and yonder rocks crowned by the Doric columns of the Parthenon, and
the thin Ionic shafts of the Erechtheum, to a man who has had
little rest, and is bitten all over by bugs? Was Alcibiades bitten
by bugs, I wonder; and did the brutes crawl over him as he lay in
the rosy arms of Phryne? I wished all night for Socrates's hammock
or basket, as it is described in the "Clouds;" in which resting-
place, no doubt, the abominable animals kept perforce clear of him.
A French man-of-war, lying in the silvery little harbour, sternly
eyeing out of its stern portholes a saucy little English corvette
beside, began playing sounding marches as a crowd of boats came
paddling up to the steamer's side to convey us travellers to shore.
There were Russian schooners and Greek brigs lying in this little
bay; dumpy little windmills whirling round on the sunburnt heights
round about it; an improvised town of quays and marine taverns has
sprung up on the shore; a host of jingling barouches, more
miserable than any to be seen even in Germany, were collected at
the landing-place; and the Greek drivers (how queer they looked in
skull-caps, shabby jackets with profuse embroidery of worsted, and
endless petticoats of dirty calico!) began, in a generous ardour
for securing passengers, to abuse each other's horses and carriages
in the regular London fashion. Satire could certainly hardly
caricature the vehicle in which we were made to journey to Athens;
and it was only by thinking that, bad as they were, these coaches
were much more comfortable contrivances than any Alcibiades or
Cimon ever had, that we consoled ourselves along the road. It was
flat for six miles along the plain to the city: and you see for
the greater part of the way the purple mount on which the Acropolis
rises, and the gleaming houses of the town spread beneath. Round
this wide, yellow, barren plain,--a stunted district of olive-trees
is almost the only vegetation visible--there rises, as it were, a
sort of chorus of the most beautiful mountains; the most elegant,
gracious, and noble the eye ever looked on. These hills did not
appear at all lofty or terrible, but superbly rich and
aristocratic. The clouds were dancing round about them; you could
see their rosy purple shadows sweeping round the clear serene
summits of the hill. To call a hill aristocratic seems affected or
absurd; but the difference between these hills and the others, is
the difference between Newgate Prison and the Travellers' Club, for
instance: both are buildings; but the one stern, dark, and coarse;
the other rich, elegant, and festive. At least, so I thought.
With such a stately palace as munificent Nature had built for these
people, what could they be themselves but lordly, beautiful,
brilliant, brave, and wise? We saw four Greeks on donkeys on the
road (which is a dust-whirlwind where it is not a puddle); and
other four were playing with a dirty pack of cards, at a barrack
that English poets have christened the "Half-way House." Does
external nature and beauty influence the soul to good? You go
about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and
wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands
Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense
of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a
Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on
those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You
theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of
Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there:
yonder dirty, swindling, ragged blackguards, lolling over greasy
cards three hours before noon, quarrelling and shrieking, armed to
the teeth and afraid to fight, are bred out of the same land which
begot the philosophers and heroes. But the "Half-way House" is
passed by this time, and behold! we are in the capital of King
Otho.
I swear solemnly that I would rather have two hundred a year in
Fleet Street, than be King of the Greeks, with Basileus written
before my name round their beggarly coin; with the bother of
perpetual revolutions in my huge plaster-of-Paris palace, with no
amusement but a drive in the afternoon over a wretched arid
country, where roads are not made, with ambassadors (the deuce
knows why, for what good can the English, or the French, or the
Russian party get out of such a bankrupt alliance as this?)
perpetually pulling and tugging at me, away from honest Germany,
where there is beer and aesthetic conversation, and operas at a
small cost. The shabbiness of this place actually beats Ireland,
enormous edifice of plaster, in a square containing six houses,
three donkeys, no roads, no fountains (except in the picture of the
inn); backwards it seems to look straight to the mountain--on one
side is a beggarly garden--the King goes out to drive (revolutions
permitting) at five--some four-and-twenty blackguards saunter up to
the huge sandhill of a terrace, as His Majesty passes by in a gilt
barouche and an absurd fancy dress; the gilt barouche goes plunging
down the sandhills; the two dozen soldiers, who have been
presenting arms, slouch off to their quarters; the vast barrack of
a palace remains entirely white, ghastly, and lonely; and, save the
braying of a donkey now and then (which long-eared minstrels are
more active and sonorous in Athens than in any place I know), all
is entirely silent round Basileus's palace. How could people who
knew Leopold fancy he would be so "jolly green" as to take such a
berth? It was only a gobemouche of a Bavarian that could ever have
been induced to accept it.
I beseech you to believe that it was not the bill and the bugs at
the inn which induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of
the residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and
forgotten. This is written off the leaden flats and mounds which
they call the Troad. It is stern justice alone which pronounces
this excruciating sentence. It was a farce to make this place into
a kingly capital; and I make no manner of doubt that King Otho, the
very day he can get away unperceived, and get together the passage-
money, will be off for dear old Deutschland, Fatherland, Beerland!
