Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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His life-long attachment to this College chum is the one romantic episode in Sir John Finch’s history. Without wife and children, he had concentrated all his unused affections on this friend for whom he entertained an admiration little short of idolatry, to whom he communicated all his thoughts, and whose advice he sought in all his difficulties. At Constantinople it soon became a current jest that there were two Excellencies, and the merchants humorously distinguished between them, by referring to the one as the Ambassador, and to the other as the Knight or the Chevalier.ssss1 It must be owned that the sight of that eternal pair of middle-aged physicians turned diplomats, each wrapped up in the other and each sufficient unto the other, had its comic as well as its romantic side. They presented to our ribald factors an object lesson in what the French call égoïsme à deux—natural only in the case of married couples, especially if they have not been married long.

Truly, it was, in Sir John’s own words, “a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls”—suave et irruptum animorum connubium; and, like all unions of the kind, it owed its strength to a happy meeting of opposites. If we may judge from the correspondence of the pair, their minds belonged to widely different types. The letters of the younger man are, on the whole, simple, straightforward, and spontaneous; the writer every now and again proves himself capable of a picturesque phrase, of a pithy statement, of a sound, if not very profound, observation. On the other hand, the elder man’s ponderous and pedantic epistles are unreadable, often unintelligible; his attempts at pleasantry painful; his whole style that of a pompous pedagogue. Of the talents which Sir John attributed to him no trace is visible in these dissertations. It is impossible to find in any of them a single remark on philosophy, religion, or society which is not dreary commonplace. And the same thing applies to the records of his conversation: they reek of stale school-learning. There can be no doubt that Finch, though no dazzling genius, had the finer intellect of the two. But intellect is not everything. As the portraits of the two friends stand confronting each other, Finch’s sensitive face with its weak mouth and melancholy eyes contrasts very suggestively with Baines’s stronger and coarser countenance: look at those lips still shaped in a firm, superior, benignant smile—the smile of one sure of his own wisdom and of his power of guiding weaker mortals! It is easy to guess at a glance to whom, in this “marriage of souls,” belonged the masculine and to whom the feminine part.