Part 6

The suburb of Mustapha takes its name from the last Dey but three who erected the palace now used as the official summer residence of the Governor. The vast sums he expended on it excited the anger of the janissaries, and led to his disgrace and death. There are many other Arab villas now modernized; they are well described by the artist Fromentin, a painter in words as on canvas: “To-day without exception they belong to Europeans. So the deep mystery which veiled them has vanished, and much of their charm has disappeared. The architecture of these houses has no great meaning when applied to European uses. We must therefore accept them for the pleasure of their exterior aspect, and study them as the graceful monuments of an exiled civilization. Inhabited by the people who built—I might say, dreamed—them, these dwellings were a creation both of poetry and genius. This people knew how to make prisons which were places of delight, and to cloister its women in convents where they were unseen yet seeing. For the day, a multitude of little apertures through stretching gardens of jasmine and vines; for the night, the terraces;—what more malicious, and at the same time more full of care for the distraction of the prisoners? The gardens resemble those playthings which are designed for the amusement of the Arab woman, that singular being whose life, long or short, is never anything but childhood. You see there only little gravelled walks, little rivulets in marble channels, where the water meanders in moving arabesque designs. The baths, too, suggest the invention of a husband at once a poet and a jealous lover. Imagine vast cisterns where the water is not more than three feet in depth, flagged with the finest white marble, and open through vaulted arches to a wide horizon. Not a tree reaches this height; when you are seated in these aerial bathing-places you see only sky and sea, and are seen only by the passing birds. We have no understanding of the mysteries of such an existence. We walk through the country to enjoy it; when we return it is to be indoors. This secluded life near to an open window, this motionless existence before so vast a space, this household luxury, this enervating climate and radiant country, the infinite perspective of the sea—all this must give birth to strange dreams, must throw the vital forces into disorder, and mingle a sentiment beyond the power of words to describe with the sorrows of captivity. But,” concludes our author, “ne me trompe-je pas en prêtant des sensations très littéraires à des êtres qui assurément ne les ont jamais eues?”

Those who are fortunate enough to have access to some of these villas will find their original features of house and garden carefully preserved; the gardens improved and extended in accordance with more intelligent views of horticulture. Others may see in the spacious and well-ordered gardens of the Hôtel St. George, the largest of the hotels frequented by English visitors, what in the way of vernal loveliness the soil and climate of Algiers are capable of producing. In the grounds of the Hôtel Continental, another large house with a sunny situation and a magnificent view, are some curious and interesting trees, a dragon tree which is considered to be six hundred years old.

There is an excellent Algerian museum at Mustapha Supérieur in a pleasant garden, close to the Governor’s Summer Palace, built with a court-yard, in the Moorish manner, an admirable form for a museum. It is laudably confined to Algerian antiquities and Arab art; there are no irrelevant South Sea Island curios; it has not been used as a receptacle for the rubbish of the local collector, a dumping-ground of the perplexed widow and the embarrassed executor. Algerian history is thoroughly represented; there are the flint implements of primitive man, a collection of Punic pottery from Gouraya, Roman antiquities of every kind, and numerous examples of Arab and Berber handicrafts. These treasures are exhibited with the taste which distinguishes the French in such matters, as is evidenced in their dressing of shop-windows. Of the Roman antiquities perhaps the gem is a bronze figure of a boy with an eagle, two feet high, and of fine style. It was found at Lambessa. From Lambessa come numerous other exhibits, including some gold coins of the period of Septimius Severus, an emperor of African origin, of Julia his wife (with filigree mounting), and Caracalla and his son, of Macrinus and Severus Alexander. These are in mint condition. And there is a very fine gold medallion of Postumus. There are numerous mosaics,—in Roman Africa mosaic pavements were very popular and well executed,—marbles of all kinds from Cherchel, and a very interesting stone tablet recording the rules for the distribution of water from an aqueduct to Roman colonists. The Arab portion includes arms, jewellery, the elaborately embroidered saddlery of Arab cavaliers, pottery, carpets, woven stuffs,— a fine assortment of Arab and Berber handiwork. Altogether a most creditable museum,—a very model of what a local museum should be. In a neighbouring building is a “Forestry” collection;—stuffed examples of Algerian wild animals, and fine specimens of Algerian woods, and so on. Some magnificent examples of slabs of the native _Thuja_ are worth notice.

