From the Elephant's Back (14 page)

Trelawny has recorded Shelley's
[3]
emotions on being taken aboard a dirty Greek caïque at Leghorn. “As you are writing a poem
Hellas
, about the modern Greeks,” said Trelawny, not without a certain sly humour,

would it not be as well to take a look at them? I hear their shrill nasal voices and should like to know if you can trace in the language or lineaments of these Greeks of the 19th century A.D. the faintest resemblance to the lofty and sublime spirits who lived in the fourth century B.C. An English merchant who has dealings with them told me he thought these modern Greeks were if judged by their actions a cross between the Jews and the Gypsies.
[4]

It was a difficult question to put to a Philhellene of Shelley's kind. Yet it was a point well worth trying to clear up. Reluctantly the poet of freedom was dragged aboard the vessel to stand in the midst of her “chattering and irascible crew.…They squatted about the decks in small knots, shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and gambling like savages.” Trelawny watched Shelley's face as the poet stood among them. “Does this realize your idea of Hellenism, Shelley?” he asked at last.
[5]

“No. But it does of Hell,” replied the poet in hollow tones anxious to escape back into fancy and leave the cold facts to take care of themselves. But Trelawny had not yet finished. They visited the captain in his cabin, where a “flaming gaudy daub of a saint” looked down at them in the light of the spirit-lamp which burned before him. The saint was San Spiridione
[6]
—which suggests that the vessel was a caïque of Corfu. Shelley made a few desultory attempts to interest the captain in the Greek revolution. The captain was against the whole idea, he discovered to his horror, because it was interfering with trade. “Come away,” gasped Shelley, at last, dragging his burly companion by the arm, “there is not a drop of the old Hellenic blood here. These are not the men to rekindle the ancient Greek fire; their souls are extinguished by traffic and superstition.”
[7]

It is a pity that he did not live to qualify his opinions in the light of the events of 1940.
[8]
Yet in a sense the moral growth and awakening of modern Greece has been due as much to Byron and Shelley as to the help of those powers concerned purely with political considerations of territorial freedom. With their passionate restatement of classical values and their hatred of tyranny they struck a chord in the Greek heart which echoes on even today; a chord which not even political misunderstandings can ever silence. It was Byron, it was Shelley, who morally re-armed the defeated and disunited little nation. And though the part the former played in the War of Independence is not without certain comic opera elements of an unheroic kind (Byron's procrastinations, his uniforms, his irritation with the Greeks for being un-Homeric), the Greeks owe English poets and poetry a great debt. And they are deeply conscious of the fact. To the Greek peasant of today every Englishman is in some sort a great-grandchild of the famous Byron, and he reaps in terms of friendship and hospitality the love and reverence that the poet himself did not live to enjoy. Yet there is no doubt that Byron shared some of Shelley's opinions about the modern Greeks. He shared much of the despondency and gloom which his fellow-poet felt when brought face to face with a jabbering Corfiot ship's crew. It is clear then that both poets had their eyes very firmly bandaged by the classics they had studied. Byron, it is true, knew and loved Greece. He had even troubled to learn Romaic
[9]
during his Athenian stay. “Byron formed his opinion of the inhabitants of this planet from books,” says Trelawny acidly, and goes on to add: “Personally he knew as little about them as if he belonged to some other.”
[10]
The charge is a harsh one but it contains the elements of truth. Yet what distinguishes the writings of Trelawny from those of the two poets is precisely a sense of human values. Trelawny judged human beings according to the terms of a large and very comprehensive experience of men and affairs. He does not whitewash the character or behaviour of the Greeks, yet he is the only one who came to be on terms of intimate friendship with them, and whose record and evaluation of their character rings absolutely true. While he was sensible of the poetic and historic values of the day, he did not diminish the war-like virtues of the Greeks he knew by measuring them against the mythical picture-book Hellene. This perhaps accounts for the soundness of his judgements and the simple honesty with which he records them.

The later Victorians interested themselves in the Klephtic ballads of Greece which so strongly resemble our Scots Border ballads; the anthropological works of Sir James Frazer and Tylor
[11]
stimulated the inquiry into modern Greek folklore so ably conducted by Sir Rennell Rodd and G.F. Abbott
[12]
about the turn of the century. By laying bare the framework of modern Greek superstition, these two scholars succeeded in tracing with accuracy and force the direct connection existing between the customs of ancient and modern Greek. Their laboratory was the peasant tongue, the peasant calendar, the whole complex of contemporary belief in Greece; and in the light of their findings the classical ancestry of much that is modern in Greece became clear. The bandages of prejudice and misconception were withdrawn. The classical scholar began to find himself no longer at sea in modern Greece, but very much at home. His equipment was no longer an obstruction but an aid to his quickened sensibility. He found points of reference everywhere in terms of myth and history and manners; such a rediscovery of Greece added immediately to his pleasure in wine, food, and landscape. The sentimentalist in him, at any rate, rediscovered a historic sanction which could now be applied to retzina, ikons, and State lotteries no less than to ancient Greek sculpture. The range of literary evocation had widened. He began to understand fully how different his Greece—the Greece of today—was from the Greece of Byron and Shelley.

But if the scholar's Philhellenism has modified itself within the last two generations, no less of a change can be found among the writers and travellers who have visited Greece, or written books about it. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek,”
[13]
wonders whether Greek literature is not for us simply “a summer's day imagined in the heart of a northern winter.”
[14]
The question was well worth asking, and to some extent it has been already answered by poets like Mr. Rex Warner
[15]
and Mr. Louis MacNeice,
[16]
who have given us ancient Greek dramas retranslated into English. We have begun to see the Greeks as something more than Homeric silhouettes. Even Homer has changed in the light of new translations by T.E. Lawrence and Mr. E.V. Rieu.
[17]
He has moved closer within the range of common familiarity, closer to the common reader.

