Athens, in what our author calls the fashionable quarter, the most
prominent, certainly, are the palace and the university. The ground, as
we have already mentioned, rises with a very gentle slope from the level
of the plain in which the Ilissus and Cephissus are lost, to the base of
Lycabettus, which overhangs the city in a most effective conical mass to
the north-east. Along the highest part of this slope runs, from north to
south generally, though with a considerable bend in the middle, a long
street, principally occupied with public buildings and other houses, in
size and elegance much surpassing the best houses in the two principal
streets described by Mr Hettner. This is the same street which is above
described as sweeping down to the Ilissus, and, under the name of Amalia
Street, opening up a view of the sea. Now it is on this upper part of
the city, just beneath the base of Lycabettus, that the palace and the
university are situated. The former especially is, next to the
Acropolis, both from its situation and its size, the most prominent
object in the city. No eye can miss its glaring extent of white wall,
and the glimmering of its long uniform ranges of windows, tier upon
tier, like the arches in the Coliseum;—but, like the Coliseum,
certainly, in nothing else—like a huge Manchester cotton-factory rather,
new and whitewashed, as the English say—or like a large Austrian
barracks, as the Germans say—or one of those immense cloister-like
baronial halls, which sometimes stare upon the flitting eye of the
tourist from amid the vine-clad heights of Germany. Altogether, not
architecturally only—for even Bavarian architects are not infallible—but
economically much more, we are disposed to think the palace was a
blunder. Nothing, indeed, can exceed the beauty and chaste magnificence
of its internal decoration—that part of the work is in every respect
worthy of the classical fame of Munich. But what has all this
magnificence to do, the practical mind will ask, with a petty and
beggarly kingdom, that has neither roads, nor people, nor water, nor
money to pay its lawful debts? We are afraid the artistic sentimentality
of Bavarian Louis had something to do with this; he was too much of a
poet, and too little of a practical man, to know what the infant kingdom
of Greece required in the first place. What it required, our readers may
see in a small but very sensible book noted below.[15] Certainly among
the last of necessary things was a royal residence, which, had it been
intended for the Queen of Great Britain and India, or the Czar of all
the Russias, could not have been raised larger in scale, or more
magnificent in embellishment.
Our German traveller had the good fortune to inspect the show-rooms of
King Otho’s palace, not in their pure naturals, as they are commonly
shown to strangers, but when furnished with fair ladies and gay knights,
on occasion of a court-ball. Let us see how they looked when lighted.
A GREEK COURT-BALL.
“I have just returned from a grand court-ball. The ball-room is
finished in the same style of luxuriant but chaste magnificence in
which the whole palace is built. It is of truly colossal dimensions.
In height it occupies two entire floors of the building. It is divided
into three parts, separated from each other by tall marble pillars,
whose Ionic capitals are adorned with painting and gilding. More than
a thousand persons can move about with ease in every part of this
magnificently lighted hall, and yet it does not appear
crowded—scarcely even filled. In the most remote parts, where no
dancing is going on, parties can saunter up and down with ease and
freedom.
“We arrived about nine in the evening. Along the walls several groups
were already seated on the crimson-velvet cushioned divans. How
remarkable the scene that now presented itself! On the right, the men
reclining at ease, in their gay and glittering Greek attire, the
scarlet cap on their heads; on the left, the women, some in Greek,
others in Frankish costumes. A few of the men were parading in the
centre of the saloon, engaged in animated conversation. There could
not be a more attractive sight than the contemplation of such a
variety of costume and outward bearing. The simple black dress-coat
prevailed least of all; then the diplomatic and military uniforms of
the different embassies, and of the French, English, and Austrian
fleets now stationed in the Piræus; but chiefly the Greek national
costume, in all its striking varieties, from the gold-embroidered
fustanella of the royal court marshals, to the simple loose Turkish
trousers of the islanders. How wild and proud are the fine expressive
countenances of these men! It almost seemed as if the smooth inlaid
floor burnt beneath their feet—for their true home is on the rocky
mountains, where they are their own masters, only issuing forth from
time to time, in true middle-age fashion, on some jovial plundering
expedition. There sits, for example, between two captains of Palikari,
a fierce-looking old man, with white hair and a long flowing white
beard, his curved sabre hanging at his side. His features are
expressive of daring, but nobly chiselled: they remind one of the fine
manly forms in which the old Byzantine mosaics represent the apostle
Paul. This man is a warrior every inch. He is the famous Papa
Kostas—called Papa because he was formerly a monk. Latterly he
returned to the world, and became an honoured hero in the Greek
Liberation war. Two years ago he wished to be elected deputy for his
native town of Lamia; but government, to whom he was obnoxious, found
means to frustrate his election. What did he then do? He incited the
whole of his province to rebellion, and for six entire months the king
had to carry on an open war with him. At length the royal troops
succeeded in conquering him, and he then took flight into Turkey.
