And as it was with the churches, so it was with the houses. Antivari never became, like Trebinje, a tumble-down Eastern town, nor, like Butrinto, a collection of beggarly huts, not fit to be called a town at all. It was a small, but well-built city, after the pattern of the other cities on the eastern coast of the Hadriatic. There was clearly no moment of general havoc; the Mussulman lived on in the house of his Christian father. Some of those houses must have been still almost new when their owners embraced the faith of their conquerors. At every step we see among the shattered houses some pretty scrap, door or window, of the style which we commonly call Venetian; we see some too which belong to the confirmedRenaissance, and which can hardly be older than the sixteenth century. One stately building indeed seems to have perished. An old print of Antivari, in a book calledViaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli, a book without date but which has an air of the sixteenth century, shows what is plainly meant for amunicipal palace, after the same general type as the bigger one at Venice and the more beautiful one at Ragusa. It has arcades below and windows above. Still as we tread, even in their state of ruin, the streets, the littlepiazze, of what once was Antivari, we see that the city perched on its Albanian height must have been no unworthy fellow of its neighbours on the Dalmatian shore.
It is sad that the enlargement of Europe and of Christendom, the winning back of their ancient coast by the valiant warriors of the Black Mountain, should have been bought only at such a price as the destruction of this interesting and really beautiful little city. The loss, it may be feared, cannot be repaired. A gently working hand might possibly set up again the ruined houses and churches nearly as they once were. Or it might at first sight seem a more obvious work to forsake the ruined hill-town, and to build another by the haven, a new Montenegrin Cattaro, to make up as far as may be for the city by theBoccheso cruelly torn away from its free brethren. But either scheme seems to be forbidden by the growing unhealthiness of the spot. The place has been for some while getting more and more fever-stricken, and the disease has now—seemingly since the siege—spread upwards to the hill-town itself. It is for medical knowledge to judge whether, as is said to be thecase in some parts of the RomanCampagna, sudden colonization, the settlement of a large number of new inhabitants at once, could do anything to check the evil. Failing this chance, it would seem as if Antivari was doomed utterly to perish. A new Montenegrin town and haven may arise, but not on the site of the ancient town and haven of the eastern Bari.
On whom rests the blame? Surely not on the conquerors, whose warfare was waged in the noblest cause for which man can fight, for their faith, their freedom, their national life, the extension of freedom and national life to their brethren under the yoke. Nor can we say that it rests with the men who fought against them, who, from their own side, were fighting for faith and freedom and national life fully as much. It rather rests with the dangerous neighbour of both, whose very existence is founded on the trampling down of freedom and national life among all its neighbours. It rests with the power which takes care to strike no blows itself, but which knows how to suck no small advantage from the blows which are struck by others on either side. The ruin of Antivari is in truth the work, though the indirect work, of the power hard by, the power which was not ashamed to stretch forth its hand for such a spoil as Spizza, the hard-won earnings of its poor neighbour. The guilt of ruined Antivari rests with those who drove itsconquerors to conquest in the wrong place by hindering them from peaceful advance in the right place. It rests with those who stirred up its defenders to a hopeless resistance by promises which never were fulfilled. When we see how in 1878 Montenegro was allowed to keep possession of ruined and almost worthless Antivari, but was forced to give up its other comparatively flourishing conquests of Spizza and Dulcigno, we better understand how the rule of doing as one would be done by is looked on in the council-chamber of an Apostolic King. And we see too, with some comfort, how England, as one of her first national acts when England found herself once more under English leadership, knew how to step in, with vigour and with patience, to undo at least one part of the wrong which had been done.
THE END.
LONDON:PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.