THE LIFE OF EDWARD HENRY PALMER.•
WE cannot bestow on this Life all the praise lavished on it by some of our contemporaries. It is an interesting book all through, in parts even a brilliant book, but it is not a good biography. Of all that Professor Edward Henry Palmer,. Orientalist, author, and explorer, did, of all that he learned, of all that he wrote, and of most things that ho appeared to his contemporaries to be, we have the fullest account in the pleasantest words ; but of what he was, absolutely nothing at all. There are no letters in the book, except some half- official from Suez, very few memoranda of con- versations, and no indications whatever of the inner life. The Professor lived half his life at Cambridge and half among Orientals, and knew about the latter, their minds, their ways, and their interests more perhaps than any European ; but of what be thought of them, whether he approved or disapproved,. loved or hated them, we never obtain one glimpse. For those who trust this biography, Mr. Palmer's endless knowledge of lan- guages, his sympathetic study of men, his patient and laborious investigation into facts, produce absolutely nothing except a certain childlike wonder that one man could know all that be evidently knew. Of the knowledge there is no doubt. Mr. Bosant is faithful to his friend, and piles up evidence on evidence proving that his reputation was not artificial, that he was an exceptional Orientalist, that learned Asiatics held him their equal or superior, that Arabs of the Desert and Arabs of the city, Arabs of Sinai and Arabs of Algeria alike took him to be in some sort a compatriot. A "Turco," or Arab soldier, in Paris, abused him for wearing the European dress, when he was a, Moslem ; the gipsies thought him a gipsy masquerading as a gentleman ; Indians wondered how a mere Western could have acquired all their learning. But of the thoughts this knowledge, so wide and deep, had brought him, of the convictions it bad induced, of the mental nature it had modified, we hear nothing what- ever. We see him only as in a looking-glass. It would be im- possible to gather from this book an idea of Professor Palmer'a creed, of his politics, of his view of society or morals, of human duties and obligations, of any mental acquisition, in fact, by which other men might be benefited and improved. Even of himself we learn comparatively little. We know that he was small, but hardy, very brave, and with the power of making himself felt, with a gift for the rapid acquisition of tongues, with unusual power of rapid literary work, with a turn for dexterous manipulation such as conjurors possess, and with great attractiveness for all whom he liked or came into intimate converse with ; but his mind, the ultimate drift of his ideas, is never revealed to ns. Was he even a thoughtful man We know that he had a childlike faculty of enjoyment, that he was ',humorous as well as learned, with a humour which had in it a trace of farce, and that he could neither keep money nor arrange his pecuniary affairs ; but still, of him as a whole man we know little. To the question, What did he do ? the reply is complete and satisfactory; but to the question, What did he think about any of his multifarious subjects ? there is no answer. He translated the Koran and other Oriental classics, he studied secret sects, he knew much of many creeds, but of his religious faith we could not give a notion beyond a guess, which is only based on an impression, that he was a convinced Theist, who thought most beliefs, possibly all beliefs, mental phenomena. He passed his life in the effort to comprehend Orientals, and succeeded in that task beyond all men,—succeeded till he could make of himself a Oriental; but of what he thought about Orientals, and the distinction between them and Westerns, we know, and from this book can know, nothing. Of his relation to his fellow- creatures, we hear little. Mr. Besant observes en passant that his hero did not love them very much, but was interested in them with a kind of watchful wonder ; but what was the cause of this wondering?
The Professor was mesmerist and conjuror, and at one time a spiritualist, and one of those men who are quick to examine any pretension to occult knowledge ; but whether he thought this branch of inquiry worth pursuing, we have no means of telling. Mr. Besant thinks he despised the whole subject, but he gives no evidence of this, he only guesses the reasons for his hero's careful silence ; be acknowledges that he was a mes- merist of the higher kind—he once, for example, sent a girl in a trance to a hospital a mile away, to submit to a painful
• The Life of Edward Henry Palmer. By Walter Besant, M.A. London John Murray.
operation, a story opening up illimitable possibilities as to mental influence—and he quotes no final or intelligible opinion.
Even of his character we are left in some doubt. Mr. Besant praises his friend on every page, quite justly by the consent of all who knew him, but he rarely proves his good qualities, ex- cept his entire disinterestedness about money, and it is not our fault if we gather that he was at bottom somewhat unscrupu- lous, especially as to accuracy of statement. He would invent a firman, if necessary, he would tell stories that create at least doubt, and he would carry mystification beyond the permissible.
Does not Mr. Besant himself mean that he was a little unscrn- pnlons when he repeats, n propos of some wonderful stories, that it is necessary to remember that Professor Palmer was a very clever man The view may be most unfair, and may even seem brutal, when we recollect that Professor Palmer died for his country, and is still unrewarded ; but we rise from the account of him with a feeling that he was more like Donatello, like Margrave, like any hero of fiction, with wonderful gifts, but with the soul left out, than any real person of whom we ever read.
