“Und aber nach zweitausend Jahren
Kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.”
“Et puis nous irons voir, car décadence et deuil
Viennent toujours après la puissance et l’orgueil,
Nous irons voir....”
We are so much accustomed to depend on the four great literary languages
for the whole body of our information and amusement, that it occurs to
few to consider that ignorance of other European dialects involves any
inconvenience at all, except to those who have occasion to visit the
countries in which they are spoken. Yet there is much of really valuable
matter which sees the light only in the minor tongues, especially those
of the industrious North, and with which the world has never been made
familiar through translation. Joachim Frederic Schouw, the Danish
botanist, is one of the writers of our day who has suffered most
prejudicially both to his own fame and to the public from having
employed only his native language. For his writings are not only
valuable in a scientific point of view, but belong to the most popular
order of scientific writing, and would assuredly have been general
favourites, had not the bulk of them remained untranslated. His ‘Tableau
du Climat de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared in French, and is a
standard work. A little collection of very brief and popular essays,
entitled ‘The Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been translated both into
German and English. One of these, styled ‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is
founded on a rather novel idea. The paintings on the walls of the
disinterred houses of that city contain (among other things) many
landscape compositions. Sometimes these are accessory to historical
representations. But they often merely portray the scenery of ordinary
out-door life. The old decorators of the Pompeian chambers had indeed an
evident taste for those trivial tricks of theatrical deception, which
are still very popular in Italy. Their verdure, sky, and so forth, seem
often as if meant to impose on the spectator for a moment as realities;
and are, therefore, executed in a “realistic” though sketchy style.
“Consequently,” says Schouw, “the observation of the plants which are
represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure
of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show
the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the
Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns
them now.”
We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant
little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to
this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most
regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the
appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of
volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken
place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and
land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very
outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were.
Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from
his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama
of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and
note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he
beheld it.
The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was
Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable
with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with
its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was
devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its
appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke
rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that
red gleam of the slow river of fire,
“A cui riluce
Di Capri la marina
E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.”
It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it
exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top;
Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped
ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to
be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical
depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and
tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long
before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to
the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must
have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very
similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.
At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to
record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of
Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic
action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of
Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the
imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since
transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he
first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of
unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his
resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August,
which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment,
except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the
Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he
relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old
prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have
attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen
up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a
level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular
oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here
and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his
conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or
mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the
fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and
cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible
name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di
Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents,
gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had
crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with
the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its
premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes
his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very
closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631.
Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered
feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that
the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and
renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says
Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was
heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and
battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the
precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals
were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo”
(so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a
contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the
mountain. There, without having taken a mouthful of anything, he was
overtaken by a profound slumber, from which awakening suddenly, he saw
no longer before his eyes the likeness of the place where he had fallen
asleep, but a new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape: instead of a
hill-side covered with wood, there appeared a wall crossing the road,
and extending on each side for a great distance, with a very lofty gate.
Astonished at this new scene, he went to the gate to inquire where he
was. There he found a porter of the order of St Francis, a young man in
appearance. Many conjecture that this was St Antony of Padua. The porter
at first seemed to repulse him, but afterwards admitted him into the
courtyard, and guided him about. After a long circuit they arrived at a
great range of buildings breathing fire from every window.” In short,
the poor peasant was conducted, after the fashion of such visions,
through the mansions of hell and purgatory, where he saw, of course,
many of his acquaintance variously tormented. “At last, on the following
day, he was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius: and was ordered to
inform his countrymen that a great ruin was impending over them from
that mountain: wherefore they should address their vows and prayers to
God. On Easter Day, at noon, he came home, and was observed of many with
his dress sprinkled with ashes, his face burnt black, as if escaped from
a fire.” This was two years before the eruption, and during the interval
Camillo always told the same story; wherefore, after passing a long time
for either mad or drunk, he was finally raised to the dignity of a
prophet. At last, on the night of the 15th December, the ancient volcano
signalised his awakening by a feat of unrivalled grandeur. In
forty-eight hours of terrific struggles, he blew away the whole cap of
the mountain; so that, on the morning of the 18th, when the smoke at
last subsided, the Neapolitans beheld their familiar summit a thousand
feet lower than it had been before; while its southern face was seamed
by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly rolling at several points into
the sea.
Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems
to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now,
in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made
the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on
Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or
two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances
on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions
prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed,
the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been
that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in
company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising
all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately
pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its
subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious
traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer
every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking
with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting
catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of
the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood,
which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and
first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale
seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its
fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once
more the danger passed away.
To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it
except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories
respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful
panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes
since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth
of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not
exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a
deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of
Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of
its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the
limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged
by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which
lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the
opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how
or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the
long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many
feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived
magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the
chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf
of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its
luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived.
Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity,
was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for
everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the _malaria_.
But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore.
The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the
summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet
land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were,
doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the
shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its
steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into
land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the
whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of
Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently
delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as
beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision
which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of
landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena
exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical
records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic
region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or
rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven
centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place
until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these
marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their
owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and
sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in
their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had
reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their
disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has
modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them.
Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all
events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of
the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at
any other epoch of the world’s history.
Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called
her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet
acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far
less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some
twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural
estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate
del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the
sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of
which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the
sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower
storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But
instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the
cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces
erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge,
even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here,
however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island
or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the
continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have
dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature
on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was
a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli
to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of
cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the
common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have
been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder
neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems
as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting
hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only
three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether
by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful
Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of
Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a
narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach,
between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has
remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the
very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along
which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on
which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the
dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at
least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone
in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by
forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and
retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal
to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather,
it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is
not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the
lake _of_ the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is
a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds
which fly over it fall dead on the earth _or_ into the lake if there
happens to be a lake below them.
“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”
And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same
meaning.
“Spelunca alta fuit....
....tuta lacu nigro nemorum que tenebris,
_Quam_ super” (not quem super, over the cavern, not the lake)
....“haud ullæ poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis....
Unde _locum_” (not _lacum_) “Graii dixerunt nomine Aornon.”
It was the exhalations from the mysterious cavern that were deadly, not
those from the lake. Such an “Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or Valley of
Death, in Java, to which condemned criminals were formerly sent to
perish; whence the romance about the Upas Tree. And such an Avernus, on
a small scale, still exists on the shore of the peaceful little Lake of
Laach in Germany, also an extinct crater: there are spots on its beach
where bird-corpses are to be found in numbers, killed by mephitic
exhalations. But—to return to our lake—it must at that time have lain at
or (like some other extinct craters) below the level of the sea; for
Augustus’s great engineering operation consisted in letting the sea
_into_ the lake.
“Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur æstus Avernis.”
Fifteen hundred years afterwards, and just before the Monte Nuovo
eruption, the place was visited by that painful old topographer, Leandro
Alberti, the Leland of Italy. The channel made by Augustus was then
gone; but the lake was still on a level with the sea, for he asserts
that in storms the sea broke into it: and the water, as he expressly
affirms, was salt. Now, its level is several feet above that of the sea,
and the water is fresh. The upheaval must have been gradual and
peaceful, for the outline of the lonely mere is as perfectly rounded now
as the poet Lycophron described it;—but a portion only of that
bewildering succession of changes of which this coast has been the
theatre: the latest vibration of that vast commotion figured in the
legendary war of the Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a conjecture as
some have deemed it, that the tradition which peopled this bright coast
with Cimmerians—then dwellers in the everlasting mist, on the
border-land between the dead and the living—had its origin in the tales
of primeval navigators, who had visited the neighbourhood during some
mighty and prolonged eruption, covering sea and shore with a permanent
darkness which “might be felt:” like the coast of Iceland in 1783, when
for a whole summer continual eruptions arose from the sea as well as the
land: when “the noxious vapours that for many months infected the air,
enveloped the whole island in a dense fog which obscured the sun, and
was perceptible even in England and Holland.”
