Part 11

I found mistakes of quite another kind in the article on “Navis” in the third edition of Smith’s _Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities_. The article was written by the present Provost of Eton; and, as he was headmaster at the time, he ought to have asked the boys to instruct him in the art of cribbing. He gives himself away by copying the misprints in the books from which he cribbed. On page 219 he cites Plato, _Leges_, iv. p. 507 instead of 707; and there is the same misprint in Cartault, _Trière Athénienne_, page 234. On page 223 he cites Polybius, xx. 85 instead of Diodorus, xx. 85; and there is the same mistake in Graser, _De veterum re navali_, page 53. On the same page he cites Diodorus, 1. 61; and Graser, page 52, has 50, 61 by mistake for 506, 61, which is the reference to the page and line in Hoeschel’s excerpts. On page 217 he prints a passage in Lucian, _Navigium_, 4, and says he took it from Josephus, _Antiquitates_, iv. 8. 37. He took the passage in Lucian from Breusing, _Nautik der Alten_, page 57, and took the reference to Josephus from another passage that Breusing prints on the same page.

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Now and then I make mistakes myself. In my _Ancient Ships_, note 214, I quoted a passage from Procopius, and added, “Apparently the _gonia_ is here the mast-head, as in Herodotus, viii. 122.” I should not have said that, if I had thought of Herodotus, i. 51; but I did not think of it until the book was out. However, it was only a single sentence in the middle of a very long note; and I hoped no harm was done. Some while afterwards I was at the Royal Academy, when the students were being lectured on Greek Sculpture. The lecturer was speaking of the trophy of the Æginetans, as described by Herodotus, viii. 122; and he told them that the grouping of the things was clear, if the _gonia_ was a mast-head, as had lately been suggested.

There is no stopping a mistake after it has started. In the preface to my _Ancient Ships_ I gave the history of a blunder that was made by Scheffer in 1654, and is now in four authoritative books of reference. In fact, when I am told that all authorities agree, I feel certain that one of them has blundered, and the rest have followed him without inquiry.

Guglielmotti has made a pleasant mistake, which these authorities are sure to copy some day: namely, that Alexander the Great was a distinguished German archæologist of the Nineteenth Century. Graser printed an account of his model of a war-ship of the time of Alexander the Great--“aus der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen.” Guglielmotti mentions it in his treatise _Delle due Navi Romane, etc._, and says, page 67:--“Non dai condottieri della nuova età, Bernardo Graser ed Alessandro de Grossen, egregi giovani, i quali hanno trattati, etc.”

Until I discovered it in Jal, _Archéologie Navale_, vol. ii, page 654, I never knew that “Sea Cheers” was an order given on English ships. Nor could I explain the ritual at All Saints’ Church in Margaret Street, until I got a hint from Baedeker, _Londres_, page 146:--“Cette église appartient à la secte des Puséystes.” This was in the edition of 1873. I got it while I was at Harrow, and found I was at “une des principales universités d’Angleterre,” page 245.

A foreigner once described to me a very interesting survival of our feudal institutions, which he had observed while travelling in a train. At one station they waited, and waited, until a man came running along, carrying a Caduceus, which he handed to the driver; and then at last the train went on. He took the Caduceus to be the symbol of some great lord’s permission to them to travel across his lands. And certainly the Staff did look rather like a Caduceus on some of the older lines that were worked upon that system.

My father used to tell me of a foreigner, who went into the refreshment-room at Swindon, had some soup, and was handed someone else’s change. On returning to the carriage, he extolled this English system, by which a passenger was entitled to a certain amount of refreshments, with a refund for the balance, if he did not take the whole amount.

In a Brighton train a foreigner asked me if he had to change at Clafam Junction. I said Clapham, and he corrected me:--“But in English _ph_ is always _f_. I will show you in my book.” At the time of the railway race to Edinburgh, another foreigner told me that he found the trains very expressive.

