BOOKS.
ATHENS AND THE MOREA.* LORD CARNARVONT has done well in rescuing these notes of his father's travels from oblivion. They were evidently in their original form mere notes, intended lo revive the writer's memory of the scenes he had passed through rather than to supplant it ; but they have been pieced together with the patient skill of affection, and they are in themselves full of interest,—notes to excite thought, not accounts intended to supersede the necessity of thinking. There is little of their date, 1839, about them, for they are not concerned mainly with matters in which dates have meaning. The editor describes his father as " a man enthusiastic in temper, cultivated in mind, a good linguist, and with a singular facility of expression, whether by word of mouth or on paper, with but one drawback—indifferent health "; but he had, it is clear, a quality besides all these, a quality which has belonged to his house for generations. He was an undeveloped artist. His eyes saw pictures where other men's see things, and there is scarcely a page of his writing which does not by very simple touches,—simple, that is, in their essence, though the words have sometimes too mellifluous a roll,—call up before the mind of the reader some scene, historic or visible, which thenceforward will be to him as real as if he had himself carefully observed it. The picturesque, or rather the pictorial, aide of life is always present to him ; he cares more for scenery than for statistics, for the living people than their dead antiquities, and though as ;Peer and politician he cannot forget to record an impression as to the relation of the Greeks to their Government, he turns away from that subject with pleasure to describe their relation to each other, and to thought. He notes the Maniote hate of the Bavarians, but he descants upon the Maniote legends of the Vampire. It is this artistic sense, so to speak, which
has preserved the freshness of these notes, which, but for this, might be a little out of date. The feudalism of the Maine, which his son. describes from his notes with such spiri t, has expired, but scenery never changes, the race has notperished, and even the manners of the people remain nearly what they were, the Greek, the least Asiatic of men in temper, resembling the Oriental in his changelessness. Must not the Arcadia of 200 years B.C. have been exactly this?—,, As we left the plain, we found ourselves amongst all the beauties of Arcadian scenery. Plane trees stretched out their spreading arm, rendering at times the path, which happened to be in little use, almost impassable ; streams of crystal delightel the eye, and refreshed us with their delicious waters ; the wild pear mingled with the holly-leaved and the common oak ; the pink, the wild violet, the red cystus bloomed on every bank, whilst fern covered the heights, and surrounded the trees which, as in some English park, often grew in large and rounded clumps A young Arcadian shepherd, with very handsome features, and great natural grace of manner, he wore the fustanella and red gaiters, a. long shaggy coat of wool, which, however, did not conceal the embroidered edges of a white vest, and a figured cotton handkerchief bound round a tasselled fez. In his belt lie carried a knife, in his hand a long shepherd's crook." Arcadia might become a Grecian Norfolk or Lancashire, and still the significance of this note, clearly a mere note intended for subsequent expansion,. would be unchanged. " He told me afterwards that hir wife, while sitting in the noonday heat under the shelter of a great. Arcadian oak, had worked for him the handkerchief which he wore, tracing the pattern on it in accordance with the light and shadow that fell upon the piece." The woman, as we understand that memorandum, had traced the pattern thrown by the light through the leaves upon the cotton, exactly as a Greek might have done two thousand years ago ; and its peculiar beauty, the beauty of absolutely natural design, extorted an inquiry from the cultivated traveller. Imagine the sort of pattern an Englishwoman of the same class forced to the same work would have devised. The book is full of touches of that kind, touches whose only fault is their extreme brevity, a brevity the writer had he lived would probably have corrected, to the injury of his own narrative and the great benefit of his readers. It is enough to make a reviewer melancholy to think of the book of, say, eight hundred pages which the writer of this sentence might have written. "And now I found the pencil-case of my pocketbook missing, upon which Elias reiterated his curses against the unlucky magpie. That miserable bird had occasioned the breaking of a bridle and a stirrup; it had caused the loss of a knife, which Elias had taken in single combat from a Turk some eight years ago ; and now my pencil-case was gone. Never had any previous magpie been so persevering in the cause of mischief. His mind was for the moment fully depressed by a sense of evil augury. Just. before we reached the town, we saw a party of priests, and this, too, he maintained was ominous of coming disaster. I observed that he was but an indifferent son of the Church, and to this he only responded by a melancholy shake of the head." And it would be difficult to express more happily, or in fewer words, the judgment which every observant traveller has passed upon the appearance of the Greek people, or rather of the Greek people when unfettered by the barbarous costume of 1Vestern Europe : " He might have been nineteen or twenty years of age. He was man who in the peasant class could only have been seen in Greece, and rarely even there. He was distinguished not merely by a faultless regularity of feature—a species of beauty confined to no class or country—but by that classical shape of head, by a general grace of form and bearing, by the intellectual forehead and expression of eye that I never yet saw in any other than the Greek peasantry. If this young Greek and those Arcadian peasants, whom I lately met, had found themselves in any society, even in that to which they were least accustomed, they would still have been distinguished by their graceful deportment. Among the Spanish I have seen in former years far more general beauty of feature than among the Greek peasantry. I bare behold and almost marvelled at that dignified bearing which appeared to elevate them above the station to which they were born, and that commanding expression of countenance which seemed to scorn the world; but in those men, proud as their bearing and striking as their features were, I never observed that facile grace of form and that intellectual expression of eye which seems to designate the peasantry ol Greece as the true desoendants of that extraordinary people who possessed the largest portion of original genius ever conferred by Heaven upon a peculiar and gifted race."
