MOROCCO.*
THESE three books on Morocco present the most violent con- trasts. The first is an encyclopaedic account of Moorish life and customs by a writer who has lived years in the country, and associated intimately with the people. The second is an outside view by a singularly clever and observant visitor. The third is a sprightly account of how Lady Grove enjoyed her- self in a brief trip, with sidelights upon Lady Grove's views on many subjects. The last may be dismissed in few words. The photogravure portrait gives the tone to the narrative, which is strictly personal, egotistic, and uninforming. It is satisfactory that "neither I nor my companions suffered from ennui during the months we spent together," and the reader must be very fastidious who can be bored by these brightly written recollections of an uneventful holiday, though he may sometimes be tempted to smile covertly at the frank self-complacency which takes it for a law of Nature that whatever Lady Grove does or says must be interesting, and quite the right thing.
Miss Macnab takes a different line. She tells little about herself, but a great deal about what she saw. Not only is she closely observant and accurate, but she knows how to convey her impressions in plain, terse language with no gush or padding, and never allows the trivial incidents of the journey
• (L) The Moors. By Bndgett Meakin. With 132 ElnstratMna. London: Swan Sonnenaebein and Co. (158.]--(2.) A Bide in Morocco antoia.Belieters and Traders. By Frances Xamab. London: E. Arnold. ]—(3.) Seventy-one Days Camping in Morocco. By Lady Grove. WithPhotogravure Portrait and 32 Illustrations from Photographs. London: Longman; and Co. [7e. 6d. net. J
to obscure the wider issues she has in view,—the study of the people and their life. It is the .same with her descriptions of Nature or of animals. Lady Grove will tell you how a horse disturbs her by incontinent neighing or insists upon drinking in the middle of a raging torrent; but Miss Macnab, who is also a keen horsewoman and dedicates her book to her mount, Conrad,' characterises the Moorish breed with the decision of a trainer :—
" The horses," she says, "interested me especially. The mares were good. Where they got the breed from I cannot tell, but I am confident there was English blood in some of them. They were light horses, such as would make good hunters or smart carriage horses. At home we should Say that they were three parts thoroughbred. One thing which struck me particularly was that they were of a very good whole colour. The Moors have no mad fancies such as the Red Indian indulges for hideous markings. I never saw a piebald the whole time I was in the country In shape, these horses have very good short heads and long necks, which I believe they stretch by continual grazing. Their fore-legs are admirable, the hind-quarters not so satisfactory. I believe this defect is principally due to using them as packhorses when they are still foals. I have positively seen a yearling following its mother to the market with a small load on its back. The mare only carried a woman and a baby. They do not load or work the mares, and their hocks are usually sound. The feet are remarkably good, and about these horses in the north there is not the puffy chest which is so ugly a defect in
the spoilt carthorses down in the south It is said that the breed down south has been spoilt by the introduction of English carthorses, which some evil genius tempted George III. to send as a present to the Sultan, and which these deplorable Moors admired. The result is that though they select their mares well, the stallions are not the best, and I fear that the breed is getting more and more mixed and spoilt. The Abda breed, which was once pure and of the pronounced Arab stamp, is very seldom met with. I saw one, which was a very pretty animal, but not a horse according to English ideas. It would have made a charming pet, and whoever rode it in the Park would have been well stared at."
