Part 20

Then in the placid landscape you are almost startled by the sight of monuments of religion. A tall quadrangular pyramid, its courses lined with rude statues, a couple of half-shaped human figures, ten times human size, a ring of colossal hobby-horses sitting on their haunches like a tea-party in Wonderland--they burst grotesquely out of meadow and thicket, standing all alone with the soil and the trees. No worshippers, no sign of human life near them, no hint of their origin or purpose--till you almost wonder whether they are artificial at all, and not petrified monsters from the beginning of the world.

These are the outposts of the great pagodas of Southern India--those sublime monstrosities which scarce any European ever sees, which most have never heard of, but which afford perhaps the strongest testimony in all India at once to the vitality and the incomprehensibility of Hinduism. The religion that inspired such toilsome devotion must be one of the greatest forces in history; yet the Western mind can detect neither any touch of art in the monuments themselves nor any strain of beauty in the creed. Both command your respect by their size: that which is so vast, so enduring, can hardly, you tell yourself, be contemptible. And still you can see nothing in the temples but misshapen piles of uncouthness, nothing in the religion but unearthly superstitions, half meaningless and half foul.

The nearest approach to a symmetrical building is the great pagoda of Tanjore. Long before you near the gate you see its tall pyramidal tower, shooting free above crooked streets and slanting roofs. Presently you see the lower similar towers, so far from the first that you would never call them part of the same building. In reality they are the outer and inner gateways--_gopura_ is their proper name--built in diminishing courses, garnished with carving and statuary. From a distance the massive solemnity of their outlines, the stone lace of their decorations, strike you with an overwhelming assertion of rich majesty. But you are in India, and you wait for the inevitable incongruity.

It comes at the very gate. The entrance is not under the stately gopura, but under a screen and scaffolding of lath and plaster daubed with yellow and green grotesqueness--men with lotus-eyes looking out of their temples, horses with heads like snakes, and kings as tall as elephants. There is to be a great festival in a day or two, explains the suave Brahman; therefore the gopuras are boarded up with pictures beside which the tapestries of our pavement-artists are truth and beauty. You walk through scaffold-poles into a great square round the great tower, and with reverence they show you that colossal monolith, the great bull of Tanjore. I wish I could show you a picture of him, for words are unequal to him. In size he stands, or rather sits, thirty-eight hands two. His material is black granite, but it is kept so piously anointed with grease that he looks as if he were made of toffee. In attitude he suggests a roast hare, and he wears a half-smug, half-coquettish expression, as if he hoped that nobody would kiss him.

From this wonder you pass to the shrines of the chief gods. The unbeliever may not enter, but you stand at the door while a man goes along the darkness with a flambeau. The light falls on silk and tinsel, and by faith you can divine a seated image at the end. Next you are at the foot of the great tower, and the ridiculous has become the sublime again. Every story is lined with serene-faced gods and goddesses, dwindling rank above rank, a ladder of deities that seems to climb half-way up to heaven. Then the Brahman shows you a stone bull seated on the ground, like a younger brother of the great one. “It is in existence,” he says, throwing out his words in groups, dispassionately, as though somebody else were speaking and it were nothing at all to do with him--“it is in existence--to show the dimensions--of four other bulls--which are in existence--up there.” You lay your head back between your shoulder-blades, and up there, at the very top, among gods so small that you wonder whether they are gods or only panels or pillars, are four more little brothers of the hare-shaped toffee-textured monster below.

Reduplication is the keynote of Hindu art. The same bulls everywhere, the same gods everywhere, and all round the cloistered outer wall scores on scores of granite, fat-dripping, flower-crowned emblems, so crudely shapeless that you forget their gross significance--but all absolutely alike. Next the Brahman leads you aside to piles and piles of what look like overgrown, gaudily painted children’s toys. This is an exact facsimile of the Tower, reduced and imitated in wood. It is all in pieces, but at the festival the parts are fitted together and carried on a car. Every god sculptured on the pyramid is represented in a section of this model, waiting to be fitted into his place. Only what is richly mellow in tinted stone is garishly tawdry in king’s yellow and red lead--and again you tumble from the sublime to the infantile.

Next, a little shrine that is a net of the most delicate carving--stone as light and fantastic as wood; pillar and panel, moulding and cornice, lattice and imagery, all tapering gracefully till they become miniatures at the summit. It is a gem of exquisite taste and patient labour. And the very next minute you are again among flaming red and yellow dragon-tigers and duck-peacocks, and the one is just as holy and just as beautiful to its worshippers as the other. From which objects of veneration the Brahman passes lightly to the domestic life of the frescoed rajahs of Tanjore. “This gentleman--marry seventeen wives--all one day--doubtless in anxiety of getting son.” It is quite true. The Rajah, having but three wives and no child, resolved to marry six more young ladies, and collected seventeen to choose them from. But the fathers and brothers of the rejected eleven were affronted; and rather than have any unpleasantness on his wedding-day, his Majesty tactfully married the whole seventeen, nine in the morning and eight in the afternoon. “And here,” pursued the Brahman automatically, showing a tank, “he will let in water--and here he will play--with all his females--and all that.”

