presenting the proof that the Beautiful is not by itself, a root out of
which the Good spontaneously grows. If we want to cultivate Purity,
Honesty, Veracity, Unselfishness or any other virtue, it is vain to
think we shall achieve our end by giving the masses pretty
pleasure-grounds and “Palaces of Delight,” or even æsthetic cottages
with the best reproductions of Botticelli adorning the walls. Do what we
may we can never hope to surround our working men with such beauty as
that of the Bay of Naples, nor to show them Art to equal the treasures
of the Museo Borbonico. And what has come of all this familiar revelling
in Beauty for centuries and millenniums to the people of Naples? Only
that they resemble more closely in ignorance, in squalor and in
degradation the most wretched Irish who dwell in mud cabins amid the
bogs, than any other people in Europe.
I had intended remaining for some time to recuperate at Naples and took
a cheery little room in a certain Pension Schiassi (now abolished) on
the Chiajia. In this Pension I met a number of kindly and interesting
people of various nationalities; the most pleasant and cultivated of all
being Finns from Helsingfors. It was a great experience to me to enter
into some sort of society again, far removed from all my antecedents; no
longer the mistress of a large house and dispenser of its hospitality,
but a wandering tourist, known to nobody and dressed as plainly as might
be. I find I wrote to my old friend, Miss St. Leger, on the subject
under date January 21st, 1858, as follows: “I am really cheerful now.
Those days in the country (at Cumæ and Capo di Monte) cheered me very
much, and I am beginning altogether to look at the future differently.
There is one thing I feel really happy about. I see now my actual
position towards people, divested of the social advantages I have
hitherto held; and I find it a very pleasant one. I don’t think I
deceive myself in imagining that people easily like me, and get
interested in my ideas, while I find abundance to like and esteem in a
large proportion of those I meet.” (Optimism, once more! the reader will
say!)
It was not, however, “all beer and skittles” for me at the Schiassi
pension. I had, as I have mentioned, taken a pretty little room looking
out on the Villa Reale and the Bay and Vesuvius, and had put up the
photographs and miniatures I carried with me and my little knick-knacks
on the writing-table, and fondly flattered myself I should sit and write
there peacefully. But I reckoned without my neighbours! It was Sunday
when I arrived and settled myself so complacently. On Monday morning,
soon after day-break, I was rudely awakened by a dreadful four-handed
strumming on a piano, apparently in my very room! On rousing myself, I
perceived that a locked door close to my bed obviously opened into an
adjoining chamber, and being (after the manner of Italian doors) at
least two inches short of the uncarpeted floor, I was to all acoustic
intents and purposes actually in the room with this atrocious jangling
piano and the two thumping performers! The practising went on for two
hours, and when it stopped a masculine voice arose to read the Bible
aloud in family devotions. Then, after a brief interval for breakfast,
burst out again the intolerable strumming. I fled, and remained out of
doors for hours, but when I came back they were at it again! I appealed
to the mistress of the house, in vain. Sir Andrew——and his daughters (I
will call them the Misses Shocking-strum, their real name concerns
nobody now) had been there before me and would no doubt stop long after
me, and could not be prevented from playing from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every
day of the week. I took a large card and wrote on it this pathetic
appeal:—
“Pity the sorrows of a poor old maid,
Whose hapless lot has made her lodge next door,
Who fain would wish those morning airs delayed;
O practise less! And she will bless you more!”
I thrust this under the ill-fitting door well into the music-room, and
waited anxiously for some measure of mercy to be meted to me in
consequence. But no! the hateful thumping and crashing went on as
before. Then I girded up my loins and went down to the packet office and
took a berth in the next steamer for Alexandria.
After landing at Messina (lovely region!) and at Malta, I embarked in a
French screw-steamer, which began to roll before we were well under
weigh, and which, when a real Levanter came on three days later, played
pitch and toss with us passengers, insomuch that we often needed to lie
on mattresses on the floor and hold something to prevent our heads from
being knocked to pieces. One day, being fortunately a very good sailor,
I scrambled up on deck and beheld a glorious scene. Euroclydon was
playing with towering waves of lapis-lazulæ all flecked and veined like
a horse’s neck with white foam, and the African sun was shining down
cloudless over the turmoil.
