Europe in the Looking Glass (16 page)

The electric permanent way does not run very deep below the surface of the earth. It resembles the Metropolitan Railway out of London. After half-an-hour’s ride, we forced our way out of the train on to the platform of Piraeus station. Piraeus itself is reminiscent of a second-rate manufacturing port in the north of England. Finding a Ford car for hire, Michael uttered Phyllis’s address, and off we hurtled, bumping painfully from floor to hood through the length of the extraordinary mushroom town, in which the Smyrniot refugees eke out an existence on the pittance of a drachma a day that the Government allows them. Streets and streets of wooden bungalows stretched in every direction, though a few rows of two-storey houses were being erected. The inhabitants, of every imaginable age and aspect, many of them wearing circular Astrakhan caps and huge baggy trousers, seemed now, after three years’ hardship, to be in a fair way towards attaining moderate comfort, if not prosperity.

Eventually we found Phyllis in her workshop. She showed us her stock of high-necked jumpers and modern native textiles, many of the latter being as beautiful as the old; then
launched into a succession of stories about her expedition to the erupting volcano of Santorin, during which she had shared one of the few washing basins on the boat with four fat male Greeks, who considered her immodest. After locking up, she bade goodnight to her aged assistant, facially a reproduction of Lloyd George, and we returned by the way that we had come. The crowd in the train was even greater than before.

Previous to this digression on the subject of Smyrna, we had been bathing at Phaleron. By the time we were dried and dressed it was usually six o’clock, and the sun would be beginning to obtrude its blinding rays of coppered gold upon the level of our eyes. Leaving the pier, it was our habit to cross the road and seat ourselves beneath a shelter roofed with brown layers of exotic dried leaves, adjoining an ugly red brick house. Chickens in every condition of baldness and disarray would drag themselves among our feet through inches of hot dust, exuding a pungent odour which was intensified in the dry, thick heat. They were occasionally accompanied by a dribbling, snivelling infant, clad in filthy chequered rags. In this paradise we would each drink a mug or two of light beer and eat hard-boiled eggs and pears. Then suddenly a bus would come rattling round the corner. A hurricane of towels and uncombed hair would sweep across the road, obliging the wretched vehicle, which had just got under way, to come to a standstill amid paroxysms of coughing and vibration.

‘Damn – only two seats!’

‘No, there aren’t – there are three.’

‘Yes, but that’s the ticket boy’s. So many have been killed standing on the step that now they all have to sit inside – so like Freddie’s police!’

‘Well, you go.’

‘I’m in no hurry – I want some more beer.’

‘Well, you.’

‘No, you!’

‘I’m not going.’

‘Nor am I.’

‘Well, Michael, you and Robert go, if you want to go round the shops.’

‘I must say I ought to tell the man about that triptych – and they shut at seven.’

‘Yes, well you two go.’

‘All right.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

And Michael and I set off in quest of ‘antiques’.

IT IS ONLY THOSE
who have themselves faltered through life beneath its burden that can appreciate the misfortune of a mentality, which, at the merest suspicion of something secondhand for sale, is as absolutely unable to resist the temptation of examining it, as a cocaine-fiend of imbibing his favourite drug. It is not merely the pursuit of this or that particular
genre
of curio that urges the fly into the parlour; nor is it solely the mellowing hand of Time nor the romance of previous ownership with which the object in question may have been invested. There is more. The malady is another and a milder form of that splendid fever that lured Livingstone to Africa and gold-hunters to Klondyke – the fever that cries of hearts un-Christian and treasures lurking ’neath the snows – of the hand of a master mouldering below the gloss of last year’s varnish, or the mark of a craftsman peeping from under some price-pencilled snippet of adhesive paper. To those who have acquired, perhaps been born, with this disastrous complaint, who fritter whole fortunes on unrelated bric-a-brac, and condemn their friends to champ the day in draught-blown attics and rheumatic cellars, each unexplored doorway offers the possibility of a hidden Luxor; each dust-grimed
windowpane
the glamour of a treasure-galleon. Michael and I have always been infected since our earliest days of boredom at a public school; he to some purpose, since he derives a small but regular income from his perseverance. There was a time when I attempted to do the same. But I soon discovered that monetary success must result from ‘flair’, rather than taste. My momentary effort was the result of a single piece of good fortune.

