Theological Essays and Other Papers v2
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Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v2
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But, for the Mediterranean, and especially for the Levant--these he
resigns to richer men; to those who can command from three to five
hundred pounds. And next, having submitted to this preliminary
limitation of radius, he is guided in selecting from what remains by
some indistinct prejudice of his early reading. Many are they in England
who start with a blind faith, inherited from Mrs. Radeliffe's romances,
and thousands beside, that, in Southern France or in Italy, from the
Milanese down to the furthest nook of the Sicilies, it is physically
impossible for the tourist to go wrong. And thus it happens, that a
spectacle, somewhat painful to good sense, is annually renewed of
confiding households leaving a real Calabria in Montgomeryshire or
Devonshire, for dreary, sunburned flats in Bavaria, in Provence, in
Languedoc, or in the 'Legations' of the Papal territory. 'Vintagers,'
at a distance, how romantic a sound! Hops--on the other hand--how
mercenary, nay, how culinary, by the feeling connected with their use,
or their taxation! Arcadian shepherds again, or Sicilian from the 'bank
of delicate Galesus,' can these be other than poetic? The hunter of
the Alpine ibex--can he be other than picturesque? A sandalled monk
mysteriously cowled, and in the _distance_, (but be sure of _that!_)
a band of robbers reposing at noon amidst some Salvator-Rosa-looking
solitudes of Calabria--how often have such elements, semi-consciously
grouped, and flashing upon the indistinct mirrors lighted up by early
reading, seduced English good sense into undertakings terminating in
angry disappointment! We acknowledge that the English are the only
nation under this romantic delusion; but so saying, we pronounce a
very mixed censure upon our country. In itself it is certainly a folly,
which other nations (Germany excepted) are not above, but below: a
folly which presupposes a most remarkable distinction for our
literature, significant in a high moral degree. The plain truth is--that
Southern Europe has no romance in its household literature; has not
an organ for comprehending what it is that we mean by Radcliffian
romance. The old ancestral romance of knightly adventure, the
_Sangreal_, the _Round Table_, &c., exists for Southern Europe as an
antiquarian subject; or if treated aesthetically, simply as a subject
adapted to the ludicrous. And the secondary romance of our later
literature is to the south unintelligible. No Frenchman, Spaniard, or
Italian, at all comprehends the grand poetic feeling employed and
nursed by narrative fictions through the last seventy years in England,
though connected by us with their own supposed scenery.
Generally, in speaking of Southern Europe, it may be affirmed that the
idea of heightening any of the grander passions by association with
the shadowy and darker forms of natural scenery, heaths, mountainous
recesses, 'forests drear,' or the sad desolation of a silent sea-shore,
of the desert, or of the ocean, is an idea not developed amongst them,
nor capable of combining with their serious feelings. By the evidence
of their literature, viz. of their poetry, their drama, their novels,
it is an interest to which the whole race is deaf and blind. A Frenchman
or an Italian (for the Italian, in many features of Gallic
insensibility, will be found ultra-Gallican) can understand a state
in which the moving principle is sympathy with the world of conscience.
Not that his own country will furnish him with any grand exemplification
of such an interest; but, merely as a human being, he cannot escape
from a certain degree of human sympathy with the dread tumults going
on in that vast theatre--a conscience-haunted mind. So far he stands
on common ground; but how this mode of shedding terror can borrow any
alliance from chapels, from ruins, from monastic piles, from Inquisition
dungeons, inscrutable to human justice, or dread of confessionals,--all
this is unfathomably mysterious to Southern Europe. The Southern
imagination is passively and abjectly dependent on _social_ interests;
and these must conform to modern types. Hence, partly, the reason that
only the British travel. The German is generally too poor. The Frenchman
desires nothing but what he finds at home: having Paris at hand, why
should he seek an inferior Paris in distant lands? To an Englishman
this demur could seldom exist. He may think, and, with introductions
into the higher modes of aristocratic life, he may know that London
and St. Petersburg are far more magnificent capitals than Paris; but
_that_ will not repel his travelling instincts. A superior London he
does not credit or desire; but what he seeks is not a superior, it is
a different, life;--not new degrees of old things, but new kinds of
experience are what he asks. His scale of conception is ampler; whereas,
generally, the Frenchman is absorbed into one ideal. Why else is it,
that, after you have allowed for a few Frenchmen carried of necessity
into foreign lands by the diplomatic concerns of so vast a country,
and for a few artists travelling in quest of gain or improvement, we
hear of no French travellers as a class? And why is it that, except
as regards Egypt, where there happens to lurk a secret political object
in reversion for France, German literature builds its historic or
