Europe in the Looking Glass (13 page)

THE POPULAR CONCEPTION OF ATHENS
is that of a high, flat rock, surmounted by an academic temple; beneath the shadow of which lies a town so nondescript in its modernity as to admit of no visualization whatever. Somewhere behind rears Hymettus, alive with the drip of honey and the buzz of bees. In front stretches the harbour of Piraeus, still connected with the main city by the ancient walls. And only last week Mr Gordon Selfridge spent three hours in the place on his way to Constantinople.

If all the private schoolmasters who deluge the budding intelligence of England with their snapshots, would in future expend five drachma (3¼ d.) on a bus or a tram to Phaleron, and then swim, camera in mouth, three hundred yards out to sea, they might succeed in correcting these prevalent opinions. From this vantage point it will be seen, in the intervals of avoiding the jellyfish, that the Acropolis does not dominate Athens. It lies in front of the city, rather to the left in the direction of Piraeus, where a group of tall factory chimneys are spurting a
panache
of black smoke across the other side of the bay. The temple stands upon its rock, very white and small against the dull, charred mauve of the hills behind reminiscent of those sugary marble models of it, that are frequently to be met with among what stationers are pleased to term their stocks of ‘Fancy Goods’. But behind it and behind the town itself, a high conical hill, shaped like a mangled and elongated clown’s hat, rises to twice or three times the height of the Acropolis. At the top glistens a tiny building, white against the heathery blue of the sky. It is Lykabettus, as this twisted eminence is named,
that is the outstanding centre of the Athenian landscape; and it is during the climb to the monastery at the top, that the best view of the Acropolis is attained.

The ascent of Lykabettus is a physical feat to be essayed only in the evening, when the sun is beginning to set. Even then its accomplishment demands unusual stamina, as the Athenian twilight in August seems if anything more stifling than the blazing fire of the noonday sun. From all around the foot of the hill, now that the builders are encroaching over the plain towards Hymettus, diverge the long, straight streets of the town, dotted with slowly moving trams and buses. Above them, terraces, approached by steep flights of earthen steps, offer footholds to clumps of rectangular modern houses. From these a rocky path, the surface of which exhibits a jagged, vertical stratum calculated to tear the sole from the most hardwearing boot, winds upward amid a plantation of stunted yellowy green pine-bushes, edged with grey aloes, that are guarded by long untidy strands of barbed wire – their stiffened, pointed leaves reminiscent of the municipal gardens at Torquay. Within ten minutes every limb is aching with exhaustion; and it is impossible to resist the temptation to stop and rest beneath a red and white awning, erected half-way up in order to shade a few bottles of mineral water, that catch the hazy orange of the deepening sunset in their pallid, green glass.

Although from this point the Acropolis is definitely below the line of vision, its pillars now appear in dark silhouette against the distant silver glitter of the sea and the dull flame-colour of the sky. Far out on the horizon, Salamis rises purple from the midst of the water. Over the city, laid out in square white blocks in the plain below, floats a vast pall of dust suspended between Heaven and Earth. The world seems to shimmer through a brown gauze. Between the town and the sea, three miles long, the great broad road to Phaleron Bay runs straight as an arrow from the two, gigantic pillars of the Roman temple of Zeus, that stand on the outskirts of the city. Along its edges are visible two rows of small green spheroid trees, broken by the sombre utilitarian
block of the Phix (ΦΙΧ) brewery. Meanwhile the lemonade is finished and the sun continues setting.

A party of unfortunate Greek mothers, dragged by the enthusiasm of their children, were slowly making their way up the side of the hill. Clustered above us on a promontory of rock, to which was affixed a wireless aerial, a group of soldiers cracked jokes at our expense. At length, in advance of the mothers, we attained the summit. From the curtained doorways of the little whitewashed church of St George that occupies three quarters of this geographical pinpoint, came the voice of chanting monks. In a converted side chapel was an old man selling beer. We gazed at the view until the light was failing; then returned to dinner. During the day the thermometer had registered 105˚ in the shade.

