Robert Byron - Europe in the looking glass

THAT THIS BOOK IS A PERIOD PIECE is obvious from the beginning. Its subtitle, Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens, tells us at once that we are to be taken back to the 1920s, when the English gentry went for Motor Drives across a Europe that was still decidedly foreign, and there was still something funny to a place-name like Grimsby.

It is a comic postcard start to a book as to a journey, leading to a destination that was still hallowed in the English heart and ingrained in the English culture (for as Murrays Handbook to Greece had observed in 1884, in those days any Englishman with the usual knowledge of ancient Greek will be able to read the Athenian papers with ease). The substance of Europe In the Looking-Glass (in the looking glass, one notes, not through it) is unmistakably of its time.

But in a literary sense the book is significantly of its period too, because it was one of the first of a revived literary genre the travel book that was determinedly more than a travel book, but also a display of intellectual enterprise and distinction, a work of art and not least a worldly entertainment. In earlier times many people had written such works in English. Laurence Sterne had toyed famously with the form in A SentimentalJourney and Dickens had portrayed America in a related frame of mind. Mark Twain had light-heartedly toured the world; Robert Louis Stevenson had wandered the Cvennes with his donkey; and Alexander Kinglake had provided a classic model with his Eothen, published in 1863, describing a journey through the nearer east in a cheerfully graceful form that feels almost contemporary to this day.

But the turn of the nineteenth century was the age of Empire, of terrific adventures in exotic parts, and of war. The allures of exploration and the seductions of imperialism made for less pleasurable travel writing, and the narratives of men like Burton, Stanley and Henry Baker, set in flamboyant places and spiced with danger, their bindings gold-embossed with lions and savages, were the non-fiction best-sellers of the age. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Great War had been fought and Empire was losing its assurances, that the Kinglake tradition was revived, and Robert Byron chose his mtier.

Europe in the Looking-Glass was his first book, written in 1926. He was twenty-one, fresh from Eton and Oxford and happily conscious of his remote relationship with Byron the poet. He was a clever, rather idiosyncratic, highly educated young English gentleman, and like Murrays Briton of an earlier generation, he was steeped in the mystique of classical Greece. He had escaped the miseries of the First World War, he was a child of the automobile age, and it was natural enough that his first foray into literature should be a Motor Drive to Athens, in the company of two similarly high-spirited English friends.

By the standards of his class and time he was conventionally immature, having been sent down from Oxford for misdemeanours, and he and his companions roister their way through this narrative like characters from the young Evelyn Waugh, whose contemporaries they were. For a start they did what such young men did then they gave their car, a rather grand Sunbeam tourer, an affectionate name, Diana, rather as Stevenson had called his donkey Modestine. They behaved, too, as footloose young men of means did behave, revelling in chance encounters and comic episodes, and Byron indulged himself in a manner presently to became common among English travel writers a kind of faux-incompetence and effeteness, self-portrayal verging upon caricature. Diana the car is constantly breaking down or running out of petrol, and the three young Englishmen present themselves as most decidedly not mechanically-minded.

Byron was clearly rather pleased with himself, and in this very first work of self-expression he indulges in grand judgements on art, politics and people that will sound to many readers, nearly a century on, insufferably pretentious. Ravenna, he magisterially informs us after a week or two on the Continent, is more overwhelming than anywhere else in Europe. The phenomenon of Rothenburgs conservation is without parallel in Europe. The art of the Risorgimento awaits recognition as one of the most meritorious intellectual phenomena of the nineteenth century. Palladios sense of proportion was unfailing. There can seldom have lived a good artist with such a capacity for bad work as Bernini.

But wait: these were the excesses of a twenty-one-year-old. As one progresses through the pages of this book, one begins to realise that they contain the early elements of a far more remarkable mind. For one thing, for all his know-all judgements the young Byron already demonstrates remarkable insights into the history and meaning of art; in this volume they are expressed most vividly in his responses to Greek classicism, later they were to be superseded by a profound admiration for the then neglected art and architecture of Byzantium. Then again, if there are some overwrought passages of prose in Europe in the Looking-Glass, there are also descriptions and evocations of striking beauty, to stop one suddenly in ones patronising tracks. And above all, perhaps, there is a truly mellow sense of humour, usually generous, often cynical or irreverent, occasionally waspish, which impregnates the whole work and remains more or less ageless.

The comedy is often incidental, as it were, to the theme of the moment, and generally lies in detail, and in a virtuoso choice of words. We glimpse, for instance, fisherwomen of Naples munching lethargically at their indescribable foods. At a fountain at the Villa Lante at Viterbo we notice ornamental lions expectorating their water towards recumbent Tritons below. And for the young Byron the character of the celebrated Greek national costume, the fustanella, is best exhibited by the dirt and squalor of the old men who passed by, their short tunic skirts frilling out above their knees, and their whole legs swathed in bulky white wrappings tied here and there like parcels of washing

But in and around the joie de vivre of it all, anyone can see that there is a remarkable sensibility germinating here. In long passages of serious description and analysis a fine intellect is at work too. For example Byron devotes several pages to the cathedral at Esztergom, in Hungary, which he had visited the year before when he was hardly more than a youth. It is a detailed, careful and perceptive technical analysis. Only once does he lapse into his adolescent dogmatism (when he cannot help remarking that the cathedrals high altar, though inoffensive, embodies the worst characteristics of the Guercino tradition) For the rest, having read this undergraduate assessment few readers will be tempted to doubt its magisterial conclusion that the church of Esztergom stands alone as the finest single edifice of early nineteenth-century architecture in existence.

And we shall be right, for in Europe in the Looking-Glass we are discovering the seed of great writing. After its title page an authors statement declares that the book makes no pretensions to literary merit it is offered to the public in the sole hope that the public will buy it. In fact, a few pages later, Byron says he hopes it will further the new sense of European consciousness, and this was certainly a truer intention. For it was a first book, very much a young mans book, and before long Robert Byron was to mature into a writer of high learning, skill and lasting influence, and to be the great master of that particular genre of travel writing with which he first experimented in 1926. He travelled constantly all his life, and became a great authority on matters Byzantine, until six books later, in 1936, he wrote his masterpiece