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Title: Pharos and Pharillon
Author: Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
Language: English
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ALEXANDRIA: A HISTORY AND GUIDE
AGENTS, MESSRS. WHITEHEAD MORRIS
9 FENCHURCH STREET E.C.
HOWARDS END
EDWARD ARNOLD
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHAROS AND PHARILLON
E. M. FORSTER
Second Edition
PUBLISHED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE HOGARTH PRESS HOGARTH
HOUSE PARADISE ROAD RICHMOND SURREY
1923
------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published May 1923
Reprinted June 1923
Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ἑρμῇ ψυχοπομπῷ
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five of the following chapters are reprinted by the courtesy of _The
Nation and the Athenæum_; the remainder have not been previously
published in this country.
I am indebted to Mr. C. P. Cavafy for permission to publish his poems,
and to Mr. George Valassopoulo for his translation of them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
PHAROS:
PHAROS 13
THE RETURN FROM SIWA 24
EPIPHANY 28
PHILO’S LITTLE TRIP 32
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 37
ST. ATHANASIUS 43
TIMOTHY THE CAT & TIMOTHY WHITEBONNET 52
THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY 56
PHARILLON:
ELIZA IN EGYPT 59
COTTON FROM THE OUTSIDE 73
THE DEN 79
BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON 82
THE SOLITARY PLACE 86
THE POETRY OF C. P. CAVAFY 91
CONCLUSION 98
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
Before there was civilization in Egypt, or the delta of the Nile had
been formed, the whole country as far south as modern Cairo lay under
the sea. The shores of this sea were a limestone desert. The coast line
was smooth usually, but at the north-west corner a remarkable spur
jutted out from the main mass. It was less than a mile wide, but thirty
miles long. Its base is not far from Bahig, Alexandria is built half-way
down it, its tip is the headland of Aboukir. On either side of it there
was once deep salt water.
Centuries passed, and the Nile, issuing out of its crack above Cairo,
kept carrying down the muds of Upper Egypt and dropping them as soon as
its current slackened. In the north-west corner they were arrested by
this spur and began to silt up against it. It was a shelter not only
from the outer sea, but from the prevalent wind. Alluvial land appeared;
the large shallow lake of Mariout was formed; and the current of the
Nile, unable to escape through the limestone barrier, rounded the
headland of Aboukir and entered the outer sea by what was known in
historical times as the “Canopic” mouth.
To the north of the spur and more or less parallel to it runs a second
range of limestone. It is much shorter, also much lower, lying mainly
below the surface of the sea in the form of reefs, but without it there
would have been no harbours (and consequently no Alexandria), because it
breaks the force of the waves. Starting at Agame, it continues as a
series of rocks across the entrance of the modern harbour. Then it
re-emerges to form the promontory of Ras el Tin, disappears into a
second series of rocks that close the entrance of the Eastern Harbour,
and makes its final appearance as the promontory of Silsileh, after
which it rejoins the big spur.
Such is the scene where the following actions and meditations take
place; that limestone ridge, with alluvial country on one side of it and
harbours on the other, jutting from the desert, pointing towards the
Nile; a scene unique in Egypt, nor have the Alexandrians ever been truly
Egyptian. Here Africans, Greeks and Jews combined to make a city; here a
thousand years later the Arabs set faintly but durably the impress of
the Orient; here after secular decay rose another city, still visible,
where I worked or appeared to work during a recent war. Pharos, the vast
and heroic lighthouse that dominated the first city—under Pharos I have
grouped a few antique events; to modern events and to personal
impressions I have given the name of Pharillon, the obscure successor of
Pharos, which clung for a time to the low rock of Silsileh and then slid
unobserved into the Mediterranean.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHAROS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHAROS
I
The career of Menelaus was a series of small mishaps. It was after he
had lost Helen, and indeed after he had recovered her and was returning
from Troy, that a breeze arose from the north-west and obliged him to
take refuge upon a desert island. It was of limestone, close to the
African coast, and to the estuary though not to the exit of the Nile,
and it was protected from the Mediterranean by an outer barrier of
reefs. Here he remained for twenty days, in no danger, but in high
discomfort, for the accommodation was insufficient for the Queen. Helen
had been to Egypt ten years before, under the larger guidance of Paris,
and she could not but remark that there was nothing to see upon the
island and nothing to eat and that its beaches were infested with seals.
Action must be taken, Menelaus decided. He sought the sky and sea, and
chancing at last to apprehend an old man he addressed to him the
following wingèd word:
“What island is this?”
“Pharaoh’s,” the old man replied.
“Pharos?”
“Yes, Pharaoh’s, Prouti’s”—Prouti being another title (it occurs in the
hieroglyphs) for the Egyptian king.
“Proteus?”
“Yes.”
As soon as Menelaus had got everything wrong, the wind changed and he
returned to Greece with news of an island named Pharos whose old man was
called Proteus and whose beaches were infested with nymphs. Under such
misapprehensions did it enter our geography.
Pharos was hammer-headed, and long before Menelaus landed some unknown
power—Cretan—Atlantean—had fastened a harbour against its western
promontory. To the golden-haired king, as to us, the works of that
harbour showed only as ochreous patches and lines beneath the dancing
waves, for the island has always been sinking, and the quays, jetties,
and double breakwater of its pre-historic port can only be touched by
the swimmer now. Already was their existence forgotten, and it was on
the other promontory—the eastern—that the sun of history arose, never to
set. Alexander the Great came here. Philhellene, he proposed to build a
Greek city upon Pharos. But the ridge of an island proved too narrow a
site for his ambition, and the new city was finally built upon the
opposing coast—Alexandria. Pharos, tethered to Alexandria by a long
causeway, became part of a larger scheme and only once re-entered
Alexander’s mind: he thought of it at the death of Hephæstion, as he
thought of all holy or delectable spots, and he arranged that upon its
distant shore a shrine should commemorate his friend, and reverberate
the grief that had convulsed Ecbatana and Babylon.
Meanwhile the Jews had been attentive. They, too, liked delectable
spots. Deeply as they were devoted to Jehovah, they had ever felt it
their duty to leave his city when they could, and as soon as Alexandria
began to develop they descended upon her markets with polite cries. They
found so much to do that they decided against returning to Jerusalem,
and met so many Greeks that they forgot how to speak Hebrew. They
speculated in theology and grain, they lent money to Ptolemy the second
king, and filled him (they tell us) with such enthusiasm for their
religion that he commanded them to translate their Scriptures for their
own benefit. He himself selected the translators, and assigned for their
labours the island of Pharos because it was less noisy than the
mainland. Here he shut up seventy rabbis in seventy huts, whence in an
incredibly short time they emerged with seventy identical translations
of the Bible. Everything corresponded. Even when they slipped they made
seventy slips, and Greek literature was at last enriched by the
possession of an inspired book. It was left to later generations to pry
into Jehovah’s scholarship and to deduce that the Septuagint translation
must have extended over a long period and not have reached completion
till 100 B.C. The Jews of Alexandria knew no such doubts. Every year
they made holiday on Pharos in remembrance of the miracle, and built
little booths along the beaches where Helen had once shuddered at the
seals. The island became a second Sinai whose moderate thunders thrilled
the philosophic world. A translation, even when it is the work of God,
is never as intimidating as an original; and the unknown author of the
“Wisdom of Solomon” shows, in his delicious but dubious numbers, how
unalarming even an original could be when it was composed at Alexandria:
Let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us
speedily use the creatures like as in youth.
Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments, and let no
flower of the spring pass by us.
Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds before they are withered.
Let none of us go without his part in our voluptuousness, let us
leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place, for this is our
portion and our lot is this.
It is true that, pulling himself together, the writer goes on to remind
us that the above remarks are no elegy on Alexander and Hephæstion, but
an indictment of the ungodly, and must be read sarcastically.
Such things they did imagine and were deceived, for their own
wickedness hath blinded them.
As for the mysteries of God they knew them not, neither hoped
they for the wages of righteousness nor discerned a reward for
blameless souls.
For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be the image
of his own eternity.
But it is too late. And all racial and religious effort was too late.
Though Pharos was not to be Greek it was not to be Hebrew either. A more
impartial power dominated it. Five hundred feet above all shrines and
huts, Science had already raised her throne.
II
A lighthouse was a necessity. The coast of Egypt is, in its western
section, both flat and rocky, and ships needed a landmark to show them
where Alexandria lay, and a guide through the reefs that block her
harbours. Pharos was the obvious site, because it stood in front of the
city; and on Pharos the eastern promontory, because it commanded the
more important of the two harbours—the Royal. But it is not clear
whether a divine madness also seized the builders, whether they
deliberately winged engineering with poetry, and tried to add a wonder
to the world. At all events they succeeded, and the arts combined with
science to praise their triumph. Just as the Parthenon had been
identified with Athens, and St. Peter’s was to be identified with Rome,
so, to the imagination of contemporaries, “The Pharos” became Alexandria
and Alexandria the Pharos. Never, in the history of architecture, has a
secular building been thus worshipped and taken on a spiritual life of
its own. It beaconed to the imagination, not only to ships, and long
after its light was extinguished memories of it glowed in the minds of
men. Perhaps it was merely very large; reconstructions strike a chill,
and the minaret, its modern descendant, is not supremely beautiful.
Something very large to which people got used—a Liberty Statue, an
Eiffel Tower? The possibility must be faced, and is not excluded by the
ecstasies of the poets.
The lighthouse was made of local limestone, of marble, and of
reddish-purple granite from Assouan. It stood in a colonnaded court that
covered most of the promontory. There were four stories. The bottom
story was over two hundred feet high, square, pierced with many windows.
In it were the rooms (estimated at three hundred) where the mechanics
and keepers were housed, and its mass was threaded by a spiral ascent,
probably by a double spiral. There may have been hydraulic machinery in
the central well for raising the fuel to the top; otherwise we must
imagine a procession of donkeys who cease not night and day to
circumambulate the spirals with loads of wood upon their backs. The
story ended in a cornice and in statues of Tritons: here too, in great
letters of lead, was a Greek inscription mentioning the architect:
“Sostratus of Cnidus, son of Dexiphanes, to the Saviour Gods: for
sailors”—an inscription which, despite its simplicity, bore a double
meaning. The Saviour Gods were the Dioscuri, but a courtly observer
could refer them to Ptolemy Soter and his wife, whose worship their son
was then promoting. For the building of the lighthouse (279 B.C.) was
connected with an elaborate dynastic propaganda known as the
“As-good-as-Olympic Games,” and with a mammoth pageant which passed
through the streets of Alexandria, regardless of imagination and
expense. Nothing could be seen in the pageant, neither elephants nor
camels nor dances of wild men, nor allegorical females upon a car, nor
eggs that opened and disclosed the Dioscuri; and the inscription on the
first story of the Pharos was a subtle echo of its appeal.
The second story was octagonal and entirely filled by the ascending
spirals. The third story was circular. Then came the lantern. The
lantern is a puzzle, because a bonfire and delicate scientific
instruments appear to have shared its narrow area. Visitors speak, for
instance, of a mysterious “mirror” up there, which was even more
wonderful than the building itself. Why didn’t this mirror crack, and
what was it? A polished steel reflector for the fire at night or for
heliography by day? Some writers describe it as made of finely wrought
glass or transparent stone, and declare that when they sat under it they
could see ships at sea that were invisible to the naked eye. A
telescope? Is it conceivable that the Alexandrian school of mathematics
and mechanics discovered the lens and that their discovery was lost and
forgotten when the Pharos fell? It is possible: the discoveries of
Aristarchus were forgotten, and Galileo persecuted for reviving them. It
is certain that the lighthouse was equipped with every scientific
improvement known to the age, that it was the outward expression of the
studies pursued in the Museum across the straits, and that its architect
could have consulted not only Aristarchus, but Eratosthenes, Apollonius
of Perga, and Euclid.
Standing on the lantern, at the height of five hundred feet above the
ground, a statue of Poseidon struck the pious note, and gave a Greek air
to Africa seen from the sea. Other works of art are also reported: for
example, a statue whose finger followed the diurnal course of the sun, a
second statue who gave out with varying and melodious voices the various
hours of the day, and a third who shouted an alarm as soon as a hostile
flotilla set sail from any foreign port. This last must belong to an
even more remarkable building, the Pharos of legend, which we will
measure in a moment. The lighthouse was the key of the Alexandrian
defences, and Cæsar occupied it before attacking the city. It was also
the pivot of a signalling system that stretched along the coast. Fifteen
miles to the west, on a ridge among masses of marigolds, the little
watch-tower of Abousir is still standing, and it reproduces, in its
three stories, the arrangements of Sostratus.
III
“I have taken a city,” wrote the Arab conqueror of Alexandria, “of which
I can only say that it contains 4000 palaces, 4000 baths, 400 theatres,
12,000 greengrocers, and 40,000 Jews.” It contained a lighthouse, too,
for the Pharos was still perfect and functioned for a few years more,
lighting the retreating fleets of Europe with its beams. Then a slow
dissolution began, and it shrinks, looms through the mists of legend,
disappears. The first, and the irreparable, disaster was the fall of the
lantern in the eighth century, carrying with it scientific apparatus
that could not be replaced. Annoyed (say the Arabs) with the magic
mirror that detected or scorched their ships, the Christians made a
plot, and sent a messenger to Islam with news of a treasure in Syria.
The treasure was found, whereupon the messenger reported something
supreme—the whole wealth of Alexander and other Pharaohs which lay in
the foundations of the lighthouse. Demolition began, and before the
Alexandrians, who knew better, could intervene, the mirror had fallen
and was smashed on the rocks beneath. Henceforward the Pharos is only a
stump with a bonfire on the top. The Arabs made some restorations, but
they were unsubstantial additions to the octagon, which the wind could
blow away. Structural repairs were neglected, and in the twelfth century
the second disaster occurred—the fall of the octagon through an
earthquake. The square bottom story survived as a watch-tower. Two
hundred years later it vanished in a final earthquake, and the very
island where it had stood modified its shape and became a peninsula,
joined to the mainland by a strip of sand.
Though unable to maintain the lighthouse on earth, the Arabs did much
for it in the realms of fancy, increasing its height to seven hundred
feet, and endowing it with various magical objects, of which the most
remarkable was a glass crab. There really were crabs at Alexandria, but
of copper, quite small, and standing under Cleopatra’s Needle; America
possesses one to-day. Oriental imagination mixed two monuments into one,
and caused a Moorish army to invade the Pharos and to ride through its
three hundred rooms. The entrance gate vanished, and they could not find
their way out, but ever descending the spirals came at last to the glass
crab, slipped through a crack in its back and were drowned. Happier,
though equally obscure, was the fate of another visitor, the poet El
Deraoui. Who sings:
A lofty platform guides the voyager by night, guides him with
its light when the darkness of evening falls.
Thither have I borne a garment of perfect pleasure among my
friends, a garment adorned with the memory of beloved
companions.
On its height a dome enshadowed me, and there I saw my friends
like stars.
I thought that the sea below me was a cloud, and that I had set
up my tent in the midst of the heavens.
Only occasionally does the note of disillusionment and bitterness creep
in. Jelaled Din ibn Mokram complains that:
The visitor to Alexandria receives nothing in the way of
hospitality except some water and a description of Pompey’s
Pillar.
Those who make a special effort sometimes give him a little
fresh air too, and tell him where the Pharos is, adding a sketch
of the sea and its waves and an account of the large Greek
ships.
The visitor need not aspire to receive any bread, for to an
application of this type there is no reply.
As a rule, life in its shadow is an earthly ecstasy that may even touch
heaven. Hark to Ibn Dukmak:
According to the law of Moses, if a man make a pilgrimage round
Alexandria in the morning, God will make for him a golden crown
set with pearls, perfumed with musk and camphor and shining from
the east to the west.
Nor were the Arabs content with praising the lighthouse: they even
looked at it. “El Manarah,” as they called it, gave the name to, and
became the model for, the minaret, and one can still find minarets in
Egypt that exactly reproduce the design of Sostratus—the bottom story
square, second octagonal, third round.
The Fort of Kait Bey, built in the fifteenth century and itself now a
ruin, stands to-day where the Pharos once stood. Its area covers part of
the ancient enclosure—the rest is awash with the sea—and in its
containing wall are embedded a few granite columns. Inside the area is a
mosque, exactly occupying the site of the lighthouse, and built upon its
foundations: here, too, are some granite blocks standing with druidical
effect at the mosque’s entrance. Nothing else can be attributed to the
past, its stones have vanished and its spirit also. Again and again,
looking at the mosque, have I tried to multiply its height by five, and
thus build up its predecessor. The effort always failed: it did not seem
reasonable that so large an edifice should have existed. The dominant
memory in the chaos is now British, for here are some large holes, made
by Admiral Seymour when he bombarded the Fort in 1882 and laid the basis
of our intercourse with modern Egypt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE RETURN FROM SIWA
Alexander the Great founded Alexandria. He came with Dinocrates, his
architect, and ordered him to build, between the sea and the lake, a
magnificent Greek town. Alexander still conceived of civilization as an
extended Greece, and of himself as a Hellene. He had taken over
Hellenism with the ardour that only a proselyte knows. A Balkan
barbarian by birth, he had pushed himself into the enchanted but
enfeebled circle of little city states. He had flattered Athens and
spared Thebes, and preached a crusade against Persia, which should
repeat upon a vaster scale the victories of Marathon and Salamis. He
would even repeat the Trojan war. At the Dardanelles his archæological
zeal was such that he ran naked round the tomb of Achilles. He cut the
knot of Gordius. He appeased the soul of Priam.
Having annexed Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from the
Persians, and having given his orders to Dinocrates, he left the city he
was building, and rode with a few friends into the western desert. It
was summer. The waters of Lake Mariout, more copious then than now,
spread fertility for a space. Leaving their zone, he struck south, over
the limestone hills, and lost sight of civilization whether of the
Hellenic or non-Hellenic type. Around him little flat pebbles shimmered
and danced in the heat, gazelles stared, and pieces of sky slopped into
the sand. Over him was the pale blue dome of heaven, darkened, if we are
to believe his historian, by flocks of obsequious birds, who sheltered
the King with their shadows and screamed when he rode the wrong way.
Alexander went on till he saw below him, in the fall of the ground, the
canals and hot springs and olives and palms of the Oasis of Siwa.
Sekhet-Amit the Egyptians called it, and worshipped their god Amon
there, whom the Greeks call Ammon, worshipped him in the form of an
emerald that lay in a sacred boat, worshipped him as a ram also. Instead
of the twin mud-cities of Siwa and Aghurmi, Alexander saw pylons and
colonnades, and descending into the steamy heat of the Oasis approached
a lonely and mysterious shrine. For what was it mysterious? Perhaps
merely for its loneliness. The distance, the solitude of the desert,
touch travellers even to-day, and sharpen the imaginations of men who
have crossed in armoured cars, and whom no god awaits, only a tract of
green. Alexander rode, remembering how, two hundred years before him,
the Persians had ridden to loot the temple, and how on them as they were
eating in the desert a sandstorm had descended, burying diners and
dinner in company. Herein lay the magic of Siwa. It was difficult to
reach. He, being the greatest man of his epoch, had of course succeeded.
He, the Philhellene, had come. His age was twenty-five. Then took place
that celebrated and extraordinary episode. According to the official
account the Priest came out of the temple and saluted the young tourist
as Son of God. Alexander acquiesced and asked whether he would become
King of this World. The reply was in the affirmative. Then his friends
asked whether they should worship him. They were told that they should,
and the episode closed. Some say that it is to be explained by the
Priest’s bad Greek. He meant to say Paidion (“my child”) and said
Paidios (“O Son of God”) instead. Others say that it never took place,
and Walter Savage Landor has imagined a conversation in the course of
which the Priest scares the King by a snake. A scare he did get—a
fright, a psychic experience, a vision, a “turn.” His development proves
it. After his return from Siwa his aspirations alter. Never again does
he regard Greece as the centre of the world.
The building of Alexandria proceeded, and copied or magnified forms from
the perishing peninsula overseas. Dinocrates planned Greek temples and
market-places, and they were constructed not slavishly but with
intelligence, for the Greek spirit still lived. But it lived
consciously, not unconsciously as in the past. It had a mission, and no
missionary shall ever create. And Alexander, the heroic chaos of whose
heart surged with desire for all that can and can not be, turned away
from his Hellenic town-planning and his narrow little antiquarian
crusade, and flung himself again, but in a new spirit, against the might
of Persia. He fought her as a lover now. He wanted not to convert but to
harmonize, and conceived himself as the divine and impartial ruler
beneath whom harmony shall proceed. That way lies madness. Persia fell.
Then it was the turn of India. Then the turn of Rome would have come and
then he could have sailed westward (such was his expressed intention)
until he had conquered the Night and eastward until he had conquered the
Day. He was never—despite the tuition of Aristotle—a balanced young man,
and his old friends complained that in this latter period he sometimes
killed them. But to us, who cannot have the perilous honour of his
acquaintance, he grows more lovable now than before. He has caught, by
the unintellectual way, a glimpse of something great, if dangerous, and
that glimpse came to him first in the recesses of the Siwan Oasis. When
at the age of thirty-three he died, when the expedition that he did not
seek stole towards him in the summer-house at Babylon, did it seem to
him as after all but the crown of his smaller quests? He had tried to
lead Greece, then he had tried to lead mankind. He had succeeded in
both. But was the universe also friendly, was it also in trouble, was it
calling on him, on him, for his help and his love? The priest of Amen
had addressed him as “Son of God.” What exactly did the compliment mean?
Was it explicable this side of the grave?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EPIPHANY
During the last years of their lives the old King and Queen had seldom
left the Palace. They sought seclusion, though for different reasons.
The King, who was gay and shy, did not wish his pleasures to be
observed. He had gathered a suitable circle of friends round him, and
was content. There was Agathocles—who, by the way, was Prime Minister;
there was Agathoclea—who, by the way, was the little prince’s nurse;
there was Œnanthe, the mother of the two A.’s, an elderly but
accomplished woman who knew how to shampoo. And there were one or two
more, for instance the wife of a forage contractor who would say to the
King, “Here, Daddy, drink this.” The King liked young women who called
him Daddy; and he drank, and when he had drunk enough he would get up
and dance, the others danced too, he would fall down, it was all
delightful. But it was not a delight he desired his subjects to witness.
The Queen employed herself otherwise. Shut up in her own apartments, she
meditated on the past. She thought of all the years when she had been on
trial: the King had never cared for her, and, though negotiating for the
marriage, had kept her waiting. Then came the Battle of Rafa. The
Syrians were invading Egypt, and just as the Egyptian army was breaking
she had ridden forth among the elephants, her hair streaming, her colour
high, and had turned defeat into victory. She became the popular
heroine, and he married her. But for nine years they had had no child.
She could see no hope anywhere. The child had come, but the situation
had not changed. Months passed, and still she sat in the Palace
enclosure—the Fortress inside the fortress of the Royal City—and looked
from the promontory that we now call Silsileh across the harbour to
Pharos, and over the unvarying expanse of the sea.
Change came at last. One night, when the King fell down, he failed to
get up again. Agathoclea paid him every attention, but he passed into a
stupor and died in her arms. His friends were in despair. He had been
such a jolly old King. And besides, what were they to do? The Queen, on
the other hand, came forward in an unexpected light. There was no
occasion for anxiety, she told them. She knew what to do quite well. She
was now Regent, and her first act was to dismiss the ministry. Moreover,
since he was now four years old, her son no longer required a nurse. The
old heroic feelings came back to her. Life seemed worth living again;
She returned to her apartments full of exaltation. She entered them. As
she did so, the curtains, which had been soaked with inflammable oil in
her absence, burst into flame. She tried to retire. The doors had been
locked behind her, and she was burnt to death.
And the life of Alexandria went on as before. Œnanthe and her progeny
still drove about in the state carriages. The King and Queen still
failed to appear in public, and the Palace still rose inviolate inside
the walls of the Royal City. Months passed, fourteen months.
When rumours began, the A.’s neglected to act. Inertia had served them
so well that they did not know how to relinquish it. But rumours
continued, and after many consultations they devised a pageant that had
the feeblest effect. It was not true, they said, that the old King and
Queen had died a year ago. But it was true that they were dead. They had
died that very minute. Alas! Woe, oh woe! Here were their urns. Their
little son was now King. Here he was. Agathocles had been appointed
Regent. Here was the will. Agathoclea—here she was—would continue to be
nurse. The people, sceptical and sullen, watched the display, which took
place in a high gallery of the Palace, overhanging the town. The actors
made their bow, and gathering up the exhibits retired. All went on as
usual for a little longer.
It was the misgovernment of Agathocles that brought things to a crisis:
that, and the report that of the two urns only one contained human
remains: the other, which was supposed to hold the Queen, was a dummy.
Perhaps the little boy would vanish next. They must see him, touch him.
And they stormed the Palace. It was in vain that the Regent parleyed,
threatened, or that Agathoclea repeated that she was the royal nurse.
The soldiers joined the people, and they broke gate after gate. At last
the Regent cried, “Take him!” and, flinging their King at them, fled.
The child was already in tears. They put him on a horse, and led it
outside to the racecourse, where were assembled more human beings than
he had ever dreamt of, who shouted Epiphany! Epiphany! and pulled him
off the horse and made him sit on a large seat. This was the world and
he did not like it. He preferred his own little circle. Someone cried,
“Shall we not punish your mother’s murderers?” He sobbed, “Oh yes—oh
anything,” and it was so. The Regent and his sister had hidden in the
Palace. Œnanthe had driven two miles away to the Thesmophorion, a
sanctuary near the present Nouzha Gardens. All were dragged from their
retreats, tortured, and killed, the women being stripped naked first.
Such were the circumstances of the accession of Ptolemy V., surnamed
Epiphanes, 204 B.C.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHILO’S LITTLE TRIP
It was nearly a serious tumble—more serious than he anticipated. There
were six in his party, all Hebrew gentlemen of position and
intelligence, such as may be seen in these days filling a first-class
carriage in the Cairo express on their way up to interview the
Government. In those days the Government was not at Cairo but at Rome,
and the six gentlemen were on their way to interview the Emperor
Caligula. Observe them in their well-appointed little yacht, slipping
out of the Mohammed Ali Square, which was then under water and part of
the Eastern Harbour. Their faces are pale, partly from fasting, partly
from anticipation, for the passage can be rough in February. And their
mission was even more poignant than cotton. It concerned their faith.
Jews at Alexandria had been killed and teased, and some Gentiles had,
with the connivance of the Governor, erected a bronze chariot in their
principal synagogue—not even a new chariot, for the horses had no tails
or feet. It was a chariot once dedicated to—O Pollution!—Cleopatra.
There it stood, and the Jews did not like to throw it down. And into
their smaller synagogues, smaller objects, such as portraits of the
Emperor, had been thrust. It is a delicate matter to complain to an
Emperor about his own portrait, but Caligula was known to be a charming
and reasonable young man, and the deputation had been selected for its
tact.
As they crossed the harbour, the Temple of Cæsar stood out on the right,
so impressive, so brilliant, that Philo could not repress his enthusiasm
and recalled the view in after years.
It is a piece incomparably above all others (he writes). It
stands by a most commodious harbour, wonderfully high and large
in proportion; an eminent sea mark: full of choice paintings and
statues with donatives and oblatives in abundance; and then it
is beautiful all over with gold and silver: the model curious
and regular in the disposition of the parts, as galleries,
libraries, porches, courts, halls, walks, and consecrated
groves, as glorious as expense and art could make them, and
everything in its proper place; besides that, the hope and
comfort of seafaring men, either coming in or going out.
When would he see this temple as he came in? Although Cleopatra had
begun it for Antony, and Augustus finished it for himself, it filled him
with love, and he turned from it with reluctance to the coast on the
left, really more important, because Jehovah had translated the entire
Bible into Greek there. There stood those seventy huts! O wonder! It was
one of the anecdotes with which he hoped to rivet the attention of
Caligula, when they arrived at Rome.
That charming and reasonable young man had lately recovered from a
severe illness, at which the whole civilized world rejoiced, and the
Eternal City was full of embassies waiting to congratulate him. Among
these, ominously enough, was a counter-deputation from Alexandria,
strongly anti-Semite in tone. Philo watched it narrowly. The imperial
invalid did not arrive till August, and at first things went pleasantly
enough. He caught sight of the Jews one day as he was calling on his
mother, seemed transported with delight and waved his hand to them, also
sent a message that he would see them at once, but immediately left for
Naples, and they had to follow him thither.
It was somewhere between Naples and Baiæ that the little trip came to
its end. We cannot say where exactly, for the reason that the Emperor
received the deputation over a considerable space of ground. He was
continually on the trot throughout the audience, and they had to trot
after him. He passed from room to room and from villa to villa, all of
which, he told them, he had thrown open for their pleasure. They thanked
him and tried to say more. He trotted on. With him ran the
counter-deputation, and also a mob of concierges, housekeepers,
glaziers, plumbers, upholsterers and decorators, to whom he kept
flinging orders. At last he stopped. The Jews of Alexandria approached.
And with a voice of thunder he cried, “So you are the criminals who say
I am not a god.” It was shattering, it was appalling, it was the very
point they had hoped would not be raised. For they worshipped Jehovah
only. The counter-deputation shouted with delight, and the six Hebrew
gentlemen cried in unison, “Caligula! Caligula! do not be angry with us.
We have sacrificed for you not once but three times—first at your
accession, secondly when you were ill, thirdly when——” But the Emperor
interrupted them with merciless logic. “Exactly. For me and not to me,”
and dashed off to inspect the ladies’ apartments. After him they ran,
hopeless of removing Cleopatra’s chariot or of interesting him in the
Septuagint. They would be lucky if they secured their lives. He climbed
up to look at a ceiling. They climbed too. He ran along a plank; so did
the Jews. They did not speak, partly from lack of breath, partly because
they were afraid of his reply. At last, turning in their faces, he
asked, “Why don’t you eat pork?” The counter-deputation shouted again.
The Jews replied that different races ate different things, and one of
them, to carry off the situation, said some people didn’t eat lamb. “Of
course they don’t,” said the Emperor, “lamb is beastly.” The situation
grew worse. A fit of fury had seized Caligula at the thought of lamb and
he yelled, “What are your laws? I wish to know what your laws are!” They
began to tell him and he cried out, “Shut those windows,” and ran away
down a corridor. Then he turned with extraordinary gentleness and said,
“I beg your pardon, what were you saying?” They began to tell him of
their laws, and he said, “We’ll have all the old pictures hung together
here, I think.” Stopping anew, he looked round at his shattered train of
ambassadors and artisans, and smiling, remarked, “And these are the
people who think I am not a god. I don’t blame them. I merely pity them.
They can go.” Philo led his party back to Alexandria, there to meditate
on the accident that had so spoilt their little trip: Caligula was mad.
Yet did it signify—signify in the long run? The history of the Chosen
People is full of such contretemps, but they survive and thrive. Six
hundred years later, when Amr took the city, he found 40,000 Jews there.
And look at them in the railway carriage now. Their faces are anxious
and eloquent of past rebuffs. But they are travelling First.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
When the assertions that were made at one time and another in the
uplands of Palestine descended from their home, and, taking the ancient
caravan route, crossed the River of Egypt and approached Alexandria,
they entered into a new spiritual atmosphere where they were obliged to
transform themselves or to perish. The atmosphere was not hostile to the
assertions, indeed it welcomed them, but it insisted that, however
unphilosophic they might be, they should wear the philosophic dress,
that they should take some account of the assertions that had arrived
previously, should recognize the existence of libraries and museums,
should approach with circumspection the souls of the rich. Under these
conditions they might remain. And exactly the same thing happened on two
distinct occasions. We are here concerned with the second of the
occasions, but it is convenient to glance at the first; it was soon
after Alexandria had been founded, and Jews were flocking to her
markets. An unexpected problem confronted them. Jehovah had said, “I Am
that I Am,” and so long as they remained in Palestine this seemed
enough. But now they had to face disquieting comments, such as “This
statement predicates existence merely,” or “This statement, while
professing merely to predicate existence, assumes the attribute of
speech,” and they grew aware of the inaccessibility and illogicality of
their national God. The result was a series of attempts on their part to
explain and recommend Jehovah to the Greeks—culminating in the great
system of Philo, who, by the doctrine of the Mediating Logos, ensured
that the deity should be at the same time accessible and inaccessible:
“The Logos,” he writes, “dwells on the margin between the Created and
the Increate, and delights to serve them both.” And there, for a little,
the matter rested.
But in Philo’s own lifetime a second assertion had been made among the
Judæan hills. We do not know its original form—too many minds have
worked over it since—but we know that it was unphilosophic and
anti-social. For it was addressed to the uneducated and it promised them
a kingdom. Following the usual route, it reached Alexandria, where the
same fate overtook it: it had to face comments, and in so doing was
transformed. It too evolved a system which, though not logical, paid the
lip service to logic that a great city demands, and interspersed bridges
of argument among the flights of faith. All Greek thinkers, except
Socrates, had done the same, so that, on its intellectual side, the new
religion did not break with the past; it consisted of an assertion in a
philosophic dress, and Clement of Alexandria, its first theologian, used
methods that were familiar to Philo two hundred years before. Not only
did he bring allegory to bear upon the more intractable passages of
Scripture, but he adapted the Philonian Logos and identified it with the
Founder of the new religion. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with God.” Philo might have written this. St. John had added to it
two statements distinctly Christian, namely, “The Word was God” and “The
Word was made flesh.” And now Clement, taking over the completed
conception, raised upon it a storied fabric such as the Alexandrians
loved, and ensured that the deity should be at the same time accessible
and inaccessible, merciful and just, human and divine. The fabric would
have bewildered the fishermen of Galilee, and it had in it a flaw which
became evident in the fourth century and produced the Arian schism. But
it impressed the passing age; Clement, working in and through
Alexandria, did more than even St. Paul to recommend Christianity to the
Gentiles.
He was probably born in Greece about A.D. 150 and initiated into
Mysteries there. Then he was converted and became head of the
theological college in Alexandria, where he remained until his exile in
202. But little is known of his life and nothing of his character,
though one may assume it was conciliatory: Christianity was not yet
official, and thus in no position to fulminate. Of his treatises the
“Exhortation to the Greeks” acknowledges several merits in pagan
thought, while “The Rich Man’s Salvation” handles with delicacy a
problem on which business men are naturally sensitive, and arrives at
the comforting conclusion that Christ did not mean what He said. One
recognizes the wary resident. And when he attacks Paganism he seldom
denounces: he mocks, knowing this to be the better way. For the age is
literal. It had lost resilience and spring, and if one pointed out to it
that Zeus had behaved absurdly in Homer, it could summon no rush of
instinct or of poetry with which to defend his worship. Demeter too! And
shrines to the sneezing Apollo and to the gouty and to the coughing
Artemis! Ha! Ha! Fancy believing in a goddess with the gout. Clement
makes great play with such nonsense. For a new religion has, as far as
persiflage is concerned, an advantage over an old one: it has not had
time itself to evolve a mythology, and his adversaries could not retort
with references to St. Simeon Stylites, or to the plague spot of St.
Roch, or to St. Fina who allowed a devil to throw her mother down the
stairs. They could only hang their heads and assent, and when Clement
derided the priests in the idol-temples for their dirt, they could not
foresee that in the following century dirt would be recommended as holy
by the Church. They were caught by his genial air and by his “logic”;
there is nothing morose about the treatises, and even to-day they are
readable, though not quite in the way that the author intended.
A solemn assembly of Greeks, held in honour of a dead serpent,
was gathering at Pytho, and Eunomus sang a funeral ode for the
reptile. Whether his song was a hymn in praise of the snake or a
lamentation over it, I cannot say; but there was a competition
and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, at the
time when the grasshoppers, warmed by the sun, were singing
under the leaves along the hills. They were singing, you see,
not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a
spontaneous song, better than the measured strains of Eunomus. A
string breaks in the Locrian’s hands; the grasshopper settles
upon the neck of the lyre and begins to twitter there as if upon
a branch: whereupon the minstrel, by adapting his music to the
grasshopper’s lay, supplied the place of the missing string. So
it was not Eunomus that drew the grasshopper by his song, as the
legend would have it, when it set up the bronze figure at Pytho,
showing Eunomus with his lyre and his ally in the contest. No,
the grasshopper flew of its own accord, and sang of its own
accord, although the Greeks thought it to have been responsive
to music.
How in the world is it that you have given credence to worthless
legends, imagining....
and blasts of theology ensue. But how grateful one is to Clement for
mentioning the grasshopper, and how probable it seems, from the way he
tells the story, that he had a faint consciousness of its beauty—just as
his risqué passages emanate a furtive consciousness of their riskiness.
His learning is immense: he is said to allude to three hundred Greek
writers of whom we should not otherwise have heard, and one gladly
follows him through the back-yards of the Classical world. The results
of his ramble are most fully stated in two other of his treatises, the
“Rug roll” and the “Tutor.” His verdict is that, though the poetry of
Hellas is false and its cults absurd or vile, yet its philosophers and
grasshoppers possessed a certain measure of divine truth; some of the
speculations of Plato, for instance, had been inspired by the Psalms. It
is not much of a verdict in the light of modern research; but it is a
moderate verdict for a Father; he spares his thunders, he does not exalt
asceticism, he is never anti-social.
Till the ground if you are a husbandman; but recognize God in
your husbandry. Sail the sea, you who love sea-faring; but ever
call upon the heavenly pilot. Were you a soldier on campaign
when the knowledge of God laid hold of you? Then listen to the
commander who signals righteousness.
Here he shows his respect for the existing fabric and his hope that it
may pass without catastrophe from Pagan to Christian, a hope that could
have found expression only at Alexandria, where contending assertions
have so often been harmonized, and whose own god, Serapis, had expressed
the union of Egypt and Greece.
Looking back—it is so easy now to look back!—one can see that the hope
was vain. Christianity, though she contained little that was fresh
doctrinally, yet descended with a double-edged sword that hacked the
ancient world to pieces. For she had declared war against two great
forces—Sex and the State—and during her complicated contest with them
the old order was bound to disappear. The contest had not really begun
in Clement’s day. Sex disquieted him, but he did not revolt against it
like his successor Origen. The State exiled him, but it had not yet put
forth, as it did under Diocletian, its full claims to divinity. He lived
in a period of transition, and in Alexandria. And in that curious city,
which had never been young and hoped never to grow old, conciliation
must have seemed more possible than elsewhere, and the graciousness of
Greece not quite incompatible with the Grace of God.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ST. ATHANASIUS
I
That afternoon was one of comparative calm for the infant Church. She
was three hundred and ten years old. The pagan persecutions had ceased,
and disputes about the Nature of Christ, over which blood was more
freely to flow, had not yet matured. It still seemed that under her
inspired guidance the old world would pass without disaster into the
new. What lovely weather! The month was June, and the beacon of smoke
that rose from the summit of the Pharos was inclined over Alexandria by
a northerly wind. Both harbours were filled with ships; the Eastern
Harbour was lined with palaces. The Western Harbour—and to it we must
turn—was indeed less splendid. Then, as now, it washed the business
quarter, the warehouses, the slums where the dock hands lived. Hardness
and poverty edged it as they do to-day, and Christianity had settled
here early, as she settled on all spots where the antique civilization
had failed to make men dignified. Issuing out of the Gate of the Moon,
the great Canopic Way here lost its straightness and split into ignoble
lanes. There was only one redeeming feature—a house in which a real
bishop was sitting. His name was Alexander. He has invited some
clergymen to lunch, and they are late.