Having foregone even a glimpse of the dome of St Peter’s, Simon, though reluctantly forced to admit that he had seen it, was determined to avoid the Parthenon at all costs. David, some two weeks after our arrival, was dragged thither much against his will one evening, lest he should offend the national susceptibilities of a Greek who had become a friend of ours. I, however, accompanied by Michael in a tight guards’ blazer, beige flannel trousers and a check tie in the German national colours, devoted my second morning in Athens to visiting the most famous building in the world.

There have occurred, since the invention of photography, moments in the life of everyone, when the actual materialization of objects familiar in monochrome since the earliest days of the nursery, somehow produces a sensation of such unreality that the eyes of the beholder seem to play him false, as if imposed on by a mirage. Such a feeling, I must confess, obtruded itself upon my common sense, as our cab gradually approached the foot of the mountainous platform on which the Parthenon stands. I felt that I was the victim of a delusion.

Eventually the driver brought his horse to a standstill. We dismounted, paid our entrance and climbed the rough, marble steps to the Propylaea. Behind us and below stretched the
Areopagus, whence Paul preached, a long sloping hill of scrub and rock, culminating in a marble cenotaph. To the right of this and infinitely far below again, where the houses began and the people seemed to crawl along like atrophied house-flies, stood the temple of Theseus, to one side of a large, brown square – itself large and brown and square. Turning, there confronted us through the pillared archway of the Propylaea a broad upward slope of shining grey stone, from the crevices of which spurted little bushes and tufts of dead grass. Strewn in all directions lay blocks of white marble gleaming in the brilliant sunlight, their broken sides displaying the oldest, and at the same time the most modern, architectural conventions, varied with now and then a fragmentary bas-relief, the hindquarters of a horse, a human arm, or draped hip. And at the top, rising from its massive double base, there stood the Parthenon, the supreme challenge of man’s hand to that of Time.

Looking into a shop window later in the day, I was unable to help noticing some typical water-colour sketches of the Russell Flint School, which depicted the Parthenon as a row of grooved cinnamon ninepins against a sky the colour of a faded butcher’s apron. It is pictures such as these, reacting on minds already sickened by those yellowed photographs that invariably adorn the dining-rooms of British pedagogy – photographs enlarged to accentuate every scratch and chip into a deep and crumbling abrasion – it is these that are responsible for the loathing with which the artistically educated person of the twentieth century is growing to regard anything in the nature of a ‘Greek Ruin’. Let me, for the benefit of posterity, pit my pen against the lens of the Victorian photographer.

The pillars of the Parthenon are Doric, plain, massive and fluted from top to bottom. They are composed of separate blocks of marble, three and a half feet deep and five in diameter, which, at the time of construction, were forcibly ground to fit one another, only the topmost having been previously fluted. Then, when the succession of blocks had become a pillar, the whole fluting was carried out by hand. The marble is still as
smooth as vellum, its surface hard as basalt, its edges sharp as steel. And for all the chips and flakes and holes, there is that certain quality about this handwork, by which handwork can always be distinguished, be it on metal, wood or stone – a textural quality that renders every imperfection not only superfluous, but invisible. Picture these pillars then, with their surface of vellum and their colour of sun-kissed satin, rising massive and radiant from the marble plinth of the whole building, against the brazen turquoise of the sky behind. At their feet the grey slabs of rock and the wreck of the innumerable statues and monuments with which the whole Acropolis was once adorned; behind, the tall spike of Lykabettus rising from the white blocks of the town beneath its veil of dust; in front, the chimneys and promontory of Piraeus; finally the sea and the islands. Immediately below, the Roman amphitheatre, a trellis-work of heavy brown stone arches one upon another, calls to mind the efficient vulgarity of the civilization that displaced the Greek, a relic infinitely more incongruous than the tramlines and the factory chimneys. Even antique dealers in the Levant despise Roman remains.

Tucked away to one side and built below the general level of the ground, so that only the cornice is visible, is the Acropolis Museum. Eventually I visited the other museum that lies in the town below. Serried ranks of giraffe-necked vases of every height from six feet to three inches; interminable statues of Praxitelean youths eyeing their overfleshed shoulders; plump fragments of female busts beneath elaborately-ruched djibbahs; triumphant wreaths of beaten gold; breastplates, brooches and safety-pins; every detail of the art and craftsmanship of Ancient Greece is ranged against the curried red duresco of their walls. The contemplation of the whole is not inspiring. But in the museum beneath the Parthenon, with its small, uncrowded rooms and mural wash of bird’s-egg blue, are to be seen the real masterpieces of Greek Art – those early
three-quarter
-length female portrait busts, popularly known as the ‘Aunts’, to which the paint with which they were once tinted, still adheres.

Though dimly familiar to the general public in the form of medieval English alabaster figures, the art of painting stone has proved, except heraldically, a rare and usually unsuccessful one. In the case of these Greek portraits, it is not easy to convey the delicate beauty of the flat, worn colour. There emanates from them none of that insupportable naturalism that characterized later Greek sculpture. They are simply formalized busts of aristocratic matrons, with delicately chiselled features, proud, pursed mouths, and their hair done in pig-tails that hang down over their breasts from either shoulder. The paint remains, faintly accentuating the features and adorning the slanting, upper borders of the dresses. One of them in particular has stayed in my memory as the possessor of a pair of faint, greyish red eyes, the colour of rain-sodden poppy petals, that appeared, for some reason, no more eccentric than those of anyone else. When next one encounters the misfortune, dragged by some self-informing child, to pass between the doors of the British Museum, it will infuse new life into the dusty outlines of the Elgin Marbles, to remember that in their original state these smut-blown figures appeared in reality as though of parchment gilded by the sun, shaded with the weathered reds and blues of this same paint, faint and flat, yet alive with the marble beneath them, like the coloured illumination of an ancient manuscript; the whole supported by the huge golden pillars, with the blue, blue, blue of the sky poured over the top and down the sides and in between. Yet how lacking in taste does this appear to the refined modern critic. The mere idea of painted stone rasps on his cultured mental palate like the kiss of a middle-aged cat.

In one province of artistic expression however the Greeks have remained admittedly unchallenged. We have had our Michael Angelos and Donatellos. But there has not lived since the days before Christ a single sculptor who has ever attempted that masterly formalization of animals, which formed an integral part of so many of the ancient Greek groups and friezes. The English public is familiar with the crested horses of the Elgin Marbles; it may even recollect the illustrations of the
Minoan bull’s head lately found in Crete. But with the one exception of the single head of the horse of Selene in the British Museum, there is nothing in this country that can give even the faintest idea of the real genius that underlay the Greek representations of domestic animals – domestic, because whereas the ancient Greek lion is often little more than a cylindrical poodle, it is usually the swine, oxen and horses that seem to have responded most successfully to reproduction in stone and bronze.

In opposite corners of a small, blue room in the Acropolis Museum, are the heads, shoulders and forelegs of two horses. Each has been caught by the sculptor at a trot, a delicately built thoroughbred with a strain of Arab in his blood. Eyes sightless, yet sensitive to every movement of the horizon, muscles invisible, yet tightening and unloosing at each step, manes erect and square, ears pricked forward, nostrils dilated to breathe the fresh morning air – every particle of the stone lives. And yet, they are wholly formalized; there is no ‘naturalness’ to detract from their reality. It is to them and to the ‘Aunts’ that the mind should turn at the mention of Ancient Greek sculpture – instead of to fat Appollos and the Venus of Milo. This last is, indeed, as the auctioneer remarked, ‘one statue broken’.

As we descended to the inevitable mutton of the Grande Bretagne, Michael pointed to a number of white slabs of stone about thirty inches by sixteen, lying in confusion at the foot of the Temple of Nike and covered with deeply-incised Turkish inscriptions. At the top of each projected a kind of broken excrescence on to which used to fit a carved, stone turban. There were several of these lying about by the side of their original supporters, shaped like confectioner’s cream-puffs. In the Middle Ages the Parthenon had become a Christian temple to which all the greatest men and women of the Eastern Empire had been wont to pilgrimage. There followed the four centuries of Turkish domination, when the Byzantine church that once stood within the pillars was transformed into a mosque. Then, at the liberation, the Parthenon was cleared of its excrescences,
Christian or infidel. These tombstones are all that remain to tell of the religious usage to which it was once put.