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ARRIA MARCELLA
A SOUVENIR OF POMPEII
Three young friends, who had under-taken an Italian tour together last year, visited the Studii Museum at Naples, where the various antique objects exhumed from the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been collected.
They scattered through the halls, inspecting the mosaics, the bronzes, the frescoes detached from the walls of the dead city, each following the promptings of his own particular taste in such matters; and whenever one of the party encountered something especially curious, he summoned his comrades with cries of delight, much to the scandal of the taciturn English visitors, and the staid bourgeois who studiously thumbed their catalogues.
But the youngest of the three, who had paused before a glass case, appeared wholly deaf to the exclamations of his comrades, so deeply had he become absorbed in contemplation. The object that he seemed to be examining with so much interest was a black mass of coagulated cinders, bearing a hollow imprint. One might easily have mistaken it for the fragment of some statue-mould, broken in the casting. The trained eye of an artist would have readily therein recognized the impression of a perfect bosom and a flank as faultless in its outlines as a Greek statue. It is well known, indeed the commonest traveller's guide will tell you, that this lava, in cooling about the body of a woman, preserved its charming contours. Thanks to the caprice of the eruption that destroyed four cities, that noble form, though crumbled to dust nearly two thousand years ago, has come down to us; the rounded loveliness of a throat has lived through the centuries in which so many empires perished without even leaving the traces of their existence; chance-imprinted upon the volcanic scoriæ, that seal of beauty remains unobliterated.
Finding that he still remained absorbed in contemplation, Octavian's friends returned to where he stood; and Max, touching his shoulder, caused him to start like one surprised in a secret. Evidently Octavian had not been aware of the approach of Max or Fabio.
"Come, Octavian," exclaimed Max, "do not stay lingering whole hours before every cabinet, else we shall get late for the train and miss seeing Pompeii to-day."
"What is our comrade looking at?" asked Fabio, drawing near. "Ah, the imprint found in the house of Arrius Diomedes!" And he turned a peculiar, quick glance upon Octavian.
Octavian slightly blushed, took Max's arm, and the visit terminated without further incident. On leaving the Studii Museum, the three friends entered a corricolo, and were driven to the railway station. The corricolo, with its great red wheels, its tracket seat studded with brass nails, and its thin, spirited horse harnessed like a Spanish mule, and galloping at full speed over the great slabs of lava pavement, is too familiar to need description here, especially as we are not recording impressions of a trip to Naples, but the simple narrative of an adventure which, although true, may seem both fantastic and incredible in the extreme.
The railroad by which Pompeii is reached runs for almost its entire length by the sea, whose long volutes of foam advance to unroll themselves upon a beach of blackish sand resembling sifted charcoal. This beach has actually been formed by lava-streams and volcanic cinders, and its deep tone forms a strong contrast with the blue of the sky and the blue of the waters. The earth alone, in that sunny brightness, seems able to retain a shadow.
The villages bordered or traversed by the railway – Portici, celebrated in one of Auber's operas; Resina, Torre del Græco, Torre dell' Annunziata, whose dwellings with their arcades and terraced roofs attract the traveller's gaze – have, notwithstanding the intensity of the sunlight and the southern love for whitewashing, something of a Plutonian and ferruginous character like Birmingham or Manchester. The very dust is black there. An impalpable soot clings to everything. One feels that the mighty forge of Vesuvius is panting and smoking only a few paces off.
The three friends left the station at Pompeii, laughing among themselves at the odd commingling of antique and modern ideas suggested by the sign, "Pompeii Station" – a Græco-Roman city and a railway depot!
They crossed the cotton-field, with its fluttering white bolls, between the railway and the disinterred city, and at the inn which has been built just without the ancient rampart they took a guide, or, more correctly speaking, the guide took them, a calamity which is not easily avoided in Italy.
It was one of those delightful days so common in Naples, when the brilliancy of the sunlight and the transparency of the air cause objects to take such hues as in the North would be deemed fabulous, and appear indeed to belong to the world of dreams rather than to that of realities. The Northern visitor who has once looked upon that glow of azure and gold is apt to carry back with him into the depths of his native fogs an incurable nostalgia.
