Because I felt very happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation,
and being alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by
the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to myself
that I would do something that would surprise him, and I gave him his
fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was surprised, for he ran
after me into the station, as I supposed, to extort more. He was holding
out a franc toward me, and I asked the guide who was bothering me to
take him to Pompeii (where there are swarms of guides always on the
grounds) what the matter was. “It is false,” he explained, and this
proved true, though whether the franc was the one I had given the driver
or whether it was one which he had thoughtfully substituted for it to
make good an earlier loss I shall now never know. I put it into my
pocket, wondering what I should do with it; the question what you shall
do with counterfeit money in Italy is one which is apt to recur as I
have hinted, and in despair of solving it at the moment I threw the
false franc out of the car-window; it was the false franc I have already
boasted of throwing away.
This was, of course, after I got into the car, and after I had suffered
another wrong, and was resolved at least to be good myself. I had taken
first-class tickets, but, when we had followed several conductors up and
down the train, the last of them said there were no first-class places
left, though I shall always doubt this. I asked what we should do, and
he shrugged. I had heard that if you will stand upon your rights in such
a matter the company will have to put on another car for you. But I was
now dealing with the Italian government, which has nationalized the
railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted the rolling stock; and
when the conductor found us places in a second-class carriage, rather
than quarrel with a government which had troubles enough already I got
aboard. I suppose really that I have not much public spirit, and that
the little I have I commonly leave at home; in travelling it is
burdensome. Besides, the second-class carriage would have been
comfortable enough if it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had
not been washed since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the
destruction of Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.
The country through which we made the hour's run was sympathetically
squalid. We had, to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean
enough; but the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while
the earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging
manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it had
been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with
stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters of
life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco shanties
which the men and women working in the fields would lurk in at
nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building, and at one
place there was a large macaroni manufactory, with far stretches of the
product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We passed
through towns where women and children swarmed, working at doorways and
playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies everywhere winter
melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them, such as you can buy at
the Italian fruiterers' in New York, and will keep buying when once you
know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the
street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices
arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of
some savage prince.
Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from
arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city
is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after
you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass
through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets
where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the
houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted
with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and
stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's
fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and
moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the
roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns
and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted
in the favorite hue of ruin.
Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to
this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and
vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of
the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of
death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in
the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where
one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect
was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted
men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been
when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It
was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of
the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip instead of
built up, a good third had been added to the count of its streets and
houses. There were not, so far as I could see, more ruts from
chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the thoroughfares, but some
convincingly two-storied dwellings had been exhumed, and others with
ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations;
there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors
were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the
stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the
revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain
impressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the
dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York were dug out
two thousand years after their submergence by an eruption of Orange
Mountain. The identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested
to the archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally
unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist's word for the fact.
One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns and vague
foundations and broken altars. Among the later discoveries certain of
the public baths are in the best repair, both structurally and
decoratively, and in these one could replace the antique life with the
least wear and tear of the imagination.
[Illustration: 12 EXCAVATING AT POMPEII]
I could not tell which the several private houses were; but the
guide-books can, and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their
names would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In
Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new ones
were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older ones. Not
more recognizably than these, they had been devoted to the varied uses
known to advanced civilization in all ages: there were dwellings, and
taverns and drinking-houses and eating-houses, and there were those
houses where the feet of them that abide therein and of those that
frequent them alike take hold on hell. In these the guide stays the men
of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the
frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so
indulged had not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can
be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which
poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain
the same from age to age, will poison life forever.
The pictures on the walls of the newly excavated houses are not
strikingly better than those I had not forgotten; but of late it has
been the purpose to leave as many of the ornaments and utensils in
position as possible. The best are, as they ought to be, gathered into
the National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more
living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it
is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall
life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave
its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that
one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One should not
perhaps
“Go visit it by the pale moonlight,”
but if one could have it all to one's self by day, such a gray day as we
had for it, there is no telling what might happen. One thing only would
certainly happen: one would get lost. It never was a town of large area;
and, like all spaces that have been ruined over, it looked smaller than
it would have looked if all its walls were standing with all their roofs
upon them. Still, it was a mesh of streets, out of which you would in
vain have sought your way if you had been caught in it alone; though it
is mostly so level that if you had mounted a truncated column almost
anywhere you could have looked over the labyrinth to its verge.
