Part 9

The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive at present are his Prime-minister, Riaz Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the second an Armenian and a Christian. It is told of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a boy as a slave. A man who can rise from such a beginning to be Prime-minister must have something in him. He showed his spirit and his desire for his country's good in the time of Ismail, whose extravagances both he and Nubar Pasha strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English in establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing was ready and invaluable. He has held almost every position in the cabinet of Egypt, and is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if left alone is experienced and accomplished enough as a statesman to manage for himself.

Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a diplomat than a statesman, but he showed his strength by the fact that he understood the weak points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the best patriot. To say that such a man as this--a man who has a better knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his country--needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. These men are not barbarians nor despots; they have not gained their place in the world by favor or inheritance. Their homes are as rich in treasures of art and history and literature as are the homes of Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, and if they care for their country and the authority of their Khedive, it is certainly hard that they may not have the right of serving both undisturbed.

The Khedive himself has been very generally represented through the English press as a "sulky boy" who does not know what is best for him. It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy who wishes to govern his own country and his own people in his own way. And not only is he not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a lack of consideration by his protectors which adds insult to injury, and makes him appear as having less authority than is really his. He might very well say to Lord Cromer, "It was all very well to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me down-stairs?"

Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years, and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance, broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he has done so well.

I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man. He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth, he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and banged tennis balls about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty, love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.

As I have said, the English press have misrepresented the young Khedive in many ways. He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance and manner and thought than his age would suggest, and if he is sulky to Englishmen it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly expect his Highness to regard them as seriously as his friends as they regard themselves. The Khedive gave me a private audience at the Abdine Palace while I was in Cairo, and from what he said then and from what others who are close to him told me of him, I obtained a very different idea of his personality than I had received from the English.

He struck me as being distinctly obstinate--a characteristic which is so marked in our President that it can only be considered one of the qualifications for success, and is probably the quality in the Khedive which the English describe as sulkiness. What I liked in him most was his pride in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians. It is always well that a ruler should be so enthusiastic over what is his own that he shows it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it to him, how much more will he show it to his people! The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several languages very well, and dresses and looks--except for the fez and his attendants--like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own good and for the good of his people.

One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest to Americans was to the effect that the officers in his army who had been trained by Stone Bey, and those other American officers who entered the Egyptian army after the end of our Civil War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in their particular department in his army. This is the topographical work, and the making of maps and drawings; but those Americans who are in charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also well esteemed. It is the English, however, who have made the fighting part of the army what it is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, and badly treated by their officers, but now the infantry and the camel corps and artillery have no trouble in getting recruits.

The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the Soudanese, who fights for love of it, but he has shown lately that when properly officered and trained and well treated, he can defend a position or attack boldly if led boldly. I suggested to the Khedive that he should borrow some of our officers, those who have succeeded so well with the negroes of the Ninth Cavalry and with the Indians, for it seemed to me that this would be of benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian soldier. It was this suggestion that called forth the Khedive's admiration for the Americans of his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English would never allow officers of any other nationality than their own to control even a company of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out those foreigners who are already in, but they can dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and they fill all the good billets with their own people; and if there is one thing an Englishman apparently holds above all else, it is a "good billet." I know a good many English officers who would rather be stationed where there was a chance of their taking part in what they call a "show," and what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell at ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself; but, on the other hand, if I were to give a list of all the subalterns who have applied to me for "good billets in America," where they seem to think fortunes grow on hedges, half the regimental colors from London to Malta would fade with shame.

And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is true the English have made them good, and they were not worth much before the English restored order; but because you have humanely stopped a runaway coach from going over a precipice, that is no reason why you should take possession of it and fill it both inside and out with your own friends and relations. That is what England has done with the Egyptian coach which Ismail drove to the brink of bankruptcy.

It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and holds the reins, but Lord Cromer sits beside him and holds the whip.

VI

MODERN ATHENS

Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical--of whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your admiration for him restored. If we could only be as sure of restoring by travel all of those other people of whom our elders ceased telling us when we left the nursery, I would head an expedition to the north pole, not to discover open seas and altitudes and eclipses and such weighty things, but to locate that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy store and his reindeer, who used to come at Christmas-time, and who has stopped coming since I left school. It is certainly worth while going all the way to Greece to see the Hill of the Nymphs, and the very cave where Pan used to sleep in the hot midday, and to thrill over the four crossroads and the high, gloomy pass where the Sphinx lay in wait for OEdipus with her cruel claws and inscrutable smile.

The story that must always strike every child as most sad and unsatisfactory is the one which tells us how the father of Theseus killed himself when his son came sailing back triumphant, and so gallantly engaged in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens whose lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist the white sails, and caused his father to throw himself off the high rocks in despair.

