This page contains affiliate links. As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases.
Language:
Form:
Genre:
Published:
  • 1901
Tags:
Buy it on Amazon FREE Audible 30 days

have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out step by step.

At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone, late in the summer, when the place was abandoned by the general crowd. I had begun a study of running water, over which I lingered as long as the weather permitted, when he came with Mrs. Gladstone and his son Herbert and daughter Helen. The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity. They had not come out to be together as at home, and each took generally a different walk. Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the way,–which not all good walkers can do,–but I do not remember his ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,–he assumed himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it; never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about them. It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall, Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of our walks; on his part with the most dispassionate appreciation and kindness of manner. I had said of his great rival that he had struck a blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, “That is true.”

He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear from English people, even from those who live in Italy. We passed a fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she had always been a washerwoman. No, she replied, she had been a _bália_ (nurse) once. He was struck by her pronunciation of the word _bália_ and walked on; but presently he said, “I thought that that word was pronounced _balía_” and, when I explained that there were two words–_bália_ which meant a nurse, and _balía_, which came from the same root as our “bailiff,” and meant a charge, custody,–he seemed annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our climb. It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language efficiency in which he prided himself on. It was the only foible I detected in him. He was very much interested in America, and asked many questions about our politics. Two things, he said, in the future of America, seemed to him ominous of evil: the condition of our civil service, and the amount of our Western lands going into mortmain through the gifts to the great railway systems.

It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of Gladstone’s calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to a certain extent. He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the other in action. The Platonist crowded the Statesman, and, at certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in so great a man.

That winter I had a commission from the “Century” (then “Scribner’s”) to make an archaeological and literary venture in Greek waters, the results of which in a series of papers in the magazine were afterwards published in a volume entitled “On the Track of Ulysses.”

Accompanied by Mr. H.M. Paget, the artist, I went to Corfu and hired the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the “Odyssey” as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in the morning of the day following, when we managed to make the port of Cerigo, during which time we could neither eat a meal nor even get a cup of coffee. Paget made a capital sailor, and, though the old Maltese captain of former days was dead, his two sons, lads then, were dexterous sailors in the rough-and-ready, rule-of-thumb manner of the Levantine boatman, knowing nothing of navigation and little more of geography than Ulysses himself. We had no charts, and only a very primitive compass, but we all had the antique love of adventure and indifference to danger. Leaving Cerigotto, an island out of the line of traditional or historic interest, but, curious for its fine and extensive Pelasgic remains, we laid our course for Crete, starting with the breeze that at nightfall generally blows towards the land, which was visible from where we took our departure, and counted on being at Canea with the morning.

But the Aegean is a tricky sea, and furnishes many surprises, as St. Paul knew, and, when not more than ten miles from the shelter of the Cretan coast, it came on to blow from the southwest with such violence that we were unable to beat up to the shelter of the Cretan highlands, and under a mere rag of canvas had to run before the wind, wherever it might drive us. I was the only one on board who knew anything of the Archipelago, and I had to decide the course, which it was possible to vary only a point or two either way, for the yacht would only run free, or, under favorable weather, with a beam wind. I had to guess our course, which from my knowledge of the islands I saw could only be directly to Milo, about forty miles away. If we hit the harbor, well and good, for it gives excellent shelter in all weather, but if we missed it we had two chances–to find an opening between the islands and reefs, or to hit a lee shore and go on it, for there was no hope of clawing off. I set the course, left the boys in charge, and went to bed. The boat was jumping through the sea with a shock at each wave she struck, as if she had leaped out of the water, and it seemed as if she must be showing her keel with each jump. I awoke in the night and, getting out of my berth to take a look outside, put my feet in the water which had risen to cover the cabin floor. All hands at the pumps kept it down, but it was clear that the old craft, nearly twenty years older than when I first saw her, was no longer seaworthy, and we had no hope of the weather lifting, for these southwesterly gales generally blow at least a day. I went back to bed again, for there was nothing to be done but wait on fortune, and be glad that we should make Milo by daylight.

My previsions justified themselves, for in the course of the afternoon we made the entrance to the harbor, and ran in before such a sea as I never saw in those waters before. The waves broke against the great pillar of rock that stands in the entrance of the harbor, sending the spray to its very summit, and as we ran to the anchorage off the little port the whole population poured down to see the arrival, wondering what sent the tiny craft out in such weather. The old pilot said that it had been the worst gale of forty years, which I could well believe. The weather having abated, we ran over to Crete, where I found the island laboring with reforms, a constitution, and a Christian governor, in the person of my old friend Photiades Pasha. We were invited to dine at the Konak, and of the company was Edhem Pasha, a charming, intelligent, and thoroughly civilized Turk, by far the most liberal and progressive of his race I had met, with the single exception of A’ali Pasha. We played at “Admiration” that evening, a game which puts a series of questions as to the qualities one admires. In reply to the question “What kind of courage do you admire?” the pasha, turning to me, replied, “I admire the courage of that gentleman in going to sea in so small a boat in such weather,” and he admitted laughingly that his courage was not at that level.

I found in the place of my old friend Dickson, consul for England and colleague of the Cretan days, since dead, Humphrey Sandwith, a noble and faithful representative of the dignity and humanity of his nation, and for many years subsequently my intimate friend, who has disappeared while I write from the lessening list of living friends, but who will ever keep his place in my regards as a noble, just, and humane representative of his race, as of his government. In the years of the subsequent Cretan difficulties, Sandwith was always the good and wise friend of the islanders. It is good to remember such a representation of the power and dignity of England in lands where his colleagues have not always honored England or humanity, and I shall always think of Sandwith with greater respect for his nation.

The results of the “Century” expedition were nothing in respect of excavation, and the records of the tracing of the route of the Great Ithacan were written out in the Dolomites in the course of the summer. We found that excavation was a matter beyond achievement with the limited funds at my disposal, but Photiades was munificent in promises of support if I wished to return for serious undertaking in that direction. In the following winter I was accordingly requested to take charge, for the American Archaeological Institute, of an expedition for research and if possible for excavation. Trusting to the benevolent promises of the pasha, I accepted the mission. He renewed his assurances of aid, and showed me the greatest cordiality and benevolence, invited me to dinner and to spend the evening, and treated me generally with a friendliness which astonished the old Turkish element, who considered me the devil of the island. (In fact, my appearance was considered the omen of trouble, and the Mussulmans said when they saw me, “Are we going to have another war?”) It was easy to see, however, that the elements of trouble in the island had not been eliminated by the appointment of a Christian governor or the concessions which had been made to the Christian majority. So long as the power of rendering ineffective any reforms, or blocking the way to progress of the higher civilization of the island, remained at Constantinople, the Turkish minority in the island would retain their faculty of making the concessions to the majority fallacious.

Photiades Pasha, an amiable and very intelligent man, recognized the dominant fact of his position to be the necessity of keeping the favor of the Mussulman oligarchy at the capital, and he could not offend the Mussulmans of the island by even a maintenance of equal justice between the two religions. He was therefore obliged to satisfy the leaders of the Christian agitators by the concession of minor advantages in the local conflicts, oftener of Christian against Christian than of the same against the Turk, and finally he was obliged to resort to the inciting of feud and jealousy between the clans, villages, and provinces in the island, to keep them from uniting against him. He found it convenient to employ me as a tub to the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate wherever I liked, he made them the concession of refusing me the permission I sought. Therefore, while he promised me all things and urged me to go at once to select my locality, he wrote to the Porte advising the refusal of the firman, which had been applied for directly by the Institute, through the minister at Constantinople.

My assistant, Mr. Haynes, who had been sent by the Institute to take his first lessons in archaeology and photography, having arrived, we went to Candia to select our site. We decided on attacking a ruin on the acropolis of Gnossus, already partially exposed by the searches of local diggers for antiques. It had a curiously labyrinthine appearance, and on the stones I found and described the first discovered of the characters whose nature has since been made the subject of the researches of Mr. Evans. I made an agreement with the Turkish proprietor of the land, and prepared to set to work when the firman should arrive. After more than one letter from Photiades, assuring me in unqualified terms that I might confidently count on the reception of the firman, I received a communication from the minister at Constantinople, that on the advice of Photiades Pasha the firman was refused. I had selected as the alternative locality the cave known as the burial-place of Zeus, on the summit of Mount Yuctas, not far from Gnossus, in the excavation of which I am convinced that archaeology will one day receive great light on early Cretan myth. The importance of the locality in the prehistoric research in which Crete is one of the most important sections of our field of study, will, I am convinced, one day justify my anxiety to attack it; and the subsequent discoveries, so important, made by Halbherr in the companion cave on Mount Ida, where Zeus was believed to have been hidden and nursed, confirm my conviction of the value of the evidence still hidden on Yuctas.

Debarred from carrying out the purpose of my expedition, I contented myself with making such a survey of that part of the island as should serve the Institute for another attempt when the artificial obstacles should be removed; and I was on the point of visiting Gortyna when troubles broke out, initiated by the murder of two Mussulmans at Gortyna, revenged by the murder of Christians at Candia, and there was nothing to be done but to get back to civilization. From the Mussulmans of the island I had less hostility to endure than from the more influential of the Christian Cretans, with whom the dominant passion of life seemed to be that of intrigue, and with whose mendacity and unscrupulousness I could not contend.

I had a curious instance of the honesty of the Mussulman in a dealer in bricabrac, embroideries, and stuffs with whom I used to deal at Candia. Arapi Mehmet, as he was called, i.e. Mahommed the Arabian, was a man in whom no religious fanaticism disturbed his relations with his fellow-men; no English agnostic could be more liberal, and we often had dealings in which his honesty was evident. On one of the last visits I made to his shop I looked at two embroidered cushion covers which I wanted to purchase, but the price he put on them made it out of the question, and as he refused to take less I gave up the bargaining, and he called for the coffee. While we were drinking it and conversing of other matters, I said to him, “Arapi, why do you ask such absurd prices? You know that the cushions are not worth so much.” “Oh,” he replied, “you are rich and can afford it.” “What makes you think I am rich?” I asked. “You travel about and see the world, and take your pleasure,” he said. “But I am not rich,” I said; “I am a workingman; I do not travel for pleasure, but to earn my living. I am a scribe, and am paid for what I write, and what I earn is all I have to live on. I have no property.” “Is that true?” he asked me, earnestly, looking me in the eyes. “That is quite true; I have nothing but what I earn,” I replied; “I make the living of my family in this way. If I do not write we have no bread.” The cushions had meanwhile been sent back to his house, as he kept all his fine goods there; and, without another word to me, he shouted to his shop boy to go and get them, and, when brought, he threw them to me, saying, “Take them and give me what you like.”

I always found that the Mussulman merchants were more trustworthy in their dealings with me than the Christians, and, though there was, as a matter of course, at first an amount of bargaining and beating down the prices, which was expected, they never attempted to deceive me in the quality of the goods, and they often called my attention to articles of artistic or archaeological value, which were cheap, and when they came to know me well they gave me, at the outset, the lowest price they could take, while it never happened with a Christian shopman in Crete that I was treated with frankness or moderation. The next time I went back to Candia, Arapi was dead.