Still farther westward in our panoramic view, the confusion between past
and present becomes even more undecipherable. Baiæ has disappeared; a
stately city of pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining foundations,
rose on a hillside in terraces, something like its British counterpart
Bath, but with its foot washed by the Mediterranean instead of the Avon:
so has Misenum, with its naval station: and not only are these towns
gone, but the land on which they stood seems so to have changed its
shape, through earthquakes, marine encroachments, and the labour of men,
that its very outlines are altered, until the eye rests at last on the
peak of Ischia, which ends the semicircle.
Thus much by way of introduction to the more immediate point of our
inquiry: the changes in the general aspect and character of the earth’s
vegetable covering which have taken place in the same period of two
thousand years, and in the same locality.
One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and
even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents,
consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of
vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the
sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in
stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true,
no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France
and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of
Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes
to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking
variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient
times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than
now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the
common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily
clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance.
Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches
left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The
beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish
character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful
beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the
vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my
home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with
their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed
northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling
what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than
may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued
existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural
writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the
evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known
pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the
‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But
what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains
where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived.
His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other
bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust
in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a
tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge
oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as
to a _colonus_ of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the
verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is
that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and
myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the
great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the
grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is
difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty
æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which
formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for
antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some
question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or
whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5]
Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the
more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and
the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done
much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime
Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the
evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the
foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of
the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by
both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater
hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence.
Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem
indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more
majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern
temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too
fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the
human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding
aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish
empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but,
in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become
extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and
by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or
intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains
predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it
ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those
hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the
Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They
have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few
problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to
be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among
the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical
Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair,
and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in
Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy,
nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who
now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France,
can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed
of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the
Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and
_cheveux châtains_. “I sought for the fair population of classical
Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On
the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons,
transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have
impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed
the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly
in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard
lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the
“Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they
regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be
threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning
from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands
of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional
vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of
species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of
England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering
only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar,
acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in
general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed
any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign
plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests
which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of
human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the
Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the
following description of the change which two thousand years have made
in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist
(Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—
“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either
entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations
which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more
northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the
Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare
and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains;
the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty
exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of
these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in
the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and
prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich
flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that
of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the
ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes
of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these
we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ,
pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain
regions in general.”
Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the
Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this
“intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the
regions north of the Mediterranean.
In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says
Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its
ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of
the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are
naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be
ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind.
And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it
was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also
occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often
delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the _nelumbium_, the
hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s
edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed
to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations
are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even
appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a
physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that
strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so
close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”
After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following
conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its
character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former
is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and
cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual
pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of
Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones
have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The
beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not
unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the
outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin,
we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the
spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern
buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with
the pointed Gothic. The “_Pinus halepensis_,” adds Schouw (the common
maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of
course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as
universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the
volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved
olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their
taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the
French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add
to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the
“arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various
uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to
the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures.
And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the
eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to
those on which his descendant gazes now.
But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of
which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we
are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the
Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the
familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes
itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to
the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless
sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to
have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty
children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come
over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented
in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly
the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or _chamærops humilis_.”
A still more important want of classical ages was that of the whole
tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians call them—the orange, lemon, citron,
and so forth. “Italy was not then,” says our Professor, “the land
Wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die gold-orangen glühn;”
and was consequently without one of the favourite features with which
æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions of Italy. They are of course
absent from the frescoes. They were known to Pliny as foreign plants
only. The “Median Apple” (citron) was cultivated in Italy no earlier
than the third century after Christ; lemons came from the Saracens;
oranges, last of all, were brought by the Portuguese from the East.
The white, or silk-worm mulberry, now the commonest of all trees in the
richer parts of Italy, was also unknown to the Pompeians. Its
cultivation on the peninsula began, according to Schouw, in the sixth
century. Silken fabrics were scarce and expensive, and imported by the
Romans from the East. Voltaire somewhere makes the great superiority of
a _femme de chambre_ of Madame de Pompadour over the Empress Livia
consist in the unlimited enjoyment of silk stockings. It may, however,
be questioned whether the Empress would have appreciated such a luxury,
or whether, as the audacious French traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted
respecting the Glasgow ladies not many years ago, she would not have got
rid of such incumbrances whenever free from the restraints of company.
