And
the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such as would inspire the brush
of Turner or Claude Lorraine. . . .
For the college, as befits its grave academic character, stands by
itself among fruitful fields and backed by a chestnut wood, at ten
minutes' walk from the crowded streets. It is an imposing edifice - the
Basilean convent of St. Adrian, with copious modern additions; the
founders may well have selected this particular site on account of its
fountain of fresh water, which flows on as in days of yore. One thinks
of those communities of monks in the Middle Ages, scattered over this
wild region and holding rare converse with one another by gloomy forest
paths - how remote their life and ideals! In the days of Fiore (1691) the
inmates of this convent still practised their old rites.
The nucleus of the building is the old chapel, containing a remarkable
font; two antique columns sawn up (apparently for purposes of
transportation from some pagan temple by the shore) - one of them being
of African marble and the other of grey granite; there is also a
tessellated pavement with beast-patterns of leopards and serpents akin
to those of Patir. Bertaux gives a reproduction of this serpent; he
assimilates it, as regards technique and age, to that which lies before
the altar of Monte Cassino and was wrought by Greek artisans of the
abbot Desiderius. The church itself is held to be two centuries older
than that of Patir.
The library, once celebrated, contains musty folios of classics and
their commentators, but nothing of value. It has been ransacked of its
treasures like that of Patir, whose disjecta membra have been tracked
down by the patience and acumen of Monsignor Batiffol.
Batiffol, Bertaux - Charles Diehl, Jules Gay (who has also written on San
Demetrio) - Huillard-Breholles - Luynes - Lenormant. . . here are a few
French scholars who have recently studied these regions and their
history. What have we English done in this direction?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Such thoughts occur inevitably.
It may be insinuated that researches of this kind are gleanings; that
our English genius lies rather in the spade-work of pioneers like Leake
or Layard. Granted. But a hard fact remains; the fact, namely, that
could any of our scholars have been capable of writing in the large and
profound manner of Bertaux or Gay, not one of our publishers would have
undertaken to print his work. Not one. They know their business; they
know that such a book would have been a dead loss. Therefore let us
frankly confess the truth: for things of the mind there is a smaller
market in England than in France. How much smaller only they can tell,
who have familiarized themselves with other departments of French thought.
Here, then, I have lived for the past few days, strolling among the
fields, and attempting to shape some picture of these Albanians from
their habits and such of their literature as has been placed at my
disposal. So far, my impression of them has not changed since the days
when I used to rest at their villages, in Greece. They remind me of the
Irish. Both races are scattered over the earth and seem to prosper best
outside their native country; they have the same songs and bards, the
same hero-chieftains, the same com-bativeness and frank hospitality;
both are sunk in bigotry and broils; they resemble one another in their
love of dirt, disorder and display, in their enthusiastic and
adventurous spirit, their versatile brilliance of mind, their incapacity
for self-government and general (Keltic) note of inspired inefficiency.
And both profess a frenzied allegiance to an obsolete tongue which, were
it really cultivated as they wish, would put a barrier of triple brass
between themselves and the rest of humanity.
Even as the Irish despise the English as their worldly and effete
relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks - even those of
Pericles - with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their
writers, are "the oldest people upon earth," and their language is the
"divine Pelasgic mother-tongue." I grew interested awhile in Stanislao
Marchiano's plausibly entrancing study on this language, as well as in a
pamphlet of de Rada's on the same subject; but my ardour has cooled
since learning, from another native grammarian, that these writers are
hopelessly in the wrong on nearly every point. So much is certain, that
the Albanian language already possesses more than thirty different
alphabets (each of them with nearly fifty letters). Nevertheless they
have not yet, in these last four (or forty) thousand years, made up
their minds which of them to adopt, or whether it would not be wisest,
after all, to elaborate yet another one - a thirty-first. And so
difficult is their language with any of these alphabets that even after
a five days' residence on the spot I still find myself puzzled by such
simple passages as this:
. . . Zilji,
mosse vet, ce asso mbremie
to ngcnrct me iljis, praa
gjith e miegculem, mhi siaarr
rriij i sgjuat. Nje voogh e keljbur
sorrevet te liosta
ndjej se i oxtenej
e pisseroghej. Zuu shiu
menes; ne mee se Ijinaar
chish Ijeen pa-shuatur
skiotta, e i ducheje per moon.
I will only add that the translation of such a passage - it contains
twenty-eight accents which I have omitted - is mere child's play to its
pronunciation.
XXIV
AN ALBANIAN SEER
Sometimes I find my way to the village of Macchia, distant about three
miles from San Demetrio. It is a dilapidated but picturesque cluster of
houses, situate on a projecting tongue of land which is terminated by a
little chapel to Saint Elias, the old sun-god Helios, lover of peaks and
promontories, whom in his Christian shape the rude Albanian colonists
brought hither from their fatherland, even as, centuries before, he had
accompanied the Byzantines on the same voyage and, fifteen centuries yet
earlier, the Greeks.