Returning to Canea, my archaeological mission being abortive, I was told by the Christian secretary of the pasha that the difficulty had been that I had not offered to give to His Excellency the coins that might be found in the excavations, and that if I did this I might hope for a firman. As it was not in my power to give what, by the agreement arrived at with the proprietor of the soil, had been definitely disposed of, half to him and the other half to the museums of the island, and as the troubles had begun, there was nothing more to be done, and I made a flying trip to some parts of the island which I had not seen. Of this, the passage through the valley of Enneochoria (the nine villages) will remain in my memory as the most delightful pastoral landscape I have ever seen, and the ideal of Greek pastoral poetry. A beautiful brook, to the perennial flow of whose waters the abundant water-cresses testified, which is a very rare thing in an Aegean scene, meandered amongst mingled sycamores and olives, and gave freshness to glades where the sheep fed under the keepership of the antique-mannered shepherd lads and lasses; and in the opening of the bordering trees we saw the far-off and arid mountains, rugged and picturesque peaks. The Cretan summer for three or four months is rainless, and a valley where the vegetation is fed by the springs so abundantly as to sustain a perpetual flora is rarely to be met in one’s travels there. I saw many new flowers there, and amongst them a perfectly white primrose, in every other respect like the common flower of the English hedgerows. The scenery had that attractive aspect which can be found only where immemorial culture, without excessive invasion of the axe, has left nature in the undiminished possession of her chief beauties, without a trace of the savage wildness–a nature which hints at art. It was classic without being formal, but no description can give an idea of the charm of it in contrast with the general aridity of the Cretan landscape.

As we rode through the villages we found the population animated by that joyous hospitality which belongs to an antique tradition, to which a stranger guest is something which the gods have sent, and sent rarely so that no tourist weariness had worn out the welcome. Something of the welcome was, no doubt, due to the reputation I had acquired in former times as a friend of the Christians of the island, but I found that in Crete, where the invasion of the foreign element had been at a minimum and the people were most conservative, ancient usages and ancient hospitality had retained all their force, as, to a lesser extent, I had found them in the Peloponnesus, while in continental Greece I never found hospitality in any form. The Cretans are probably the purest remnant of the antique race which resulted from the mixture of Pelasgian, Dorian, Achaian, Ionian, and the best representative of the antique intellect.

It was almost impossible to travel in the interior of the island, where the Christian element still held its own unmixed, without coming in contact with remnants of the most ancient superstitions. In one place my guide pointed out to me a cave where Janni the shepherd one day gathered his sheep in the midday heats to fiddle to them, when there came out of the sea a band of Nereids, who begged him to play for their dancing. Janni obeyed and lost his heart to one of the sea damsels, and, sorely smitten, went to a wise woman to know what he should do to win her, and was told that he must boldly seize her in the whirl of the dance and hold her, no matter what happened. He followed the direction, and though the nymph changed shape many times he kept his hold and she submitted to him and they were married. In process of time she bore a child, but all the while she had never spoken a word. The wise woman, consulted again, told Janni to take the child and pretend to lay it on the fire, when his wife would speak. He obeyed again, but made a slip, and the child, falling into the fire, was burned to death, whereupon the wife fled to the sea and was never seen again. This was told me in all seriousness as of a contemporary event, and was evidently held as history. I bought from a peasant one of the well-known three-sided prisms with archaic intaglios of animals on the faces, and had the curiosity to inquire the virtues of it, for I was told that it was greatly valued and had been worn by his wife, who reluctantly gave it up. He replied that it had the power of preventing the mother’s milk from failing prematurely.

We passed through Selinos, where the riflers of the antique necropolis brought me quantities of glass found in the graves, and a few bronze and gold ornaments; and when I had loaded myself and my attendants with all the glass we could safely carry, the people begged me still to buy, if only for a piastre each piece, what they had accumulated for want of a buyer. But what is found in this district is mainly or entirely of a late period, that of the Roman occupation of the island, I suppose, for we found no archaic objects of any kind, or early inscriptions, and only a few in late characters. But the ride through this section of the island is one of the most delightful one could take, so far as I know, in classical lands. The kindly, hospitable Seliniotes, known for centuries as the bravest of all the Cretan clans, persecuted with all the cruelty of Venetian craft in the days when the island city ruled the island sea, always refractory under foreign rule and often unruly under their own régime, seem to have enjoyed in the later centuries of Roman rule and the earlier of the Byzantine a great prosperity, if one may judge from the evidence of the necropolis, the graves in which yield a singular indication of a well-distributed wealth. These graves lie for great distances along every road leading to what must have been the principal centre of the civilization, though there are no ruins to mark its location. This singular absence of ancient ruin indicates a peculiarity in the civilization of that section of the island which history gives no clue to. Northward, near the sea, there are the remains of great Pelasgic cities, of which when I first traveled in the island the walls were in stupendous condition, but of which at this visit I had found hardly a trace–the islanders had pulled them down to get stone for their houses. The site of Polyrhenia, connected in tradition with the return of Agamemnon from Troy, was one of the finest Pelasgic ruins I have ever seen when I first visited it, but on this visit I could hardly find the locality, and of the splendid polygonal wall I saw in 1865 not a stone remained.

Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in the “great insurrection”–that of 1837–to punish them for assembling to petition the Sultan for relief. It is one of the most ghastly of all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans, pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot. According to the statement of the consul, not less than thirty of the chief men of that district were so executed.

But the history of the Venetian rule shows that it was no less cruel and even more treacherous, and Pashley gives from their own records the story of the slaughter of many of the chief people of the same district to punish refractoriness against the government of that day. Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic world–rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary. Yet in 1865 it had been reckoned at 375,000, Christian and Mussulman. But it must be admitted that the Cretan was always the most refractory of subjects, and, though at the time of this visit the island had obtained the fundamental concessions which it had fought for, in the recognition of its autonomy with a governor of the faith of the majority, in a later visit in 1886 I found it ravaged by a sectional war of vendetta, Christian against Christian, in which, as Photiades Pasha assured me, in one year 600 people had been killed and 25,000 olive-trees destroyed in village feuds. But the evidence was at hand to show that the pasha himself, finding the islanders no less difficult to control for all the concessions made them, had been obliged in the interest of his own quiet and permanence in government to turn the restlessness of the Cretans into sectional conflicts during which they left him in peaceful possession of his pashalik. In eastern countries government becomes a fine art if not a humane one.

CHAPTER XXXVI

GREEK BROILS–TRICOUPI–FLORENCE

The troubles initiated at Gortyna increased until the eastern end of the island was drawn into them, and, as the Greek government at the same time began to agitate for the execution of those clauses in the Treaty of Berlin which compensated it for the advantages gained by the principalities through the war, I received orders to go to Athens and resume my correspondence with the “Times.” Athens was in a ferment, and the discontent with the government for its inefficiency was universal; the ministry, as was perhaps not altogether unjustifiable under the circumstances past, allowed the King to bear his part of the responsibility, and discontent with him was even greater than that with Comoundouros, the prime minister, whose position became very difficult, for the King and his _entourage_ opposed all energetic measures, and the people demanded the most energetic. Excitement ran very high, and the ministry was carried along with the populace, which demanded war and the military occupation of the territory assigned to Greece.

Comoundouros was, on the whole, the most competent prime minister for Greece whom the country has had in my time. Tricoupi, who was the chief of the opposition at the time, was an abler man, and a statesman of wider views,–on the whole, the greatest statesman of modern Greece, _me judice_; but in intrigue and Odyssean craft, which is necessary in the Levant, Comoundouros was his master. In 1868, when they were both in the ministry, they formed the most competent government Greece has known in her constitutional days, but it was betrayed by the King, who paid now in part for his defection, for no one placed the least confidence in him. The diplomatic corps pressed for peace, and the nation demanded war, for which it was not in the least prepared. The animosity towards the King was extreme. I saw people who happened to be sitting in front of the cafés rise and turn their backs to him when he walked past, as he used to do without any attendant. Comoundouros ran with the diplomats and hunted with the populace,–I think he really meant to continue running and avoid hunting at any risk, but he talked on the other side. I knew him well, and used continually to go to his house when he received all the world in the evening, in perfectly republican simplicity, as is the way in Athens, and he said to me one evening that the King prevented action, and impeded all steps to render the army efficient.

This was evidently the feeling of the populace, and public demonstrations took place which menaced revolution, and on one occasion shots were fired, and the demonstrators were dispersed by the cavalry. I asked him on that occasion why the ministry did not let the revolution loose, and drive the King away. “Ah! they think now that we have no stability,–what would they think then? and what could we get better?” I find in a file of my letters of the time one which says: “I am not surprised at Mrs. —-‘s opinion of the King,–there are few people of either sex here who are not of the same opinion, and the conviction is getting very general that no progress or reform is to be hoped for until he is expelled the country.” Another, a little later, says: “It looks very much as if there were a revolution preparing, and that the King would have to go. He is so detested that I don’t think any one wants to save him.” To complicate matters, there came some scandals to light concerning the frauds and peculations in the furnishing of supplies for the army, which was being prepared for a campaign in extravagant haste, and rumor involved persons in the closest intimacy with the prime minister. I do not believe that Comoundouros was personally complicated, but I find in one of my letters the following, under date, “Athens, June 10:”–

“Things here are in a horrible state. The latest disclosures of the great defalcations seem to involve so many officials and non-officials, and break out in so many new directions, that one does not know whom to exonerate. The King and most of the ministers–quantities of officials, persons in high social positions and unblemished reputation–seem to have been carried away by the fever; Comoundouros himself is accused of participation; —- and —- are clearly guilty, and I think the ministry must resign. So far we have no accusation against Tricoupi or any of his friends. That is the only comfort we can draw out of the affair. I am holding back from exposing the affair in the ‘Times’ from the double motive that the scandal will affect all Greece, and because the affair is not yet fully disclosed and we don’t know what it may lead to in the way of exposures. The government is doing everything it can to prevent the investigation extending, and this I mean to stop by exposing the whole matter in the ‘Times,’ but until it succeeds in arresting the disclosures I shall let them go. Comoundouros is buying up all the correspondents he can, and one of his emissaries told me two or three days ago that if I would help him out I could pocket 20,000 francs.”

To this offer I replied by a letter to the “Times” attacking the ministry savagely, and when it was printed and reached Athens, and I saw the minister again, he remarked with his imperturbable good-humor, which indeed never failed him, “How you did give it to us to-day!” As I recall the old man, running over the twenty odd years during which I had known him more or less with long interruptions, I retain my impression of his genuine patriotism and personal integrity; but he was surrounded by people who did profit by their relation to him. He was singularly like Depretis in manner and character; and of Depretis it was said that he would not steal himself, but he did not care how much his friends stole; but I think that the Greek was the abler man by much. Comoundouros mitigated the rancors usual in the politics of Greece (as in those of Italy of to-day) by his unvarying good-nature, never permitting his antagonisms to degenerate to animosities. In the years when I first knew him, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866, he was at his best in power and in patriotism; but during the years which followed, full of the base intrigues which had their birth in the influences surrounding the court, he got more or less demoralized, for patriotism and honesty were no passports to power, and he was ambitious before all things. Not to be in office or near coming to office is in Greece to have no political standing whatever, and the King’s defection and betrayal of the interests of Greece in 1868 convinced Comoundouros and many others that with the King there was nothing to be done for a purely Hellenic and consistent policy. All my study of Levantine politics since that day convinces me that in sacrificing the interests of Greece to the demands of the Russian ministry in 1868, the King threw away the only opportunity which Greece has ever had of attaining the position her people and her friends believed her destined to,–that of the heir of the Ottoman empire. The case is now hopeless, for the adverse influences have gained the upper hand, and the demoralization of Greece has progressed with the years. The sturdy independence of Comoundouros in 1868 was wasted, and I can imagine that the old man understood that, though the forms of independence and the semblance of progress must be kept up, there was really no hope of a truly Hellenic revival, and with his hopes and his courage he lost all his patriotic ambitions. In this juncture he was satisfied with the husks which the diplomats threw to Greece, and blustered and threatened war to attain a compromise which should keep him in office and in peace with the King, whom he would gladly have rid Greece of if it had been practicable.

