildings," says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions, bad in detail, both in taste and execution, fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius. Their cities are not decorated with public monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish." Their religion forbids them every sort of painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts cannot exist among them. They have no music but vocal; and know of no accompaniment except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe. Their singing is in a great measure recitative, with little variation of note. They have scarcely any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do not allow of anatomy. As to science, the telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are unknown, except as playthings. The compass is not universally employed in their navy, nor are its common purposes thoroughly understood. Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry, are either not known, or practised only on antiquated and exploded principles. As to their civil and criminal codes of law, these are unalterably fixed in the Koran. Their habits require very little furniture; "the whole inventory of a wealthy family," says Volney, "consists in a carpet, mats, cushions, mattresses, some small cotton clothes, copper and wooden platters for the table, a mortar, a portable mill, a little porcelain, and some plates of copper tinned. All our apparatus of tapestry, wooden bedsteads, chairs, stools, glasses, desks, bureaus, closets, buffets with their plate and table services, all our cabinet and upholstery-work are unknown." They have no clocks, though they have watches. In short, they are hardly more than dismounted Tartars still; and, if pressed by the Powers of Christendom, would be able, at very short warning, to pack up and turn their faces northward to their paternal deserts. You find in their cities barbers and mercers; saddlers and gunsmiths; bakers and confectioners; sometimes butchers; whitesmiths and ironmongers; these are pretty nearly all their trades. Their inheritance is their all; their own acquisition is nought. Their stuffs are from the classical Greeks; their dyes are the old Tyrian; their cement is of the age of the Romans; and their locks may be traced back to Solomon. They do not commonly engage either in agriculture or in commerce; of the cultivators of the soil I have said quite enough in a foregoing Lecture, and their commerce seems to be generally in the hands of Franks, Greeks, or Armenians, as formerly in the hands of the Jews.[82]
The White Huns took to commerce and diplomacy in the course of a century or two; the Saracens in a shorter time unlearned their barbarism, and became philosophers and experimentalists; what have the Turks to show to the human race for their long spell of prosperity and power?
As to their warfare, their impracticable and unprogressive temperament showed itself even in the era of their military and political ascendancy, and had much to do, as far as human causes are concerned, with their defeat at Lepanto. "The signal for engaging was no sooner given," says the writer in the "Universal History," "than the Turks with a hideous cry fell on six galeasses, which lay at anchor near a mile ahead of the confederate fleet." "With a hideous cry,"—this was the true barbarian onset; we find it in the Red Indians and the New Zealanders; and it is noticed of the Seljukians, the predecessors of the Ottomans, in their celebrated engagement with the Crusaders at Dorylæum. "With horrible howlings," says Mr. Turner, "and loud clangour of drums and trumpets, the Turks rushed on;" and you may recollect, the savage who would have murdered the Bishop of Bamberg, began with a shriek. However, as you will see directly, such an onset was as ignorant as it was savage, for it was made with a haughty and wilful blindness to the importance of firearms under their circumstances. The Turks, in the hey-day of their victories and under their most sagacious leaders, had scorned and ignored the use of the then newly invented instruments of war. In truth, they had shared the prejudice against firearms which had been in the first instance felt by the semi-barbarous chivalry of Europe. The knight-errant, as Ariosto draws and reflects him, disdained so dishonourable a means of beating a foe. He looked upon the use of gunpowder, as Mr. Thornton reminds us, as "cruel, cowardly, and murderous;" because it gave an unfair and disgraceful advantage to the feeble or the unwarlike. Such was the sentiment of the Ottomans even in the reign of their great Soliman. Shortly before the battle of Lepanto, a Dalmatian horseman rode express to Constantinople, and reported to the Divan, that 2,500 Turks had been surprised and routed by 500 musqueteers. Great was the indignation of the assembly against the unfortunate troops, of whom the messenger was one. But he was successful in his defence of himself and his companions. "Do you not hear," he said, "that we were overcome by guns? We were routed by fire, not by the enemy. It would have been otherwise, had it been a contest of courage. They took fire to their aid; fire is one of the elements; what is man that he should resist their shock?" They did not dream of the apophthegm that knowledge is power; and that we become strong by subduing nature to our will.
Accordingly, their tactics by sea was a sort of land engagement on deck, as it was with our ancestors, and with the ancients. First, they charged the adverse vessel, with a view of taking it; if that would not do, they boarded it. They fought hand to hand, and each captain might pretty much exercise his own judgment which ship to attack, as Homer's heroes chose their combatants on the field of Troy. However, the Christian galeasses at Lepanto,—for to these we must at length return,—were vessels of larger dimensions than the Ottomans had ever built; they were fortified, like castles, with heavy ordnance, and were so disposed as to cover the line of their own galleys. The consequence was, that as the Turks advanced in order of battle, these galeasses kept up a heavy and destructive fire upon them, and their barbarian energy availed them as little as their howlings. It was the triumph of civilization over brute force, as well as of faith over misbelief. "While discipline and attention to the military exercises could insure success in war, the Turks," says Thornton, "were the first of military nations. When the whole art of war was changed, and victory or defeat became matter of calculation, the rude and illiterate Turkish warriors experienced the fatal consequences of ignorance without suspecting the cause; accustomed to employ no other means than force, they sunk into despondency, when force could no longer avail."