Kitabı oku: «The Life of Lord Byron», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XV

Leave Utraikee—Dangerous Pass in the Woods—Catoona—Quarrel between the Guard and Primate of the Village—Makala—Gouri—Missolonghi—Parnassus

Having spent the night at Utraikee, Byron and his friend continued their journey southward. The reports of the state of the country induced them to take ten additional soldiers with them, as their road for the first two hours lay through dangerous passes in the forest. On approaching these places fifteen or twenty of the party walked briskly on before, and when they had gone through the pass halted until the travellers came up. In the woods two or three green spots were discovered on the road-side, and on them Turkish tombstones, generally under a clump of trees, and near a well or fountain.

When they had passed the forest they reached an open country, whence they sent back the ten men whom they had brought from Utraikee. They then passed on to a village called Catoona, where they arrived by noon. It was their intention to have proceeded farther that day, but their progress was interrupted by an affair between their Albanian guard and the primate of the village. As they were looking about, while horses were collecting to carry their luggage, one of the soldiers drew his sword at the primate, the Greek head magistrate; guns were cocked, and in an instant, before either Lord Byron or Mr Hobhouse could stop the affray, the primate, throwing off his shoes and cloak, fled so precipitately that he rolled down the hill and dislocated his shoulder. It was a long time before they could persuade him to return to his house, where they lodged, and when he did return he remarked that he cared comparatively little about his shoulder to the loss of a purse with fifteen sequins, which had dropped out of his pocket during the tumble. The hint was understood.

Catoona is inhabited by Greeks only, and is a rural, well-built village. The primate’s house was neatly fitted up with sofas. Upon a knoll, in the middle of the village, stood a schoolhouse, and from that spot the view was very extensive. To the west are lofty mountains, ranging from north to south, near the coast; to the east a grand romantic prospect in the distance, and in the foreground a green valley, with a considerable river winding through a long line of country.

They had some difficulty in procuring horses at Catoona, and in consequence were detained until past eleven o’clock the next morning, and only travelled four hours that day to Makala, a well-built stone village, containing about forty houses distinct from each other, and inhabited by Greeks, who were a little above the condition of peasants, being engaged in pasturage and a small wool-trade.

The travellers were now in Carnia, where they found the inhabitants much better lodged than in the Albanian villages. The house in which they slept at this place resembled those old mansions which are to be met with in the bottoms of the Wiltshire Downs. Two green courts, one before and the other behind, were attached to it, and the whole was surrounded by a high and thick wall, which shut out the prospect, but was necessary in a country so frequently overrun by strong bands of freebooters.

From Makala they proceeded through the woods, and in the course of their journey passed three new-made graves, which the Albanians pointing at as they rode by, said they were “robbers.” In the course of the journey they had a distant view of the large town of Vraikore, on the left bank of the Aspro, but they did not approach it, crossing the river by a ferry to the village of Gouria, where they passed the night.

Leaving that place in the morning, they took an easterly direction, and continued to ride across a plain of cornfields, near the banks of the river, in a rich country; sometimes over stone causeways, and between the hedges of gardens and olive-groves, until they were stopped by the sea. This was that fruitful region formerly called Paracheloïtis, which, according to classic allegory, was drained or torn from the river Achelous, by the perseverance of Hercules and presented by him for a nuptial present to the daughter of Oëneus.

The water at which they had now arrived was rather a salt marsh than the sea, a shallow bay stretching from the mouth of the Gulf of Lepanto into the land for several miles. Having dismissed their horses, they passed over in boats to Natolico, a town which stood in the water. Here they fell in with a hospitable Jew, who made himself remembered by saying that he was honoured in their having partaken of his little misery.

Natolico, where they stayed for the night, was a well-built town; the houses of timber, chiefly of two stories, and about six hundred in number. Having sent on their baggage in boats, they themselves proceeded to the town of Missolonghi, so celebrated since as having suffered greatly during the recent rebellion of the Greeks, but more particularly as the place where Lord Byron died.

