Europe in the Looking Glass

by Morris, Jan, Byron, Robert

  The pillars of the Parthenon are Doric, plain, massive and fluted from top to bottom. They are composed of separate blocks of marble, three and a half feet deep and five in diameter, which, at the time of construction, were forcibly ground to fit one another, only the topmost having been previously fluted. Then, when the succession of blocks had become a pillar, the whole fluting was carried out by hand. The marble is still as smooth as vellum, its surface hard as basalt, its edges sharp as steel. And for all the chips and flakes and holes, there is that certain quality about this handwork, by which handwork can always be distinguished, be it on metal, wood or stone – a textural quality that renders every imperfection not only superfluous, but invisible. Picture these pillars then, with their surface of vellum and their colour of sun-kissed satin, rising massive and radiant from the marble plinth of the whole building, against the brazen turquoise of the sky behind. At their feet the grey slabs of rock and the wreck of the innumerable statues and monuments with which the whole Acropolis was once adorned; behind, the tall spike of Lykabettus rising from the white blocks of the town beneath its veil of dust; in front, the chimneys and promontory of Piraeus; finally the sea and the islands. Immediately below, the Roman amphitheatre, a trellis-work of heavy brown stone arches one upon another, calls to mind the efficient vulgarity of the civilization that displaced the Greek, a relic infinitely more incongruous than the tramlines and the factory chimneys. Even antique dealers in the Levant despise Roman remains.

  Tucked away to one side and built below the general level of the ground, so that only the cornice is visible, is the Acropolis Museum. Eventually I visited the other museum that lies in the town below. Serried ranks of giraffe-necked vases of every height from six feet to three inches; interminable statues of Praxitelean youths eyeing their overfleshed shoulders; plump fragments of female busts beneath elaborately-ruched djibbahs; triumphant wreaths of beaten gold; breastplates, brooches and safety-pins; every detail of the art and craftsmanship of Ancient Greece is ranged against the curried red duresco of their walls. The contemplation of the whole is not inspiring. But in the museum beneath the Parthenon, with its small, uncrowded rooms and mural wash of bird’s-egg blue, are to be seen the real masterpieces of Greek Art – those early three-quarter-length female portrait busts, popularly known as the ‘Aunts’, to which the paint with which they were once tinted, still adheres.

  Though dimly familiar to the general public in the form of medieval English alabaster figures, the art of painting stone has proved, except heraldically, a rare and usually unsuccessful one. In the case of these Greek portraits, it is not easy to convey the delicate beauty of the flat, worn colour. There emanates from them none of that insupportable naturalism that characterized later Greek sculpture. They are simply formalized busts of aristocratic matrons, with delicately chiselled features, proud, pursed mouths, and their hair done in pig-tails that hang down over their breasts from either shoulder. The paint remains, faintly accentuating the features and adorning the slanting, upper borders of the dresses. One of them in particular has stayed in my memory as the possessor of a pair of faint, greyish red eyes, the colour of rain-sodden poppy petals, that appeared, for some reason, no more eccentric than those of anyone else. When next one encounters the misfortune, dragged by some self-informing child, to pass between the doors of the British Museum, it will infuse new life into the dusty outlines of the Elgin Marbles, to remember that in their original state these smut-blown figures appeared in reality as though of parchment gilded by the sun, shaded with the weathered reds and blues of this same paint, faint and flat, yet alive with the marble beneath them, like the coloured illumination of an ancient manuscript; the whole supported by the huge golden pillars, with the blue, blue, blue of the sky poured over the top and down the sides and in between. Yet how lacking in taste does this appear to the refined modern critic. The mere idea of painted stone rasps on his cultured mental palate like the kiss of a middle-aged cat.

