Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 - G. F. Abbott - Страница 10

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To a man who had passed the better part of his life in the elegant cities of Italy—cities like Florence, famous for its neat streets and palaces of sculptured stone—Constantinople assuredly was no paradise. Its streets were narrow, crooked, and dirty. The houses, built of timber and sun-dried brick, soon fell into decay. Nor was there the least attempt to make up in style what these ephemeral habitations wanted in solidity. In the whole of the Ottoman capital you would not have found one stately house. Western visitors, impressed by this phenomenon, endeavoured to account for it, each according to his lights. Some saw in it a manifestation of Turkish other-worldliness; making the Turk say to himself: “’Tis a sign of a proud, lofty and aspiring mind, to covet sumptuous houses, as if so frail a creature as man did promise a kind of immortality and an everlasting habitation to himself in this life, when alas! we are but as pilgrims here. Therefore we ought to use our dwellings as travellers do their inns, wherein if they are secured from thieves, from cold, from heat, and from rain, they seek not for any other conveniences.”[42] But this pretty theory was refuted by the fact that not only the Turks, but the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians manifested the same studious avoidance of any approach to architectural display. The true explanation was much more prosaic: a fine dwelling would have been a proof of wealth, and wealth, in a country where all men were slaves except one, was a dangerous thing. A trumped-up charge, on the sworn testimony of two incredible witnesses, was enough to bring about the ruin of the man who had the misfortune to be rich. So, while the interior of an Eastern home might teem with all the luxury that vanity could prompt and money procure, outwardly it presented to the onlooker a picture of abject meanness.[43] The picture had its charm; but it was a charm too subtle for ordinary seventeenth-century eyes. Judged by contemporary aesthetic standards, the metropolis of the Ottoman Empire was, as a predecessor of Sir John’s had described it, “a sink of men and sluttishness.”[44] Sir John must have often wondered what his cousin Winchilsea could have meant when in years gone by he had written to him: “This city I hold much better worth seeing then all Italy.”[45]

On the other hand, there were the magnificent relics of Greco-Roman antiquity, brought into strong relief by their paltry surroundings: towers and arches, aqueducts and temples, that had defied the havoc of the ages. For such antiquarian treasures seventeenth-century Europeans had an eye, and they lavished upon the past all the enthusiasm which the Orient of their day failed to evoke in them. There were also the public buildings added by the Turks—superb mosques, vaulted baths, and bazaars resplendent with the fabrics and redolent of the spices of the East. Above all, there was the matchless beauty of the situation—a natural privilege which rendered the capital of the Sultans beyond comparison the most wonderful city on the face of the earth; and of all parts of that capital not the least advantageously situated were the suburbs of Galata and Pera in which the Franks had their residence, separated from Stambul by the harbour of the Golden Horn.

Galata, the business quarter, occupying the lower slopes of a hill, and Pera, where the Embassies stood, the higher, formed an amphitheatre which commanded a panoramic view of the circumjacent seas with all their bays and islands. Down below gleamed the Golden Horn: a scene of ceaseless animation: merchant ships of all nations riding at anchor; light caïcks flitting to and fro with the grace and the swiftness of swallows; enormous, heavily gilded galleys sailing in and out, some bound north for the Black Sea, others south for the Aegean. From behind this ever-moving panorama, the city of Stambul surged up in all its majesty; a sierra of seven hills broken by the massive domes and slender minarets of innumerable mosques, it glittered in the sunlight and moonlight of the East like a jewel in a silver setting. The most precious gem in this regal jewel was the Grand Signor’s Seraglio—a gorgeous assemblage of palaces, mosques, baths, and kiosks scattered amidst gardens and groves. It covered a walled space four miles in circumference, with the Golden Horn on one side, the Sea of Marmara on the other, while round the third side, blue and limpid as the sky itself, swept the rapid stream of the Bosphorus. Across the Bosphorus, on the coast of Asia, rose the bold promontory of Scutari, its slopes encrusted with kiosks and grottos, thickets and hanging gardens, its summit crowned with the domes and minarets of a stately mosque. And close by, in striking contrast, were seen the dark cypress-groves of Scutari—a procession of mourners watching over a city of the dead. In these congenially solemn groves the Turks loved to sleep their last sleep, permitting the infidels to plant their cemeteries with other trees, but reserving the cypress jealously to themselves. Hither, to the soil of Asia, whence he had come, the Turk loved to return at the last, as if he considered himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe, as if he felt that here alone his remains would not be disturbed by the revengeful Giaour, when the day of reckoning dawned.

Amidst these exotic scenes, the witchery of which no artist has yet found means to represent on canvas, our countrymen dwelt in spacious and commodious, if unpretentious, houses, with many servants and slaves to minister to their wants. His rank naturally imposed upon the Ambassador proportionate magnificence, and before leaving England he had laid out no less than £2500 on clothes and plate: he knew that his foreign colleagues tried to outshine each other, and he was resolved not to be eclipsed by any of them.[46] The merchants also, though free from such onerous obligations, lived on a scale which at the present day would be pronounced extravagant. Every self-respecting factor kept horses, dogs, and hawks; dressed, drank, gambled—led in the East the existence his contemporaries led at home: we are dealing with English gentlemen of the Restoration, a period when the excessive austerity of the Puritan regime had yielded to a reaction of debauchery.[47] Only in the East the opportunities for self-indulgence were more ample.