Perhaps of all the book the account of the Maine, the mountainous southern district of the Morea, with its people who claimed to be Spartans and were as vengeful as Corsicans, its nobles shut up in towers, and its commonalty so used to murder that they could hardly be drilled into an ordinary walk,—retaining always the stealthy, cat-like tread taught by a hundred ambuscades,—its wild super stitions and profound belief in the sanctity of women, is the most interesting chapter ; but it is also the one in which the piecing has been most frequent, and it is a little difficult at times to tell which is the father's observation and which the son's idea of the deduction the father would have drawn. As an account of a civilization, or shall we say a form of barbarism even then unique and now extinct, it is for fewness of words and clearness of touch almost unsurpassed in descriptive writing, and of itself quite sufficient to justify a book the greatest fault of which is a brevity as extreme as in our day it is unusual.
Lord Carnarvon prefixes to his father's notes a preface against which we feel inclined to protest, as it gives a tone to the reader's thoughts which he ought to derive only from the father's work. The late Earl, though contemptuous of the Bavarian, was, we gather, full of hopefulness for the Greek, of whom the present one seems more than half inclined to despair. Admitting to the full all that mankind owes to the Greek, that is, everything except the religious impulse, Lord Carnarvon still regards the present condition of Greece with the irritation natural to an English statesman, who sees in " order " the first, or at least most necessary, of blessings, and is half-inclined to leave her to her fate. The disorder of ancient Greece, however, was at least as great, and the world was not benefited when the stern Roman rule reduced her to respectability and powerlessness. The right to independence includes the right to recede, and after all is it the fault of the Greeks ? They have not made their own government. By nature a perfectly democratic people, inclined to be governed as Italy is inclined, not by assemblies so much as by individuals thrown through those assemblies up to power ; a people essentially idealistic, and greatest where other races would be beaten, they have been forced by external compulsion into the dull constititutional groove. They need now as ever genius at their head, and we have given them in succession two dull German lads for Kings, lads who in England, it may be, would have succeeded as well as the duller Hanoverians who did succeed, but who in Greece have been dead-weights, arresting all national development, and compelled in their unfitness to secure themselves by corrupting the representative bodies. We have ordered the Government to be modern, yet limited its frontiers till modernness has proved too expensive a quality, and then, when the Greek mind, despairing of progress at home, has sought the realization of its dreams abroad, we have driven it back with menaces upon itself. This very year, when a war for existence once more seemed possible, and would have reinvigorated every fibre of the national frame, Europe, in its selfish dread of affecting the price of stocks, has ordered a people whose vanity is their best antiseptic to submit to any humiliation rather than risk any danger. Till we leave Greece to herself, order our Envoys to be as passive as if they were accredited to Washington, and allow the nation to develop the strength which comes of victory, or the fortitude produced by subjugation, we have no right to condemn the Greeks. We talk of gratitude, but what have we done for them that they should be grateful, compared with what they have done for us? We gave them freedom, but they gave us the thought that freedom is a blessing to be desired, and while we moan over their neglect of physical improvements, we forget that but for them Europe had never pursued the path of scientific inquiry. If their constitution is unworkable, they invented politics; if they have no roads, they made geometry ; if they disturb Europe, they also preserved it. The bondholders who inherit claims which are almost swindles may be justified perhaps in murmuring at the insolvency their greedy credulity has helped to cause, but financiers will remember that Greeks add every year to the wealth of Britain ten times the aunt her poverty is assumed to take away, that the merchants whose enterprise makes hunger so impossible in Britain are mainly Greeks. Everywhere save at home the Greeks succeed, because everywhere save at home Europe leaves them to themselves. Do the Jews succeed in Palestine? or fail anywhere else?
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