Ali the Magnificent BOOKS OF THE DAY

By E. H. CARR IN the days when people of any literary pretensions knew at least their first two cantos of Childe Harold by heart, All the despot of Epirus was a household name : " I talk not of mercy, I talk not of fear ;

He neither must know who would serve the Vizier ; Since the days of our Prophet, the Crescent ne'er saw A chief ever glorious like Ali Pashaw."

But nowadays, when Byron is more fashionable as a theme for Freudian biographers than as a poet, All the Lion is a title which will probably mean nothing to nine out of ten readers. He has recently been resuscitated in France. In England there has been no book about Min for close on a hundred years. In the not wisely but too well tilled field of contemporary biography Mr. Plomer may be congratulated on having staked out his claim to what is, to all intents and purposes, virgin soil.

Ali's fascination resides in the fact that he was a hero of the Dark Ages translated into the more merciful and more senti- mental twilight of the Romantic Revival. His racial origins it is difficult to guess. His native languages were Greek and Albanian ; and his handsome profile and clear complexion reveal no trace of Arab swarthiness or of the characteristic Mongol features. " Why didn't I come into the world sooner ? " he is reported to have exclaimed once. " With the

aid of a few madmen I might perhaps have been hailed as a prophet . . . but Mohammed got in first and shut the door, and t he trick's been done once for all." There was, however, in All nothing of the prophet or the religious fanatic. He was of the breed not of Mohammed, but of Tamerlaine and

Genghis Khan. He impressed his contemporaries, and especially his victims, with the same indomitable and inex- orable will, the same eager lust to shed blood, the same confidence in his star as a conqueror and ruler of men.

All had been apprentice I to the trade from his earliest years. His mother in her will

" had expressed the wish that All and Shainitza (his sister) should at the earliest possible moment do their best to exterminate the people of Uardikai and Khormovo, who had formerly captured and outraged her, and added a curse on her children should they fail her in this . . . Finally, she had prepared a list of individuals she wanted assassinated, and villages she wanted burnt."

Mr. Plomer spares us nothing of the execution of these com- missions and of others of similar character which Ali's own tastes and ambitions imposed on him. The record of burnings, torturings and mass executions becomes, if the truth be told, rather monotonous. But these Asiatic methods were im- pressively successful. Before long Ali. had extended his effective dominion over the whole of the Peloponnesus, and over the greater part of Northern Greece and Thessaly. The overlordship of Constantinople (for all these territories were still part of the Turkish Empire) was no more than a fiction, to be pleaded when convenient and otherwise ignored. Nelson, when cruising in the Ionian Sea, did not hesitate to send a message of respect to the " hero of Epirus," who had just defeated and massacred a French garrison ; and Byron remarked that Jannina, Ali's capital, surpassed Athens in the wealth, refinement, learning and dialect of its inhabitants."

Byron, who came to Jannina with John Cam Hobhouse in 1809. does full justice to the more picturesque and variegated aspects of Ali's Court :

" The wild Albanian kirtled to the knee,

With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun ; . . . the lively, supple Greek ; And swarthy Nubia's mutilated son ; The bearded Turk that rarely deigns to speak, Master of all around, too potent to be meek."

From Ali Byron could get a romantic thrill more authentic and more horrific than from all the literature of shudders— Ali the Lion. By William Plomer. (Cape. Ins. 6d.)

the school of fiction beginning with The Castle of Otranto and ending with The Monk—which had been the rage of his youth.

He was fascinated by that " aged, venerable face " ,arid " hoary, lengthening beard," by the urbane reception which

Ali never failed to give to distinguished strangers, and, above all, by the delightfully disturbing consciousness of dark

" deeds that lurk beneath." Ali was a tyrant in the grand manner which had, even then, almost vanished from the world. He had about him all the attraction of the frank scoundrel :

" You don't know the Greeks and Albanians (he assured one visitor). When I hang a man on the plane tree, brother robs brother under the very branches. If I burn a man alive, his son is waiting to steal the father's ashes to sell them. It is their fate to be ruled by me, and nobody but All can keep them in order."

Such a man not only demanded but inspired devotion. No wonder that, on one of his wedding-days, " two men announced

that they had taken on their heads all the misfortunes that fate might have in store for the Vizier; and threw themselves from a high tower into the courtyard below, both being severely injured." Ali, whose meanness seems to have equalled his courage and his brutality, accorded them "a minute pension and a daily ration of bread."

Mr. Plomer has made the most of this (in modern times) unparalleled and almost incredible story. It is, indeed, a little difficult to follow Ali's tortuous experiments in European politics, playing off the French against the English, the English against the French, and both against his nominal suzerain the Sultan. In 1807 he even sent an envoy to Napoleon, then at Tilsit, to offer him his alliance against the Russians. But Ali had not followed with sufficient rapidity the moves on the diplomatic chess-board ; and the envoy arrived at the very moment when Napoleon and the Tsar were falling into each other's arms. Talleyrand wrote All a letter, addressing him as tres haul, tres excellent et nzagnifique seigneur, but gave him to understand that his assistance was not required at the moment. For years, an unhappy French consul, Pouqueville by name, was com- pelled to reside at Ali's capital, alternately cajoled, insulted and threatened by the Vizier, and every year less and less reconciled to his exile among these treacherous and unieL Countable barbarians. Officially, Great Britain took l'e.4S interest than France in the Epirote empire. But 11Yron and Hobhouse were by no means the only English visitors whom curiosity drew to Ali's garish court. Among the last of them was Thomas Smart Hughes, the author of a once famous poem, Belshazzar's Feast. Mr. Plomer plausibly suggests that his reception at Jannina may have inspired some of the high lights of this ornate production.

This is a book which everyone who has not too queasy a stomach for horrors should read. The illustrations, whiCb are reproductions of paintings and sketches of Ali, his retinue and his favourites done by a French traveller, and originally published in a contemporary French travel-book, are delightful, and provide just that touch of elegant idealisation which is necessary to veil the 'naked atrociousness of this hoary old buccaneer. Here you have not the uninhibited sadist, the monster of cruelty and lust, which Ali on any showing must have been, but a courtly and serene old gentleman, the father of his people and lover of beauty and the arts, smoking the pipe of peace in the evening of his days amid the bounties of nature—the very pattern of the high-souled and enlightened brigand so familiar in romantic literature. All was perhaps the first begetter of that obstinate nineteenth century—the romance of the Balkans. It is indeed wonderful what the successors of Rousseau could make out of the doctrine of the Noble Savage.