The picturesque Carouba tree (_Ceratonia siliqua_), which now forms
groves along many parts of the Italian coast, is also probably of modern
introduction. We may add another more important plant which the
Professor has omitted—the chestnut. Not, of course, that this
magnificent native of Thessaly was unknown to Roman antiquity. It was,
on the contrary, extensively cultivated in ancient Italy for its fruit.
Naples was particularly famous for the excellence of its chestnuts—
“Quas docta Neapolis creavit,
Lento castaneas vapore tostas”—
such as Martial appetisingly describes, and such as that _flâneur_ of a
poet had doubtless often purchased, scalding hot, from the tripod of
some hag-granddaughter of Canidia or Sagana, in the alleys of the
learned city. But it was probably as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced
but two centuries before Christ,[6] it had not had time to form forests;
to become, as it now is, the characteristic tree of the lower Apennines,
supplanting its ancient but thriftless relative the beech, and driving
the latter back to the narrow domain which it still occupies on the top
of Monte Sant’ Angelo. The gnarled and twisted chestnut trunks, with
their pointed foliage, under which Salvator Rosa studied his art when
sojourning among the brigands at the back of Amalfi, have no counterpart
in the drawings of Pompeii any more than in the poetry of Virgil.
Of cultivated crops, wheat and barley are represented in the Pompeian
frescoes, and grains of them have been discovered in the houses. In one
pretty sketch a quail is picking at an ear of barley; in another at a
kind of millet. Other less known cereals seem to have been familiar to
the ancients. But two of the most important, both in an economic and
picturesque point of view, are missing from these sketches,—maize and
rice. Both are of modern introduction. The “polenta” of the classical
peasant was of barley. Cotton, it need scarcely be added, is of very
modern introduction; it now covers extensive fields at the southern foot
of Vesuvius.
After this long list of acquisitions, we must turn to some few instances
of vegetable forms familiar to the ancient eye, and which the modern
misses. The absolute extinction of a species is indeed a rare thing.
Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’ likens the changes in
vegetation to those which take place in a language: the appearance of a
new word, or a new species, attracts observation at once; the
disappearance of an old one is very gradual, and seldom total. We have
already spoken of the comparative scarcity at present of deciduous
trees, and of one—the æsculus—which modern botanists have been unable to
define. But one or two ornamental foreigners, introduced in old times,
have also disappeared, or nearly so. The most remarkable of these is the
oriental Plane. Every Latin scholar is well aware of the modish passion
for these trees which prevailed among the wealthy Romans, a preference
not wholly æsthetic; it was partly a fashion, borrowed like other
fashions from the despotic East, in days when republican millionaires at
Rome, like those of Washington, had begun to discover that everything
really meritorious came from lands possessing a “strong government.” The
Platanus had been from hoary antiquity the object of veneration of
Persian monarchs and Grecian heroes. No tree had anything like the same
amount of historic and fabulous tradition attached to it. Marsyas was
hanged on one, when duly skinned, by Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus
planted a couple, each of which, a monstrous relic, was shown to
Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes had caused his whole host to halt
before a noble specimen in Lycia. “He was so enamoured of it,” says old
Evelyn, “that for some days neither the concernment of his expedition,
nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army,
could persuade him from it. He styled it his mistress, his minion, his
goddess: and when he was forced to part from it, he caused a picture of
it to be stamped on a model of gold, which he continually wore about
him.” As it is now the glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it was of the
Greek cities of yore. The groves of the Academe and Lyceum were composed
of it. “By the Plane Tree” was the favourite oath of Socrates: the more
shame to him, said his accuser Melitus, that he should blaspheme so fine
a tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said
to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The
Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm
which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his
sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of
its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in
Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and
flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine.
“Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.”
It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as
well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of
every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions.
“Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.”
Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to
form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the
remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at
Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of
an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be,
of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths
march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of
late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an
ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely,
and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to
throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark.
Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe,
as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost
always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the
princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or
button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger
perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the
encroachments of modern democracy.
To the Oriental plane we must add the date-palm: not indeed as strange
now to the Italian eye, nor as very abundant in classical times; but as
certainly more abundant then than now; an exception to the general law
which we have indicated of the increasing prevalence of Southern forms
of vegetation. The date-palm in Italy is, after all, but an occasional
exotic. Mayer, the painstaking German author of a book on ‘Naples and
the Neapolitans,’ says there are scarcely a dozen or two of them in the
gardens of that city and its suburbs. There are eight or ten only in
Rome, says M. Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit. It dwells
uncomfortably, in the uncongenial neighbourhood of the pine; for in
America and other unsophisticated regions, the natural limit of the palm
ends where that of the pine begins. Picturesque as its solitary form
often is, in the villa garden, or behind the convent wall, we cannot
look at it without thinking of some poor captive Saracen maiden,
shivering at the door of a Northern crusading baron. Even on the coast
of the Riviera, where it appears to thrive the most, it affords a
melancholy sight when writhing under the icy Mistral, which ever and
anon turns the flank of the precarious barrier of the Maritime Alps, and
whirls its blasts of snow-dust against the broad leaves. It appears in
many of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw suggests that this does not prove
it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But
the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore
in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.[7] “Vulgo in
Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from
the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of
Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it
in the ‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’ is still more to the point,
when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds,
among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for
making cordage.
“Thus we perceive,” concludes our naturalist, “that the vegetable world,
and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many
changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the
ancient Pompeians enjoyed a great superiority over the moderns in
respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the
arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased
geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their
descendants.”
But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these
relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects
perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and
return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples
of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose
speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such
inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they
inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and
from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the
ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out
of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though
profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’
in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present
catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as
brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark _forward_ and
abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming
degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was
about to fall.
“In peggio
Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida
Ai putridi nipoti
L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema
De’ miseri vendetta.”
For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are
sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection;
but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from
with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse
ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the
last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian
cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region
in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was
the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of
intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can
scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality.
“Credetne virûm ventura propago,
Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt,
Infra urbes populosque premi.”
And yet there are those who persist in cramming us with that dry formula
of Positivism, that each generation enjoys the “accumulated knowledge”
of preceding ones! Ask those countless millions of Chinese who vegetate,
generation after generation, in the vast interior of their empire apart
from all foreign influence, how much of “accumulated knowledge” their
community has gathered since the days of Confucius; ask the black
nations of the interior of Africa what amount of “progress”
distinguishes them from their ancestors known to Herodotus or to Leo
Africanus; ask the wretched remnants of tribes which wander over the
American wilderness, whether their progenitors, the sons of those who
came thither over the ocean, were fewer and feebler and more ignorant
than they? For those who seek truth and not phrases, “progress,” as the
term is used in social science, is an attribute not of mankind, but of
the European family alone; and of that family only since the discovery
of printing. What that incomparably greatest of all merely human events
may have done towards fixing the elements of social improvement, and
converting into a permanent advance that which was before only a
precarious, oscillatory movement, we need not now consider. It may be
that the so-called triumphal march of humanity is now secured from
repulse, and that, as some of our latest speculators seem to hold, the
powers of nature which we employ will begin of themselves to decay