After some time an amnesty was granted him; and now he is at a
court-ball, but so proud and unsubdued, that, instead of a pardoned
rebel, he looks like one who is waiting for the first favourable
occasion to avenge the humiliation he has endured.
“There is in like manner some history about all these men. They are
barbarians, but there is poetry in them; and it is quite intelligible
that these wild mountaineers should have been victorious over the
superior force of the enervated Turks.
“The saloon gets more and more crowded. Suddenly the general murmur
ceases. The king appears with his blooming consort on his arm. Early
in the morning a new French man-of-war had arrived in the Piræus, and
the officers are now presented by the French ambassador. Immediately
the Polonaise begins, the queen opening the ball with the Austrian
ambassador. She is dressed in blue, embroidered with silver, her hair
magnificently arranged in the European style. The king, on the
contrary, is as usual in the glittering gold and silver gala-dress of
the national Greek costume; he and the sister of the English resident
minister make the second pair. The queen dances the second movement of
the Polonaise with the president of the Chamber. He is a Hydriot, and
wears the dress of the Greek islanders—dark blue, tight-fitting short
jacket, wide bunchy Turkish trousers of the same colour, and between
jacket and hose a simple red girdle. The king leads out the venerable
matron, the wife of the president of the Chamber, who is also dressed
in the costume worn by the women of the Greek islands—a blue silk
dress with yellow stripes, a jacket of the same material, very much
cut open in, front, the bosom covered with a silk handkerchief, also a
little parted in front. In Berlin or Paris it would excite some
wonderment to see such attire recognised as admissible at court.
“And now the ball begins in good earnest; no more national dances, but
all in true European style. The king danced a great deal, and was most
courteous and affable in his demeanour. But the queen shone above
every one, and was the first in all the dances. She is a true knightly
dame, the boldest equestrian in the land, and graceful above all in
the dance. The young Greek ladies have shown great facility in
acquiring the new dances. It would be difficult to discover a single
national trait in them, were it not for the dark glancing eyes, the
brown complexion, and their love of bright showy colours, which betray
their half-southern, half-Oriental character. They almost all appeared
in white ball-dress, but wearing over it an extremely beautiful little
jacket of red velvet, richly embroidered with gold; and on the head,
trimmed around with plaits of deep black hair, is placed coquettishly,
inclined to one side, a little cap, also of red velvet embroidered
with gold, exactly corresponding to the jacket.
“The Greek men do not mix in the dance. Some collect in quiet corners
in groups; others contemplate languidly the strange foreign movements.
How would these stately forms and costumes correspond with such
unpoetic waltzing and whirling? The keenest dancers were the gentlemen
of the diplomatic corps.”
Then follow some sentimental remarks about Themistocles, Pericles, and
Plato, and how they would have looked dancing the polka; and how it is
almost a profanation for young diplomatists to think of enjoying a dance
at all, on ground where grave Aristotle walked, and stern Demosthenes
thundered; and how a fine German “belletrist,” in the midst of such a
gay scene, “cannot but feel every moment as if some sturdy old
Marathonians would rush in, blow the lights out, and tear all the pretty
Parisian frippery to rags.” Shade of Goethe, what nebulous nonsense even
sensible Germans will speak and print! With us a young lady, passing
stupidly out of her teens, and thinking of moonshine and marriage, would
be ashamed formally to enunciate such trash.