Having shaken off a corner of her cinder shroud, the resurrected city again rose with her thousand details under a dazzling day. The cone of Vesuvius, furrowed with striæ of blue, rosy, and violet-hued lavas, ruddily bronzed by the sun, towered sharply defined in the background. A thin haze, almost imperceptible in the sunlight, hooded the blunt crest of the mountain. At first sight it might have been taken for one of those clouds which shadow the brows of lofty peaks on the fairest days. Upon a nearer view, slender threads of white vapor could be perceived rising from the mountain-summit, as from the orifices of a perfuming pan, to reunite above in a light cloud. The volcano, being that day in a good humor, smoked his pipe very peacefully; and but for the example of Pompeii, buried at his feet, no one would ever have suspected him of being by nature any more ferocious than Montmartre. On the other side fair hills, with outlines voluptuously undulating like the hips of a woman, barred the horizon; and, further yet, the sea, that in other days bore biremes and triremes under the ramparts of the city, extended its azure boundary.
Of all spectacles, the sight of Pompeii is one of the most surprising. This sudden backward leap of nineteen centuries astonishes even the least comprehensive and most prosaic natures. Two paces lead you from the antique life to the life of to-day, and from Christianity to paganism. Thus, when the three friends beheld those streets wherein the forms of a vanished past are preserved yet intact, they were strangely and profoundly affected, however well prepared by the study of books and drawings they might have been. Octavian, above all, seemed stricken with stupefaction, and like a man walking in his sleep, mechanically followed the guide, without hearing the monotonous nomenclature that the varlet had learned by heart and recited like a lesson.
He gazed wildly on those ruts hollowed out in the cyclopean pavements of the streets by the chariot wheels, and which seem to be of yesterday, so fresh do they appear; those inscriptions in red letters skilfully traced upon the surfaces of the walls by rapid strokes of the brush (theatrical advertisements, notices of houses to let, votive formulas, signs, announcements of all descriptions, not less curious than a freshly discovered fragment of the walls of Paris, with advertising bills and placards attached, would prove a thousand years hence for the unknown people of the future); those houses, whose shattered roofs permit one to penetrate at a glance into all those interior mysteries, all those domestic details which historians invariably neglect, and whereof the secrets die with dying civilizations; those fountains that even now seem scarcely dried up; that forum whose restoration was interrupted by the great catastrophe, and whose architraves and columns, all ready cut and sculptured, still seem waiting in their purity of angle to be lifted into place; those temples, consecrated, in that mythologic age when atheists were yet unknown, to gods that have long ceased to be; those shops wherein the merchant only is missing; that public tavern where may still be seen the circular stain of the drinking cups upon the marble; that barracks with its ochre and minium-painted columns, on which the soldiers scratched grotesque caricatures of battle, and those juxtaposed double theatres of song and drama which might even now resume their entertainments, were not the companies who performed in them turned long since to clay, and at present occupied perchance in closing the bunghole of a cask or stopping a crevice in the wall, after the fashion of Alexander's ashes or Cæsar's dust, according to the melancholy reflections of Hamlet!
Fabio mounted upon the thymele of the tragic theatre while Max and Octavian climbed to the upper benches; and there, with extravagant gestures, he commenced to recite whatever poetical fragments came to his memory, much to the terror of the lizards, who fled, vibrating their tails, and hid themselves in the joints of the ruined stonework. Although the brazen or earthen vessels formerly used to reverberate sounds no longer existed, Fabio's voice sounded none the less full and vibrant.
The guide then conducted them across the open fields which overlie those portions of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheatre situated at the other end of the city. They passed under those trees whose roots plunge down through the roofs of the edifices interred, displacing tiles, cleaving ceilings asunder, and disjointing columns; and they traversed the farms where vulgar vegetables sprout above wonders of art – material images of that oblivion wherewith time covers all things.
The amphitheatre caused them little surprise. They had seen that of Verona, vaster and equally well preserved; besides, the arrangement of such antique arenas was as familiar to them as that of those in which bull-fights are held in Spain, and which they much resemble save in solidity of construction and beauty of material.