Many years ago an old Belgian gentleman came down upon my father:--“I ask the butler for mutton-leg, and he say leg-of-mutton. Now you say mutton-chop. Why do you talk like that?” Some friends of mine from Paris asked me quite angrily:--“Why do you call Portland Place a Place? It is not a Place.” They had gone to the Langham under the impression that it looked out on something like the Vendôme or the Concorde. At an hotel in Switzerland my father was objecting to rooms without a view. The landlord said no others were vacant then, “but to-morrow I shall give you rooms where I shall make you see the Mont Blanc.” Faire voir, of course.

A learned German told me that Thomas Aquinas was one of the most genial men that ever lived. (By a genial man he meant a man of genius). Being in Berlin, I went to see an antiquarian friend, who was a surgeon by profession. I was then at work upon the sort of book that Germans call a Corpus; and he said he hoped to get much information from my corpse.

I have made much worse mistakes myself. On a hot summer day at Ferrara I went into a café to see if I could get an ice. Instead of asking the man if he had got _Gelati_, which are ices, I asked if he had got _Geloni_, which are chilblains. Arriving quite exhausted at an inn in the Tyrol, I said I wanted the _Abendmahl_ at once. The word means Supper, just like _Abendessen_, but is now used only of the Sacrament.

In all probability I shall never again say Thank-you to a German; but I find that, if I do, I must say Donkey’s-hair. I fancied it was Danke-sehr, but am corrected by a girl from a superior sort of school near here.

A man built a bungalow not far from here, and chose to call it Chez-nous; but it is known as Chestnuts. Chars-à-banc are known as Cherubim. On venturing to hint that this was a mistake, I got a crushing reply:--“Why, us read of the Lord a-ridin’ on the wings of the Cherubim, and they folk be a-ridin’ on their seats.”

A quantity of plants arrived here while I was away, and among them were some Kalmias and Andromedas. On my

return I asked where they had all been put; and I was told that some of them were in the greenhouse, others were in various parts of the garden, and the Camels and Dromedaries were out in the orchards.

An old gardener once gave me his opinion that a laundry was better than a garden, “as garments had not got such mazin’ names as plants.” And the maze grows more intricate, when Berberis Darwinii is Barbarous Darwin, and Nicotiana is Nicodemus, and Irises are Irish, and they English Irish be braver than they Spanish Irish.

There was an old lady here who always said:--“If there be a flower that I do like, it be a Pertunium.” It was neither a petunia nor a geranium; but I never found out exactly what it was. Botanists might adopt the name, when they want one for a novelty, for it is better than most of theirs. It may be convenient to give things Greek or Latin names, and it certainly sounds better to say Archæopteryx and Deinotherium than Old Bird and Awful Beast. But it is absurd to take the ancient name for one thing, and give it to another; yet that is what Linnæus and his followers have very often done.

Besides their botanical names, many things have trade names now. There is a plant here of the sort that is described at Kew as Rhododendrum Ponticum Cheiranthifolium. But, when I wanted to get another like it, I found the nurseryman did not know it by that name. He called it Jeremiah J. Colman.

Even in plain English there are pitfalls. At a hotel in Penzance I found the coffee-room quite full, when I came in to breakfast, and I asked the head-waiter if he couldn’t find me a place. He answered:--“Very sorry, sir, only whiting and soles to-day.”

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One morning in London I was eating potted tunny-fish at breakfast, and I soon felt that it was having an effect on me. My brain was clearer than it has ever been before or since. I understood things that had always puzzled me; and nothing was obscure. In fact, for about two hours I was a Man of Genius; and then I dropped down to my usual level.

I made many inquiries about it afterwards, but without result until I came upon a man who had spent a couple of years at the Laboratory of Marine Zoology at Naples. He had himself felt odd after eating tunny-fish one day, and he knew of other cases. In his own case there was increased blood-pressure, especially in the brain, such as might arise from eating putrid meat. But he thought his fish was sound, and ascribed the effect to some unknown substance in a tunny.

