SOURCE: "Cities and Harvests," in Daylight and Champaign, revised edition, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948, pp. 28-34.

[In the following essay, Young praises Byron's display of insight and adept prose style in The Road to Oxiana.]

A diary is not to be judged like other books, because in real life incidents will not happen in the right order, or observe their proper artistic balance. Mr. Byron's objective was the Oxus: his route was by Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Damascus into Persia; and thence by Afghanistan and the Khyber to Peshawar. But though his appeal to the Minister of the Interior of Turkestan might have melted a stone—a stone being assumed to have no appreciation of irony—he was not allowed to see the stream which, as he gracefully informed His Excellency, had been celebrated by the sacred pen of Matthew Arnold. So it was not the Oxus but Mr. Byron that proved to be the foiled circuitous wanderer. But one disappointment, in a region which seems to be half-crazy with adolescent nationalism and the frontier-complex, is not much to set against such a harvest of things observed and felt. I divide travel books into those which make me want to go there, and those which make me thankful that someone else has gone for me. The Road to Oxiana is of the latter class. I trust I shall always be young enough to giggle consumedly over motor break-downs and funny foreigners, but in the flesh I find them merely tiresome. And I would rather see the garden at Kavar through Mr. Byron's eyes than my own, because they see so much more. It reminded me of another garden, one which Virgil knew, 'below the castled crag of Oebalia'.

Even finer is the journey across the steppe to the Tower of Kabus, itself alone worth many journeys.

As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels. Here the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as of a life within, in the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups, and poppies, pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, forms and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come, bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud shadow, and all grew dark as for a moment's sleep, though a few feet off there would be no ripple and no darkness; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions, having just those gradations of distance that the outer lacked.

Of prose like that I can say nothing. Mr. Byron's references to childhood are always apt, as another passage will indicate:

The sound of the machinery became apocalyptic, clanking and fizzing without any sort of rhythm till at last, with a final deafening cannonade, it ceased altogether, and Abbas beamed at us with the expression of a conductor laying down his baton at the end of an applauded symphony. A sympathetic report from the near hind tyre, though a beat late, announced that it too needed rest. There was no spare tyre. Gathering up the shreds of the outer cover, Abbas produced a patching outfit. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. It remained to bring the engine to life. But this was accomplished with a few random blows of a hammer, as one beats a child.

The power of making every situation yield all it contains of comedy and beauty at once is the best gift of a mature culture to its elect children. On this theme I should like some day to expatiate, with illustrations from the Birds of Aristophanes, from the Misanthrope, and, last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the eighteenth century, the verse and prose of another pilgrim who died one hundred and thirteen years ago. It is to this tradition that Mr. Byron adheres. By humanism I mean a determination of the mind to maintain its own poise, and to view the world in its own perspective: and I call it insolent for the readiness with which it turns to aggression if its poise is disturbed by sectarian clamour or its perspective blurred by fashionable sentiment. Kinglake had it, but in Kinglake I am always aware of an uneasy self-consciousness which prevents him from ever surrendering completely to the scene before him, or to his own emotions; while I do not suppose that Mr. Byron has ever struck out an adjective for fear that someone might call it sentimental, or mitigated a single impertinence lest someone should call it indiscreet. I am sure, too, that my most earnest representations will never stop him writing such sentences as—

Dawn, like a smile from the gallows, pierced the gusty, drizzling night.

And how, not being bootblacks, poppies manage to 'shine their leaves', I ask with no expectation of an answer.

How will the humanist approach Jerusalem?

The buildings are wholly of stone, a white cheese-like stone, candid and luminous, which the sun turns to all tones of ruddy gold. Charm and romance have no place. All is open and harmonious. The associations of history and belief, deep-rooted in the first memories of childhood, dissolve before the actual apparition … Set in this radiant environment, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre appears the meanest of churches … The visitor is in conflict with himself. To pretend to detachment is supercilious; to pretend to reverence, hypocritical. The choice lies between them. Yet for me that choice has been averted. I met a friend in the doorway, and it was he who showed me how to cope with the Holy Places. …

Stepping through the Franciscans as though they were nettles, Gabriel dived into a hole three feet high, from which came a bright light. The inner chamber was about seven feet square. At a low slab of stone knelt a Frenchwoman in ecstasy. By her side stood another Greek monk.

'This gentleman has been to Mount Athos, ' announced Gabriel to his crony, who shook hands with me across the body of the Frenchwoman. 'It was six years ago—and he remembers Synesios' cat. This is the Tomb'—pointing to the slab of stone—'I shall be in here all day to-morrow. There isn't much room, is there? Let's go out.'