Accordingly they soon retraced their footsteps and gained the Street of Fortune by a cross-path, listening half-distractedly to the cicerone, who named each house they passed by the name which had been given it immediately upon its discovery, owing to some characteristic peculiarity – the House of the Brazen Bull, the House of the Faun, the House of the Ship, the Temple of Fortune, the House of Meleager, the Tavern of Fortune, at the angle of the Consular Road (Via Consularia), the Academy of Music, the Public Market, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon's Shop, the Custom House, the House of the Vestals, the Inn of Albinus, the Thermopolium, and so on – until they came to that gate which leads to the Street of the Tombs.
Within the interior arch of this brick-built gate, once adorned with statues which have long since disappeared, may be noticed two deep grooves designed to receive a sliding portcullis, after the style of a mediæval donjon, to which era, indeed, one might have supposed such a defence peculiar.
"Who," exclaimed Max to his friends, "could have dreamed of finding in Pompeii, the Græco-Latin city, a gate so romantically Gothic? Fancy some belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this entrance, summoning them to raise the portcullis, like a page of the fifteenth century!"
"There is nothing new under the sun," replied Fabio; "and the aphorism itself is not new, inasmuch as it was formulated by Solomon."
"Perhaps there may be something new under the moon," observed Octavian, with a smile of melancholy irony.
"My dear Octavian," cried Max, who during this little conversation had paused before an inscription traced in rubric upon the outer wall, "wilt behold the combats of the gladiators? See the advertisement! Combat and chase on the 5th day of the nones of April; the masts of the velarium will be rigged; twenty pairs of gladiators will fight during the nones; if you fear for the delicacy of your complexion, be assured that the awnings will be spread; and as you might in any case prefer to visit the amphitheatre early, these men will cut each other's throats in the morning —matutini erunt. Nothing could be more considerate."
Thus chatting, the three friends followed that sepulchre-fringed road which, according to our modern ideas, would be a lugubrious avenue for any city, but which had no sad significations for the ancients, whose tombs contained in lieu of hideous corpses only a pinch of dust – abstract idea of death! Art beautified these last resting-places, and, as Goethe says, the pagan decorated sarcophagi and funeral urns with the images of life.
It was therefore, doubtless, that Fabio and Max could visit, with a lively curiosity and a joyous sense of being, such as they could not have felt in any Christian cemetery, those funeral monuments, all gayly gilded by the sun, which, as they stood by the wayside, seemed still trying to cling to life, and inspired none of those chill feelings of repulsion, none of those fantastic terrors evoked by our modern dismal places of sepulture. They paused before the tomb of Mammia, the public priestess, near which a tree (either a cypress or a willow) is growing; they seated themselves in the hemicycle of the triclinium, where the funeral feasts were held, laughing like fortunate heirs; they read with mock solemnity the epitaphs of Navoleia, Labeon, and the Arria family, silently followed by Octavian, who seemed more deeply touched than his careless companions by the fate of those dead of two thousand years ago.
Thus they came to the villa of Arrius Diomedes, one of the finest residences in Pompeii. It is approached by a flight of brick steps, and after entering the door-way, which is flanked by two small lateral columns, one finds himself in a court resembling the patio which occupies the centre of Spanish and Moorish dwellings, and which the ancients termed impluvium or cavædium. Fourteen columns of brick, overlaid with stucco, once supported on four sides a portico or covered peristyle, not unlike a convent cloister, and beneath which one could walk secure from the rain. This courtyard is paved in mosaic with brick and white marble, which presents a subdued and pleasing effect of color. In its centre a quadrilateral marble basin, which still exists, formerly caught the rain-water that dripped from the roof of the portico. It was a strange experience, entering thus into the life of the antique world, and treading with well-blacked boots upon the marbles worn smooth by the sandals and buskins of the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius.
The cicerone led them through the exedra or summer parlor, which opened to the sea, to receive its cooling breezes. It was there that the family received company, and took their siesta during those burning hours when prevailed the mighty zephyr of Africa, laden with languors and storms. He brought them into the basilica, a long open gallery which lighted the various apartments, and in which clients and visitors erst awaited the call of the Nomenclator. Then he conducted them to the white marble terrace, whence extended a broad view of verdant gardens and blue sea. Then he showed them the Nymphæum, or Hall of Baths, with its yellow-painted walls, its stucco columns, its mosaic pavement, and its marble bathing-basin which had contained so many of the lovely bodies that have long since passed away like shadows; the cubiculum, where flitted so many dreams from the Ivory Gate, and whose alcoves contrived in the wall were once closed by a conopeum or curtain, of which the bronze rings still lie upon the floor; the tetrastyle, or Hall of Recreation; the Chapel of the Lares; the Cabinet of Archives; the Library; the Museum of Paintings; the gynæceum or women's apartment, comprising a suite of small chambers, now half fallen into ruin, but whose walls yet bear traces of paintings and arabesques, like fair cheeks from which the rouge has been but half wiped off.