This tempts me to suggest a problem. The ancient Greeks were the cleverest people ever known, and they were always eating pickled tunny. Were they quite so clever before they reached the Mediterranean, and got this particular food?--Common trout were put into some of the New Zealand streams, and they became great fish, quite unlike their ancestors. Did something of the same sort happen to the ancient Greeks, in intellect though not in body?

There is no denying the cleverness of the ancient Greeks; but I am sceptical about their beauty. They would never have talked so much of beauty, unless it had been rare. When people now-a-days go talking of the beauty of Greek Gods, they are thinking of the works of Pheidias and his successors. There is much charm in works of earlier date; but nobody can say quite honestly that the people in them are good-looking, much less that they are beautiful. Yet the nation cannot suddenly have changed its looks. I think it was that artists were getting more fastidious in their choice of models.

This notion struck me forcibly in the spring of 1888. I rode over a great part of Greece; and I did it comfortably, taking a dragoman and cook, with mules to carry the baggage, and muleteers to tend the mules. When my little cavalcade went through a village, the people all came out to have a look at it; and I had a look at them. Most of them were very plain indeed; but at every second or third village there would be one or two people who looked like ancient statues come to life. If I had brought home pictures of these people, and said nothing of the rest, I should have given quite a wrong impression of the modern Greeks.

We may have an equally wrong impression of the ancient Greeks. Zeuxis painted his Helen from five damsels whom he had chosen out of all the damsels in the city of Croton; and Anacreon suggests a similar plan for painting a Bathyllus. Pheidias modelled a statue from Pantarkes, and Praxiteles from Phryne. In the Hermes of Praxiteles the foot is copied from a model who used to go about on stony ground in sandals; yet Hermes was a god who travelled through the air. The statue represents an individual, not a type.

I went out from Orchomenos to see the Acidalian fountain, in which the Graces used to bathe. Instead of Graces bathing there, I found three old washerwomen scrubbing very dirty clothes, 13 April 1888. Washerwomen seem to have a fancy for such places. I have found them at Siloam, 17 March 1882, Fontebranda, 19 April 1892, and Vaucluse, 15 March 1891. They probably were there in Petrarch’s time, and Ezzelino’s also, and at an earlier time as well. I did not find them at Callichoros, where the women of Eleusis performed their mystic dance; but I found their washing spread out upon the beach to dry, 23 April 1880, and some of it puzzled me very much indeed--pieces of white material, less than a yard in width, but quite a dozen yards long.

These proved to be the petticoats of the Palikaris, old stalwarts of the War of Independence, who still wore the national costume--which really was Albanian, and not Greek at all. I found out afterwards how a Palikari put his petticoat on. He took one end, while another man held the other, and then he pirouetted towards the other man, winding the top edge round his waist.

Meanwhile my mother was observing other things, and in her diary I find:--“Some peasants at dinner at the little inn--one well dressed in Greek costume. They had a bowl of French beans, over which they poured a bottle of vinegar and sprinkled salt. Each man put in his fork, and helped himself to a mouthful, and then bit off a piece of raw onion and some black bread. They finished with honey on which they poured a bottle of oil, and ate the same way.” My father sometimes noted things like that. In his diary I find, Leukerbad, 27 August 1871:--“Sat by the cold spring in the broad walk towards the Ladders. Many came to drink it--with absinthe.”

My father and my mother were at the Certosa near Pavia on 21 August 1857. There were monks there then, and ladies were not admitted to the monastery or the aisles and choir of the church, but only to the nave. So my mother sat outside, while my father was seeing the interior. And then a bull came rushing along, with peasants in pursuit. She made a dash for the cloister gate; but the janitor was not going to have the place polluted by her presence: so he crossed himself, and slammed the door, leaving her to face the bull outside. Luckily the bull saw something else and turned aside, and she reached the church.

In 1891 I went to Kairouan, 27-29 March. There was no great difficulty in going then, and it is quite easy now; but until 1881 no Christians were allowed there. At the Mosques the people showed quite plainly that they did not want you there, and yet seemed pleased that you should see things, if you could appreciate their merits. But some French people came, who treated the whole thing as a show; and this displeased a very stalwart Dervish. So he went off, and rooted up a prickly-pear plant well covered with spikes, and then pranced in, whirling this huge thing round his head. And he personally conducted that party out of his Mosque and some way down the road.

