Constantinople Settings and Traits
by . New York: Harper & Bros.. 1026. xvvi+553 pp. Illus. $4.00.
AFTER eleven years, Mr. Dwight’s Constantinople Old and New, which the flood of war and post-war
books thrust into an undeserved backwash, comes, in its new and revised edition of Constantinople Settings and Traits, as a great joy to this reader.
‘To have gone deliberately to Constantinople, not in 1707 or in 1807, but in 1907, with the notion of turning out something between Loti’s Vers Ispahan and Howell’s Venetian Life, was quite inexcusable. Nevertheless,’ explains Mr. Dwight, ‘it happened.’ But, appearing in 1915 under a name which the author did not choose, ‘it had a foreboding ring of irony then when the hurricane was already raging that was to sweep away the old Ottoman Empire.’
Thus, afresh to interpret this hurricane which blew in the new Turkey, and to show that all that emerged from it did not suddenly materialize from a magician’s hat, that the seeds and soul of it existed in the old régime, this was one of the two prime reasons for a revision of the book. The other reason — and the principal one, according to the author—having to do with the kind of book it happens to be: not a guidebook, a history, an archæological treatise, but a character sketch of a great and famous city, a city which holds still the same charm for foreigners that it held in 1907, 1807, 1707.
One has only to dip into Mr. Dwight’s book to he assured of this. Those who are familiar with his recent pieces in Harper’s will find the same wit that shone forth in ‘Impatience on a Monument’ or ‘Shoulder Straps’ poking one’s ribs with the pointed fact that the seven hills upon which Constantinople is said to have been built do not exist, that the so-called Turkish corner in the interiors of certain Occidental homes never originated anywhere but in the imagination of an upholsterer, that there is no such person as a Sultana, that the author does not like the minarets of Saint Sophia simply because they are ugly, and that in Turkey there is no Great Unwashed — save among those who are not Turks.
But it is the H. G. Dwight of Stamboul Nights who transports one into a world where seal cutters make one’s name in brass almost as quickly as one can write it; where scribes sit under trees ready to write one’s letters; where pedlars come and go selling beads, perfumes, fezzes, and sweets; where men smoke hubble-bubbles in tipsy little coffee houses above the Marmora or squat motionless on their brown, narrow heels; and where as strong as the laws of the Medes and Persians are the traditions that no man but one of Iran shall drive a house builder’s donkey, that only a Mohammedan Albanian of the South shall lay a pavement, or a Southern Albanian who is a Christian and wears an orange girdle shall lay railroad ties, that none save a landlubber from the hinterland of the Black Sea may row a caïque, or them of Konia peddle yo’ourt.
And it is not only to Constantinople alone that Mr. Dwight carries one, but also to Scutari, the City of Gold, to printing houses where hand wood-block printing has been carried on by the same family for over two hundred years; or to Therapia on the upper Bosporus, where moons rise on pale waters and purple-shadowed gardens as I have never seen them elsewhere.
One puts down Constantinople Settings and Traits with a sense that only a man born in her environs and bred young with a sense of her strange beauty could have set her down with that fine restraint of color and line that spells the deepest understanding. Decrying the fact that with two exceptions no etcher has ever done this city of constantly recurring gray dome, white minaret, and black cypress, Mr. Dwight has himself etched its lights and shadows into the minds of his readers with the acid of words that fairly bite with meaning.
MARGARET DE FOREST HICKS