Part 6

Most of our party started at once for Athens, but I and a companion, resolved on enjoying the Mediterranean as long as we could, crossed the hill, and descended to the Munychia for a bath, which we achieved in the saltest and most buoyant water I have ever been in. The rocks (volcanic, apparently), on which we dressed and were nearly grilled, were all covered with incrustations of salt, looking as if there had been a tremendous frost the night before. After our bath we strolled through the little port town, hugely amused with the Greek inscriptions over the shop-doors, and with the lively, somewhat rowdy look and ways of the place; and, resisting the solicitations of many of the dustiest kind of cab-drivers, who were hanging about with their vehicles on the look-out for a fare to Athens, struck across the low marsh land, where the Ilissus must run when he can find any water to bring down from the hills, and were soon in amongst the olive groves. Here we were delivered from the dust at any rate, and in a few minutes met a Greek with a basket of grapes on his head, from whom, for half a franc, we purchased six or seven magnificent bunches, and went on our way mightily refreshed. We had made up our minds to be disappointed with the place, and so were not sorry to be out of sight of it, and the olive groves were quite new to us. Some of the old trees were very striking. They were quite hollow, but bearing crops of fruit still quite merrily, as if it were all right, and what was left of the trunk was all divided into grisly old fretwork, as if each root had just run up independently into a branch, and had never really formed part of the tree. They looked as if they might be any age--could Plato have sat or walked under some of them?

Vines grow under the olives, just as currant and gooseberry bushes under the fruit-trees in our market gardens. They were loaded with fine grapes, and the vintage was going lazily on here and there. There were pomegranates too scattered about, the fruit splitting with ripeness. It was tremendously hot, but the air so light and fresh that walking was very pleasant. Presently we came to an open space, and caught a glimpse of the Acropolis; and now that we were getting round to the front of it, and could catch the outline of the Parthenon against the sky, it began to occur to us that we had been somewhat too hasty.

In among the olive groves again, and then out on another and another opening, till at last, when we came upon the _Via sacra_, we could stand it no longer. The ruins had become so beautiful, and had such an attraction, that giving up the grove of the Academy and Colonus, which were not half a mile ahead of us, and which we had meant to visit, we turned short to the right, and walked straight for the town at a pace which excited the laughter of merry groups dawdling round the little sheds where the winepresses were working. The town through which we had to pass is ugly, dusty, and glaring. There are one or two broad streets, with locust-trees planted along the sides of them, but not old enough yet to give shade; and in the place before the palace, on which our hotel looked, there are a few shrubs and plenty of prickly pears, which seem to be popular with the Athenians, and are the most misshapen hot-looking affairs which I have yet met with in the vegetable world. But shade, shade--one longs for it, and there is none; and the glare and heat are almost too much, even at the beginning of October--in summer it must be unendurable. If the Athenians would only take one leaf out of the book of their old enemies, and stain and paint their houses as the Turks of the Bosphorus do! But though the houses are as ugly as those of a London suburb, and there are no tolerable public buildings except one church, the modern town is a very remarkable one, when one comes to remember that thirty years ago there were only ten or twelve hovels here. But you may suppose that one scarcely looks at or thinks of the modern town; but pushing straight through it, makes for the Acropolis. A fine broad carriage-road runs round the back of the hill, and so up with a long sweep to the bottom of the western face, the one which we had seen from the olive groves. You can manage to pass the stadium and the columns of Jupiter on your left, as you ascend, without diverging, but even to reach the Parthenon you cannot go by the theatre of Dionysus, lying on your right against the northern face of the Acropolis, without stopping. They are excavating and clearing away the rubbish every day from new lines of seats; you can trace tier above tier now, right up the face of the hill, till you get to precipitous cliff; and down below, in the dress circle, the * marble seats are almost as fresh as the day they were made; and most comfortable stalls they are, though uncushioned, with the rank of their old occupants still fresh on them. You could take your choice and sit in the stall of a [Greek phrase] as you fancied. Below was the actual stage on which the tragedies of Sophocles and Æschylus were played to audiences who understood even the toughest chorus; and, for a background, Hymettus across the plain, and the sea and islands! We passed yet another theatre as we went up the hill, but nothing now could turn us from the Parthenon, and certainly it very far exceeded anything I had ever dreamt of. Every one is familiar with the shape and position and colour of the ruins from photographs and paintings. We look at them and admire, and suppose they grew there, or at any rate scarcely give a thought to how they did get there.