As with other public buildings in Algeria, the usefulness of this museum is somewhat curtailed by the short time it is open,—only in the afternoon and not every day,—and, what is worse, by the absence of any notice of the hours during which it may be visited. In my ignorance I tried to enter on two or three occasions. Goaded to desperation one morning I rang the bell, and found the amiable custodian at leisure to admit me, but only by favour. Such a collection is worthy of a notice-board in French, Arabic, English, German, Spanish, and Italian, setting forth the hours it is open, and to a foreigner (I make the suggestion with diffidence) it appears that the morning hours should not be forgotten. This is too good a museum to be circumscribed by such antiquated and provincial arrangements as prevail at present. The object of a museum should be to get people to come in, not to keep them out. I was informed that it was closed on Monday afternoon because there were too many people about! The British workman’s Monday is evidently not the insular institution I had supposed. But a museum is not a fortress.

We are wont to speak of “Arab Art,” but the term, if consecrated by usage, is incorrect and misleading. There is, in fact, no such thing. The Arab has never been an artist. The nomad had of necessity no architecture, and architecture is the mother of the arts. Artistic incapacity and an effort to break away from anthropomorphism in religion went hand in hand among the Semitic races;—“Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” And when Solomon builded his temple he turned for assistance to the King of Tyre; and one Hiram, a brassworker of Tyre, “wrought all his work.” To this day the Jews, who have excelled in finance and statecraft, in literature and in music, have made little mark in art.

The rise of Islam is an extraordinary phenomenon. In one generation the Arab is a wanderer, half patriarch, half brigand, pasturing his flocks on the verge of the cultivated lands of more civilized peoples, and snatching such prey as hazard brought within his grasp; in the next he is a conqueror ruling from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and threatening to extinguish Christendom. On the vanquished he imposed his religion and his social code; he had no art to impose. Having become by force of conquest and the exigencies of government a dweller in cities, he showed his incapacity to understand the work of his predecessors in such eccentricities as re-erecting their fallen buildings with the columns inverted, using the capital as base, and the base in the capital’s place. As architects he employed the natives of the countries he had overrun, in Egypt Copts and Greeks, who reproduced Byzantine forms and fixed the typical lines on which the development of “Arab art” was to take place. In this deference to local tendencies is to be found the origin of the wide divergencies of art in the Mohammedan world,—of Persian art in the east, and Moorish art in the west. The conquered and converted peoples continued to build, as far as the main plan was concerned, in the same way as they had built before their conversion, adapting their previous methods to present needs, and to the requirements of their conquerors.

In Barbary the development of art followed closely that of Spain. The Moorish art of Spain was chiefly Roman or Byzantine in origin; the first mosque built, that of Cordoba, is said to have been designed by architects from Byzantium. Columns used in its construction were brought from the ruins of Merida and other Roman towns, and even from distant parts of the Mediterranean. From this commencement sprang the later glories of Moorish art, exhibited in their most splendid developments at Granada in Spain, and Tlemçen in Algeria.

If in the scheme of its buildings Moorish architecture followed earlier examples, the Byzantine basilica and the Roman house, in its decorative features it was more distinctively Mohammedan. Yet if the Semite nourished his traditional aversion from the graven image, if the Prophet forbade idolatry and his disciples extended the prohibition to the portrayal of the human body, and enjoined that only trees, flowers and inanimate objects should be depicted; it is nevertheless necessary to seek some deeper cause for the objection of the western Mohammedans to any artistic representation of animal forms. This objection was by no means universal in the Mohammedan world. The Persian rejoiced in his pictures and statues. The explanation may be found perhaps in the zeal of the iconoclasts which had rent North Africa before the Arab invasion. Fathers of the Church had thundered against images; humbler Christians, such as the Copts in Egypt, had striven to dissociate their art from materialistic suggestions, and to find in geometric designs some expression of their aspirations for the infinite. But Hellenism, with its delight in nature, and especially the human form, was still dominant in Christian art. It disappeared before the onslaught from Arabia. The Coptic builder saw his opportunity. His abstract ideas fitted exactly with those of his new master. In his rhythmical representations of foliage, his polygonal figures and intersecting angles, may perhaps be found the germ of the characteristic motives of Mohammedan decoration.

Its elements may be divided into three groups;—inscriptions in writing, and interlacements, rectilinear and curvilinear. It will be found that almost all Moorish decoration falls under one of these three heads. The inscriptions as a rule are not historic, but ornamental, verses of the Koran, pious sentences and so forth. The style is at first sober and monumental, more stately than the cursive hand in ordinary use. As we should expect, it became in time more elaborate and fantastic, harmonizing well with the decorative interlacements which commonly surround the lettering. The inscriptions themselves are often in geometrical form, so as to give at first sight the impression of a pattern; for instance, a sentence may be repeated four times around a central letter.