Missolonghi is situated on the south side of the salt marsh or shallow, along the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth, nearly opposite to Patras. It is a dull, and I should think an unwholesome place. The marsh, for miles on each side, has only from a foot to two feet of water on it, but there is a channel for boats marked out by perches. When I was there the weather was extremely wet, and I had no other opportunity of seeing the character of the adjacent country than during the intervals of the showers. It was green and pastoral, with a short skirt of cultivation along the bottom of the hills.

Abrupt and rapid as the foregoing sketch of the journey through Albania has been, it is evident from the novelty of its circumstances that it could not be performed without leaving deep impressions on the susceptible mind of the poet. It is impossible, I think, not to allow that far more of the wildness and romantic gloom of his imagination was derived from the incidents of this tour, than from all the previous experience of his life. The scenes he visited, the characters with whom he became familiar, and above all, the chartered feelings, passions, and principles of the inhabitants, were greatly calculated to supply his mind with rare and valuable poetical materials. It is only in this respect that the details of his travels are interesting. – Considered as constituting a portion of the education of his genius, they are highly curious, and serve to show how little, after all, of great invention is requisite to make interesting and magnificent poetry.

From Missolonghi the travellers passed over the Gulf of Corinth to Patras, then a rude, half-ruined, open town with a fortress on the top of a hill; and on the 4th of December, in the afternoon, they proceeded towards Corinth, but halted at Vostizza, the ancient Ægium, where they obtained their first view of Parnassus, on the opposite side of the gulf; rising high above the other peaks of that hilly region, and capped with snow. It probably was during this first visit to Vostizza that the Address to Parnassus was suggested.

 
Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey
Not in the frensy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing?
The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by
Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string,
Though from thy heights no more one muse will wave her wing.
 
 
Oft have I dream’d of thee! whose glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man’s divinest lore;
And now I view thee, ’tis, alas! with shame
That I in feeblest accents must adore.
When I recount thy worshippers of yore
I tremble, and can only bend the knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy
In silent joy, to think at last I look on thee.
 

CHAPTER XVI

Vostizza—Battle of Lepanto—Parnassus—Livadia—Cave at Trophonius—The Fountains of Oblivion and Memory – Chæronéa—Thebes—Athens

Vostizza was then a considerable town, containing between three and four thousand inhabitants, chiefly Greeks. It stands on a rising ground on the Peloponnesian side of the Gulf of Corinth. I say stands, but I know not if it has survived the war. The scenery around it will always make it delightful, while the associations connected with the Achaian League, and the important events which have happened in the vicinity, will ever render the site interesting. The battle of Lepanto, in which Cervantes lost his hand, was fought within sight of it.

What a strange thing is glory! Three hundred years ago all Christendom rang with the battle of Lepanto, and yet it is already probable that it will only be interesting to posterity as an incident in the life of one of the private soldiers engaged in it. This is certainly no very mournful reflection to one who is of opinion that there is no permanent fame, but that which is obtained by adding to the comforts and pleasures of mankind. Military transactions, after their immediate effects cease to be felt, are little productive of such a result. Not that I value military virtues the less by being of this opinion; on the contrary, I am the more convinced of their excellence. Burke has unguardedly said, ‘that vice loses half its malignity by losing its grossness’; but public virtue ceases to be useful when it sickens at the calamities of necessary war. The moment that nations become confident of security, they give way to corruption. The evils and dangers of war seem as requisite for the preservation of public morals as the laws themselves; at least it is the melancholy moral of history, that when nations resolve to be peaceful with respect to their neighbours, they begin to be vicious with respect to themselves. But to return to the travellers.

