The Press. — London, England, 1858-07-10 00:00:00

111.111.11.1110111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 THE PRESS, JULY 10, 1858. 655 _____, fittraturt, Peloponnesus : Notes of Study and Travel. By William George Clark, Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. London : John W. Parker and Son. OP the two chief regions of classical antiquity, Greece is probably the one which presents to a modern traveller the greater amount of poetic interest. The associations of Italy are, indeed, more copious and more capable of exact verifica tion. But that which makes them so, brings them for those very reasons more into connection with the prosaic side of history ; with its useful and practical aspect; with its laws, its govern ments, and its material civilization. The tradi tions, too, of Italy—except in the case of Pom peii and Herculaneum—form an almost unbroken series, in which the ancient portion is not abruptly separated, but is shaded off into mediaeval and modern, by insensible gradations. And the latter portions, including as they do events of surpassing magnitude and importance, set up, as it were, a rivalry with the earlier, and dim its splendour by the lustre of recent glory. The long line of consuls and emperors is matched by the protracted lineage of the Catholic hierarchy ; the Mamertine prison of the accomplices of Catiline, of Jugurtha, and of Sejanus, is conse crated by tradition as the cell of St. Peter ; the Vatican, vast enough for an eighth hill of Rome, emulates, in fact as in aspect, the modernized Capitol ; the " eloquent air breathes, burns with" Rienzi as well as with Cicero ; and if the amphi theatre of Vespasian recalls the butchery of gladiators, whose savage progeny returned to avenge them on the declining empire of his suc cessors, not less does the dome of Michaelangelo suggest those corruptions of faith and practice which originated the sale of indulgences and roused to action the resistless spirit of Luther. The landscape reflects these features of its his tory equally with the stronghold of imperial power. Soracte, indeed, and Bandusia remain, and the Anio still irrigates the orchards of Tibur; but frowning feudal fortress and pictu resque mediaeval monastery dispute with Cyclo pean walls and shattered columns the dominion of the land they once swayed or sanctified. In Greece, all is different. There the events of the period, when the land had a history of its own, stand out clear and distinct ; and no suc cession of subsequent occurrences affiliates the events of yesterday to the twilight of fable. • Ancient Greece means races and nationalities ; modern Greece is "a geographical expression." Between the last efforts of the Achtean league and the history of modern Europe is fixed a great desert, peopled only by the phantoms of expiring philosophies, or the spectres of those ruined cities which Sulpicius saw as he sailed from /Egina to Megara.—Homer and Phidias, Themistocles, Brasidas, and Plato, hold their territory still by the tenure of genius and immortality, with no competitor save the solitary figure whose letters were read at Corinth, and who preached from the platform of the Areo pagus the knowledge of the Unknown God. The history of Italy is like one of its own rivers, flowing through every variety of scenery, but traceable through all the sinuosities of its course; the history of Greece and of the Greeks is like one of those streams which the traveller constantly encounters in its limestone districts, brilliant, youthful, and abundant in the valleys of its birth, but either lost, as it proceeds, in a marsh, or dried up in its stony channel, or swal lowed, in full vigour, by a chasm, again to re appear, if at all, with diminished importance and doubtful authenticity. Greece, too, like Spain and Palestine, is one of those countries where facilities of move ment and appliances of civilization have done little or nothing to vulgarize the scenes of in terest. Inns are infrequent ; roads hardly exist; no railway-engine, as in the Bay of Naples, sends the shrill scream of Progress into the ear of dusty Antiquity • and the distances are too great to accommodate the knapsack-bearing Pedestrians who people the paths of Switzerland, with the certainty of rest, refreshment, and society at the close of each day's journey. Nor is a tour in Greece likely to be a cheap one. In dependently of the long distance from England, the means of locomotion are expensive, and the discomfort occasionally considerable. Consider ing also the kind of knowledge which is required for the due appreciation of Hellenic sites, it will be evident that the class of travellers in Greece must always be of a somewhat limited