The flute-notes echo

Harold Acton

The Travels of Lord Charlemont in Greece and Turkey, 1749 Edited by W.B. Stanford and E.J. Fino- poulos (Trigraph Limited £13.50) Happily the Society of Dilettanti still flourishes under the aegis of Sir Brins- ley Ford. One of its early members, Lord Charlemont, kept a detailed journal of his travels in Greece and Turkey in 1749 and this has finally been published in an illus- trated volume edited by the late Professor W.B. Stanford and Mr E.J. Finopoulos. Lord Charlemont continued to polish and amend his youthful manuscript for the next 50 years, so it was evidently dear to his heart.

In spite of a tendency to indulge in rhetoric, for he was essentially Irish and a friend of Henry Grattan, 'the Irish De- mosthenes', Charlemont wrote in the suave 18th-century style known as Augus- tan. His Augustan gusto is infectious and refreshing. No tourist brochure could excel his eulogy of the Greek islands he visited, Where 'the air is at all seasons healthful and Pleasant, and spring is extended through the whole year'. Edward Murphy, his scholarly tutor, had encouraged this im- pressionable young aristocrat of ample means to make the most of his talents. Avoiding the 'taverns, stews and gaming sets' of contemporary Dublin, he chartered l'Aimable Vainqueur, a French frigate of 200 tons captured by the British, and had it equipped for a lengthy voyage. Armed With cannon for defence and stocked with histories, books of reference and scientific instruments, as well as a supply of watches, Pistols, silverware and English cloth for distribution among Turkish officials, he

Was accompanied by two congenial fellow- Irishmen, Francis Burton and Alexander Scott. Burton seems to have been a Falstaffian figure incapable of controlling his laughter on solemn occasions: 'laugh he must even at the hazard of his life,' as Charlemont observes in his article 'A Ludicrous Occasion' though he was prone to use the word 'whimsical' for 'ludicrous'.

Sailing from Leghorn in April 1749, l'Airnable Vainqueur crossed the straits of

Messina, and while in Sicily Charlemont Persuaded Richard Dalton, a vagabond artist, to join the party as a substitute for a modern Leica. 'Though his drawings were among the first of their kind,' as the editors remark, 'they are not of the highest, quali- ty.' In fact, their interest is more archaeological than aesthetic.

Before broaching the Greek islands, the party stayed with Sir James Porter, the British Ambassador in Constantinople, another Dubliner, and the Turkish por- tions of the book are the most entertaining. Charlemont was 'pleased and surprised at having found such amazing and much more than Christian politeness among the people whom I had been taught to believe little less than barbarous'. But he was shocked by the unreasonableness and iniquity of Turkish custom where women were con- cerned. 'Degraded from the dignity of their nature, they seem to be considered as little superior to the brute creation and, like them, are set apart, and assigned to the arbitrary use of a lordly master, for whose pleasure and convenience alone they are supposed to be framed.' During an inter- view with a sensible Turk, he asks: 'Do you believe in astrology or the influence of the stars in enabling men to foretell events?' And the Turk answers: 'I do not, but think it a foolish science. For whilst a man pretends to foretell events and to read the heavens he does not know what his own wife is doing.' However, the police were well organised and `no such thing as robbery is ever heard or. His account of a visit to a Turkish bath is extremely comic- al. He endured the violence of the massage in spartan silence, whereas Burton 'roared like a bull, while his executioner heard him unmoved, without either pity or laughter, but continued the operation with a digni- fied gravity that had something perfectly ridiculous in it'.

The article about black and white eunuchs is equally, to adopt his favourite expression, whimsical.

His description of the isles of Greece is little short of ecstatic. Like Mr Lawrence Durrell he was an islomane and he found the islands of the Aegean irresistible; even under the Turkish yoke each had some singular delight to offer. 'Though it be

difficult to make a choice among perfect beauties,' he wrote, he would declare a

preference for Lesbos, in spite of the fact

that 'the women, according to the vulgar phrase, wear the breeches'. He found the

ladies of the island 'haughty' but 'piquant', and regrettably he deleted half a page of remarks on Sappho, who might have left her influence on the matriarchy. At Chios he encountered four Christian slaves among the crew of a Turkish man-of-war, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, and an Englishman,

and never surely were the different charac- ters of their respective countries more clearly distinguished than in the appearance, be- haviour, and converse of these persons . . . the Englishman was a perfect philosopher . . . as it was the peculiar property of every Englishman to love Liberty, he had taken the pains to write to our ambassador at the Porte to procure him his freedom, but that he was not very anxious concerning the success of his application, since he found himself as little unhappy where he now was, as he probably should be elsewhere.

On Naxos, he was entertained by a hospitable French baron who had been a page to Louis XIV and now chose to live as prince in exile, idolised by the local population. And so on from island to island while Dalton sketched the scenery and classical monuments. From Vathy they rode on horseback to Athens, having escaped 'the perils of the road, which, from the frequency of Robberies, is here accounted highly dangerous'.

For an amateur, Charlemont was a very competent scholar, as the editors observe, and the inscriptions he copied are still of value to students. Dalton was the first to copy the remaining bas-reliefs at Bodrum, the ancient Halicarnassos. The resulting publication will be welcomed not only by archaeologists and dilettanti but also by Philhellenes and Turcophiles. In Sir Joshua Reynolds's caricature of Raphael's School of Athens Charlemont is depicted as a flautist. One cart still hear the flute-notes echo in this resuscitated record of his grand Aegean tour.