There were some French Nuns on board going to a convent in Cairo, where
they were to be charitably engaged taking care of girls. The monastic
mind is always an interesting study. It brings us back to the days of
Bede, and times when miracles (if it be not a bull to say so) were the
rule and the ordinary course of nature the exception. People are then
constantly seen where they are not, and not seen where they are; and the
dead are as “prominent citizens” of this world (as an American would
say) as the living. Meanwhile the actual geography and history of the
modern world and all that is going on in politics, society, art and
literature, is as dark to the good Sister or Brother as if she or he had
really (as in Hans Andersen’s story) “walked back into the eleventh
century.” My nice French nuns were very kind and instructive to me. They
told me of the Virgin’s Tree which we should see at Heliopolis (though
they knew nothing of the obelisk there), and they informed me that if
anyone looked out on Trinity Sunday exactly at sunrise, he would see
“_toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité_.”
I could not help asking: “Madame les aura vues?”
“Pas précisément, Madame. Madame sait qu’à cette saison le soleil se
lêve bien tôt.”
“Mais, Madame, pour voir _loutes_ les trois personnes?”
It was no use. The good soul persisted in believing what she liked to
believe and took care never to get up and look out on Trinity Sunday
morning,—just as ten thousand Englishmen and women, who think themselves
much wiser than the poor Nun, carefully avoid looking straight at facts
concerning which they do not wish to be set right. St. Thomas’ kind of
faith which dares to look and _see_, and, if it may be to _touch_, is a
much more real faith after all than that which will not venture to open
its eyes.
Landing at Alexandria (after being blown off the Egyptian coast nearly
as far as Crete) was an epoch in my life. No book, no gallery of
pictures, can ever be more interesting or instructive than the first
drive through an Eastern city; even such a hybrid one as Alexandria. But
all the world knows this now, and I need not dwell on so familiar a
topic. The only matter I care to record here is a visit I paid to a
subterranean church which had just been opened, and of which I was
fortunate enough to hear at the moment. I have never been able to learn
anything further concerning it than appears in the following extract
from one of my note-books, and I fear the church must long ago have been
destroyed, and the frescoes, of course, effaced:
“In certain excavations now making in one of the hills of the Old
City—within a few hundred yards of the Mahmoudié Canal—the workmen
have come upon a small subterranean church; for whose very high
antiquity many arguments may be adduced. The frescoes with which it is
adorned are still in tolerable preservation, and appear to belong to
the same period of art as those rescued from Pompeii. Though
altogether inferior to the better specimens in the Museo Borbonico,
there is yet the same simplicity of attitude and drapery; the same
breadth of outline and effect produced by few touches. It is
impossible to confound them for a moment with the stiff and
meretricious style of Byzantine painting.
“The form of the church is very peculiar, and I conceive antique. If
we suppose a shaft to have been cut into the hill, its base may be
considered to form the centre of a cross. To the west, in lieu of
nave, are two staircases; one ascending, the other descending to
various parts of the hillside. To the east is a small chancel, with
depressed elliptical arch and recesses at the back and sides, of the
same form. The north transept is a mere apse, supported by rather
elegant Ionic pilasters, and having a fan-shaped roof. Opposite this,
and in the place of a south transept, is the largest apartment of the
whole grotto: a chamber, presenting a singular transition between a
modern funeral-vault and an ancient columbarium. The walls are pierced
on all sides by deep holes, of the size and shape of coffins placed
endwise. There are in all thirty-two of these holes; in which,
however, I could find no evidence that they had ever been applied to
the purpose of interment. In the corner, between this chamber and the
chancel-arch, there is a deep stone cistern sunk in the ground; I
presume a font. The frescoes at the end of the chancel are small, and
much effaced. In the eastern apse there is a group representing the
Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. In the front walls of the
chancel-arch are two life-size figures; one representing an angel, the
other having the name of Christ inscribed over it in Greek letters.