antiquarian researches almost exclusively upon English travellers? Our
travellers may happen or not to be professional; but they are never
found travelling for professional objects. Some have been merchants
or bankers, many have been ecclesiastics; but neither commercial nor
clerical or religious purposes have furnished any working motive,
unless where, as express missionaries, they have prepared their readers
to expect such a bias to their researches. Colonel Leake, the most
accurate of travellers, is a soldier; and in reviewing the field of
Marathon, of Plataa, and others deriving their interest from later
wars, he makes a casual use of his soldiership. Captain Beaufort,
again, as a sailor, uses his nautical skill where it is properly called
for. But in the larger proportions of their works, even the professional
are not professional; whilst such is our academic discipline, that all
alike are scholars. And in this quality of merit the author before us
holds a distinguished rank. He is no artist, though manifesting the
eye learned in art and in landscape. He is not professionally a soldier;
he is so only by that secondary tie, which, in our island, connects
the landed aristocracy with the landed militia; yet though not, in a
technical sense, military, he disputes, with such as _are_, difficult
questions of Greek martial history. He is no regular agriculturist,
yet he conveys a good general impression of the Greek condition with
relation to landed wealth or landed skill, as modified at this moment
by the unfortunate restraints on a soil handed over, in its best parts,
by a Turkish aristocracy that had engrossed them, to a Bavarian that
cannot use them. In short, Mr. Mure is simply a territorial gentleman;
elevated enough to have stood a contest for the representation of a
great Scottish county; of general information; and, in particular, he
is an excellent Greek scholar; which latter fact we gather, not from
anything we have heard, but from these three indications meeting
together;--1. That his verbal use of Greek, in trying the true meaning
of names, (such as Mycene, the island of Asteris, &c.,) is original
as well as accurate. 2. That his display of reading (not volunteered
or selected, but determined by accidents of local suggestion) is ample.
3. That the frugality of his Greek citations is as remarkable as their
pertinence. He is never tempted into trite references; nor ever allows
his page to be encumbered by more of such learning than is severely
needed.
With regard to the general motives for travelling, _his_ for Greece
had naturally some relation to his previous reading; but perhaps an
occasional cause, making his true motives operative, may have been his
casual proximity to Greece at starting--for he was then residing in
Italy. Others, however, amongst those qualified to succeed him, wanting
this advantage, will desire some positive objects of a high value, in
a tour both difficult as regards hardships, costly, and too tedious,
even with the aids of steam, for those whose starting point is England.
These objects, real or imaginary, in a Greek tour, co-extensive with
the new limits of Greek jurisdiction, let us now review:--
I. _The Greek People_.--It is with a view to the Greeks personally,
the men, women, and children, who in one sense at least, viz., as
occupants of the Greek soil, represent the ancient classical Greeks,
that the traveller will undertake this labor. Representatives in one
sense! Why, how now? are they not such in all senses? Do they not trace
their descent from the classical Greeks?' We are sorry to say _not_;
or in so doubtful a way, that the interest derived from that source
is too languid to sustain itself against the opposing considerations.
Some authors have peremptorily denied that one drop of genuine Grecian
blood, transmitted from the countrymen of Pericles, now flows in the
veins of any Greek subject. Falmereyer, the German, is at the head (we
believe) of those who take that view. And many who think Falmereyer
in excess, make these unpleasant concessions; viz., 1st, that in Athens
and throughout Attica, where, by special preference, one would wish
to see the Grecian cast of face predominating, _there_, to a single
family almost, you may affirm all to be Albanian. Well; but what is
Albanian? For the Albanian race, as having its headquarters in regions
once undoubtedly occupied by a Greek race. Epirus, for instance,
Acarnania, &c., may still be Grecian by descent: but unfortunately it
is not so. The Albanians are no more Grecian, and notoriously no more
represent the old legitimate Greeks, who thumped the Persians and whom
the Romans thumped, than the modern English represent the Britons, or
the modern Lowland Scotch represent the Scoti, of the centuries
immediately following the Christian era. Both English and Lowland
Scotch, for the first five centuries after the Christian era, were
ranging the forests of north Germany or of southern Sweden. The men
who fought with Caesar, if now represented at all, are so in Wales,
in Cornwall, or other western recesses of the island. And the Albanians
are held to be a Sclavonic race--such at least is the accredited theory;
so that modern Greece is connected with Russia not merely by the bond
of a common church, but also by blood, since the Russian people is the
supreme branch of the Sclavonic race. This is the first concession
made which limits any remnant of the true Greek blood to parts of the
ancient Hellas not foremost in general interest, nor most likely to
be visited.