On the 14th of December they hired a boat with fourteen men and ten oars, and sailed to Salona; thence they proceeded to Crisso, and rode on to Delphi, ascending the mountain on horseback, by a steep, craggy path towards the north-east. After scaling the side of Parnassus for about an hour, they saw vast masses of rock, and fragments of stone, piled in a perilous manner above them, with niches and sepulchres, and relics, and remains on all sides.

They visited and drank of Castalia, and the prophetic font, Cassotis; but still, like every other traveller, they were disappointed. Parnassus is an emblem of the fortune that attends the votaries of the Muses, harsh, rugged, and barren. The woods that once waved on Delphi’s steep have all passed away, and may now be sought in vain.

A few traces of terraces may yet be discovered – here and there the stump of a column, while niches for receiving votive offerings are numerous among the cliffs, but it is a lone and dismal place; Desolation sits with Silence, and Ruin there is so decayed as to be almost Oblivion.

Parnassus is not so much a single mountain as the loftiest of a range; the cloven summit appears most conspicuous when seen from the south. The northern view is, however, more remarkable, for the cleft is less distinguishable, and seven lower peaks suggest, in contemplation with the summits, the fancy of so many seats of the Muses. These peaks, nine in all, are the first of the hills which receive the rising sun, and the last that in the evening part with his light.

From Delphi the travellers proceeded towards Livadia, passing in the course of the journey the confluence of the three roads where Œdipus slew his father, an event with its hideous train of fatalities which could not be recollected by Byron on the spot, even after the tales of guilt he had gathered in his Albanian journeys, without agitating associations.

At Livadia they remained the greater part of three days, during which they examined with more than ordinary minuteness the cave of Trophonius, and the streams of the Hercyna, composed of the mingled waters of the two fountains of Oblivion and Memory.

From Livadia, after visiting the battlefield of Chæronéa (the birthplace of Plutarch), and also many of the almost innumerable storied and consecrated spots in the neighbourhood, the travellers proceeded to Thebes – a poor town, containing about five hundred wooden houses, with two shabby mosques and four humble churches. The only thing worthy of notice in it is a public clock, to which the inhabitants direct the attention of strangers as proudly as if it were indeed one of the wonders of the world. There they still affect to show the fountain of Dirce and the ruins of the house of Pindar. But it is unnecessary to describe the numberless relics of the famous things of Greece, which every hour, as they approached towards Athens, lay more and more in their way. Not that many remarkable objects met their view; yet fragments of antiquity were often seen, though many of them were probably brought far from the edifices to which they had originally belonged; not for their beauty, or on account of the veneration which the sight of them inspired, but because they would burn into better lime than the coarser rock of the lulls. Nevertheless, abased and returned into rudeness as all things were, the presence of Greece was felt, and Byron could not resist the inspirations of her genius.

 
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal! though no more; though fallen, great;
Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth
And long-accustom’d bondage uncreate?
Not such thy Sons who whilom did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait:
Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb!
 

In the course of the afternoon of the day after they had left Thebes, in attaining the summit of a mountain over which their road lay, the travellers beheld Athens at a distance, rising loftily, crowned with the Acropolis in the midst of the plain, the sea beyond, and the misty hills of Egina blue in the distance.

On a rugged rock rising abruptly on the right, near to the spot where this interesting vista first opened, they beheld the remains of the ancient walls of Phyle, a fortress which commanded one of the passes from Bæotia into Attica, and famous as the retreat of the chief patriots concerned in destroying the thirty tyrants of Athens.

 
Spirit of freedom! when on Phyle’s brow
Thou sat’st with Thrasybulus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord it o’er thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed unmann’d.
 

Such was the condition in which the poet found the country as he approached Athens; and although the spirit he invoked has reanimated the dejected race he then beheld around him, the traveller who even now revisits the country will still look in vain for that lofty mien which characterises the children of liberty. The fetters of the Greeks have been struck off, but the blains and excoriated marks of slavery are still conspicuous upon them; the sinister eye, the fawning voice, the skulking, crouching, base demeanour, time and many conflicts only can efface.