In the struggle with diplomacy he so far gained his point that there was an adjustment of the frontiers in accordance with the treaty. The commission for the delimitation, at the head of which was General Hamley, met at Athens with the intention of beginning the trace from the Epirote side, and I had made all my preparations for accompanying it, when there happened one of those curious mischances which are possible only in the East. The summer was hot and dry, and the mayor of Athens, foreseeing a drought, had decided to turn the stream known as the “washerwoman’s brook,” one of the few perennial sources in the vicinity, into the aqueduct which supplied the city with drinking water. As all the dirty clothes of Athens, comprising those of the military hospital, in which there were grave cases of typhoid, were washed in that stream, the consequences were soon evident in a great outbreak of the malady in the city, the victims being estimated at 10,000 persons; and, two days before that on which the commission was to start on its work, I was taken ill. I sent for a doctor and he declared the illness to be fever, and probably typhoid. I went to bed, and took for three days in succession forty grains of quinine a day, getting up on the fourth, to find the commission gone and myself in no condition to follow it; and so I missed the most interesting journey which had ever offered itself in my journalistic career. My exasperation at the imbecility of the mayor can be easily imagined, and it was vented in a proper castigation in my correspondence. In the burning weeks that followed, the state of Athens reminded one of Boccaccio’s description of Florence in the plague. There were not physicians enough in the city to attend the sick, or undertakers to bury the dead. The funeral processions to the great cemetery beyond the Ilissus seemed in constant motion, and the water-sellers drove a brisk trade in the water of a noble spring under Hymettus.

At the next municipal election the mayor was reëlected triumphantly! The ministry was less fortunate, a dissolution resulting in a majority for the opposition, and Tricoupi came into power. As the most competent and eminent of the rulers of Greece in the following years (for Comoundouros died not long after), and cut off prematurely in the midst of his services to the land he always served with an honest, patriotic devotion, he deserves the commemoration which, as his intimate friend for many years, I am better qualified, perhaps, to render him than any other foreigner. Our friendship began in the period when he held the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in 1867-8 and continued till his death. He was educated and, I think, born in London, where his father held for many years the legation of Greece. The elder Tricoupi and his wife were two of the most sympathetic and admirable people of their race I have ever known, and the elder Tricoupi’s history of his country in its later fortunes is recognized as the standard, both in its history and in its use of the modern Greek, purely vernacular, which we have. The son, head of the government or leader of the opposition from an age at which in few countries a man can lead in politics, was, _rara avis_ in those lands, an absolutely devoted patriot and honest man; but his country has never been in a state of political education or patriotic devotion such as to enable it to profit by his ability or his honesty. I well remember that during his first premiership I said to him that I hoped he was in for a long term of office, which might establish some solidity in Greek politics, and he replied, “They will support me until I am obliged to tax them, and then they will turn me out.” And so it happened.

The general elections, which were stormy, brought Tricoupi into power; but the violence to the freedom of election of which the government was guilty made them very exciting. One of Tricoupi’s chief supporters was standing for Cephalonia, I think, and we heard that there were great preparations to defeat him by the common device of overawing his supporters and driving them from the polls, and I decided to go at once to the locality and watch the method of the elections. The presence of the correspondent at the polling booths, all of which I visited in rapid succession through the day, completely deranged all the plans, and only at one place was there an attempt at illegal pressure, on which occasion one man was shot. The chief of police at the place came to me from time to time, saying, “Have you seen anything illegal?” as if he were under orders to convince me that the law had been obeyed. The result was that the Tricoupist candidate was elected, and he admitted to me that his election was due to my presence. He had only had one man shot, the general plan of carrying the elections by violence having been abandoned in deference to public opinion in England, represented by the correspondent of the “Times.”

I decided to go to Volo as soon as the annexation was accomplished, and took letters of introduction to several leading citizens, amongst them one from Tricoupi. The Christian portion of the town was, of course, in exultation, but an attempt at inspection of the Turkish quarter had to be abandoned precipitately before a demonstration of the Mussulman juvenility. My visit had to be abbreviated, for the filthy khan which was the only place of entertainment for man and beast swarmed with bugs and mosquitoes; and, though the five letters I had were to the wealthiest persons in Volo, amongst them being the mayor, not one offered me hospitality when I told them the next day that I must return by the steamer that brought me, in default of a decent bed and eatable food; and, though they expressed polite regrets, they saw no alternative, and I took a return passage. Hospitality in continental Greece has no traditions; and even in Athens, except from Greeks who had lived in England, I have never been asked to accept bed or bread, while in Crete and in the Peloponnesus there was always a more or less active competition as to who should give me both. The stranger, who was in the classical days the messenger of the gods and received welcome as such, has degenerated to the position of the modern tramp. The difference is, no doubt, due to the centuries of oppression and isolation in which the fragments of the race have lived, and in which they have suffered the intrusion of unwelcome elements amongst them, always overborne and finding no protector except their own cunning, and no friend save in their own religion.

A thought that comes up very often while one deals with the Greek in Hellenic lands, is the wonder at the tenacity of the religion of the Greek, surviving the hostility not only of the Turk, but of his fellow Christian of the rival creed. No other nation has ever endured the hostile pressure on its religious fidelity which the Greeks have had to submit to since the fall of Constantinople. The Venetians were even more cruel with the Greeks under their rule than the Turks have ever been, and the influence of the Papal See has always been exerted with the most inflexible persistence for the suppression of what in Rome is called the Greek schism, to which it has shown an animosity greater even than that displayed toward the Protestant Church. And yet I have always found the Orthodox Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given the best their resources could compass–a roast lamb or kid, generally. The _kalogeros_ in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, “Why! he is not even a Christian!” but was none the less cordial afterward–he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church. This liberal hospitality on the part of the ecclesiastics makes the want of it on the part of the people all the more conspicuous and inexplicable.

In the event Comoundouros found his game of bluff a safe one, for his claims were just, and diplomacy was derelict, or there would have been no utility in the demonstration. But the futility of the Greek threats was most conspicuously shown, for not a battalion got to the frontier in a condition to fight, and two batteries sent off from Athens in great pomp broke down so completely that not a gun was fit to go into action when they reached the frontier. The (for them and for the moment) fortunate issue of the contention by the cession of the territory in dispute seemed to the Greeks in general due to their good military measures, and so confirmed them in the dangerous conviction that the powers were afraid that they might beat the Turks and open the question of Constantinople, etc., which the powers had determined should not be opened. Tricoupi alone of all those who had a policy was of the opinion that the powers should not have interfered, but should have let the Greeks have their way and learn their lesson. It was his opinion that the political education of the Greeks was thwarted by this continual intermeddling of the powers, which made their independence a fiction. Subsequent events showed that he did not nourish that blind confidence in the military capacity of his countrymen which they had, but he said until they were allowed to test their abilities they would never know on what that confidence reposed. The common opinion was that one Greek was worth ten Turks, even in the state of the Greek training. This was not Tricoupi’s opinion, which was that it was impossible under the tutelage which the powers exercised for them to know the truth, and he had, from 1867, persistently urged the let-alone policy, which would at least enable them to find their level.

Time has shown that Tricoupi was the only party leader in Greece who saw affairs justly. Had his counsel prevailed, the nation would have found in 1881 what they discovered only in 1897, that they needed training and concentration to hold their own, and that the path of conquest of their ancient estate was set with obstacles which only Spartan discipline and endurance could clear away. As it has happened, the lesson has been learned only after all the competing elements have had theirs and are on the way to the primacy in the Balkans which the Greeks thought the heritage of their race, but of which they can now hold no hope. The protection of the powers has been fatal, for the future of the Levant belongs to the Slav in spite of all the intelligence, activity, and personal morality in which the Greeks excel all their rivals. An English statesman who had to deal with Tricoupi in regard to official matters said to me once that he found him apparently open and business-like, but that when they came to the transaction of matters at issue he proved to be as slippery and dishonest as any of his countrymen. But Tricoupi was a Greek, and evasion, diplomatic duplicity, and the usual devices of the weak brought to terms by the strong, are ingrained with the race. He felt the truth, viz., that all the powers, while professing to protect them, were really oppressing them by their protection, and that the negotiations in which they posed as friends were really hostile measures which he was, in duty to his nation, bound to fight by all the means in his reach; and in this case the means were those of the weak, deprived of liberty of action as much as if they were held down by the troops of the powers.

In all these considerations Tricoupi stands as much the type and impersonation of the modern Greek in his best phase, and the Hellenic cause lost in his early death the largest exponent of the characteristics of the race I have ever known, but, as fate had it, lost him only when his abilities could only serve to mitigate disaster and accentuate failure. Had he been alive, I am convinced that the disaster of 1897 would not have taken place, and, if a conflict was, through the ignorant impetuosity of the masses, unavoidable, it would have resulted more creditably to the Greek army, not in victory indeed, for this was under the circumstances not to be hoped for, but in a defeat which was not irretrievable.

The campaign finished, I returned to Florence, where, during the lull in Eastern matters, I found my only public occupation in the contest with regard to the restoration of ancient buildings in Italy. Those who can remember the aspect of the Ducal Palace and St. Mark’s in those years, shored up to prevent large portions of them from falling in crumbling ruin into the Piazza, and can see that now at least the general aspect of the perfect building is preserved, and in the case of the Ducal Palace even the details of the most important decorative elements restored with a fidelity which defies examination, will hardly be inclined to resent the restorations which have abolished the hideous balks of timber and bulkheads of most of the southern and western façades. The southwest angle of the Palace was prevented only by massive shoring from falling bodily into the Piazzetta. The anti-restoration society in England had raised a great outcry over the works, which had, however, been going on without criticism during the Austrian occupation since 1840; and, after a thorough examination of the state of the two precious buildings, and the plans and appliances for their restoration, I undertook the defense of the restorers, and the hot controversy in the “Times” and other journals on the subject resulted in the confirmation of the authorities in their resolution to continue the works which have left the Ducal Palace at least in a condition to be seen for a few hundred years to come, and relieved the church of the scaffolds and bulkheads which disfigured it up to 1890. The works in St. Mark’s reëstablished in more than its original solidity the south flank, which was in such a state of ruin that only the abundant shoring had prevented the façade from top to bottom from falling bodily into the Piazza.

