Littell's Living Age/Volume 138/Issue 1779/Vefyk Pasha on Asia And Europe

From The Spectator.

VEFYK PASHA ON ASIA AND EUROPE.

Englishmen are often surprised at the preference which many Orientals display, and which most, we think, feel at heart, for their own life over the life of Europe. The latter seems to them so much more varied, so much more interesting, so much fuller both of change and of incident, that they can hardly understand how a man who has tasted both can deliberately prefer the former. They think that to bring Orientals to Europe is to make them European, to convince them that "civilization" is a pleasing ideal, to plant in their minds discontent with their own inferior method of life. They expect Asiatics, even if not converted by Europe, to enjoy its life as Americans do, or rather, to absorb its ideas as Greeks — who always seem slightly Asiatic to Englishmen, but who are au fond intensely European, though not Teutonic — usually do. The fact that there are Orientals who, having tried both, prefer their own method of life, with all its uncertainties and fears and defects of "civilization," puzzles them beyond measure, and is usually set down to the influence of polygamy, which exists, no doubt, but not to the degree commonly supposed. There is another influence which has, we believe, much more effect on Orientals in good position — and few others try Europe — and that is the absence of a certain form of social pressure necessitating an endless taking of trouble. Not only the mental atmosphere, but the social life of Europe are based upon the idea that a man who wishes for a pleasant life will show energy in its pursuit, will take endless small trouble, will not feel an exertion of mind or will, any more than the piston of a steam-engine feels rising or falling. That, however, is not the basis of society in Asia, where the root-idea is that those who have not to live by labor are to enjoy a certain exemption from worry, to do as they please, and not as other folks please, and while respecting certain immutable, but few and definite laws, such as that which from the Balkan to Pekin enforces, though in degrees of wide divergence, the seclusion of women, are to be released in great measure from the atmospheric pressure of opinion. The Oriental is, whatever his grade, to be in a way independent, released from small obligations, left "free" in a sense explained below. This idea, carried out as it is in daily life, produces many of the least intelligible phenomena of Asiatic society, — the democratic equality of all men, which is so singularly combined with readiness to endure and to inflict oppression; the absence of mauvaise honte, which is the secret of the much-admired "manner" of most Asiatics, and which is found, too, for the same reason, in some classes of Americans; and the sense of ease always perceptible in a better-class Oriental at home, and always puzzling to the European, who thinks he knows facts which should make his interlocutor uneasy. In the new and very charming book in which Mrs. Simpson has collected her father's conversations with great Frenchmen, there occurs a very striking and in its way attractive statement of the difference, so far as it affects the mere details of daily life. Mr. Senior, who, though at home regarded as a rather hard official — he was hard, too, intellectually, the quality peeping out perpetually in these conversations — was in society, and especially in foreign society, the most sympathetic of men, and could by some rare talent coax the most different of mankind into revealing their real opinions, had in 1860 a long talk with Vefyk Pasha, then minister at Paris, recently, we believe, the man who presided over the Ottoman Assembly. He said of Paris: —

What I complain of is the mode of life. I am oppressed not by the official duties — they are easy, Turkey has few affairs — but by the social ones. I have had to write fifteen notes this morning, all about trifles. In Turkey life is sans gêne; if a man calls on you he does not leave a card; if he sends you a nosegay he does not expect a letter of thanks; if he invites you he does not require an answer. There are no engagements to be remembered and fulfilled a fortnight afterwards. When you wish to see a friend, you know that he dines at sunset; you get into your caique, and row down to him through the finest scenery in the world. You find him in his garden, smoke a chibouque, talk or remain silent as you like; dine, and return. If you wish to see a minister you go to his office; you are not interfered with, or even announced; you lift the curtain of his audience-room, sit by him on his divan, smoke your pipe, tell your story, get his answer, and have finished your business in the time which it takes here to make an appointment — in half the time that you waste here in an antechamber. There is no dressing for dinners or for evening parties; evening parties, indeed, do not exist. There are no letters to receive or to answer. There is no post-hour to be remembered and waited for, for there is no post. Life glides away without trouble. Here everything is troublesome. All enjoyment is destroyed by the forms and ceremonies and elaborate regulations which are intended, I suppose, to increase it or to protect it. My Liberal friends here complain of the want of political liberty. What I complain of is the want of social liberty; it is far the more important. Few people suffer from the despotism of a government, and those suffer only occasionally. But this social despotism, this despotism of salons, this code of arbitrary little règlements, observances, prohibitions, and exigencies, affects everybody, and every day, and every hour.

