THE REALISTIC DRAMA IN CONSTANTINOPLE.
READERS who have carefully studied the daily records of the events of this month in Constantinople, records which leave nothing to be desired in fullness, though we may desire much in the way of authentication, must have been struck with their extraordinarily dramatic character. The scenic element in them is so strong, the rapidity of the changes so great, the violence of the incidents ao- stunning, that most Englishmen received an im- pression of unreality, of a drama going on elsewhere than in real life, of personages whose acts must be judged by their effectiveness, rather than by any rule, either of morality or politics. They could not care, in their amazement, whether Abdul Aziz ought to have been dethroned or not, or executed or not, any more than if he had been an actor in a tragedy at the Lyceum, and felt only inclined to ask that he should be deposed in a telling way, and
executed amid fitting accompaniments of quivering music, lowered lights; and wailing women. They were, in their own minds, watch-
ing a spectacle, not assisting, however passively, in a grand Euro- pean event. That impression of unreality is, however, baseless, the scene owing its dramatic character not to inventive skill on the part of any author, but to the fact that it was actually a drama,—a historic event, transacted under the conditions which
existed when life was dramatic, when kings could be deposed suddenly by plots, when armed men disposed of thrones in a night, when the personages in a political struggle knew that they carried their lives in their hands, and must succeed instantly, or sur- render themselves to the executioner. The suddenness was real, and the pose of the personages naturally full of emotion, and the violence an indispensable condition of the movement. Europe, in its- long submission to policemen, and opinion, and diplomatists, and other noiseless machinery, has forgotten what violence once couldeff cot, till many of the events in Constantinople seem shadowy or stagey ; but such events are real enough in the East, where life obeys many of the old conditions. Nothing can, be more theatrical than the account of the summons of the War Minister to Murad, in his place of confinement ; .the panic-terror of the Heir, his renewed confidence as the pistol is handed him, and his short journey to the Ministry at War and to a throne ; but it was all real enough to Murad. The announcement might be a trick of his uncle's to betray him into treason, and so justify his death ; but no, it could not be a trick, for with the pistol he could kill himself or Hussein Avni, and thus produce precisely the popular sensation which, if his uncle were only plotting, would have been most care- fully avoided, and so he ventured to go on, glancing on each side to discover the possible ambush, as an actor would glance on the stage, to reveal to the audience that he was still not reassured.
Even this drama, however, with its wonderful contrasts of, momentary situation, the captive becoming Caliph, and the prisoner an absolute monarch, is far exceeded by the one which accompanied the arrest of Abdul Aziz, which arranged itself exactly as a British playwright would most have desired, into two Acts, the first having three "set" scenes—the first, an anteroom of the Dolma Bagtche Palace, with the Chief -Eunuch, a fat and scornful slave revealed half-asleep, but roused by three knocks at the door, and Reschid Pasha and " guards " entering menacingly from the right. There are no " guards " surround- ing big persons in Europe now, except in the theatre, but when violence was to be expected or practised as matter of daily custom, there were "guards"—armed men, soldiers and servants, who would cut you down tumultuously if bidden—and in the East there are such persons now Every Indian Prince who visited the Prince of Wales was surrounded by the men— part courtiers, part servants, part soldiers—now classed on the stage as "guards," and armed with spears, abso- lutely uselesas in a house. The "roaring laughter" of the Chief Enuneh at the announcement that his master had ceased to reign ; his seizure, lest he should resist ; and the ad- vance of Reschid Pasha "with guards" to the "holy of holies," the Sultan's sleeping-room, is all in that theatrical style of sudden- ness and impressiveness that seems so improbable to us now, but is so real, when, if minutes are lost, a threatened Sultan may find guards to defend him, and " Off with his head-!" may not sound in the invader's ears as a melodramatic; command. Ten minutes' delay in the actual march through the rooms, and the chances are that the Sultan's women would have found help, and Reschid would have been lying a strangled or beheaded corpse in a corridor, and the Sultan have been an exultant Sovereign, issuing sharp sen- tences of death. One can hear the shuddering music, as Reschid passes, with long strides.
The second scene transports us to the Sultan's bed-room, where the portly monarch, suddenly awakened by strangers, is told in formal style that he is dethroned, and his ,nephew master, and
breaks out :-
" My nephew! Murad I Had I but foreseen What kind of tree from this black plant would grow, I had watered him with poison!"