It would be a rewarding task to attempt a sketch of modern Greek literature from 1821 in order to try to establish whether there are signs that Greek writing has begun to assume a European, instead of a purely national, validity. No literature, to begin with, has depended upon purely linguistic questions to quite the same extent, and if we mark the emergence of Dionysios Solomos and Calvos
[18]
during the War of Independence as the first birthday of modern Greek poetry, we should not forget how immense their problems were.

The sterility and darkness which lie over the later Byzantine period are a historical commonplace. Four centuries of Turkish rule all but extinguished the Greek spirit, however, and today it seems clear that had it not been for the monk and the bandit the emergence of a new literature might have been delayed perhaps for centuries. It was this unholy alliance that kept the face of the Greek peasants turned towards their ancestors, kept them alive to the responsibilities of their culture. Such literature as there was flowered in the folk-song, while the flavour and ambience of the mother-tongue were preserved in the Church services that the townsman so often heard gabbled out by the illiterate Greek priests.

A Greek poet of the time of Byron was confronted by much the same sort of problem as an early Elizabethan. He was doubtful about the
propriety
of writing in so vulgar a medium as demotic.
[19]
He suffered also from the critic and the literary reactionary, who decried his happiest attempts in the popular idiom and told him he was un-Greek to attempt such works. It was almost as if the pedantries of Gabriel Harvey
[20]
were being re-stated. The popular tongue had yet to win its spurs. Critical taste and conservatism set up barriers around the poet, and it is possible that he would never have conquered them had he not recognized his creature kinship with the border ballads, the lovely clearly woven poetry of the peasant folk, the spells and riddles, the acrostics and marriage songs of the islands and the hills. It is directly from this oral poetic tradition that the poetry of Dionysios Solomos springs.

And still today I'm here on Friday, Saturday.

Sunday I'll say good-bye and go to the wilderness,

To the flocks of the nightingales and the fat shadows,

To lay me down at ease and gather an hour's sleep,

To listen to the nightingale's songs and the birds' plaints:

How they all curse the eagle who carries off their young:

“May you gnaw off your own talons, O eagle your own claws,

For snatching away my mate from out of my arms,

The one that I held in my arms and so sweetly kissed.”

(Macedonian Folk-song)
[21]

The funeral and marriage songs of the peasant had been flowing on for centuries like an underground river, with their rare wealth of symbolism and the spontaneous purity of their poetic form. The poet whose sensibility was not deadened by literary prejudice found in the folk-poetry of the country a stockpot of imagery and symbol upon which to draw at will. The Greek, like the Elizabethan, chose freedom rather than bondage.

Solomos was the first major poet to draw boldly upon this fund of riches; but to its influence he added both the personal accent of a great poet and a flavour of European intellectual sophistication, for beyond the very real and ardent nationalism of his work lies a metaphysical preoccupation with the nature of human values—a preoccupation generally foreign to peasant and pastoral poetic traditions, and which must be admitted as a part of the European heritage. Folk-poetry is not founded upon the struggles of the individual
ego
as the poetry of Solomos is; it expresses the feelings and beliefs of a community. But in Solomos (though what he said represented the common spirit and voice) the relation of the poet to his public has changed. Solomos has become symbolic as an individual; a
personal
expression of the common voice.
[22]

For Solomos, then, the liberation of Greece was something deeper than a romantic fanfaronade; he, a Greek educated largely in Italy (a Greek, moreover, who had to relearn his mother language before he was able to write poetry in it) saw the implications of the whole pattern. He saw that behind the question of territorial freedom for Greece, the question of political balance, lay the whole unexplored question of human freedom itself, the quintessence of the idea of liberation. This was something which embraced the whole area of the individual human soul—a personal and religious question as much as a national one. It is precisely this that distinguishes his voice from that of any other poet before him. His great poem,
The Free Besieged
,
[23]
is set up as solidly as a monument, as clearly as a marker, to indicate the exact point at which Greece became once more part of that European tradition which she herself had nourished from ancient times. Byron could wish for no finer monument to his self-sacrifice than the works of Solomos. The Greek poet, living in Xante, was able to see the clouds of smoke and to feel the ground tremble under the Turkish cannonade as the Turks closed in on the town. In that strange, unfinished poem,
The Woman of Xante
, which was found untitled among his papers long after his death, he describes the scene with all the freshness of an eyewitness. The refugees, who had crowded into Xante, had become public beggars for alms, though they were not schooled to it. But hunger drove them out into the open street, conquering their shame. The poet follows them to the seashore:

1. And I followed the women of Missolonghi, they lay down upon the sand, and I kept behind a hedge and watched.

2. And each one of them put her hand to her breast and took out what she had gathered, and they collected it all in a pile.

3. Then one of them spread out a hand to touch the shore. “My Sisters” she shouted aloud.

4. “Listen and see whether you ever felt such an earthquake as now strikes Missolonghi. Perhaps we are winning, or perhaps the town is falling…who can say?”

5. And inside me I heard a tremendous disturbance, and the spirit of Missolonghi suddenly took possession of me…

6. And I raised my eyes to heaven to pray with all the warmth of my spirit when I saw, lit by a wheel of perpetual sparks, a woman with a lyre in her hand, who hovered in the air above the smoke of battle.

7. I hardly had time to wonder at her robe as black as a hare's blood and at her eyes and so on…when the woman stood still in the smoke and watched.

8. She spread out her fingers upon the lyre and I beard her sing.

i.  Since daybreak I've taken