Having fully inspected all these, they descended to the lower floor, for the ground is much lower on the garden side than it is on the side of the Street of the Tombs. They traversed eight halls painted in antique red, whereof one has its walls hollowed with architectural niches, after that style of which we have to-day a good example in the vestibule of the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra, and finally they came to a sort of cave or cellar, whose purpose was clearly indicated by eight earthen amphoræ propped up against the wall, and once perfumed, doubtless, like the odes of Horace with the wines of Crete, Falernia, or Massica.
One solitary bright ray of sunshine streamed through a narrow aperture above, half choked by nettles, whose light-traversed leaves it transformed into emeralds and topazes, and this gay natural detail seemed to smile opportunely through the sadness of the place.
"It was here," observed the cicerone, in his customary indifferent tone, "that among seventeen others was found the skeleton of the lady whose mould is exhibited at the Naples Museum. She wore gold rings, and the shreds of her fine tunic still clung to the mass of cinders which have preserved her shape."
The guide's commonplace phrases deeply affected Octavian. He made the man point out to him the exact spot where the precious remains had been discovered, and had it not been for the restraining presence of his friends, he would have abandoned himself to some extravagant lyrism. His chest heaved, his eyes glistened with a furtive moisture. Though blotted out by twenty centuries of oblivion, that catastrophe touched him like a recent misfortune. Not even the death of a mistress or a friend could have affected him more profoundly; and while Max and Fabio had their backs turned, a tear, two thousand years late, fell upon the spot where that woman, with whom he felt he had fallen retrospectively in love, had perished, suffocated by the hot cinders of the volcano.
"Enough of this archæology," cried Fabio. "We do not propose to write dissertations upon an ancient jug or a tile of the age of Julius Cæsar in order to obtain memberships in some provincial academy. These classic souvenirs give me the stomachache. Let us go to dinner – if such a thing be possible – in that picturesque hostelry, where I fear we shall be served with fossil beefsteaks and fresh eggs laid prior to the death of Pliny."
"I will not exclaim with Boileau:
'Un sot, quelquefois, ouvre un avis important,'"
exclaimed Max, with a laugh. "That would be ill-mannered, but your idea is a good one. Still, I think it would have been pleasant to banquet here, on some triclinium, reclining after the antique fashion, and waited upon by slaves according to the style of Lucullus or Trimalchio. It is true that I see no oysters from Lake Lucrinus, the turbots and mullets from the Adriatic are wanting, the Apuleian boar cannot be had in market, and the loaves and honey-cakes on exhibition in the Naples Museum lie, hard as stones, beside their green-gray moulds. Even raw macaroni sprinkled with cacciacavallo, detestable as it may be, is certainly better than nothing. What does friend Octavian think about it?"
Octavian, who was deeply regretting that he had not happened to be in Pompeii on the day of the eruption, so that he might have saved the lady of the gold rings, and thereby merited her love, had not heard a syllable of this gastronomic conversation. Only the last two words uttered by Max had fallen upon his ears, and feeling no desire to broach a discussion, he gave a random nod of assent, upon which the amicable party retraced the road along the ramparts to the inn.
The table was placed under a sort of open porch which served as a vestibule to the hostelry, whose rough cast walls were decorated with various daubs that the host entitled "Salvator Rosa," "Espagnolet," "Cavalier Massimo," and other celebrated names of the Neapolitan School, which he deemed himself bound to extol.
"Venerable host," cried Fabio, "do not waste your eloquence to no purpose. We are not Englishmen, and we prefer young women to old canvases. Better send us your wine-list by that handsome brunette with the velvety eyes whom I just now perceived on the stairway."