It happened one wet and windy March afternoon during my first term at Oxford, that a friend of mine and I, having forsaken the horrors of a river only too familiar in the bosom of a former Alma Mater, were wandering disconsolately along the golden privet alleys of the Abingdon Road, when a board, rising from amid the dead chrysanthemum stumps of number 184, informed our casual glance that Mrs Mary Cook being now also deceased, there would take place a sale of her effects on the following morning. In company with one or two prospective housewives, we wandered inside, curious to view the chattels of a house that was so ordinary as to be interesting; and were aimlessly engaged in fingering a set of engraved fish-knives cradled in cobalt satin, when the friend who was accompanying me suddenly fell through the floor. Though it was no fault of ours that Mrs Cook had permitted her detached and desirable maisonette to fall into this state of disrepair, a feeling of guilt led us hurriedly to seek the shelter of an upper bedroom. After listening to make sure that all was quiet below, we looked about us. In one corner stood an ancient, wooden washstand, the yellow graining of which had almost disappeared beneath the barrage of a century of soapsuds. And above it, protecting from the same menace the rows of formal tulips with which the wall was covered, hung a large panel of painted wood. Upon closer inspection this seemed, beneath its coating of dirt and soap, to represent an inferno, in the form of a cavernous fang-strewn mouth, round which were prancing a series of loathsome, human and beastish deformities. This was evidently Hell. Hence the picture’s relegation to the back bedroom. Next morning, I successfully acquired it; and some days later sold it at a profit of 400 per cent as a genuine work of Pieter Breughel the younger. Such was my first and last venture as a commercial connoisseur. And having since become only too forcibly aware of my real inability to drive a bargain, it was with a pleasant feeling of security that I followed Michael round the labyrinthine antique-shops of Athens. Being personally known to all their
proprietors, and having been responsible for a large portion of their summer’s custom, he was offered anything he wanted at the actual minimum. Occasionally a dealer would have been saving some newly arrived treasure for his inspection. It was his custom, therefore, to ‘go round the shops’ every evening between six and seven o’clock. And it was for that reason that we had permitted ourselves to take the only two available seats in the first bus.

Not very far from the bottom of Hermes Street, the Regent Street of Athens, that slopes downhill from the foot of Constitution Square, lies the recognized ‘antique quarter’, popularly known as ‘Shoe Lane’. This narrow, crowded thoroughfare resembles an Eastern bazaar, with its rows of awnings and dark, poky shops, on the thresholds of which sit either dealers and their assistants, or families at work upon some such domestic industry as cobbling. It has often been said that ‘antiques’ are the same all the world over. Those in Athens, however, provide the exception. They bear no resemblance whatever to the familiar harmonies of good taste and eccentricity with which travelled collectors become weary and disgusted in their search for new fields.

The classes of object for sale, though unique, seldom vary. Of Greek remains, which fetch high prices, there are vases, small and large, plain and painted; statuettes in bronze, stone and pot, representing both animals and human beings; and occasionally some work of art of exceptional beauty, that is unwrapped with trembling reverence from an old clothes heap in a darkened corner of the room. Such a treasure was the cup which Michael bought on that particular evening. It was of alabaster and in two pieces, having lain under the sea for two thousand years – of an exquisite proportion, with a colour of cream that has formed on milk and been left to stand and a surface pitted as a skin by smallpox, yet smooth to the touch as worn ivory. Then, more modern, there are the rectangular boxes of old chased silver which can be used for snuff and cigarettes. Many of these are fitted with under-lids,
hinged at the end, covering plain sheets of looking-glass. Such a novelty would make a fortune if manufactured by a Parisian jeweller. Also to be found from time to time are sets of old gilded glass, relics of the Venetian occupation of the Islands – bottles, decanters, tumblers of all designs and sizes, and even hanging lamps made on the eastern model. Athens is the only place in Europe at the present time where such glass comes on the market.