I have never seen a town in England which may be compared to this;
for though Herne Bay is a ruin now, money was once spent upon it
and houses built; here, beyond a few score of mansions comfortably
laid out, the town is little better than a rickety agglomeration of
larger and smaller huts, tricked out here and there with the most
absurd cracked ornaments and cheap attempts at elegance. But
neatness is the elegance of poverty, and these people despise such
a homely ornament. I have got a map with squares, fountains,
theatres, public gardens, and Places d'Othon marked out; but they
only exist in the paper capital--the wretched tumble-down wooden
one boas
ts of none.
One is obliged to come back to the old disagreeable comparison of
Ireland. Athens may be about as wealthy a place as Carlow or
Killarney--the streets swarm with idle crowds, the innumerable
little lanes flow over with dirty little children, they are playing
and puddling about in the dirt everywhere, with great big eyes,
yellow faces, and the queerest little gowns and skull-caps. But in
the outer man, the Greek has far the advantage of the Irishman:
most of them are well and decently dressed (if five-and-twenty
yards of petticoat may not be called decent, what may?), they
swagger to and fro with huge knives in their girdles. Almost all
the men are handsome, but live hard, it is said, in order to
decorate their backs with those fine clothes of theirs. I have
seen but two or three handsome women, and these had the great
drawback which is common to the race--I mean, a sallow, greasy,
coarse complexion, at which it was not advisable to look too
closely.
And on this score I think we English may pride ourselves on
possessing an advantage (by WE, I mean the lovely ladies to whom
this is addressed with the most respectful compliments) over the
most classical country in the world. I don't care for beauty which
will only bear to be looked at from a distance, like a scene in a
theatre. What is the most beautiful nose in the world, if it be
covered with a skin of the texture and colour of coarse whitey-
brown paper; and if Nature has made it as slippery and shining as
though it had been anointed with pomatum? They may talk about
beauty, but would you wear a flower that had been dipped in a
grease-pot? No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy rose out of
Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome
exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote
more cant of this sort than any poet I know of. Think of "the
peasant girls with dark blue eyes" of the Rhine--the brown-faced,
flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of "filling high a
cup of Samian wine;" small beer is nectar compared to it, and Byron
himself always drank gin. That man never wrote from his heart. He
is dangerous ground, even more dangerous than to look Athens full
in the face, and say that your eyes are not dazzled by its beauty.
The Great Public admires Greece and Byron: the public knows best.
Murray's "Guide-book" calls the latter "our native bard." Our
native bard! Mon Dieu! HE Shakspeare's, Milton's, Keats's,
Scott's native bard! Well, woe be to the man who denies the public
gods!
The truth is, then, that Athens is a disappointment; and I am angry
that it should be so. To a skilled antiquarian, or an enthusiastic
Greek scholar, the feelings created by a sight of the place of
course will be different; but you who would be inspired by it must
undergo a long preparation of reading, and possess, too, a
particular feeling; both of which, I suspect, are uncommon in our
busy commercial newspaper-reading country. Men only say they are
enthusiastic about the Greek and Roman authors and history, because
it is considered proper and respectable. And we know how gentlemen
in Baker Street have editions of the classics handsomely bound in
the library, and how they use them. Of course they don't retire to
read the newspaper; it is to look over a favourite ode of Pindar,
or to discuss an obscure passage in Athenaeus! Of course country
magistrates and Members of Parliament are always studying
Demosthenes and Cicero; we know it from their continual habit of
quoting the Latin grammar in Parliament. But it is agreed that the
classics are respectable; therefore we are to be enthusiastic about
them. Also let us admit that Byron is to be held up as "our native
bard."
I am not so entire a heathen as to be insensible to the beauty of
those relics of Greek art, of which men much more learned and
enthusiastic have written such piles of descriptions. I thought I
could recognise the towering beauty of the prodigious columns of
the Temple of Jupiter; and admire the astonishing grace, severity,
elegance, completeness of the Parthenon. The little Temple of
Victory, with its fluted Corinthian shafts, blazed under the sun
almost as fresh as it must have appeared to the eyes of its
founders; I saw nothing more charming and brilliant, more graceful,
festive, and aristocratic than this sumptuous little building. The
Roman remains which lie in the town below look like the works of
barbarians beside these perfect structures. They jar strangely on
the eye, after it has been accustoming itself to perfect harmony
and proportions. If, as the schoolmaster tells us, the Greek
writing is as complete as the Greek art; if an ode of Pindar is as
glittering and pure as the Temple of Victory; or a discourse of
Plato as polished and calm as yonder mystical portico of the
Erechtheum: what treasures of the senses and delights of the
imagination have those lost to whom the Greek books are as good as
sealed!
