THE CITIES OF THE PAST.*
TEIRE is no need of a critic to explain why Miss Cobbe's writings attract. Her style is simply that of an accom- plished, high-minded gentleman, softened, and as it were mellowed, by something which it is not given to men to express, and which, if we may venture to analyze it, we must define as capacity for loving, an ability to recognize without conscious tholught the links which bind, or rather ought to bind, the • The Cities of the Past. By Frances roller Cobb,. London : Triibner. traveller to the people he travels among. This—a description of Cairo—is the talk of a cultivated man :— "Every figure is a picture—new in face, new in dress, new, above all, in bearing and character. It is this which gives endless amuse- ment in watching the stately walk of the rich old man, the nimble bounding race of half-dressed young ones, and the laughing, shuffling gait of the women, who always seem making a masquerading joke of their ridiculous bundle of attire, and of the brass screw over their noses to hold up the veil over then. months ! The clamour of shouting voices, rarely drowned by any sound of wheels; the strings of camels, whose large burdens fill the narrow streets from side to side ; the innu- merable donkeys, with boys screaming Ashmala Djemila,' and bela- bouring them behind; solemn old gentlemen seated in state, smoking pipes six feet long ; the rich variety of the street architecture—of which Chester gives just the faintest hint; the great stone archways leading into romantic courts ; latticed windows, in projecting balconies, touching across the streets ; lovely minarets, shooting up into the cloudless sky; mosques of red and white stone, quaint and beautiful ; shops all open, with all the goods displayed to the street, and the shop- man seated cross-legged, playing with his child or his cat; on every side there is a picture one longs to preserve, in all its rich colouring, on one's mind fdi- ever."
But no man alive could, or at least would, have written thus :— "Presently there came by a young mother, with a little girl running beside her, and a baby of a year old in her arms. Like nearly all the Syrian women, she had a sweet, soft face, and the lithesome figure and pretty colours of the graceful dress made her a charming picture. I touched my breast and head, of course, with the usual salutation, 'Salaam aleik I' (Peace be with you!) and received the fitting reply, Aleik salaam!' and I suppose I looked at the little child as mothers like their infants to be looked at, for, without a word or a hesitation, she placed the little fellow in my lap, and then, in the gentle Eastern fashion, seated herself silently close 'beside me. We talked a long while, if talking it could be called, when signs and smiles and my dozen words of Arabic had to do all the duty ; and then she rose and kissed my hand, and passed away down the shore, singing some sweet monotonous song. Good-bye !' I thought, 'pretty Amina, and dear little Mustapha—we shall not meet again ; but your ready claim of human relationship has clone my heart good, and will not soon be for- gotten.' "
But though it is easy to explain Miss Cobbe, and the fascination which makes this little book more easy to read than any novel Mudie is likely to be blest with this year, it is not quite so easy to understand why women succeed so completely in accounts of the East. They don't succeed particularly well in pictures of France, and if the best account of German life is by an English- woman, still the Baroness Tautphceus was not intending to write an account of German life, but only an Anglo-German novel. But the best narrative of Syrian travel in existence is Miss Rogers's ; Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu is still unrivalled in her pictures of Turkey ; Miss Whately has told us- in "Ragged Life in Egypt "—we quote the name from memory—more even than Mr. Lane; Miss Martineau has written the most readable of all sketches of Palestine ; and as for India, there are but three books of description worth the trouble of perusal—Miss Roberts', Mrs. Fanny Parkes', and, better than all, Mrs. Colin Mackenzie's —" The Camp, the Mission, and the Zenana." It may be that the real reason of this success is that women can write of women, and that men being the principal readers they are more closely touched by accounts of female, and there- fore of internal life, than they could be by pictures of masculine, and therefore of out-of-door adventure, But we are inclined to think there is another and a far less flattering reason. Female travellers enjoy in the East the inestimable advantage of conscious and shameless ignorance. They travel without theories, or preconceived ideas, or read-up knowledge, are not afraid to mention what strikes them as new, and find all things new which are not European. They, therefore, simply observe, and observing, state what it is they have observed, describe all those external peculiarities which call up a picture-- the true colour of the skin, the real arrangement of the dress, the thousand gestures, and ways, and words which are not those of Europe. The man passes over all this ; and then he has always read so much, and bores one so dreadfully with half-digested learning, nasty morsels of chewed text, and fact, and history, when one is wanting a description of that which is and not of that which has been. Women, too, in the East are always reverential. Whether it be that their Eastern ideas are usually Biblical and therefore sacred,—and middle class English people are very doubtful whether it is right to describe pomegranates as detest- able mixtures of red currants and rotten pips because pome- granates are in the Canticle—or that with them all which is absolutely outside conventionalism excites a feeling of awe, or that the life of the East appeals to that appreciation of nature which is so deep-seated in good women, the fact remains— women writing of the East seldom retain more of their drawing- room tone than suffices to make their sketches lively and truthful. Here, for example, is Miss Cobbe on Baalbec, and Cairo, and the Dead Sea, and Jerusalem. There is not a word of decent learning in the whole four compositions, scarcely a reference to learning, except some vague, and we are fain to believe—knowing something of the truth—rather absurd re- ferences to the ancient creeds of Canaan. Nobody need read them who wants to know the history of Baalbec or Cairo, or the precise relation of the Dead Sea to Genesis, or the vicissitudes of Jerusalem, or who cares greatly about topography, or is anxious about architecture, or is distressed if anybody misplaces any very conspicuous ruin. We do not know that any- body could, from the most careful study of them, strike out any new light as to the condition of the ancient world, or its creeds, or its manners, or anything which interests historians, or antiquarians, or theologians. But then, if any- body wants to feel, to feel unmistakeably, the impression which Baalbec visibly before him would produce upon his mind to have the scene so described to him as to evoke a pas-
sionate longing to see it, and a fancy that without going there he can see it, and to have the spirit of Baalbec added
as it were to the sum of his own experiences,—why he may as well read Miss Cobbe. He will gain his objects, some information, beside an hour of such pleasure as literature very seldom gives, and a sensation of wishing very hard that English women travelling had all natures of that kind, as then our nation would scarcely be so badly judged abroad.