The first view of the city was fleeting and unsatisfactory; as the travellers descended from the mountains the windings of the road among the hills shut it out. Having passed the village of Casha, they at last entered upon the slope, and thence into the plain of Attica but the intervening heights and the trees kept the town concealed, till a turn of the path brought it full again before them; the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon – the Museum hill – and the Monument of Philopappus —

 
Ancient of Days – august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone – glimmering through the dreams of things that were:
First in the race that led to glory’s goal,
They won, and pass’d away: – is this the whole?
A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!
The warrior’s weapon, and the sophist’s stole
Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.
 

CHAPTER XVII

Athens—Byron’s Character of the modern Athenians—Visit to Eleusis—Visit to the Caverns at Vary and Keratéa—Lost in the Labyrinths of the latter

It has been justly remarked, that were there no other vestiges of the ancient world in existence than those to be seen at Athens, they are still sufficient of themselves to justify the admiration entertained for the genius of Greece. It is not, however, so much on account of their magnificence as of their exquisite beauty, that the fragments obtain such idolatrous homage from the pilgrims to the shattered shrines of antiquity. But Lord Byron had no feeling for art, perhaps it would be more correct to say he affected none: still, Athens was to him a text, a theme; and when the first rush of curiosity has been satisfied, where else can the palled fancy find such a topic.

To the mere antiquary, this celebrated city cannot but long continue interesting, and to the classic enthusiast, just liberated from the cloisters of his college, the scenery and the ruins may for a season inspire delight. Philosophy may there point her moral apophthegms with stronger emphasis, virtue receive new incitements to perseverance, by reflecting on the honour which still attends the memory of the ancient great, and patriotism there more pathetically deplore the inevitable effects of individual corruption on public glory; but to the man who seeks a solace from misfortune, or is “a-weary of the sun”; how wretched, how solitary, how empty is Athens!

 
Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past
Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied throng;
Long shall the voyager, with th’ Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
Long shall thy annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore;
Boast of the aged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,
As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore!
 

Of the existing race of Athenians Byron has observed, that they are remarkable for their cunning: “Among the various foreigners resident in Athens there was never a difference of opinion in their estimate of the Greek character, though on all other topics they disputed with great acrimony. M. Fauvel, the French consul, who has passed thirty years at Athens, frequently declared in my hearing, that the Greeks do not deserve to be emancipated, reasoning on the ground of their national and individual depravity – while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only be removed by the measures he reprobates.

“M. Roque, a French merchant of respectability long settled in Athens, asserted with the most amusing gravity, ‘Sir, they are the same canaille that existed in the days of Themistocles.’ The ancients banished Themistocles; the moderns cheat Monsieur Roque: thus great men have ever been treated.

“In short, all the Franks who are fixtures, and most of the Englishmen, Germans, Danes, etc., of passage, came over by degrees to their opinion, on much the same grounds that a Turk in England would condemn the nation by wholesale, because he was wronged by his lackey and overcharged by his washerwoman. Certainly, it was not a little staggering when the Sieurs Fauvel and Lusieri, the two greatest demagogues of the day, who divide between them the power of Pericles and the popularity of Cleon, and puzzle the poor Waywode with perpetual differences, agreed in the utter condemnation of the Greeks in general, and of the Athenians in particular.”

I have quoted his Lordship thus particularly because after his arrival at Athens he laid down his pen. Childe Harold there disappears. Whether he had written the pilgrimage up to that point at Athens I have not been able to ascertain; while I am inclined to think it was so, as I recollect he told me there that he had then described or was describing the reception he had met with at Tepellené from Ali Pasha.

After having halted some time at Athens, where they established their headquarters, the travellers, when they had inspected the principal antiquities of the city (those things which all travellers must visit), made several excursions into the environs, and among other places went to Eleusis.