Finding that his guests did not belong to the mystifiable class of Philistines and bourgeois, the palforio ceased to vaunt his gallery in order to glorify his cellar. To begin with, he had all the best vintages: Château Margaux, Grand Lafitte which had been twice to the Indies, Sillery de Moët, Hochmeyer, scarlet wine, port and porter, ale and ginger beer, white and red Lachryma-Christi, Caprian, and Falernian.
"What, you have Falernian wine, animal! And put it at the end of your list! And you dare to subject us to an unendurable œnological litany!" cried Max, leaping at the inn-keeper's throat with burlesque fury. "Why, you have no sentiment of local color. You are unworthy to live in this antique neighborhood. Is it even good, this Falernian wine of yours? Was it put in amphoræ under the Consul Plancus —Consule Planco?"
"I know nothing about the Consul Plancus, and my wine is not put in amphoræ, but it is good, and worth ten carlins a bottle," answered the inn-keeper.
Day had faded away and the night came, a serene, transparent night, clearer, assuredly, than full midday in London. The earth had tints of azure, and the sky silvery reflections of inconceivable sweetness. The air was so still that the flames of the candles on the table did not oscillate.
A young boy, playing a flute, approached the table, and standing there, with his eyes fixed upon the three guests, performed upon his sweet and melodious instrument, one of those popular airs in a minor key which have a penetrating charm.
Perhaps that lad was a direct descendant of the flute-player who marched before Duilius.
"Our repast is assuming quite an antique aspect. We only need some Gaditanian dancing women and ivy garlands," exclaimed Max, as he helped himself to a great bumper of Falernian wine.
"I feel myself in the humor for making Latin quotations like a feuilleton in the Débats. Stanzas of odes come back to my memory," added Max.
"Keep them to yourself!" cried Fabio and Octavian, justly alarmed. "Nothing is so indigestible as Latin at dinner."
Among young men with cigars in their mouths and elbows on the table, who find themselves contemplating a certain number of empty flagons, especially when the wine has been capitally good, conversation never fails to turn upon women. Each explained his own system, whereof the following is a fair summary:
Fabio cared only for youth and beauty. Voluptuous and positive, he found no pleasure in illusions, and had no preferences in love. A peasant girl would have pleased his fancy as well as a princess, provided she were beautiful. The body rather than its apparel attracted him. He laughed much at certain of his friends who were enamored of so many yards of lace and silk, and he declared it were more rational to fall in love with the stock of a fashionable marchand des nouveautés. These opinions, which were rational enough in the main, and which he made no attempt to conceal, caused him to pass for an eccentric.
Max, less of an artist than Fabio, cared only for difficult undertakings, complicated intrigues. He sought resistances to vanquish, virtues to seduce, and played at love as at a game of chess, with long-premeditated moves, reserved ambuscades, and stratagems worthy of Polybius. In a drawing-room he would always choose the woman who seemed least in sympathy with him for the object of attack. To make her pass by skilful transition from aversion to love afforded him delicious pleasure. To impose himself upon characters which strove to repel him, and master wills that rebelled against his influence, seemed to him the sweetest of all triumphs. Like those hunters who, through rain, sunshine, or snow, through fields and woods, and over plains, pursue with excessive fatigue and unconquerable ardor some miserable quarry which in three cases out of four they would not deign to eat, so Max, having once captured his prey, troubled himself no further about it, and at once started off on another chase.
As for Octavian, he confessed that reality itself had little charm for him, not because he indulged in student-dreams, all moulded of lilies and roses like one of Demoustier's madrigals, but because there were too many prosaic and repulsive details surrounding all beauty, too many doting and decorated fathers, coquettish mothers who wore natural flowers in false hair, ruddy-faced cousins meditating proposals, ridiculous aunts in love with little dogs. An acquatinta engraving after Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung up in a woman's room, would have been sufficient to check a growing passion within him. More poetical even than amorous, he wanted a terrace on Isola-Bella, in Lake Maggiore, under the light of a full moon to frame a rendezvous. He would have wished to elevate his love above the midst of common life, and transport its scenes to the stars. Thus he had by turns fallen fruitlessly and madly in love with all the grand feminine types preserved by history or art. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and would have wished that the undulations of the ages might bear to him one of those sublime personifications of human desires and dreams, whose forms, to mortal eyes invisible, live immortally beyond Space and Time. He had created for himself an ideal seraglio, with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana of Poitiers, Jane of Arragon. At times also he had fallen in love with statues, and one day, passing before the Venus of Milo in the Museum, he cried out passionately: "Oh, who will restore thy arms that thou may'st crush me upon thy marble bosom!" At Rome, the sight of a matted mass of long thick human hair, exhumed from an antique tomb, had thrown him into a fantastic delirium. He had attempted, through the medium of a few of those hairs, obtained by a golden bribe from the custodian, and placed in the hands of a clairvoyant of great power, to evoke the shade and form of the dead; but the conducting fluid – the subtle odyle – had evaporated during the lapse of so many years, and the apparition could no more come forth out of the eternal night.
