In entering a town he always estimates its general effect before proceeding to details; and his impressions seem often divided between an artistic love of the picturesque and a determined architectural preference for regularity. In proceeding to greater particularity, no buildings came amiss to him. Besides the churches and palaces, which have a prescriptive right to precedence, he seems to have had a special taste for two most opposite specimens of architectural effect. Cemeteries, on the one hand, always attracted his notice, both as to their arrangement and their accompanying buildings, and in their case he had a strong dislike of over-embellishment. The sombre solemnity of a Turkish burial-ground was his ideal. The same taste which attached brightness and cheerfulness in buildings that ministered to life, inclined to solemnity and sadness in all that suggested the idea of death. On the other hand, theatres greatly interested him at all times, from the Scala at Milan to the little theatres of Italian country towns. He thought that they gave a grand opportunity for architectural effect, which was generally frittered away. And his note-books abound in plans and criticisms of existing buildings, and ideas as to their best theoretical construction. It was curious enough that a theatre was almost the only kind of public building which it never fell to his lot to execute.
Perhaps the one point especially to be noticed in all his examinations of buildings is the extreme care for accuracy which distinguishes them; measurements are always given, plans generally accompany the descriptions in his journals; he would take any trouble to obtain measurements and details, even if it risked his neck, or threw him into the hands of the police.[5] What was vague seemed to him worthless, and difficulties rather excited than daunted him.[6]
In this way the first nine months of his travels passed over—a good preparation, but only a preparation, for professional study. It became a question whether he should return home, or visit Greece in the congenial company of Mr. (afterwards Sir C.) Eastlake, already distinguished as an artist; Mr. Kinnaird, an architect, afterwards editor of the last volume of Stuart’s ‘Athens;’ and Mr. Johnson, afterwards a Professor at Haileybury College. Home ties and considerations of economy drew him back; he consulted his friends at home, and especially his future father-in-law, Mr. Rowsell, and by his sensible advice he determined to disregard difficulties, and give full scope to his tastes and powers. It was a wise resolution; he had left England inexperienced and unknown; he was now recognised as an artist of talent and promise, and was to travel with men of acknowledged ability, generally his superiors in education and knowledge both of books and men. His journals show clearly the effect of his past experience in greater maturity of judgment, greater taste for antiquity, and general growth of mind.
Athens and Constantinople were their two main objects. The season was rather advanced, so they hurried on, paying but a hasty visit to Naples[7] and Pompeii, then across Calabria to Bari, while he made the most of his time by sketching incessantly under a great umbrella, and managing to give careful descriptions and rough plans of all that he visited. Thence they crossed to Corfu;[8] and there first the richness and picturesque beauty of the island seem to have captivated him, and stirred up anew the artistic power within. His pencil was never out of his hand, but it was employed almost entirely on the beauties of nature, and his delight in the scenery itself evidently increased with his power of representing it.
This was even more strikingly the case in a visit to Parnassus and Delphi, where they spent some ten days in the hut of a poor cottager, and were richly compensated for their disappointment at finding no traces of the old temple, and no remains worthy of notice, by the extraordinary beauty of the country, and the opportunity which it gave them for countless sketches. They even offered a reward from the minaret of the village for one of the great vultures of the mountain, and obtained, for sketching purposes, a magnificent bird, measuring nine feet from tip to tip of his wings. “I drank,” he says, “deeply of the Castalian spring, but did not find my poetic faculty improved thereby.” Yet the genius loci did not fail him entirely. It was here more especially that a change and growth of artistic power in him struck his fellow-travellers.[9] Before he left Rome, his drawings had been only careful and elaborate; now there began to show itself in them that indescribable power of insight and imagination, which distinguishes the true artist from the mere draughtsman. Conventionalities were shaken off, and nature represented as it was; laboured and ineffective drawing gave place to a bold and masterly grasp of the leading lines, and the general effect of the scene represented; and his journals show an ever-increasing admiration for natural and artificial beauty, and an absorbing delight in the task of representing it. The progress, once begun, never ceased. Every day witnessed a progress in his power, till his sketches in Egypt showed those powers in full maturity, and astonished those who had known him only in Italy and in Greece.
At Athens they stayed about a month, in despite of some danger of plague which hung over the city. Here unfortunately his journals fail us for a time, and there is no means of supplying the deficiency. It is easy to imagine his intense delight in seeing the buildings which he had so long considered not only as the masterpieces of Greek art, but as the highest forms in which the architectural idea of beauty had clothed itself. We know, what might easily have been conceived, that his admiration did not evaporate in mere enthusiasm, but gave rise to careful study and thoughtful criticism; and that such study, while it deepened his original admiration, yet led him to feel that changes of circumstances, needs, and conceptions might well limit that imitation of Greek models, which had hitherto exercised a despotic influence over modern architecture. But beyond this, there is no memorial of what he perhaps at that time felt to be the crowning pleasure of his architectural tour, except some sketches, made always entirely on the spot, and remarkable for uniting great accuracy and truthfulness of effect to free and spirited drawing.
He left Athens on June 25th, 1818, with Mr. Johnson, and passed by Ægina, and through the Cyclades, touching at Delos, to Smyrna, and thence by land to Constantinople. The voyage was “one continued delight;” full of architectural and antiquarian interest, and even fuller of natural beauty, seen under cloudless skies and glorious sunsets.
They were now having their first experience of countries under Turkish rule, just at the beginning of Mahmoud’s reign, when lawlessness was at its height, scarcely kept down by his bloody justice, or awed by the suspicions of the coming revolution. It is not uninteresting to gather from the journals the impressions made upon the travellers even then by the Turkish and the Greek characters.
The Turks seemed essentially barbarians, not without some excellences (which probably have been deteriorated in late years), such as simplicity and sincerity of religious devotion, dignity, truthfulness, and even generosity of character. They appeared to occupy rather than inhabit the country, allowing its richest regions to fall into desolation, and its commerce (except where the Greeks or English[10] sustained it) to languish and decay. The relics of its former grandeur were transformed for their own purposes, or watched over as antiquities with a jealous and ignorant churlishness;[11] their general insolence and violence were unbridled. At Constantinople Mr. Barry, by attempting a panorama of the city from the Galata tower, grievously offended the Turkish women, who, after abusing him with all their powers of vituperative eloquence, called up the guard to dismiss him summarily, and incited a mob of boys to pursue him with stones, and cries of “Giaour” through the city. Such insults were common then, and had to be borne patiently even by those under ambassadorial protection.
The Greeks, on the other hand, wherever, as at Iverli, Scio, and Patmos, they managed to secure self-government by payment of tribute, appear to have shown that activity and intellectual capacity which the modern kingdom of Greece, with all its defects, has since exemplified. They had schools and universities, in spite of the jealousy and ill-will of the Turks, libraries ancient and modern, and even scientific instruments from Paris. It was a matter of regret, but, after ages of slavery, hardly a matter of surprise, that their honesty and truthfulness did not keep pace with their intellectual progress. But there seemed then grounds for hope of improvement in them, and none for their Turkish masters.