Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

From our windows, then, we could note, first, the Citadel, high on its rock, three hundred feet above the town. The oldest part of the present fortress was erected in 1550; but the site has always been the stronghold. Corinthians, Athenians, Spartans, Macedonians, and Romans have in turn held the island, and this rock is the obvious keep. Later came four hundred years of Venetian control, and I am ashamed to add that the tokens of this last-named period were to me more delightful than any of the other memorials. I say "ashamed," for why should one be haunted by Venice in Greece? With the Parthenon to look forward to, why should the lion of St. Mark, sculptured on Corfu façades, be a thing to greet with joy? Many of us are familiar with the disconsolate figures of some of our fellow-countrymen and countrywomen in the galleries of Europe, tired and dejected tourists wandering from picture to picture, but finding nothing half so interesting as the memory of No. 4699 Columbus Avenue at home. I am afraid it is equally narrow to be scanning Corfu, Athens, Cairo, and the sands of the desert itself for something that reminds one of another place, even though that place be the enchanting pageant of a town at the head of the Adriatic. History, however, as related by the esplanade, pays no attention to these aberrations of the looker-on; its story goes steadily forward. The lions of St. Mark on the façades, and another memento of the Doges—namely, the statue of Count von der Schulenburg, who commanded the Venetian forces in the great defence of Corfu in 1716—these memorials have as companions various tokens of the English occupation, which, following that of Venice, continued through forty-nine years—that is, from 1815 to 1863. Before this there had been a short period of French dominion; but the esplanade, so far as I could discover, contains no memorial of it, unless Napoleon's phrase can stand for one—and I think it can. The souvenirs of the British rule are conspicuous. The first is the palace built for the English Governor, a functionary who bore the sonorous official name of Lord High Commissioner, a title which was soon shortened to the odd abbreviation "the Lord High." This palace is an uninteresting construction stretching stiffly across the water-side of the esplanade, and cutting off the view of the harbor. It is now the property of the King of Greece, but at present it is seldom occupied. While we were at Corfu its ghostliness was enlivened for a while; Prince Henry of Prussia was there with his wife. They had left their yacht (if so large a vessel as the Irene can be called a yacht), and were spending a week at the palace. An hour after their departure entrance was again permitted, and an old man, still trembling from the excitement of the royal sojourn, conducted us from room to room. All was ugly. Fading flowers in the vases showed that an attempt had been made to brighten the place; but the visitors must have been endowed with a strong natural cheerfulness to withstand with success such a mixture of the commonplace and the dreary as the palace presents. They had the magnificent view to look at, and there was always the graceful silhouette of the Irene out on the water. She could come up at any time and take them away; it was this, probably, that kept them alive.

If the palace is ordinary, what shall be said of another memento which adorns the esplanade? This is a high, narrow building, so uncouth that it causes a smile. It looks raw, bare, and so primitive that if it had a pulley at the top it might be taken for a warehouse erected on the bank of a canal in one of our Western towns; one sees in imagination canal-boats lying beneath, and bulging sacks going up or down. Yet this is nothing less than that University of the Ionian Islands which was founded by the Earl of Guildford early in this century, the epoch of English enthusiasm for Greece, the days of the Philhellenes. Lord Guildford, who was one of the distinguished North family, gave largely of his fortune and of his time to establish this university. Contemporary records speak of him as "an amiable nobleman." But after seeing his touchingly ugly academy and his bust (which is not ugly) in the hall of the extinct Ionian Senate at the palace, one feels sure that he was more than amiable—he must have been original also.

The English are called cold; but as individuals they are capable sometimes of extraordinary enthusiasms for distant causes and distant people. Adventurous travellers as they are, does the charm lie in the word "distant"? The defunct academy now shelters a school where vigorous young Greeks sit on benches, opposite each other, in narrow, doorless compartments which resemble the interior of a large omnibus; this, at least, was the arrangement of the ground-floor on the day of our visit. Although it was December, the boys looked heated. The teachers, who walked up and down, had a relentless aspect. Even the porter, white-haired and bent, had a will untouched by the least decay; he would not show us the remains of the university library, nor the Roman antiquities which are said to be stored somewhere in a lumber-room, among them "fifty-nine frames of mosaic representing a bustard in various attitudes." He had not the power, apparently, to exhibit these treasures while the school exercises were going on, and as soon as they were ended—instantly, that very minute—he intended to eat his dinner, and nothing could alter this determination; his face grew ferocious at the mere suggestion. So we were obliged to depart without seeing the souvenirs of Lord Guildford's enthusiasm; and owing to the glamour which always hangs over the place one has failed to see, I have been sure ever since that we should have found them the most fascinating objects in Corfu.