No part of the globe has been so liberally blessed with the things that enter into the mouth as the Levant. Western residents and travellers grew ecstatic at the abundance of good cheer they found in Turkey and its amazing cheapness. For a halfpenny it was possible to buy bread enough for three meals; for little more than a halfpenny a robust man might get as much mutton as he could consume; a pheasant could be had for five pence, and a brace of partridges for nine farthings.[48] The soil there yields its fruits and the sea its fish in equal profusion and variety; and a temperate climate imparts to everything an exquisite flavour. Not less remarkable than the abundance of food was the multiplicity of forms under which it made its appearance on the table. Greek, Turkish, and Italian Masters had combined for centuries to bring the gentle Art of Levantine cooking to a height of perfection that only the Archimageirus of Zeus could have excelled. It is not hard to understand the sentiments of mingled pleasure and mystification with which these succulent dishes were approached by people fresh from a land where a sirloin of beef or a venison pasty represented the utmost achievements of the kitchen, and where every meal was haunted by the unsalted and unsanctified presence of the tedious boiled potato. Turkey was, indeed, a veritable Academy for any Englishman who chose to devote himself seriously and single-mindedly to the cultivation of his stomach.

As for drink—a mighty question!—at home few Englishmen could afford to intoxicate themselves and their guests properly with anything less coarse than beer; in the Levant the choicest wines were common beverages; and those Franks whose palates craved greater variety supplemented their cellars with the products of the West. Ambassadors were even privileged to import 7000 measures of wine a year duty-free. Sir John Finch, who loved the wines of Italy dearly, but could not consume in his own household more than 2000 measures, was thus able, by selling the surplus, to have his annual supply for nothing.[49]

Things being so, Britons, on the whole, found life in Turkey tolerable enough, and in a place like Constantinople well worth living. To be sure, there were frequent earthquakes and fires, which always caused inconvenience, often grave trouble, sometimes severe suffering. But the most vexatious affliction of all—Turkish oppression—was least felt at Pera. In that suburb Europeans tasted a snatch of liberty not to be found elsewhere throughout the Ottoman Empire, except at Smyrna. There hats and wigs might show themselves abroad with little fear of being struck off the wearer’s head. In each other’s houses the merchants could indulge their sociable proclivities without let or hindrance. Those among them who had more room than they knew what to do with harboured paying guests, and every now and again there arrived from England a transient visitor whom the residents entertained with hospitable prodigality; for the English in the Levant had caught all the geniality of the Levantine climate, and prided themselves on nothing more than on their warmth towards strangers.

When the summer heats and the Plague, which visited every Turkish town with devastating regularity, made Pera unendurable, the English “Nation” resorted to Belgrade—a well-wooded and well-watered, peaceful little village not more than ten miles distant, open to the fresh and wholesome breezes of the Black Sea. Here, in the company of other Franks, they could dine and dance on the grass near the rivulets and fountains as freely as in any country-place in Europe. Here the ladies also, who at Constantinople were obliged to efface themselves, more or less, in conformity to Oriental notions of decorum, joined in the amusements of the men. All this served to alleviate the pains of exile for ordinary Britons.

But alas! the best of these sources of happiness—the happiness that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse—was sealed to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern satraps—attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes, attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common run of his countrymen—that he stood in the scale of creation as far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects. This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was; and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant.

Fortunate in this respect also, Sir John Finch had under his own roof all the society he needed. It consisted of one person—Sir Thomas Baines, another Doctor of Medicine, some years his senior. Finch had made Baines’s acquaintance at Christ’s College, and from that moment the two had become inseparable. Together at Cambridge, they went together to Padua, where they read the same books and took the same degrees. When Finch returned to England in 1661, he saw to it that Baines shared his good fortune. Both were elected Fellows of the College of Physicians of London on the same day, and together they were made Doctors of Medicine at Cambridge. Finch’s devotion knew no bounds. When he was appointed Minister at Florence, he got his friend appointed physician to the Legation, interested all his relatives in him, and, through the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Conway, procured him the honour of Knighthood in 1672. After living with Finch in Italy and England, Baines followed him to Turkey in the character of a comrade and confidant.

His life-long attachment to this College chum is the one romantic episode in Sir John Finch’s history. Without wife and children, he had concentrated all his unused affections on this friend for whom he entertained an admiration little short of idolatry, to whom he communicated all his thoughts, and whose advice he sought in all his difficulties. At Constantinople it soon became a current jest that there were two Excellencies, and the merchants humorously distinguished between them, by referring to the one as the Ambassador, and to the other as the Knight or the Chevalier.[50] It must be owned that the sight of that eternal pair of middle-aged physicians turned diplomats, each wrapped up in the other and each sufficient unto the other, had its comic as well as its romantic side. They presented to our ribald factors an object lesson in what the French call égoïsme à deux—natural only in the case of married couples, especially if they have not been married long.