and ex clusive character. But no country could be imagined more attractive to a well-read English man, with sufficient money, health, and leisure before him ' • and in such regions, a Cambridge tutor, neither undistinguished in scholarship nor unversed in the ways of popular literature, may well be expected to make not the worst use of his time. Mr. Clark's tour seems to have lasted between two and three months,—part of March, April, and May, 1856,—and was a tolerably complete one, comprehending Corinth, Alycenm, Argos, Man tinca, Sparta, Kalamata, Navarino, Messene, Olympia, Pyrgo, Elis, Patras, and Sicyon. Any one who takes a map and observes the relative position of these places will see that the route which connects them passes through the most interesting localities in the Pelopennesus. The author kept a careful diary, and his volume is the result of personal observation combined with an examination, on the spot, of Colonel Leake's " Travels" and Murray's " Handbook," and en riched by references to classical authorities at home. Its value is mainly topographical, and many portions will afford but little interest to the general reader ; but it abounds in picturesque passages—not purple patches in a dry setting of antiquarian dissertation, but clear descriptions of the scenery, fresh with somewhat of the air of a southern spring, and radiant with somewhat of the colour of Greek sky, soil, and foliage. With its sober enthusiasm, its critical tone, its out-of door spirit, and its classical intention, it is as cha racteristic of the English college Don as Mm. About's volume, with its mercurial carelessness, its pictorial grouping, and its tales of piquant scandal, is of the modern French litti:rateur. Mr. Clark has striven to " interest, not merely ar " chteologists, but educated men generally," and to make his hook " grave in substance and light " in manner." We do not think that it will, as he fears, prove "trivial to the one class and pe dantic to the other" ; but most persons who have no immediate concern with the identification of ancient sites will reserve the topographical por tions for perusal on the spots to which they refer, and will find themselves attracted by the para graphs which relate either to the grand natural features of the country or to the memorable his tory of its inhabitants. In verifying Hellenic remains, Mr. Clark is by no means satisfied with the ipse dixit of Colonel Leake or of any other writer. Thus, he questions the received notions that 2Eschylus and So phocles, in the Agamemnon and Electra respec tively, intended to adhere to the true topography of either Argos or Mycente. Ile shares the doubts of Colonel Mure as to the underground chambers at the latter place, and conjectures them to have probably been constructed as tombs. We content ourselves with drawing attention to these points, which it would he useless to inves tigate from the data afforded by description alone, and turn with more confidence to the phy sical features of the spot,—the level plain, dotted with green fruit-trees and black spires of cypress, and bounded by precipitous mountain ranges, over which tower in the distance the snow-clad summits of Parnassus. From Argos Mr. Clark proceeded to Karya, a village which does not appear to represent any ancient site, but the beauty of which makes it deserving of commemoration for its own sake. After the "thirst" plain of Argos, it was a plea sant change to ride up the valley of the Cha radrus and face the fresh breezes which, over greener herbage and more sparkling waters, brought tidings of the pastoral Arcadia. Karya itself seems to resemble those Italian villages near Itadicofani which, with their red-tiled roofs and slender towers, peer forth from the rich woodlands of Mount Amiata, and refresh the eye of the traveller, wearied with the inter minable slopes of the yellow Apennine, by their similarity to the cool landscapes of Claude or Poassin : In about four hours and a half we came to Karya, a little village nestling in a tt ell-watered, well-sheltered hollow, on the main range of Arteluisitim. The white-walled, red roofed houses are scattered on the slope, each with its own green plot of field and garden beside it. A wreath of blue smoke curled up froui each chinineyless roof, finding ita way through the tiles as best it might. We thought that w e had never seen anything so beautiful. There are, I dar e Ray, a thousand villages, in high Alpine valleys, which ar e every whit as beautiful as Karya ; but it is only after the eye has been wearied with a succession of barren grey mountains and burnt brown plains . that it feels the true pleasure of resting on verdure. • • • • We left Karya about