And yet one meets with very dull first-class men. Genius won't
transplant from one brain to another, or is ruined in the carriage,
like fine Burgundy. Sir Robert Peel and Sir John Hobhouse are both
good scholars; but their poetry in Parliament does not strike one
as fine. Muzzle, the schoolmaster, who is bullying poor trembling
little boys, was a fine scholar when he was a sizar, and a ruffian
then and ever since. Where is the great poet, since the days of
Milton, who has improved the natural offshoots of his brain by
grafting it from the Athenian tree?
I had a volume of Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that
question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and
Conscience, under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek
muse, which had been going on ever since I had commenced my walk
about Athens. The old spinster saw me wince at the idea of the
author of Dora and Ulysses, and tried to follow up her advantage by
farther hints of time lost, and precious opportunities thrown away.
"You might have written poems like them," said she; "or, no, not
like them perhaps, but you might have done a neat prize poem, and
pleased your papa and mamma. You might have translated Jack and
Jill into Greek iambics, and been a credit to your college." I
turned testily away from her. "Madam," says I, "because an eagle
houses on a mountain, or soars to the sun, don't you be angry with
a sparrow that perches on a garret window, or twitters on a twig.
Leave me to myself: look, my beak is not aquiline by any means."
And so, my dear friend, you who have been reading this last page in
wonder, and who, instead of a description of Athens, have been
accommodated with a lament on the part of the writer, that he was
idle at school, and does not know Greek, excuse this momentary
outbreak of egotistic despondency. To say truth, dear Jones, when
one walks among the nests of the eagles, and sees the prodigious
eggs they laid, a certain feeling of discomfiture must come over us
smaller birds. You and I could not invent--it even stretches our
minds painfully to try and comprehend part of the beauty of the
Parthenon--ever so little of it,--the beauty of a single column,--a
fragment of a broken shaft lying under the astonishing blue sky
there, in the midst of that unrivalled landscape. There may be
grander aspects of nature, but none more deliciously beautiful.
The hills rise in perfect harmony, and fall in the most exquisite
cadences--the sea seems brighter, the islands more purple, the
clouds more light and rosy than elsewhere. As you look up through
the open roof, you are almost oppressed by the serene depth of the
blue overhead. Look even at the fragments of the marble, how soft
and pure it is, glittering and white like fresh snow! "I was all
beautiful," it seems to say: "even the hidden parts of me were
spotless, precious, and fair"--and so, musing over this wonderful
scene, perhaps I get some feeble glimpse or idea of that ancient
Greek spirit which peopled it with sublime races of heroes and
gods; {1} and which I never could get out of a Greek book,--no, not
though Muzzle flung it at my head.
CHAPTER VI: SMYRNA--FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST
I am glad that the Turkish part of Athens was extinct, so that I
should not be baulked of the pleasure of entering an Eastern town
by an introduction to any garbled or incomplete specimen of one.
Smyrna seems to me the most Eastern of all I have seen; as Calais
will probably remain to the Englishman the most French town in the
world. The jack-boots of the postilions don't seem so huge
elsewhere, or the tight stockings of the maid-servants so Gallic.
The churches and the ramparts, and the little soldiers on them,
remain for ever impressed upon your memory; from which larger
temples and buildings, and whole armies have subsequently
disappeared: and the first words of actual French heard spoken,
and the first dinner at "Quillacq's," remain after twenty years as
clear as on the first day. Dear Jones, can't you remember the
exact smack of the white hermitage, and the toothless old fellow
singing "Largo al factotum"?
The first day in the East is like that. After that there is
nothing. The wonder is gone, and the thrill of that delightful
shock, which so seldom touches the nerves of plain men of the
world, though they seek for it everywhere. One such looked out at
Smyrna from our steamer, and yawned without the least excitement,
and did not betray the slightest emotion, as boats with real Turks
on board came up to the ship. There lay the town with minarets and
cypresses, domes and castles; great guns were firing off, and the
blood-red flag of the Sultan flaring over the fort ever since
sunrise; woods and mountains came down to the gulf's edge, and as
you looked at them with the telescope, there peeped out of the
general mass a score of pleasant episodes of Eastern life--there
were cottages with quaint roofs; silent cool kiosks, where the
chief of the eunuchs brings down the ladies of the harem. I saw
Hassan, the fisherman, getting his nets; and Ali Baba going off
with his donkey to the great forest for wood. Smith looked at
these wonders quite unmoved; and I was surprised at his apathy; but
he had been at Smyrna before. A man only sees the miracle once;
though you yearn over it ever so, it won't come again. I saw
nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we came to Smyrna, and
had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the inn) about landing
at all. A person who wishes to understand France or the East
should come in a yacht to Calais or Smyrna, land for two hours, and
never afterwards go back again.
But those two hours are beyond measure delightful. Some of us were
querulous up to that time, and doubted of the wisdom of making the
voyage. Lisbon, we owned, was a failure; Athens a dead failure;
Malta very well, but not worth the trouble and sea-sickness: in