A second is, that if any claim to a true Grecian descent does exist
extensively, it must be looked for amongst Mahometan clans, descended
from renegades of former days, now confounded with our Mussulmans
ejected from Greece, and living in Thrace, or other regions under the
Sultan's sceptre. But even here the purity of the descent is in the
last degree uncertain.
This case is remarkable. From the stationary character of all things
in the East, there was a probability beforehand, that several
nations--as in particular, four that we will mention: the Greeks, the
Egyptians, the Persians, the Affghans--should have presented the same
purity of descent, untainted by alien blood, which we find in the
children of Ishmael, and the children of his half-brother the patriarch
Isaac. Yet, in that case, where would have been the miraculous unity
of race predicted for these two nations exclusively by the Scriptures?
The fact is, the four nations mentioned have been so profoundly changed
by deluges of foreign conquest or foreign intrusion, that at this day,
perhaps, no solitary individual could be found whose ancestral line
had not been confounded with other bloods. The Arabs only, and the
Jews, are under no suspicion of this hybrid mixture. Vast deserts,
which insulate one side of the Arabian peninsula; the sea, which
insulates the other sides, have, with other causes, preserved the Arab
blood from all general attaint of its purity. Ceremonies, institutions,
awful scruples of conscience, and through many centuries, misery and
legal persecution, have maintained a still more impassable gulf between
the Jews and other races. Spain is the only Christian land where the
native blood was at any time intermingled with the Jewish; and hence
one cause for the early vigilance of the Inquisition in that country
more than elsewhere; hence also the horror of a Jewish taint in the
Spanish hidalgo; Judaism masquing itself in Christianity, was so keenly
suspected, or so haughtily disclaimed, simply because so largely it
existed. It was, however, under a very peculiar state of society, that,
even during an interval, and in a corner, Jews _could_ have intermarried
with Christians. Generally, the intensity of reciprocated hatred, long
oppression upon the one side, deep degradation upon the other,
perpetuated the alienation, had the repulsion of creeds even relaxed.
And hence, at this day, the intense purity of the Jewish blood, though
probably more than six millions of individuals.
But with respect to the Grecians, as no barrier has ever existed between
them and any other [Footnote 3] race than the Turks, and these only
in the shape of religious scruples, which on one side had the highest
political temptation to give way, there was no pledge stronger than
individual character, there could be no national or corporate pledge,
for the maintenance of this insulation. As therefore, in many recorded
cases, the strongest barrier (viz., that against Mahometan alliances)
is known to have given way, as in other cases innumerable, but
forgotten, it must be presumed to have given way? this inference
follows, viz., that if anywhere the Grecian blood remains in purity,
the fact will be entirely without evidence; and for us, the result
will be the same as if the fact had no existence. Simply as a matter
of curiosity, if our own opinion were asked as to the probability,
that in any situation, a true-blooded population yet survives at this
day, we should answer that, if anywhere, it will be found in the most
sterile of the Greek islands. Yet, even there the bare probability of
such a result will have been open to many disturbances; and especially
if the island happen to be much in the way of navigators, or the harbors
happen to be convenient, or if it happen to furnish a good stage in
a succession of stages, (according to the ancient usages of
Mediterranean seamanship), or if it possessed towns containing
accumulations of provisions or other stores, or offered good
watering-places; under any of these endowments, an island might be
tempting to pirates, or to roving adventurers, or to remote overpeopled
parts of Italy, Africa, Asia Minor, &c.; in short, to any vicious city
where but one man amongst the poorer classes knew the local invitations
to murderous aggressions. Under so many contingencies operative through
so many centuries, and revolutions so vast upon nations so multiplied,
we believe that even a poor unproductive soil is no absolute pledge
for non-molestation to the most obscure of recesses.