The son of a small tradesman of Cambridge, Mr. Palmer showed from the first the tastes which distinguished him in after-life. As a mere boy he acquired Romany, the gipsy tongue, so perfectly, that throughout life the Gipsies believed him to be a man of their tribe ; and as a clerk in Eastcheap, -doing the dock business of his firm, he spent his whole leisure and spare silver in cafés, picking up French and Italian in all its dialects. He had for all words a cloudless memory, he possessed that mimetic faculty essential to easy speech in a foreign tongue, and he had profound confidence in his own power :—
" 'Either you want to learn a language,' he would say, or you do cot. If you do not, follow the way of the English schools, and you will succeed. If, however, you do—'—and here he would go on to .explain bow it should first be studied without the grammar, and with the intention of acquiring, to begin with, the most important part of the actual vocabulary ; how languages, being in groups, present vocabularies which, with certain variations, are common property ; bow inflections, suffixes, and so forth, also resemble each other, and therefore come quite easily to the man who has begun with the words, so that in learning simply how to read a tongue, without opening any- thing more than a dictionary, you acquire insensibly a vast amount of grammar and a great quantity of syntax. The true reason, he always insisted, of the really brilliant failure to teach modern languages which distinguishes our schools is that we only approach them by the aid of grammars modelled after the Latin and Greek manner, and that we mistake the teaching of inflection and syntax for that of lan- guage. Any intelligent person, Palmer maintained, can learn to read a language in a few weeks, and to speak it in a few months, unless it be his first attempt at an Oriental language."
When forced in 1859 by ill-health to return to Cambridge, where, though an orphan, he had an aunt with money, he made the acquaintance of Syud. Abdnllah, then teaching Indian languages, and thenceforward devoted himself to Oriental study. He learned Urdu till his letters were the delight of native editors and scholars in India ; Persian, till Professor Cowell, a master of that tongue, declared his vocabulary " exhaustless ;" Arabic, till he could render old Arabic with the original swing- ing rhythm, and could talk modern Arabic till the Bedaween half believed him a kinsman, and men like Garcia de 'Tansy and Stanley Lane Poole expressed titter " wonder" at his acquirements. The Engineers who surveyed Palestine trusted him in the incredibly difficult task of ascertain- ing and verifying the Arab names for places, and their rela- tion to the Hebrew names, and he explored the " Desert of the Wanderings " as it has never been explored yet. He hoped, after his labours, to be made Professor of Arabic in Cambridge, bat the Heads of Houses found he had only taken a third-class in Classics, they thought him a bit of a Bohemian, and they passed him over, in favour of a man quite worthy, but an out- sider—an affront he never forgave. Fortunately, the Dean of Windsor, Dean Wellesley, who then, as Queen's Almoner, held the patronage, gave him the Lord Almoner's Professorship of
Arabic, and this, though it yielded only £40 a year, enabled him to keep his Fellowship after marriage. He married at -once, and a year after the University increased his income by £250. He did much work besides, some of it splen- did work, though he was too rapid, and might have
been prosperous, but he could not keep money ; he was unlucky in his wife's health, which drove her to gentler -climates, and be had, from the moment he was passed over, a distaste for Cambridge. After his wife's death, he assigned his income to creditors, came up to London, and was gradually acquiring a place in journalism when he was asked by Lord Northbrook, on the part of the Government, to perform a dangerous service, for which there was no other fit man. He was to go to the Desert of Sinai, and persuade the Sheikhs, who might have brought 50,000 men to the aid of Arabi, to sit quiet, and if necessary, to engage them to protect the Canal. He had no written instructions, but he knew pre- cisely what to do, and he rode into the Desert as the wealthy Sheikh Abdullah, the friend of the Beni Ismail, and, at the price of much suffering, contrived to see and convince the leading Sheikhs. Daring a ride of days through the Desert, he so conciliated the leading Sheiks that they agreed to desert Arabi, to remain quiet, to protect the Canal, and if it were threatened by the Nile tribes, to attack them with fifty thousand men. Palmer returned to Suez on August 1st, 1882, supremely successful in his mission, to find himself ap- pointed interpreter-in-chief to her Majesty's Forces in Egypt, and authorised to draw on the Government for any expenses, and furnished with 220,000. It was characteristic that he was ordered to fix his salary, but could not attend to such a detail. After a short rest, he set out again with captain Gill to buy camels, tailing with him £3,000. He was misled by a treacherous guide, and attacked and murdered by a party of Arabs, either anxious for the money, or, as Mr. Besant believes, acting under superior orders, transmitted through the Governor of Nakhl from Constantinople. The whole party were taken to the edge of a deep ravine, and shot down. So perished a man of high attainments, who fascinated his friends, and who was enabled in the last year of his life to perform a grand service for his country, which, as yet, has not been adequately acknow- ledged. We trust for the sake of justice that the omission will be recognised, and that, moreover, the best of the Pro- fessor's work, including his very striking and original poetical efforts, will yet be given to the world in a collected form. He was a man of rare gifts.
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