In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English
names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering
to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road:
"This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to
buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a
favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the
whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the
bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their
windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses
opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It
was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of
New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum,
leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.
This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre,
bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the
water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is
built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain
on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive
layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the
virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast
deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you
descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the
outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous
theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been
had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which
I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by
the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly
dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last
century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the
foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself
so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should
not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of
classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)
But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain
any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent
bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to
the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of
Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works
of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue
a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third
of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old
times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst
attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its
contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the
variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.
The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor
to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of
Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the
opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two
or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and
knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and
lava bestow!
Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor
extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the
custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient
population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing
the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream
already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed
quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters
perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in
Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be
guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of
Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels
toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary,
he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and
he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the
ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni,
signori! ma----." At the end, we find that he has some medallions of
lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the _partito
d'azione_, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of
Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We
decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace
(signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes
his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that
we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his
great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his
face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we
nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.