On the other hand, I found at Florence that the authorities, in anticipation of the completion of the present splendid façade of the Duomo, had decided to refresh the entire surface of the flanks to put them in keeping with the new sculpture of the front, and had actually inaugurated the system of removing with acids, followed by the chisel, of all the toned surface of the sculptured parts so that the Duomo should, when the façade was revealed, present the aspect of a bride-cake in the brilliant whiteness of its marble, but without a touch remaining of the workmanship of its original architects and sculptors. At this juncture the editor of the “Cornhill Magazine” asked me for an article on the restorations in Italy, and I profited by the invitation to write a scathing article on the cleaning up of the Duomo, which, falling under the attention of the government at Rome, provoked a telegram ordering peremptorily the cessation of all restoration on the church. I received the thanks of the Italian ministry and the formal request to inform it of any other similar operations which should fall under my attention, and when a few weeks later I saw the scaffold raised around the beautiful pulpit of Donatello at Prato, a note to the ministry had the effect of telegraphically stopping operations. The indignation of the good people of Florence at the cessation of the house-cleaning brought me a request from a high quarter to undertake the defense of the city against the insolent Englishman of the “Cornhill!”

The subsequent years of my residence in Florence were on the whole the most tranquil and the happiest of my mature life. We all enjoyed it without serious drawback, the routine becoming a visit in early summer to Venice, then visits to the Venetian Tyrol, Cadore, Cortina, and Landro, and the return to Florence in the autumn. I found in Florence an intellectual life and serenity of which there was no evidence elsewhere, with surroundings of the noblest art of the Renaissance, and an intellectual atmosphere hardly, I think, to be found in any other Italian city. Amongst our dearest friends were the Villaris, with whom we still remain in cordial sympathy. I can wish Italy no greater good than the possession of many children like Pasquale Villari. Our great diplomat George P. Marsh had an unbounded admiration for him–he used to say, “Villari is an angel;” and he certainly stands at the head of the list of noble Italians I have known for the personal and intellectual virtues and subtlety of appreciation, not rare amongst Italians, but unfortunately to be sought for in their politics in vain. In Italy as in America men of that type are pushed to the wall and crowded out of the conflicts of political life.

I was finally, after five years of residence, obliged to abandon our home at Florence by the constant recurrence of fevers, which gave us perpetual anxiety as well as perplexity, for there is no malaria in that part of Tuscany. After an attack which nearly proved fatal to one of the children, my courage gave out, and we broke up housekeeping, and the family, with the exception of myself and my eldest daughter, went back to England. It was only subsequently that I discovered that the secret of the fevers was in the water drawn from the wells of Florence. These are sunk in a stratum of gravel in which are countless cesspools, the filtration of which extends through the entire stratum and poisons every well within the limits of their influence. On my accession in later years to the service of the “Times” as Rome correspondent, I attacked the system of drainage and water supply of Florence in a series of letters, and brought down on my head the most furious abuse which my journalistic life has known, but which ended in the reformation, not yet complete, however, of the water supply of the city, and the admission by the Florentines that if they had attended to my warnings earlier they would have been saved great losses, chief of which was the abandonment of a projected return to Florence by Queen Victoria, on account of a serious epidemic of typhoid which broke out after her first visit. Like most reformers, I was threatened with violence if I returned to the scene of my labors, to be hailed as a friend when I had been found to be right and my warnings salutary. But at the moment, the effect of the fevers was to drive me out of Florence, where residence had on many accounts proved most delightful, and send me off again on adventure.

I passed the next year at New York on the staff of the “Evening Post,” sending occasional correspondence to the “Times,” and during this absence my father-in-law became involved in financial embarrassments which ultimately cost my wife her allowance, after we had again established our residence for the family in London. With a widened literary experience and connection I could see my way to a better situation than that of the past years, but in 1886 the death of the Rome correspondent of the “Times,” and the definite retirement of Mr. Gallenga, the Italian correspondent _par excellence_, brought me into a regular and permanent employment by the paper as its representative for Greece and Italy, with residence at Rome.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE BLOCKADE OF GREECE

I took possession of my double charge of the (to me) most interesting of all foreign lands, Greece and Italy, at a moment when affairs were quickening for new troubles in the former, where demagoguery had again taken the upper hand. Comoundouros was dead, and Tricoupi, who had succeeded, as I had long before anticipated that he would, to the lead in Greek politics, had fallen, as he had foretold, on the question of taxation. The new successor to the bad qualities of old Comoundouros, Deliyanni, in his electoral programme had promised to relieve the people of all taxation, and had, of course, been elected, and I found Tricoupi still at the head of the opposition. I had stayed at Rome only long enough to take possession of my place and have a conversation with the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, General Robilant, as to the course which Italy would follow if there were troubles in Greece, and received his assurance that Italy would stand with England, whatever might happen.

Robilant was one of the ablest ministers of foreign affairs Italy has had in my time, and, if not the most conspicuous occupant of that position in intellectual qualities, he certainly was so, with one exception–that of Baron Blanc–in sound common sense and a large and comprehensive perception of the situation of Italy amongst the powers, and her true affiliations. To him, more than to any other individual Italian, was due the entry of Italy into the Triple Alliance, a measure which has probably been very largely instrumental in keeping the peace between the European powers ever since it was formed. Simple and reserved in his manner to a correspondent, he was entirely frank and courteous in communicating what could be communicated, and quietly silent beyond. Always the butt of the most savage hostility of the Italian radicals, he resigned the year after, though supported by the majority in the Chamber, rather than expose himself longer to the vulgar and brutal partisan insolence of Cavallotti and his allies in the Chamber. As individual, as soldier, and as minister, Robilant was the type of the Italian at his best. Very few of the extreme Left in the Italian Chamber made any pretensions to a comprehension of the nature of a gentleman, and the vulgarity of the outbreak which provoked his resignation–it was on the occasion of the disaster of Dogali–was of a nature which only a hardened politician could adapt himself to. It was my first experience of the indecencies of Italian parliamentarism, and, when he left the Chamber under the unendurable insults poured on him in language adapted only to street broils, I said to a colleague that he would never appear again in the Chamber. I was right, for, though the ministry obtained a vote of confidence, and he was urged to withdraw his resignation, he refused. In his charge the foreign policy of Italy was at its best.

I found affairs at Athens in a critical condition. Deliyanni was trying the game of bluff which had succeeded in the hands of Comoundouros, but with quite a different measure of competence. With Deliyanni it was an evident sham. He had promised war without the least intention of preparing for it, in the childish expectation that Europe would oblige the Sultan to make some concession which would save his credit in the country and enable him to continue in office. But circumstances were different; Greece had on the former occasion a valid claim, admitted by the powers, while on this there was only the pretension that Greece should receive a compensation for betterments acquired by Bulgaria. In the former, the Treaty of Berlin had sanctioned the cession; in the latter, there was only the bare impudence of Mr. Deliyanni to move the powers. The ministry called out class after class of the reserves and sent them northward, but made no effective preparation for war; the men were ill-clad, worse provided, and everything was lacking to make them ready for a campaign. The casual observer could see that war was not intended, and that Deliyanni was silly enough to believe that the agents of the powers did not see through his sham, and thought that he could frighten them. The men on the frontier finally amounted to about 45,000 men, kept there as a scarecrow to the powers at an expense, ascertained from the safest authorities, of 1000 deaths per month. The powers insisted on demobilization. Deliyanni replied by waving his torch and threatening to set fire to Europe if they did not give him a province; and meanwhile the Turkish government was gathering a solid force of about 40,000 men on the menaced frontier, and preparing silently to march on Athens.

The common people of the city, ignorant of everything connected with war, and inflamed by the jingo official press, conceived that nothing was needed but to set the Greek army in motion to insure a triumphant march on Constantinople, and were shouting for the troops to cross the frontier. Deliyanni had never had the least intention of making war, but he dared not withdraw for fear of his own people and the war fever he had inoculated them with. The worst feature in the position was that he had armed and provided with large quantities of ammunition the entire population of the Greek frontier, and the irregulars so formed had no discipline and obeyed no orders, but began each on his own account to harass the Turkish outposts. The Turks, obedient to their orders, contented themselves with repelling these minute stings, keeping their own side of the frontier, and waiting till the attack developed to take up a solid and thoroughly prepared offensive. The summons came from the powers to demobilize, or the Greek coast would be blockaded. This was Deliyanni’s only escape from a terrible disaster to the country, or the personal humiliation of withdrawal he would not submit to, with the added risk of violence on the part of the mob of the city, fired to a safe and flaming enthusiasm by the reports continually coming in of new victories on the frontier, each little skirmish with a picket being invariably followed by the withdrawal of the Turks to a position well within their own territory, according to the general order to accept no combat under actual conditions, so that the least skirmish was magnified at Athens to a new victory. The summons to demobilize was met by a point-blank refusal, when the fleets of the powers–Russia and France excepted–entered on the scene, and the blockade of the Greek coast was declared. This saved the credit of the ministry with the country; and Deliyanni, protesting against intervention as a measure on behalf of the Sultan, and hostile to Greece, resigned, but gave no orders to his commandants on the frontier to withdraw, and the skirmishing went on. The King in this crisis behaved well, and put Deliyanni in the alternative of demobilizing or resigning; and, when he chose the latter course, the King called Tricoupi to form a ministry.

Tricoupi’s position was difficult. He protested against the blockade as an unwarrantable interference with the freedom of action of Greece, as he considered that the government should have been allowed on its own responsibility to make war and take the consequences, as the only method of teaching the Greeks how to fulfill their international obligation. But the withdrawal of the diplomatic representatives of the great powers, whose fleets were blockading the coast, had left him without any channel of communicating with the powers, either for protesting or for yielding, and the fighting was increasing in extent if not in intensity. On the day, too, on which Tricoupi accepted the charge, the Turkish commander had received his orders to cross the frontier on the next day and march on Athens if the annoyance were not stopped. A great extent of the frontier was not provided with the telegraph, and the chosen partisans of Deliyanni were in command, and determined to force a conflict. The blockade prevented Tricoupi from sending officers by sea to take over the command, and there was not time to send them by land. General Sapunzaki was the only general officer on whom the minister could depend to obey orders, and he could reach only a part of the line on which the fighting was going on. There was no subordination and no general plan in the offensive; but each detachment of troops on the frontier made war on its own responsibility, and the Turks contented themselves with repelling attacks.

I went to the telegraph office to get the late advices in the afternoon of the last day of the fighting, when it had become very general all along the frontier. Tricoupi had sent imperative orders to cease hostilities, but the telegraph had been cut, probably by some one who wanted the war to ensue, and when I found Tricoupi at the telegraph in the afternoon in conversation with Sapunzaki over the wire, he turned to me with an expression of intense distress, exclaiming, “They are fighting again all along the line, and if it cannot be stopped at once we are lost.” “Can I do anything?” I asked. He replied, “I should be glad if you would go to Baring” (who had been sent to take charge of the legation, but with no diplomatic powers or relation with the Greek government) “and tell him the position, and ask him to telegraph to his government to urge Constantinople to send word to Eyoub Pasha that the Greek government had given stringent orders to stop the fighting, and ask him to coöperate.”

