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O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante! Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!
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Zante, Zante, fior di Levante! This flower of the Levant exports not flowers, but fruit. The currants, which had vaguely presented themselves at Santa Maura and Cephalonia, came now decisively to the front. One does not think of these little berrylettes (I am certainly hunted by
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) as ponderous. But when one beholds tons of them, cargoes for ships, one regards them with a new respect. It was probably the brisk commercial aspect of the currants which made the port look so modern. All the Ionian Islands except Corfu export currants, but Zante throws them out to the world with both hands. I must confess that I have always blindly supposed (when I thought of it at all) that the currant of the plum-pudding was the same fruit as the currant of our gardens--that slightly acrid red berry which grows on bushes that follow the lines of back fences--bushes that have patches of weedy ground under them where hens congregate. I fancied that by some process unknown to me, at the hands of persons equally unknown (perhaps those who bring flattened raisins from grapes), these berries were dried, and that they then became the well-known ornament of the Christmas-cake. It was at Zante that my shameful ignorance was made clear to me. Here I learned that the dried fruit of commerce is a dwarf grape, which has nothing in common with currant jelly. Its English name, currant, is taken from the French
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or Corinth grape, a title bestowed because the fruit was first brought into notice at Corinth. We have stolen this name in the most unreasonable way for our red berry. Then, to make the confusion worse, as soon as we have put the genuine currants into our puddings and cakes, we turn round and call them
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! The real currant, the dwarf grape of Corinth, is about as large as a gooseberry when ripe, and its color is a deep violet-black; the vintage takes place in August. It is not a hardy vine. It attains luxuriance, I was told, only in Greece; and even there it is restricted to the northern Peloponnesus, the shores of the Gulf of Corinth, and the Ionian Islands. M. About, confronted with the 195,000,000 pounds of currants which were exported in 1876, dipped his French pen afresh, and wrote:
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Plum-pudding and plum-cake are typical pleasures of the English nation, pleasures whose charms the Gaul cannot appreciate. He adds that if other countries should in time be converted to
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Greece would not need to cultivate anything else; she would become rich
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We are seven the islands declare as persistently as the little cottage girl, though the seventh has gone away, if not to heaven, at least to the very end of the Peloponnesus. Why Cerigo should have been included in the Ionian group I do not know; it lies off the southernmost point of Greece, near Cape Malea, and might more reasonably be classed with the Cyclades, or with Crete. Birthplace of Aphrodite, Cythera of the ancients, though it is, I have never met any one who has landed there in actual fact (I do not include dreams). People going by sea to Athens from Naples, or from Brindisi, pass it in their course, and if they read their Murray or their Baedeker, to say nothing of other literature, no doubt their thoughts dwell upon the goddess of love for a moment as they pass her favorite shore. A photograph of the minds of travellers, as their eyes rest upon this celebrated isle, would be interesting. To mention (with due respect) typical names only, what would be the vision of Mr. Herbert Spencer, or of Prince Bismarck? of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or of Ibsen? of General Booth, Tolstoï, or Miss Yonge? We can each of us think of a list which would rouse our curiosity in an acute degree. To come down to an unexciting level, I know what the apparition in my own mind would be--that picture in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence: Botticelli's
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Birth of Venus.