Mark the idea which underlies that complaint, and remember that it extends to every department of life, and you catch, as no book can teach you, one of the secrets of the Asiatic mode of living, and its charm for Asiatics. You are in slippers, not in shoes; in a dressing-gown, not in a dress-coat. The ways which we think duties they think worries, — at once evidences of unrest, and needless obligations imposed on life to make it tiresome. When observances are imposed by religion, that is another matter; but except by religion or superior power, the will ought to be unrestrained. They feel that life under a routine of duties, obligations, observances, is life only to be endured under coercion, is life needlessly made miserable. Or rather, to use an illustration many of our readers will understand better, they feel the European scheme of life as men who are by nature idle, or who have always been masters of their own time, feel monotonous daily work, as if that alone by itself took the sweetness out of life. They do not, for example, want servants, as Englishmen do, invisibly working the household machine, and keeping everything to-day as it was yesterday, but want personal attendants, always visible, always at hand, always saving them from minute trouble and effort. The feeling is not exactly indolence, though it looks so like it, and though it has, in the course of ages passed in climates where exertion is also effort, become mixed up with it; but rather, as Vefyk Pasha says, a form of the liking for liberty, or the desire for the gratification in details of the strong self-will which gives to all Asiatics without exception some characteristics of spoiled children. They do not want to dine out when they are asked, but to dine out when they wish, and the mere notion that if they dine out and have the whim to be silent they may not be silent, is fatiguing. Life, to be delightful, must be always afternoon, and afternoon in holiday. Unfortunately for themselves, Asiatics carry this spirit, which, if confined to social arrangements, might produce nothing worse than simplicity, into serious life, and apart altogether from bad morale, which we are not now discussing, allow a defect of temperament to ruin administration. They will not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian Beamten. They issue orders, and punish terribly if they are not obeyed, but that is their only notion of securing obedience. As to "hunting the order down" to its execution, they would not accept life at the price of such a duty. Nothing can be funnier than a contrast which happens to be drawn in this book between Thiers's idea on this matter and Vefyk Pasha's. We have given the Turk's, here is the Frenchman's: —

I used constantly to find my orders forgotten, or neglected, or misinterpreted. As I have often said to you, men are naturally idle, false, and timid; menteurs, lâches, paresseux. Whenever I found that an employé supposed that because an order had been given, it had been executed, or that because he had been told a thing, it was true, I gave him up as an imbecile. Bonaparte nearly lost the battle of Marengo by supposing that the Austrians had no bridge over the Bormida. Three generals assured him that they had carefully examined the river, and that there was none. It turned out that there were two, and our army was surprised. When I was preparing for war in 1840, I sat every day for eight hours with the ministers of war, of marine, and of the interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of execution of our previous determinations. I never trusted to any assurances, if better evidence could be produced. If I was told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the courier. If answers had been received, I required their production. I punished inexorably every negligence, and even every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all day, and almost all night. We were all of us half-killed. Such a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work. At night my servants undressed me, took me by the feet and shoulders and placed me in my bed, and I lay there like a corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt, were administrative.

No Asiatic not an exceptional man will do that, yet in Asia it is five times as necessary as in Europe, because the subordinates, besides the regular desire not to work over-much, of which Thiers complained, feel the overwhelming desire for that which Vefyk Pasha called "liberty," — a life not burdened with peremptory but "trifling" duties. They want to be "gentlemen," as the poor often understand the word, — that is, men released from imperative necessities. One-half the weakness of every Oriental government — we do not mean one-half the oppression, that has a different origin — arises from the impossibility of finding men who will act as Thiers did, or of supplying the absence of the lacking spirit either by regulations or by punishments. An Oriental household can be well ordered in its way, but as to making it a machine as perfect as a regiment, and self-acting as many European households are, it cannot be done. No punishment and no reward will make a race in which this spirit is inborn, or into which it has entered, exact, punctual, or prompt. The Southern slaveholders tried it with negroes under the most favorable circumstances, and failed; and no European that we can recollect has ever thoroughly succeeded. That which can be neglected is neglected, not from a wish that it should not be done, but from a detestation of the fatigue of doing it at an inopportune moment, — that is, at any moment when doing it would break up the sense of the pleasant ease of afternoon, which, in the Asiatic ideal, should constitute the whole of life. Of course, with that temper comes its correlatives, indifference about right and wrong — for if you are not indifferent, the afternoon is always being broken — and a callousness as to what happens to anybody, if the restful ease do but remain undisturbed. Charles II., as described by Macaulay, had the temperament to perfection, would, in fact, have been the most perfect specimen of the Oriental, but that having a trace of Scotland in his blood, he was liable to the curse from which the Asiatic is usually free, — the mental low fever for which we have adopted the word ennui.

We dare say we have failed in making this temperament and its tendencies as visible to our readers as it is to ourselves, but it is the peculiarity which makes those Englishmen who best like the East despair most of administrative reform. They know that a certain rigor will produce honesty, that oppression can be checked by giving certain power of resistance, and that Asiatics who wish well can be discovered, but they know also that all this will not produce an effective governing machine without the Western power of taking trouble perpetually. That is what first of all makes them cry out for "European assistance" in every department, and praise Asiatic rulers in proportion to their readiness to take European advice. They know — Sir Henry Layard, for instance, knows — that besides the readiness to take bribes, and the religious arrogance, and the sensuality, the reformers have to contend with the desire for the "afternoon life," which, in the ruler, produces cruelty, because only cruelty can get him his way without endless trouble, and, in his subordinate, neglect. They know that an Oriental regiment will uninspected go to pieces, because the officers want to avoid the harass of details; that a department will get to a dead-lock, because nobody will worry like Thiers; that a province will grow discontented, because nobody will search into harassing, trivial complaints. They know, in fact, that civilization cannot be kept up if life all the while is to be always afternoon; and that an Asiatic is like an average aristocrat, and regards that afternoon as the summum bonum, to which all else may expediently be sacrificed, and those who interfere with it as "unaccountable, uncomfortable works of God." The European is in Asia the man who will insist on his neighbor doing business just after dinner, and being exact when he is half-asleep, and being "prompt" just when he wants to enjoy, — and he rules in Asia and is loved in Asia, accordingly.