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