The Maid of Athens—Romance and Reality—American Benefactions
to Greece—A Greek Wife and Scottish Husband—School of Capo
d’Istrias—Grecian Disinterestedness—Ruins of the Most Ancient
Temple—Beauty of the Grecian Landscape—Hope for the Land of
Epaminondas and Aristides.
ISLAND OF ÆGINA.—The “Maid of Athens,” in the very teeth of poetry, has
become _Mrs. Black of Ægina_! The beautiful Teresa Makri, of whom Byron
asked back his heart, of whom Moore and Hobhouse, and the poet himself,
have written so much and so passionately, has forgotten the sweet
burthen of the sweetest of love songs, and taken the unromantic name,
and followed the unromantic fortunes, of a Scotchman!
The commodore proposed that we should call upon her on our way to the
temple of Jupiter, this morning. We pulled up to the town in the barge,
and landed on the handsome pier built by Dr. Howe (who expended thus,
most judiciously, a part of the provisions sent from our country in his
charge), and, finding a Greek in the crowd, who understood a little
Italian, we were soon on our way to Mrs. Black’s. Our guide was a fine,
grave-looking man of forty, with a small cockade on his red cap, which
indicated that he was some way in the service of the government. He laid
his hand on his heart, when I asked him if he had known any Americans in
Ægina. “They built this,” said he, pointing to the pier, the handsome
granite posts of which we were passing at the moment. “They gave us
bread, and meat, and clothing, when we should otherwise have perished.”
It was said with a look and tone that thrilled me. I felt as if the
whole debt of sympathy which Greece owes our country, were repaid by
this one energetic expression of gratitude.
We stopped opposite a small gate, and the Greek went in without cards.
It was a small stone house of a story and a half, with a rickety flight
of wooden steps at the side, and not a blade of grass or sign of a
flower in court or window. If there had been but a geranium in the
porch, or a rose-tree by the gate, for description’s sake.
Mr. Black was _out_—Mrs. Black was _in_. We walked up the creaking
steps, with a Scotch terrier barking and snapping at our heels, and were
met at the door by, really, a very pretty woman. She smiled as I
apologised for our intrusion, and a sadder or a sweeter smile I never
saw. She said her welcome in a few, simple words of Italian, and I
thought there were few sweeter voices in the world. I asked her if she
had not learned English yet. She coloured, and said, “No, signore!” and
the deep spot in her cheek faded gradually down, in teints a painter
would remember. Her husband, she said, had wished to learn her language,
and would never let her speak English. I began to feel a prejudice
against him. Presently, a boy of perhaps three years came into the
room—an ugly, white-headed, Scotch-looking little ruffian, thin-lipped
and freckled, and my aversion for Mr. Black became quite decided. “Did
you not regret leaving Athens?” I asked. “Very much, signore,” she
answered with half a sigh; “but my husband dislikes Athens.” Horrid Mr.
Black! thought I.
I wished to ask her of Lord Byron, but I had heard that the poet’s
admiration had occasioned the usual scandal attendant on every kind of
pre-eminence, and her modest and timid manners, while they assured me of
her purity of heart, made me afraid to venture where there was even a
possibility of wounding her. She sat in a drooping attitude on the
coarsely-covered divan, which occupied three sides of the little room,
and it was difficult to believe that any eye but her husband’s had ever
looked upon her, or that the “wells of her heart” had ever been drawn
upon for anything deeper than the simple duties of a wife and mother.
She offered us some sweetmeats, the usual Greek compliment to visitors,
as we rose to go, and laying her hand upon her heart, in the beautiful
custom of the country, requested me to express her thanks to the
commodore for the honour he had done her in calling, and to wish him and
his family every happiness. A servant-girl, very shabbily dressed, stood
at the side door, and we offered her some money, which she might have
taken unnoticed. She drew herself up very coldly, and refused it, as if
she thought we had quite mistaken her. In a country where gifts of the
kind are so universal, it spoke well for the pride of the family, at
least.
I turned after we had taken leave, and made an apology to speak to her
again; for in the interest of the general impression she had made upon
me, I had forgotten to notice her dress, and I was not sure that I could
remember a single feature of her face. We had called unexpectedly of
course, and her dress was very plain. A red cloth cap bound about the
temples, with a coloured shawl, whose folds were mingled with large
braids of dark-brown hair, and decked with a tassel of blue silk, which
fell to her left shoulder, formed her head-dress. In other respects she
was dressed like a European. She is a little above the middle height,
slightly and well-formed, and walks weakly, like most Greek women, as if
her feet were too small for her weight. Her skin is dark and clear, and
she has a colour in her cheek and lips that looks to me consumptive. Her
teeth are white and regular, her face oval, and her forehead and nose
form the straight line of the Grecian model—one of the few instances I
have ever seen of it. Her eyes are large, and of a soft, liquid hazel,
and this is her chief beauty. There is that “looking out of the soul
through them,” which Byron always described as constituting the
loveliness that most moved him. I made up my mind, as we walked away,
that she would be a lovely woman anywhere. Her horrid name, and the
unprepossessing circumstances in which we found her, had uncharmed, I
thought, all poetical delusion that would naturally surround her as the
“Maid of Athens.” We met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose Scotch
husband’s terrier had worried us at the door, and we left her, feeling
that the poetry which she had called forth from the heart of Byron, was
her due by every law of loveliness.