To the variety of geometrical and curvilinear interlacements there is obviously no limit. Angles, straight lines and curves are frequently combined in the style we denominate arabesque, a style which has prevailed far beyond the limits of Arab conquest, and is particularly a feature of Venetian art. Late examples show great development, especially on floral lines. Leaves of particular trees, notably the palm, are represented. But a mathematical suggestion does not cease to prevail. The passion for interlacement and for excessive decoration of surface gives rise to curious vagaries,—such are the intricate intersection of arches, the breaking up of the arch itself into subsidiary arches, and the “stalactites” which commonly adorn the roof of the _mihrab_, the Holy of Holies. It is not without interest when visiting a mosque to note these developments and to strive to trace them to their original elements.

Our insight into the Arab mind is so limited, we have ourselves so slight an inclination to the symbolic and the mystic, so strong a preference for directness in art and speech, for “straight-flung words and few,” that we may well hesitate to dogmatize in such a matter as Moorish decoration. In the light of our own tame submission to a superabundance of ecclesiastical and domestic ornament which is without significance we should regard it as merely a habit of clothing blank spaces with conventional markings. Yet it may be that the spiritual dreamer, ever intent on the conception of an abstract deity, rejecting with scorn the idea of a God made flesh and dwelling among men, finds in the geometrical expressions of unending line and angle, in the interminable intricacies of the interlacing curve, some harmony with his own longings, and some suggestion of the Infinite.

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_V—SWORD AND PLOUGH_

Great events and trivial causes—The Dey’s fan—France roused—England as dog-in-the-manger—The French expedition and conquest—Clauzel— Abd-el-Kader—Bugeaud.

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares.” ISAIAH.

It is naturally impossible for a traveller to traverse Algeria without being constantly conscious of the effects of the French conquest. His own presence there otherwise than as a Christian slave is one of them, and not the least important one for him. But in the course of his journeyings he will be so frequently informed of important incidents in the series of campaigns, of the connection of localities he is visiting with some phase of victory or defeat, that a short résumé of the lengthy transactions may not be out of place. With many side-issues the story resolves itself in the end, as such war-histories often do, into a struggle for the mastery between two great men. The Frenchman won the rubber.

Stern as was the lesson which Lord Exmouth inflicted, it was soon forgotten, and the ingrained habit of centuries reasserted itself. A subsequent Dey set himself to re-create a fleet, and in 1820 he had forty-four vessels with 1560 sailors. Fresh trouble arose with the British consul, and the weakness of the admiral who was sent to support him only made matters worse. The Dey refused to see Mr. McDonell, who had been forced to leave, and treated Mr. St. John, who replaced him, with ignominy. “All the disgraceful ceremonies in the intercourse between the representative of Great Britain and the Turkish authorities were continued. The consul was obliged, the moment he came in sight of the Dey’s palace, to walk bareheaded in the hottest sun; in waiting for an audience he had to sit on a stone bench in the public passage; he could not wear a sword in the Dey’s presence, nor ride to the palace, though his own servants, if Mohammedans, might do so.” And the corsair fleet began once more to harry the coasts of France and Spain.

In the early days of the Turkish domination the corsairs had been influenced by political preferences. They had especially waged war against the Spaniards, who had expelled the Moors, and whose sovereign, Charles V, was the enemy of the Sultan. They respected the vessels of Francis I, the Sultan’s ally. So may even pirates follow the dictates of conscience. But as time went on the high character of the Algerian corsairs suffered some abasement through association with the renegades of Christendom, and French and Spanish vessels met a like fate,—all was fish that came to their net. The French, who had formerly felt that the Spaniards were getting no more than their deserts, and had even afforded Kheir-ed-Din a temporary refuge in the port of Marseilles during a storm, were naturally hurt at the ingratitude of these proceedings. They went so far, in the reign of the Grand Monarque, as to bombard Algiers on two occasions,—with the customary result. Their fleets sailed away; Algiers rebuilt itself, and proceeded upon its piratical way. No one has ever rivalled the Deys in the art of taking a beating, and coming up again with a smile,—unless it be their ultimate conquerors.

Great changes in the history of the world have often been, or have seemed to be, the result of accident. Wars have been waged, conquests effected, empires created, not of settled intention and design, but as the outcome of the personal quarrels, and the personal ambitions of individuals, less, in modern times at any rate, of sovereigns than of subjects. The British Empire has been created rather in spite of than by the aid of the governing powers of Great Britain. Cecil Rhodes is but the latest of the long line of Englishmen who imposed imperial responsibilities on a half-hearted England. Governments seldom dream imperial dreams; they are more concerned to keep their seats. Sovereigns like George III may lose an empire. Mere accidental citizens, as Clive or Rhodes, may create one.