Truly, it was, in Sir John’s own words, “a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls”—suave et irruptum animorum connubium; and, like all unions of the kind, it owed its strength to a happy meeting of opposites. If we may judge from the correspondence of the pair, their minds belonged to widely different types. The letters of the younger man are, on the whole, simple, straightforward, and spontaneous; the writer every now and again proves himself capable of a picturesque phrase, of a pithy statement, of a sound, if not very profound, observation. On the other hand, the elder man’s ponderous and pedantic epistles are unreadable, often unintelligible; his attempts at pleasantry painful; his whole style that of a pompous pedagogue. Of the talents which Sir John attributed to him no trace is visible in these dissertations. It is impossible to find in any of them a single remark on philosophy, religion, or society which is not dreary commonplace. And the same thing applies to the records of his conversation: they reek of stale school-learning. There can be no doubt that Finch, though no dazzling genius, had the finer intellect of the two. But intellect is not everything. As the portraits of the two friends stand confronting each other, Finch’s sensitive face with its weak mouth and melancholy eyes contrasts very suggestively with Baines’s stronger and coarser countenance: look at those lips still shaped in a firm, superior, benignant smile—the smile of one sure of his own wisdom and of his power of guiding weaker mortals! It is easy to guess at a glance to whom, in this “marriage of souls,” belonged the masculine and to whom the feminine part.

SIR THOMAS BAINES. From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.

To face p. 42.

Further, Finch’s face reveals vanity, and Baines’s letters a turn for flattery—gross and inflated beyond even a seventeenth-century measure. Thomas, clearly, had established over John an ascendancy by accustoming him to lean upon his strength and to feed upon his praises. There is also evidence to show that Thomas was not the man to relax his hold: to surrender or share a domination which interest and sentiment alike made precious to him. In 1661 Finch met in Warwickshire a young lady who had the good fortune to please him. The moment Baines got wind of this matrimonial project, he set vigorously to work to defeat it. He used many arguments of a prudential nature, but the one that clinched the matter was this: Suppose you have children, then you die, and she marries again, how can you be sure that she will not dispose of her estate to her second husband and his progeny?[51] The logic of Thomas triumphed over what John called his love, and he never again caused his friend any uneasiness upon that score. Thenceforward his whole life was annexed and welded to the life of Baines in a degree which, perhaps, has no counterpart in authentic history. As to Baines, he does not seem to have ever loved anybody except Finch and himself.

Needless to say, Sir Thomas did his best to solace Sir John for the loneliness which is the penalty of greatness. That he was a cheerful companion it would be absurd to imagine: he was just as cheerful as could be expected from one who often lay, as he himself tells us, “under the torment of gout and stone both in bladder and rheyns”[52]—common distempers of the times. Not that Finch enjoyed wild spirits either. Both were of a studious and sedentary disposition, and their long residence in Italy had confirmed their constitutional languor: so much so that their friends in England had found the ways of these “Italians,” as they nicknamed them, a little hard to understand. As a consequence, they both indulged rather freely in exercises of a theologico-philosophical character and in the pleasures of the table. For the rest, their recreations appear to have been of a strictly conventual innocence. Let us intrude for an instant upon their domestic privacy.

It is the beginning of summer, 1674, and Sir Thomas is seated at his escritoire, writing to Lord Conway. After enumerating “my Lord Ambassadour’s” multitudinous achievements, he descends to matters of a less exalted and more pleasing nature. His very style loses much of its rhetorical affectation as he writes:

“As to the House in itself, it affords no great aspect to the eye without, but truly it is very convenient within, and I think it gives great content to my Lord, as I am sure it does to me. We both taking a great delight to set in our chairs and see the birds in the court lodge upon the cypress tree with as much alacrity and security as the malefactors fly into a church in Italy or a publick Minister’s house, upon the foresight of which my Lord from his first coming gave order to all his servants not only [not] to shoot a gun at them, but not to throw a stone: insomuch that at this time we have little wrens which begin to learn to fly first from bough to bough, then from tree to tree, then from tree to the top of the house and so back again, and all under safe protection.”[53]

It is a vividly realised picture, sympathetically painted. We see, across the dead years, that long since vanished courtyard at Pera, with its tall bird-haunted cypress tree—and on the open gallery above, behind its wood railing, two clean-shaven, middle-aged English bachelors in full-bottomed wigs, seated side by side, watching the young wrens try their wings; while around them lay the splendour and the havoc of the East: a world in which semi-tones existed not—in which the dominant note was exaggeration—where life was a singular, often a sinister, mixture of brilliant light and deep gloom, and reality partook alternately of the enchantments of a dream and the horrors of a nightmare.