Let us now look to
THE UNIVERSITY.
“All the more highly educated Greeks exhibit a lively interest in the
newly-erected university at Athens, which is formed entirely on the
German model. The professors are chiefly Greeks, who have studied at
the French and German universities. Since the revolution of 1843,
Landerer the chemist, and Fraas[16] the botanist, are the only
foreigners in the university, but they, like the others, lecture in
Greek. The teachers, with the exception of the private tutors, are
paid by the state; they have, on an average, seven hundred dollars,
but no honorarium for the lectures. The influx of students is very
great, amounting to more than four hundred, which would be
inconceivable in so thinly-populated a country, were it not that
numbers come from Epirus, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; also from Turkish
Greece, and even, (so great is the feeling of nationality,) from the
Ionian Islands, although there is a Greek university in Corfu. The
Athenian professors point with pride to this fact, alleging that their
university forms thus the centre of all the Grecian countries, many of
them now under foreign rule, and as such is perhaps the nursery of a
future political union.
“No university in the whole world is placed on a site so rich in
associations. When the student comes out of the lecture-room, and
saunters in the open piazzas which form the entrance, he has before
him the empurpled range of Hymettus, whose bees are proverbially
associated with the glory of Attic wisdom and art; and the venerable
Acropolis, with the towering pillars of the Parthenon, remind him of
the ancient glory of his country. Where is the youth who would not
feel his heart elevated by such noble recollections?
“And yet these wings are only the wings of Icarus; they cannot perform
impossibilities. True culture and a national literature and art can
only exist where there is material prosperity, and an education
extending to all ranks of the people. There is, however, no sense of
the importance of instruction; for in most places the lowest
elementary schools are not to be found, scarcely even a few miserable
attempts at such. Government has committed the fault of working from
above downwards, instead of from beneath upwards, and has proceeded
forcibly to engraft the most extreme points—even the excrescences of
European customs and refinement—on the prevailing barbarism. They have
erected four gymnasia at Athens, Syra, Patras, and Nauplia; but the
people’s schools are still in the condition in which Capo d’Istria
left them; indeed, general evil report says rather worse than better.
How can we reap unless we sow? How can the building stand firm, when
the foundation is awanting?
“It is, therefore, a quite fruitless and premature, though well-meant,
endeavour that has been made by some of the more noble-minded Greeks,
since the happy issue of the Liberation War, to found a modern Greek
literature. The attempt, however, has had the merit of purifying the
language, and assimilating it to the ancient Greek. But so long as
Greek culture has no firm root in itself, all such endeavours must
prove imperfect imitations of foreign models. I fear much that a
hideous mildew is already nipping the blossom in the bud. Among the
many discouraging impressions caused by the present state of Greece,
the most so to me was, that the booksellers’ shops are almost
exclusively filled with the worst sort of new French romances. It is
here much as with the poor inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, who
have gained nothing by their intercourse with enlightened Europe but
the poison of whisky.”
These remarks open up the whole question of education and intellectual
culture in Greece—a vista far too wide for our detailed survey on the
present occasion; but we must add a few remarks by way of necessary
correction. We have met persons to whom the university of Athens was as
much “a myth” as any of those nebulous allegories into which German
scepticism weens that it has dissipated the solid traditions of an old
Attic Theseus, and other classical monarchs. But the testimony of our
traveller here is most decided to the point, that the university of
Athens is an existing fact, and one of the most real and significant in
the whole history of the restored nationality of this remarkable people.