At the present school the teaching is done, no doubt, in a tongue which would have made the old university shudder. In a letter written by Sir George Bowen in 1856, from one of the Ionian Islands, there is the following anecdote: "Bishop Wilberforce told me that he recently had, as a candidate at one of his ordinations, Mr. M., the son of an English merchant settled in Greece. 'I examined him myself,' said the bishop, 'when he gave what was to me an unknown pronunciation.' 'Oh, Mr. M.,' I said, 'where did you learn Greek?' 'In Athens, my lord,' replied the trembling man." Classical scholars who visit Greece to-day are not able to ask the simplest questions; or, rather, they may ask, but no one will understand them. Several of these gentlemen have announced to the world that the modern speech of Athens is a barbarous decadence. It is not for an American, I suppose, to pass judgment upon matters of this sort. But when these authorities continue as follows: "And even in pronunciation modern Greek is hopelessly fallen; the ancients never pronounced in this way," may we not ask how they can be so sure? They are not, I take it, inspired, and the phonograph is a modern invention. The voice of Robert Browning is stored for coming generations; the people A.D. 3000 may hear him recite "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Possibly the tones of Lord Salisbury and of Mr. Balfour are already garnered and arranged in cylinders for the future orators of the South Seas. But we cannot know how Pindar spoke any more than we can know the song the Sirens sang; the most learned scholar cannot, alas! summon from the past the articulation of Plato.

In the esplanade the period of English rule is further kept in mind by monuments to the memory of three of the Lords High—a statue, an obelisk, and (of all things in the world) an imitation of a Greek temple. This temple—it is so small that they might call it a templette—was erected in honor of Sir Thomas Maitland, a Governor whose arbitrary rule gained for him the title of King Tom. The three memorials are officially protected, an agreement to that effect having been made between the governments of Great Britain and Greece. They were never in danger, probably, as the English protection was a friendly one. In spite of its friendliness, the Corfiotes voted as follows with enthusiasm when an opportunity was offered to them: "The single and unanimous will of the Ionian people has been and is for their reunion with the Kingdom of Greece." England yielded to this wish and withdrew—a disinterested act which ought to have gained for her universal applause. Since 1864 Corfu and her sister islands, happily freed at last from foreign control, have filled with patriotic pride and contentment their proper place as part of the Hellenic kingdom.

The esplanade also contains the one modern monument erected by the Corfiotes themselves—a statue of Capo d'Istria. John Capo d'Istria, a native of Corfu, was the political leader of Greece when she succeeded in freeing herself from the Turkish yoke. The story of his life is a part of the exciting tale of the Greek revolution. His measures, after he had attained supreme power, were thought to be high-handed, and he was accused also of looking too often towards that great empire in the North whose boundaries are stretching slowly towards Constantinople; he was resisted, disliked; finally he was assassinated. Time has softened the remembrance of his faults, whatever they were, and brought his services to the nation into the proper relief; hence this statue, erected in 1887, fifty-six years after his death, by young Greece. It is a sufficiently imposing figure of white marble, the face turned towards the bay with a musing expression. Capo d'Istria—a name which might have been invented for a Greek patriot! The Eastern question is a complicated one, and I have no knowledge of its intricacies. But a personal observation of the hatred of Turkey which exists in every Greek heart, and a glance at the map of Europe, lead an American mind towards one general idea or fancy—namely, that Capo d'Istria was merely in advance of his time, and that an alliance between Russia and Greece is now one of the probabilities of the near future. It is unexpected—at least, to the non-political observer—that Hellas should be left to turn for help and comfort to the Muscovites, a race to whom, probably, her ancient art and literature appeal less strongly than they do to any other European people. But she has so turned. "Wait till Russia comes down here!" she appears to be saying, with deferred menace, to Turkey to-day.

These various monuments of the esplanade do not, however, make Corfu in the least modern. They are unimportant, they are inconspicuous, when compared with the old streets which meander over the slopes behind them, fringed with a net-work of stone lanes that lead down to the water's edge. It has been said that the general aspect of the place is Italian. It is true that there are arcades like those of Bologna and Padua; that some of the byways have the look of a Venetian calle, without its canal; and that the neighborhood of the gay little port resembles, on a small scale, the streets which border the harbor of Genoa. In spite of this, we have only to look up and see the sky, we have only to breathe and note the quality of the air, to perceive that we are not in Italy. Corfu is Greek, with a coating of Italian manners. And it has also caught a strong tinge from Asia. Many of the houses have the low door and masked entrance which are so characteristic of the East; at the top of the neglected stairway, as far as possible from public view, there may be handsome, richly furnished apartments; but if such rooms exist, the jealous love of privacy keeps them hidden. This inconspicuous entrance is as universal in the Orient as the high wall, shutting off all view of the garden or park, is universal in England.