It was an intensely hot day in the end of May, and the streets of Athens, deserted by the population, were an oven; not a cab was to be found on the square or in the streets. I ran to the British legation, fortunately found Baring there, and explained the position, saying that Tricoupi, in the absence of any diplomatic relation between them, had begged me to present myself personally to urge intervention. Baring was convinced that Tricoupi, as well as the late premier, was bent on war, and would not at first believe that his request was sincere, but finally, overpersuaded, did telegraph to London. I then flew to all the other legations, except the French and Russian, which had been supporting Deliyanni, and repeated the request to the secretaries in charge, winding up with the Turkish minister, whose ship had not yet arrived, and who was therefore still in Athens, pending its arrival, and gave him the fullest explanation of Tricoupi’s position and the difficulties of it, and begged him to telegraph Constantinople to order Eyoub Pasha to withdraw from the frontier far enough to leave the bands no outlying detachment to attack. I succeeded in convincing him that Tricoupi was sincere in his efforts to keep peace, and the good fellow said at once, “If Tricoupi is sincere, I will not stand on diplomatic etiquette, but will go to see him at once.” He did so, and found the Greek minister at the war office, as he had taken that portfolio with the premiership, and they arranged between them that the Porte should be telegraphed to, requesting Eyoub Pasha to put a sufficient distance between him and the attacking bands of Greeks to make a conflict out of the question; and before nightfall the white flag was flying along the frontier, and communication established between Eyoub and Sapunzaki via Salonica, and peace was secured.

Eyoub’s orders to cross the frontier with his solid column of thirty to forty thousand men, and march straight to Athens if the attacks persisted another day, were peremptory, and there was no force or dispositions of defense to prevent his triumphal movement. There were no defensive works, for the jingo Greeks ridiculed the idea of needing a defensive preparation against an invasion of the Turkish army, which they were confident of annihilating ten to one. There was no lack of personal courage on the part of the Greek population, but there was no efficient organization even of the so-called regular army, and there was really nothing to prevent a Turkish walk-over as far as the old frontiers of Greece, and even there there were no earthworks.

The sequence was disgraceful and humiliating. I wrote at the time that “The wounded are not yet all in the hospitals when the attacks on Tricoupi for having ordered the demobilization already begin in the Chamber and the press. His happy arrival at the moment of danger has saved Greece from, a disaster which, now that it is averted, the Greeks in general will never believe to have been so near, and will not accept as a lesson.” And for the trifling part I had taken in the final negotiations I was afterwards insulted in the streets of Athens as having “prevented the Greeks from marching to Constantinople.” They got their lesson years after, when they were far better prepared for war than on this occasion. But Tricoupi was right when he said that the blockade was a mistake, and that the powers should have allowed the Greeks to take their own course and learn their lesson. Undiscriminating Philhellenism has been the worst enemy of Greece.

The flurry over and quiet restored, the heat, the excitement, and the hard and unremitting work and anxiety of that month of May told on me, and I broke down with an attack of nervous prostration and acute dyspepsia, by which I was quite incapacitated from movement. Taking the first steamer to Naples, I passed the rest of the summer at Rome, disabled, until the heats had passed, for any considerable exertion. But, contrary to the general superstition regarding Rome, it is a city where one may pass the summer months most agreeably if not very actively. The English ambassador of that time, Sir John Saville Lumley, afterwards Lord Saville of Burford, to whom I owe many delightful hours in that and subsequent years, used to say that he knew no city where one could pass the year so delightfully as in Rome. By strict diet and an activity limited to the hours of the early morning and afternoon I weathered the summer, but each return of the heats during the succeeding six years brought me a relapse, so that on the whole I paid a long penalty for my participation in Greek politics.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CRISPI–A SECRET-SERVICE MISSION–MONTENEGRO REVISITED

The following year was marked by the accession of Crispi to the direction of the government of Italy. So many fables have accumulated regarding Crispi, and such bitterness of prejudice against him even in England, that as one of the very few disinterested witnesses of his conduct from that day until his second fall after Adowah, and supposed to be in his confidence, I am disposed to put briefly on record my impressions of him. His popularity at that date (1887) was incontestably greater than that of any other Italian statesman, but the animosity entertained for him by the Radicals was intense, owing to his most vigorous repression of all anti-dynastic tendencies, and the bitterer for his having once been himself a Radical leader; but, what was at first sight inexplicable, the hostility to him of the Conservatives was scarcely less bitter than that of the Republicans,–the former because he had once been a Republican, and the latter because he had ceased to be one. The leading chiefs of groups among the politicians were afraid of him on account of his strength, and the court had the most cordial hatred of him, partly because he had never tried to conciliate it or to conceal his distrust of it, and partly because Signora Crispi was an object of aversion to all the society of Rome. This aversion was intensified by the fact that, as the wife of a member of the order of the Annunciata, she was entitled to precedence over all the Italian nobility not so honored.

A Knight of the Annunciata is technically the cousin of the King, and at the receptions of the Queen, Signora Crispi, who was really an antipathetic person, had her seat in the royal circle, where she sat as completely ignored by all present as if she were a statue of Aversion. I am convinced that the larger part of the animosity shown for Crispi by the better classes in Rome was due to her. One of Crispi’s oldest and most constant friends told me of a visit he once made to his house with General—-, one of the Mille of Marsala, when, as they left the house, the general said mournfully, “Poor Crispi, he has not a friend in the world.” “Nonsense, he has thousands,” replied the other. “No,” returned the general, “if he had _one_ he would kill that woman.” In the latter part of Crispi’s first ministry we were on friendly terms, though our first intercourse was anything but kindly; but I avoided going needlessly to his house to the end of my term of residence in Rome, except when the service demanded it, because I did not like to meet his wife.

Crispi and I were never intimate, and the supposed confidence between us never extended beyond the communication of political matter which he thought should be made public, and which could be made public without violation of official secrecy. He had far too high an estimate of his position as the head of the government of one of the powers of Europe to enter into intimacy with a correspondent of even the “Times,” a journal of which, nevertheless, he always spoke with the respect due another power. “It is not merely a journal, but a great public institution,” he said, and he treated me as the agent of that power; but intimacy in any other sense there never was. Crispi had, to a degree I never knew in any other Italian minister, the sense of the dignity of his position, which, to those who did not read the man thoroughly, seemed arrogance, and made him many enemies. He had an invincible antipathy to newspaper correspondents, but at the outset of our acquaintance I made him understand that even if he did not see fit to treat me with cordiality, he should not treat the “Times” with disrespect. He had two secretaries, Alberto Pisani Dossi, one of the most noble Italian natures I ever knew, and Edmond Mayor, a Swiss, naturalized in Italy, and an admirable diplomat, now in its service, an honest, faithful child of the mountain republic; and both these became and remain my excellent friends, and, as they were permitted, they kept me informed of the matters which it was for the advantage of the “Times” to know; but until near the end of the first term of Crispi’s premiership we never came nearer than that to being friends. I found his manner intolerable, as, no doubt, other journalists did, and, as the relations of the journalists to the man in office are in Italy generally corrupt, Crispi’s aversion to them and their ways accounted easily for the very general and violent hostility between him and the press.

The tone of the journals in Italy has very little to do with public opinion. All the world knows that, with the exception of two or three dailies, the Italian papers are the organs of purely personal interests, ambitions, and opinions,–not even of parties, which do not exist except in the form of fossil fragments; and when a journal emits an opinion or formulates a policy, everybody knows that it is the opinion or policy of the man who has a dominant or entire control of its columns. Crispi had his own journal, “La Riforma,” which frankly and entirely expressed his views, and he paid no attention to the others. I happened to be on the way to the Foreign Office the day after Crispi assumed the reins of government, and by the way fell in with the foreign editor of one of the journals of the Left, exulting in the accession of a minister of his old party. He said to me, “I will wager you, Stillman, that in six weeks we are recognized as official,”–which meant subsidized. He had his audience first, and it was short, but within the fortnight his paper was one of the most violent opponents of the ministry. I had my audience, and in five minutes I turned my back on the premier and walked out of the office, and never put my foot in it again until, many weeks after, some trouble on the African frontier between English and Italian officers brought me a request from Crispi to come and receive a communication.

I finally conquered his respect by showing him that I was the sincere friend of Italy, and our relations became confidential as far as his very rigorous sense of his official limitations permitted, but not a line beyond. I have seen in his hands the copy of the treaty of Triple Alliance, but I never drew from him the faintest hint of its provisions except that it was purely defensive and contained no stipulation for any aggressive movement under any circumstances. I learned them from other sources, and, with the changes of ministries and the diversities of their policies, foreign as well as domestic, there is no doubt that all the powers are fully informed of the details of the treaty. But personal intimacy, in the sense of that friendship which obtains amongst equals, could never have existed between us. Crispi is extremely reticent and reserved in his personal relations and has very few intimate friends, and those, so far as I know, entirely amongst the faithful few who were his intimates in the days of insurrection and conspiracy; but I know him as well as any one out of that circle, and I know him to be an absolutely honest and patriotic statesman, the first of Italy since Cavour. It is my opinion, too, that he is the ablest man not only in Italy but in Europe, since the death of Bismarck. In 1893 he was urged to assume the dictatorship, and the King in the general panic was willing to accord it, but Crispi refused, saying, “I am an old man with few years to live, but I will not give my countrymen an example of unconstitutional government.”

But Italian politics are only the wrangle of personal ambitions and of faction intrigues. The Chamber is a legislative anarchy from which a few honest and patriotic men occasionally emerge as ministers through a chance combination, to disappear again with the first tumult, and the influence of the chief of the state was never such as to guide it out of the chaos. King Humbert, one of the truest gentlemen and most courteous sovereigns that ever sat on the throne of any country, never made an effort to defend the prerogatives of the crown, and accepted with the same _bonhomie_ every ministerial combination proposed to him, whether it comprised dangerous elements or not. At no time did he attempt to exert the enormous influence which the crown possesses in Italy for the maintenance of a consistent policy, internal or foreign. Lord Saville told me that, when Crispi came to power in 1887, he asked the King if he was a safe head of the government, and the King replied that it was better to have him with them than against them, for at that time Crispi was regarded by all Conservatives as the devil of Italian politics. But in the following years Crispi’s profound–even exaggerated–reverence for the King, and his masterly administration of the government, had laid all the apprehensions of the sovereign at rest, and gained for him the widest popularity ever possessed, in my knowledge of Italian affairs, by any minister. The King said to me that he had the most absolute confidence in his devotion, integrity, and abilities. Yet, when in 1891 an artificial crisis in the Chamber gave Crispi his first defeat on a question of so little constitutional import that his successors adopted his measure and passed it, the King accepted with the same equanimity a ministry composed of the most discordant elements, ignoring all the constitutional proprieties. At a later epoch, that of 1893, when Crispi saved Italy from menacing chaos, the King repeated to me his expression of confidence in Crispi and his very low opinion of his only possible alternative, Rudiní, but in the succeeding crisis accepted Rudiní with the same cheerfulness he had shown when Crispi saved the position in 1893.

Nothing could exceed the devotion of the King to his subjects and their personal welfare, but he allowed the ship of state to drift into the breakers because he would not maintain the highest prerogative of the crown, that of insisting on a ministry which possessed and deserved his confidence. Knowing, as he did, that parliamentary government in Italy had become a mere farce and the derision of the country, he never attempted to insist on exercising any influence on the composition of the ministry, which represented his authority as well as the popular will, and in 1896 he yielded the dissolution of the Chamber to the pressure of a court favorite against the advice of all his constitutional advisers. Personally I was a warm admirer of the man, but I regard his reign as a long disaster to the kingdom of Italy, the greater because his personal qualities gave him such a hold on the population that he might safely have assumed any initiative beneficial to the state. He might have abolished the Chamber–he allowed it to abolish him.