Miss Macnab is equally detailed and well-informed on everything she met with in Morocco, from missionaries to lepers—we are not sure which of the two is the more repulsive to her—and she speaks her mind on Moorish social questions with that freedom and plainness which none but women dare to use. Perhaps it is part of that " conspiracy of silence " among wicked men that makes them so reticent in their books. Lady Grove and Miss Macnab use no such reserve, and call the Moorish spade by its proper (or improper) name tout court, where a man would have put himself to any incon- venience to evade the unpleasant topic. We are not blaming this frankness, but merely stating a fact. It is a sign of the times, and possibly the beginning of a reform which is needed in other places than Morocco. This outspokenness, indeed, is the great charm—when dealing with other subjects—of Miss Macnab's book. We feel throughout that we have the honest opinions and unexaggerated observations of a very clear-sighted, courageous woman, who knows the world, and is fully competent to judge justly what she sees. Her travels in Morocco, it is true, were limited to what has been called "the beaten track "; but the beating is scarcely perceptible, and it needs some pluck for a lady to ride alone, save for native attendants, or at most in the company of another lady, through so supremely unsophisticated a country as Morocco still remains even in the northern parts. Probably this lack of all the usual conveniences is one reason why people are attracted to it. There is a fascination in travel where there are no railways, no hotels, no post, no proper roads, and where you have not only to carry your tent, but are dutifully protected —or spied upon—at night by village guards at each halt, as
an indispensable condition of Government protection. In the rough-and-tumble of genuine travel Morocco has no rival
within easy reach of England, and Miss Macnab evidently enjoyed the many obstacles and hardships to which she breezily exposed herself. But hers is no mere record of adventures on the road, or where the road should have been, though it is full of vivid incidents. It is much more,—a, cool and careful survey of the present state of the country, the character and life of the people, the con- ditions of trade, and the political situation. Miss Macnab came away with a considerable admiration, tempered with tolerant criticism, for the Moors, and does not at all approve of the theory of English journalism that " dark Morocco must be tarred and tarred again" :— "These representations," she remarks, "whether true or ex- aggerated, refer to an Oriental people which was ruled much as
it is to-day long before we came to be even a small nation. They neither justify our imposing an alien rule, nor do they prove Morocco to be past hope. The late Sultan had a policy not dissimilar to that of Mehemet All when Egypt was no better than Morocco is to-day. It was 'the transformation of a barbarous province into a State formed on a civilised model, with trained armies and fleets, with treasure to fall back upon, and a definite policy not lacking in grandeur.' But France is alive to such possibilities, and Europe has so little wish for a revival of Islamic power that the Christian Governments unite in harassing the Sultan. The promotion of trade would mean the introduction of inventions, which would be followed by the same rush of civilisa- tion which it introduces elsewhere, and none of the Powers wishes to see Morocco rich and self-confident."
In short, Miss Macnab holds that the Powers, in striving to maintain the status quo lest worse should befall, are deliberately strangling all hopes of development in a naturally rich country inhabited by " very good natives industrious, persevering, and enduring," though " they break down in office " ; and that such policy is only helping the insidious designs of France, who loses no opportunity to insinuate her- self deeper into Moorish complications, in the hope of a great increase of trade. Of the French designs there is not, of course, the smallest doubt. They have been steadily working for two generations at least. Miss Macnab holds, indeed, that " France may shatter herself in Africa. She is the last Power that should touch the East. It requires the cold, resolute, dogged North to control the childish, passionate, feeble East." Nevertheless, the French possess qualities which have often proved singularly effectual among Easterns, and though Algeria is hardly a success as a colony, the con- trol at all events is adequate. One point comes very clearly out in the experiences of the author, and this is the rooted dislike of the Moors for the Spaniards. But if neither Spain nor France is to take the government of Morocco in hand, who is to do it? Miss Macnab would perhaps suggest the precedent of Egypt; but we fear a British administration would mean a European war. There remains self-reform in Morocco itself—and here, again, we fear that the reply will be the invariable promise, ghada, in sha-llah—" to-morrow, if God please "—the Moorish form of the Egyptian bukra and the Ottoman bakaloum, all belonging in sense, though not in grammar, to the paulo-post-future. But if the political future of Morocco is 'dark, of one thing we are certain. It would be the height of folly for us to provoke a quarrel with France over its disposal. We have too many commitments elsewhere to make it wise to contemplate quarrelling with France over Morocco.