One whole side of the shop will inevitably be occupied with shelves of stuffs and rugs. Most of the former have already been made up into native dresses. Silks, stiff and glittering with metal tissues, woven in patterns of foliage and stripes; velvets, hard and close-spun, of rich dark reds and blues with brilliant lights; embroideries of infinite detail and pains, often, like the ancient art of Rhodes, almost Persian in spirit; materials of every colour and elaboration; gold, silver, red on white, and black on white, old, modern, Victorian, eighteenth century; all are to be found heap upon heap, manufactured into every conceivable shape of coatee, stole and trouser.

But the great feature of the shops is the primitives. Though these are for the most part eighteenth century, the word ‘primitive’ best describes them. For a thousand years the Byzantine tradition throughout the Levant had never faltered. There was none of Guido Reni and Sassa Ferrato to influence the local iconostasis-painter. And until the machine-manufactured olegraph sprouted on the booth of the religious candle-seller, the primitive form of wooden body and dark polished face had remained, since the earliest days of the Eastern Empire, the stereotyped adjunct of religion. The enormous quantity of these paintings that exist is to be accounted for by the iconoclast rule of the Greek Church and the consequent need for an even greater number of representations of the celestial hierarchy in two dimensions, than in the Roman. There is small merit in most of them. Yet with the dull gold, sometimes lettered with Greek inscriptions, of their backgrounds, the red robes of their figures, and their stilted architectural settings,
their decorative qualities are superb. And if purchased with a certain perspicacity, they can always be foisted upon the ignorant as ‘the new primitive in the dining-room’.

Now and then, however, paintings of real spiritual beauty emerge from the dust and gloom. Such was that which we discovered in a newly-opened shop in Shoe Lane. The proprietor knew Michael by reputation, and, being anxious to obtain his custom, was obsequious to an embarrassing degree. His wife beseeched us to coffee; his son in knickerbockers heaped preserved oranges upon us; while his mother, bowed with age, tottered forward bearing glasses of that none too common luxury, drinking-water. Meanwhile the panel was brought out and wiped with a damp rag. There was revealed, fresh as it was painted two hundred years ago, though slightly chipped and cracked, the head and shoulders of a life-size Madonna. Down the midst of a polished oval of grey ebony, stretched her long straight-boned nose, like the visor of a Norman warrior. Beneath it, a tapering hand of the same shade and texture was supporting a Child against a draped robe of subdued scarlet. Behind glowed the thickest of gold backgrounds. Unfortunately the Child was missing; the painting had been discovered in use as the lid of a chest in the island of Chios. The proprietor was intending to return for the purpose of finding the remaining pieces. He thought that they were still there. He would know in a week’s time. Then he and Kyrios Troover would undoubtedly be able to come to some agreement. As a matter of fact David was at that moment planning in his mind the construction of a green bedroom at Highworth, and rather fancied the idea of this Madonna hung against the curtains at the back of the bed – a gilded wooden pavilion of immense elaboration that he had seen in Rome. The idea seemed to me sacrilege.

In more important examples of Byzantine art, Athens is unhappily deficient. Those to whom this strange art appeals, the expression of first the conflict, and then eventually the fusion between East and West, between the geometric philosophy
of the Syrian Monk and the naturalism of the Hellenistic humanist, must make the seven mile journey to Daphni in Attica. From the dome of the monastery church there gazes upon the beholder, with a kind of furrowed agony, the superb mosaic head of Christ Pantokrator, the eyes of which appear to possess a kind of uncanny film, due to their mutilation in the thirteenth century by the lances of the followers of Othon de la Roche, the Lord of Athens, who presented the monastery to the Cistercian Abbey of Bellevaux in Burgundy. But in Athens, when the modern town and its square blocks were planned, almost everything Byzantine was destroyed. There remains, however, the charming little church known as the Gorgoepekoos, that stands not far from the cathedral. This building, which is in the form of a Greek cross surmounted by a tiny, tiled dome, scarcely four yards in diameter, is ornamented with irregular panels in bas-relief, which are executed in the flat, delicate style of embroidery, and display as many pagan as Christian symbols. But of Byzantine architecture, despite the claims of Rome and Palermo, there is nothing of outstanding merit between Ravenna and Constantinople.

