1912] Father Tyrrell's Autobiography 403 



father and of Victor's father. I like Victor much. Though far less 

 brilliant than Neville, he has good solid qualities, and a much wider 

 range of interests. He has a good heart and a logical mind. What he 

 told me of his boyish devotion to his father in the year after his 

 father's death was very interesting as a spiritual experience. He is 

 himself devoted now to his own children. 



" 1st Nov. — A great Turkish defeat is admitted, and it is only a 

 question whether the Bulgarians will march on to Constantinople or 

 forestall European intervention by making a separate peace with the 

 Sultan, which shall include the cession of the whole of European Tur- 

 key west of the fortified line between the Black Sea and the sea of 

 Marmora. This is the more likely result of the two. 



" Victor has gone back to Knebworth, and his place here is taken 

 by Beauclerk just returned from his gold-mining adventure in Alaska, 

 and bringing with his fresh ideas as well as a huge nugget of copper 

 for me. 



" 13th Nov. — My recent sadness has been deepened by reading 

 Miss Petre's ' Life of Father Tyrrell,' which at last is out. It is a 

 record of failure, though intensely interesting — indeed the auto- 

 biographical part is comparable in its ways to Rousseau's, a real self- 

 dissection. His failure at Rome is very like mine with Cairo or Con- 

 stantinople, attempts both of them to make silk purses out of sow's 

 ears, and reading it has filled me with a double gloom. Up to the 

 present moment it had been possible for me to feel that I had played 

 a useful and successful part in the regeneration of Islam. Now I can 

 no longer feel this. It is too patent to me that Islam will never be re- 

 generated, and that my work of thirty years has been absolutely thrown 

 away. The Mohammedan religion will of course survive the present 

 shock for many years, perhaps for many generations. But Islam, as 

 a political institution and power in the world, has had its death blow, 

 from which it will not recover. The Ottoman Caliphate will drag out 

 a crippled existence in Asia, but it will be under European, probably 

 Russian tutelage, and will be used as an instrument for enslaving what 



*■&'-> 



were once the Ottoman provinces, and will have fallen into Christian 

 hands. Islam's sole chance now as an independent social existence 

 will be in the deserts whence it originally sprang, Arabia and North 

 Africa, and the chance is a poor one at best. At any rate it must be 

 on lines other than those I have pursued, or of which I can hope even 

 to see the beginnings. 



" 14th Nov. — I have written to Miss Petre congratulating her upon 

 her book, an admirable piece of work. Tyrrell's case and my own, as 

 I said yesterday, have a certain analogy. Not that in either case the 

 ideals we pursued are false, but rather that the men in whose hands 

 the issues lay were unworthy and unwise. Thus I have read the 