seven next morning, and . . . . . waited fur our troop at an angle of the road which looks over the peaceful village with its smoking roofs. Close by was a water•mill, constructed thus :—a strong buttress of wall is built against the hillside, and on the lop of it a series of wooden troughs convey a runlet of water at the proper angle to the wheel. The dripping wall was tufted with lady-ferns and all manner of luxuriant grasses. We had often occasion to admire the patient ingenuity with which a scanty stream of water was brought for miles, in a channel made along the hillside, to turn one of these mill wheels, and then distributed to the fields below. It was often our lot to rest in the neighbourhood of such a mill, for there we were sure to find the two essential requisites, water and shade. I remember, in particular, this of Karya, and the pleasant half-hour we spent listening to the groaning of the wheel and the plashing of the water. There was a fresh Alpine breeze blowing, a bright sunshine glistening on dewy grass —earth and sky " washed," as it were," with morning." It was a scene which would have inspired Theocritus with an idyl, destitute indeed of sentiment, but full of that frank and genuine human feeling which is the salt of literature. I am persuaded that if travellers' books were written in the same honest spirit, and without reference to the effect to be produced on sentimental readers, we should find that the scenes which dwelt most vividly on their memory were those associated,with recollections of personal comfort and enjoyment. The latter passage supplies the key-note to Mr. Clark's own tone of mind, and inaugurates the discussion of a theme on which much has lately been written, but which must still be interesting —the taste for the Picturesque among the ancient Greeks. Mr. Clark is not entirely satisfied with the reasons usually assigned for the neglect of it, such as the indifference produced by familiarity, the practical and sensuous character of the people, and the deification of natural objects, which drew off admiration from the visible tree or fountain to fix it upon the latent divinity. He thinks that such a mountain as Taygetus would still be sublime to an Athenian ; that a practical turn of character does not necessarily (witness Scott—and we may add, most of his countrymen) involve indifference to such matters ; and that the genuine belief in natural divinities had died out before the historic age of Greece. He believes that the language in which that deification was expressed, conveyed to a Greek ear the feelings of beauty and majesty which in modern times are embodied in a picturesque description; and that the epithets attached on certain occasions to natural objects prove that their aspect was felt to be sympatheti cally associated with certain moods of the mind that perceived them. He further observes that the present taste for fine scenery is of compara tively modern growth, arising from "the growth "of the natural sciences, the exhaustion of old " subjects for poetry and painting, and the habit "of holiday-tours " ; and believes that itwill pass away, making the poems of Wordsworth and others affected or unintelligible to our de scendants. In these remarks he is corroborated by high authorities. Macaulay, in speaking of the Highlands, expresses his conviction that scenery cannot be enjoyed when the road is dangerous. Carlyle, in " Sartor Resartus," sneers at the fondness for " view-hunting," which he deems a purely modern fashion. Emerl son remarks that the beauty of Nature, if too eagerly hunted, becomes a show merely, and mocks us with its unreality. And Dr. Sewell, in commenting on the " bit of green" in Plato's " Pluedrus," is severe on the propensity as sickly and sentimental, and traces it, like many other bad things, to the declamations of the Sophists. We do not think that any of these views is entirely conclusive, or that even Mr. Cope's interesting Essay (Cambridge Essays, 1856) quite exhausted the subject. But as we do not, on the other hand, profess to have attained to a complete solution of the difficulty, we may for the present be content with registering the additional idea which Mr. Clark has contributed, and which appears to us both novel and im portant : But there was one reason which has not been brought forward yet, why this could not have been. It is a mood of mind which requires seclusion and solitude for its aliment. The Greeks were the most gregarious of people; their literature was intended tar the theatre and the stow, to be declaimed and recited and sung is public, not read in the closet. It is impossible for a thousand people at once to be sentimental and tender on the beauties of