  In one province of artistic expression however the Greeks have remained admittedly unchallenged. We have had our Michael Angelos and Donatellos. But there has not lived since the days before Christ a single sculptor who has ever attempted that masterly formalization of animals, which formed an integral part of so many of the ancient Greek groups and friezes. The English public is familiar with the crested horses of the Elgin Marbles; it may even recollect the illustrations of the Minoan bull’s head lately found in Crete. But with the one exception of the single head of the horse of Selene in the British Museum, there is nothing in this country that can give even the faintest idea of the real genius that underlay the Greek representations of domestic animals – domestic, because whereas the ancient Greek lion is often little more than a cylindrical poodle, it is usually the swine, oxen and horses that seem to have responded most successfully to reproduction in stone and bronze.

  In opposite corners of a small, blue room in the Acropolis Museum, are the heads, shoulders and forelegs of two horses. Each has been caught by the sculptor at a trot, a delicately built thoroughbred with a strain of Arab in his blood. Eyes sightless, yet sensitive to every movement of the horizon, muscles invisible, yet tightening and unloosing at each step, manes erect and square, ears pricked forward, nostrils dilated to breathe the fresh morning air – every particle of the stone lives. And yet, they are wholly formalized; there is no ‘naturalness’ to detract from their reality. It is to them and to the ‘Aunts’ that the mind should turn at the mention of Ancient Greek sculpture – instead of to fat Appollos and the Venus of Milo. This last is, indeed, as the auctioneer remarked, ‘one statue broken’.

  As we descended to the inevitable mutton of the Grande Bretagne, Michael pointed to a number of white slabs of stone about thirty inches by sixteen, lying in confusion at the foot of the Temple of Nike and covered with deeply-incised Turkish inscriptions. At the top of each projected a kind of broken excrescence on to which used to fit a carved, stone turban. There were several of these lying about by the side of their original supporters, shaped like confectioner’s cream-puffs. In the Middle Ages the Parthenon had become a Christian temple to which all the greatest men and women of the Eastern Empire had been wont to pilgrimage. There followed the four centuries of Turkish domination, when the Byzantine church that once stood within the pillars was transformed into a mosque. Then, at the liberation, the Parthenon was cleared of its excrescences, Christian or infidel. These tombstones are all that remain to tell of the religious usage to which it was once put.

  During our descent into the city we passed the Forum of Hadrian, with its rows of thin, grey, broken pillars, as squalid and uninteresting as its namesake in Rome, where the cats congregate and play or sleep amid the refuse and oleander bushes. It is for the privilege of demolishing the houses in this part of Athens, that the American archaeologists are paying a million pounds to the Greek Government, in order to transform it into yet another wilderness of unintelligible foundations. The American methods of excavation are noted in archaeological circles. The Greek Government has driven a good bargain, as not only does it receive a large sum with which to build new houses, but also retains everything that is unearthed. Works of art are never allowed to leave the country.

  While still touching on the subject of Greek sculpture, there is one bas-relief in the Athens Museum, which, having only been discovered in 1923, is yet awaiting universal recognition. It is carved on the side of a square plinth, on which originally rested a statue. Against a background of faint, dull red, stand four male figures, white and unclothed. Each is holding in his two hands a hockey-stick – not a travesty of modern perfection such as the old Victorian tennis-bat appears when unearthed from the upper attic – but an ordinary, slim, well-proportioned hockey-stick. On the ground lies a white ball. The two centre figures are represented in the self-conscious act of bullying, each about to give the second rap upon the earth. The others are poised anxiously on the lookout. Were it not for the absence of protective covering, the whole composition, wit
h its attitudes of alert expectation, would present an exact picture of the modern game. If the Greek nation, with its dangerously ramified foreign policy, were only to advertise this work of art more widely – for instance, engrave it on their postage stamps – they could be assured of the support of the English-speaking peoples for all time. It might, of course, become known that ‘soccer’ has Constantinople and the Young Turk movement firmly in its grip; in which case future Labour governments could only be expected to put their money on Kemal and his proverbial wrong horse. Hockey has not the same hold as football on the acute political intelligence of the British franchise. Had the gods but played cricket…

  That night we drove out miles along the seashore, winding our way amid hummocks and ditches of brown dust. On every side stood old twisted olive trees made weird in the mobile beams of the electric lamps. Eventually we left the car, and walking down to the beach, sat down in the darkness to undress. It seemed best, however, to wait until the moon had risen. Gradually its halo mounted above the black brow of the adjoining hill. Then, like some million-candle-power fire-balloon, the great plate of light came surging up the arc of Heaven. The water, hitherto black and sluggish, was transformed into a sea of opalescent silver, which clothed our bodies in a kind of phosphorescent accretion as they moved amid pools of light. Very slowly the sand sloped, and by the time we were swimming land was but a dark blur in the night.