Few people go to see the ruins of Utica, as the ruins are not worth seeing. But it struck me that some eminent writers had made a mess of the topography; and I went there, 24 March 1891, to see what I could make of it. And then I wrote a couple of articles in the _Revue Archéologique_, saying things about those writers. I apologised to the editor for my French of Stratford atte Bowe, but he said he thought it was the French of Billingsgatte.

I was sitting in the ruins of what clearly was the theatre: the lower parts were covered by a marsh; and presently a Chorus of Frogs came out, and gave me a lesson on Aristophanes. He makes his Chorus of Frogs say _brekekekex koax koax_; and I found that this should be taken as three syllables, answering to his _oo-op-op_ and _rhyp-pa-pai_. The _brekekekex_ stands for one long croak, not four; and the modern music of the play has got it wrong.

Just after this I was going down from Constantine to Biskra, and met the locusts coming up, 3 April 1891. There is a narrow gorge, not more than fifty yards in width, by which one passes from the Tell to the Sahara; and it was quite choked up with them from ground to sky. They seemed to be flying only eight or ten inches apart, and coming on interminably. They are pleasant-looking creatures, and would be as popular as grasshoppers, if only they would come in reasonable numbers. Coming in myriads, they have their uses too. Potted locust is not bad.

In 1882 I went by Austrian mail-steamer from Corfu to Trieste, 28 April to 1 May. She came from Alexandria, and was late in reaching Corfu; and it was midnight when I went on board. She was lying in the roadstead, and everything was silent then; but, as soon as she got out to sea and rolled, there were unexpected and alarming sounds. I discovered in the morning that she had a large consignment of wild beasts on board. They were confined in crates that looked very much too small and not nearly strong enough; but I was told that, if beasts were cooped up tight, they could not use their strength. An old lady remarked to me that she thought it very dangerous to have so many lions on board, and she took the precaution of locking her cabin door at night. I admit I had a pretty bad nightmare of an unknown animal, with a neck like a giraffe’s, standing on deck with his neck down the companion-ladder, the neck growing longer and longer till it nearly reached my cabin door.

I once spent a night on the summit of Mount Etna, 22-23 September 1883, and I have never seen anything more uncanny than the cone of that volcano, gleaming like metal in the moonlight, and sending up vast clouds of steam. It stands about 10,700 feet above Catania; and I made the ascent in about eleven hours from there, going by carriage to Nicolosi, and then by mule to the hut at the foot of the cone.--This hut was on the site of the new observatory.--The cone was troublesome, as my feet sank in at every step, and brought out puffs of sulphur: looking back, I could see all my footsteps smoking, and likewise those of my two guides. The crater was full of this sulphureous steam, and there was no view down into it, nor into the Valle del Bove, as the wind drove the steam down there. Apart from this, the view was clear. I saw the sun set from the summit of the cone, came down to the hut for shelter in the night, and saw the sun rise from the Torre del Filosofo, not far from the hut and nearly level with it.--The philosopher was Empedocles, but the tower is Roman, and may have been built for Hadrian, when he went up to see the sun rise.

There is not so wide a view from any of the summits in a chain of mountains like the Alps, nor do you seem to be at such a height as on this isolated mountain, although the height may really be much greater. The world seemed like a map spread out below me; and I saw the Shadow. As the sun rose, I began to see another great mountain standing in the middle of Sicily; and then the mountain faded, being only Etna’s shadow on the haze. It is the same thing as the Spectre of the Brocken. I have been up the Brocken also, 14 August 1874, but have not seen the Spectre.

After seeing the view from the Faulhorn at sunrise, 22 August 1849, my father noted in his diary:--“Looking at my three Swiss companions as they stood with myself on the apex of this mountain in the clear smooth snow, I could not help thinking of our being the only created beings who could be enjoying this magnificent spectacle.” He always had this sort of feeling that people ought to make more effort to see the wonders of the world.

