PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXVI. AUGUST, 1854. Vol. LXXVI.
TRICOUPI AND ALISON ON THE GREEK REVOLUTION.[[1]][[2]]
We certainly owe an apology to our Greek ambassador. The nine hundred and ninety-ninth edition of a declamatory old play of Euripides, cut and slashed into the most newfangled propriety by some J. A. Hartung, or other critical German, with a tomahawk, is a phenomenon in the literary world that can excite no attention; but when a regularly built living Greek comes forward in the middle of this nineteenth century, exactly four hundred years after the last Byzantine chronicler had been blown into the air by our brave allies the Turks—and within the precincts of the Red Lion Court, London—ἐν τῇ ἀυλῇ τοῦ ἐρυθροῦ λέοντος—puts forth a regularly built history of the Greek Revolution of 1821, thereby claiming—not without impudence, as some think—a place on our classical shelves alongside of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and a great way above Diodorus Siculus, and other such retailers of venerable hearsay: this truly is an event in the Greek world that claims notice from the general reviewer even more than from the professed classical scholar. At the present moment, particularly, one likes to see what a living Greek, with a pen in his hand, has to say for himself; his language and his power of utterance is an element in the great Turko-Russian question that cannot be lost sight of. Doubly welcome, therefore, is this first instalment of Mr Tricoupi’s long-expected history; and as it happens opportunely that the most interesting portion of Sir A. Alison’s third volume is occupied with the same theme, we eagerly seize the present opportunity at once to acquit ourselves of an old debt to our Hellenic ambassador, and to thank Sir A. Alison for the spirited, graphic, and thoroughly sympathetic style in which he has presented to the general English reader the history of a bright period of Greek history, which recent events have somewhat tended to becloud. It is not our intention on the present occasion to attempt a sketch of the strategetical movements of the Greek war, 1821–6. A criticism of these will be more opportune when Mr Tricoupi shall have finished his great work.[[3]] We shall rather confine ourselves to bringing out a few salient points of that great movement, which may serve, by way of contrast or similitude, to throw light on the very significant struggle in which we are now engaged. A single word, however, in the first place, with regard to the dialect in which Mr Tricoupi’s work is written; as that is a point on which all persons are not well informed, and a point also by no means unimportant in the decision of the question,—What are the hopes, prospects, and capabilities of the living race of Greeks?
Now, with regard to this point, Mr Tricoupi’s book furnishes the most decided and convincing evidence that the language of Aristotle and Plato yet survives in a state of the most perfect purity, the materials of which it is composed being genuine Greek, and the main difference between the style of Tricoupi and that of Xenophon consisting in the loss of a few superfluous verbal flexions, and the adoption of one or two new syntactical forms to compensate for the loss—the merest points of grammar, indeed, which to a schoolmaster great in Attic forms may appear mighty, but to the general scholar, and the practical linguist, are of no moment. A few such words of Turkish extraction, as ζάμιον, a mosque; φιρμάνιον, a firman; βεζιρης, a vizier; γενίτσαρος, a janizary; ραγιάδης, a rajah, so far from being any blot on the purity of Mr Tricoupi’s Greek, do in fact only prove his good sense; for even the ancient Greeks, ultra-national as they were in all their habits, never scrupled to adopt a foreign word—such as γάζα, παράδεισος, ἄγγαρος—when it came in their way, just as we have κοδράντης, κηνσος, σουδάριον, and a few other Latinisms in the New Testament. The fact is, that the modern Greeks are rather to be blamed for the affectation of extreme purity in their style, than for any undue admixture of foreign words, such as we find by scores in every German newspaper. But this is their affair. It is a vice that leans to virtue’s side, and springs manifestly from that strong and obstinate vitality of race which has survived the political revolutions of nearly two thousand years; and a vice, moreover, that may prove of the utmost use to our young scholars, who may have the sense and the enterprise to turn it to practical account. For, as the pure Greek of Mr Tricoupi’s book is no private invention of his own, but the very same dialect which is at present used as an organ of intellectual utterance by a large phalanx of talented professors in the University of Athens, and is in fact the language of polite intercourse over the whole of Greece, it follows that Greek, which is at present almost universally studied as a dead language, and that by a most laborious and tedious process of grammatical indoctrination, may be more readily picked up, like German or French, in the course of the living practice of a few months. It is worthy of serious consideration, indeed, how far the progress of our young men in an available knowledge of the finest language of the world may have been impeded by the perverse methods of teachers who could not speak, and who gave themselves no concern to speak, the language which they were teaching; who invented, also, an arbitrary system of pronouncing the language, which completely separated them from the nation who speak it. But this is a philological matter on which we have no vocation to enter here: we only drop a hint for the wise, who are able to inquire and to conclude for themselves.
We now proceed to business. There are five points connected with the late Greek Revolution which stand out with a prominent interest at the present moment.
First,—The character, conduct, and position of Russia at the outbreak of the Revolution.
Second,—The character and conduct of the Turks and the Turkish government, as displayed by the manner in which the revolt was met.