  Hypnotized by the languorous pulsing of the water, I lay full length on my back and gazed at the midnight moon now risen to its full height in the cloudless murk. In my ears the Aegean throbbed gently. The roots of my hair quivered in the keen, shivering water, black and soft and warm. England seemed very unreal and very far away. That morning a letter had arrived from home to say that cubbing had begun in the forest. And as the mesmerizing ripples rippled, the whole scene seemed to come to life. I could hear the sound of the horn, the thud of hoofs on virgin turf, the voice of hounds in full cry. I could see the horses ploughing through bracken to their saddles beneath the dull, dark green, beginning to turn brown, of beeches at the end of summer. And here was I, floating about in the middle of the night on the further side of Greece. I turned over and shook myself; then swam to shore like a marine comet. David and Michael were already dressed. Next morning we all three awoke to a sensation of indigestion.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE ENGLISH TRADITION is more firmly rooted in Athens than in any other European capital. This perhaps is not surprising when it is remembered that Lord Elgin presented the municipality with an iron clock in lieu of the Parthenon Frieze. Unfortunately this incomparable object perished by fire on August 8th, 1884. One can picture the cuspidals and pinnacle of its airy Gothic fretwork, wrought by a hand inspired as Pheidias’ own – more so, perhaps, since the latter was outside the Church of England – and one regrets the passing of the old English ‘Milor’ and all that he embodied in the eyes of an impoverished continent. There remains, however, righteously erect, the English church; and the Athenian can indeed count himself lucky in this Gothic masterpiece. It stands on a small railed mound on the further side of the tramlines from the Zappeion Gardens, and is built of granite, imported at immense expense into the finest marble country in the world. There is no salvation in marble.

  One cannot help feeling that in aeons to come, when the civilization of Europe is as that of the Hittites and New York lies buried like a Babylon undug, the English churches throughout the world will have endured, lights in the darkness, symbols of the incontrovertible permanence of Henry VIII’s second marriage. The austere Presbyterian at Venice, the ‘tables’ of chocolate and gold at Florence, the groined haven at Rome – of which city Metternich recorded in the twenties that it was one of the amusements of the natives to watch the English families, decked like Paschal lambs in Bibles and top-hats, filing every Sabbath morn through the Porto del Popolo to their church outside the walls of the Scarlet Woman – these will abide until the world’s end. Even at Patras, the unmistakable cluster of Gothic stone crockets beamed suddenly upon us from the end of a narrow street. But our natural pleasure at this homely spectacle was marred by the effrontery of Mr Teeling, who informed us that his leanings to Rome had lately persuaded him to resign his position as lay-reader to a congregation that consisted, he said, of nothing better than a ‘pack of bigots’.

  But even more forcibly than the undying spirit of Protestantism, it is the Byron cult that keeps England perennially green in the eyes of the Greeks. The foundations of the national reverence for this most picturesque of nineteenth century liberators were firmly reinforced three years ago by the celebrations of the centenary of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, in 1824. The party of English Philhellenes set sail in March for the Kingdom of Greece, to be greeted five days later by a frock-coated President, who had dispensed with the King by plebiscite the day before. The festivities were, nevertheless, strictly adhered to. A lady in Greek draperies recited ‘Maid of Athens’ between the pillars of the Propylaea, illuminated, owing to the inefficiency of the moon, by the light of two bicycle lamps, and supported by a massed choir. An eminent Greek professor, having missed the first instalment of the state luncheon, complained that Byron was not the only martyr. The representative of the British Government, poet and ambassador, fell into the sea on the way to Missolonghi and was obliged to retire to bed until his trousers were dry. Finally, a special issue of postage stamps depicted the Liberator, enveloped in a toga, exhorting the populace and priesthood of his adopted country to further deeds of valour against the Turk.