This same feeling was expressed by a distinguished foreigner in rather an unexpected way. In 1900 a lady was saying in his presence that she did not mean to go to Paris for the Exhibition. He struck in:--“You _can_ go, and you _will_ not go? At the Last Day the Good God will say to you, ‘You did not go to the Paris Exhibition when-you-might-have-gone. You have not used the Talent that-I-gave-you. Go DOWN. Go DOWN.” It had not struck her in that light before.

* * * * *

In my younger days I took some trouble to see things. And it was worth the trouble, to see Moscow from the Sparrow hills, whence Napoleon saw it first, or Damascus from the heights of Salahîyeh, where Mohammed turned away, lest he should think no more of Paradise. Or, apart from history and association, to see things so beautiful as the Alhambra and the Generalife at Granada, and the deserted city of Mistra on the mountains overlooking Sparta.

When I first went to Athens, in the spring of 1880, the Acropolis still had its mediæval ramparts; and, as one stood on the Acropolis, they shut the modern city out of view, and one was there alone with the temples and the sky. These ramparts were demolished before I went there next, in the spring of 1882; and before I went again, in the spring of 1888, the whole of the Acropolis had been excavated and laid bare down to the solid rock. The results were of the highest interest; but the charm was gone. I felt that I had seen a dragon-fly hovering in the Attic air; and my dragon-fly was now a lifeless specimen, set out with pins upon a card.

I happened once to arrive at Athens in a sea-fog. The steamer had slowly hooted its way into the Piræus in the early morning; and I was driving up to Athens soon after sunrise. With the sun behind it, the Acropolis loomed up through the fog, as I came near; and this is the only time that I have seen it looking as I feel it ought to look. It seemed a vast and overwhelming mass; whereas in broad daylight it looks rather small, and quite puny, when one sees it from a distance. I have noticed that the Pyramids at Gizeh also look puny at a distance: yet the dome of St Peter’s looks its largest at fifteen or twenty miles from Rome. I cannot give a reason; but it is a fact.

Apart from that curious look upon its face, I have never found the Sphinx at Gizeh as impressive as the Sphingeion in Bœotia, the sphinx of Œdipus outside the gates of Thebes. This is merely a hill shaped like a sphinx; and there must have been another such hill at Gizeh, from which the Sphinx was formed. There is another within a walk of here; but it takes the shape only from a certain point of view--the western rock at Haytor, as one sees it on the road from Widdicombe. In a Dartmoor mist it looks stupendous, and surpasses the Sphingeion and the Sphinx.

There is another sight within a walk of here, also recalling Greece; and this is Grimspound. When I have visitors who have been in Greece, I take them over Hameldon, so as to come down on Grimspound from above. I give no hint beforehand, and just wait to hear what they will say. And they always say:--“Mycenæ.” The impression goes off, when one begins to think of details; but at first sight it is vivid.

Sometimes I take people up to Hittesleigh (or Hisley) Gate for the view of Lustleigh Cleave, and there await their comments. One man was an artist; and for a long while he was silent, and seemed to be drinking in the beauty of the scene. Then he pointed to some object in the middle distance, and remarked:--“I think I’d pick that out in Chinese White.” Another man who also painted, was silent also, and also seemed to drink it in; and he remarked:--“If I were going in for grouse, I’d put the butts round there.”

Looking on things less practically, one fancies that the scene is all unchanging and unchanged, and that its aspect was the same when our ancestors were living in hut-circles and building cromlechs and kistvaens. It needs an effort to carry back the mind to earlier ages, when there was a little volcano in this parish, and a bigger one about a mile this side of Newton; or to ages more remote, when this tract of igneous rock was first upheaved, and these lichen-covered boulders came rolling down the slopes red-hot. And there will come a time when only the granite will survive, the rest all vanishing like the land between our Land’s End and the Scilly Isles; and then Dartmoor will be a group of islands, and Wreyland one of the outlying reefs.

End of Project Gutenberg's Small Talk at Wreyland. First Series, by Cecil Torr