Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it
would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in
fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase
in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much
more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the
tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise
my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their
full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all
unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have
lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is
seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and
though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the
city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I
thought.
But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its
greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction,
and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance
of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.
Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a
matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of
his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and
travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life
and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can
remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to
which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can
rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a _valet de place_ of
the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he
is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the
empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with
the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently
step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops
of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run
across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top,
through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not
sullen lumps of ashes; those stately _amphoræ_ behind are full of
wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.
"This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
"It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people
in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an
every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins
of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman
women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy
heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for
our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the
street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the
day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more
offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the
personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change
for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time,
and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we
do.
(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for
himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among
the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola
has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all
the speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha!
my Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step
down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)