For instance, the poorest district of the large island Crete, might
(if any could) be presumed to have a true Greek population. There is
little to be found in that district beyond the means of bare
subsistence; and (considering the prodigious advantages of the ground
for defensive war) little to be looked for by an invader but hard
knocks, 'more kicks than halfpence,' so long as there was any indigenous
population to stand up and kick. But often it must have happened in
a course of centuries, that plague, small-pox, cholera, the
sweating-sickness, or other scourges of universal Europe and Asia,
would absolutely depopulate a region no larger than an island; as in
fact, within our brief knowledge of the New Hollanders, has happened
through small-pox alone, to entire tribes of those savages, and, upon
a scale still more awful, to the American Indians. In such cases, mere
strangers would oftentimes enter upon the lands as a derelict. The
Sfakians, in that recess of Crete which we have noticed, are not
supposed by scholars to be a true Grecian race; nor do we account them
such. And one reason of our own, superadded to the common reasons
against allowing a Greek origin, is this:--The Sfakians are a
large-limbed, fine-looking race, more resembling the Wallachians whom
we have already noticed, than the other races of Crete, or the other
Greek islanders, and like the Wallachians, are often of colossal
stature. But the classical Greeks, we are pretty certain, were a race
of little men. We have more arguments than one for this belief. But
one will be sufficient. The Athenian painter who recorded the battle
of Marathon in fresco upon the walls of a portico, was fined for
representing the Persians as conspicuously taller than the Greeks. But
why?--why should any artist have ascribed such an advantage to the
enemy, unless because it was a fact? What plausible motive, other than
the notoriety of the fact, can be imagined in the painter? In reality,
this artist proceeded as a general rule amongst the Greeks, and a rule
strictly, if not almost superstitiously observed, and of ancient
establishment, which was, that all conquerors in any contest, or at
any games, olympic, or whatsoever they might be, were memorialized by
statues exactly representing the living man in the year of victory,
taken even with their personal defects. The dimensions were preserved
with such painful fidelity, as though the object had been to collect
and preserve for posterity, a series from every generation, of those
men who might be presumed by their trophies to have been the models
by natural prefiguration for that particular gymnastic accomplishment
in which they had severally excelled. [See the _Acad. des Inscriptions_,
about the year 1725.] At the time of Marathon, fought against the
Lieutenant of Darius, the Olympic games had existed for two hundred
years, _minus_ thirteen; and at the closing battle of Plataea, fought
against the Lieutenant of Xerxes, for two hundred, _minus_ only two.
During all this period, it is known for certain, perhaps even from far
older times, that this rule of exact _portraiture_, a rigid demand for
duplicates or fac-similes of the individual men, had prevailed in
Greece. The enormous amount of Persian corpses buried by the Greeks,
(or perhaps by Persian prisoners,) in the Polyandrium on the field of
battle, would be measured and observed by the artists against the
public application for their services. And the armor of those select
men-at-arms, or [Greek Text: oplitai], who _had_ regular suits of
armor, would remain for many centuries suspended as consecrated
anathaeyata in the Grecian temples; so that Greek artists would never
want sure records of the Persian dimensions. Were it not for this rule,
applied sternly to all real conflicts, it might have been open to
imagine that the artist had exaggerated the persons of the enemy by
way of exalting to posterity the terrors which their ancestors had
faced; a more logical vanity than that inverse artifice imputed to
Alexander, of burying in the Punjaub gigantic mangers and hyperbolical
suits of armor, under the conceit of impressing remote ages with a
romantic idea of the bodily proportions in the men and horses composing
the _elite_ of the Macedonian army. This was the true secret for
disenchanting the martial pretensions of his army. Were you indeed
such colossal men? In that case, the less is your merit; of which most
part belongs manifestly to a _physical_ advantage: and in the ages of
no gunpowder the advantage was less equivocal than it is at present.