But I’ll defy any man to walk up the Propylæa and about the Parthenon without being struck with wonder at the simple question, how it all got there. Can the stories we have all been taught be true? Leaving beauty altogether out of the question, here you are in the midst of the wreck of one of the largest buildings you ever were in. You see that it was built of blocks of white marble; that the columns are formed of these blocks, each some four feet high, and so beautifully fitted together that at the distance of two thousand years you very often cannot find the joints, except where the marble is chipped. You see that the whole of this building was originally surrounded by most elaborate sculpture; you see that the whole side of the hill up which you approach the great temple was converted into a magnificent broad staircase of white marble--in short, you see probably the greatest architectural feat that has ever been done in the world, and are told that it was done by a small tribe--not more numerous than the population of a big English town--who lived in that little barren corner of earth which you can overlook from end to end from your standing-place, in the lifetime of one generation; that Pericles thought the idea out, and the Athenians quarried the marble, carried it up there, carved it, and built it up, in his lifetime. Well, it _is_ hard to believe; but when one has sat down on one of the great blocks, and looked over Salamis and Ægina, and the Isthmus of Corinth, and then down at the groves of the Academy and the Pynx and the Areopagus, and remembered that at this very time the thoughts, and methods of thought, of that same small tribe are still living, and moulding the minds of all the most civilised and powerful nations of the earth, the physical wonder, as usual, dwarfs and gives way before the spiritual. We saw the sunset, of course, from the front of the Parthenon, and then descended to the Areopagus, and stood on, or at any rate within a few feet of, the place where the glorious old Hebrew of the Hebrews stood, and looking up at those marvellous temples made by man, spoke a strange story in the ears of the crowd, whose only pleasure was to hear or tell some new thing. It is the only place where I have ever come in my journeyings right across the Scripture narrative, and certainly the story shines out with new light after one has stood on the very rock, and felt how the scene before Paul’s eyes must have moved him.

We got to our inn after dark, and after dining went to a Greek play. Theatre and acting both decidedly second-rate, the audience consisting chiefly of officers--smart-looking young fellows enough. There were two murders in the first act, but I regret to say that we could none of us make out the story of the play. There were half a dozen young men, all with good brains, none of whom had left our Universities more than two years, at which the Greek language is all but the most prominent study, and yet they might as well have been hearing Arabic. As for myself--unluckily my ear is so bad that I can never catch words which are not familiar to me--on this occasion, indeed, I could almost have sworn the actors were using French words. But it really is a pity that we can’t take to the modern Greek pronunciation in England. One goes into Athens, and can read all the notices and signs, and even spell through a column of newspaper with a little trouble, and yet, though one would give one’s ears to be able to talk, cannot understand a word, or make oneself understood. We managed, however, to get a clear enough notion that something serious was going to happen; and from several persons, French, Italian, and Greek, learned positively that Prince Alfred was to be King of Greece shortly, which remarkable proposition has since spread widely over the world. We sailed from Athens, after a two days’ stay, in an Austrian Lloyd boat. The sailors were all Italians, and there were certainly not much more than half the number which we found on the French boat from Constantinople. And yet the Austrian Lloyd Company has not lost a boat since it was a company, and the Messageries Impériales have done nothing but lose theirs. Happily, the French are not natural sailors, or there would be no peace on sea or land.

The Run Home, October 1862.

We ran from Athens to Syra through the islands, in a bright moonlight, and half a gale of wind, the most enjoyable combination of circumstances in the world for those who are not given to sea-sickness. The island is a rock almost as bare as Hymettus, and that is the most barren simile I can think of--any hill in the Highlands would look like a garden beside it. But it has a first-rate small harbour, which has become the central packet-station of the Levant; and the town which has sprung up round the harbour is the most stirring place in the East, and the commercial capital of Greece. A very quaint place to look at, too, is Syra, for at the back of the lower town, which lies round the harbour, rises a conical hill, very steep, right up to the top of which a second town is piled, with the Bishop’s palace on the highest point. This second, or pyramidal, town is built on terraces, and is only accessible to foot passengers, who ascend by a broad stone staircase, running from the lower town up to the Bishop’s palace, and so bisecting the pyramid. As restless a place as ever I was in, in which nothing seems to be produced, but everything in the world exchanged--a very temple of the Trade Goddess, of whom I should say there are few more devout or successful worshippers than the Greeks. Here we waited through a long broiling day for the steamer, which was to take us westward--homewards.

