Turkey To-day and To-morrow MAGINE a couple of hundred boys
and girls from every vilayet in Turkey in place of our Slade School, and the Bosphorus lapping outside the windows instead of the roar of London, and Namak Ismail Bey in place of Mr. Tonks—and you have the artistic centre of new Turkey : L'Ecole des Beaux Arts. We must glance at this establishment before leaving for the Turkish capital, because it expresses much, I think, that is in the mind of the Turkish renaissance.
I am no art critic and looked rather at the faces of the pupils than at their canvasses. What I saw was energy, enthusiasm, clean living, a great variety of racial types and a good many blue eyes. About a hundred pupils are studying painting, and a dozen sculpture. The classes I saw were drawing from the nude. The girls, I was told, were keener and more diligent than the boys. Is this, I wonder, because " war-neurosis " affects males more than females ? I did not observe any very striking scope or originality in the work of either boys or girls, but it is not what is being done in Turkey to-day so much as what is being attempted which is of importance. These students, embodying, as we may assume, the artistic- creative impulses of the nation, are busy copying the West and are acquitting themselves with credit. The confidence, the leisure, the security required for the birth of a distinctive national culture, have not yet come. But the spirit is willing, and in the architectural class I saw a particularly clever design for a cinema to which the mighty Sinan Pasha, builder of the Suleimaniyeh and other great mosques would have given his approval. In all these studies and students the President of the Republic takes special interest, for he knows that it is through the younger generation that his reforms must justify themselves.
The man who has deposed the Caliph, changed the law from top to bottom, unveiled women, un-fezzed men, and reversed the brain-tracks of his people, may or may not succeed in resolving the elusive x in the equation of talent. At any rate, he is not wanting in ideas. Art will certainly continue to attract his interest and attention. The Moslem Friday may be abolished as a day of rest, in favour of Sunday. Some scheme may be devised for utilizing the mosques for education as well as prayer (to the great benefit, as it would seem to the outsider, of true religion), but above all the new alphabet will continue to be imposed upon the country with refreshing vigour and audacity. It is on his success as the liquidator of national illiteracy that the Ghazi's fame will depend.
While we are in the train to Angora, the capital of progress and reform, let ine outline the principles of this linguistic revolution. If you will look out of the window you will see we are in a stony, frosty, empty plain. Other parts of the country are rich in their soil, but all are un- developed, under-populated, poor, illiterate. How is Turkey to become cultured, active, prospectus ? Ob- viously by a change of mind in her people and by closet contact with the West. And so (perhaps for the first time in history} a whole nation has been sent to •the schoolroom by its ruler. On the day I write this the Vali of Constantinople and his aides-de-camp are to-pass their official compulsory examination in Roman writing. Within a few months the Arabic script will have dis- appeared from all Government records. Already no newspapers are published except in • Roman characters. An analogous situation would be produced in England if Parliament enacted that the English language should in future be spelt phonetically, backwards, in the Greek character ; that all printed -matter was to be produced in this manner ; and that all public officials, beginning with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, should pass an examination in the new language under pain of dismissal.
Naturally enough there have been difficulties and some dissent, but the overwhelming mass of both Turkish and foreign opinion is in favour of the change. The unanimous opinion of Englishmen with whom I talked was that the measure had been planned with skill and carried into effect with wisdom. Not only will a Turkish child be able to learn the new alphabet of twenty-nine letters in about four months, instead of the four years required to master the hundred characters of Arabic, but the Roman alphabet bridges the gap between East and West, is more accurate and legible, and records phonetically every sound of the Turkish tongue, which Arabic did not.
Editors of newspapers are among the most enthu- siastic supporters of the new writing, for although their circulations have temporarily:declined, they know that in a few years they will double and treble their present sales.
The Millie, for instance, which is the Turkish Times, has dropped from 18,500 to 16,000, and is meeting with type-setting difficulties obvious to anyone who is ac- quainted with newspaper production, yet the Editor is confident that the reform, apart from its national im- portance, will raise his circulation as the advantages of the new system become apparent. No doubt he is right, especially -as in the Millie the news is laid out with skill and taste, rather on the lines of the New York Herald- Tribune. A tidy and self-respecting dress of print is the reflection of a similar mind.
Ghazi Mustapha Kemal • Pasha is a remarkable man, but we must not expect him to be able to inspire his people in the course of a few months, or even years, with a mental endurance equal to their fortitude as soldiers. The human brain is curious, secret, pulpy stuff, not to be moulded with the ease with which regiments are disci- plined. When one looks away from theories to the flesh and blood in which they are to work, one realizes the immense task which the new Turkey faces. These jolly, sturdy, ragged children that are standing outside the restaurant car, with their huge, cream-coloured, black- muzzled Anatolian sheepdogs—will they become scientific dairymen or remain wild herdsmen ? The leanness of the land is terrible. I threw a piece of bread out of the window and was shocked to see a child snatch it under the jaws of a dog, and begin to gnaw.