The return of the summer heats bringing on a recurrence of the malady acquired at Athens, I was obliged to leave Italy for the summer and I returned to England. On my arrival the “Times” manager proposed to me a trip to America in quest of evidence connected with the Parnell case. A professional detective sent out some time before had failed to get hold of the threads of the question, and MacDonald, thinking that as an American I might succeed where the professional had failed, desired me to try my luck. Of the general history of that case the public has long ago learned all that it cares to know. I had nothing to do with that and am not here concerned with it; but I had a curious and interesting experience in my visit, the object of which was the obtaining of documents that would confirm the connection of Mr. Parnell with secret and illegal acts in Ireland, with which the Irish conspirators in America were probably connected, it being hoped that some of the latter might be induced to give up documents in confirmation.

I had warned MacDonald that the published facsimile of a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell in connection with the Phoenix Park murders was not what he supposed it to be, and that the theory that it had been written by Parnell’s secretary and signed by Parnell was erroneous. It was clear to me that it had been written and signed by the same hand and by the same pen. I had once gone through a complicated case of forgery with Chabot, the great expert in handwriting, in the course of which I became greatly interested in the man. We had become friends and he had taught me all that could be taught of his profession, so that I had some capacity to form a judgment on the matter. MacDonald replied that they were certain of their facts, and that they should maintain that position. There was ample personal evidence that a letter of the import of that produced in facsimile in the “Times” had been sent by Parnell to Sheridan, who was implicated in the Phoenix Park murders, and that this letter had been seen by many persons supposed to be in the councils of the Irish party! and it is probable that Pigott had seen it and bargained for its delivery to some party on behalf of the “Times.” He was probably deluded in this expectation, and, not to fail in his promise, reproduced it from memory and with the aid of the handwriting of Parnell’s secretary and an old signature of Parnell, and delivered it as the original. Confirmation of this hypothesis is given by the fact that Parnell dared not bring his suit against the “Times” until the forged letter had been shown in court in the course of the connected case of O’Donnell, and was seen by him not to be the original. That was safe in the custody of Sheridan, who had taken it to America and kept it in hiding from both parties. It was the special object of my mission.

The English detective who had preceded me had the naïveté to apply to the chief of the New York detective police, an Irishman, for assistance, and was handed over to pretended colleagues who were really agents of the Irish organization, and so completely duped by them as to be induced to send a supposed detective (who was one of themselves) to Mexico, where he was assured that Sheridan had gone, and led to undertake various operations which were simply contrivances to make him lose his time and his money.

On carefully surveying the ground at New York before attempting to make any direct application to any person whom I supposed capable of furnishing me with what I sought, I discovered that the detective service of New York was in the hands of the Fenian organization, that the chief of police (now deceased) was their confederate, and, above all persons, not to be taken into my confidence, and that the principal line of transatlantic telegraph was under the supervision of a confederate of the association. The latter betrayed himself at once by the absurd difficulties he made about my registering a London telegraphic address, which I at the instant saw to be assumed for the purpose of delay and imposing on me a prearranged address, which, however, I accepted with apparent simplicity and good faith. My telegrams were of course to be in cipher, and this was so secure from all attempts at deciphering that I had no anxiety about the Irish chiefs solving it. I have heard in later times that they boasted of having copies of all my messages (which is probable) and having read them, but this was impossible, as not only was the cipher extremely difficult to any one even who had the key, but the key was changed every day by a scheme arranged before I left London and known only by the office and myself. My cipher, if used according to the directions, is absolutely insoluble by any patience or experience, and the Fenian boast that they read it was pure “blague.” I knew that they had the telegraph in their hands and made my arrangements accordingly. But the secret power of the organization surprised me, though I knew very well the political influence at election time which the rottenness of our politics gave them.

I obtained from a leading New York merchant a letter of introduction to a well-known private detective whom, as a fellow-countryman, I succeeded in so far interesting in my work that I had no difficulty in getting from him all the useful information that he possessed; but to my request for practical assistance he replied that half of the detectives in his own employment were Irish, and that the knowledge that he had taken part in any such undertaking as mine would lead to their desertion and the paralysis of his own service. But he put me in the way of getting the services of a most competent detective who worked on his own hook, and from whom I obtained all that I needed. He succeeded in tracing Sheridan to a ranch in Nevada, and ascertained that he had the Parnell letter which we wanted, but that he did not carry it with him, for fear of being robbed of it, and that he was watched so closely by the agents of the Fenian organization that, as my mission was suspected, my connection with the “Times” being known to all the world, any attempt on my part to enter into personal relations with him would be dangerous to me personally, and if I did succeed in purchasing the desired document from him, I should be killed, if necessary, to get it from me. Sheridan was willing to sell it, but he considered his life to be in such danger if it were known that he had done so, that he demanded a price which would, in the event of his being assassinated, put his wife at ease for the rest of her life. Later he would have accepted a much smaller price, and it is said that a prominent English Radical, to put the matter out of the possibility of renewal of the accusation, subsequently purchased it.

Pending these researches and the arrival of a reply by post to my request at length for more detailed instruction as to certain negotiations which I had entered into, I went into the Adirondack woods for ten days, a movement which proved how closely I was watched by the Irish agents. Since my early knowledge of that wilderness, a railroad had been built through it, and to see the portion through which it passed–a section far from my old haunts–I followed it as far as “Paul Smith’s Hotel,” on the northern edge of the woods, and then took a boat across the lake country, reaching “Martin’s,” on the south, near my former camping-grounds. Two days later an Irishman arrived at “Martin’s” from “Paul Smith’s,” in a buggy. As I had made no secret of my destination in leaving Smith’s, having no suspicion of being shadowed, and quite indifferent to it if attempted, I suspected at once that our Hibernian guest was on my track. He brought with him an old army carbine, but as it was the close season for the deer, and the arm was rusty and unfit for sporting uses, I was confirmed in my suspicions that his business was with any person who might come to hold a conference with me. Finding that no one came to meet me, he grew friendly and, under the influence of the good whiskey plentiful there, confidential. He pretended to have served in the Federal cavalry during the War of Secession, and that the carbine was his accustomed weapon; but one day when well soaked with whiskey he was induced to come out and join in a shooting match, when we found that he actually did not know how to fire at a mark, and it was evident that his employers considered that a revolver would be a greater danger to him than to the man he was expected to punish, and so had provided him with a safer weapon. I kept him pretty drunk for two or three days, and he told us frankly that he was employed usually in carrying messages between New York and Ireland. There remained no question that his business was to take care of any traitor to the cause who might have been so incautious as to meet me in secret, and the caution of my detective that my life was in danger if I entered personally into negotiation with Sheridan was shown to be justified.

As the negotiations had showed me that the members of the party were not all incorruptible, and as I had learned that Tynan, who was then in New York, and who was supposed to be the famous No. 1, was conversant with all the facts relating to the murder in Phoenix Park, I suggested to my friend the principal detective that I should make Tynan a direct bid for the information we wanted, offering an ample compensation. He replied that Tynan was incorruptible, and that my proposition would most probably be regarded as an insult which he would resent by a revolver bullet, “and,” he added, “in the present state of politics here, no jury could be found which would convict him of murder.”

As the result of my expedition, we obtained some unimportant documents, though nothing that related to Parnell; but the picture of the state of politics in New York, dominated by a clique of conspirators and murderers, in possession of the police of the city, and the telegraph service, sitting as a Vehmgericht in the principal city of the Union, and paralyzing the criminal law whenever its security was threatened, was worth some trouble and expense. Of its truthfulness there remained no question. I did not depend on one source of information in my researches, but, having had a confidential letter to the English consul in New York, I applied to him for help simultaneously with my dispatch of the detective, and he ultimately confirmed the report of the detective in every respect, but cautioned me on my first visit against coming to the consulate again, as the surveillance of the Fenians was constant, and if my business with him were suspected it might lead to needless complications, so that I was obliged, in order to consult him, to meet him at some prearranged place, a restaurant by choice, where we could exchange information without attracting the attention of the Fenian spies.

Though the chief object of my mission was not attained, the information I did gather was considered of such importance that on my return to Rome the “Times,” “for the good service rendered,” added to my salary the rent of my quarters, the only advance in my pay ever made from the beginning of my service. I remained in charge of the two peninsulas, Greece and Italy, as long as Mr. MacDonald lived. He died in 1889, and though I have never had any ground for discontent at the relation I was in with the office, under either his successor or the change of proprietorship which took place not long after, I felt when MacDonald died that the strongest personal tie which bound me to the paper was severed. When I joined the staff Delane was the editor, and though, on account of his health, he rarely interfered in the details of the management, and my relations were entirely with the sub-editor, Mr. Stebbing, whose real and hearty friendship was matter of great personal satisfaction to me then and since, we always felt that Delane was over us. When Chenery succeeded, the relation became one of cordial friendship with the chief, who was a scholar as well as a journalist, of whose sympathy for a good piece of work one was sure. His death and the accession of Mr. Buckle in no manner changed my situation at the office, but it was another editorial change, while with MacDonald not only had I the relation of a subordinate with a friendly chief, in constant correspondence on every point of duty from the beginning of my service, but there were many and strong ties between us in outside sympathies, and he was as kind to me as an elder brother. He was most unjustly credited with the Pigott fiasco, but, as I have shown, the evidence of the genuineness of the letter which Pigott had forged was so strong that the experienced counsel were all deceived by it, and the conduct of Parnell himself showed that he was not sure that it was not the genuine document until he saw it. _Au fond_ the “Times” was right, and its accusation against Parnell was fully justified, but by one of those chances which occur to even the most prudent, there was a defect in the chain of evidence at the most important point.

The animosities developed by the affair found expression in terms of the most unjustifiable imputations of collusion with the forgery, on the part of MacDonald and Mr. Walter, which I have seen repeated in later years; but no one who knew either of the men would for a moment admit that there could be a shadow of justice in the imputation. Mr. Walter, though of an uncompromising hostility to any political measures or persons that he considered dangerous to the country, was of an inflexible sincerity and honesty, and absolutely incapable of the remotest complicity with a fraud. No other man of his race have I known in whom the patriotic fire burned more intensely, or who better merited the description of the Latin poet, “Justum et tenacem propositi virum,” or had more of the English bulldog tenacity in a cause which he considered just and of vital importance to the country. Slow to form antipathies, he was immovable in them once formed, and as constant in his confidences once he found them merited. To his intense conservatism and antagonism to shifty politics was probably due the unvarying opposition of the “Times” to Home Rule and all other attempts at infringement of the British Constitution, but so far as my own experience goes he never attempted to influence the views of the correspondence. There were points in which, in regard to Italian and Greek affairs, he differed from me seriously, but he never imposed a hair’s weight on what I had to say, nor do I believe that he intentionally influenced the tone of the paper beyond the exercise of the inevitable control over its national policy. The antagonism to the United States at the outbreak of the War of Secession was Delane’s, and not in accordance with Mr. Walter’s feeling, but, like most of Delane’s views, borrowed from London society or the government. The “Times” has its traditions like those of a monarchy, interests to defend which are not in all cases those of an ideal state policy, but are those which have made England what she is, and which are probably those which will keep her what she is the longest and most safely. And of these interests, and of this inflexible maintenance of them, John Walter was the most strenuous of supporters. He was a consistent liberal as far as he felt liberalism to be perfectly safe, but he had the most vivid dislike of Gladstone and his ways; a dislike dating from their earliest contact in the House of Commons, long before Gladstone adopted Home Rule. And to this nature the character of MacDonald responded as the natural executive. The following letter which I received from Mr. Walter in reply to mine of grief at the death of MacDonald, tells the story of their relation better than I can.