In travelling there is only one pleasure which can be named with the start--that luxurious moment when one unstrings the bow, and leaving one’s common pursuits and everyday life, plunges into new scenes--and that is, the turning home. I had never been so far or so long away from England before, so that the sensation was proportionately keen as we settled into our places in the _Pluto_, one of the finest of the Austrian Lloyd boats, which was to take us to Trieste. And a glorious run we made of it. In the morning we were off the Lacedaemonian coast. Almost as bare, this home of the Spartans, as that of their old rivals in Attica; in fact, all the south of the Peloponnesus is barren rock. We might almost have thrown a stone on to Cape Matapan as we passed. Above, the western coast soon begins to change its character, and scanty pine forests on the mountains, and not unfrequent villages, with more or less of cultivated land round them, are visible. Towards evening we steam past the entrance of Navarino Bay, scarcely wider than that of Dartmouth harbour, but with room inside for four modern fleets to ride and fight; as likely a place for a corsair to haunt and swoop out of, in old days, as you could wish to see. Night fell, and we missed the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth; and Ithaca, alas! was also out of sight astern before we were on deck again. But we could not complain; the Albanian coast, under which we were running, was too beautiful to allow us a moment for regret--mountains as wild and barren, and twice as high, as those of Southern Greece, streaked with rich valleys, and well-clothed lower hills. By midday we were ashore at Corfu, driving through the old Venetian streets, and on, over English macadamised roads, through olive groves finer than those of Attica, up to the one-gun battery--the finest view in the fairest island of the world. Bathing, and lunching, and all but letting the steamer go on without us! Steaming away northward again, leaving the shade of the union-jack under which we had revelled for a few hours, and the delightful sound of the vernacular in the mouth of the British soldiers, for a twenty-four hours’ run up the Adriatic, and into Trieste harbour, just in time to baulk a fierce little storm which came tearing down from the Alps to meet us.

Trieste is the best paved town I was ever in, and otherwise internally attractive, while in the immediate neighbourhood, on the spurs of the great mountains and along the Adriatic shore, are matchless sites for country houses, and many most fascinating houses on them. For choice, the situation, to my mind, even beats the celebrated hills round Turin, for the view of the Adriatic turns the scale in favour of the former. But neither city nor neighbourhood held us, and we hurried on to Venice by rail, with the sea on our left, and the great Alpine range on our right--now close over us, now retiring--the giant peaks looking dreamily down on us through a hot shadowy haze all the day long. Poor Venice! we lingered there a few days amidst pictures and frescoes and marbles; at night drinking our coffee in the Place of St. Mark, on the Italian side, watching the white and blue uniforms on the other, and hearing the Austrian military band play, or gliding in a gondola along the moonlit grand canal. English speculators are getting a finger in house property at Venice. There were placards up in English on a dozen of the palaces, “To be let or sold,” with the direction of the vendors below. What does this portend? Let us hope not restoration on Camberwell or Pentonville principles of art.

Then we sped westward again, getting an hour in the Giotto chapel at Padua, a long day at Verona, amongst Roman ruins and Austrian fortifications, and the grand churches, houses, and tombs of the Scaligers. Over the frontier, then, into Italy. ‘While the Austrian officials diligently searched baggage and spelt out passports, I consoled myself with getting to a point close to the station, pointed out by a railway guard, and taking a long look at the heights of Solferino and the high tower--the watch-tower of Italy, a mile or two away to the south. To Milan, through mulberries and vines--rich beyond all fancy; the country looked as we passed as if peace and plenty had set up their tent there. But little enough of either was there in the people’s homes. The news of Garibaldi’s capture and wound was stirring men’s minds fearfully; and all the cotton mills, too, of which there are a good number scattered about, were just closing; wages, already fearfully low, were falling in other trades. I came across a Lancashire foreman, who had escaped the day before from the mill in which he had been employed for five years, and only just escaped with his life. Sixteen men had been stabbed and carried to the hospitals in the closing row. He was making the best of his way back. “What was the state of things in Lancashire to what he had just got out of,” he answered, when I spoke of our distress. “He had been standing for three hours and more in a dark corner, with two men within a few feet of him waiting to stab him.” I rejoice to say that in the streets of Milan we saw everywhere unmistakable signs that Italy is beginning to appreciate her faithful ally. Some of the best political caricatures were as good as could be--as Doyle’s or Leech’s--and bitter as distilled gall. At Turin we had time to see the monuments of the two Queens, the mother and wife of Victor Emmanuel, in a little out-of-the-way Church of Our Lady of Consolation, where they used constantly to worship in life; their statues are kneeling side by side in white marble--as touching a monument as I have ever seen. Murray does not mention it (his last edition was out before it was put up), so some stray reader of yours may perhaps thank me for the hint. Over the Mount Cenis, and down into Savoy, past the mouth of the tunnel which, in six years or so, is to take us under the Alps to the lovely little town of St. Michael, where the rail begins, we went, pitying the stout king from whom so beautiful a birthplace had been filched by the arch robber; and so day and night to Paris; and, after a day’s breathing, a drive along the trim new promenades of the Bois de Boulogne, and a look round the ever-multiplying new streets of the capital of cookery and gilded mirrors, in ten hours to London.

