In May I went to Greece in a yacht belonging to Madame de Béarn. There were on board besides myself two Austrians and a German Professor called Krumbacher. We started from Naples and landed somewhere on the west coast, and went straight to Olympia. As we landed we were met by a sight which might have come straight from the Greek anthology: a fisherman spearing some little silver fishes with a wooden trident, and wading in the transparent water; and that water had the colour of a transparent chrysoprase—more transparent and deeper than a turquoise, brighter and greener than a chrysoprase. Olympia was carpeted with flowers, and the fields were like Persian carpets: white and mauve and purple, with the dark blood-red poppies flung on the bright green corn. At every turn sights met you that might have been illustrations to Greek poems: a woman with a spindle; a child with an amphora on its head. The air was the most iridescent I have ever seen. At sunset time it was as if it was powdered with the dust of a million diamonds, and in the background were the wonderful blue mountains, and against the sky the small shapes of the trees.
At Olympia, in the museum, the only intact or nearly intact masterpiece of one of the great Greek sculptors has a little museum to itself: the Hermes of Praxiteles. There are still traces, faint traces, of the pink colour on some parts of the limbs, and even of faded gilding. The marble has the texture and ripple of live flesh; the statue is different in kind from all the statues in the Vatican, the Capitol, or the Naples Museum, and to see it is to have one of those impressions that are like shocks and take the breath away, and leave one stunned with admiration, wonder, and awe.
From Olympia we went to tragic heights and rocks of Delphi, where we saw the bronze statue of the charioteer, so magnificent in its effect and in its simplicity, and so startling in its trueness to the coachman type, for the face might be that of a hansom-cab driver; and from Delphi to Corinth and Athens. The first sight of the Acropolis and the Parthenon takes the breath away; the Parthenon is so much larger than one expects it to be; and the colour of the pillars is not white, but a tawny amber, as though the marble had been changed to gold. In the evening these pillars stand like large ghosts against the purple hills, that are dry, arid, like a volcanic crust. In the distance you see the blue ocean. And Byron’s lines, with which the “Curse of Minerva” opens:
“Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea’s hills, the setting sun;”
describe exactly what you see. Byron is by far the most satisfactory singer of Greece, for he wrote with his eye on the spot, and there is something in his verse of the exhilarating and incandescent quality of the Greek air; something of the fiery strength of the Greek soil, and of the golden warmth of the Greek marbles.
And next to Byron in this business I should put a widely different poet, Heredia; but they both seize on the characteristic things in Greek landscape; Byron, when he says:
“Yet these proud pillars claim no passing sigh,
Unmoved the Moslem sits, the light Greek carols by,”
perhaps even more than Heredia, when he writes: