Text: N. P. Willis (?), Review of Eothen, or Traces of Travel, Weekly Mirror (New York), November 2, 1844, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 52-53

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This book, with a bad title, is wonderfully clever. Weary with Eastern travel, we read it with lively interest from the first page to the last. — There is a great deal that we object to in it. It is not a wise book, nor a learned; indeed the writer tells us at starting that he means to be superficial. It contains much that is hasty, flippant, and ill-digested; and it contains nothing that is useful, scientifical, moral, political, statistical, or geographical. But it has a rarer quality. It is real. The writer tells you what he actually saw and felt.

Doctor Johnson said that the great value of distant travel was, that it took you out of yourself; removed you from the present, and gave you dignity and elevation. Certainly Eothen does not do this; something rather the reverse, indeed. There is more of the Roeseau than the Dr. Johnson in it. We do not mean that the author has the moral code of him of Geneva, and thinks what he feels to be right is right, and what he feels to be wrong is wrong; but that his book is made up of his own impressions, how short soever they have fallen of what the actual fact may be. Chateaubriand wrote a volume about Carthage after a day's visit. The author of Eothen could accomplish no feat of that kind.

His first experience of the east was at Belgrade; whence, with the ordinary routine of Eastern travel, he rode to Constantinople. Then he went over the Troad, expressing beliefs as confidently as if a Clarke, a Pococke, a Chandler, a Chevalier, or a Jacob Bryant had never lived to agitate a learned world. In passing, let us say of these discussions that they never enough admit that principle of poetic truth — of truth to general nature — which embraces and harmonizes so many minor details. Afterwards, by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo, our traveler reached Smyrna, whence he sailed in a brigantine for the coast of Syria, and had the rough but romantic experience of a forty days’ winter cruise with Greek sailors, who seem to retain, in the charming and novel picture he presents of them, much of the childlike adventure, humor, and fear, which checkered the ten years’ voyage of Ulysses. The story-telling propensities of these lively mariners even suggested to our not less lively author a Greek origin for the Arabian Nights. But this is a little hard on the East, and we suspect has no foundation. We never heard of such a notion in all the learning wasted on the subject. Indian, Sanscrit, Persian Syrian and Arabian claimants there have been; but never a Greek. If he has the least pretension of any kind, it can only be as the fragment of an atomic theory. But we hold that Mr. Lane has lately established the Arabian origin of these wonderful compositions.

Before we say more of these ramblings, let us give an example of the writer's manner. Here are touches common to all the East.

“The Moslem quarter of a city is lonely and desolate; you go up and down, and on overshelv-ing and hillocky paths through the narrow lanes, walled in by blank, windowless dwellings; you come out upon an open space strewed with the black ruins that some late fire has left; you pass by a mountain of cast-away things, the rubbish of centuries, and on it you see numbers of big, wolflike dogs, lying torpid under the sun, with limbs outstretched to the full, as if they were dead; storks, or cranes, sitting fearless upon the low roofs, gravely down upon you; the still air that you breathe is loaded with the scent of citron and pomegranate rinds scorched by the sun, or (as you approach the bazaar) with the dry, dead perfume of strange spices. You long for some signs of life, and tread the ground more heavily, as though you would wake the sleepers with the heel of your boot; but the foot falls noiselessly upon the crumbling soil of an eastern city, and silence follows you still. Again and again you meet turbans, and faces of men, hut they have nothing for you — no welcome — no wonder — no wrath — no scorn — they look upon you as we do upon a December's fall of snow — as a seasonable,’ unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, that may have been sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter.” [column 2:]

And so, out of this filth and squalor; perhaps lifeless indifference; perhaps crowded, pushing, jostling rascality; there rise the mosques and domes and minarets which alone connect present and past. We discover in such a book as Eothen the marvellous deadness and degeneracy of the East. Fine romantic looking fellows anxious to cheat you. Dignified figures bent upon plundering you, in Allah's name and with the assistance of his prophet. All of the form and none of the realities of the old time. Vulgar, smoking, drinking pachas, with neither the sense of justice nor of decency. Plenty of names to remind you of your loved Arabian Nights; caliphs, cadis, muftees, sheiks, slaves and eunuchs; but never such a thing as an Haroun al Raschid.

Yet your author is not without his good word for them now and then, and ingeniously accounts for one form of the rascality of a Turkish tradesman. The passage is altogether extremely felicitous.

“The Osmanlees speak well. In countries civilized according to the European plan, the work of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey, this division of labor has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, fora bad specimen may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet, and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees, have a lawyer-like habit of speaking connectedly, and at length. The treaties continually going on in the bazaar for the buying and selling of the merest trifles, are carried on by speechifying, rather than by mere colloquies, and the eternal uncertainty as to the market value of things in constant sale, gives room for endless discussion. The seller is forever demanding a price immensely beyond that for which he sells at last, and so occasions unspeakable disgust to many Englishmen, who cannot see why an honest dealer should ask more for his goods than he will really take: the truth is, however, that an ordinary tradesman of Constantinople has no other way of finding out the fair market value of his property. The difficulty under which he labors is easily shown by comparing the mechanism of the commercial system in Turkey with that of our own country. In England, or in any other great mercantile country, the bulk of the things which are bought and sold, goes through the hands of a wholesale dealer, and it is he who higgles, and bargains with an entire nation of purchasers, by entering into treaty with retail sellers. The labor of making a few large contracts is sufficient to give a clue for finding the fair market value of the things sold throughout the country; but in Turkey, from the primitive habits of the people, and partly from the absence of great capital, and great credit, the importing merchant, the warehouseman, the wholesale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman are all one person. Old Moostapha, or Abdallah, or Hagdi Mohamed, waddles up from the water's edge with a small packet of merchandize, which he has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar, he puts his goods before the counter, and himself upon it — then laying fire to his tchiboque he ‘sits in permanence,’ and patiently waits to obtain the best price that can be got in an open market.’ This is his fair right as a seller, but he has no means of finding out what the best price is, except by actual experiment. He cannot know the intensity of the demand, or the abundance of the supply, otherwise than by the offers which may be made for his little bundle of goods; so he begins by asking a perfectly hopeless price, and then descends the ladder until he meets a purchaser, forever

“This is the struggle which creates the continual occasion for debate. The vender, perceiving that the unfolded merchandize has caught the eye of a possible purchaser, commences his opening speech. He covers his bristling broadcloths, and his meagre silks, with the golden broidery of oriental praises, and as he talks, along with the slow and graceful waving of his arms, he lifts his undulating periods, upholds, and poises them well till they have gathered their weight, and their [column 3:] strength, and then hurls them bodily forward, with grave, momentous swing. The possible purchaser listens to the whole speech with deep and serious attention; but when it is over, his turn arrives; he elaborately endeavors to show why he ought not buy the things at a price twenty times more titan their value; bystanders, attracted to the debate, take a part in it as independent members — the vendor is heard in reply, and coming down with his price, furnishes the materials for a new debate. Sometimes, however, the dealer, if he is a very pious Mussulman, and sufficiently rich to hold back his ware, will take a more dignified part, maintaining a kind of judicial gravity, and receiving the applicants who come to his stall, as if they were rather suitors, than customers. He will quietly hear to the end, some long speech which concludes with an offer, and will answer it all with the one monosyllable, ‘Yok,’ which means distinctly ‘No.’ “

After his experience of Greek cruising, the au. thor found himself in Cyprus, and crossing thence to Beyroot, visited (his travel was in 1835) Lady Hester Stanhope in her fastness on the east of Sidon. She had known some of his relatives, and after her peculiar fashion gave him welcome. His account of her is curious, and in the impression it leaves of a methodical, voluntary, studied madness, does not differ from Lamartine's. But she has a more natural air, and condescends oftener to the truths and commonplaces. She indulged even a talent for mimicry: in which she was said to excel when she presided over her uncle's house in London.

“The first whom she crucified in my presence was poor Lord Byron; she had seen him, it ap. peared, I know not where, soon after his arrival in the East, and was vastly amused at his little affectations; he had picked up a few sentences of the Romaic, with which he affected to give orders to his Greek servant; I can’t tell whether Lady Hester's mimicry of the bard was at all close, but it was amusing; she attributed to him a curiously coxcombical lisp.

“Another person, whose style of speaking the lady took off very amusingly, was one who would scarcely object to suffer by the side of Lord Byron — I mean Lamartine, who had visited her in the course of his travels; the peculiarity which attracted her ridicule was an over-refinement of manner; according to my lady's imitation of Lamartine, (I have never seen him myself,) he had none of the violent grimace of his countrymen, and not even their usual way of talking, but rather bore himself mincingly, like the humbler sort of English dandy.”

Holy Land is the next scene in the descriptions of Eothen, and our traveler was much impressed at Nazareth, but apparently not moved by the other holy cities — reverentially that is; for he seems to have been sufficiently disturbed in other respects.

“Except at Jerusalem, never think of attempt. ing to sleep in a holy city.’ Old Jews from all parts of the world go to lay their bones upon the sacred soil, and as these people never return to their homes, it follows that any domestic vermin which they may bring with them are likely to be. come permanently resident, so that the population is continually increasing. No recent census had been taken when I was at Tiberias, but I know that the congregation of fleas which attended at my church alone, must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood. The fleas of all nations were there. The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell street — the pert, jumping ‘puce’ from hungry France — the wary, watchful pulce’ with his poi. coned stiletto — the vengeful ‘pulga’ of Castile with hie ugly knife — the German ‘fob,’ with his knife and fork — insatiate — not rising from table, — whole swarms from all the Russias, and Asiatic hordes unnumbered — all these were there, and all rejoiced in one great international feast. I could no more defend myself against my enemies, than if I had been ‘pain à discretion’ in the hands of a French patriot, or English gold in the claws of a Pennsylvanian Quaker. After passing a night like this, you are glad to pick up the wretched remains of your body long, long before morning dawns. Your skin is scorched — your temples [page 53:] throb — your lips feel withered and dried — your burning eye-balls are screwed inwards against the brain.”

He must have had a sharper taste of realities in this Terra Santa, than anywhere else in the East; roughing it with wild and lawless Arabs, pitching his own tents, and sleeping on his mother earth, (of which he gives a most graphic notion,) after the best approved models of nomadic life. He bivouacked on the banks, and bathed in the waters, of the Dead Sea; and was afterwards dragged across it with his party by swimming Arabs. He had no religious enthusiasm in Jerusalem, being not altogether free, we suppose, from the disenchanting influence of over-familiarity.

“Your hotel is a monastery — your rooms are cells — the landlord is a stately abbot, and the waiters are hooded monks. — If you walk out of the town you find yourself on the Mount of Olives, or in the valley of Jehosophat, or on the Hill of Evil Counsel. If you mount your horse and extend your rambles, you will be guided to the wilderness of St. John, or the birth place of our Saviour. Your club is the great Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where everybody meets everybody every day. If you lounge through the town, your Bond street is the Via Dolorosa, and the object of your hopeless affections is some maid, or matron all forlorn, and sadly shrouded in her pilgrim's robe. If you would hear music, it must be the chanting of friars — if you look at pictures, you see Virgins with mis-foreshortened arms, or devils out of drawing, or angels tumbling up the skies in impious perspective. If you would make any purchases you must go again to the church doors, and when you inquire for the manufactures of the place, you find that they consist of double-blessed beads, and sanctified shells.”