So this fertile North Africa, through history the shuttle-cock of Asia and Europe, with an illimitable hinterland of “rather light soil,” to quote the words of a statesman who had little sympathy with African conquest, became French because an Algerian Dey struck a consul with his fan. This incident arose—as modern international incidents frequently arise—out of a financial dispute. Certain Jews of Algiers had a claim against France for corn supplied during the Napoleonic wars. The Dey pressed this claim as his own; and being dissatisfied with the delay in settlement he made a violent scene with the consul, “et s’oublia jusqu’à le toucher de son chasse-mouches.” Apologies were demanded and refused, and for three years, from 1827 to 1830, France endeavoured to blockade the port of Algiers. The Dey Hussein continued obdurate. So little repentant was he that when the _Provence_ entered the port in 1829, having on board a French admiral, charged to make a last effort at negotiation (for the blockade was costing seven millions of francs a year and effecting nothing), all the batteries opened fire on her. Even now the French ministry was reluctant to make war, and proposed to the Sultan of Turkey that Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, should bring the Barbary states under his rule. The Sultan refused his authorization, and an expedition was decided on. France was destined to become an African power, “un peu malgré elle.”

The naval authorities were strongly opposed to a military expedition; it would, they declared, be absolutely impracticable to land an army with its indispensable materiel; and former experience, especially the failure of Charles V, appeared to support their view. But the French Cabinet decided to make the attempt. With the exception of England, the European powers were complaisant. England demanded explanations as to the object of the preparations. M. de Polignac in a circular note explained that his master desired only to suppress piracy, slavery and the tribute paid by Christian nations to the Dey. England was not satisfied and asked for a formal renunciation of a policy of annexation. The President of the Council replied to the British ambassador that the King was not led by any sentiment of ambition, that he was not aware that he had need to ask the permission of anyone to avenge an insult to his flag; that he had already made known his intentions, and that his word ought to be sufficient guarantee. England returned to the charge. M. de Polignac then produced a second circular note in which he declared that “if Algiers fell into the power of the French army the King would examine in conjunction with his allies what new order of things it would be fitting to establish for the benefit of Christianity.” England complained that this note contained no formal engagement not to keep Algiers; the French minister put an end to the discussion by declaring that the King’s communications required no further development.

It is interesting to recall these diplomatic amenities; _mutatis mutandis_ they bear strong resemblance to certain international passages at the time of the English occupation of Egypt. But France does not seem to have given any undertaking that her operations should be only temporary.

If his memoirs are to be trusted, Admiral d’Haussez, the French Minister of Marine, lacked the diplomatic suavity of his colleague. Even a sailor’s bluffness hardly covers the tone of a declaration he made to the British ambassador. “The King wishes the expedition to be made, and it will be made. France laughs at England. She will do in this instance what she likes, and will put up with neither control nor opposition. We are no longer in the days when you dictated laws to Europe. Your influence rested on your wealth, your ships and your habit of domination. All that is past. I suppose you are not willing to compromise what remains of your influence by going beyond threats. But if you wish to do so, I will give you the means. Our fleet is already assembled at Toulon, and will be ready to sail in the last days of May. It will call at the Balearic Isles, and it will land the troops to the west of Algiers. If the fancy takes you, you may meet it.”

France had her way without interference; the admiral’s prophecy (recorded after the event) was fulfilled to the letter. An army of 35,000 men under General Bourmont was transported in 300 vessels, and disembarked with no great difficulty at Sidi Ferruch, about fifteen miles to the west of Algiers, on June 14th, 1830. The landing was unopposed, Hussein having expected it to take place to the east of the town and collected his army there. A few days later the Dey’s son-in-law and general, Ibrahim, came into conflict with the French troops and was defeated. A second attack had the same result. The French army marched on Algiers, laid siege to Fort l’Empereur, so called because it stood on the heights above the town where Charles V had pitched his tent. The French soldiers knew only one Emperor, and promptly called it Fort Napoleon. The Turkish garrison blew up the fort and fled, and Algiers lay at the mercy of the invaders.

It appears that Hussein was ready to resist to the death, and sooner than submit to blow up the city. But disaffection appeared among his troops, who sent an emissary to Bourmont, offering the Dey’s head as a token of conciliation. The Dey then decided to treat; he was willing to make every reparation for the insult offered to the consul, to abandon his pecuniary claims and to pay the cost of the war. But Bourmont would have nothing but the surrender of the city and its forts. The Dey was to be at liberty to retire to some place to be fixed on, with his family and his riches. As regards the inhabitants,—“l’exercice de la religion mussulmane restera libre. La liberté des habitants de toutes les classes, leur religion, leurs propriétés, leur commerce, leur industrie ne recevront aucune atteinte, leurs femmes seront respectées: le général en chef en prend l’engagement sur l’honneur.” These terms were accepted; the French army entered Algiers on July 5th; and it appears that the conditions were fairly well observed.