Bishops existed then in a profusion we can scarcely conceive. Every
large village produced one, and they even went so far as to disorganize
the postal service by galloping about in troops upon the government
horses. But he of Alexandria was a bishop of no ordinary brand. He bore
the title of “Patriarch of all the Preaching of St. Mark,” and a
prestige that only Rome challenged. If he lived in these slums, it was
because historical associations detained him. The sainted shoemaker
Annianus had plied his trade hard by. A church to the right—St.
Theonas’—had been built by another local saint. Here were the origins of
his power, but its field lay elsewhere—eastward among the splendours of
the town; southward, hundreds of miles southward, up the valley of the
Nile. The whole of Egypt was ripe for Christianity. A magnificent prize!
The waters of the harbour, placid and slightly stale, came almost up to
his house. He gazed at them, and at the grubby beach where some little
boys were playing. They were playing at going to church. They were poor,
they had no toys, and, since railway trains did not exist, going to
church was the only game they could command. Indeed, it is a fascinating
game. Even Anglican nurseries have succumbed to it. Scantily robed, they
processed and inclined, and the Bishop, being not Anglican, but African,
only smiled. Boys will be boys! He was specially diverted by their
leader, a skinny but sportive youth, who would take his flock for a swim
and, diving, reappear when and where they least expected. Then more
solemn thoughts returned.
The whole of Egypt was ripe for Christianity. Ah, but for what kind of
Christianity? That was the trouble. Fancy if, with Arius, it adopted the
heresy of “Time was when He was not”! Fancy if it paltered with
Gnosticism, and believed that creation, with its palaces and slums, is
the result of a muddle! Fancy if it Judaized with Meletius, the
disobedient Bishop of Assiout! Alexander had written to Meletius, asking
him to Judaize less, but had had no reply. That was the disadvantage of
a copious episcopy. You could never be sure that all the bishops would
do the same thing. And there were dreadful examples in which flighty
laymen had lost their heads, and, exclaiming, “Me be bishop too!” had
run away into the desert before any one could stop them. The Emperor
Constantine (that lion-hearted warrior!) was a further anxiety.
Constantine so easily got mixed. Immersed in his town-planning, he might
stamp some heresy as official and then the provinces would take it up.
How difficult everything was! What was to be done? Perhaps the
clergymen, when they arrived for lunch, would know. There used to be too
little Christianity. Now there almost seemed too much. Alexander sighed,
and looked over the harbour to the Temple of Neptune that stood on the
promontory. He was growing old. Where was his successor?—someone who ...
not exactly saintliness and scholarship, but someone who would codify,
would define?
Stop! stop! Boys will be boys, but there are limits. They were playing
at Baptism now, and the sportive youth was in the act of pouring some of
the harbour water over two other Gippoes. To enter into the Bishop’s
alarm we must remember the difference between Northern and Southern
conceptions of impiety. To the Northerner impiety is bad taste. To the
Southerner it is magic—the illicit and accurate performance of certain
acts, and especially of sacramental acts. If the youth had made any
mistake in his baptismal ritual it would not have mattered, it would
have remained play. But he was performing accurately what he had no
right to perform; he was saying, “Me be bishop too,” and Heaven alone
knew the theological consequences. “Stop! stop!” the genuine article
cried. It was too late. The water fell, the trick was done ... and at
the same moment the clergymen arrived, offering such apologies for their
unpunctuality as are usual among Egyptians.
It was long before lunch was served. The culprits were summoned, and in
terrific conclave their conduct was discussed. There was some hope that
the two converts were Christians already, in which case nothing would
have been affected. But no. They had bowed the knee to Neptune hitherto.
Then were they Christians now? Or were they horrid little demons who,
outside or inside the Church, would harm her equally? The sportive youth
prevailed. He won over the Bishop, and calmed the clergymen’s fears, and
before evening fell and the smoke on the Pharos turned to a column of
fire, it was settled that he had by his play rendered two souls eligible
for immortal bliss. And his action had a more immediate consequence: he
never washed again. Taken into the Bishop’s house, he became his pupil,
his deacon, his coadjutor, his successor in the see, and finally a saint
and a doctor of the Church: he is St. Athanasius.
II
At the other end of the city there lived another clergyman. His name was
Arius, and it was a very long time indeed since the Bishop had asked him
to lunch. He took duty at St. Mark’s, a small church that stood on the
brink of the Mediterranean. The neighbourhood was of the best—palaces,
zoological gardens, lecture-rooms, etc.—and over some trees rose the
long back of the temple that Cleopatra had built to Antony. That temple
would make a seemly cathedral, Arius often thought, and the obelisks in
its forecourt—Cleopatra’s Needles—would be improved if they supported
statues of God the Father. The whole of Egypt was ripe for
Christianity—for the right kind of Christianity, that is to say: not for
the kind that was preached at the western end of the town.
Arius was elderly by now. Learned and sincere, tall, simple in his
dress, persuasive in his manner, he was accused by his enemies of
looking like a snake and of seducing, in the theological sense, seven
hundred virgins. The accusation amazed him. He had only preached what is
obviously true. Since Christ is the Son of God, it follows that Christ
is younger than God, and that there must have been a condition—no doubt
before time began—when the first Person of the Trinity existed, and the
Second did not. This has only to be stated to be believed, and only
those who were entirely possessed by the devil, like doddering Alexander
and slippery Athanasius, would state the contrary. The Emperor
Constantine (that lion-hearted warrior!) would certainly see the point,
provided it was explained to him. But Constantine so easily got mixed,
and there was indeed a danger that he would stamp the wrong type of
Christianity as official, and plunge the world into heresy for thousands
of years. How difficult everything was! One’s immediate duty was to
testify, so day after day Arius preached Arianism to the seven hundred
virgins, to the corpse of the Evangelist St. Mark who lay buried beneath
the church, and to the bright blue waves of the sea that in their
ceaseless advance have now covered the whole scene.
The quarrel between him and his bishop grew so fierce and spread so far
that Constantine was obliged to intervene and to beg his
fellow-Christians to imitate the Greek philosophers, who could differ
without shedding one another’s blood. It was just the sort of appeal
that everyone had been fearing that the Emperor would make. He was
insufficiently alive to eternal truth. No one obeyed, and in desperation
he summoned them to meet him at Nicæa on the Black Sea, and spent the
interval in trying to find out what their quarrel turned on. Two hundred
and fifty bishops attended, many priests, deacons innumerable. Among the
last named was Athanasius, who, thundering against Arius in full
conclave, procured his overthrow. Amid scenes of incredible violence the
Nicene Creed was passed, containing clauses (since omitted) in which
Arianism was anathematized. Arius was banished. Athanasius led his
tottering but triumphant bishop back to Alexandria, and the Emperor
returned to the town-planning and to the wardrobes of wigs and false
hair that sometimes solace the maturity of a military man.
The powers of Athanasius were remarkable. Like Arius, he knew what truth
is, but, being a politician, he knew how truth can best be enforced; his
career blends subtlety with vigour, self-abnegation with craft.
Physically he was blackish, but active and strong. One recognizes a
modern street type. Not one single generous action by him is recorded,
but he knew how to inspire enthusiasm, and before he died had become a
popular hero and set the pace to his century. Soon after his return from
Nicæa he was made Patriarch of Alexandria, but he had scarcely sat down
before Arius was back there too. The Emperor wished it. Could not
Christians imitate, etc...? No; Christians could not and would not; and
Athanasius testified with such vigour that he was banished in his turn,
and his dusty theological Odyssey begins. He was banished in all five
times. Sometimes he hid in a cistern, or in pious ladies’ houses, or in
the recesses of the Libyan desert; at other times, going farther afield,
he popped up in Palestine or France. Roused by his passage from older
visions, the soul of the world began to stir, and to what activity!
Heavy Romans, dreamy Orientals and quick Greeks all turned to theology,
and scrambled for the machinery of the Pagan State, wrenching this way
and that until their common heritage was smashed. Cleopatra’s temple to
Antony first felt the killing glare of truth. Arians and Orthodox
competed for its consecration, and in the space of six years its back
was broken and its ribs cracked by fire. St. Theonas’—the episcopal
church—was gutted, and Athanasius nearly killed by some soldiers on its
altar. And all the time everyone was writing—encyclicals as to the date
of Easter, animadversions against washing, accusations of sorcery,
complaints that Athanasius had broken a chalice in a church in a village
near Lake Mariout, replies that there was no chalice to break, because
there was no church, because there was no village—reams and reams of
paper on this subject travelling over the empire for years, and being
perused by bishops in Mesopotamia and Spain. Constantine died; but his
successors, whatever their faith, were drawn into the dance of theology,
none more so than Julian, who dreamed of Olympus. Arius died, falling
down in the streets of Alexandria one evening while he was talking to a
friend; but Arianism survived. Athanasius died too; but not before he
had weaned the Church from her traditions of scholarship and tolerance,
the tradition of Clement and Origen. Few divines have done more for her,
and her gratitude has been both profound and characteristic; she has
coupled his name to a Creed with which he had nothing to do—the
Athanasian.
Were his activities all about nothing? No! The Arian controversy
enshrined a real emotion. By declaring that Christ was younger than God
Arius tended to make him lower than God, and consequently to bring him
nearer to man—indeed, to level him into a mere good man and to forestall
Unitarianism. This appealed to the untheologically-minded—to Emperors,
and particularly to Empresses. It made them feel less lonely. But
Athanasius, who viewed the innovation with an expert eye, saw that while
it popularized Christ it isolated God, and raised man no nearer to
heaven in the long run. Therefore he fought it. Of the theatre of this
ancient strife no trace remains in Alexandria. Not even Cleopatra’s
Needle stands there now. But the strife still continues in the heart of
men, ever prone to substitute the human for the divine, and it is
probable that many an individual Christian to-day is an Arian without
knowing it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIMOTHY THE CAT
AND TIMOTHY WHITEBONNET
“Miaou!”
Such was the terrible sound which, half way through the fifth century,
disturbed the slumbers of certain Monophysite monks. Their flesh crept.
Moved by a common impulse, each stole from his cell, and saw, in the
dimly lighted corridor, a figure even more mysterious than
pussy’s—something that gibbered and bowed and said, in hollow and
sepulchral tones, “Consecrate Timothy.” They stood motionless until the
figure disappeared, then ran this way and that in search of it. There
was nothing to be seen. They opened the convent doors. Nothing to be
seen except Alexandria glimmering, still entirely marble; nothing except
the Pharos, still working and sending out from the height of five
hundred feet a beam visible over a radius of seventy miles. The streets
were quiet, owing to the absence of the Greek garrison in Upper Egypt.
Having looked at the tedious prospect, the monks withdrew, for much had
to be done before morning: they had to decide whether it was an angel or
a devil who had said “Miaou.” If the former, they must do penance for
their lack of faith; if the latter, they were in danger of hell-fire.
While they argued over a point that has puzzled the sharpest of saints,
the attention of some of them began to wander, and to dwell on one who
was beyond doubt a devil—Proterius, whom the Emperor had imposed on them
as their Patriarch, and who slept in a convent hard by. They cursed
Proterius. They reflected too that in the absence of the garrison he no
longer slept safely, that they were Egyptians and numerous, he a Greek
and alone. They cursed him again, and the apparition reappeared
repeating, “Consecrate Timothy.” Timothy was one of their own number and
the holiest of men. When, after an interval, they ran to his cell, they
found him upon his knees in prayer. They told him of the ghostly
message, and he seemed dazed, but on collecting himself implored that it
might never be mentioned again. Asked whether it was infernal, he
refused to reply. Asked whether it was supernal, he replied, “You, not
I, have said so.” All doubts disappeared, and away they ran to find some
bishops. Melchite or Arian or Sabæan or Nestorian or Donatist or
Manichæan bishops would not do: they must be Monophysite. Fortunately
two had occurred, and on the following day Timothy, struggling piously,
was carried between Cleopatra’s Needles into the cathedral and
consecrated Patriarch of Alexandria and of all the Preaching of St.
Mark. For he held the correct opinion as to the Nature of Christ—the
only possible opinion: Christ has a single Nature, divine, which has
absorbed the human: how could it be otherwise? The leading residential
officials, the municipal authorities, and the business community thought
the same; so, attacking Proterius, who thought the contrary, they
murdered him in the Baptistery, and hanged him over the city wall. The
Greek garrison hurried back, but it was too late. Proterius had gone,
nor did the soldiers regret him, for he had made more work than most
bishops, having passed the seven years of his episcopate in a constant
state of siege. Timothy, for whom no guards need be set, was a great
improvement. Diffident and colloquial, he won everyone’s heart, and
obtained, for some reason or other, the surname of the Cat.
Thus the _coup d’église_ had succeeded for the moment. But it had to
reckon with another monk, a second Timothy, of whom, as events proved,
the angel had really been thinking. He was Timothy Whitebonnet, so
called from his headgear, and his life was more notable than the Cat’s,
for he lived at Canopus, where the air is so thick with demons that only
the most robust of Christians can breathe. Canopus stood on a promontory
ten miles east of Alexandria, overlooking the exit of the Nile. Foul
influences had haunted it from the first. Helen, a thousand years ago,
had come here with Paris on their flight towards Troy, and though the
local authorities had expelled her for vagabondage, the ship that
carried her might still be seen, upon summer nights, ploughing the waves
into fire. In her train had followed Herodotus, asking idle questions of
idle men; Alexander, called the Great from his enormous horns; and
Serapis, a devil worse than any, who, liking the situation, had summoned
his wife and child and established them on a cliff to the north, within
sound of the sea. The child never spoke. The wife wore the moon. In
their honour the Alexandrians used to come out along the canal in barges
and punts, crowned with flowers, robed in gold, and singing spells of
such potency that the words remained, though the singers were dead, and
would slide into Timothy Whitebonnet’s ear, when the air seemed
stillest, and pretend to him that they came from God. Often, just as a
sentence was completed, he would realize its origin, and have to
expectorate it in the form of a toad—a dangerous exercise, but it taught
him discernment, and fitted him to play his part in the world. He
learned with horror of the riots in the metropolis, and of the elevation
of the heretical Cat. For he knew that Christ has two Natures, one
human, the other divine: how can it be otherwise?
At Constantinople there seems to have been a little doubt. Leo, the
reigning emperor, was anxious not to drive Egypt into revolt, and
disposed to let Alexandria follow the faith she preferred. But his
theologians took a higher line, and insisted on his sending a new
garrison. This was done, the Cat was captured, and Whitebonnet dragged
from Canopus and consecrated in his place. There matters rested until
the accession of Basiliscus, who sent a new garrison to expel
Whitebonnet. Once more the Cat ruled bloodily until the Emperor Zeno
took the other view, and sending a——
However, the curtain may drop now. The controversy blazed for two
hundred years, and is smouldering yet. The Copts still believe, with
Timothy the Cat, in the single Nature of Christ; the double Nature,
upheld by Timothy Whitebonnet, is still maintained by the rest of
Christendom and by the reader. The Pharos, the Temple of Serapis—these
have perished, being only stones, and sharing the impermanence of
material things. It is ideas that live.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY
When at the hour of midnight
an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing
with exquisite music, with voices—
Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides,
your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have proved
illusions.
But like a man prepared, like a brave man,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing.
Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream,
that your ear was mistaken.
Do not condescend to such empty hopes.
Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,
like the man who was worthy of such a city,
go to the window firmly,
and listen with emotion
but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward
(Ah! supreme rapture!)
listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.
C. P. CAVAFY.[1]
Footnote 1:
For a study of Cavafy’s work see p. 91.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHARILLON
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELIZA IN EGYPT
I
When the lively and somewhat spiteful Mrs. Eliza Fay landed at
Alexandria in the summer of 1779 that city was at her lowest ebb. The
glories of the antique had gone, the comforts of the modern had not
arrived. Gone were the temples and statues, gone the palace of Cleopatra
and the library of Callimachus, the Pharos had fallen and been succeeded
by the feeble Pharillon, the Heptastadion had silted up; while the
successors to these—the hotels, the clubs, the drainage system, the
exquisite Municipal buildings—still slept in the unastonished womb of
time.
Attached to Mrs. Fay was her husband, an incompetent advocate, who was
to make their fortunes in the East. Since the boat that had brought them
was owned by a Christian, they were forbidden to enter the Western
Harbour, and had to disembark not far from the place where, in more
enlightened days, the Ramleh Tramway was to terminate. All was barbarism
then, save for two great obelisks, one prone, one erect—“Cleopatra’s
Needles,” not yet transferred to New York and London respectively. They
were met in this lonely spot by the Prussian Consul, a certain Mr.
Brandy, who found them rooms, but had bad news for them: “a melancholy
story,” as Mrs. Fay calls it when writing to her sister. Between Cairo
and Suez, on the very route they proposed to take, a caravan had been
held up and some of its passengers murdered. She was pitiably agitated.
But she did not give up her sight-seeing; she had got to Alexandria and
meant to enjoy it. Cleopatra’s Needles in the first place. What did the
hieroglyphics on them signify? She applied to Mr. Brandy; but the
Consul, following the best traditions of the residential Levant, “seemed
to know no more than ourselves.” His kindness was unfailing. Next day he
produced donkeys—being Christians they were not allowed to ride
horses—and the party trotted over three miles of desert to Pompey’s
Pillar, preceded by a janissary with a drawn sword. Pompey’s Pillar
arouses few emotions in the modern breast. The environs are squalid, the
turnstile depressing, and one knows that it dates not from Pompey but
from Diocletian. Mrs. Fay approached it in a nobler mood.
Although quite unadorned, the proportions are so exquisite that
it must strike every beholder with a kind of awe, which softens
into melancholy when one reflects that the renowned hero, whose
name it bears, was treacherously murdered on this very coast by
the boatmen who were conveying him to Alexandria. His wretched
wife stood on the vessel he had just left, watching his
departure, as we may very naturally suppose, with inexpressible
anxiety. What must have been her agonies at the dreadful event!
The time was to come when Mrs. Fay herself would have watched with very
little anxiety the murder of Mr. Fay. Her Anthony—for such was his
name—led her from mess to mess, and in the end she had to divorce him.
Let us turn from these serious themes to a “ludicrous accident” that
befell Mr. Brandy on the way to “Cleopatra’s Palace.” He was very large
and stout, and his donkey, seizing its opportunity, stole away from
under the consular seat and left him astride on the sand! As for
“Cleopatra’s Palace,” it was not the genuine palace, but it was as
genuine as the emotion it inspired.
Never do I remember being so affected by a like object. I stood
in the midst of the ruins, meditating on the awful scene, till I
could have almost fancied I beheld its former mistress,
revelling in luxury with her infatuated lover, Mark Anthony, who
for her sake lost all.
An account of a party at the Brandies’ concludes the letter—a clear-cut
malicious account. Eliza is the child of her century, which affected
lofty emotions but whose real interest lay in little things, and in
satire.
We were most graciously received by Mrs. Brandy, who is a native
of this place; but as she could speak a little Italian we
managed to carry on something like a conversation. She was most
curiously bedizened on the occasion, and being short,
dark-complexioned, and of a complete dumpling shape, appeared
altogether the strangest lump of finery I ever beheld. She had a
handkerchief bound round her head, covered with strings composed
of spangles, but very large, intermixed with pearls and
emeralds; her neck and bosom were ornamented in the same way.
Add to all this an embroidered girdle with a pair of gold
clasps, I think very nearly four inches square, enormous
ear-rings, and a large diamond sprig at the top of her forehead,
and you must allow that she was a most brilliant figure. They
have a sweet little girl about seven years of age, who was
decked out in much the same style; but she really looked pretty
in spite of her incongruous finery. On the whole, though, I was
pleased with both mother and child; their looks and behaviour
were kind, and to a stranger in a strange land (and this is
literally so to us) a little attention is soothing and
consolatory; especially when one feels surrounded by
hostilities, which every European must do here. Compared with
the uncouth beings who govern this country, I felt at home among
the natives of France, and I will even say of Italy.
On taking leave, our host presented a book containing
certificates of his great politeness and attentions towards
travellers, which were signed by many persons of consideration,
and at the same time requesting that Mr. Fay and myself would
add our names to the list. We complied, though not without
surprise that a gentleman in his situation should have recourse
to such an expedient, which cannot but degrade him in the eyes
of his guests.
Rather cattish, that last remark, considering how much the Consul had
done for her. But a cat she is—spirited and observant, but a cat.
II
Heedless of the weather, heedless of the rumour of plundered caravans,
Eliza removed her husband as soon as possible for the interior, and some
account must now be given of their adventures. Her pen is our guide.
Through flood and blood it keeps its way, curbed only by her fear of the
Turkish Censor, and by her desire to conceal her forebodings from
friends at home. As soon as misfortunes have occurred she will describe
them. But about the future she is always confident and bright, and this
gallant determination to make the best of trouble gives charm to a
character that is otherwise unsympathetic.
The Fays selected the river route. Since the Mahmoudieh Canal had not
been cut, they had to reach the Rosetta mouth of the Nile by sea. They
were nearly drowned crossing its bar, and scarcely were they through
when a boat of thieves shot out from the bank and caused Mr. Fay to fire
off two pistols at once. They outsailed their pursuers, and sped up the
lower reach to Rosetta, then a more important place than Alexandria and
apparently a tidier place. Eliza was delighted. Thoughts of England and
of the English Bible at once welled up in her mind.
There is an appearance of cleanliness in Rosetta, the more
gratifying because seldom met with in any degree so as to remind
us of what we are accustomed to at home. The landscape around
was interesting from its novelty, and became peculiarly so on
considering it as the country where the children of Israel
sojourned. The beautiful, I may say the unparalleled story of
Joseph and his brethren rose to my mind as I surveyed these
banks on which the Patriarch sought shelter for his old age,
where his self-convicted sons bowed down before their younger
brother, and I almost felt as if in a dream, so wonderful
appeared the circumstance of my being here.
It is news that Jacob ever resided in the province of Behera. Passing by
this, and by the Pyramids which they only saw from a distance, we
accompany the Fays to Boulac, “the port of Grand Cairo,” where their
troubles increased. Restrictions against Christians being even severer
here than at Alexandria, Mrs. Fay had to dress as a native before she
might enter the city. “I had in the first place a pair of trousers with
yellow leather half-boots and slippers over them”; then a long satin
gown, another gown with short sleeves, a robe of silk like a surplice,
muslin from her forehead to her feet, and over everything a piece of
black silk. “Thus equipped, stumbling at every step, I sallied forth,
and with great difficulty got across my noble beast; but as the veil
prevented me breathing freely I must have died by the way.” She rode
into the European enclave where terror and confusion greeted her. The
rumour about the caravan proved only too true. Complete details had just
arrived. It had been plundered between Cairo and Suez, its passengers
had been killed or left to die in the sun, and, worse still, the Turkish
authorities were so upset by the scandal that they proposed murdering
the whole of the European community in case the news leaked out. It was
thought that Mrs. Fay might be safe with an Italian doctor. As she
waddled across to his house her veil slipped down so that a passer
reprimanded her severely for indecency. Also she fell ill.
There broke out a severe epidemical disease with violent
symptoms. People are attacked at a moment’s warning with
dreadful pains in stiff limbs, a burning fever with delirium and
a total stoppage of perspiration. During two days it increases,
on the third there comes on uniformly a profuse sweat (pardon
the expression) with vomiting which carries all off.
But as soon as her disease culminated, out she sallied to see the
ceremonies connected with the rise of the Nile. They disappointed and
disgusted her.
Not a decent person could I distinguish among the whole group.
So much for this grand exhibition, which we have abundant cause
to wish had not taken place, for the vapours arising from such a
mass of impurity have rendered the heat more intolerable than
ever. My bedchamber overlooks the canal, so that I enjoy the
full benefit to be derived from its proximity.
Events by now were taking a calmer turn. Mr. Fay, who had also had the
epidemic, was restored to such vitality as he possessed, and the Turkish
authorities had been persuaded by a bribe of £3000 to overcome their
sensitiveness and to leave the European colony alive. The terrible
journey remained, but beyond it lay India and perhaps a fortune.
III
The Suez caravan—an immense affair—was formed up in the outskirts of
Cairo. In view of the recent murders it included a large guard, and the
journey, which took three days, passed off without disaster. Mr. Fay had
a horse; Eliza, still panting in her Oriental robes, travelled in a
litter insecurely hung between two restive camels. Peeping out through
its blinds she could see the sun and the rocks by day, and the stars by
night. She notes their beauty, her senses seem sharpened by danger, and
she was to look back on the desert with a hint of romance. Above her
head, attached to the roof of the litter, were water-bottles, melons,
and hard-boiled eggs, her provision for the road, rumbling and crashing
together to the grave disturbance of her sleep. “Once I was saluted by a
parcel of hard eggs breaking loose from their net and pelting me
completely. It was fortunate that they were boiled, or I should have
been in a pretty trim.” By her side rode her husband, and near him was a
melancholy figure, followed by a sick greyhound, young Mr. Taylor, who
became so depressed by the heat that he slid off his horse and asked to
be allowed to die. His request was refused, as was his request that she
should receive the greyhound into her litter. Eliza was ever sensible.
