Reminiscences of a student's life

Greece and Russia

All through my London life (fifteen years) I lectured there and in the provinces. Being one of a family of twelve, my fortune was slender, and social life is costly. I regret those lecturing years. I was voluble and had instant success, but it was mentally demoralising and very exhausting. Though I was almost fatally fluent, I could never face a big audience without a sinking in the pit of what is now called the solar plexus. Moreover, I was lecturing on art, a subject for which I had no natural gifts. My reactions to art are, I think, always second-hand; hence, about art, I am docile and open to persuasion. In literature I am absolutely sure of my own tastes, and a whole Bench of Bishops could not alter my convictions. Happily, however, bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology, mythology merged in religion; there I was at home. All through my London life I worked very hard—but, no! I remember that Professor Gilbert Murray once told me that I had never done an hour’s really hard work in my life. I think he forgets that I have learnt the Russian declensions, which is more than he ever did. But I believe he is right. He mostly is. I never work in the sense of attacking a subject against the grain, tooth and nail. The kingdom of heaven from me “suffereth no violence”. The Russian verb “to learn” takes the dative, which seems odd till you find out that it is from the same root as “to get used to”. When you learn you “get yourself used to” a thing. That is worth a whole treatise of pedagogy. And it explained to me my own processes. One reads round a subject, soaks oneself in it, and then one’s personal responsibility is over; something stirs and ferments, swims up into your consciousness, and you know you have to write a book. That may not be “hard work”, but let me tell Professor Murray it is painfully and pleasantly like it in its results; it leaves you spent, washed out, a rag, but an exultant rag.

My London life was happily broken by much going abroad. All my archæology was taught me by Germans. The great Ernst Curtius, of Olympian fame, took me round the museums of Berlin. Heinrich Brunn came to see me in my lodgings at Munich, where I was thriftily living on four marks a day. I remember his first visit—a knock, a huge figure looming in the doorway, a benevolent, bearded, spectacled face, and he presented himself with the words, “Brunn bin Ich”. Dörpfeld was my most honoured master—we always called him “Avtos”. He let me go with him on his Peloponnesos Reise and his Insel Reise. They were marvels of organisation, and the man himself was a miracle. He would hold us spellbound for a six hours’ peripatetic lecture, only broken by an interval of ten minutes to partake of a goat’s-flesh sandwich and etwas frisches Bier. Once I saw, to my sorrow, three Englishmen tailing away after the frisches Bier. I was more grieved than surprised. They were Oxford men—the (then) Provost of Oriel, the Principal of Brasenose and an eminent fellow of Balliol. It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship, as already hinted, is nothing to “write home about”, but compared to those German professors I am a centaur. How it all comes back to me, for only last month, to my great joy, I met the grandson of Ernst Curtius, Professor Robert Ernst Curtius, a worthy descendant.

