No part of the globe has been so liberally blessed with the things that enter into the mouth as the Levant. Western residents and travellers grew ecstatic at the abundance of good cheer they found in Turkey and its amazing cheapness. For a halfpenny it was possible to buy bread enough for three meals; for little more than a halfpenny a robust man might get as much mutton as he could consume; a pheasant could be had for five pence, and a brace of partridges for nine farthings.[48] The soil there yields its fruits and the sea its fish in equal profusion and variety; and a temperate climate imparts to everything an exquisite flavour. Not less remarkable than the abundance of food was the multiplicity of forms under which it made its appearance on the table. Greek, Turkish, and Italian Masters had combined for centuries to bring the gentle Art of Levantine cooking to a height of perfection that only the Archimageirus of Zeus could have excelled. It is not hard to understand the sentiments of mingled pleasure and mystification with which these succulent dishes were approached by people fresh from a land where a sirloin of beef or a venison pasty represented the utmost achievements of the kitchen, and where every meal was haunted by the unsalted and unsanctified presence of the tedious boiled potato. Turkey was, indeed, a veritable Academy for any Englishman who chose to devote himself seriously and single-mindedly to the cultivation of his stomach.
As for drink—a mighty question!—at home few Englishmen could afford to intoxicate themselves and their guests properly with anything less coarse than beer; in the Levant the choicest wines were common beverages; and those Franks whose palates craved greater variety supplemented their cellars with the products of the West. Ambassadors were even privileged to import 7000 measures of wine a year duty-free. Sir John Finch, who loved the wines of Italy dearly, but could not consume in his own household more than 2000 measures, was thus able, by selling the surplus, to have his annual supply for nothing.[49]
Things being so, Britons, on the whole, found life in Turkey tolerable enough, and in a place like Constantinople well worth living. To be sure, there were frequent earthquakes and fires, which always caused inconvenience, often grave trouble, sometimes severe suffering. But the most vexatious affliction of all—Turkish oppression—was least felt at Pera. In that suburb Europeans tasted a snatch of liberty not to be found elsewhere throughout the Ottoman Empire, except at Smyrna. There hats and wigs might show themselves abroad with little fear of being struck off the wearer’s head. In each other’s houses the merchants could indulge their sociable proclivities without let or hindrance. Those among them who had more room than they knew what to do with harboured paying guests, and every now and again there arrived from England a transient visitor whom the residents entertained with hospitable prodigality; for the English in the Levant had caught all the geniality of the Levantine climate, and prided themselves on nothing more than on their warmth towards strangers.
When the summer heats and the Plague, which visited every Turkish town with devastating regularity, made Pera unendurable, the English “Nation” resorted to Belgrade—a well-wooded and well-watered, peaceful little village not more than ten miles distant, open to the fresh and wholesome breezes of the Black Sea. Here, in the company of other Franks, they could dine and dance on the grass near the rivulets and fountains as freely as in any country-place in Europe. Here the ladies also, who at Constantinople were obliged to efface themselves, more or less, in conformity to Oriental notions of decorum, joined in the amusements of the men. All this served to alleviate the pains of exile for ordinary Britons.
But alas! the best of these sources of happiness—the happiness that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse—was sealed to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern satraps—attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes, attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common run of his countrymen—that he stood in the scale of creation as far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects. This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was; and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant.
Fortunate in this respect also, Sir John Finch had under his own roof all the society he needed. It consisted of one person—Sir Thomas Baines, another Doctor of Medicine, some years his senior. Finch had made Baines’s acquaintance at Christ’s College, and from that moment the two had become inseparable. Together at Cambridge, they went together to Padua, where they read the same books and took the same degrees. When Finch returned to England in 1661, he saw to it that Baines shared his good fortune. Both were elected Fellows of the College of Physicians of London on the same day, and together they were made Doctors of Medicine at Cambridge. Finch’s devotion knew no bounds. When he was appointed Minister at Florence, he got his friend appointed physician to the Legation, interested all his relatives in him, and, through the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Conway, procured him the honour of Knighthood in 1672. After living with Finch in Italy and England, Baines followed him to Turkey in the character of a comrade and confidant.
His life-long attachment to this College chum is the one romantic episode in Sir John Finch’s history. Without wife and children, he had concentrated all his unused affections on this friend for whom he entertained an admiration little short of idolatry, to whom he communicated all his thoughts, and whose advice he sought in all his difficulties. At Constantinople it soon became a current jest that there were two Excellencies, and the merchants humorously distinguished between them, by referring to the one as the Ambassador, and to the other as the Knight or the Chevalier.[50] It must be owned that the sight of that eternal pair of middle-aged physicians turned diplomats, each wrapped up in the other and each sufficient unto the other, had its comic as well as its romantic side. They presented to our ribald factors an object lesson in what the French call égoïsme à deux—natural only in the case of married couples, especially if they have not been married long.
Truly, it was, in Sir John’s own words, “a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls”—suave et irruptum animorum connubium; and, like all unions of the kind, it owed its strength to a happy meeting of opposites. If we may judge from the correspondence of the pair, their minds belonged to widely different types. The letters of the younger man are, on the whole, simple, straightforward, and spontaneous; the writer every now and again proves himself capable of a picturesque phrase, of a pithy statement, of a sound, if not very profound, observation. On the other hand, the elder man’s ponderous and pedantic epistles are unreadable, often unintelligible; his attempts at pleasantry painful; his whole style that of a pompous pedagogue. Of the talents which Sir John attributed to him no trace is visible in these dissertations. It is impossible to find in any of them a single remark on philosophy, religion, or society which is not dreary commonplace. And the same thing applies to the records of his conversation: they reek of stale school-learning. There can be no doubt that Finch, though no dazzling genius, had the finer intellect of the two. But intellect is not everything. As the portraits of the two friends stand confronting each other, Finch’s sensitive face with its weak mouth and melancholy eyes contrasts very suggestively with Baines’s stronger and coarser countenance: look at those lips still shaped in a firm, superior, benignant smile—the smile of one sure of his own wisdom and of his power of guiding weaker mortals! It is easy to guess at a glance to whom, in this “marriage of souls,” belonged the masculine and to whom the feminine part.
SIR THOMAS BAINES.
From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.