She was not going to be immured with a boiling hot dog which might bite
her. “I hope no person will accuse me of inhumanity for refusing to
receive an animal in that condition: self-preservation forbade my
compliance; I felt that it would be weakness instead of compassion to
subject myself to such a risk.” Consequently the greyhound died. An Arab
despatched him with his scimitar, Mr. Taylor protested, the Arab ran at
Mr. Taylor. “You may judge from this incident what wretches we were cast
among.”
They found a boat at Suez and went on board at once. Mr. Fay writes a
line to his father-in-law to tell him that they are safe thus far: a
grandiose little line:
Some are now very ill, but I stood it as well as any Arabian in
the caravan, which consisted of at least five thousand people.
My wife insists on taking the pen out of my hands.
She takes it, to the following effect:
My dear Friends—I have not a moment’s time, for the boat is
waiting, therefore can only beg that you will unite with me in
praising our Heavenly Protector for our escape from the various
dangers of our journey. I never could have thought my
constitution was so strong. I bore the fatigues of the desert
like a lion. We have been pillaged of almost everything by the
Arabs. This is the Paradise of thieves, I think the whole
population may be divided into two classes of them: those who
adopt force and those who effect their purpose by fraud.... I
have not another moment. God bless you! Pray for me, my beloved
friends.
It is not clear when the Fays had been pillaged, or of what; perhaps
they had merely suffered the losses incidental to an Oriental
embarkation. The ship herself had been pillaged, and badly. She had been
connected with the earlier caravan—the ill-fated one—and the Government
had gutted her in its vague embarrassment. Not a chair, not a table was
left. Still they were thankful to be on board. Their cabin was good, the
captain appeared good-natured and polite, and their fellow-passengers, a
Mr. and Mrs. Tulloch, a Mr. Hare, a Mr. Fuller, and a Mr. Manesty,
seemed, together with poor Mr. Taylor from the caravan, to promise
inoffensive companionship down the Red Sea. Calm was the prospect. But
Eliza is Eliza. And we have not yet seen Eliza in close contact with
another lady. Nor have we yet seen Mrs. Tulloch.
IV
The beauty of the Gulf of Suez—and surely it is most beautiful—has never
received full appreciation from the traveller. He is in too much of a
hurry to arrive or to depart, his eyes are too ardently bent on England
or on India for him to enjoy that exquisite corridor of tinted mountains
and radiant water. He is too much occupied with his own thoughts to
realize that here, here and nowhere else, is the vestibule between the
Levant and the Tropics. Nor was it otherwise in the case of Mrs. Fay. As
she sailed southward with her husband in the pleasant autumn weather,
her thoughts dwelt on the past with irritation, on the future with hope,
but on the scenery scarcely at all. What with the boredom of Alexandria,
what with her fright at Cairo, what with the native dress that
fanaticism had compelled her to wear (“a terrible fashion for one like
me to whom fresh air seems the greatest requisite for existence”), and
finally what with Suez, which she found “a miserable place little better
than the desert which it bounds,” she quitted Egypt without one tender
word. Even her Biblical reminiscences take an embittered turn. She
forgets how glad Jacob had been to come there and only remembers how
anxious Moses and Aaron had been to get away.
Content to have escaped, she turns her gaze within—not of course to her
own interior (she is no morbid analyst) but to the interior of the boat,
and surveys with merciless eyes her fellow-passengers. The letter that
describes them exhibits her talent, her vitality, and her trust in
Providence, and incidentally explains why she never became popular, and
why “two parties,” as she terms them, were at once formed on board, the
one party consisting of her husband and herself, the other of everyone
else. The feud, trivial at the time, was not to be without serious
consequences. “You will now expect me, my dear friends,” she begins, “to
say something of those with whom we are cooped up, but my account will
not be very satisfactory, though sufficiently interesting to us—to being
there.”
The grammar is hazy. But the style makes all clear.
The woman Mrs. Tulloch, of whom I entertained some suspicion
from the first, is, now I am credibly informed, one of the very
lowest creatures taken off the streets in London. She is so
perfectly depraved in disposition that her supreme delight
consists in making everybody about her miserable. It would be
doing her too much honour to stain my paper with a detail of the
various artifices she daily practises to that end. Her pretended
husband, having been in India before and giving himself many
airs, is looked upon as a person of mighty consequence whom no
one chooses to offend. Therefore madam has full scope to
exercise her mischievous talents, wherein he never controls her,
not but that he perfectly understands to make himself feared.
Coercive measures are sometimes resorted to. It is a common
expression of the lady, “Lord bless you, if I did such or such a
thing, Tulloch would make no more ado, but knock me down like an
ox.” I frequently amuse myself with examining their
countenances, where ill-nature has fixed her empire so firmly
that I scarcely believe either of them smiled except
maliciously.
As for the captain he is a mere Jack in office. Being
unexpectedly raised to that post from second mate by the death
of poor Captain Vanderfield and his chief officer on the fatal
Desert, he has become from this circumstance so insolent and
overbearing that everyone detests him. Instead of being ready to
accommodate every person with the few necessaries left by the
plundering Arabs, he constantly appropriates them to himself.
“Where is the captain’s silver spoon? God bless my soul, Sir,
you have got my chair; must you be seated before the captain’s
glass?” and a great deal more of this same kind; but this may
serve as a specimen. And although the wretch half starves us, he
frequently makes comparisons between his table and that of an
Indiaman which we dare not contradict while in his power.
Food is a solemn subject. Eliza was not a fastidious or an insular eater
and she would gladly sample the dishes of foreign climes. But she did
demand that those dishes should be plentiful, and that they should
nourish her, and loud are her complaints when they do not, and vigorous
the measures she takes.
During the first fortnight of our voyage my foolish complaisance
stood in my way at table, but I soon learned our gentle maxim,
catch as catch can. The longest arm fared best, and you cannot
imagine what a good scrambler I have become. A dish once seized,
it is my care to make use of my good fortune; and now provisions
running very short, we are grown quite savages: two or three of
us perhaps fighting for a bone, for there is no respect of
persons. The wretch of a captain, wanting our passage money for
nothing, refused to lay in a sufficient quantity of stock; and
if we do not soon reach our port, what must be the consequence,
Heaven knows.
Mr. Hare, Eliza’s chief gentleman enemy, was not dangerous at meals. It
was rather the activity of his mind that threatened her. Whenever she
writes of him, her pen is at its sharpest, it is indeed not so much a
pen as a fang. It lacerates his social pretentiousness, his snobbery,
the scorbutic blotches on his face, and his little white eyes. Poor
young Mr. Taylor once showed him a handsome silver-hilted sword. He
admired it, till he saw on the scabbard the damning inscription, “Royal
Exchange.” “Take your sword,” said he; “it’s surprising a man of your
sense should commit an error; for fifty guineas I would not have a city
name on any article of my dress.” She comments: “Now would anyone
suppose this fine gentleman’s father was in trade and he himself brought
up in that very city he affects to despise? Very true, nevertheless.”
How, by the way, did she know that? Who told her? And, by the way, how
did she know about Mrs. Tulloch? But one must not ask such dreadful
questions. They shatter the foundations of faith.
And so his studied attention to me in the minutest article
effectually shielded him from suspicion till his end was
answered, of raising up a party against us, by the means of that
vile woman, who was anxious to triumph over me, especially as I
have been repeatedly compelled (for the honour of the sex) to
censure her swearing and indecent behaviour. I have, therefore,
little comfort to look forward to for the remainder of the
voyage.
Then she reckons up her allies, or rather the neutrals. They are a
feeble set.
It is only justice to name Mr. Taylor as an amiable though
melancholy companion, and Mr. Manesty, an agreeable young man
under twenty. Mr. Fuller is a middle-aged man. He has, it seems,
fallen into the hands of sharpers and been completely pillaged.
He has the finest dark eyes I ever met with. Mr. Moreau, a
musician, is very civil and attentive.
Small fry like these could be no help. They can scarcely have got enough
to eat at dinner. Her truer supports lay within.
Having early discovered the confederacy, prudence determined us
to go mildly on, seemingly blind to what it was beyond our power
to remedy. Never intermeddling with their disputes, all
endeavours to draw us into quarrels are vainly exerted. I
despise them too much to be angry.
And the letter concludes with a moving picture of home life in the Red
Sea:
After meals I generally retire to my cabin, where I find plenty
of employment, having made up a dozen shirts for Mr. Fay out of
some cloth I purchased to replace part of those stolen by the
Arabs. Sometimes I read French or Italian and study Portuguese.
I likewise prevailed on Mr. Fay to teach me shorthand, in
consequence of the airs Mr. Hare gave himself because he was
master of this art and had taught his sisters to correspond with
him in it. The matter was very easily accomplished. In short, I
have discovered abundant methods of making my time pass usefully
and not disagreeably. How often, since in this situation, have I
blessed God that He has been pleased to endow me with a mind
capable of furnishing its own amusement, despite of all means
used to discompose it.
Admirable too is the tone of the postscript:
I am in tolerable health and looking with a longing eye towards
Bengal, from whence I trust my next will be dated. The climate
seems likely to agree very well with me. I do not at all mind
the heat, nor does it at all affect either my spirits or my
appetite.—Your ever affectionate E. F.
She was to date her next not from Bengal but from prison. Here, however,
her Alexandrian audience must really have the decency to retire. Eliza
in chains is too terrible a theme. Let it suffice to say that though in
chains she remained Eliza, and that Mrs. Tulloch was enchained too; and
let those who would know more procure “The Original Letters from India
of Mrs. Eliza Fay,” published by the Calcutta Historical Society. The
book contains a portrait of our heroine, which quite fills the cup of
joy. She stands before us in the Oriental robes she detested so much,
but she has thrown back their superfluities and gazes at the world as
though seeing through its little tricks. One trousered foot is advanced,
one bangled arm is bent into an attitude of dignified defiance. Her
expression, though triumphant, is alert. She is attended in the
background by a maid-servant and a mosque.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COTTON FROM THE OUTSIDE
I
“Oh, Heaven help us! What is that dreadful noise! Run, run! Has somebody
been killed?”
“Do not distress yourself, kind-hearted sir. It is only the merchants of
Alexandria, buying cotton.”
“But they are murdering one another surely.”
“Not so. They merely gesticulate.”
“Does any place exist whence one could view their gestures in safety?”
“There is such a place.”
“I shall come to no bodily harm there?”
“None, none.”
“Then conduct me, pray.”
And mounting to an upper chamber we looked down into a stupendous Hall.
It is usual to compare such visions to Dante’s Inferno, but this really
did resemble it, because it was marked out into the concentric circles
of which the Florentine speaks. Divided from each other by ornamental
balustrades, they increased in torment as they decreased in size, so
that the inmost ring was congested beyond redemption with perspiring
souls. They shouted and waved and spat at each other across the central
basin which was empty but for a permanent official who sat there, fixed
in ice. Now and then he rang a little bell, and now and then another
official, who dwelt upon a ladder far away, climbed and wrote upon a
board with chalk. The merchants hit their heads and howled. A terrible
calm ensued. Something worse was coming. While it gathered we spoke.
“Oh, name this place!”
“It is none other than the Bourse. Cotton is sold at this end, Stocks
and Shares at that.”
And I perceived a duplicate fabric at the farther end of the Hall, a
subsidiary or rather a superseded Hell, for its circles were deserted,
it was lashed by no everlasting wind, and such souls as loitered against
its balustrades seemed pensive in their mien. This was the Stock
Exchange—such a great name in England, but negligible here where only
cotton counts. Cotton shirts and cotton wool and reels of cotton would
not come to us if merchants did not suffer in Alexandria. Nay,
Alexandria herself could not have re-arisen from the waves, there would
be no French gardens, no English church at Bulkeley, possibly not even
any drains....
Help! Oh, help! help! Oh, horrible, too horrible! For the storm had
broken. With the scream of a devil in pain a stout Greek fell sideways
over the balustrade, then righted himself, then fell again, and as he
fell and rose he chanted “Teekoty Peapot, Teekoty Peapot.” He was
offering to sell cotton. Towards him, bull-shouldered, moved a lout in a
tarboosh. Everyone else screamed too, using odd little rhythms to
advertise their individuality. Some shouted unnoticed, others would
evoke a kindred soul, and right across the central pool business would
be transacted. They seemed to have evolved a new sense. They
communicated by means unknown to normal men. A wave of the note-book,
and the thing was done. And the imitation marble pillars shook, and the
ceiling that was painted to look like sculpture trembled, and Time
himself stood still in the person of a sham-renaissance clock. And a
British officer who was watching the scene said—never mind what he said.
Hence, hence!