As Fabio had divined before the glass cabinet in the Studii Museum, the imprint discovered in the cellar at the villa of Arrius Diomedes had excited in Octavian wild impulses toward a retrospective ideal. He longed to soar beyond Life and Time and transport himself in spirit to the age of Titus.
Max and Fabio retired to their room, and being somewhat heavy-headed from the classic fumes of the Falernian, were soon sound asleep. Octavian, who had more than once suffered the full glass to remain before him untasted, not wishing to disturb by a grosser intoxication the poetic drunkenness which boiled in his brain, felt from the agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the hostelry on tiptoe that he might cool his brow and calm his thoughts in the night air.
His feet bore him unawares to the entrance which leads into the dead city. He removed the wooden bar that closed it, and wandered into the ruins beyond.
The moon illuminated the pale houses with her white beams, dividing the streets into double-edged lines of silvery white and bluish shadow. This nocturnal day, with its subdued tints, disguised the degradation of the buildings. The mutilated columns, the façades streaked with fugitive lizards, the roofs crumbled in by the eruption, were less noticeable than when beheld under the clear, raw light of the sun. The lost parts were completed by the half-tint of shadow, and here and there one brusque beam of light, like a touch of sentiment in a picture-sketch, marked where a whole edifice had crumbled away. The silent genii of the night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some representation of fantastic life.
At times Octavian fancied that he saw vague human forms in the shadow, but they vanished the moment they approached the edge of the lighted portion of the street. A low whispering, an indefinite hum, floated through the silence. Our promenader at first attributed them to a fluttering in his eyes, to a buzzing in his ears; it might even, he thought, be merely an optical delusion, coupled with the sighing of the sea-breezes, or the flight of some snake or lizard through the nettles, for in nature all things live, even death; all things make themselves heard, even silence. Nevertheless he felt a kind of involuntary terror, a slight trembling, that might have been caused by the cold night air, but which made his flesh creep. Could it be that his comrades, actuated by the same impulses as himself, were seeking him among the ruins? Those dimly seen forms and those indistinct sounds of footsteps! Might it not have been only Max and Fabio walking and chatting together, who had just disappeared round the corner of a cross-road? But Octavian felt to his dismay that this very natural explanation could not be true, and the arguments which he made to himself in favor of it were the reverse of convincing. The solitude and the shadow were peopled with invisible beings whom he was disturbing. He had fallen into the midst of a mystery, and it seemed that they were awaiting his departure in order to commence again. Such were the extravagant ideas that floated through his brain, and obtained no little verisimilitude from the hour, the place, and the thousand alarming details which those can well understand who have ever found themselves alone by night in the midst of some vast ruin.
Passing before a house which he had attentively observed during the day, and which the moon shone fully upon, he beheld in perfect integrity a certain portico whereof he had vainly attempted to restore the design in fancy. Four Ionic columns – fluted for half their height and their shafts purple-robed with minium tints – sustained a cymatium adorned with polychromatic ornaments that the artist seemed only to have completed the day before. Upon one side wall of the entrance a Laconian molossus, painted in encaustic, and accompanied by the warning inscription "Cave canem" barked at the moon and the visitor with pictured fury. On the mosaic threshold the word HAVE, in Oscan and Latin characters, saluted the guest with its friendly syllables. The outer surfaces of the walls, tinted with ochre and rubric, were unmarred by a single crack. The house had grown a story higher; and the tiled roof, now surmounted by a bronze acroterium, projected an intact outline against the light blue of the sky, where a few stars were growing pale.
