[British Critic, vol. 25, April 1839.]
We never fell in with a writer who showed such a horror of the inconveniences of foreign travel, yet who with his eyes open had submitted himself to such voluntary discomfort as Mr. Elliott. He had to absent himself from England from ill health; and he is not content even with Ovid’s exile in Pontus; but after voyaging down the Ister amid rocks and falls, he betakes himself to Scythia, shivers with cold, sickens of hunger, and cloys of vermin in Bessarabia, crosses to Crim Tahtary and thence goes to Constantinople to meet the plague, which is there raging; then he coasts along the bays and promontories and amid the pirates of Asia Minor down to Beyroot in Syria, and thence performs a land pilgrimage to Jerusalem, when he falls ill of a fever, and the work closes. Such is the termination, we are sorry to say, of the wanderings which indisposition forced upon our author, a termination as contrary to the rules of the Epopée, as to any but the Homœopathic system of physicking.
There is a story of an Englishman, who, when told of the miseries of foreign travel, said that he was not particular, for so that he had a knife and fork and a good beefsteak for dinner of a day, he could with good heart dispense with every thing else. Mr. Elliott has no such gross dreams floating before him; yet he is not the less possessed with a vision of ideal comfortableness, and is the victim of very definite imaginations, which arc never gratified. He is a scholar and an accomplished man; but above all he is a refined English gentleman, and he seeks to be comfortable and English with so strong a yearning, that he woos comfort, “otium divos rogat,” in a steam vessel on the Danube, in a Moldavian hut, in a lazaret in Bessarabia, on the steppes of Tahtary, on the inhospitable Euxine, in the ruins of the Seven Churches, and amid the desolateness of Syria and Palestine.
It is this phenomenon, the impression of which is carried off by the reader of these volumes. They do not disclose nearly so much about the countries they advertise, as about Mr. Elliott himself; or at least their principal charm lies in the relation existing between the traveller and his adventures, in his exquisite appreciation of the worth of every thing of English manufacture, whether English comfort, or English Ultra-Protestantism, and his consequent annoyance, dejection, or contempt when he meets with things and persons moulded upon a different standard.
He began his voluntary pains in a steam vessel on the Danube in the autumn of 1835; and the first shock which his feelings received arose from the straitened dimensions of its cabin, which was the occasion of some of his female fellow passengers undressing in his presence. Now he certainly mentions breaches of decorum on the part of passengers of his own sex, which might have been avoided, but we do think him somewhat too hard on these unhappy women. The chief part of their offence in Mr. Elliott’s judgment is their not being conscious they were committing any; and yet when he gets to Constantinople, in spite of his own sensitive refinement, he cannot enter a whit the better into the feelings of the Turkish women, who in turn accuse English women of forwardness in making a display of themselves in public at all. He says—
“When she [a Turkish female] appears abroad, she is so wrapped up as to conceal her face, any exposure of which, however partial, is regarded as a violation of delicacy. A Frank lady informed us that one day, in the street, her arm was rudely seized, and separated from that of a gentleman who escorted her, by a Moslimah who felt her sex dishonoured by such familiarity; and we heard from another that, only three years ago, a green veil was pulled off her head by a Turkish female, enraged at seeing the sacred colour defiled by contact with an infidel so indelicate as to exhibit her face.”—vol. i. p. 442.
Mr. Elliott’s notions then of decorum move on a precise and fantastical line; yet from the following remarks on Turkish customs, which he gives from a modern writer, one would think that he had imbibed something of a more philosophical spirit.
“The abhorrence of the hat is well known; but the uncovering of the head, which with us is an expression of respect, is by them considered disrespectful and indecent. A quaker will give no offence by keeping on his hat in a mosque, if his shoes were left at the threshold, The Turks turn in their toes; they mount on the right side of the horse; they follow their guests into a room and precede them on leaving it; the left hand is the place of honour; they do the honours of the table by serving themselves first; they take the wall and walk, hastily in sign of respect; they beckon by throwing back the hand, instead of drawing it towards them; they cut the hair from the head, and remove it from the body, but leave it on the chin; they sleep in their clothes; they look upon beheading as a more disgraceful punishment than strangling; they deem our close and short dresses indecent, and our shaven chins a mark of effeminacy or servitude; they resent an inquiry after their wives as an insult; they eschew pork as an abomination; they regard dancing as a theatrical performance only to be practised by slaves; lastly, their mourning habit is white, their sacred color is green, and their holy day is Friday.”—vol. i. pp. 444, 445.