It was not much crowded by visitors; though there were strings of them
at the heels of the respective guides, with, I thought, a prevalence of
the Germans, who are now overrunning Italy; I am sorry to say they are
not able to keep it cheap, at least for other nationalities. Among these
I noted two little smiling, shining, twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks
for the capture of that classical antiquity which could never really
belong to them. Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what
keeps us alien even more than the want of a common Christian tradition.
“The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome”
could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they
put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and
were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were
fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with
them I shall believe so.
[Illustration: 13 THE STREET OF TOMBS, POMPEII]
Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate,
thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to
find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or
Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous
people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got
tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had,
without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of
Tombs, where the tombs are in so much better repair than the houses. For
myself, I remembered the amphitheatre so perfectly from 1864 that I did
not see how I could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had
already turned into literature; and though Pompeii is but small, the
amphitheatre is practically as far from the Street of Tombs, after you
have walked about the place for two hours, as the Battery is from High
Bridge. There is no Elevated or Subway at Pompeii, and even the lines of
public chariots, if such they were, which left those ruts in the lava
pavements seem to have been permanently suspended after the final
destruction in the year 79.
We were not only very tired, but very hungry, and we asked our guide to
take us back the shortest way. I suggested a cross-cut at one point, and
he caught at the word eagerly, and wrote it in his note-book for future
use. He also acted upon it instantly, and we cut across the back yards
and over the kitchen areas of several absent citizens on our way back.
Our guide was as good and true as it is in the nature of guides to be,
but absolute goodness and truth are rather the attributes of American
travellers; and you will not escape the small graft which the guides are
so rigorously forbidden to practise. Pompeii is no longer in the
keeping of the Italian army; with the Italian instinct of
decentralization the place has claimed the right of self-government, and
now the guides are civilians, and not soldiers, as they were in my far
day. They do not accept fees, but still they take them; and our guide
said that he had a brother-in-law who had the best restaurant outside
the gate, where we could get luncheon for two francs. As soon as we
were in the hands of the runner for that restaurant the price augmented
itself to two francs and a half; when we mounted to the threshold, lured
on by the fascinating mystery of this increase, it became three francs,
without wine. But as the waiter justly noted, in hovering about us with
the cutlery and napery while he laid the table, a two-fifty luncheon was
unworthy such lords as we. When he began to bring on the delicious
omelette, the admirable fish, the excellent cutlets, he made us observe
that if we paid three francs we ought to eat a great deal; and there
seemed reason in this; at any rate, we did so. The truth is, that
luncheon was worth the money, and more; as for the Vesuvian wine, it had
the rich red blood of the volcano in it, and it could not be bought in
New York for half a franc the bottle, if at all; at thrice that sum in
Naples it was not a third as good.
If there had been anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we
could not have done it, we were so spent with our two hours' walk
through Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating.
Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day forty-three
years before when I had broiled over the same ground under the blazing
sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference in the muscles and
emotions of twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of
the white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a
much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than had
accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year 1864. During
most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its
ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully,
however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession
and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the
fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition
of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the
Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of
municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, and the
general adoption of automobiling. These things, and others like them,
had perhaps not aged Pompeii so much as they had aged me, but their
subjective effect was the same, and upon the whole I was not altogether
sorry to have added scarcely a new impression of the place to those I
had been carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were
plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens,
columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater
Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so
well.
This, at least, was what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in
the National Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian
things, new and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show
there beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a few
streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things than all the
lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against
Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under
that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and
the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have
been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle
slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than
alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is
curiously without pathos; Newport in ruins might not be touching;
possibly all skeletons or even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii
is a skeleton, or at the most a mummy, of the past.
Seeing what antiquity so largely was, however, one might be not only
resigned but cheerful in the ef-facement of any particular piece of it;
and for a help to this at Pompeii I may advise the reader to take with
him a certain little guide-book, written in English by a very courageous
Italian, which I chanced to find in Naples. Though it treats of the
tragical facts with seriousness, it is not with equal gravity that one
reads that sixteen years before the Vesuvian eruption “the region had
been shaken by strong sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants
to forsake precipitately their habitations. But being the amazement up,
they got one's home again as soon as the earth was quiet and all fear
and sadness went off by memory.” Signs of the final disaster to follow
were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were crossed by
currents of carbonic acid; “the domestic animals were also very sensible
of the approaching of the scourge; they lost the habitual vivacity, and
having the food in disgust, had from time to time to complain with
mournful wailings, without justified reasons.... The sky became of a
thick darkness,... interrupted only by flashes of light which the
lava reverberated, by the bloody gliding of the thunderbolts, by the
incandescence of enormous projectiles, thrown to an incommensurable
highness.... Death surprised the charming town; houses and streets
became the tombs of the unhappies hit by an atrocious torture.”