In the other direction, the logic of the Greek artist who painted
Marathon is more cogent. The Persians were numerically superior, though
doubtless this superiority has been greatly exaggerated, not wilfully
so much as from natural mistakes incident to the Oriental composition
of armies; and still more on the Grecian side, from extreme inaccuracy
in the original reports, which was so great that even Herodotus, who
stood removed from Plataea at the time of commencing his labors, by
pretty much the same interval as we in 1842 from Waterloo, is rightly
observed by Colonel Leake (_Travels in Greece_) to have stated to him
the Greek numbers on the great day of Plataea, rather from the basis
of fixed rateable contingents which each state was bound to furnish,
than of any positive return that he could allege. However, on the
whole, it seems undeniable that even at Platsea, much more at Marathon,
the Persians had the advantage in numbers. If, besides this numerical
advantage, they had another in qualities of bodily structure, the
inference was the greater to the Grecian merit. So far from slighting
a Persian advantage which really existed, a Greek painter might rather
be suspected of inventing one which did not. We apprehend, however,
that he invented nothing. For, besides that subsequent intercourse
with Persians would have defeated the effect of his representation had
it reposed on a fiction, it is known that the Greeks did not rightly
appreciate tallness. 'Procerity,' to use Dr. Johnson's stately word
in speaking of the stately Prussian regiment, was underrated in Greece;
perhaps for this reason, that in some principal gymnastic contests,
running, leaping, horsemanship, and charioteering, it really _was_ a
disadvantage. And hence possibly arose a fact which has been often
noticed with surprise; viz. that the legendary Hercules was never
delineated by the Greek artists as more than an athletic man of the
ordinary standard with respect to height and bulk. The Greek imagination
was extravagantly mastered by physical excellence; this is proved by
the almost inconceivable value attached to gymnastic merit. Nowhere,
except in Greece, could a lyrical enthusiasm have been made available
in such a service. But amongst physical qualities they did not
adequately value that of lofty stature. At all events, the rule of
portraiture--the whole portrait and nothing but the portrait--which
we have mentioned as absolute for Greece, coerced the painter into the
advantageous distinction for the Persians which we have mentioned. And
this rule, _as servile to the fact_, is decisive for the Greek
proportions of body in comparison with the Persian.
But were not some tribes amongst the Greeks celebrated for their
stature? Yes; the Daulians, for instance, both men and women: and in
some modern tourist we remember a distinction of the same kind claimed
for the _present_ occupants of Daulis. But the ancient claim bad
reference only to the Grecian scale. Tall, were they? Yes, but tall
for Grecians. The Romans were possibly a shade taller than the Greeks,
but they also were a little race of men. This is certain. And, if a
man were incautious enough to plead in answer the standard of the
modern Italians, who are often both tall and athletic, he must be
reminded that to Tramontanes, in fact, such as Goths, Heruli, Scyrra,
Lombards, and other tribes of the Rhine, Lech, or Danube, Italy is
indebted for the improved breed of her carcasses. [Footnote 4] Man,
instead of degenerating according to the scandalous folly of books,
very slowly improves everywhere; and the carcasses of the existing
generation, weighed off, million for million, against the carcasses
of any pre-Christian generation, we feel confident would be found to
have the advantage by many thousands of stones [the butchers' stone
is eight pounds] upon each million. And universally the best _prima
facie_ title to a pure Greek descent will be an elegantly formed, but
somewhat under-sized, person, with a lively, animated, and intelligent
physiognomy; of which last may be said, that, if never in the highest
sense rising to the noble, on the other hand, it never sinks to the
brutal. At Liverpool we used to see in one day many hundreds of Greek
sailors from all parts of the Levant; these were amongst the most
probable descendants from the children of Ion or of OEolus, and the
character of their person was what we describe--short but symmetrical
figures and faces, upon the whole, delicately chiselled. These men
generally came from the Greek islands.
Meantime, what is Mr. Mure's opinion upon this much-vexed question?
Into the general problem he declines to enter; not, we may be sure,
from want of ability to treat it with novelty and truth. But we collect
that he sees no reason for disputing the general impression, that an
Albanian or hybrid population is mainly in possession of the soil, and
that perhaps he would say, _lis est de paupere regno_; for, if there
is no beauty concerned in the decision, nor any of the quality of
physical superiority, the less seems the value of the dispute. To
appropriate a set of plain faces, to identify the descent of ordinary
bodies, seems labor lost. And in the race now nominally claiming to
be Grecian, Mr. Mure evidently finds only plain faces, and ordinary
bodies. Those, whom at any time he commends for beauty or other
advantages of person, are tribes confessedly alien; and, on the other
hand, with respect to those claiming to be Greek, he pronounces a
pointed condemnation by disparaging their women. It is notoriously a
duty of the female sex to be beautiful, if they can, with a view to
the recreation of us males--whom Lily's Grammar affirms to be 'of the
worthier gender.' Sitting at breakfast, (which consisted 'of red
herrings and Gruyere cheese,') upon the shore of Megara, Mr. Mure
beheld the Megarensian lasses mustering in force for a general ablution
of the Megarensian linen. The nymphs had not turned out upon the usual
principles of feminine gatherings--
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