William James Stillman

“ Like every other really great artist, he had a very just appreciation of the work of other men, and his criticisms were, me judice, very sound and broad from the point of view of art; the only painter of any note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he could not tolerate. But he had a higher opinion of his own natural abilities than of his actual achievement,—his self-appreciation was not the conceit of a man who understood only what he himself did, but a full consciousness of what at his best he would be capable of doing and hoped to do before he died. ”

“ I found the island materially as I had left it, but almost deserted and quite desolate, and the local administration in the hands of the spies and the traitors of the insurrection; all the brave men in exile and the gloom of death over everything; villages still unrebuilt, and the only sign of activity the building in the most accessible districts of military roads and blockhouses. As my successor delayed, I, to pass the time, went to Omalos to carry out the ancient plan which could no longer be postponed if it was to be carried out, for I never intended to see Crete again. ”

“ Women went and came with their water-pitchers on their heads, moving in serene tranquillity, without quickening a step, and the life of the place seemed absolutely undisturbed by the danger, as if shells did not burst. Now and then one of the houses caught fire and varied the show; the Turkish return fire was mainly directed at the batteries where the great Russian guns were posted, and the Montenegrins used to sit on the rocks around, utterly heedless of the Turkish fire, despising cover. ”

“ I had long seen that Crete could not be governed from Athens without a course of such preparation as the Ionian Islands had had; they would never submit to prefects from continental Greece; they felt themselves, as they really are, a superior race, superior in intelligence and in courage; but the men from Athens had persuaded them that the only alternative to submission to the Sultan was annexation, and, meanwhile, the ships of Europe were carrying their families to Greece, where they were to remain practically as hostages for the fulfillment of the Greek plans. ”

“ I have seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do. He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the Albanian raids, the agricultural and much other work fell necessarily to the women. ”

“ It only wanted for the diversity of my career that I should have served a term as a demi-official of the Turkish government I had served to undermine. For A'ali Pasha I retain the respect due to the most remarkable ability, honesty, and patriotism combined I have ever known in a man in his position, a most difficult one, surrounded by corruption, venality, and treason as probably the ruler of no other state has been in our day. ”

“ My profound conviction is that until a great moral reform shall break out and awaken the ruling classes, and especially the Church, to the recognition of the necessity of a vital, growing morality to the health of a state, there will be no new Italy. The idle dreamers who hope to cure the commonweal by revolution and the establishment of a republic will find, if their dream come true, that to a state demoralized in its great masses, more liberty can only mean quicker ruin. ”

“ The real cause of failure was in the general indifference to all preparation, in which the government was supported by the nation. The overweening confidence in themselves, which was so great as to permit them to believe that without any organization or discipline they were more than a match for the Turkish army, has always been their fatal weakness. One of the leaders of the war party said to me a little later, "The Greeks are so clever that they do not need to be trained; they can fight without it well enough to beat the Turks." ”

“ Climbing the heights which make a rim like the wall of a crater round the plain of Niksich, I reached a table-land (planina) which rolls away to the frontier. I made my first halt at the monastery of Zupa, situated in a lovely valley where the fertility of the land supports a considerable population, and where the Russians had established a hospital. Nothing could exceed the kindness and humanity of those Russian surgeons. ”

“ Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic world—rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary. ”

“ A thought that comes up very often while one deals with the Greek in Hellenic lands, is the wonder at the tenacity of the religion of the Greek, surviving the hostility not only of the Turk, but of his fellow Christian of the rival creed. No other nation has ever endured the hostile pressure on its religious fidelity which the Greeks have had to submit to since the fall of Constantinople. ”

“ And yet I have always found the Orthodox Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. ”

“ For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day has its seat at the Vatican, and whose aim and end are the absolute antagonism of all pure religion, I have no respect, and only the feeling due to unmitigated evil. It is a deadly political malady, malefic in proportion to its influence on the people; and, I fear, until Italy is freed from it, no progress or healthy political life or morality is possible. ”

“ I have seen a man, in the midst of a hot interchange of rifle bullets between the Turkish trenches and our own, the trenches occupying the crests of two parallel ranges of low hills, go around outside the works and climb with the greatest deliberation up the hillside, exposed to the Turkish fire, and back over the breastwork into our trenches, all the time under a hail of rifle bullets. ”