Bearwood, December 19, 1889.

Dear Mr. Stillman,–One appreciates true sympathy at such a time as this, and none that I have received has touched me more than yours. It is sad indeed to go down to the office and be no more greeted with MacDonald’s cheery voice and kindly look. His illness was unexpected and its progress rapid. Within a few days after his return from his holiday in Mull, he was attacked by the complaint which proved fatal–“an enlargement of the prostate gland”–brought on, I have no doubt, by exposure day after day to continual rain, and accompanied by recurrent attacks of fever. To myself personally his loss is irreparable, for I had been intimately associated with him for thirty years, while his connection with the paper, formed in my father’s time, was very much longer. He was confident, to the last, of the successful issue of the great cause to which he had devoted so much time during the last three years, and I would that he had been spared to witness it.

Yours very truly,

J. WALTER.

Of the fourteen years of increasing and finally cordial intimacy that followed Mr. MacDonald’s acceptance of my services as casual correspondent of the “Times,” I have the unbroken record in the file of letters received from him at every post where my duty carried me. These contain the evidence of a noble, honest, and sympathetic nature, whose loss to me was, as Mr. Walter found it, “irreparable,” for such friendships sever themselves from all relation of interest and business.

During the tenure of the joint jurisdiction over Greece and Italy, I had an amusing experience through a report of my assassination by the Albanians. I profited by one of the visits to Athens and Crete to pass through Trieste and take Montenegro and northern Albania in the itinerary. Disembarking at Cattaro I drove by the new road to Cettinje, a magnificent drive with unsurpassed views seaward and inland, but the abolition of the natural defense of Montenegro against the Austrian artillery. No doubt the astute Prince understood that after the recognition of Montenegrin nationality by all Europe and the emphasis put on its importance by the Dulcigno demonstration and its results, he could afford to ignore the hostility of Austria and take his chances as the head of a civilized nation which had rights Austria must respect. But even in this breaking down of a barrier provided by nature he showed his shrewdness and tenacity, for the Austrians, in passing the frontier, had made the trace of the road pass over an elevation from which their artillery would command the difficult gorge that was the gate to the principality, and the Prince refused to bring his portion of the road to meet it but brought it up to the frontier by a safe route, and left the terminus there until the Austrians brought their road to meet it where the junction was in favor of the Montenegrin defense.

My reception in Cettinje was one of the pleasant incidents of my career as correspondent, for it was marked by a grateful cordiality unique in my experience, and I saw that a people and a Prince could retain gratitude for past services where nothing was needed or to be expected in the future. The Prince received me as a brother. There was no time to revisit under happier circumstances the familiar places as I should have been glad to do, but I determined at least to see the new possessions on the coast, and passing from Cattaro I followed the coast road by Spizza, the impregnable (if defended) fortress which had surrendered to Montenegro towards the close of the war, and was, without the shadow of a right, taken possession of by Austria in the settlement, and made a halt at Antivari. Here all was decay and ruin; the damages by the bombardment years before had not been repaired, the former Albanian inhabitants, mainly Mussulmans, had not returned, and the Montenegrins had not come. I could not even pass the night there, but took a boat from the port (there is no harbor) to Dulcigno. The owner of the boat put a mattress in it where I could lie at length, and so, sleeping, or listening to the songs of the rowers, or watching the stars overhead, I found myself in the course of the night at Dulcigno, where I was warmly received and hospitably entertained by the governor, a comrade of the war-days. With a little expenditure and energy Dulcigno might be made a delightful winter resort, the climate being that of Naples and the surroundings picturesque, but Montenegro has neither the capital nor the appliances to profit by its position. A company had proposed to the Prince to build a port and construct a hotel and all necessary appurtenances if he would give, in compensation, the right of establishing gaming-tables, after the fashion of Monte Carlo, but the Prince, awake to the importance of maintaining the respect of Europe so fairly won, refused the offer.

From Dulcigno the road I had to take to Scutari was a plunge into the unknown. I hired two horses, one a pack-horse for the baggage and the other a poor hack for riding. The roads were fetlock deep in mud, and the whole region so inundated that we often had to take across country, profiting by the ridges to avoid fording the unconjecturable depths of water in the ancient roads. At one point we had to pass a deep ditch, over which I forced my horse to jump, but the baggage horse refused it until pushed to it by main force, when he plumped in over head, ears, and baggage, and we had very great difficulty to extricate him, as the water was at least four feet below the bank. But I reached Scutari fortunately before night, wet, bedraggled, and muddied from head to foot, my clothes in tatters from the tenacious wait-a-bit thorn hedges we had had to force our way through, and all my baggage soaked, more or less as the water had had time to penetrate to it. Not an inhabited house did we pass on the way, such had been the terror of the border warfare still not dissipated. But from Scutari south there were other dangers. The Albanians were in a state of incipient revolt, and the country was unsafe for a Turkish escort, if even such protection were not to me a greater danger, and I found, not I confess without a little trepidation, that the only protection I could count on was the consular postman who rode with the mail-bag to San Giovanni di Budua, the first point at which the Austrian Lloyd steamers called. We met with no annoyance, however, and though we had at some points curious looks we encountered nothing more offensive, but I decided to give up the remainder of the land journey till more propitious times. San Giovanni seems to have been an important Roman port and there are interesting remains of the Imperial epoch.

On my arrival at Athens I received a telegram from my brother-in-law in London mysteriously praying me, “If you are alive, wire us.” On the heels of that came another from my father-in-law, “If you are safe, telegraph to Marie,” one to Tricoupi, then prime minister, to ask news of me, one to the English legation from the Foreign Office demanding information of my whereabouts, and another to the same from the “Times”–to all which I could get no explanation nor could anybody in Athens conjecture the why of the querying. We soon learned that a telegram from Cettinje, based on a report from Albania, had reported my being beheaded in the interior of Albania. I was honored by a question in the House of Commons, and obituary notices were general in the American papers. The official Montenegrin journal went into mourning. Several kind-hearted ladies waited on my wife in Florence to condole with her, but as I had telegraphed her on receipt of the telegram from her father that I was well, and the Italian papers with the news of my death had not frightened her, for she never read them, the condolence was discounted and the condoling friends went away, their object unexplained and their equanimity upset by the information that she had received a telegram from me that morning. There was a small compensation in the reading of my obituary notices, a satisfaction that can rarely be given a man.

CHAPTER XXXIX

ITALIAN POLITICS

In the reorganization of the office consequent on the entry of a new manager, I was offered the choice between the posts of Athens and Rome. Personally I should have preferred Athens, but I had recently established my family at Rome, and the serious objection to a family residence at Athens in the want of any refuge from the heats of the intense summer of that city at a practicable distance from it, was an insuperable obstacle to my accepting it. The succession of Lord Dufferin to the Embassy at Rome, and the friendly personal relations which his large-hearted nature established between the Embassy and the correspondentship, made the position highly agreeable. He was of all the diplomats I have ever known the one who best understood how to treat a correspondent. He took my measure as correspondent and accepted me _pro tanto_ into his confidence. He used to say, “I tell you whatever information there is, because I know that then you will not telegraph what ought not to be telegraphed, while if you find it out for yourself I have no right to restrain you.”

In 1890 the negotiations between England and Italy in reference to the occupation of Kassala by the latter, culminated in the congress of Naples, where Crispi met Sir Evelyn Baring (now Lord Cromer), for the discussion of the conditions. Until that time my relations with Crispi had been such as he generally maintained with journalists, viz., a distant civility, but in my case attended by confidential relations with his two secretaries. I attended the congress, and was admitted by both Dufferin and Baring to such confidential knowledge of the negotiations as was possible. From Crispi’s private secretary I learned his views, and, knowing the opinions on both sides, I was able to remove certain prejudices on the part of Crispi and so smooth the difficulties which his suspicious nature raised. Unfortunately there was one misapprehension on his part of which I became aware too late, namely, that Sir Evelyn Baring was hostile to Italians in Egypt and predisposed to combat Crispi’s conditions. This was due to sheer misrepresentation on the part of the Italian delegates, who were both Anglophobes; and the conviction on the part of Crispi that he must fight Baring as an enemy led to protracted and obstinate contest of each point in the conditions, till finally, just as agreement had been arrived at, a dispatch from Lord Salisbury ordered the withdrawal from the negotiations, and the convention fell through, to Crispi’s great annoyance. His total miscomprehension of the large-hearted and generous ruler of Egypt was a misfortune to Italy and to Crispi, but the defect was in his temperament–a morbid tendency to suspicion of strangers characteristic of the man and in the roots of his Albanian nature. Crispi was not a judge of men–had he been he would have avoided the friends who ruined his political career, and made friends who would have strengthened his position. The efforts I had made to remove misunderstandings satisfied Crispi that I was really friendly to Italy and established more cordial relations between us thenceforward. In acknowledgment of his mistaken treatment of me he conferred on me the cross of commander of the Crown of Italy.

A little later the combination was formed in the Chamber to overthrow the ministry. I had some time before befriended Monsignor X., the victim of an outrageous act of injustice on the part of the French government, and of accessory indifference on the part of the Vatican, and he had repaid me by valuable information from the Vatican from time to time. When this ministerial crisis was in progress, Monsignor X. came to me one evening to tell me that the chiefs of the factions in opposition were in conference with agents of the Vatican to support them in the overthrow of Crispi. The Vatican promised to release Catholics from the _non expedit_ in case of the fall of the ministry and the necessity of going to the country in a general election. The ministerial combination which accepted this pact with the immitigable enemy of the unity of Italy, whose sole motive for hostility to Crispi was the latter’s invincible antagonism to the temporal power and the immixtion of the Church in civil affairs, comprised a leading Republican and Radical, Nicotera, and Rudiní, the chief of the ultra-Conservative group, beside members of various groups of intervening shades of politics. Knowing little of the rottenness of the politics of Italy at that time I was amazed by the information of Monsignor X., and went at once to the Palazzo Braschi to inform Crispi and ascertain if there was positive confirmation of the information. I asked him to use his means of intelligence at the Vatican, which was always sure, and so well informed that Cardinal Hohenlohe told me one day that Crispi knew better what was passing at the Vatican than the cardinals did. On inquiry he discovered that my news was true, and for the first time he understood the full meaning of the combination against him.