That is all, except to write your name in the visitor’s book. As I went in to sign, I noticed a band of musicians standing at the door and thought no more of it. But as my pen touched the paper, suddenly reedy pipes and discordant fiddles and heady tom-toms began to play “God Save the Queen.” A huge chaplet of muslin and tinsel, like a magnified Christmas-tree stocking, was cast about my neck; betel and attar-of-rose were brought up in silver vessels, and flowers and fruits on silver trays. The pagoda keeps its character to the end: the compliment was sublime--and I ridiculous.

Yet the temple of Tanjore is the most simple and orderly of all its kind. Visit the great pagoda of Madura and you will come out mazed with Hinduism. All its mysteries and incongruities, its lofty metaphysics and its unabashed lewdness, seem to brood over the dark chambers and crannying passages. The place is enormous. Over the four chief gateways rise huge pyramid-towers, coloured like harlequins, red tigers jostling the multiplied arms and legs of blue and yellow gods and goddesses so thick that the gopuras seem built of them. In the pure sunlight you almost blush for their crudity, just as you would blush if the theatre roof were lifted off during a matinée. But inside the place is nearly all half-lighted, dim, and cryptic. You go through a labyrinth, that seems endless, of dark chambers and aisles. Now you are in thick blackness, now in twilight, now the sun falls on fretwork over pillared galleries and damp-smelling walls. But as the light falls on the pillar you start, for it is carved into the shape of an elephant-headed Ganesh, or a conventionally high-stepping Shiva. On you go, from maze to maze, till there is no more recollection of direction or guess at size: you are lost in an underground world of gods that are half devils; you hardly distinguish the silent-footed, gleaming-eyed attendants from the stone figures. Some of the fantastic images are smeared with red-lead to simulate blood: all drip with fat. A heavy smell of grease and stagnant tank-water loads your lungs.

You feel that you are bewitched--lost and helpless among unclean things. When you come out into the sun and the cleaner dirt of the town, you draw long breaths. If you could understand the Hindu religion, you tell yourself, you would understand the Hindu mind. But that, being of the West, you never, never will.

THE VENDRAMIN-CALERGI

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

Following a vagabond method, let us regain the Grand Canal and give some details upon the Vendramin Palace, now occupied by the Duchesse de Berry. It is of a rich and noble architecture, probably by Pietro Lombardo; in the entablature and above the windows, little cherubs uphold storied shields adorned with exquisite taste, and contribute much elegance to this façade. A garden of somewhat restricted space contributes some green trees alongside this palace, which would not be distinguished from the others if the large white and blue posts with ropes did not indicate, by means of the fleur-de-lis painted upon them, a princely and semi-royal dwelling.

After having obtained permission to visit this palace, _valets_ in green livery welcome you very politely at the base of the staircase, the steps of which are laved by the waters, fasten your boat to the posts, and take you into a vestibule, where you wait until all the formalities of admission are complied with.

This vestibule is just as long as the palace; it opens upon a kind of court similar to the courts of our hotels.

Two hitched gondolas and a few earthen pots containing small firs and other poor plants that are dying of thirst are all that adorn the bareness of this vast waiting-room that is found in every Venetian palace,--an antechamber that is also a landing-place.

In the centre of this vestibule, a little to the left, a wide stairway between two walls is seen where the same decoration of miserable plants appear. A narrow carpet covers the steps leading to an immense hall resembling a vestibule, without furniture and without adornment. From this, you enter the dining-room, the walls of which are hung with family portraits.

This is a long square room. It is very well lighted by two enormous French windows.

An oval table stands in the centre and a screen shields the entrance. Upon the wall to the right you notice the portrait of the Duchesse de Bourgogne in a blue velvet dress; also of the Comte d’Artois and Madame la Princesse de Lamballe and several others. Upon the left wall opposite, is the full length portrait of Louis XV., and on either side of him, his daughters.

In this dining-room, a masked door opens into a dark chapel, so small that it will barely hold six persons. You can count four _Prie-Dieu_ there. On the right, a large door opens into a very modern drawing-room filled with pictures and a great number of small pieces of furniture: English tables, Parisian coffers,--nothing is lacking to produce that charming home-like feeling that is derived from luxurious trifles. Two portraits of Her Royal Highness are placed opposite one another; that by Lawrence in a dress of white satin, with a rose on her breast, exhibits the most charming little foot that can possibly be admired in a white satin slipper.

