I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its
colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the bay. ’Twas the Vesuvius
range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance constructed the
monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no dragon has
wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes imperturbably while
the generations rise and fall. Beautiful the smoke, too, when it grows
golden in the setting sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous
purple. We wonder men should still build on Vesuvius—betwixt the devil
and the deep sea—yet the chances of eruption are no greater than the
chances of epidemic in less salubrious places, as the plague-churches of
Italy testify.
But should a new eruption overwhelm Pompeii, and its first record be
lost, there were a strange puzzle for the antiquarians of the fiftieth
century exhuming its cosmopolitan population; blonde German savages in
white pot-hats, ancient Britons in tweeds, extinct American
cycle-centaurs; incongruously resident amid the narrow streets and wide
public buildings of a prehistoric Roman civilisation.
Pompeii is buried some twenty feet deep. The Middle Ages walked over
these entombed streets and temples and suspected nothing. But all towns
are built on their dead past, for earth’s crust renews itself as
incessantly as our own skin. We walk over our ancestors. There are
twenty-seven layers of human life at Rome.
It needs no earth-convulsions, no miracles of lava. One generation of
cities succeeds another. Nature, a pious Andromache, covers up their
remains as softly as the snow falls or the grass grows. When man
uncovers them again, he finds stratum below stratum, city below city, as
though the whole were some quaint American structure of many storeys
which the earth had swallowed at a single gulp, and not with her stately
deglutition. At Gezer in Palestine Macalister has been dissecting a
tumulus which holds layers of human history as the rocks hold layers of
earth-history. Scratch the mound and you find the traces of an Arab
city, slice deeper and ’tis a Crusaders’ city; an undercut brings you to
the Roman city whence—by another short cut—you descend to the Old
Testament; to the city that was dowered to Solomon’s Egyptian Queen, to
the Philistine city, and so to the Canaanite city. But even here Gezer
is but at its prime. You have sunk through all the Christian era,
through all the Jewish era, but fifteen centuries still await your
descent. Down you delve—through the city captured by Thotmes III,
through the city of the early Semites, till at last your pick strikes
the Hivites and the Amorites, the cave-men of the primitive Gezer.
Infinitely solemn such a tumulus in its imperturbable chronicling, with
its scarabs and altars, its spear-heads and its gods, the bones of its
foundation-sacrifices yet undecayed. The Judgment Books need no
celestial clerks, no recording angels; earth keeps them as she rolls. In
our eyes, too, as we gaze upon this ant-heap of our breed, a thousand
years are but as a day—nay, as a dream that passeth in the night. We
are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded
with a mound. Beside Gezer, Pompeii and Herculaneum are theatrical,
flamboyant, the creatures of a day, the parvenus of the underworld.
Mentally, too, strange ancestral strata lie in our deeps, even as the
remains of an alimentary canal run through our spine and a primitive eye
lies in the middle of our brain—that pineal gland in which Descartes
located the soul. Sometimes we stumble over an old prejudice or a
primitive emotion, prick ourselves with an arrow of ancestral
conscience, and tremble with an ancient fear. Mayhap in slumber we
descend to these regions, exploring below our consciousness and delving
in the catacombs of antiquity.
The destruction of Pompeii was effected, however, not by Vesuvius, but
by the antiquarian. He it was to whom Pompeii fell as a spoil, he who
turned Pompeii from a piece of life to a piece of learning, by
transporting most of its treasures to a museum. The word is surely short
for mausoleum. For objects in a museum are dead, their relations with
life ended. Objects partake of the lives of their possessors, and when
cut off are as dead as finger-nails. A vase dominating the court of a
Pompeian house and a vase in the Naples Museum are as a creature to its
skeleton. What a stimulation in the one or two houses left with their
living reality—their frescoes and their furniture, their kitchens and
middens! ’Tis statues that suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly
rows. A statue is an æsthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the close
of a vista. See that sunlit statue of Meleager in the grounds of the
Villa Medici, at the end of a green avenue, with pillar and architrave
for background, and red and white roses climbing around it, and imagine
how its glory would be shorn in a gallery. The French have remembered to
put the Venus of Milo at the end of a long Louvre corridor, which she
fills with her far-seen radiance. These collections of Capolavori—these
Apollos and Jupiters, and Venuses and Muses, dumped as close as cemetery
monuments—are indeed petrified. The fancy must resurrect them into
their living relations with halls and courtyards, temples and piazzas,
shrines and loggias. The learned begin to suspect that the polytheism of
Greece and Rome is due to the analogous aggregation of local gods, each
a self-sufficing and all-powerful divinity in its own district. When
there were so many deities, their functions had to be differentiated, as
we give a different shade of meaning to two words for the same thing.
Were one to collect the many Madonnas in Italy, one might imagine
Christianity as polytheistic as Paganism.
But the most perfect visualising of a god’s statue in its local setting
will not annul that half-death which sets in with the statue’s loss of
worship. These fair visions of Pallas and Juno, shall they ever touch us
as they touched the pious Pagan? Nay, not all our sense of lovely line
and spiritual grace can replace that departed touch of divinity.
The past has indeed its glamour for us, which serves perhaps as
compensation for what we lose of the hot reality, but an inevitable
impiety clings to our inquisitive regard, to our anxious exhumation of
its secrets. Unless we go to it with our emotions as well as our
intellect, prepared to extract its spiritual significance and to warm
ourselves at the fire of its life and pour a libation to the gods of its
hearth, a wilderness of archæological lore will profit us little. A man
is other than his garments and a people than its outworn shell.
There is perhaps more method than appears at first sight in the madness
of the Turk, who reluctantly permits the scientific explorer to dig up
the past but insists that once he has unearthed his historic treasure,
his buried streets and temples, ay, of old Jerusalem itself, he shall
cover them up again. The dead past is to bury its dead. Death, whether
in citizens or their cities, is sacred. Cursed be he who turns up their
bones to the sun. And who will not sigh over the mummies, doomed to be
served up in museums after five thousand years of dignified death?
Princesses and potentates were they in their lives; how could they
dream, as they were borne in their purpureal litters through the streets
of the Pharaohs, that they would make a spectacle for barbarians on wet
half-holidays? And thou, Timhotpu, prefect of the very Necropolis of
Thebes in the eighteenth dynasty, how couldst thou suspect that even thy
gilded sarcophagus would be violated, thy golden earrings wrenched off,
thy mortuary furniture stolen, and thy fine figure exhibited to me in
the Turin Museum, turned into a grey char under thy winding-sheet! The
very eggs placed in the tombs of thy cemetery have kept their colour
better: one feels that under heat they might still hatch a hieroglyphic
chicken. But thou art for evermore desiccated and done with.
Saddest of all is the fate of the immortals: goddesses of the hearth and
gods of the heaven are alike swept into the museum-limbo. They are
shrunk to mythology, they who once charioted the constellations. For
mythology dogs all theologies, and one god after another is put on the
bookshelf.
All roads lead to the museum. Thither go our old clothes, our old coins,
our old creeds, and we wonder that men should ever have worn steel
armour or cast-iron dogmas. Gazing at the Pompeian man, that “cunning
cast in clay,” whose clutch at his money-bags survives his bodily
investiture, who does not feel as one from another planet surveying an
earth pygmy? What strange limited thoughts were thine, O Pompeian of the
first century! I warrant thou hadst not even heard of the Man of
Nazareth: how small thine atlas of the world, not to say thy chart of
the heavens! Poor ignoramus—so unacquainted with all that hath happened
since thy death! How wise and weighty thou wast at thy table, recumbent
amidst thy roses, surrounded by those gay frescoes of Cupids and
Venuses; with what self-satisfaction thou didst lay down the Roman law,
garlanded as to thy narrow forehead!
But if ’tis easy to play the Superman with this fusty provincial, ’tis
not hard to smell the museum must in our own living world. Too many
people and things do not know they are essentially of the museum: have
the arrogance to imagine they are contemporary. How full of life seems
the cannon as it belches death! Yet ’tis but an uncouth, noisy creature,
long since outgrown and outmoded among the humanised citizens of the
planet; some day it will be hunted out like the wolf and the boar, with
a price upon its mouth.
’Tis to the stage that extinct human types betake themselves by way of
after-life—the theatre serving as the anthropological museum—but there
are some that linger unconscionably on this side of the footlights.
Bigots, for example, have an air of antediluvian bipeds, monstrous
wildfowl that flap and shriek. I even gaze curiously at Gold Sticks and
pages of the Presence. They are become spectacular, and to be
spectacular is to be well on the way to the museum. Mistrust the
spasmodic splendour—leap of the dying flame. Where traditions must be
pored over, and performers rehearsed, it has become a play; is propped
on precedent instead of uplifted by sap. The passion for ritual is one
of the master-passions of humanity. Yet stage properties can never
return to the world of reality. The profession will tell you that they
are sold off to inferior theatres, never to the real world outside. What
passes into the museum can never repass the janitor.
On the leaders of life lies in each generation the duty of establishing
the museum-point. The museum-point in thought, art, morals. No matter
that obsolete modes prevail in the vulgar world: do the ladies allow the
mob to dictate their fashions? Hath a bonnet existence because it
survives in Seven Dials or the Bowery? Is a creed alive because it
flourishes in Little Bethel? Man is one vast being, and the thought of
his higher nerve-centres alone counts: generation hands the torch to
generation. Doubtless the lower ganglia are not always ready for the new
conception. But such considerations belong to Politics, not to Truth. At
the worst the map must be made while the march is preparing.