Greece in those days held many adventures. To one of these I still look back with poignant shame for my own bad manners. We arrived at Vurkano, just as the monastery gates were closing, and were hospitably received. The Hegoumenos led me into supper, placed me by his side, and fed me with titbits from his own plate. The Greek clergy, even the monks who may not marry, are quite simple and friendly to women. After the Roman attitude, it is refreshing to be accepted as a man and a brother—if a weaker one—and not looked at with sour eyes as an incarnate snare. I remember at Tinos I was watching the procession of the miraculous Eikon; the priest carrying the Eikon saw that I was the only West-European woman struggling in a throng of men, and sent a young priest to fetch me to walk by his side. There I could safely watch all that went on, the bowings, the kissings of the Eikon, and the priests’ splendid vestments, the cures. But to return to my Hegoumenos. After supper he said he had a question to ask me. He had heard that rich Englishmen had in their mouths “stranger” (or “guest”) teeth made of gold, and which moved. Was it true? It was. Had I in my mouth by any chance a stranger tooth? I had, I owned, one, but in the best Oriental fashion I deprecated any mention of it. It was but a poor thing, made not of gold, but of an elephant’s tusk. Did I ever take it out? Yes. When? “Oh,” nervously, “only very early in the morning.” After a short sleep—sleep in a Greek monastery is rarely for long—I woke. The Hegoumenos was seated at my bed-head telling his beads and ... watching. Oh, why, why did I not take out that “stranger” tooth? I might so easily have made a good man happy. The Graiæ themselves pointed the way. But I was young, and youth is vain and cruel. He was too polite to press the matter, and withdrew himself, slowly and sadly. In about ten minutes he was back, his face dark with anger. A terrible scandal had arisen in the monastery, its sanctity was outraged; we must leave at once. For one bad moment I feared that the scandal was my wholly unchaperoned state. No such thing. With a Greek the great impropriety for a woman is to travel alone and unprotected. What had happened was this. The friend with whom I was travelling, after a feverish night spent in wrestling with the hosts of Midian, had gone out to get cool, seen a pump in the monastery courtyard, and incontinently proceeded to have a much-needed shower-bath. The news flew like wildfire through the Brotherhood, and the Hegoumenos was summoned to purge the outrage. I ruthlessly sacrificed my kind protector. The “Lord”, I said, was young and ignorant; he knew no Greek letters (a gross libel); he had been born and reared not in Christian England, but in a strange barbarian hyperborean land, where raiment was scanty and Christian modesty unknown. Would His Reverence pardon the young man and teach him better? Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenos sent for the “Lord”, and finding him dumb, pointed to a place about an inch above his wrists, told him that thus far, without danger to his soul, could a Christian man wash himself. The “Lord” was heard to mutter to himself words to the effect that he would “jolly well like to put the Hegoumenos under his own pump”. This I hastily translated into a solemn promise that while life lasted the “Lord”, by the heads of his fathers, would never exceed the limit. The crisis passed. When we left next morning we gave more than the wonted largesse in the hope of atoning for the bath. But the outraged saint was far too fine a Christian and a gentleman to be won by money. The adieus were frigid. We left under a cloud. At parting I gave him my photograph. He placed it below the Eikon of the Virgin and solemnly commended me to her protection against the spiritual dangers to which I was so obviously exposed.

Long after, I visited Mount Athos. Of course, as a woman I could not set foot on the sacred promontory. My friends started off elate in the early morning, to visit the monasteries. Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, I remember, proudly led the way. We mere women were left behind on the yacht disconsolate. They came back in the evening after the usual Pauline adventures in baskets, and with them came some Mount Athos monks to see the ship and the women, and sell rosaries, etc. One of the monks—a Russian, I think, for I could not understand his Greek, gave me a sheet of letter-paper with, for heading, a brightly coloured picture of the Mountain Mother issuing from Mount Athos. He pointed to the picture and then to me, and then to the mountain, as though he would say: Well, we’ve smuggled in one woman anyhow. It was wonderful to find the Great Mother here in her own Thrace, and worshipped still not by women but by her own celibate priests, the Kouretes.

The British Legation, at Athens, kept open house, and in those days the cheery young men who dwelt there made it a pleasant place. It was the proud boast of some of them that they had never been up to the Acropolis, and that they only knew one word of modern Greek and that was sitheróthromos, the Greek for railway station, by means of which they hoped shortly to make their escape. They pretended, of course, that they were frightened to death of me because of my Greek, and that they dare not ask me to dance. They maligned themselves; they feared nothing in the world except that they might have to apply their minds to something sometime. They might have said with Punch’s malingering marine, “Well sir, it’s this way with me. I eats well and I sleeps well, but when I sees a bit o’ work, I’s all of a tremble.”

At Athens I met Samuel Butler. We were in the same hotel; he saw me dining alone and kindly crossed over to ask if he might join me. Of course I was delighted and looked forward to pleasant talks, but, alas! he wanted me only as a safety-valve for his theory on the woman-authorship of the Odyssey, and the buzzing of that crazy bee drowned all rational conversation.