  Statues and tablets are many. The most noteworthy is the group erected in the Zappeion Gardens, depicting Liberty propping up the dying Byron by the nape of the neck, and proffering it a bunch of asparagus. Another reminder of the warrior-bard is the recurrence of the inscription ‘ΛΟΡΔΟΣΒΥΡΩΝ’ on the rims of the sailor-hats worn by the little boys. I was jokingly informed, in fact, that if a member of the poet’s family, or even merely a bearer of his name, were to cultivate a certain measure of self-advertisement, he might reasonably hope to aspire to high political office.

  It was with this end in view that Howe led me one afternoon to the presence of M. Kokkinopoulos, the Director of Air Services. A young man of twenty-eight, he was, according to Howe, the eyes and ears of General Pangalos, the newly installed military dictator.

  ‘The time may come when Pangalos will need a puppet king,’ remarked Howe.

  M. Kokkinopoulos was to be found during the day at his headquarters at Phaleron, near our bathing-place, which was on the opposite side of the bay to Piraeus. Between the roadway and the water, adjacent to the row of cabins jutting out upon a series of quadrangular piers, was the aerodrome, and opposite it, the Zoological Gardens. As the animals were all starved to death during the Allied blockade of 1916, the gardens are now used as the official residence of the Director of Air Services.

  Having argued our way past a sentry clad in a soiled white sweater and a pair of trousers, we arrived at a raised villarette, upon the steps of which were seated M. Kokkinopoulos and a colleague of benign countenance, with whom he was conversing. Howe was contracting to supply the Air Ministry with waders. Myself, rather dishevelled and bearing a vermilion bathing-dress, I was introduced as a candidate for the throne. I said that I had my living to earn. M. Kokkinopoulos, who was educated in Glasgow, and therefore spoke perfect English, replied that he would keep the matter before his mind’s eye.

  At this juncture a unit of the Air Force, uniformed in the same manner as the sentry, brought us some lime-juice, which we drank sitting upon a ring of unsafe chairs in the midst of an avenue of preposterous, barrel-trunked palm trees, which ended some hundred yards further in a circular iron cage like a bandstand, forlorn and rusting in the absence of its rightful denizens. When our drinks were finished we stepped across the road to inspect the aerodrome, which did not appear very extensive, though barracks, in addition to aeroplanes, were in process of construction. Adjoining the Botanical Gardens stood an i
mposing concrete factory with an outline like a row of saw’s teeth, which had been erected by the English firm of Whitehead’s for the manufacture of aircraft, on the understanding that the Greek Government was prepared to order eighty machines a month. So far the Government had omitted to order any, and M. Kokkinopoulos playfully remarked to Howe that he had no intention of ever doing so; several, however, have since been built. After promising to lend us a pinnace from which we could bathe, we all returned to Athens by bus, arranging to meet later at the Zappeion.

  It so happened that evening that David and I found ourselves in particularly high spirits. When we arrived in the dinner garden M. Kokkinopoulos had already finished his meal, but with exquisite courtesy he forsook his own party to join ours. David, embarrassed by an occasional silence, began to chatter like a watermill, employing those assertive extremes of intonation that have resulted from long practice in inflaming the local snobberies of Gloucestershire society. Every dish that we suggested was discovered by the waiter after ten minutes investigation in the pavilion-de-cuisine, to have been finished. Food did not arrive and wine did. The staff would pay us no attention. At length, taking the glasses from the table we hurled them to the ground in the hope of attracting the waiters’ attention. Athens turned in its chairs. And M. Kokkinopoulos, who had been slowly enduring the tortures of a vanishing reputation, found this wanton destruction more than he could endure. He was obliged to recollect an engagement calculated to occupy the remainder of his evening. As we said goodnight, I felt discredited. Thus are thrones lost and won.