All persons who have lived even for a short period in familiar converse
with the Greek people, have felt that, in a remarkable degree, they have
retained that quickness of intellectual perception, that eagerness for
knowledge, which was so characteristic of their ancestors. It is well
known, also, to persons who have looked into the recent history of this
people, that the political revolution, by which they threw off the yoke
of Turkish oppression, was preceded by an intellectual revolution which
taught them to shake off the night of Turkish ignorance; and Corais is,
in fact, a name not less mighty in the history of Greek liberty than
Miaulis or Mavrocordato. Under these circumstances, that education
should have been a main concern with the new Greek government was just
what was to have been expected. To have shown indifference in such a
matter would have argued a complete blindness to the finest capabilities
of the materials under hand. Nor has Bavarian Otho, so far as we can
see, laid himself open to any charge of neglect on this score. Mr
Hettner, in the strictures which he pays in the above passage, proceeds,
we are afraid, on a very insufficient basis of facts, and is also
vulnerable in point of logic. It is far from being true, as he says,
that a people must be educated from below upwards. The upper classes are
everywhere more open to educational influences than the lower; and in
semi-barbarous countries, such as Greece and Russia, it is a necessity
which cannot be avoided, that the elements of intellectual culture
shall, in the first place, be imported from the more advanced
surrounding nations; and the importers of such merchandise must be the
upper classes. To enable them to appropriate, elaborate, and assimilate
the materials thus thrown in upon them, a university is the natural and
most convenient, if not the absolutely indispensable instrument. How, it
may be asked, is the state to obtain well-informed statesmen, lawyers,
theologians, physicians, and teachers, without a university? Surely the
judge must be made wise before the attorney, and the parish priest
rather than the parishioner. A peasant may hew wood and draw water
without learning, but scarcely will a gospel text be well expounded, or
a surgeon’s cut dexterously performed. There appears to us, therefore,
nothing blameworthy in a government of a new country erecting a
university first, and parish schools afterwards. But the facts with
regard to elementary education in Greece are by no means such as our
German reporter represents. It may be quite true that the educational
law of the Greek kingdom, according to which there should be a primary
school in every δημος or _commune_, has not yet been everywhere carried
out; it may be true, also, considering the immense extent of desolate
districts in Greece, that some of the miserable ill-peopled villages
that compose a district are at very inconvenient distances from the
δημος where their school is situated; but this is only a hardship
arising out of the general state of poverty in which the whole country
lies, to which familiar analogies are at hand in the ecclesiastical
condition of many of our own Highland parishes. And with regard to the
general state of education among the lower orders of Greece, the writer
can state, from personal observation, that it is by no means suffering
generally from any such neglect as Mr Hettner imputes to the present
government. During a tour of several weeks in continental Greece, the
present writer was constantly in the habit of conversing with the
peasant boys, as a sort of pleasant amusement after the fatigues of
equestrian travel in the hot days of June; and as the conversation,
however it might start, often ended with schooling and school-books, he
had frequent opportunities of observing, not only the remarkable
quickness of their juvenile Hellenic wit, but the general prevalence of
a fair school-training among the rising generation. The subjects with
which they seemed most conversant, and on which they always produced
three well-thumbed school-books, were Greek history, Scripture history,
and general geography. They very often also produced a Romaic New
Testament; and there seemed to be not the least shyness (as there might
be in Italy) of exhibiting a familiarity with its contents. The New
Testament, indeed, in the Greek Church, does not seem to be a forbidden
book at all. A certain class of priests, no doubt, with Oeconomus at
their head, will look with shyness on the preachings of Protestant
missionaries, and exhibit more or less of that tendency to monopolise
the Scriptures in the hands of self-authorised interpreters, which is so
characteristic of Popery; but in general the Greeks seem to entertain no
suspicion that there is anything in the Scriptures contrary to their
“orthodox faith;” and a jealous sacerdotal tyranny never was established
in the East during the middle ages, and is not at all likely to be
carried through now.[17]
As little of kindly or reasonable criticism do we find in Herr Hettner’s
remarks on the influence of French literature on the living Greek mind,
and on the existing literature of Greece generally. From the very nature
of the case, as we have already said, the literature of Greece must, for
a considerable period, be a literature of appropriation; and as the