This used to appeal to me as one of the most pathetic incidents in history; but as time wore on my sympathy for the father and indignation against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about them both. But when they point out where the black sails were first seen entering the bay, and you stand on the rock from which the people watched for Theseus, and from which his father threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and you rebel just as strongly against that morbid anticlimax, as you did when you first read the story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad to be true.

They had such a delightful way of mixing up the histories of gods and mortals in those days that the imaginative person who visits Athens will find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed at the rocks in which the Centaur hid as at those from which Demosthenes delivered his philippics, just as in London the room at the Charter House where Colonel Newcome said "Adsum" for the last time is much more real than that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was killed, or as the rock from which Monte Cristo sprang, at the base of the Chateau d'If, is so much more actual than the entire field of Waterloo. It is hard to know just which was real and which a delightful myth; and yet there has been so little change in Greece since then that you are brought nearer to Alcibiades and to Pericles than you can ever come, in this world at least, to Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate Grub Street and the debtors' prison, but Euboea still "looks on Marathon, and Marathon on the sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can strut up and down the rocky plateau from which Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat in one of the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, and pretend you are a worthy citizen of Athens listening to a satire of Sophocles.

The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys and dragomans, nor are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new King and Royal Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafes around the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of thought. The men have adopted his costume, and the women wear little flat curls like the French ladies in _Le Figaro_, and peaked bonnets and high heels.

The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all national costumes, it is only worn, except for political effect and before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets of the city.

It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner--ourselves. In Spain the peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you would think you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis to look up to.

The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a part of modern Greece than the Rock of Gibraltar is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so little inspiration has he apparently drawn from it, and so little has it served to bring out in him to-day those qualities that made demigods of his ancestors. I think I represent the average intelligence, and yet at this moment I cannot think of any Greek within the last hundred years who has gained world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an artist, a soldier, a writer of comedies and satires, a statesman, nor even as an archaeologist; the very historians of Greece and the exponents of its secrets and the most distinguished of its excavators are of other countries. They have many heroes of their own; you see their portraits or their photographs in every shop-window; but they are not as familiar to you as the faces and histories of those other Greeks who sighed because there were no more worlds, and whose fame has lasted long after the other worlds were discovered. One would think that some young Greek, on arising in the morning and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would say to himself, "To-day I shall do something worthy of that." And were he to say that often enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the temple above him, he might help to make Greece in this known world what she was in the smaller world of her day of glory. It is not because the world has grown and given her more with which to compete that she has fallen into lesser and lesser significance; for though the world has increased in latitude and longitude, it has not yet carved another Hermes like that of Praxiteles; and though it has added three continents since his day, it has never equalled in marbles the fluttering draperies of the Flying Victory, nor the carvings over the doorway of the Erechtheum.

But, as far as in him lies, the Greek has endeavored to copy the traditions of his ancestors. He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena which King George has had excavated, and if victorious receives a wreath of wild olives from the hands of the King; and he builds the new market where the old market stood, and the new military hospital as near as is possible to the hospital of AEsculapius. But he cannot restore to the market-place that very human citizen who cast in his shell against Aristides because he was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor can either his games or his hospital bring back the perfect figure and health of the men whose figures and profiles have set the model for all time. He has, however, retained the Greek language, which is very creditable to him, as it is a language one learns only after much difficulty, and then forgets at once. He even goes so far as to put up the names of the streets in Greek, which strikes the bewildered tourist trying to find his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and he prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. This is, perhaps, going a little too far, as it leaves you in some doubt as to whether you have been reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the battle of Marathon.

Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most public-spirited and patriotic generosity, and taste as well, in erecting the buildings of the university at his own expense and giving them to the city. They are reproductions in many ways of different parts of the temples of the Acropolis in miniature. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy of the front of the Parthenon. There is a picture of it from a photograph given in this article, but it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements are the same in degree; and the Polytechnic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the original Parthenon, and for the first time makes you understand how brilliant reds and beautiful blues and gold and black on marble can be combined with the marble's purity and help rather than cheapen it. It is a lesson in loveliness, and is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a building as the marble and gold monument to the Prince Consort in Hyde Park is vulgar and atrocious. If this copy in miniature, this working model of the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be understood how great must be the strength and purity of the Parthenon, even in ruins, with its gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall certainly not attempt to describe it.

There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as though you had been the first to climb its sides. I do not mean by this that it is neglected, or that relic-hunters may chip at it or carry away pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits of the Turkish shells that have shattered it, but the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to wander in and out in this forest of marble and fallen trunks of columns as though you were the ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the scenes of his former life.

There is no question that half of the pleasure you receive in wandering over the top of this great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding snow-touched mountains on a level with your eye, and the great temples rearing above you or lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there, is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that no guide's parrot-like volubility harasses you, no guard's scornful gloom chills your enthusiasm. The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green fields and the bunches of cactus and groves of dark olive-trees below are unspoiled by modern innovations, and the hills are still dotted with sheep and shepherds, as they were in the days of Sappho.