before our capability of employing them abates. But all this, if so,
does not annul the melancholy record of previous periods of loss and
retreat. It is extremely difficult, no doubt, for us to realise those
periods. In our healthy exuberance of life we can hardly conceive a
state of chronic political ebb or decline—a state, that is, in which
each generation, instead of profiting by the “accumulated knowledge” of
its predecessors, lets something of the results of that knowledge drop
from its enfeebled grasp; is reduced in numbers, less provided with the
external comforts of life, weaker against aggression, poorer in
substance, feebler in spirit, inferior in mental acquirements;
nevertheless, such periods have been beyond all doubt. The history of
the Byzantine empire furnishes one well known to all: and many such have
rolled drearily away in the dimmer ages of early time, since the
subjects of Nimrod were dispersed on the plain of Shinar. But let us
take the most familiar, and at the same time the truest, instance of
what we mean, and which happens also to be most germane to the matter in
hand. Could a modern really do what many a visitor to Pompeii has
striven to do in intense eagerness of fancy; could he restore those
truncated columns and repeople those desolate streets, and actually
converse with some cultivated contemporary of Pliny and Juvenal, or
Cicero and Horace; one can fancy that the feeling on both sides, after
the first strangeness of the meeting had been got over, would be one of
surprise, that two specimens of humanity of such distant origin could
have so much in common. In moral and social philosophy; in political
speculation; in appreciation of eloquence, literature, art, they would
really find themselves—some exceptions apart which would give zest to
the conversation—almost on the same ground. In respect of matters of
still more intimate interest—the inner clothing, as it were, of
civilised existence—in their estimate of physical and mental pursuits,
tendencies, weaknesses, pleasures, and pains, and their relation to each
other—each would feel that he understood his companion; each would be
conscious, as it were, of possessing a key to many of the other’s inmost
feelings. This would be partly owing, no doubt, to the circumstance that
the ancients have been our tutors, and that much of our mental furniture
is derived directly from them. But also, in great measure, to mere
similarity of circumstances, which engenders similarity of ideas.
Civilisations so nearly resembling each other, even in many points of
minuteness, as those of modern Europe and of the Rome of Cicero or the
Athens of Demosthenes, must, from the necessity of the case, have
strongly corresponding spiritual and mental emotions, and corresponding
language wherein to express them.
Now let us alter the picture: let the man of the nineteenth century wake
up under the shadow of Winchester or Canterbury Cathedral, such as the
Saxons had reared them, and, to give him the best company of the day,
let him consort with a baron or an abbot of the time of the Norman
conquest. Except the subject of religion, of which we would not now
speak, what single topic could they have in common? Would they not be
separated from each other by a barrier as high and strong as any which
divides contemporary civilised from savage man? What object (except
possibly horses and dogs), could they appreciate together? What points
of morals or science or politics, small talk, sentiment, or humour,
would suit them both? How could they argue on premises which one would
assume as certain and the other would treat with contempt? The medieval
wight would certainly rate the modern at a very different value from his
own estimate of himself; and if the modern escaped with a whole skin
from the interview, which is greatly to be doubted of, he would find his
romantic respect for the baron, or veneration for the ecclesiastic, very
little increased. They would be denizens of alien spheres, and would
converse in utterly dissonant tongues.
And yet the Norman was our countryman; was nearer to us by many an age
than the Roman; and possessed the “accumulated knowledge” (had such a
thing really existed before the invention of printing), of many an
intervening generation. But these were in truth generations of decline,
not of advance; a decline often hardly sensible, or arrested for a time,
but on the whole prodigious. And if the enthusiastic disciple of
progress chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant exceptions to his
general theory of flow, let us remember that a space of a thousand
years, however unimportant to a geologist, is a considerable fraction of
the historical existence of man.
And this, as many have said, though not many truly feel it, is one of
the most real advantages of classical study, and one of the charms which
make us turn back to it with recurring affection, after resultless
wanderings in company with the “Positivists.” He who has imbibed its
lessons deeply can hardly find his judgment much affected by those
metaphors turned into arguments which pass commonly current, likening
the youth, manhood, and old age of the world to those of an individual;
nor will he readily adopt the formulas of a recent clever writer of the
Positive school, that “we may expect to find, in the history of man,
each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the
preceding,” and that “this power, whereby the present ever gathers into
itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a
colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of
judgment.” Classical study made men pedants, after a fashion, two
centuries ago; at present its effect is to preserve them from an equally
tasteless and less innocent pedantry. By bringing clearly before our
view that magnificent phantasma of great communities entombed, and great
conceptions buried with them, it weakens the ordinary temptation to
overvalue ourselves and our age. It displays to us the vast ocean of
moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of
rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining
ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that
“Excelsior” tendency which elevates but often misleads us—an
indiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species.