Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

Missolonghi is a small abortive Venice, without the gondolas; it is situated on a lagoon, and a causeway nearly two miles long leads to it, across the shallow water. Vague and unimportant as it is upon its muddy shore, it was the soul of the Greek revolution. It has been through terrible sieges. During one of these Marco Botzaris was in command, and his grave is outside the western gate. A few years ago all the school-boys in America could chant his requiem; perhaps they chant it still. After the death of Botzaris, Byron took five hundred of the chieftain's needy Suliotes, and formed them into a body-guard, giving them generous pay. This is but one of many instances. It is the fashion of the day to paint Byron in the darkest colors. But when you stand in the squalid, unhealthy little street where he drew his last breath you realize that he came here voluntarily; that he offered his life if need be, and, in the end, gave it, to the cause which appealed to him; he did not stay safely at home and write about it. He died nearly seventy years ago, but at Missolonghi he is very real and very present still—with his red coat, and his bravery and penetration. Napier said that, of all the Englishmen who came to assist the Greek revolution, Byron was the one who comprehended best the character of the modern Greek—"all the rest expected to find Plutarch's men." It is another fashion of the moment to put aside as of small account the glittering cantos which stirred the English-speaking world in the early days of this century. But it is not while the wild, beautiful Albanian mountains are rising above your head that you think meanly of them. "Remember all the splendid things he said of Greece," says some one. When you are in Greece, you do remember.

The only brigands we saw we met at Patras. Missolonghi is on the northern shore of the bay; to reach Patras the steamer crosses to the Peloponnesus side. It was a dark night, and I don't know where we stopped, but it must have been far out from land. The barges which came to meet us were rough craft, with loose boards for seats and water in the bottom. We obtained places in one of them, and after twenty minutes of pitching up and down, shouting, tumbling about, and splashing, the crew bent to their big oars, and we started. Swaying lights glimmered through the darkness here and there; they came from vessels at anchor in the roadstead. We plunged and rolled, apparently making no progress; but at last a long, wet breakwater, dimly seen, appeared on the right, and finally we perceived the lights of the landing-place, which is the water-side of one of the squares of the town. Our crew jumped out in the surf, and drew the heavy boat up to the steps of the embankment. Here were assembled the brigands. There were a hundred of them at least, all yelling. Probably they were astonished to see ladies landing from the Greek coaster. This was part of our original misconception in the selection of that steamer (a mistake, however, which had turned out to be such a picturesque success); but it was part also of a general error which came from our nationality. For we were natives of the one land on earth where to women is always accorded, without question, a first place. It had never occurred to us that we could be jostled. After Patras we were more careful (and more proud of our country than ever). But at the moment, as we were pulled first to the right by men who wished to carry us and our travelling-bags in that direction, and then to the left by others who had attacked the first party, felled them, and captured their prey—at the moment when we were closely pressed by a throng of wild-looking, dancing, shrieking figures, dressed in strange attire, and carrying pistols, it was not a little alarming. The fray had lasted six or seven minutes, and there were no signs of cessation, when there appeared on the edge of the throng a neatly dressed little man in spectacles. He made his way within, and rescued us by the simple process of repeating something that sounded like "La, la, la, la! La, la, la, la!" Breathless, freed, we stood, saved, in the square, while our preserver went back and captured our bags, bringing them out and depositing them gently, one after the other, on the ground by our side. We then waited until a handcart, trundled by a petticoated porter, appeared, when the little man led us quietly to the custom-house near by, where, after some delay, we obtained our luggage, which was piled upon the cart. Followed by this cart, we walked across the square to the hotel. Throughout the whole of this process, which lasted twenty minutes, the brigands surrounded us in a close, scowling circle that moved as we moved. When its line drew too near us the little man walked round the ring—"La, la, la, la! La, la, la, la!"—and it widened slightly, but only slightly. We reached refuge at last, and escaped into a lighted hall. It was a real escape, and the hotel seemed a paradise. It was not until the next day that we recognized it as a mortal inn, with the appearance of the well-known tepid soup in the dining-room; but the coffee was excellent. And this showed that there was a German influence somewhere in the house; it proved to emanate from our preserver, who was also the landlord, and an exile from the Rhine. I think he was homesick. But at least he had learned the dialect of his temporary abode, and also the way to treat the last remnants of the pirate and brigand days, as its spirit reappears now and then, though faintly, among the hangers-on of a Greek port town.

Though I have talked of brigands, for Greece as a whole, for the young nation, I have but one feeling—namely, admiration. The country, escaping at last from its bondage to Turkey, after a long and exhausting war, had everything to do and nothing to do it with. There was no agriculture, no commerce, no money, and only a small population; there were no roads, no schools, no industries or trades, and few men of education. (I quote the words of Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, written in 1891.) The Greeks have done much, and under the most unfavorable conditions. They will do more. The struggle upward of an intelligent and ambitious people is deeply interesting, and the effort in Greece appeals especially to Americans, because the country, in spite of its form of government, is a democracy.

When we left Patras we left the Ionian Sea, and I ought therefore to bring these slight records to a close. But it was the same blue water, after all, that was washing the shores of the long, lake-like gulf beyond, and the impression produced by its pure, early-world tint, lasts as far as Corinth; here one turns inland, and the next crested waves which one meets are Ægean. They rouse other sensations.

There is now a railroad from Patras to Athens. On the morning when we made the transit there was given to us for our sole use a saloon on wheels, which was much larger than the compartments of an English railway carriage, and smaller than an American parlor car. In its centre was a long table, and a cushioned bench ran round its four sides; broad windows gave us a wide view of the landscape as we rolled (rather slowly) along. The track follows the gulf all the way to Corinth, and we passed through miles of vineyards. But I did not think of currants here; they had been left behind at Zante. There is, indeed, only one thing to think of, and the heart beats quickly as Parnassus lifts its head above the other snow-clad summits. "The prophetess of Delphi was hypnotized, of course." This sudden incursion of modernity was due no doubt to the mode of our progress through this sacred country. We ought to have been crossing the gulf in a Phæacian boat, which needs no pilot, or, at the very least, in a bark with an azure prow. But even upon an iron track, through utilitarian currant fields, the spell descends again when the second peak becomes visible at the eastern end of the bay.

"Not here, O Apollo!

Are haunts meet for thee,

But where Helicon breaks down

In cliff to the sea—"

How many times, in lands far from here, had I read these lines for their mere beauty, without hope of more!

And now before my eyes was Helicon itself.

THE END

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