This last struck me as peculiarly interesting; from the circumstance
that the face bears no resemblance whatever to the one conventionally
received among us, in modern times. The eyes, in the Alexandrian
fresco, are dark and widely opened; the eyebrows straight and strongly
marked; the hair nearly black and gathered in short, thick masses over
the ears. I was the more attracted by these peculiarities, as my
attention had shortly before been arrested very forcibly by the
splendid bronze bust from Herculaneum, in the Museo Borbonico. This
grand and beautiful head, which Murray calls ‘Speucippus’ and the
custodi, ‘Plato in the character of the Indian Bacchus,’ resembles so
perfectly the common representations of Christ, that I should be at a
loss to define any difference, unless it be that it has, perhaps, more
intellectual power than our paintings and sculptures usually convey,
and a more massive neck. If this Alexandrian fresco really represent
the tradition of the 3rd or 4th century, it becomes a question of some
curiosity: _whence_ do we derive our modern idea of Christ’s face?”
Cairo was a great delight to me. I could not afford to stop at
Shepheard’s Hotel but took up my abode with some kind Americans I had
met in the steamer, in a sort of Pension kept by an Italian named Ronch;
in old Cairo, actually on the bank of the Nile; so literally so, that I
might have dropped a stone from our balcony into the river, just
opposite the Isle of Rhoda. From this place I made two excursions to the
Pyramids and had a somewhat appalling experience in the “King’s Chamber”
in the vault of Cheops. I had gone rather recklessly to Ghiza without
either friend or Dragoman; and allowed the wretched Scheik at the door
to send five Arabs into the pyramid with me as guides. They had only two
miserable dip candles altogether, and the darkness, dust, heat and noise
of the Arabs chanting “Vera goot lady! Backsheeh! Backsheeh! Vera goot
lady,” and so on _da capo_, all in the narrow, steeply-slanting
passages, together with the intolerable sense of weight as of a mountain
of stone over me, proved trying to my nerves. Then, when we had reached
the central vault and I had glanced at the empty sarcophagus, which is
all it contains, the five men suddenly stopped their chanting, placed
themselves with their backs to the wall in rows, with crossed arms in
the attitude of the Osiride pilasters; and one of them in a businesslike
tone, demanded: “Backsheesh”! I instantly perceived into what a trap I
had fallen, and what a fool I had been to come there alone. The idea
that they might march out and leave me alone in that awful place, in the
darkness, very nearly made me quail. But I knew it was no time to betray
alarm, so I replied that I “Intended to pay them outside, but if they
wished it I would do so at once.” I took out my purse and gave them
three shillings to be divided between the five. They took the money and
then returned to their posture against the wall.
“We want Backsheesh!”
I took my courage _à deux mains_, and said, “If you give me any more
trouble the English Consul shall hear of it, and you will get the
stick.”
“We want Backsheesh!”
“I’ll have no more of this,” I cried in a very sharp voice, and, turning
to the ringleader, who held a candle, I said, “Here, you fellow! Take
that candle on in front and let me out. Go!” _He went!_—and I blessed my
stars, and all the stars, when I emerged out of that endless passage at
last, and stood safe under the bright Egyptian sun.
I am glad to remember Ghiza as it was in those days before hotels, or
even tents, were visible near it; when the solemn Sphinx,—so strangely
and affectingly human! stood gazing over the desert sands, and beside it
were only the ancient temple, the rifled tombs, and the three great
Pyramids. To me in those days it seemed the most impressive Field of
Death in the world.
The old Arab Mosques in Cairo also delighted me greatly both for their
beauty and as studies of the original early English architecture.
Needless to say I was enchanted with the streets and bazaars, and all
the dim, strange, lovely pictures they afforded, and the Eastern odours
which pervaded them in that bright, light air, wherein my chest grew
sound and strong after having been for years oppressed with bronchial
troubles. One day in my plenitude of enjoyment of health and vigour, I
walked alone a long way down the splendid Shoubra avenue of Acacia
Lebbex trees with the moving crowd of Arab men and women in all their
varied costumes, and trains of camels and asses laden with green
trefoil, glittering in the alternate sun and shade with never a cart or
carriage to disturb the even currents to and fro. At last I came in
sight of the Nile, and in the extreme excitement of the view, hastily
concluded that the yellow bank which sloped down beyond the grass must
be sand, and that I could actually plunge my hands in the River of
Egypt. I ran down the slope some little distance from the avenue, and
took a few steps on the supposed yellow sand. It proved to be merely
mud, like the banks of the Avon at low tide at Clifton, though of
different colour, and in a moment I felt myself sinking indefinitely.