On and on and up and up we crept, to the head of the long valley which Angora commands. It was bitterly cold, and snowing. Such weather breeds a hardy race of men, and accounts, I suppose, for the famous goats and cats, who are not more obstinate and inscrutable than the human inhabitants of Angora when they happen to resent the stranger within their midst.
From the railway station, an avenue set with sickly trees leads across mud-flats to the modern town, three-quarters of a mile away. Above it rises the charming old city (really little more than a village) clustered round its /tick. built fortress. In all there may be 250,000 inhabitants. Through the muddy streets gangs of Anatolian peasants trudge, and a good many pasty-faced young men (the clerkly class has not yet taken to physical culture, I am afraid) and a few attractive and bright-eyed young ladies in short skirts, pink stockings, galoshes, furs—an interest ing illustration of the way modern fashions have taken root in the new Turkey. There is one good hotel (the best hotel south of Buda Pesth and only equalled, if you travel eastward, when you arrive in Simla), but there is no other meeting-place for the wit and beauty of the capital outside their own homes, unless it be the Mulen Ruj (Moulin Rouge) which is a cinema and dance hall. Is it a trivial detail that Ismet Pasha, the clever Prime Minister, has a tennis court by his cottage ? I think not. There should be many more tennis courts in Angora.
The really interesting thing about Angora is what is going on in the minds of the Ghazi and his friends, and of that I can give no useful report. • As to the townsfolk, my impression of them was disappointing. Here, if anywhere in Turkey, I ought to have been able to note the foreglow of a commercial dawn. What I did see was that the coffee shops were well patronized and that the State Lottery for Aviation was popular. I failed to find any good shops, any well-displayed windows, any devices for attracting custom, any typical " novelties " or adver- tisements—in short, none of the bustle which is so stimulating in even the poorest of the poor quarters of Athens. The average modern Turk seems to me to be as bone-lazy as the average old Turk. I could give a good many instances of such inertia which were brought home to me personally and unpleasantly—small things in themselves, but symptomatic of a very general laziness. I will cite only one. I was given a printed French transla- tion of a recent speech by the Ghazi which had been cir- culated to every important newspaper in the world. There were more than thirty misprints and mistakes in this brochure of ten small pages. I do not want to cavil in the spirit of one who can see nothing in a glowing phrase but a split infinitive, but with every desire to be fair I think that such slovenliness is too ingrained- in the adult Turk to allow him to be a nation-builder. For the younger generation, however, spared from the nervous strain of war, a magnificent vista is open, pro- vided it can learn to use its head as it can use its hands. Turkey must produce something the world wants, if she is to be a great nation. It is not enough to be a dog with a bone that no one cares to fight. The dog must join the pack. At present it is lean and lone.
The carpet and tobacco industries have largely gone to the Greeks. Constantinople and Smyrna are losing trade. A bad harvest last year caused importations into a country that should export grain. All sorts of important projects for roads, railways, irrigation, drainage, are held up for lack of money. More serious still, the modern Turk has not maintained among foreign merchants the sterling reputation of the old Turk for honesty. Let us hope that this sign of the " get-rich-quick " spirit is but a passing phase of post-War adjustment ; yet it would be impossible to say that Turkey of to-day is as yet a suitable field for the investment of British capital. So far, the Turks have not asked for a penny from the out- side world. One admires them for that and understands their deep distrust of the Great Powers who have caused them so much suffering in the past. We British, were we in the place of the Turks, would have behaved much as they have done—up to a point ; but we should have been quicker than they to sense the new .spirit abroad in. the world.
Will the Turk have the vitality - and constructive ability to build up the nation which his soil - could support and which his courage deserves ? The spark seems missing as yet. The flame from Heaven has not yet come down, but I should be the last to deny that the miracle may happen. Turkey has offered up a whole generation on the altar of nationhood. She awaits the consummation of the sacrifice.
Under her Ghazi she is setting out to conquer a world invisible. It is a strange scene this : a nation which was once at the gates of Vienna and a threat to Europe has voluntarily exchanged the scimitar of Islam for the copybooks of the infidels. She is drilling herself, not to fight, but to think. Whether she will succeed, not I, nor any man, even the Ghazi, can gauge, for such thoughts lie too deep to measure. Perhaps her women will touch those depths and crown the work her soldiers began.
F. YEATS-BROWN.
Previous page