II
My next vision is cloistral in comparison. Vision of a quiet courtyard a
mile away (Minet el Bassal), where the cotton was sold on sample. Pieces
of fluff sailed through the sunlight and stuck to my clothes. Their
source was the backs of Arabs, who were running noiselessly about,
carrying packages, and as they passed it seemed to be the proper thing
to stretch out one’s hand and to pull out a tuft of cotton, to twiddle
it, and to set it sailing. I like to think that the merchant to whom it
next stuck bought it, but this is an unbridled fancy. Let us keep to
facts, such as to the small fountain in the middle of the courtyard,
which supported a few aquatic plants, or to the genuine Oriental carpets
which were exposed for sale on the opposite wall. They lent an air of
culture, which was very pleasing. Yet, though here there was no cause
for fear, the place was even more mysterious than the Bourse. What did
it all mean? To the outsider nothing seems more capricious than the
mechanism of business. It runs smoothly when he expects it to creak, and
creaks when he expects it to be still. Considering how these same men
could howl and spit, one would have anticipated more animation over the
samples. Perhaps they sometimes showed it, but my memory is of calm
celibates in dust-coats who stood idling in the sunshine before the
doors of their cells, sipping coffee and exchanging anecdotes of a
somewhat mechanical impropriety. Very good the coffee was, too, and the
very blue sky and the keen air and the bright dresses of some natives
raised for a moment the illusion that this courtyard was actually the
academic East, and that caravans of camels were waiting with their snowy
bales outside. There were other courtyards with ramifications of
passages and offices, where the same mixture of light business and light
refreshments seemed in progress—architectural backwaters such as one
used to come across in the Earl’s Court Exhibition, where commerce and
pleasure met in a slack communion. These I did not care for, but the
main courtyard was really rather jolly, and that British officer (had he
visited it) could certainly have left his comment (whatever it was)
unspoken.
Hence!
III
In the final stage I was in the thick of it again, though in a very
different sort of thickness. Cotton was everywhere. The flakes of Minet
el Bassal had become a snowstorm, which hurtled through the air and lay
upon the ground in drifts. The cotton was being pressed into bales, and
perhaps being cleaned too—it is shocking not to be sure, but the row was
tremendous. The noise was made no longer by merchants—who seldom so far
remount the sources of their wealth—but by a certain amount of wooden
machinery and by a great many Arabs. Some of them were fighting with
masses of the stuff which was poured over them from an endless
staircase. Just as they mastered it, more would arrive and completely
bury them. They would shout with laughter and struggle, and then more
cotton would come and more, quivering from the impetus of its transit,
so that one could not tell which was vegetable, which man. They thrust
it into a pit in the flooring, upon which other Arabs danced. This was
the first stage in the pressing—exerted by the human foot with the
assistance of song. The chant rose and fell. It was better than the
chants of the Bourse, being generic not personal, and of immemorial
age—older than Hell at all events. When the Arabs had trodden the cotton
tight, up they jumped, and one of them struck the flooring with his
hand. The bottom of the pit opened in response, a sack was drawn across
by invisible agents, and the mass sank out of sight into a lower room,
where the final pressure was exerted on it by machinery. We went down to
see this and to hear the “cri du coton,” which it gives when it can
shrink no more. Metal binders were clamped round it and secured by hand,
and then the completed bale—as hard as iron and containing two or three
Arabs inside it for all I know—was tumbled away to the warehouse.
It is difficult to speak intelligently about or against machinery, and
my comments made no great stir—_e.g._ “Why has it to be pressed?” and
“Do the different people’s cotton not get mixed?” and “What I like is,
it is so primitive.” To this last indeed it was somewhat severely
replied that the process I had viewed was anything but primitive—nay,
that it was the last word on cotton-pressing, or it would not have been
adopted at Alexandria. This was conclusive, and one can only hope that
it will be the last word for ever, and that for century after century
brown legs and rhythmic songs will greet the advancing cataracts of
snow. That peevish British officer would have forgotten his peevishness
had he come here. He would have regretted his criticism of the Bourse.
It was “A bomb in the middle of them is the only possible comment,” and
when he made it I realized that there was someone in the world even more
outside cotton than I was myself.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DEN
At last I have been to a Den. The attempt was first made many years ago
in Lahore City, where my guide was a young Missionary, who wasted all
his time in liking people and making them like him. I have often
wondered what he found to convert, and what his financial backers—old
ladies in America and England—will have to say upon the results of his
labours. He had lived in the Lahore bazaars as a poor man, and as he
walked through their intricacies he explained how this became
comprehensible, and that pardonable, and that inevitable, so soon as one
drew close enough to it to understand. We did interesting things—went
into a temple as big as a cupboard where we were allowed to hold the
gods and ring the bells, visited a lawyer who was defending a client
against the charge of selling a wife—and as the afternoon closed the
Missionary said he supposed I should like to include a Den. He remarked
that a great deal of rubbish was talked about opium, and he led me to a
courtyard, round whose sides were some lean-to’s of straw. “Oh! it isn’t
working,” he said with disappointment. He peered about and pulled from a
lean-to a solitary sinner. “Look at his eyes,” he said. “I’m afraid
that’s all.”
There my acquaintance with Vice stopped, until Egypt, the land of so
much, promised new opportunities. It would not be opium here, but
hashish, a more lurid drug. Concealed in walking-sticks, it gave
delicious dreams. So I was glad of a chance of accompanying the police
of Alexandria upon a raid. Their moral tone was superior to the
Missionary’s, but they had no better luck. Advancing stealthily upon a
fragile door they burst it open and we rushed in. We were in a passage,
open to the stars. Right and left of it, and communicating with one
another, were sheds which the police explored with their heavy shoulders
and large feet. In one of them they found a tired white horse. A
corporal climbed into the manger. “They often secrete bowls here,” he
said. At the end of the passage we came upon human life. A family was
asleep by the light of a lamp—not suspiciously asleep, but reasonably
disturbed by our irruption. The civil father was ordered to arise and
carry the lamp about, and by its light we found a hollow reed, at which
the police sniffed heavily. Traces of hashish adhered to it, they
pronounced. That was all. They were delighted with the find, for it
confirmed their official faith—that the city they controlled was almost
pure but not quite. Too much or too little would have discredited them.
A few weeks later an Egyptian friend offered to take me round the native
quarters of the same town. We did interesting things—saw a circumcision
procession, listened to an epic recitation—and as the evening closed he
asked me whether I should like to include a Den. He thought he knew of
one. Having laid his hand on his forehead for a moment he led through
intricate streets to a door. We opened it silently and slipped in. There
was something familiar in the passage, and my forebodings were confirmed
by the sight of a white horse. I had left as an avenging angel, I was to
return as a devotee. I knew better than my friend that we should find no
hashish—not even the hollow reed, for it had been confiscated as an
exhibit to the Police Station—but I said nothing, and in due time we
disturbed the sleeping family. They were uncivil and refused to move
their lamp. My friend was disappointed. For my own part I could hardly
help being sorry for poor sin. In all the vast city was this her one
retreat?
But outside he had an idea. He thought he knew of another Den, which was
less exposed to the onslaughts of purity since it was owned by a British
subject. We would go there. And we found the genuine article at last. It
was up a flight of stairs, down which the odour (not a disagreeable one)
floated. The proprietor—a one-eyed Maltese—battled with us at the top.
He hadn’t hashish, he cried, he didn’t know what hashish was, he hardly
knew what a room was or a house. But we got in and saw the company.
There is really nothing to say when one comes to the point. They were
just smoking. And at the present moment they don’t even smoke, for my
one and only Den has been suppressed by the police—just as his old
ladies must by now have suppressed my Missionary at Lahore.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON
Of the three streets that dispute the honour of being Alexandria’s
premier thoroughfare the Rue Rosette undoubtedly bears the palm for
gentility. The Bond Street (I refer to Rue Chérif Pacha) is too shoppy
to be genteel, and the Boulevard de Ramleh competes from this particular
aspect not at all. In its length, its cleanliness, and the refined
monotony of its architecture, Rue Rosette outdoes either of its rivals.
They are tainted with utility: people use them to get something or
somewhere. But Rue Rosette is an end in itself. It starts in the middle
of the town and no man can tell where it stops: a goal it may have, but
not one discoverable by mortal leg. Its horizon, narrow but
uninterrupted, ever unrolls into a ribbon of blue sky above the
wayfarer’s head, and the ribbon of white beneath his feet corresponds,
and right and left of him are the houses that he thought he had passed a
quarter of an hour before. Oh, it is so dull! Its dullness is really
indescribable. What seem at first to be incidents—such as the trays of
worthies who project from the clubs—prove at a second glance to be
subdued to what they sit in. They are half asleep. For you cannot have
gentility without paying for it.
The poor street does not want to be dull. It wants to be smart, and of a
Parisian smartness. Eternally well-dressed people driving infinitely in
either direction—that is its ideal. It is not mine, and we meet as
seldom as possible in consequence. But friends of a higher social
outlook tell me that, by a great effort, they can feel perfectly at home
in the Rue Rosette—can transform the municipal buildings into
Ministries, and the Consulates into Embassies, and arabias into
broughams, can increase the polish on the gentlemen’s boots and the
frou-frou from the ladies’ skirts, until the Rue Rosette becomes what it
yearns to be—a masterpiece by Baron Haussmann, debouching in an Arc de
Triomphe instead of a Police Station.
I have never been able to make that effort. When fancies do come here,
they are of an older and friendlier civilization. I recall Achilles
Tatius, a bishop of the post-classical period, who wrote a somewhat
improper novel. He made his hero enter Alexandria by this very street
one thousand years ago. It was not called the Rue Rosette then, but the
Canopic Road, and it was not genteel or smart but presented throughout
its length scenes of extraordinary splendour. Beginning at the Gate of
the Sun (by the Public Gardens) it traversed the city uninterruptedly
until it reached the waters of the Harbour (near Minet el Bassal), and
here stood the Gate of the Moon, to close what the Sun had begun. The
street was lined with marble colonnades from end to end, as was the Rue
Nebi Daniel, and the point of their intersection (where one now stands
in hopeless expectation of a tram) was one of the most glorious
crossways of the ancient world. Clitophon (it was thus that the Bishop
named his hero) paused there in his walk, and looked down the four
vistas, over whose ranks rose temples and palaces and tombs, and he
tells us that the crossways bore the name of Alexander, and that the
Mausoleum close to them was Alexander’s tomb. He does not tell us more,
being in search of a female companion named Leucippe, whom he deems of
more permanent interest, but there is no reason to doubt his statements,
for Achilles Tatius himself lived here and dare not cause his characters
to lie. The passage gleams like a jewel among the amorous rubbish that
surrounds it. The vanished glory leaps up again, not in architectural
detail but as a city of the soul. There (beneath the Mosque of Nebi
Daniel) is the body of Alexander the Great. There he lies, lapped in
gold and laid in a coffin of glass. When Clitophon made his visit he had
already lain there for eight hundred years, and according to legend he
lies there still, walled into a forgotten cellar. And of this glory all
that tangibly remains is a road: the alignment of the Rue Rosette.
Christian and Arab destroyed the rest, but they could not destroy the
direction of a road. Towards the harbour they did divert it, certainly;
the great thoroughfare contracts into the Rue Sidi Metwalli and becomes
heaven knows what in the neighbourhood of the Rue des Sœurs. But in its
eastern stretch it runs with its old decision, and the limestone and
stucco still throw over it the shadows that marble once threw.
Of the two gates there survives not even a description. They may have
been masterpieces of art, they may have been simple entrances, but they
must certainly have included shrines to the god and goddess who
respectively guarded them. No one took much notice of the shrines.
Paganism, even in the days of Clitophon and Leucippe, was dead. It is
dead, yet the twin luminaries still reign over the street and give it
what it has of beauty. In the evening the western vista can blaze with
orange and scarlet, and the eastern, having darkened, can shimmer with a
mysterious radiance, out of which, incredibly large, rises the globe of
the moon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SOLITARY PLACE
Delicate yet august, the country that stretches westward from the
expiring waters of Lake Mariout is not easy to describe. Though it
contains accredited Oriental ingredients, such as camels, a mirage, and
Bedouins, and though it remounts to a high antiquity, yet I cannot
imagine our powerful professional novelists getting to work at it, and
extracting from its quiet recesses hot tales about mummies and sin. Its
basis is a soft limestone, which rises on the seaward side into two
well-defined and parallel ridges, and swells inland into gentle hills
whose outlines and colouring often suggest a Scotch moor: the whole
district has a marked tendency to go purple, especially in its
hollows—into that sombre brownish purple that may be caused by moorland
growths. Many of the bushes are like flowerless heather. In the lower
ground barley is cultivated, and depends for its success upon an
occasional violent thunderstorm which shall swill a sudden torrent off
the hills. The ancients cultivated vines and olives here too, as the
remains of their presses prove, and Cleopatra had a garden here, but
from such luxuries the soil has desisted. It has beat a general retreat
from civilization, and the spirit of the place, without being savage, is
singularly austere. Its chief episode is the great temple of Abousir,
which with its attendant beacon-tower stands so magnificently upon the
coastal ridge. And inland lie the marble basilicas of St. Menas and his
holy well. But these apart, there is nothing to catch the attention. The
tents of the Bedouins, so Mongolian in outline, seldom cut the lines of
the sky, but blend in colour with the stone, against which they crouch.
The quarries, vast and romantic, lie hidden in the flanks of the
limestone. They do not play the part that a chalk-pit does in the
landscape of the Sussex downs. The place is not a wilderness, it is a
working concern. But it is essentially solitary, and only once a year
does it, for a brief space, put its solitude away, and blossom.