On walking through the dining-room, you enter, by a door on the left, a little salon, which seems relatively small after the preceding rooms, and perhaps overwhelmed by the sumptuous furniture that adorns it. It contains thirty splendid pictures; this is a kind of Uffizi or _Salon carré_, where scarcely one of the greatest names in painting is missing. Among these great masterpieces shines a Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, so beautiful that it would make cold chills run through the most elementary connoisseur and the most hide-bound and prosaic Philistine.

This Salon illumined by a soft and well distributed light, seems to me the select spot, the very heart of the building, and I left it with deep regret to go and visit the famous salon which contains those two porphyry columns whose value is so great that they are worth more than the entire palace. They are placed in front of a door, and thus produce as little effect as the lapis lazuli in the “Salon Serra” in Genoa, which you might well believe were painted and varnished, and which strongly resemble a metallic blue watered silk.

There is still another salon, but it is not remarkable in any way. In the four corners, four bracket pedestals support four busts: those of the Duc de Berry, of Charles X., and other members of the royal family.

The Vendramin-Calergi has gained an additional interest in recent years on account of the fact that Richard Wagner died in it on Feb. 13, 1883.--E. S.

A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE

PIERRE LOTI

The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees; in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of day. The little Turkish _cafés_ begin to open, and two or three _minims_ are already being shaved in the open air under the trees.

It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with those warm little _bonbons_ that they sell here in the morning, and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast.

About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress.

These walls shut in a little corner of earth which is absolutely special and unique, and which is the extreme point of Oriental Europe,--a promontory that juts out towards neighbouring Asia, and which was, moreover, for many centuries, the residence of the Caliphs and a place of incomparable splendour. This, and the sacred suburb of Eyoub contain all that is most exquisite in Constantinople: this is the “Old Seraglio,”--a name that alone evokes a world of dreams.

They open for us a door in this wall, and, then, as soon as the barrier is passed, the delicious melancholy of interior things is revealed to us, and the dead Past takes us to itself and envelops us with its winding-sheet.

At first, there is silence and shadow. Empty, desolate courts, where the neglected grass pushes through the flag-stones and where still live ancient trees that were contemporaries of the magnificent sultans of former times: black cypresses as tall as towers, plane-trees which have acquired unwonted forms, all hollowed out by time, being supported only by immense shreds of bark and bent like old men.

Then come the galleries with colonnades in the ancient Turkish style, painted with strange frescoes, under which the great Solomon forced the ambassadors of the European kings to enter. And this place, happily never open to profane visitors, has not yet become a common promenade for tourists; behind the high walls, it preserves a little mysterious peace, it is all imprinted with the sadness of dead splendour.

Crossing these first courts, we have upon the right impenetrable gardens, where you see rising above the clumps of cypress old kiosks with closed windows,--the residences of imperial widows and aged princesses who wish to end their days here in this austere retreat in one of the most wonderful sites in the world.

It is all bathed in sunlight, all dazzling in tranquil light, the last portion of this walled-in spot to which we have now come,--the very last point of the Old Seraglio, and of Europe. It is a solitary esplanade, very elevated and very white, dominating the distant blue of the sea and of Asia. The clear morning sunlight inundates those depths of space out yonder, where the towns, the islets and the mountains are sketched out in light tints above the motionless sheet of Marmora.

Around us are old buildings also white, which contain all that is rarest and most precious in Turkey.

First the kiosk, forbidden to infidels, where the cloak of the Prophet is kept in a cover embroidered with jewels. Then the kiosk of Bagdad, the interior of which is entirely clothed in those old Persian faïences; which are priceless to-day: the branches of red flowers were made upon them with coral that they liquified by a process now lost and spread upon them like pigment.

Then the Imperial Treasury, very white also under its layers of whitewash and barred like a prison; and whose iron gates will be opened for me presently.

And finally, a palace, uninhabited, but well maintained, which we entered and sat down. Steps of white marble led us to the salons of the first floor, which were furnished about the middle of the last century in the European taste. They are of the Louis XV. style, to which an imperceptible mixture of Oriental singularity gives a special charm. The white and gold wainscots with old cherry or old lilac damask with white flowers show nothing but light tints mellowed by time. There are some large Sèvres and Chinese vases, and few other objects, but all of them are old and rare. Much space, air, and light, and a tranquil symmetry in the arrangement of everything--give a feeling of changelessness and neglect.

