Bayard Taylor's Travels in Greece and Russia [pp. 648-656]

BAYARD TAYLORIS TRAVELS
views, makes them despise the fashionable opinions of the
hour, and become at once truthful and paradoxical. The
man who does not speak and write paradoxes, speaks and
writes falsehoods; for popular opinions are all erroneous, or at
least but partially, locally, and temporarily true, yet to differ
from them is to be paradoxical. He who deals in general ab st~act truths-who has sense enough to think for himself, and
courage enough to express his thoughts, must be satisfied with
self-approval, and the hope that posterity will reverse the hasty,
thoughtless, prejudiced judgment of his contemporaries. The
public understand enough truth to manage admirably everyday affairs; but each man mistakes his little modicum of
truth-what is true only to day, in his neighborhood, farm,
village, or nation-for universalandperpetualtruth. Tobe
truthful is to be paradoxical, and we take this occasion, Mr.
Editor, to thank you for so often mentioning our paradoxes.
Now, we like Mr. Taylor as a man; we think he is frank
and honest in the expression of his thoughts and opinions. He
has luckily a popular way of thinking, or of adopting the
common thought. He might think for himself, form his own
opinions, but he is too busy travelling to take time for such
unprofitable and suicidal labor. He now agrees with the world
and thie world with him, and they get along most cheerily together. Why quarrel with his friends and turn misanthrope,
by publishing truth which few will read and still fewer believe.
No doubt he thinks that crinoline and foundling hospitals, universal suffrage and elective judiciaries, are the greatest of human
institutions, and will survive the Pyramids. Happy man! we
envy him. But let him keep out of Greece. That is not a
land for fashionable notions. We should not like to see a railroad profaning the field of Marathon or a cotton factory built
upon the site of the Parthenon. But let us follow our author to
the Acropolis and the Parthenon. He thus writes:
"Once having looked upon the Parthenon, it was impossible to look elsewhere,
and I drew nearer and nearer, finding a narrow lane through the chaos of fragments piled almost as high as my head, until I stood below the western front. I
looked up at the Doric shafts, colossal, as befitted the shrine of a goddess, yet
tender and graceful as a flower stem, upholding without effort the massive entablature and shattered pediment, in one corner of which two alone remain of
all the children of Phidias, and to my confusion, I must confess it, all my fine
resolves were forgotten. I was seized with an overpowering mixture of that
purest and loftiest admiration which is almost the same thing as love, and of unmitigated grief and indignation. BWell, consider me a fool if you like, but had I
been alone, I should have cast myself upon the marble pavement, and exhausted
in some hysterical way, the violence of this unexpected feeling."
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