Already it was nearly up to my knees, and in a few minutes I should have
been (quietly and unperceived by anybody) entombed for the investigation
of Egyptologers of future generations. It was a ludicrous position, and
even in the peril of it I believe I laughed outright. Any way I happily
remembered that I had read years before in a bad French novel, how
people saved themselves in quicksands in the Landes by throwing
themselves down and so dividing their weight over a much larger surface
than the soles of the feet. Instantly I turned back towards the bank,
and cast myself along forward, and then by dint of enormous efforts
withdrew my feet and struggled back to _terra firma_, much, I should
think, after the mode of locomotion of an Ichthyosaurus or other “dragon
of the prime.” Arrived at a place of safety I had next to reflect how I
was to walk home into the town in the pickle to which I had reduced
myself! Luckily the hot sun of Egypt dried the mud on my homely clothes
and enabled me to brush it off as dust in an incredibly quick time.
Before it had done so, however, a frog of exceptional ugliness mistook
me for part of the bank and jumped on my lap. He looked such an ill-made
creature that I constructed at once the (non-scientific) hypothesis that
he must have been descended from some of the frogs which Pharaoh’s
magicians are said to have made in rivalry to Moses; forerunners of
those modern pathologists who are just clever enough to _give us_ all
sorts of Plagues, but always stop short of _curing_ them.
I was very anxious, of course, to ascend the Nile to Philæ, or at the
very least to Thebes; but I was too poor by far to hire a dahabieh for
myself alone, and, in those days, excursion steamers were non-existent,
or very rare. I did hear of a gentleman who wanted to make up a party
and take a boat, but he coolly proposed that I should pay half of the
expenses of five people, and I did not view that arrangement in a
favourable light. Eventually I turned sorrowfully and disappointed back
to Alexandria with a pleasant party of English and American ladies and
gentlemen; and after a short passage to Jaffa, we rode up all together
in two days to Jerusalem. I had given up riding many years before and
taken to driving instead, but there was infinite exhilaration on finding
myself again on horseback, on one of the active little, half Arab,
Syrian steeds. That wonderful ride through the Jaffa orange groves and
the Plain of Sharon with all its flowers, to Lydda and Ramleh, and then,
next day, to Jerusalem, was beyond all words interesting. I think no one
who has been brought up as we English are, on the double literature of
Palestine and England, can visit the Holy Land with other than almost
breathless curiosity mingled with a thousand tender associations. What
England is to a cultivated American traveller of Washington Irving’s or
Lowell’s stamp, _that_ is Palestine to us all. As for me, my religious
views made it, I think, rather more than less congenial and interesting
to me than to many others. I find I wrote of it to my friend from
Jerusalem (March 6th, 1858):
“I feel very happy to be here. The land seems worthy to be that in
which from earliest history the human soul has highest and oftenest
soared up to God. One wants no miraculous story to make such a country
a ‘Holy Land;’ nor can such story make it less holy to me, as it does,
I think, to some who equally disbelieve it. It seems to me as if
Christians must be, and in fact are, overwhelmed and confounded to
find themselves in the scene of such events. To me it is all pleasure.
I believe that if Christ can see us now like other departed spirits,
it is those who revere him as I do, and not those who give to him his
Father’s place, whom he can regard most complacently. If I did not
feel this it would pain me to be here.”
When I went first into the church of the Holy Sepulchre it happened, on
account of some function going on elsewhere, to be unusually free from
the crowds of pilgrims. It seemed to me to be a real parable in stone.
All the different churches, Greek, Latin, Armenian Maronite, _opened
into_ the central Temple; as if to show that every creed has a Door
leading to the true Holy Place.
I loved also the little narrow marble shrine in the midst with its
small, low door, and the mere plain altar-tomb, with room to kneel
beside it and pray,—if we will,—to him who is believed to have rested
there for the mystic three days after his crucifixion; or if we will
(and as I did), to “his Father and our Father”; in a spot hallowed by
the associations of a hundred worshipping generations, and the memory of
the holiest of men.