The opinion has frequently been expressed by writers and commentators of habitually restrained enthusiasms that the most beautiful Byzantine mosaic in existence must be the most beautiful object in the world. It is impossible, without having visited Ravenna, to conceive even a tithe of the feelings that can have inspired such a sentiment.

To a person susceptible to emotion, when merely a vision of the past is conjured up before his eyes, Ravenna, as a place, is perhaps more overwhelming than anywhere in Europe. To the artist it is equally supreme. Language has scarcely been evolved to portray the interior of such a building as the mausoleum of the Empress Galla Placidia. This small, cruciform building was built in the middle of the fifth century as a burial place for the empress who was the mother of Valentinian III, and had died at Ravenna in AD 450. On the floor stands her massive and typically Roman sarcophagus; flanking it, those of two
of her relatives. The narrow windows, one on each wall, are paned with thin sheets of vivid, glowing alabaster. Through this the sun, or simply the light of day, filtered into buttered gold, strikes the million planes of the sapphire mosaic of the dome and vaults, where flickers faintly an occasional figure etched in deadened, lemon gilt. In the words of Mr Dalton, the author of
East Christian Art
: ‘the… interior, with its colouring at once soft and splendid, and the mystical suggestion of its decoration, ranks as one of the most impressive in the world’.

From the purely historical point of view, however, the culminating marvel of Ravenna is the large basilica of S. Apollinare Nuovo, built originally by Theodoric in the first years of the sixth century, as the Arian Church of S. Martin, and redecorated some fifty years later under Justinian, when the building was converted to Catholicism. The present apse dates from the late Renaissance. But on the upper walls, supported by the two long rows of marble pillars, are three tiers of pictorial mosaics that run the whole length of the building. On the southern side there occurs at the western end a fifteen hundred year old mosaic panorama of Ravenna and her once famous fleet, in which is distinctly recognisable the domed octagon of the fifth century baptistry of S. Giovanni in Fonte, which to this day stands just outside the church, not a stone or tile disturbed. From this, a long row of male saints, with black monograms embroidered on their white robes, leads to a portrait of Our Lord. On the opposite side, starting from a picture of Theodoric’s palace at Classis, stretches a corresponding row of female saints, headed by the Magi in ringed trousers and Phrygian caps, and culminating in a Nativity. The whole is carried out in pale colouring against the sour gold of the mosaic background. Over the door is a contemporary portrait of Justinian; in other places faces of Arian saints have been erased. Fifteen hundred years… The organ was playing behind the altar. Suddenly by some mechanical contrivance, it swelled out from the western end of the building in addition. And then, as if by magic, the
far-off bells of the attendant campanile came chiming and pealing through the silver air, as though in harmony. The Magi pranced and proffered, as they had pranced and proffered since Theodoric the Goth had fashioned them to glorify the Indian summer of the disintegrating Empire; the male saints gazed across at the female saints; the female saints returned the stare of fifteen centuries. And up above in an unobtrusive corner of the green, squared ceiling, there appeared, in place of the expected boss, a date, in letters of gold: the twelfth of February, 1916; where an Austrian bomb, to the delectation of the saints, had continued history still. Ravenna, once the seaport capital of the Western world, now but a drowsy landlocked
market-town
among the flats, yesterday the haunt of Byron and the refuge of Garibaldi, today has not been forgotten.