There is nothing there of the ordered progress of the English spring,
with its slow extension from wood-anemones through primroses into the
buttercups of June. The flowers come all of a rush. One week there is
nothing but spikes and buds, then the temperature rises or the wind
drops, and whole tracts turn lilac or scarlet. They scarcely wait for
their leaves, they are in such a hurry, and many of them blossom like
little footstools, close to the ground. They do not keep their times.
They scarcely keep their places, and you may look in vain for them this
season where you found them last. There is a certain tract of yellow
marigolds that I suspect of migration. One year it was in a quarry, the
next by the railway line, now it has flown a distance of five and a half
miles and unfolded its carpet on the slopes beneath Abousir. All is
confusion and hurry. The white tassels of garlic that wave in the shadow
of the temple may be fallen to-morrow, the blue buds of the borage never
have time to unfold. The pageant passes like the waving of a
handkerchief, but in compensation without the lumber that attends the
passing of an English spring, no stalks and reluctant exits of half-dead
leaves. As it came, so it goes. It has been more like a ray of coloured
light playing on the earth than the work of the earth herself, and if
one had not picked a few of the flowers and entombed them in vases upon
an Alexandrian mantelpiece, they could seem afterwards like the growths
of a dream.
It would require a botanist to do justice to these flowers, but
fortunately there is no occasion to do justice to flowers. They are not
Government officials. Let their titles and duties remain for the most
part unknown. The most permanent of them are, oddly enough, the
asphodels, whose coarse stems and turbid venous blossoms have
disappointed many who dreamt of the Elysian Fields. How came the Greeks
to plant so buxom a bulb in the solitary place they imagined beyond the
grave—that place which though full of philosophers and charioteers
remains for ever empty? The asphodel is built to resist rough winds and
to stand on the slopes of an earthly hill. It is too heavy for the hands
of ghosts, too harsh for their feet, but perhaps ours were not the
asphodels the Greeks planted, and their ghosts may have walked upon what
we call Stars of Bethlehem. The marigolds are solid too, but for the
most part the flora are very delicate, and their colours aerial. There
is a tiny vetch that hesitates between terracotta and claret. There is a
scented yellow flower the size of flax which is only found in one part
of the district and which closes in the evening when the irises unfold.
Two of these irises are dwarf, and coloured purple and deep blue; at
third is larger and china blue. There are tracts of night-scented stock.
Down in the quarries grows a rock plant with a dull red spire and a
fleshy leaf that almost adheres to the stone. As for the shrubs, some
have transparent joints that look filled with wine; while from the
woolly fibre of others jut buttons like a blue scabious. Other blue
plants wave their heads in the barley. Mignonette, purple and white
anemones, scarlet and yellow ranunculus, scarlet poppies, coltsfoot and
dwarf orange marigolds, nettles genuine and false, henbane, mallows,
celandine, hen and chickens, lords and ladies, convolvulus. English
daisies I do not remember. And many of these flowers are not the
varieties we know in England. The lords and ladies, for instance, are
smaller and thrust up their pale green spoons in the open ground. While,
to compensate, there is a larger kind—an arum of great size with a
coal-black sheath and clapper—a positively Satanic plant, such as Des
Esseintes would have commanded for his conservatory. In this way, just
here and there, the tropic note is struck, and reminds us that these
familiar and semi-familiar flowers are after all growing in Africa, and
that those swelling hills stretch southwards towards the heart of the
dark continent.
But what impresses one most in the scene is the quiet persistence of the
earth. There is so little soil about and she does so much with it. Year
after year she has given this extraordinary show to a few Bedouins, has
covered the Mareotic civilization with dust and raised flowers from its
shards. Will she do the same to our own tins and barbed wire? Probably
not, for man has now got so far ahead of other forms of life that he
will scarcely permit the flowers to grow over his works again. His old
tins will be buried under new tins. This is the triumph of civilization,
I suppose, the final imprint of the human upon this devoted planet,
which should exhibit in its apotheosis a solid crust of machinery and
graves. In cities one sees this development coming, but in solitary
places, however austere, the primæval softness persists, the vegetation
still flowers and seeds unchecked, and the air still blows untainted hot
from the land or cold from the sea. I have tried to describe this
Mariout country as it is at the beginning of March, when the earth makes
her great effort. In a few days the wind may scratch and tear the
blossoms, in a few weeks the sun will scorch the leaves. The spongeous
red growth of the ice-plant endures longest and further empurples the
hills. This too will dry up and the bones of the limestone reappear.
Then all will be quiet till the first winter rain, when the camels will
be driven out to surface-plough. A rectangle is outlined on the soil and
scattered with seed barley. Then the camel will shuffle up and down
dragging after him a wooden plough that looks like a half-open penknife,
and the Bedouin, guiding it, will sing tunes to the camel that he can
only sing to the camel, because in his mind the tune and the camel are
the same thing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE POETRY OF C. P. CAVAFY
Modern Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul. Founded upon cotton
with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill planned, ill
drained—many hard things can be said against it, and most are said by
its inhabitants. Yet to some of them, as they traverse the streets, a
delightful experience can occur. They hear their own name proclaimed in
firm yet meditative accents—accents that seem not so much to expect an
answer as to pay homage to the fact of individuality. They turn and see
a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a
slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly. “Oh,
Cavafy...!” Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat
to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he
vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he
may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet
shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of
reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to
its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling
than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street,
sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It
deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096,
or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of
friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor.
It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And
despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured
charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle
to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.
A Greek who wishes to compose poetry has a special problem; between his
written and spoken language yawns a gulf. There is an artificial
“literary” jargon beloved by schoolmasters and journalists, which has
tried to revive the classical tradition, and which only succeeds in
being dull. And there is the speech of the people, varying from place to
place, and everywhere stuffed with non-Hellenic constructions and words.
Can this speech be used for poetry and for cultivated prose? The younger
generation believes that it can. A society (Nea Zoe) was started in
Alexandria to encourage it, and shocks the stodgy not only by its
writings but by its vocabulary—expressions are used that one might
actually hear in a shop. Similar movements are born and die all over the
Levant, from Smyrna and Cyprus to Jannina, all testifying to the zeal of
a race who, alone among the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, appear
to possess the literary sense and to desire that words should be alive.
Cavafy is one of the heroes of this movement, though not one of its
extremists. Eclectic by nature, he sees that a new theory might be as
sterile as the old, and that the final test must be the incommunicable
one of taste. His own poems are in Demotic, but in moderate Demotic.
They are all short poems, and unrhymed, so that there is some hope of
conveying them in a verbal translation. They reveal a beautiful and
curious world. It comes into being through the world of experience, but
it is not experience, for the poet is even more incapable than most
people of seeing straight:
Here let me stand. Let me too look at Nature a little,
the radiant blue of the morning sea,
the cloudless sky and the yellow beach;
all beautiful and flooded with light.
Here let me stand. And let me deceive myself into thinking that I saw
them—
(I really did see them one moment, when first I came)
—that I am not seeing, even here, my fancies,
my memories, my visions of voluptuousness.
It is the world within. And since the poet cannot hope to escape from
this world, he should at all costs arrange and rule it sensibly. “My
mind to me a kingdom is,” sang the Elizabethan, and so is Cavafy’s; but
his is a real, not a conventional, kingdom, in which there may be
mutinies and war. In “The City” he sketches the tragedy of one who
misgoverned, and who hopes to leave the chaos behind him and to “build
another city, better than this.” Useless!
The city shall ever follow you.
In these same streets you shall wander,
and in the same purlieux you shall roam,
and in the same house you shall grow grey....
There is no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.
You have so shattered your life here, in this small corner,
that in all the world you have ruined it.
And in “Ithaca” he sketches another and a nobler tragedy—that of a man
who seeks loftily, and finds at the end that the goal has not been worth
the effort. Such a man should not lament. He has not failed really.
Ithaca gave you your fair voyage.
Without her you would not have ventured on the way,
but she has no more to give you.
And if you find Ithaca a poor place, she has not mocked you.
You have become so wise, so full of experience,
that you should understand by now what these Ithacas mean.
The above extracts illustrate one of Cavafy’s moods—intensely
subjective; scenery, cities and legends all re-emerge in terms of the
mind. There is another mood in which he stands apart from his
subject-matter, and with the detachment of an artist hammers it into
shape. The historian comes to the front now, and it is interesting to
note how different is his history from an Englishman’s. He even looks
back upon a different Greece. Athens and Sparta, so drubbed into us at
school, are to him two quarrelsome little slave states, ephemeral beside
the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed them, just as these are ephemeral
beside the secular empire of Constantinople. He reacts against the
tyranny of Classicism—Pericles and Aspasia and Themistocles and all
those bores. Alexandria, his birthplace, came into being just when
Public School Greece decayed; kings, emperors, patriarchs have trodden
the ground between his office and his flat; his literary ancestor—if he
has one—is Callimachus, and his poems bear such titles as “The
Displeasure of the Seleucid,” “In the Month of Athyr,” “Manuel
Comnenus,” and are prefaced by quotations from Philostratus or Lucian.
Two of these poems shall be quoted in full, to illustrate his method.[2]
In the first he adopts the precise, almost mincing style of a chronicle
to build up his effect. It is called “Alexandrian Kings” and deals with
an episode of the reign of Cleopatra and Antony.
Footnote 2:
A third is on page 56.
An Alexandrian crowd collected
to see the sons of Cleopatra,
Cæsarion and his little brothers
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were brought to the Gymnasium,
there to be crowned as kings
amidst a splendid display of troops.
Alexander they named king
of Armenia, of Media, and of the Parthians.
Ptolemy they named king
of Cilicia, of Syria, and Phœnicia.
Cæsarion stood a little in front,
clad in silk the colour of roses,
with a bunch of hyacinths at his breast.
His belt was a double line of sapphires and amethysts,
his sandals were bound with white ribbons
embroidered with rosy pearls.
Him they acclaimed more than the small ones.
Him they named “King of Kings!”
The Alexandrians knew perfectly well
that all this was words and empty pomp.
But the day was warm and exquisite,
the sky clear and blue,
the Gymnasium of Alexandria a triumph of art,
the courtiers’ apparel magnificent,
Cæsarion full of grace and beauty
(son of Cleopatra, blood of the Lagidæ!),
and the Alexandrians ran to see the show
and grew enthusiastic, and applauded
in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
bewitched with the beautiful spectacle,
though they knew perfectly well how worthless,
what empty words, were these king-makings.
Such a poem has, even in a translation, a “distinguished” air. It is the
work of an artist who is not interested in facile beauty. In the second
example, though its subject-matter is pathetic, Cavafy stands equally
aloof. The poem is broken into half-lines; he is spelling out an epitaph
on a young man who died in the month of Athyr, the ancient Egyptian
November, and he would convey the obscurity, the poignancy, that
sometimes arise together out of the past, entwined into a single ghost:
It is hard to read ... on the ancient stone.
“Lord Jesus Christ” ... I make out the word “Soul.”
“In the month of Athyr ... Lucius fell asleep.”
His age is mentioned ... “He lived years....”—
The letters KZ show ... that he fell asleep young.
In the damaged part I see the words ... “Him ... Alexandrian.”
Then come three lines ... much mutilated.
But I can read a few words ... perhaps “our tears” and “sorrows.”
And again: “Tears” ... and: “for us his friends mourning.”
I think Lucius ... was much beloved.
In the month of Athyr ... Lucius fell asleep....
Such a writer can never be popular. He flies both too slowly and too
high. Whether subjective or objective, he is equally remote from the
bustle of the moment, he will never compose either a Royalist or a
Venizelist Hymn. He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of
the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a
slight angle to it, and, in conversation, he has sometimes devoted a
sentence to this subject. Which is better—the world or seclusion?
Cavafy, who has tried both, can’t say. But so much is certain—either
life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONCLUSION
A serious history of Alexandria has yet to be written, and perhaps the
foregoing sketches may have indicated how varied, how impressive, such a
history might be. After the fashion of a pageant it might marshal the
activities of two thousand two hundred and fifty years. But unlike a
pageant it would have to conclude dully. Alas! The modern city calls for
no enthusiastic comment. Its material prosperity seems assured, but
little progress can be discerned elsewhere, while as for the past such
links as remain are being wantonly snapped: for instance, the
Municipality has altered the name of the Rue Rosette to the meaningless
Rue Fouad Premier, and has destroyed a charming covered Bazaar near the
Rue de France, and out at Canopus the British Army of Occupation has
done its bit by breaking up the Ptolemaic ruins to make roads.
Everything passes, or almost everything. Only the climate, only the
north wind and the sea remain as they were when Menelaus, the first
visitor, landed upon Ras el Tin, and exacted from Proteus the promise of
life everlasting. He was to escape death, on his wife’s account: he was
not to descend into the asphodel with the other shades whom Hermes
conducts, himself a shade. Immortal, yet somehow or other
unsatisfactory, Menelaus accordingly leads the Alexandrian pageant with
solid tread; cotton-brokers conclude it; the intermediate space is
thronged with phantoms, noiseless, insubstantial, innumerable, but not
without interest for the historian.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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