“It Never Entered into My Head That You Were Going to Annex Any Romaic Specimens to Your Poem”: , , and the Politicization of Greek Language, Literature, and Learning (original) (raw)

Abstract

When university friends Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse traveled together to Ottoman Greece as part of their Grand Tour from 1809 to 1811 (Hobhouse left in July 1810; Byron extended his stay until April 1811), they joined an influx of Britons traveling to, and writing about, the Levantine area. In fact, in the century preceding Byron and Hobhouse's journey to Greece, the country (officially an Ottoman territory until 1832) was in the process of being "rediscovered" by Western travelers. As Bernard Herbert Stern details in The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature 1732-1786, a transition occurred in the eighteenth century wherein Europe's engagement with (primarily Ancient) Greece shifted from a relationship that was exclusively textual to one that included an interest in the material realities of the country, and thus a desire to visit the land. As Stern writes, "[t]he neo-classical attitude toward the antique, with its principles of formalism, moralism, and imitation, is transformed into an attitude equally admiring, but with the different principles of primitivism, symbolism, and individualism. The interest in the antique turns away from books and authority, textual or academic study, to exploration, archaeology, and travel" (4). In England,

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (14)

  1. /Ἐκδικήσωμεν πατρίδος / καθ' ὄνειδος αἰσχρόν" (which Byron translates as "Then manfully despising / The Turkish tyrant's yoke, / Let your country see you rising, / And all her chains are broke") are similar to Childe Harold 2.76: "Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? / By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? / Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? no! / True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, / But not for you will Freedom's altars flame. / Shades of the Helots! triumph o'er your foe! / Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; / Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thine years of shame" (lines 720-8).
  2. François Pouqueville (1770-1838) was a French doctor, writer, and diplomat whose publications about Greece contributed to European Philhellenism. Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople, en Albanie, et dans Plusieurs autres Parties de l'Empire Ottoman was first published in English by Sir Richard Phillips in 1806, with a second translation appear- ing in 1813 by Anne Plumptre. Pouqueville published other works in support of Greek independence, including Voyage de la Grèce (1820- 1822), Histoire de la régénération de la Grèce (1824), and La Grèce (1825). For more on Pouqueville, see Susan Pickford, "Writing with 'manly vigour': Translatorial Agency in Two Early Nineteenth-Century English Translations of François Pouqueville's Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople, et en Albanie," in Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750- 1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender, ed. Alison E. Martin and Susan Pickford (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 197-218.
  3. The author of the piece was likely the Classicist Edward Valentine Blomfield, to whom Byron responds in Note III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. See note 3 in Byron's Letters and Journals: Famous in My Time, ed. Leslie Marchand, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 102. Korais (or Coray) was by the time of this review one of the best-known Greek writers in European literary circles, hav- ing gained a reputation for himself as a great scholar in Paris, where he lived from 1788 until his death in 1833 (Mackridge p. 102). In fact, the Edinburgh Review writer begins his review by acknowledging the fact that the journal's "attention was first directed to this publication, by the celebrity of the reputed translator" (p. 55). See Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  4. After determining that there can be no true intellectual culture without national freedom, the writer's focus shifts from a consideration of Modern Greek literature with respect to Greece's political condition, to a discus- sion of Romaic in relation to classical scholarship (and the ways in which the Modern Greek language can benefit British Classical scholars). This shift becomes Byron's main contention with the Edinburgh Review piece. to assimilate their customs. However, if Greeks became familiar with British (or Western) "customs and manners," they would be tempted to adopt the characteristics of the "superior civilization" as their own.
  5. In 1813, John Galt, who had met Byron and Hobhouse while traveling in Greece, published his travelogue Letters from the Levant (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813). In his travelogue, Galt endorses a com- mercial trade partnership between Britain and Greece and suggests that this is the best means through which Greeks can ameliorate their social and political condition. Galt reports that "[t]he Greeks are well inclined towards the British, and would give them a decided preference over either the French or the Russians" (p. 28). Galt, as well as the Quarterly Review critic, were likely influenced by the work of eighteenth-century political economists like Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) who endorsed a commercial liberalism that linked consum- erism with individual and national prosperity. For more on Montesquieu's and Adam Smith's economic theory, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Andrew Scott Bibby, Montesquieu's Political Economy, (London: Palgrave, 2016);
  6. and Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
  7. Other examples of articles that correlate Greek literature and education with political emancipation include "ART. VIII. A Journey Through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey," The Quarterly Review, Oct 1813 (10.19), pp. 175-203; "ART. XII. Researches in Greece," The Quarterly Review, Jul 1814 (11.22), pp. 458-80; "ART. II. An Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance between the Ancient and Modern Greeks," The Quarterly Review, Jul 1820 (23.46), pp. 325-59; and "Travels into the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly and Macedonia," The Edinburgh Review, Oct 1815 (25.50), pp. 455-85. These articles, influ- enced by Enlightenment theories of language and learning, and by the travelogues of the 1810s, are consistent in their repetition of the argu- ment that Modern Greek improvements in literature and education demonstrate the Greek people's desire for independence.
  8. For more on the Romantic print market, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
  9. See Jane Stabler, "Byron's Digressive Journey," in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775-1884, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 225; and Paul Stock, The Shelley- Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 24.
  10. Though Stock's book focuses predominantly on Shelley and Byron, Hobhouse features periodically throughout the book. As Stock writes in his Introduction: "Throughout the following chapters, I read Percy Shelley's and Byron's works alongside the writings of their 'circle,' a term I use broadly to refer to those people they traveled, corresponded, or met with in a defined period of their careers" (p. 11).
  11. This plan for purifying the Modern Greek was Adamantios Korais's and led to the establishment of Katharevousa as Greece's official language after the Greek War of Independence. For more, see Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  12. Interestingly, Hobhouse considered the Ancient Greeks more Oriental than European: "yet, on the whole, the system of manners belonging to the civilized ancients of the West and East, seems to be nearly the same as that of the modern Orientals, and entirely distinct from that of the Franks and of Christendom" (2.840). In this way, Stock argues, "Hobhouse challenges those thinkers, including Byron, who enshrine Greece at the centre of European tradition" (pp. 29-30). Hobhouse's view of Ancient Greece as Oriental, I argue, reflects his opinion of Modern Greek libera- tion as a process of Europeanizing Greece, rather than of Hellenizing it.
  13. See for example Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron's Eastern Tales (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987);
  14. and Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).