Poor dear old London! groaning under the last days of the Great Exhibition. After those bright, brave, foreign towns, how dingy, how unkempt and uncared for thou didst look! From London Bridge station we passed through a mile and a half of the most hideous part of Southwark to the west. Even in the west, London was out at elbows, the roads used up, the horses used up; the omnibus coachmen and cads,--the cabbies, the police, the public, all in an unmistakable state of chronic seediness and general debility. In spic-and-span Paris yesterday, and here to-day! Well, one could take thee a thought cleaner and more cheerful, and be thankful, Old London; but after all, as we plunge into thy fog and reek and roar, and settle into our working clothes again, we are surer than ever of one thing, which must reconcile any man worth his salt to making thee his home,--thou art unmistakably the very heart of the old world.

Dieppe, Sunday, 13th September 1863.

I have just come away from hearing a very remarkable sermon at the Protestant church here, of which I should like to give you some idea before it goes out of my head. The preacher was a M. Bevel, a native of Dieppe, now a minister at Amsterdam, where he has a high reputation. He is here visiting his mother, which visit I should say is likely to be cut short if he goes on preaching such sermons as he gave us to-day, or else a liberty is allowed in the pulpit in France which is not to be had elsewhere. The service began with a hymn. Then a layman read out the Commandments at a desk. Then we sang part of Psalm xxv.; one of the verses ran:

Qui craint Dieu, qui veut bien,

Jamais ne s’égarera,

Car au chemin qu’il doit suivre

Dieu même le conduira--

À son aise et sans ennui

Il verra le plus long âge,

Et ses enfans après lui

Auront la terre en partage.

Good healthy doctrine this, and an apt introduction to the sermon. While we were singing, M. Revel mounted the pulpit. He is a man of thirty-five or thereabouts; middlesized, bald, dark; with a broad brow, large gray eyes, and sharp, well-cut features. After two short extempore prayers--almost the only ones I have ever heard in which there was nothing offensive--he began his sermon on a text in Ecclesiastes. As it had little bearing on the argument, and was never alluded to again, I do not repeat it.

“There is much talk,” M. Revel began, “in our day about an order of nature. All acknowledge it; as science advances it is found more and more to be unchangeable. We ought to rejoice in this unchangeableness of the order of nature, for it is a proof of the existence of a God of order. Had we found the earth all in confusion it would have been a proof that there could be no such God. But this God has established a moral order for man as unchangeable as the order of nature. It was recognised by the heathen who worshipped Nemesis. The whole of history is one long witness to this moral order, but we need not go back far for examples. Look at Poland, partitioned by three great monarchs, and at what is happening and will happen there. Look at America, the land of equality, of freedom, of boundless plenty, and what has come on her for the one great sin of slavery. Look at home, at the story of the great man who ruled France at the beginning of our new era, the man of success--‘_qui éblouissait lui-même en éblouissant les autres_,’ who answered by victory upon victory those who maintained that principle had still something to say to the government of the world, and remember his end on the rock in mid-ocean.

“Be sure, then, that there is an unchangeable moral order, and this is the first law of it, ‘_Qui fait du mal fait du malheur_.’ The most noticeable fact in connection with this moral order which our time is bringing out is the _solidarité_ of the human race. The _solidarité_ of the family and the nation was recognised in old times. Now, commerce and intercourse are breaking down the barriers of nations. A rebellion in China, a war in America, is felt at once in France, and the full truth is dawning upon us that nothing but a universal brotherhood will satisfy men. But you may say that punishment follows misdoing so slowly that the moral order is virtually set aside. Do not believe it. ‘_Qui fait du mal fait du malheur_.’ The law is certain; but if punishment followed at once, and fully, on misdoing, mankind would be degraded. On the other hand, ‘_Qui fait du bon fait du bonheur_,’ and this law is equally fixed and unchangeable in the moral order of the world.

“You may wonder that I have scarcely used the name of Christ to you to-day; but what need? I have spoken of humanity; He is the Son of Man, of a universal brotherhood which has no existence without Him, of which He is the founder and the head.”