“ X. or Y. is an immoral man, but in that he is not in the least discredited by well-known immoralities which would banish a man from public life in England or America, and compared with which those with which Crispi was charged were trivial.
One cannot pronounce the same judgment on Greece and Italy. The decay in Greece is economic and civic, poverty of resource and resources on one side, and on the other invincible insubordination, refusal in the individual to submit to discipline or sacrifice, the conceit of a dead and forgotten superiority which makes progress or docility impossible. ”

“ The land is an immense upland, rolling slightly, and the finest grass land I ever saw; it is an immense prairie, with the horizon unbroken, except by the picturesque peak of Dormitor at the north, the summit peak of the mountains of upper Herzegovina, and the centre of the glacial system of the lands between the Adriatic and the great Rascian valley which divides Servia and the lower Danube from Montenegro. ”

“ The Orthodox Church is national, lives with and for the people, has no political ambitions, and cannot endanger the state.
In Italy the danger is other. The Roman Church has long ceased to be a distinctly religious institution; it has become a great human machine organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and formalities, but now employed in the conquest of political influence, a kingdom absolutely of this world. It is as much a foreign body in Italy (or France) as if it were the Russian Church ”

“ The convent is on a site of singular beauty and salubrity, on a fertile plateau several hundred feet above the valley of the Zeta, at the foot of a precipice, in the face of which is a cave enlarged into a chapel, where lies the body of St. Basil, a Herzegovinian bishop of the early days of the Turkish conquest, who did his Christian duty by the scattered Orthodox Christians in Herzegovina and Montenegro, visiting stealthily and at the constant risk of his life the little groups of the faithful over a territory vast for the supervision of one man. ”

“ To him, art was the dominant interest of existence, not only of his own, but of existence per se, and he tolerated nothing that sacrificed it to material or purely intellectual subjects. I remember his indignation at the death of Mrs. Wells, the wife of the Royal Academician, herself a talented painter, who died in childbed, "a great artist sacrificed to bringing more kids into the world, as if there were not other women just fit for that!" ”

“ The Chamber is a legislative anarchy from which a few honest and patriotic men occasionally emerge as ministers through a chance combination, to disappear again with the first tumult, and the influence of the chief of the state was never such as to guide it out of the chaos. King Humbert, one of the truest gentlemen and most courteous sovereigns that ever sat on the throne of any country, never made an effort to defend the prerogatives of the crown, and accepted with the same bonhomie every ministerial combination proposed to him, whether it comprised dangerous elements or not. ”

“ He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. ”

“ It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of Gladstone's calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to a certain extent. He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the other in action. ”

“ The kalogeros in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, "Why! he is not even a Christian!" but was none the less cordial afterward—he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church. ”

“ All the world knows that, with the exception of two or three dailies, the Italian papers are the organs of purely personal interests, ambitions, and opinions,—not even of parties, which do not exist except in the form of fossil fragments; and when a journal emits an opinion or formulates a policy, everybody knows that it is the opinion or policy of the man who has a dominant or entire control of its columns. Crispi had his own journal, "La Riforma," which frankly and entirely expressed his views, and he paid no attention to the others. ”

“ The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery. ”

“ The Albanians are quick, ingenious, and industrious, and are the best workmen in the finer industrial arts of the Balkans, gold and silver workers of remarkable skill, dividing the blacksmithing with the gypsy, but the best and indeed the only armorers of that world. We had a number of them in the camp at Niksich, refugees from the tribes on our frontier, and I found them most interesting companions, generally speaking Italian and Serb as well as their own dialects. Their conservatism is something almost inexplicable. ”

“ The horses could not graze, and the women who came with their husbands' rations could not reach us without passing within gunshot of the outlying trenches of the Turks, and I have seen a file of them come in, each with a huge loaf of bread on her head, and the bullets from the trenches flying around them, but not one hastening her step or paying the least attention to the danger. This is the habit of the Montenegrin woman, who would consider herself disgraced by a display of fear, no matter what the danger. ”