Another day I was able to walk alone nearly all round outside the walls
of Jerusalem, beginning at the Jaffa gate and passing round through what
was then a desert, but is now, I am told, a populous suburb. I came
successively to Siloam and to the Valley of Hinnom, and of Jehoshaphat;
to the Tombs of the Prophets, and at last to Gethsemane. At the time of
my visit, this sacred spot, containing the ruins of an “oil press”
(whence its supposed identification), was a small walled garden kept by
monks who did their best to spoil its associations. Above it I sat for a
long time beside the path up to St. Stephen’s Gate, where tradition
places the scene of the great first Christian Martyrdom. The ground is
all strewed still, with large stones and boulders, making it easy to
conjure up the terrific picture of the kneeling saint and savage crowd,
and of Saul standing by watching the scene.
Leaving Jerusalem after a week with the same pleasant English and
American companions, and with a due provision of guards and tents and
baggage mules, I rode to Bethlehem and Hebron, visiting on the way
Abraham’s oak at Mamre, which is a magnificent old terebinth, and the
vineyard of Esh-kol, then in a very poor condition of culture. We
stopped the first night close to Solomon’s Pools, and I was profane
enough to bring my sponges at earliest dawn into Jacob’s Well at the
head of the waters, and enjoy a delicious bath. Ere we turned in on the
previous evening, a clergyman of our party read to us, sitting under the
walls of the old Saracenic castle, the pages in Stanley’s Palestine
which describe, with all his vivid truthfulness and historic sentiment,
the scene which lay before us; the three great ponds, “built by Solomon,
repaired by Pontius Pilate,” which have supplied Jerusalem with water
for 3,000 years.
I am much surprised that the problem offered by the contents of the
vault beneath the Mosque of Hebron has not long ago excited the
intensest curiosity among both Jews and Christians. Here, within small
and definite limits, must lie evidence of incalculable weight in favour
of or against the veracity of the Mosaic record. If the account in Gen.
L. be correct, the bones of Jacob were brought out of Egypt and
deposited here by Joseph; embalmed in the finest and most durable
manner. We are expressly told (Gen. L., 2 and 3) that Joseph ordered the
physicians to embalm his father, that “forty days were fulfilled for
him, for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed;” and
that Joseph went up to Canaan with “all the servants of Pharaoh and the
elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt,” (a rather
amazing exodus!) and “chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” They
finally buried Jacob (v. 13) “in the Cave of the field of Machpelah
which Abraham bought.” It was unquestionably, then, a first-class Mummy,
covered with wrappers and inscriptions, and enclosed, of course, in a
splendidly-painted Mummy-coffin, which was deposited in that unique
cave; and the extraordinary sanctity which has attached to the spot as
far as tradition reaches back, affords presumption amounting almost to
guarantee that _there_, if anywhere, below the six cenotaphs in the
upper chamber, in the vault under the small hole in the floor where the
Prince of Wales and Dean Stanley were privileged to look down into the
darkness,—lie the relics which would terminate more controversies, and
throw more light on the origin of Judaism than can be done by all the
Rabbis and Bishops of Europe and Asia together! Why do not the
Rothschilds and Hirschs and Montefiores and Goldschmidts put together a
modest little subscription of a million or two and buy up Hebron, and so
settle once for all whether the Jewish Ulysses were a myth or a man; and
whether there were really an Israel of whom they are the “Children?” I
have talked to Dean Stanley on the subject, who (as he tells us in his
delightful _Jewish Church_, I., 500) shared all my curiosity, but when I
urged the query: “_Did_ he think that the relics of the Patriarchs would
be found, if we could examine the cave?” he put up his hands in a
deprecating attitude, which all who knew and loved him will remember,
and said, “Ah! that is the question, indeed!”
Is it possible that the millionaire Jews of Germany, France and England
are, after all, like my poor friends the Nuns, who would not get up at
sunrise on Trinity Sunday to see “_toutes les trois personnes de la
sainte Trinité_,”—and that they prefer to believe that the bones of the
three Patriarchs are where they ought to be, but would rather not put
that confidence to the test?