And there in a sort of sumptuous solitude, seated on these _fauteuils_ of a deliciously pale rose, before large open windows, we have from this last promontory of Europe, the splendid view that charmed the Sultans of the past. To our left, and very far below us, the Bosphorus spreads, furrowed with ships and caïques; the whiteness of the marble quays are reflected in it; the whiteness of the new imperial residences, Dolma Bagtche and Tcheragan, are mirrored inverted in long, pale lines; the row of palace and mosques is pictured magnificently upon its banks. Opposite is Asia, still bluish in the remaining drifts of the morning mist; it is Scutari, with its domes and minarets, with its immense cemetery and its forest of dark cypresses. To the right, the infinite expanse of Marmora;--distant steamboats are moving upon it, lost in all that diaphanous blue,--little grey silhouettes trailing delicate clouds of smoke.

How well it was chosen, this site, to dominate and watch from above that Turkey, seated superbly on two divisions of the world! And to-day, what peace and what melancholy splendour in this complete isolation from all the agitations of modern life, in this great silence of abandonment, under this clear and mournful sun!

When the guardian of the Treasury--an old man with a white beard--is ready to open the iron door with his enormous keys, twenty individuals come to form a hedge, ten to the right, ten to the left, on each side of the entrance.

We pass between this double row and enter the rather dark halls, into which they all follow us.

The cavern of Ali Baba could never have been filled with such wealth! For eight centuries they have been heaping up here the rarest jewels and the most astonishing marvels of art. As our eyes become rested from the outside sunlight, and get accustomed to the shadowy interior, the diamonds begin to sparkle everywhere. Things in profusion, without age or price, classified by species upon shelves. Arms of all periods, from Genghis Khan to Mahomet; weapons of silver and gold set with jewels. Then there are collections of golden coffers of all sizes and of all styles; some are covered with rubies, others with diamonds and others with sapphires; some of them are even cut out of a single emerald as big as an ostrich’s egg. Then there are services for coffee, for drinking, and ewers of antique and exquisite forms. And the stuffs fit for fays; the saddles; the harness, the housings of parade in brocades of gold and silver, embroidered and encrusted with flowers in precious stones; the large thrones made to sit upon cross-legged: all these in ruby and fine pearl together produce a rosy brilliancy; elsewhere, others covered with emeralds and brilliant in their green reflections, look as if bathed in sea-water.

In the last hall, there is waiting for us behind the windows a motionless and terrible company: twenty-eight _macabre_ dolls, of human size, standing up straight in a military row with their elbows touching each other. They all wear that high pear-shaped turban that has not been in use for a century, and which is only to be seen upon the catafalques of distinguished personages, in the twilight of mortuary kiosks, or carved upon the tombs--so that this kind of a turban is for me absolutely associated with the idea of death. Until the beginning of this century, whenever a sultan died, they brought here a doll clothed in the ceremonial robes of the dead sovereign, they placed marvellous arms in his belt, put on his turban, and his magnificent jewelled aigrette,--and it remained here forever covered with this eternally wasted wealth. The twenty-eight Sultans who succeeded each other from the capture of Constantinople until the end of the Seventeenth Century are standing here in their imperial robes in facsimile; slowly has the sombre and sumptuous assembly increased, new funeral dolls came one by one to range themselves in line with the old ones, who had awaited them for hundreds of years, sure of seeing them at last--and they are now touching each other’s elbows.

Their long robes are of the strangest brocades, with great mysterious designs whose tints are dimmed by time; priceless poignards with large handles made of a single precious stone, rust, notwithstanding the care, in the silken belts; it even seems that the enormous diamonds of the aigrettes have lost some of their fire, and shine with a yellowish and dulled light.

And this unheard of luxury, all powdered with dust, is sad to look upon. Fabulously magnificent, the dolls with the high coiffure, objects of so much human covetousness guarded there behind the double doors of iron, useless and dangerous, see the seasons, years, reigns, revolutions and centuries pass by with the same immobility and the same silence, with scarcely any daylight through the gratings of the old windows and in total darkness after the sun sets. Each one bears his name, written like a common name upon a faded ticket--illustrious names that were formerly terrible: Mourad the Conqueror, Soliman the Magnificent, Mohammed and Mahmoud. I believe that these dolls give me the most terrifying lesson of fragility and nothingness.

THE DUOMO, THE LEANING TOWER. THE BAPTISTERY AND THE CAMPO-SANTO OF PISA

H. A. TAINE

There are two Pisas: one in which people are bored and where they have lived in a provincial manner since the decadence; this is the greater part of the city, with the exception of a secluded corner: the other is this corner, a marble sepulchre, where the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower and the Campo-Santo repose silently like beautiful things that are dead. The true Pisa is here, and in these relics of an extinguished life, you find a world.