French language, for obvious reasons, happens to be the most generally
known among the educated classes in that part of the world, it is as
necessary that those who are in search of amusement should read French
novels, as that those who are in search of strange philological
erudition among ourselves should go to Germany. What our author means by
his remark, that it is “a quite fruitless and premature endeavour in the
Greeks to attempt the founding of a modern Greek literature,” it were
hard to say. No literature, in the highest sense, can be founded till
God sends forth original genius to found it; and it is true also that,
except upon the basis of a certain degree of material prosperity, that
extent of luxurious intellectual culture which we call a national
literature cannot be expected to rise; but in the mean time, till the
conditions favourable to such a higher development shall arise, the
Greeks are busying themselves, and have been busying themselves since
the time of Corais and Righas, mainly in appropriating whatever their
need most loudly calls for, not only from French, but to a great extent
also from German, Italian, and English sources; while, at the same time,
they have not been averse to give whatever nurture was possible to the
first germ and tender blade of an original and truly Hellenic modern
literature. Into the details of this matter our limits do not allow us
to enter; but were the purification of their language the only fruit
which the renewed activity of the liberated Greek mind had produced, it
would have deserved a more kindly mention than the cold sympathy of Mr
Hettner allows. Those who know to what a state centuries of neglect and
abuse had brought the fine language of Homer and Plato, will at once
perceive the great public service performed by that band of patriotic
translators and original writers who have, in the course of two
generations, made Greek—pure Greek—a second time the grand organ of a
national culture and a popular regeneration.[18]
A glimpse into the Greek Church, as it exists at Athens, will now
gratify the just curiosity of many of our readers. Take the following
graphic account of the celebration of Easter:—
“_10th April._
“All is gaiety here to-day. It is Easter week, and Easter is the
principal festival of the Greek Church. Athens presents at this season
a remarkable appearance. The Greeks observe the fasts with great
strictness, therefore they indemnify themselves on Easter morning by
an exhibition of license, in which the paschal lamb performs the
principal part. I was told as a fact, that at Easter, in Athens alone,
from twelve to fifteen thousand, and throughout Greece more than two
hundred thousand, lambs and sheep are slaughtered and eaten. The
country people out of every part of Attica keep driving their flocks
into the city the whole week. The city of the goddess of wisdom is now
full of nothing but bleating lambs.
“When the Greek carries home his lamb, he slings it round his neck,
holding it by the feet crossed over his breast. This is to be seen
with us also; but the sight is especially attractive here, for it was
in this manner the ancients represent Hermes as the guardian and
multiplier of the flocks. So stood the statue of Hermes at Olympia,
Oechalia, and Tanagra. Small marble statues of this kind have even
come down to us, one of which is to be seen in the Pembroke collection
at Wilton House; another, a smaller one, here in the Stoa of Hadrian.
This representation, however, appears most frequently in the oldest
works of Christian art, in which the laden Hermes is turned into a
laden Christ, who often called himself the Good Shepherd, and
expressly says in the Gospel of St Luke, that when the shepherd finds
the sheep, he lays it joyfully on his shoulders.
“In Easter week a fair is also held, and much skill displayed in
decking out the wares. Candles are the chief article of trade; for no
Greek, on this occasion, enters a church without bearing in his hand a
candle or taper. These candles are mostly painted in variegated
colours, and prettily disposed in the booths according to their
different colours—some alike, others in direct contrast. The Greek
people are still sticking fast in old heathen customs and ways of
thinking. These booths, and the greater number of the shops also, are
decked out with all sorts of pictures and images on which the
possessors can lay their hands. They display images of the saints,
pictures of the battles of the Liberation War, portraits of Napoleon
and Frederick the Great, and, not unfrequently, even modern French
pictures of equivocal meaning, coloured and lithographed, all mixed up
together without any attempt at order. Round these pictures hang lamps
and candles, many of them adorned with gold tinsel and stripes of
coloured paper, often artistically twisted together to represent
chandeliers. In the midst of all this lumber stands a huge image of
Christ or of the Virgin; and the object of this is manifest. In true
heathen fashion, Christ and the Virgin are supposed to be really
present in their images, and enjoying the sight of these motley
groups, and lights are placed there that they may see them the better.
How rude and childish all this seems, and yet how entirely
corresponding to the most ancient image-worship!