That the King should have accepted Crispi’s resignation under the circumstances (the adverse vote in the Chamber, being a surprise vote involving no question of policy, and, as all knew, the result of a secret combination–a conspiracy, in fact) was a grave mistake on the part of His Majesty, and opened the way to all the confusion and parliamentary anarchy which has followed, and which to-day is increasing and menaces the stability of the throne and the unity of Italy. The government of Crispi had been most successful, his attitude in the Bulgarian affair had rendered an important service to the cause of European peace, as was acknowledged by Lord Salisbury in a published dispatch, and he had strengthened the ties between England and Italy; he had maintained perfect order, and had effected economies in the national expenditure to the amount of 140,500,000 lire a year, besides suppressing some annoying taxes and without imposing any new one, and when he fell gold was practically at par and the financial position solid as it had not been since 1860. He had decided on the reform of the banking system, which would have prevented the catastrophe that fell on the succeeding ministry, and the rotten banks and the corrupt element in the Chamber which was in their pay were the leading element in the combination against him. Under these circumstances the King’s duty was to support a minister who had at the grave crisis of the death of Victor Emmanuel saved the dynasty from a serious danger, who was universally known to be the only Italian statesman whose nerve was equal to any sudden emergency, and of whose devotion, as the King personally assured me later, he was absolutely certain. That no reason for the crisis existed was shown by the fact that the succeeding ministry adopted the identical measure on which Crispi was defeated. But the King (whose death has occurred while I am revising these chapters) showed on many occasions that, though loyal to his constitutional obligation so far as deference to parliamentary forms is concerned, he never had the nerve to assume a responsible attitude or maintain the authority of the throne; and, while he was ready to abdicate if popular opinion demanded it, he was unable to withstand a factious and revolutionary movement as his father had done, by calling to his support the statesmen who could maintain order when menaced. His form of constitutionality was perfectly adapted to a country where the Conservative forces were supreme and the institutions solid; but in a half-consolidated monarchy, attacked from within and without by dissolvent influences as is Italy at present, he was a cause of weakness to good government. And Rudiní assured me when I went to pay the formal visit of congratulation on his accession to power, that the King had said that he was in the position of the young Emperor of Germany when he threw off the yoke of Bismarck–he was tired of Crispi’s strong hand. The King later denied the statement in an audience he gave me, but I am afraid that Rudiní was, for a novelty, nearer the truth.

Rudiní as minister of foreign affairs began with a blunder which might well have been fatal. When the murder of the Italian prisoners at New Orleans took place, he determined to show his energy and patriotic spirit, and he telegraphed to the Italian minister at Washington to demand of the federal government the immediate bringing to justice of the murderers under the alternative of sending the Italian fleet to New Orleans. This amazing display of ignorance of the situation and of geography appeared in the Roman journals of the next morning. As I knew enough of the temper of my countrymen to foresee that this demand was certain to end in war or a humiliating result to Italy, I jumped into a cab and drove over to the ministry of public instruction, the titular of which, Professor Villari, was an old friend of our life in Florence, and begged him to go at once to Rudiní and urge the countermanding of the telegram of the previous night, for, as the federal government had no jurisdiction in the case, it could not comply, and the imperious demand of the Italian government, intended for home consumption and as demonstration of the high spirit of the ministry, was certain to be peremptorily responded to, while the menace of sending the ironclad fleet to New Orleans was absurd and impossible of execution as the Mississippi did not admit ships of their draft, to say nothing of the defenses of the river and the certainty of war if the ultimatum were pushed. Vlllari at once took a cab and drove to the house of the minister, and we never heard anything more of the matter.

The presence (which nothing but the amorphous state of Italian politics could explain), in that scratch ministry, of Villari, one of the most devoted, honest and patriotic of living Italians and for years one of my best friends in Italy, secured my support of the ministry until their financial measures came on, and I was obliged to expose their specious character in the “Times,” when our friendly relations ceased temporarily. Political opponents in Italy are more likely to meet with seconds than at a friendly dinner party, as used to be the case in the days of Minghetti and Sella, and this passionate personal antagonism for purely political motives which influences all political and social intercourse in Italy is one of the gravest causes of political decline.

Amongst the notable men whose friendship I gained at this period of my service was Von Keudall, the German ambassador, one of the most human diplomatists whose acquaintance I have ever made. Like Dufferin, he measured exactly the distance to which a correspondent could be treated confidentially, without encouraging him to presume on cordiality. Introduced to him by Sir John Saville Lumley, I was treated as one of the diplomatic body, with the confidence which is so important to a journalist, and as long as he remained in Rome our relations were of the most cordial and unceremonious. Wishing to make me a confidential communication one day and the coast not being clear, he asked me, in the presence of others, if I had ever seen the view from the tower of the embassy, and, as of course I had not, he invited me to come and see it, and we had our conversation on the platform of the lookout with all Rome and the Campagna spread out before us, beyond the reach of others’ hearing. Von Keudall was a power in Rome, and no ambassador of any government in my time had the influence at court that he had.

During the period of Von Keudall’s residence Lord Rosebery came to Rome, in an interval of being in opposition, and, as the late Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and probably a future occupant of the same post, it was important that in a brief stay he should see all the important people in the capital. Lady Rosebery, who was the most assiduous and intelligent manager possible of her husband’s interests, had sent for me to ascertain who were the people whom he should know in order to learn the true condition of affairs in Italy. Chief amongst them I put Von Keudall, but, as Lord Rosebery did not know him, and the custom of Rome is that the newcomer makes the first call, Lady Rosebery was in a quandary, her ideas of the position of her husband not consenting that he should make the first call on an ambassador. At the last moment, for he was to leave Rome the midnight following, she begged me to tell her how the acquaintance could be made, without derogation of Lord Rosebery’s position between two portfolios. “Give me his card,” I replied, “and I will manage it.” I had intended to ask Von Keudall for some information, and I made my visit, finding him engaged with a dispatch, and as I wrote a message on the business on which I had come, I added that Lord Rosebery was at the Hôtel de Rome and was leaving that night, and left his lordship’s card with mine. When I got back to the hotel I found Von Keudall’s carriage at the door and him closeted with Lord Rosebery. And certainly no man could then have told the English statesman the state of things in Italy so well as the large-hearted German ambassador, who enjoyed the confidence of every element in Italian politics as a sincere friend of the country. He was recalled later on account of a pique of Herbert Bismarck, whose untimely meddling with public affairs had, I believe, more to do with his father’s fall than any act of the Prince. As an eminent German statesman put it, in a conversation not long after the recall of Von Keudall, “a Bismarck dynasty could not be tolerated.” Von Keudall was succeeded by his antithesis, a nullity in court and country of whom even his fellow diplomats could say nothing in praise.

The Rudiní ministry had no long life and merited no more, while that of Giolitti, which followed, ended in scandal and disaster. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brin, with whom alone I had had to do, was an honest, able, and patriotic man, and my relations with him were always excellent. The fall of that ministry coincided with the culmination of the financial and political disorders which were the direct consequence of the overthrow of Crispi and the demoralization which ensued. From the beginning of the financial embarrassment which came to its crisis during the term of Rudiní’s government, I had devoted much attention to the financial situation and had predicted the crash when no one else foresaw it. But for Villari I should have been expelled from Italy on account of my letters exposing the situation, which created such a sensation that Rothschild wrote to a financial authority in Rome to inquire what truth there was in them, receiving naturally such assurances as only hid the trouble. But when the crash came people said, “How did you know? What a prophet you were!” etc., etc. Tanlongo, the director of the Banca Romana, which led off in the crash, threatened the “Times” with a libel suit, and accompanied the threat by offers to me of personal “commercial facilitations” to drop the subject. The _argumentum ad hominem_ did not weigh, but it was desired in the office to avoid legal troubles and I was advised to keep a more moderate tone. The disaster came so soon after, however, that I got all the credit, and maintained abroad the prestige of a greater authority in Italian finance than I perhaps deserved.

It is true that honesty and courage are two things that a correspondent has no right to boast of, for honest editing and management presupposes them in him, and a conspicuous want of either cuts his career very short unless he is uncommonly clever; but as the result of my personal experience I may say that, having campaigned with many English colleagues, I have found them to be almost universally men of thorough honesty and unflinching courage. Personality aside, I think I may be permitted to say so much of a profession of whose real character and besetting temptations no one can know so much as one of themselves, and of whom the general public knows very little.

The financial authority which thus accrued to me became of not unimportant influence a little later when the second scratch ministry broke up under the financial depression, with gold at 16 premium, the scandals of the bank affair oozing into publicity, and insurrection breaking out in Sicily and Tuscany, with movements pending in the Romagna, where the spring had come late and so saved the country from a great disaster. It became so clear to even the most benighted partisan that a strong hand at the Palazzo Braschi was imperiously necessary, that even the strongest Conservatives submitted in silence to the call for Crispi which came from all parts of Italy, and no section of the Chamber except the extreme Left, who were the prime movers in the insurrectionary movement, raised the least objection to the old Sicilian’s return to the position from which the most corrupt and ignoble intrigues had driven him hardly three years before, years of discredit and steady demoralization.

The disgraceful struggle for office then grown characteristic of Italian parliamentary politics now assumed the most shameful form that I have ever known. The general sentiment of the country was that Crispi should be given dictatorial powers, and one of the Venetian deputies, an ultra-Conservative, coming fresh from an audience with the King, said to me that Crispi ought to be made dictator and that the King had professed his readiness to confer that power on him; and the chiefs of all the factions that had been engaged in the conspiracy for his downfall in 1891 were among the most eager to enter his ministry, when the King finally gave him the call to form one, after having combined in the most desperate intrigues to effect some other combination. In the anteroom of the minister designate all the political world, personally or by deputy, was represented except the friends of the insurrection, who fought him by every device. I met there a Roman deputy who was one of the amphibious politicians that breed freely in Italian politics, who gave his right hand to Crispi and his left to Rudiní, and who, under the impression that I had great personal influence with the old man, begged me to urge him to offer the portfolio of Foreign Affairs to Rudiní. In fact, my defense of Crispi in the “Times” in 1891 and the fulfillment of my predictions of his inevitable and necessary return to office, at a moment when there was no one in Italy who did not consider his career at an end, gave me a purely fanciful importance as a counselor in the crisis and as having great weight with the minister.

The obsequiousness of the leading politicians at that juncture must have given Crispi a savage satisfaction for the contumely he had had to suffer in 1891, and there is no kind of question in my mind that, if he had then insisted as a _sine qua non_ on a dictatorship, he would have had it with the almost universal approbation of Italians out of office and the acquiesence of those who hoped to be in it. Cavalotti, his most implacable opponent and personal enemy in disguise, in a session of the Chamber made a passionate appeal to him to avoid Sonnino and take a ministry of one color, i.e. the Left, promising his entire devotion on such a concession. The hostility was sullen and masked, but purely parliamentary; the country at large would have been delighted to see the old man sweep the parliament out of existence, and I am convinced that he might then have played the rôle of Cromwell and received the support of nine tenths of all Italians. The Chamber had become nauseous to the nation.

I was cool enough to see that the key of the position was finance, for I knew that Crispi would make short work with the insurrection, and I knew also the full value of all the possible ministers of finance in the country, and their influence abroad. When I saw that the constitution of the cabinet really hung on the disposition of that portfolio, I did not hesitate to say to Crispi that, while I could not pretend to any judgment as to the formation of the ministry at large, I could assure him that if there was to be a rehabilitation of the financial position of Italy abroad by his ministry, it could only be by the appointment of Sonnino to the Treasury. I said to him in so many words that Sonnino was as necessary to the restoration of the credit of the financial situation as he himself was to that of order. The pressure in the Chamber was very great to induce him to take the finance minister from the Left and so move toward the constitution of the government in accordance with the color of the majority, and Crispi was urged that way by most of his oldest and most faithful adherents, either unconscious of or indifferent to the influence of financial opinion through Europe on the stability or success of the ministry. I could see that he was hesitating and that the idea of reconstituting parties, which had always been one of his most cherished and important schemes, was very present with him, but I think that the conviction of the necessity of the restoration of the confidence of the financial publics of Europe finally prevailed