From the house of the maid of Athens we walked to the school of Capo
d’Istrias. It is a spacious stone quadrangle, enclosing a court
handsomely railed and gravelled, and furnished with gymnastic apparatus.
School was out, and perhaps a hundred and fifty boys were playing in the
area. An intelligent-looking man accompanied us through the museum of
antiquities, where we saw nothing very much worth noticing, after the
collections of Rome, and to the library, where there was a superb bust
of Capo d’Istrias, done by a Roman artist. It is a noble head,
resembling Washington.
We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents in returning to the
boat, and offered money to one or two common men who had been of
assistance to us, but _no one would receive it_. I italicise the remark,
because the Greeks are so often stigmatised as utterly mercenary.
We pulled along the shore, passing round the point on which stands a
single fluted column, the only remains of a magnificent temple of Venus,
and, getting the wind, hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern side of
the island five or six miles, till we arrived opposite the mountain on
which stands the temple of Jupiter Panhellenios. The view of it from the
sea was like that of a temple drawn on the sky. It occupies the very
peak of the mountain, and is seen many miles on either side by the
mariner of the Ægæan.
A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bareheaded and bare-legged,
with shirts and trousers reaching to the knee, lay in a small caique
under the shore; and, as we landed, the taller of the two laid his hand
on his breast, and offered to conduct us to the temple. The ascent was
about a mile.
We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there a cluster of
fig-trees, wild patches of rock and brier, and an occasional wall, and
arrived breathless at the top, where a cool wind met us from the other
side of the sea with delicious refreshment.
We sat down among the ruins of the oldest temple of Greece after that of
Corinth. Twenty-three noble columns still lifted their heads over us,
after braving the tempests of more than two thousand years. The ground
about was piled up with magnificent fragments of marble, preserving,
even in their fall, the sharp edges of the admirable sculpture of
Greece. The Doric capital, the simple frieze, the well-fitted frusta,
might almost be restored in the perfection with which they were left by
the last touch of the chisel.
The view hence comprised a classic world. There was Athens! The broad
mountain over the intensely blue gulf at our feet was Hymettus, and a
bright white summit as of a mound between it and the sea, glittering
brightly in the sun, was the venerable pile of temples in the Acropolis.
To the left, Corinth was distinguishable over its low isthmus, and
Megara and Salamis, and following down the wavy line of the mountains of
Attica, the promontory of Sunium, modern Cape Colonna, dropped the
horizon upon the sea. One might sit out his life amid these
loftily-placed ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the human history
that has unrolled within the scope of his eye.
We passed two or three hours wandering about among the broken columns,
and gazing away to the main and the distant isles, confessing the
surpassing beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a green spot,
and its vales are treeless and uninhabited, and all that constitutes
desolation is there, and strange as it may seem, you neither miss the
verdure, nor the people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece, in
the first place, is the finest in the world. The mountains lean down
into the valleys, and the plains swell up to the mountains, and the
islands rise from the sea, with a mixture of boldness and grace
altogether peculiar. In the most lonely parts of the Ægæan, where you
can see no trace of a human foot, it strikes you like a foreign land.
Then the atmosphere is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It
gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly-teinted glass.
Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and changing shapes envelop the
mountains on the clearest day, and without obscuring the most distant
points perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses that of
verdure. I never saw such _air_ as I see in Greece. It has the same
effect on the herbless and rocky scenery about us, as a veil over the
face of a woman.
The islander who had accompanied us to the temple, stood on a fragment
of a column, still as a statue, looking down upon the sea towards
Athens. His figure for athletic grace of mould, and his head and
features, for the expression of manly beauty and character, might have
been models to Phidias. The beautiful and poetical land, of which he
inherited his share of unparalleled glory, lay around him. I asked
myself why it should have become, as it seems to be, the despair of the
philanthropist. Why should its people, who, in the opinion of Childe
Harold, are “nature’s favourites still,” be branded and abandoned as
irreclaimable rogues, and the source to which we owe, even to this day,
our highest models of taste, be neglected and forgotten? The nine days’
enthusiasm for Greece has died away, and she has received a king from a
family of despots. But there seems to me in her very beauty, and in the
still superior qualities of her children, wherever they have room for
competition, a promise of resuscitation. The convulsions of Europe may
leave her soon to herself, and the slipper of the Turk, and the hand of
the Christian, once lifted fairly from her neck, she will rise, and
stand up amid these imperishable temples, once more free!
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