IN A TÜRBEH
ENTRANCE TO THE TÜRBEH OF SELIM II. AT S. SOPHIA
Its worst expression is recalled in the blood and luxury which are linked with the names of these two sultans. Its best is attached to the one other architectural feature of the city which I must mention in this place. One of the most beautiful and most characteristic sights that strikes the western traveller as he wanders through Stambûl is the fountain outside every mosque and at almost every street corner. Hundreds of them are worth lingering over. Here I will only mention one. Outside the Bâb-i-Humayûn, the gate upon which the heads of so many disgraced officials have been placed, and under the shadow of S. Sophia, is the most beautiful of all, designed by Ahmed I. himself. White marble it is, with beautiful arabesques and elaborate inscriptions in those graceful elaborations of kaligraphy in which the Turks have always excelled. It is the most elaborate of all the fountains, but the little ones at the street corners, with an arched or domical pent-house above them and some small decorative inscription above the marble founts, have a simple charm of their own.
As one turns away from the Turkish buildings and tries to sum up the impressions which the architecture represented by the mosques of Constantinople leaves on the student of other styles, there are criticisms which are natural and inevitable. How little variety, we say; how tiresome, this similarity of design! The Turks indeed have felt it themselves, but they have been unable to set themselves free. For indeed the lack is the hopeless one, the sheer absence of originality, in every feature. We may call one mosque more eastern than another, but it would puzzle us to find a single feature in any of them, except the Mihrab, which is not ultimately Christian. The feeling, it is true, differs; but that will be felt, by Westerns at least, to be a conspicuous defect. There is no sense of the mystery that lies behind all life, the solemn awe in which alone man may fitly draw nigh to God. All is clear, complete, satisfied, protestant of its completeness and satisfaction. Is there anything, one feels, beyond man and this world? Certainly here there is nothing to raise thought to heaven, to help to pierce behind the veil. Is it fanciful to say that something of this it is that makes the difference between the windows of a Christian church and those of a mosque? The mosques have windows of the plainest, ugliest, most staring. Can anything be more pitiable than the windows of Ahmed's, the characteristic Turkish mosque? No tracery, no stained glass, nothing that uplifts or separates from the outer world.
Yet to all this there must be a corresponding gain. From this absorption in the things of the present, this satisfaction with the work of men's hands, comes often a real perfection of detail. How often the fore-court is an admirable piece of building, worth examination and imitation at every point! Yet even here there is the exception that detracts from the merit of all Southern "pointed" work: the arches will not remain firm of themselves, they must needs be tied together with cross beams. How sordid and untidy this looks one sees in a moment as one stands in the court of the Valideh mosque. But the detail, we must insist, is often good, the niches notably so in the "stalactite pattern," which also appears in the capitals of late date of sixteenth and seventeenth century building, as in the courts of Ahmed and Valideh. Yet when all this is said, the chief glory of the mosques, the best and most original feature of the Moslem art as we see it in Constantinople, is the exquisite tile-work everywhere and of every date. It brings us back again, as we end this chapter, to the magnificent Sultan and his proud wife. The choicest art surrounds the tomb of the Circassian, and there
The walls that shut thee from the sun,
The potter's art made bright with blue,