The author's study of the life of Pompeii is notable for diction which,
if there were logic in language, would be admirable English, for while
yet in his mind it must have been “very choice Italian.” He tells us
that “Pompei's dwellings are surprising by their specific littleness,”
and explains that “Pompei inhabitants, for the habitudes of the climate
could allow, lived almost always to the open sky,” just as the Naples
inhabitants do now. “They got home only to rest a little, to fulfill
life wants, to be protected by bad weather. They spent much time during
the day in forum, temples, thermes, tennis-court, or intervened to
public sports, religious functions and meetings.... Few houses only
had windows. The sunlight and ventilation to the ancients was given
through empty spaces in the roofs.... Hoofs knocked under the weight
of materials thrown out by Vesuvius; it is undoubted, however, that
roofs were provided with covers or supported terraces. In the middle of
the roofs was cut an overture through which air and light brought their
benefits to the underlaid ambients.... Proprietor disposed the locals
according to his own delight.... So that, there were bed, bath,
dining, talking and game rooms.” In the peristyle “the ground was
gardened, the area shared in flower beds, had narrow paths; herbs,
flowers, shrubs were put with art well in order on flower beds,
delighted from time to time by statues of various subjects,” as may be
noted in the actual restorations of some of the Pompeian houses.
As for their spiritual life, “Pompeian's religion, like by Roman people,
was the Paganism. Deities were worshipped in the temples with prayers,
sacrifices, vows, and festivities.... Banquets to the Deity were
joined to prayers. In fact, dining tables were dressed near the altars,
and all around them on dining beds, _tricli-nari,_ placed Divinities
statues as these were assembled to own account to the joyous banquet.”
Auspices or auguries “gave interpretation to thunders, lightnings,
winds, rain crashes, comets, or to bird songs and flights....
Horuspices inquired the divine will on the animal bowels, sacrificed to
the altar; they took out further indications by fleshes and bowels
flames when burnt on the altar.”
An important feature of Pompeian social life was the bath, which “was
one of the hospitality duty, and very often required in several
religious functions.... Large and colossal edifices were quite
furnished with all the necessary for care and sport. Besides localities
for all kind of bath--cold, warm, steam bath--didn't want parks, alleys,
and porticos in order to walk; lists rings for gymnastic exercises,
conversation and reading rooms, localities for theatrical
representations, swimming stations, localities for scientific
disquisitions, moral and religious teachings. The most splendid art
works adorned the ambient.”
When we pass to the popular amusements we are presented with the
materials of pictures vividly realized in _The Last Days of Pompeii,_
but somewhat faded since. “In the beginning gladiators' rank was made by
condemned to death slaves and war prisoners. Later also thoughtless
young men, who had never learned an advantageous trade, became
gladiators.” In the arena they engaged in sham fights till the
spectators demanded blood. Then, “sometimes one provided one's self nets
for wrapping up the adversary, who, hit by a trident much, frequently
die. When the gladiator was deadly wounded, forsaking the arm, struck
down and stretching the index, asked the people grace of life. The
spectators decided up his destiny, turning the thumb to the breast, or
toward the ground. The thumb turned toward the ground was the unlucky's
death doom, and he had without fail the throat cut off.”
Such, dimly but unmistakably seen through our Italian author's
well-reasoned English, were the ancient Pompeians; and, upon the whole,
the visitor to their city could not wish them back in it. I preferred
even those modern Pompeians who followed us so molestively to the train
with bargains in postal-cards and coral. They are very alert, the modern
Pompeians, to catch the note of national character, and I saw one of
them pursuing an elderly American with a spread of hat-pins, primarily
two francs each, and with the appeal, evidently studied from some fair
American girl: “Buy it, Poppa! Six for one franc. Oh, Poppa, buy it!”
I had again lavished my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had
my Utah friend, who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to
secure a first-class carriage. “When I can't go first-class in Italy,
I'll go home.” I promptly and proudly agreed with him, but I concealed
my morning's experience of the fact that in Italy you may sometimes go
second class when you have paid first. I agreed with him, however, in
not minding the plunder of Italian travel, since, with all the
extortions, it would come to a third less than you expected to spend.
His was the true American spirit.