—raising his voice, we doubt not, as Kean would have done, almost to a scream, as he uttered the last sentence, which— utterly stagey as it sounds—we have given as reported, with scarcely the transposition of a word. Then the fierce burst of the Sultan's royal indignation, answered by the dramatic order to look outside and see the troops drawn up, and cannon pointed at the Palace, and the boats of the ironclads waiting to attack—it is said in some accounts that both troops and sailors were ordered out to defend the Sultan, and probably the men in both were quite in ignorance of the use that would be made of. them ;—then the rush on the. scene of the Sultana Valide, her face exposed, screaming, with hair dishevelled, raging, but pitiful for her son ; her brief question whether nothing could be done ; Reschid's stern reply that his Majesty must obey at once or die; and the Sultan's submission, with the silent "guards," all looking on passively as a throne fell,—it was all perfectly natural, given the time, place, and circumstances; but oh! how Jules Verne, who now makes up the spectacular pieces for Paris, would delight to put it all together, and arrange for the dim light inside and the pale moonlight outside, and the wonderful scene on the Bosphorus, seen through a falling side of the room, and the fitful music, and all the rest of the theatrical impression ! It seems too scenic to have hap- pened, but what can a soldier ordered to seize a Sultan do but threaten immediate death as the price of resistance ; or how would you have an angry Sultan and his mother—once a servant, or rather slave, within the palace, and still utterly igno- rant—behave amidst such a scene? And then the third scene— the Sultan and his sons, and the women and the slaves, floating down the Bosphorus to prison, with " guards " ordered to slay the whole party if they resist ; the monarch silent, but protesting, and half-paralysed with mingled amazement, rage, and fear. What can be more natural, or what, to the modem and Western notions of people who expect dethroned kings to go away unobtru- sively to England, more perfectly operatic ? One seems to see Giuglini's pantomime, as the mimic fleet, with the singer as Sultan, and the wooden soldiers, and the huddled women, are rowed slowly and silently across the stage into the outer darkness. Granted a beautiful scene, a grand catastrophe necessarily extremely sudden, excited and impassive personages, great ladies with dishevelled hair and furious speech—the Sultana Valide is said to have recalled her youth, and expressed herself in energetic Turkish Billingsgate—and threats of death, and that actual " com- mittal to the Tower" which was once so real an episode in the life of the English great, though now the description reads like a novelist's " property," and we have all the elements which make up theatric tragedy, and which, though they have grown so old and so meaningless, were once as real as Newgate-yard and the gallows and the hangman and the officials now are to the condemned. The early tragedians did not invent their "situations." They described what they knew to have occurred, and the situations seem only stagey now because they represent a life which in Europe has passed away, though it continues in the East. We execute, but after long formalities, and we arrest, but it is through unarmed men in blue coats, who do not condescend to threaten.
The second Act has but one scene, but that is one which, as it is described, an early tragedian would have loved to depict,—the dethroned monarch in his imprisonment, raging as only an Oriental can rage—that is, as Rossi or Salvini would rage, if theatric emotion had put them really beside themselves— muttering, cursing, praying, now dashing his head against the wall, and then forcing himself into scornful calm, as the officer appeared to demand his arms, lest he should kill himself, it is said,—but by possibility also lest he should struggle too violently for his life. The revolver is surrendered— it is characteristic of Oriental manners that the officer would not touch it till the ex-Sultan had laid it out of his hand—and then came the scornful question,
" If they, Sir, are so careful of my life, Why leave that sabre here ?"
—and the cunning, half-maniacal demand for the scissors, which may well serve instead of a poniard, the sharp stabs, the silence, the in- road of shrieking women, and finally, the half-frenzied mother, who struggles in vain to terminate her life by throwing herself from the lofty window of the palace. The scene is painfully theatrical, but itis so only because the men who gave us our stereotyped impression of the theatre depicted scenes they knew to have occurred, and which occur still in Turkey, where, if the other story be true, and Abdul Aziz were done to death, the scene with the man sink- ing under his sleeping-potion, and his arms then cut while be was paralysed for resistance and incapable of pain, but alive enough to bleed, must have been equally theatric, equally like a scene from Titus Andronicus or King John. Every violent incident, except an ordinary murder, now strikes Englishmen as unreal ; but violence in high places is still one of the conditions of East- ern life, as it once was of European. The temper of the day makes men too intolerant of exaggeration, too much inclined to set down everything sensational as untrue, and more especially anything sensational which assumes a ghastly callousness or a debased timidity in the surrounding population. Captain Mayne Reid's wild novels are spoiled for grown-up readers by the fiendish cal- lousness he attributes to Mexicans, the readiness with which they tolerate or sanction atrocities which, to the European mind, are impossible or sickening. Yet what story that he ever told or in- vented—we suspect he has invented very little of the scenically horrible deliberateness of Mexican punishments—comes near this statement, seriously and indeed incidentally made by Mr. Arthur Arnold, in this month's Contemporary Review, in a grave paper on the condition of Persia ?—
" And how do the Princes of Persia act up to this high calling ? They are reputed, by those who are in aposition to know the facts of govern- ment, to be very skilful and ingenious in forcing contributions to the revenue of the State.'. The Zil-i-Sultan, though only twenty-six years of age, has a high reputation of this sort, and has already been governor of two of the most important divisions of Turkey. A prince whom we met with is said to have lately fitted, with successful result, a huge pair of trousers filled with snow upon a man who declined to pay .a large demand, in the season when the thermometer stands for months below zero. Every governor seems to be more or less an expert in cruel punishments. A predecessor of the Zil-i-Sultrin in the govern- ment of Shiraz recently punished highway robbers by-fixing them neck- deep in cylinders of brickwork. He then poured a sort of plaster of Paris around their naked bodies, which set hard long before the miserable wretches died of congestion and starvation."
There are scenes, we doubt not, going on in Constantinople as full as those we have mentioned of the elements of tragedy, even if the Sultan's son be still living ; and all must be transacted in the way which to men of the modern West suggests not history, but some opera, which, like La Juive contains some scene too realistic to be borne, and therefore is set aside as probably "exaggerated'" or untrue.
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