It is difficult, reading Miss Cobbe's account of Baalbec, not to doubt for a moment whether, after all, the world has made such
very great physical advances. The nineteenth century has railways, no doubt, and electric telegraphs, and Nasmyth's hammers, and iron-clads, and pebble spectacles, and other things of more or less grandeur and utility,—but then just read this :—
"Baalbec possesses two characters peculiarly its own—enormous magnitude and redundant richness. The buildings are not only of immense height and extent, but each individual block is of dimensions almost unexampled elsewhere. Five spans of my extended arms and some three feet over (thirty-one feet) only touched the extremities of one stone in the temple of Baal. The shafts of the pillars, standing and prostrate, are each miracles of size and perfection ; the fragments of palaces reveal halls of a magnificence unparalleled. Then all these enormous blocks and edifices are wrought with such lavish luxuriance of imagination, such incredible perfection of detail, that the idea of the Arabs that they were the work, not of men, but of genii, seemed per- fectly naturally. I wandered on, now revelling in beauty, now overawed with grandeur, till it seemed as if one's soul and heart could bear no more. Here were the towering six columns of the giant fane of the Sun ; here the second terople, the most magnificent, the most perfect left to us of the ancient world. Passing out at the great ruined gate- way, here the vast and splendid square and hexagonal courts with their walls forming exedras, and loaded with indescribable profusion of orna- ments, columns, pilasters, entablature; niches, and seats overhung with garlands and sculptured wings of fanciful creatures. All that the richest of the styles of ancient architecture could achieve—the magni- ficent Corinthian in its most luscious dreams—seems perfectly here. Streets and gateways and palaces, hardly distinguishable in their decay, yet all on the same scale of grandeur and solidity, follow on beyond the courts and portico. One huge house stands with its ruined staircase like a great tower in the centre ; another, half underground, contains a vast stone hall, yet roofed and perfect. Further yet is the most splendid of all the palaces ; noble Corinthian doorways and win- dows, and exquisite cornices and ornaments of broken entablature; attest its surprising richness. I climbed up a shattered stair to the summit of the Saracenic wall, which here bounds the ruined city ; and there below, through an opening in the massive masonry, lay the living world—the glittering brook, a group of almond-trees in blossom, the village, the beautiful mosque, and Anti-Lebanon with his crown of snow."
And when you have read it just reflect what Manchester would be after 3,000 years of desolation, what a hideous congeries of bad bricks, and broken pottery, and bits of thin stone, and slovenly sewer arches, and morsels of metal would strew a plain half-hidden by perpetual fog, or overshadowed by trees which it is an insult to nature to call green. (There are greens in the East ; but green in England, except in ferns, is merely green steeped in some muddy dye.) In all that mighty city not a building would be left worth a second's glance, not a record that a people higher than savages had ever dwelt there,not a proof that its inhabitants had the faintest notion of an object higher than that of sheltering themselves from the elements, or more enduring than the children whom they bred up to live amidst vulgar sights and contemptible sounds, and objects which possessed no one quality of beauty except its perishableness. Englishmen think themselves very great in their supremacy over the material world, but will it ever occur to them to build anything tolerably large—a hall, for example, which would contain thirty thousand people, yetendurethree thousand years without repair. Would Mr. Brassey contract to build Baalbec ? We shall be told, of course, that it is all a matter of climate; but, after all, Stonehenge is not on the Mediterranean, and the ,round towers have stood a thousand years, and Westminster Hall seems likely to outlive the houses of gingerbread, built on leasehold land, which we all think palaces. The truth is, the despots, and priests, and traders who erected these marvellous structures had arrived at ideas before which the English idea of comfort is a very small one, had realized the notion just beginning to re-awake among us that man is greater than the generations of man—that it is possi- ble to teach and instruct and benefit a race, a tribe, a nation, as well as a generation. They had learnt the single lesson which the East has never forgotten and Europe has never acquired—not to hasten, to "let stone settle," to be content if but the father buy the threshing floor and the son rear thereon the temple. Manchester of course is great, but Baalbec saw Rome founded and exists ; and, after all, it is doubtful whether man—we do not mean the middle class,—was not happier in Baalbec than in Manchester, in the lowest suburb of the old Pagan city than in Ashley lane. 'Who knows ? It is good, at least, for those who believe in a never-ending progress to read books like this, and realize that when they havo exhausted wealth and reached the limit of science, they cannot give to their creations the beauty inherent in the unpurchasable sky of the desert, or the permanence conceded to all things great by the undestroying Syrian air. We English can do a good deal, but we fight against the worst of earthly climates and a people whose ideas are as yet the least glorious of all which have ever been effective among men.
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