On the 13th of January they mounted earlier than usual, and set out on that road which has the site of the Academy and the Colonos, the retreat of Œdipus during his banishment, a little to the right; they then entered the Olive Groves, crossed the Cephessus, and came to an open, well-cultivated plain, extending on the left to the Piræus and the sea. Having ascended by a gentle acclivity through a pass, at the distance of eight or ten miles from Athens, the ancient Corydallus, now called Daphnérouni, they came, at the bottom of a piney mountain, to the little monastery of Daphné, the appearance and situation of which are in agreeable unison. The monastery was then fast verging into that state of the uninhabitable picturesque so much admired by young damsels and artists of a romantic vein. The pines on the adjacent mountains hiss as they ever wave their boughs, and somehow, such is the lonely aspect of the place, that their hissing may be imagined to breathe satire against the pretensions of human vanity.

After passing through the hollow valley in which this monastic habitation is situated, the road sharply turns round an elbow of the mountain, and the Eleusinian plain opens immediately in front. It is, however, for a plain, but of small dimensions. On the left is the Island of Salamis, and the straits where the battle was fought; but neither of it nor of the mysteries for which the Temple of Ceres was for so many ages celebrated, has the poet given us description or suggestion; and yet few topics among all his wild and wonderful subjects were so likely to have furnished such “ample room, and verge enough” to his fancy.

The next excursion in any degree interesting, it a qualification of that kind can be applied to excursions, in Attica, was to Cape Colonna. Crossing the bed of the Ilissus and keeping nearer to Mount Hymettus, the travellers arrived at Vary, a farm belonging to the monastery of Agios Asomatos, and under the charge of a caloyer. Here they stopped for the night, and being furnished with lights, and attended by the caloyer’s servant as a guide, they proceeded to inspect the Paneum, or sculptured cavern in that neighbourhood, into which they descended. Having satisfied their curiosity there, they proceeded, in the morning, to Keratéa, a small town containing about two hundred and fifty houses, chiefly inhabited by rural Albanians.

The wetness of the weather obliged them to remain several days at Keratéa, during which they took the opportunity of a few hours of sunshine to ascend the mountain of Parné in quest of a cave of which many wonderful things were reported in the country. Having found the entrance, kindled their pine torches, and taken a supply of strips of the same wood, they let themselves down through a narrow aperture; creeping still farther down, they came into what seemed a large subterranean hall, arched as it were with high cupolas of crystal, and divided into long aisles by columns of glittering spar, in some parts spread into wide horizontal chambers, in others terminated by the dark mouths of deep and steep abysses receding into the interior of the mountain.

The travellers wandered from one grotto to another until they came to a fountain of pure water, by the side of which they lingered some time, till, observing that their torches were wasting, they resolved to return; but after exploring the labyrinth for a few minutes, they found themselves again close beside this mysterious spring. It was not without reason they then became alarmed, for the guide confessed with trepidation that he had forgotten the intricacies of the cave, and knew not how to recover the outlet.

Byron often described this adventure with spirit and humour, magnifying both his own and his friend’s terrors; and though, of course, there was caricature in both, yet the distinction was characteristic. Mr Hobhouse, being of a more solid disposition naturally, could discern nothing but a grave cause for dread in being thus lost in the bowels of the earth; Byron, however, described his own anxiety as a species of excitement and titillation which moved him to laughter. Their escape from starvation and being buried alive was truly providential.

While roaming in a state of despair from cave to cell; climbing up narrow apertures; their last pine-torch fast consuming; totally ignorant of their position, and all around darkness, they discovered, as it were by accident, a ray of light gleaming towards them; they hastened towards it, and arrived at the mouth of the cave.

Although the poet has not made any use of this incident in description, the actual experience which it gave him of what despair is, could not but enrich his metaphysical store, and increase his knowledge of terrible feelings; of the workings of the darkest and dreadest anticipations – slow famishing death – cannibalism and the rage of self-devouring hunger.