A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief
severity of a Roman winter is already past, and when violets and daisies
begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came
out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and walked briskly along
the Appian Way.
For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous
road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues.
It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and
plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as
almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are of
most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social;
they have seldom or never a door opening on the wayside, but are
accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller
through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn or a
wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance, within
which you discern a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests
refresh themselves with sour bread and goats’-milk cheese, washed down
with wine of dolorous acerbity.
At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an ancient
tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high and broken
mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten
by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were
composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were
cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully
wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered
majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique
splendor has long since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the
palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonored
sepulchres, except their massiveness.
Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien
from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their
gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements,
and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you
may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees,
perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of
fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on
that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and
successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman
whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a
crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad
sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years
of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more
modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is
now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the
tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to
endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and summon forth
its unknown dead.
Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious
of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just
as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a
headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to
think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.
About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile, sepulchral in its
original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of
great blocks of hewn stone, on a vast, square foundation of rough,
agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other
ruinous tombs. But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far
better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so long
since had time begun to crumble the supplemental structure, and cover
it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick
festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel and
donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella’s husband
could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics, had only
sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles,
long ages after her death.
A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian
Way, and directed his course across the Campagna, guided by tokens that
were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the
Claudian aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses. Before him,
many miles away, with a blue atmosphere between, rose the Alban hills,
brilliantly silvered with snow and sunshine.
He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and
sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to make acquaintance with
him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature
gambolled along, now before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at
him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy head,
as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear, he came
galloping up, like a charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a sudden,
when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna at the
slightest signal of nearer approach. The young, sportive thing, Kenyon
half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like the heifer that led
Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in spite of a hundred
vagaries, his general course was in the right direction, and along by
several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks of his way.
In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy form of animal life,
there was something that wonderfully revived Kenyon’s spirits. The warm
rays of the sun, too, were wholesome for him in body and soul; and so
was a breeze that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the sole
purpose of breathing upon his cheek and dying softly away, when he would
fain have felt a little more decided kiss. This shy but loving breeze
reminded him strangely of what Hilda’s deportment had sometimes been
towards himself.
The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these genial and
delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so happy with mere life,
in spite of a head and heart full of doleful thoughts, anxieties, and
fears, which ought in all reason to have depressed him. It was like no
weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly
not in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side either of
heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry, as it would have
been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather than what we
New Englanders recognize in our idea of spring. But there was an
indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate, which
the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled, and, as it were, tickled
Kenyon’s heart with a feeling partly of the senses, yet far more a
spiritual delight. In a word, it was as if Hilda’s delicate breath were
on his cheek.
After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour, he reached a
spot where an excavation appeared to have been begun, at some not
very distant period. There was a hollow space in the earth, looking
exceedingly like a deserted cellar, being enclosed within old
subterranean walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made
accessible by a narrow flight of stone steps. A suburban villa had
probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of Rome, and these
might have been the ruins of a bathroom, or some other apartment that
was required to be wholly or partly under ground. A spade can scarcely
be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things, without
hitting upon some discovery which would attract all eyes, in any other
land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of precious marble,
coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper, you break into
columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed apartments that look
like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.
The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and sat down on a
block of stone. His eagerness had brought him thither sooner than
the appointed hour. The sunshine fell slantwise into the hollow, and
happened to be resting on what Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless
fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed by the
crumbling down of earth.
But his practised eye was soon aware of something artistic in this rude
object. To relieve the anxious tedium of his situation, he cleared
away some of the soil, which seemed to have fallen very recently, and
discovered a headless figure of marble. It was earth stained, as well it
might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but at once impressed the
sculptor as a Greek production, and wonderfully delicate and beautiful.
The head was gone; both arms were broken off at the elbow. Protruding
from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld the fingers of a marble
hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a little further search
enabled him to find the other. Placing these limbs in what the nice
adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the
poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest
instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and snatched them
back at the moment of revival. For these long-buried hands immediately
disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique
artist knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de’ Medici.
“What a discovery is here!” thought Kenyon to himself. “I seek for
Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good or ill?”
In a corner of the excavation lay a small round block of stone, much
incrusted with earth that had dried and hardened upon it. So, at least,
you would have described this object, until the sculptor lifted it,
turned it hither and thither in his hands, brushed off the clinging
soil, and finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly discovered
statue. The effect was magical. It immediately lighted up and vivified
the whole figure, endowing it with personality, soul, and intelligence.
The beautiful Idea at once asserted its immortality, and converted that
heap of forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect to the mind, if not
to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with snowy lustre; nor was
the impression marred by the earth that still hung upon the exquisitely
graceful limbs, and even filled the lovely crevice of the lips. Kenyon
cleared it away from between them, and almost deemed himself rewarded
with a living smile.
It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the
Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied with the small head, the
narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous statue,
and its mouth such as nature never moulded, should see the genial
breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one of the few
works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood, and that,
moreover, without prejudice to its divinity.
Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have found! How happened
it to be lying there, beside its grave of twenty centuries? Why were not
the tidings of its discovery already noised abroad? The world was richer
than yesterday, by something far more precious than gold. Forgotten
beauty had come back, as beautiful as ever; a goddess had risen from her
long slumber, and was a goddess still. Another cabinet in the Vatican
was destined to shine as lustrously as that of the Apollo Belvedere;
or, if the aged pope should resign his claim, an emperor would woo this
tender marble, and win her as proudly as an imperial bride!
Such were the thoughts with which Kenyon exaggerated to himself the
importance of the newly discovered statue, and strove to feel at least
a portion of the interest which this event would have inspired in him a
little while before. But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix
his mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be reckoned a
consummate artist, because there was something dearer to him than his
art; and, by the greater strength of a human affection, the divine
statue seemed to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of worthless
fragments.
While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of
small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the Campagna; and soon his frisky
acquaintance, the buffalo-calf, came and peeped over the edge of the
excavation. Almost at the same moment he heard voices, which approached
nearer and nearer; a man’s voice, and a feminine one, talking the
musical tongue of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his four footed
friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making
gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow
space.