The first time I went to Athens I had the luck to make a small archæological discovery. I was turning over the fragments in the Acropolis Museum, then little more than a lumber-room. In a rubbish pile in the corner, to my great happiness, I lighted on the small stone figure of a bear. The furry hind paw was sticking out and caught my eye. I immediately had her—it was manifestly a she-bear—brought out and honourably placed. She must have been set up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this precinct, year by year, went on the arkteia or bear-service. No well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her bear-service, unless she was, in a word, confirmed to Artemis. In the Lysistrata of Aristophanes the chorus of women chant of the benefits they have received from the state, and the sacred acts they had accomplished before they came to maturity, and say, “I, wearing a saffron robe, was a bear at the Brauronian festival.” Always these well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls must, to the end of their days, have thought reverently of the Great She-Bear. Among the Apaches to-day, we are told, only ill-bred Americans or Europeans who have never had any “raising” would think of speaking of the Bear without his reverential prefix of “Ostin”, meaning “Old One”, the equivalent of the Roman senator.

Crete I visited again and again, and to Crete I owe the impulse to my two most serious books, the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis. Somewhere about the turn of the century there had come to light in the palace of Cnossos a clay sealing which was a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. I shall never forget the moment when Mr. Arthur Evans first showed it me. It seemed too good to be true. It represented the Great Mother standing on her own mountain with her attendant lions, and before her a worshipper in ecstasy. At her side, a shrine with “horns of consecration”. And another sealing read the riddle of the horns. The Minotaur is seated on the royal throne, and the Minotaur is none other than the human King—God wearing the mask of a bull. Here was this ancient ritual of the Mother and the Son which long preceded the worship of the Olympians: here were the true Prolegomena. Then when, some years later, I again visited Crete, I met with the sequel that gave me the impulse to Themis, the Hymn of the Kouretes found in the temple of Diktaean Zeus. Here we have embodied the magical rite of the Mother and the Son, the induction of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father. My third book on Greek religion, the Epilegomena, is, in the main, a résumé of the two first, and an attempt to relate them to our modern religious outlook. I should like to apologise here for the clumsy and pedantic titles Prolegomena and Epilegomena, but they really express the relation of the two books to my central work—Themis.

Copenhagen possesses a small but valuable collection of vases, and I had long planned to go there. I was delighted when a friend offered to take me in his yacht. My childhood having been passed between sea and moor, I have always had a passion for the sea and for sailing; but I am a wretched sailor, and the friends who are kind enough to take me on their yachts have always cause for repentance. The voyage began with disaster. In the North Sea we met bad weather, and the vessel, a yawl of only 20 tons, was in some danger. When she got back to dock at Cowes, they told us it was a wonder we had not all gone to the bottom. The last thing I remember was crawling on deck and seeing above me waves mountain high that seemed as if they must fall and swallow us. Then I suppose I lost consciousness, for I woke—as I thought—in heaven, in utter bliss. Round me were kneeling angels in blue gowns and white caps with streamers. Under stress of weather we had put in at Heligoland, and they had landed me in a boat and, every hand being needed aboard, had left me lying on the shore, and the women of Heligoland crowded to see me. I suppose it was the relief from the heaving sea, but I knew then the extreme of physical rapture after physical anguish. We were weather-bound for a couple of days and then made our way into the Eider Canal, where all was peace. Arguing on philosophy all day long, for my host was a hard thinker as well as a bold and skilful seaman, we drifted through long lines of one-legged storks and into the Baltic, with its fiords and its beech trees, with their branches dipping into the water. The Baltic is a “short” unpleasant sea, but I remember with pride that I recovered sufficiently to steer the yacht into Copenhagen. There I learnt what honesty is. The keeper of the Museum met me the first day, but the second he was engaged. He left me a huge bunch of keys and the freedom of the place. I had the yacht’s boat in the canal at the Museum door and could easily have looted the whole place. But it seems, among the hardy Norsemen, these things simply are not done. Yet in my own England, at the British Museum, when I am at work a member of the staff never leaves me. Ostensibly he is there to help me, but really as policeman. I remember Sir Francis Darwin telling me that in Stockholm he and a Swedish friend were crossing a bridge and they saw a gold watch lying on the pavement. Sir Francis stooped to pick it up and said: “I suppose we must take it to the police.” “Oh no,” said the Swede, “just put it on the parapet, where it will be safe; the man who lost it is sure to come back.” I fancy if you left a gold watch on the parapet of London Bridge it would not wait long for its owner; yet we English are supposed to be an honest people.

To face page 90.