Mr. Meakin's Moors should have had the first place in this notice on the score of its intrinsic value, but like the host of Cana, we have kept our best wine for the last. Miss Macnab shows us Morocco "entirely from a Western standpoint," as she admits, and exceedingly well she does it. Mr. Meakin writes as one who knows the Moors at home, who has lived with them, eaten with them, talked with them, travelled with them, bathed with them (no light venture), and even read to them every page of this veracious book in their own Arabic for the benefit of their criticism. In a needlessly modest and apologetic preface he says that he wished to emulate Lane's classical work on the Modern Egyptians, and he deplores his failure. He has not failed, however; he has conspicuously succeeded. The present volume forms the completion of his Moorish encyclopaedia, of which the volumes ou The Moorish Empire and The Land of the Moors appeared in 1899 and 1901, and we are not sure that it is not the best of the three, though all are of high value. If not so miraculously complete down to the smallest detail as Lane's minute description of the Cairenea, it is as full as most students will desire, and is written in an easy, attractive style, which will commend it also to those who are not students. It is the result of many years of conscientious labour and observation, and is unquestionably the best general account of the Moors that we possess. Mr. Meakin takes us with him from the cradle to the grave of his Morocco friends, and at every stage he has a vast deal of exceedingly interest- ing and curious information to tell on manners and customs, social life and character, trade and industries, superstitions, and every imaginable subject. What strikes one most forcibly is the remarkably close resemblance of the customs of Morocco to those of the modern Egyptians,—a similarity due, no doubt, to the influence of the religion. In Morocco Islam Is still pugnacious and repellent, and nowhere in the East are its rules more strictly observed or the curiosity of strangers more sternly repressed. There, too, we find the same strange discord between theory and practice whioh is perhaps more marked in Mohammedanism than in the other great religions of the world. Mr. Meakin quotes the following candid confession of a Moor,—we hope an exceptional character:—" Do you want to know what our religion is P We purify ourselves with water while we con- template adultery ; we go to the mosque to pray, and as we do so we think how best to cheat our neighbours ; we give alms at the door, and go back to our shop to rob ; we read our Korans, and go out to commit unmentionable sins; we fast and go on pilgrimages, yet we lie and kill." Mr. Meakin says his Moorish friends endorsed this plain statement, and gener- ally his estimate of the people is much less favourable than Miss Macnab's. There is no question which is the more experienced authority, and we must believe Mr. Meakin against our will But if he is not enthusiastic about their virtues—holding, indeed, that "no woman in Morocco is chaste who has it in her power to be otherwise, and that no man loses the slightest chance " of gratifying his passions—be is a great admirer of their manners, their dress, and their dishes. He vigorously defends their mode of eating with their fingers, for instance. Lane, when people objected, used to content himself with remarking that this was the way of our Lord and His Disciples. Mr. Meakin goes further: he regards it as the most graceful, as it is the most natural, mode of eating, and much more cleanly than the use of spoons and forks which have been in other mouths and may have been imperfectly washed. He also appreciates Morocco menus, and gives some tempting recipes for the national plats. His working patterns of Moorish dresses are worthy of a modiste, and we should expect to see modifications in next season's fashions based upon his instructions, if the picturesque ever appealed to London tailors and dressmakers. The whole book is thorough and detailed on every point. Whether it be local saints or relics of pre-Mohammedan cults —such as the Midsummer and New Year's festivals, and the parade of the figure of the corn-goddess Mats at harvest— slave auctions or native farriery, pottery, leather-work, or Moorish arithmetic (a singularly involved science), cosmetics or jewellery, Mr. Meakin is at home in it, and can answer all reasonable questions. The only point on which we are in- clined to fall foul of him is his spelling of Moorish words, and yet this has the great advantage that it is so complicated that we are often uncertain whether it is really wrong or merely unintelligible. It is, however, certain that " Sinibrah-zadeh," " Shah-zenen," " Shah-rier, " k'hol," " Marhabba," " Bellal," " madarsah," are wrong, and that "Mohammed er-Rascal Allah" is a solecism that no Arab or Moor would commit. The plural of " is " jawimi'," but whether Mr. Meakin means this when he writes " j5e.m'a " only those who understand his system of transliteration can say. Most of his Arabic, however, is correct enough, and fortunately not one reader in a thousand will be troubled by such trifles, which do not seriously mar a work of sterling merit, at once scholarly and eminently readable, and as unpretentious as it is sound. Mr. Meakin's three volumes on Morocco form an indispensable treasury of every kind of information on the country, its people and its history, and reflect the highest credit on the industry and research of their author. He has produced the standard work on a s ngularly interesting country.
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