The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

The end of the official war and the hopelessness of seeking to reestablish myself in a literary career in London, as well as the desire of my wife to try a residence in a climate and surroundings more attractive than those of the Isle of Wight—the fact, too, of being without local ties—led to the determination to find a residence for a time abroad, and the family came to meet me at Turin, en route for Corfu, where we decided to pass the winter. If I had hoped to escape political agitation there, I was mistaken. The Greeks had hung fire in joining in the Balkan movement, hoping that the powers would include them in the arrangements for a final settlement of the Eastern question. When, in the negotiations which accompanied the conclusion of peace, Greece found that she was ignored, the inflammable public opinion broke out in a violent demonstration against the treaty of peace. When the Russian government had decided to declare war, it proposed to Greece that if a Greek army were sent across the frontiers for even a fruitless attack on Turkey when that of Russia entered on the other side, Greece should participate in the benefits of the settlement. Greece did nothing, and the offer was renewed at a later period, when the war was evidently tending to the complete triumph of Russia, but still there was no action at Athens, and Greece was consequently ignored by Russia when the treaty was negotiated.

Desperate at this delusion of all their hopes, the Greeks demanded that the invasion of Epirus and Thessaly should be at once undertaken, the semblance of an army corps was formed for the latter destination, and the insurrectionary committees organized (if the word can be applied to the huddling together of a mass of volunteers without organization) the invasion of Epirus from the coast. A few hundred men of many nations, amongst whom were a number of gallant Italians, full of Hellenic enthusiasm, were landed at Aghia Saranda, a port opposite Corfu and in sight of the city, a scant allowance of food and ammunition was thrown on shore with them, and the steamer which brought them steamed away, leaving them to their fate, which was to be butchered under the eyes of the spectators at Corfu, looking on with horror. Only a few of the hapless volunteers escaped under the guidance of one of the Greeks, who knew the country and guided a party through the mountains to the Gulf of Corinth, the rest being killed almost without resistance, no provision for their escape by sea having been thought of. At the other extremity of the frontier the same tactics were successful in raising a brief insurrection about Volo, which collapsed after a few days' fighting, during which a correspondent of the "Times," Mr. Ogle, was killed by the Turkish troops. The Greek ministry, in the dilemma of acting or being left out of the settlement, decided that the army to cross the frontier should be commanded by the King in person, but the King so earnestly declined the honor put upon him that the plan was abandoned. One of the ministers assured me that the King with tears in his eyes begged to be excused from going. He had never been popular in the country, and this failure to realize a step in the Panhellenic policy made him for the time the object of all the popular indignation. But he probably realized that nothing was ready for such a movement and that it was certain to end in disaster.

The real cause of failure was in the general indifference to all preparation, in which the government was supported by the nation. The overweening confidence in themselves, which was so great as to permit them to believe that without any organization or discipline they were more than a match for the Turkish army, has always been their fatal weakness. One of the leaders of the war party said to me a little later, "The Greeks are so clever that they do not need to be trained; they can fight without it well enough to beat the Turks." We saw at Corfu how ill-prepared they were, for the classes were called out to go to the frontier of Epirus, and those of Corfu marched through the streets to the place of embarkation weeping as if they went to death. This delusion as to their natural military capacity was never dispelled until the later disaster in Thessaly. The army did in fact cross the frontier, but within forty-eight hours they were obliged to return to Greek territory for want of provisions—the commissariat had been forgotten!

Outside of political agitation we found living in Corfu delightful, and I question if there is, within the limits of the north temperate zone, any more delightful winter residence than was that of Corfu in the period we were there. What remained of the advanced civilization of the English garrison period gave the island a distinct advantage over all the other Greek isles, and even over Crete with its superior natural advantages. Greek enterprise and civilization are so far superior to that found anywhere in the Turkish territory that they are capable of maintaining the substantial progress which the English occupation achieved in Corfu; and, though we found the peasantry not largely inoculated by the fever of progress, the better classes of the city population succeed in supporting the better condition attained to. But the obstinacy of the conservatism retained by the agricultural classes is equal to that in the least frequented islands of the Aegean. A relative, on whose estate we passed a part of the winter, remote from the city of Corfu, had tried to introduce improvements in the culture of his olives; but the laborers not only refused to coöperate with him, but opposed the introduction of laborers who would lend themselves to his operations. As the olives had been gathered in the days of Nausicaa they should be gathered still, and so should the oil be made, and he was obliged to yield. But as we from the west suffer not a little from over-civilization and artifice, it is grateful to repose the eyes and the aesthetic sense in a land where there still remains something of the antique simplicity and picturesque uncouthness, and the winter in Scheria remains one of the grateful memories of a wandering life.

Leaving Corfu with freedom from any local obligations, and a keen enjoyment of the change from life in England, we decided to establish ourselves for a time in Florence, where we passed the whole of the summer. In October a son was born to us, and we took a house and furnished it. I took a studio, too, and returned to painting, as well as the long interval permitted me to gather up the threads of habit. Art is not to be followed in that way, and there is no cause for surprise, nor, perhaps, for regret, that literature had the stronger hold on my mind; and that, between the "Times," letters for which were provoked by so many themes of interest to the English public, and archaeology, especially the study of the prehistoric monuments of central Italy, so important in their yet hardly determined relations to the classical world, the pencil found less attraction than the pen. To my wife, whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense, Florence was an ideal residence; and on some accounts I still regret the circumstances which drove us out of the lily city,—to me still the most desirable residence I have ever known, when one is able to adapt one's self to the life there. After the first summer we found the Italian Alps one of the most delectable of retreats, Cadore and Auronzo, with Cortina and Landro,—all places full of picturesque and natural fascination. And now, as the strength wanes and we live more in memory than in act, the recollection of the summers passed in the land of Titian remains a gallery of the most delightful pictures.

At Cortina I met and first knew Browning, who, with his sister Sariana, our old and dear friend, came to stay at the inn where we were. I am not much inclined to reckon intellectual greatness as a personal charm, for experience has shown me that the relation is very remote; but Browning always impressed me—and then and after I saw a good deal of him—as one of the healthiest and most robust minds I have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out step by step.

At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone, late in the summer, when the place was abandoned by the general crowd. I had begun a study of running water, over which I lingered as long as the weather permitted, when he came with Mrs. Gladstone and his son Herbert and daughter Helen. The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity. They had not come out to be together as at home, and each took generally a different walk. Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the way,—which not all good walkers can do,—but I do not remember his ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,—he assumed himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it; never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about them. It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall, Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of our walks; on his part with the most dispassionate appreciation and kindness of manner. I had said of his great rival that he had struck a blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, "That is true."

He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear from English people, even from those who live in Italy. We passed a fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she had always been a washerwoman. No, she replied, she had been a bália (nurse) once. He was struck by her pronunciation of the word bália and walked on; but presently he said, "I thought that that word was pronounced balía" and, when I explained that there were two words—bália which meant a nurse, and balía, which came from the same root as our "bailiff," and meant a charge, custody,—he seemed annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our climb. It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language efficiency in which he prided himself on. It was the only foible I detected in him. He was very much interested in America, and asked many questions about our politics. Two things, he said, in the future of America, seemed to him ominous of evil: the condition of our civil service, and the amount of our Western lands going into mortmain through the gifts to the great railway systems.

It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of Gladstone's calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to a certain extent. He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the other in action. The Platonist crowded the Statesman, and, at certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in so great a man.

That winter I had a commission from the "Century" (then "Scribner's") to make an archaeological and literary venture in Greek waters, the results of which in a series of papers in the magazine were afterwards published in a volume entitled "On the Track of Ulysses."