Eastern Life

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It is nearly thirty years since I entered by travel upon my study of »Eastern Life, Present and Past«; yet, in preparing for the issue of a new Edition of the book in which I there recorded my impressions and thoughts, there has not been more than a moment's pause upon the question how to present it after so considerable a lapse of time. The practice of many authors, poets, essayists, philosophers, and, among the rest, travellers, – of altering passages of their works to make them accord with the latest views or impressions of the writer's, must operate either as an example or a warning in such a case as the present. Which should it be? – a warning or an example, – in case of such a lapse of years as must have wrought more or less change in the mind of the writer, and in the aspect of the objects described?

I must say that this is a matter on which I have never entertained any serious doubt. Even in the most questionable case of all that of works of the Imagination, and of productions of the great Masters of Expression, I have always regretted, as no doubt most readers have, the changes too often introduced by poets and essayists in the latest edition of their works, upon the assumption that experience and practice must have improved them, – giving them something more and different to say, and power to say it better.

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There is something very interesting in meeting with a fellow-feeling in ancient travellers so strong as may be found in the following passage from Abdallatif with that of some modern Egyptian voyagers. The passage is almost the same as some entries in my journal, made when I had never heard of the Bagdad physician. He speaks of Memphis, as seen in his day, and as, alas! one fears it will be seen no more. »Notwithstanding the immense extent of this city, and its high antiquity: notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of the different governments under which it has passed: notwithstanding the efforts that various nations have made to destroy it in obliterating the minutest traces, effacing its smallest remains, carrying off the materials, even to the very stones of which it was constructed; laying waste its edifices, mutilating the figures which adorned them; and notwithstanding all that four thousand years and more have been able to add to such causes of destruction, these ruins yet offer to the eye of the spectator such a combination of wonders as confounds his understanding, and as the most eloquent man would vainly attempt to describe. The longer he contemplates, the more admiration he feels: and each returning glance at these ruins causes new ecstasy. Scarcely has the spectacle suggested one idea to the mind of the spectator, when it overpowers it by a greater; and when he thinks he has obtained a perfect knowledge of what is before him, he presently learns that his conceptions are still far below the truth.«14 A yet older traveller, Herodotus, says the same thing more briefly. »I shall enlarge upon what concerns Egypt, because it contains more wonders than any other country; and because there is no other country where we may see so many works which are admirable, and beyond all expression.«15

It is not the vastness of the buildings which strikes one first at El-Uksur, vast as they are; it is the marvel of the sculptures with which they are covered – so old, so spirited, and so multitudinous. It is Homer, alive before one's eyes. And what a thought it is, to one standing here, how long this very sculpture has been an image and a thought to great minds placed one far behind another in the stages of human history! Herodotus, who here seems a modern brother-traveller, stood on this spot, and remembered the Iliad as we were now remembering it. He spoke of Homer, his predecessor by four hundred years, as we speak of those who lived in the crusading times. And Homer told of wars which were the same old romance to the people of his time as the Crusades are to us. And at the time of these wars, this Thebes was a city of a thousand years; and these battle-pictures now before our eyes were antiquities, as our cathedrals are to us. Here we were standing before one of the »hundred gates« through which Homer says the Theban warriors passed in and out; and on the flanks of this gateway were sculptured the achievements of the ancestors of these warriors. There are the men and horses and chariots, as if in full career – as full of life as if painted, and painted in a modern time! The stones of the edifice are parting in many places; and these battle-figures extend over the cracks, almost uninjured by the decay. These graven epics will last some time longer, though the stone records will give way before the paper.

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