They May Talk About
Beauty, But Would You Wear A Flower That Had Been Dipped In A
Grease-Pot?
No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy rose out of
Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome
exotics, which are only good to make poems about.
Lord Byron wrote
more cant of this sort than any poet I know of. Think of "the
peasant girls with dark blue eyes" of the Rhine - the brown-faced,
flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of "filling high a
cup of Samian wine;" small beer is nectar compared to it, and Byron
himself always drank gin. That man never wrote from his heart. He
got up rapture and enthusiasm with an eye to the public; but this
is dangerous ground, even more dangerous than to look Athens full
in the face, and say that your eyes are not dazzled by its beauty.
The Great Public admires Greece and Byron: the public knows best.
Murray's "Guide-book" calls the latter "our native bard." Our
native bard! Mon Dieu! HE Shakspeare's, Milton's, Keats's,
Scott's native bard! Well, woe be to the man who denies the public
gods!
The truth is, then, that Athens is a disappointment; and I am angry
that it should be so. To a skilled antiquarian, or an enthusiastic
Greek scholar, the feelings created by a sight of the place of
course will be different; but you who would be inspired by it must
undergo a long preparation of reading, and possess, too, a
particular feeling; both of which, I suspect, are uncommon in our
busy commercial newspaper-reading country. Men only say they are
enthusiastic about the Greek and Roman authors and history, because
it is considered proper and respectable. And we know how gentlemen
in Baker Street have editions of the classics handsomely bound in
the library, and how they use them. Of course they don't retire to
read the newspaper; it is to look over a favourite ode of Pindar,
or to discuss an obscure passage in Athenaeus! Of course country
magistrates and Members of Parliament are always studying
Demosthenes and Cicero; we know it from their continual habit of
quoting the Latin grammar in Parliament. But it is agreed that the
classics are respectable; therefore we are to be enthusiastic about
them. Also let us admit that Byron is to be held up as "our native
bard."
I am not so entire a heathen as to be insensible to the beauty of
those relics of Greek art, of which men much more learned and
enthusiastic have written such piles of descriptions. I thought I
could recognise the towering beauty of the prodigious columns of
the Temple of Jupiter; and admire the astonishing grace, severity,
elegance, completeness of the Parthenon. The little Temple of
Victory, with its fluted Corinthian shafts, blazed under the sun
almost as fresh as it must have appeared to the eyes of its
founders; I saw nothing more charming and brilliant, more graceful,
festive, and aristocratic than this sumptuous little building.
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