I should like also to quote Baalbek—which, incidentally, tried Kinglake a little above his powers—

and the stone peach-coloured, with a marmoreal texture, not transparent, but faintly powdered, like bloom on a plum. …

The stars came out and the mountain slopes grew black. I felt the peace of Islam. And if I mention this commonplace, it is because in Egypt and Turkey that peace is now denied, while in India Islam appears, like everything else, uniquely and exclusively Indian. In a sense it is so; for neither man nor institution can meet that overpowering environment without a change of identity. But I will say this for my own sense: that when travelling in Mohammedan India without previous knowledge of Persia, I compared myself to an Indian observing European classicism, who had started on the shores of the Baltic instead of the Mediterranean.

The idea is new to me; I have no knowledge of my own with which to verify it; and it is less the originality or correctness of the observation that impresses me than the range of historic reflection which it implies. But the traveller among the monuments of Timarid magnificence and power has much to reflect upon, and the his-tory of that astonishing race, who, ruling in Samarcand and Herat, made themselves felt from Pekin to Byzantium, furnishes the bony structure of Mr. Byron's narrative. It is a story to go to the heart of the humanist, when he reads, in the words of the Emperor Babur, how in Herat—as in Florence—

whatever work a man took up he aimed and aspired to bring it to perfection:

and it seems to reach its artistic climax in the mausoleum of Timur's daughter-in-law, Gohar Shad, whose history Mr. Byron has at last pieced together and eluci-dated.

Educated at Eton and one of the larger Oxford colleges, Mr. Byron finds it easy to assume the habits of a lower-middle-class Persian, and in that guise he was able to penetrate into her mosque. What follows I shall quote, because it conveys more completely than any other pas-sage in the book the spirit in which Mr. Byron's pilgrimage was made.

Turbaned Mullahs, white-robed Afghans, vanished like ghosts between the orbits of the lamps, gliding across the black pavement to prostrate themselves beneath the golden doorway. A sound of chanting was heard from the sanctuary, where a single tiny figure could be seen abased in the dimness, at the foot of its, lustred mihrab. Islam! Iran! Asia! Mystic, languid, inscrutable!! One can hear a Frenchman saying that, the silly fool—as if it was an opium den in Marseilles. We felt the opposite: that is why I mention it. Every circumstance of sight, sound, and trespass conspired to swamp the intelligence. The message of a work of art overcame this conspiracy, forcing its way out of the shadows, insisting on structure and proportion, on the impress of superlative quality, and on the intellect behind them.

'Please blow your nose,' whispered our guide.

'Why?'

'I ask you, blow it, and continue to blow.'

Without the aesthetic apprehension, a man loses three parts of life: without the comic apprehension he is in danger of losing his head as well. But to the humanist, to the observer with a classical tradition behind him, it is not enough for the world to be lovely and amusing: it must be intelligent. Of Malcontenta, Mr. Byron writes:

Outside, people argue over the sides and affect to ignore the back. The front asks no opinion. It is a precedent, a criterion. You can analyse it—nothing could be more lucid; but you cannot question it. Europe could have bidden me no fonder farewell than this triumphant affirmation of the European intellect.

'You can analyse it, but you cannot question it': that is classicism. No room here for good intentions, or adumbrations, or compliances with what other people think you ought to think. The artist has said what he meant to say. Romantic art, and romantic criticism, is always hinting at the things left unsaid, and, too often, when you ask point blank: What are they? well, it just does not know. None of my readers, I hope, will suppose I think lightly of Ruskin if I confess that, every now and then, in reading him, I catch myself saying, like the Arab whom Palgrave charged two dirhems for an eye-wash, 'I say, Mister, remember God!' Far too much modern writing, I mean of the descriptive and analytic kind, seems to me to derive from the looser Victorian Romanticism, with the added demerit that the writers have taken their eye off the object, and are trying to squint simultaneously at their own subconscious and someone else's style.

Of the Omayad Mosque, and the mosaic landscapes of the Grand Arcade, Mr. Byron says:

For all their Pompeian picturesqueness, their colonnaded palaces and crag-bound castles, they are real landscapes, more than mere decoration, concerned inside formal limits with the identity of a tree or the energy of a stream.

If he had brought back nothing else, that lesson would be enough. But it is the lesson of the whole book. Identity and energy within formal limits, that is style, that is reason, that is freedom. I doubt if there was ever a time when had we more cause to be grateful for those who have the courage to assert their necessity, and the genius to exemplify their virtue.