“That depends upon what is understood by civilisation. If you mean humbug, vice, vanity and bluster, infamous plays and vaudevilles, immoral literature generally, you may crown France with a triple crown of shameless glory. But if you mean truth, good manners, purity, sense and honourable restraint in all things, as the old world understood it, then France is below all other countries to-day. It is because Greece is so infatuated with France that I completely despair of her future.”
“It seems to me that you are charging an innocent country with the vices of a depraved town. France is not Paris, and Paris is the sinner.”
“Paris! France! It is one. The country looks on complacently, and approves the nameless follies of the city. It makes no effort to impede her fatal career, and is not dismayed to see her, with her band of lascivious poets and novelists, dance madly towards her doom, in the degradation of decay, with a weak and dissolute smile on her worn lips.”
“Do you condemn all her writers?”
“Upon moral and artistic grounds I condemn all unreservedly. You are one of those who, perhaps, call Victor Hugo great. I do not. ‘Words, words, words,’ as Hamlet says, and nothing to come at them. Chip away all the superfluous decorations and excrescences of ‘Notre Dame,’ and measure it by the severe restrictions of Greek Art. You have twenty pages, strengthened, purified, with only essential action and speech, instead, of two long volumes of intolerable verbiage. No, sir; France’s sentence has been pronounced. One day Germany will sweep her away, with her vices and her graces, and they, I admit, are many. She is in a debilitated and anæmic state, starting up in spasms of febrile vitality, and the sooner her destiny is accomplished, the better for us and all other such feebly imitative peoples. Have you stayed long in Athens?”
“No, in fact I have seen nothing as yet of the town.”
“Ah, then you have yet to learn why I, and every true lover of Greece, should hate the name of France. The men and women in Athens speak bad Greek, though there is no reason why their speech should not be as pure as Plutarch’s. Every one chatters in bad French, with what object it would puzzle the Lord himself to discover. The women rave about Ohnet, a vulgar writer whose style even I can know to be execrable. Like the illustrious Hugo, the men read Zola, and are thereby much improved. There are French vaudevilles and cafés-chantants; our army is superintended by Frenchmen, who draw large salaries for the privilege of laughing at us. Paris condescends to send our women its cast-off fashions at enormously disproportionate prices. Athens is, in fact, a small, dull, feeble Paris,—Paris in caricature, without the fascination of its many-sided life.”
He stopped suddenly, half-ashamed and slightly flushed after his burst of indignation. When we had smoked a cigarette apiece, I made careless mention of his brother, and asked about his family. Constantine, he told me, had long ago married a handsome Levantine who, after a few months of conjugal discord, had attempted to shoot him, and then betaken herself to Constantinople with a native of Syra. This disaster had naturally tended to convince Constantine of the nothingness of marriage, and he had since remained in single inconsolation. Pericles himself had been blessed with a wife, picked up at Ischia, as lovely in soul as in body, but here again was demonstrated the singular fleetingness of wedded bliss. This pearl among wives melted away in the crucial test of childbirth—and Selaka was left, bereaved and truly forlorn, with a baby girl upon his hands.
Later on in the afternoon Selaka joined me, just as my senses were lazily shaking themselves out of the thrall of siesta. He asked me if I were interested in the study of ancient Greek, and upon my enthusiastic affirmative, his face brightened and his manner immediately assumed a cordiality and a pleasure that charmed me. He invited me to accompany him in his walk through his orchard and vineyard; and truly a delight it was to me to be brought face to face with a nature so simple and a mind so exquisitely cultivated as his. Perhaps it would be thought that such exclusive recognition of the past and such a profound and unutterable contempt for the present were narrow and pedantic. That it tended to lessen his interest in humanity cannot be denied. But how very precious, from sincerity and undecorated speech, were the thoughts to which he gave expression during our leisurely walk! Much as I delighted, however, in the ancients, and deeply interesting as was any discussion upon the old Greek writers, I could not get out of my head the one word “Inarime.” I was haunted with the wish, nay, almost the need, to hear something of her, and at last, after a pause in our conversation, I hazarded the question:
“Is your daughter married?”