They
are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let
them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be
allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a
corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.
What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,
with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly
misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise
a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,
or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.
My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....
Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit
the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the
spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long
paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they
hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.
Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They
cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion.
Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes
of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after
life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect.
Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others
are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed
crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered
fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the
defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should
once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that
these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of
the skull - a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and
which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of
the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.
One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle
Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose
civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to
transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and
mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair
attached to contorted limbs - they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome
link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between
them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish.
They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of
your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over - -
Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative
and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid
lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare
phenomenon - life, and individuality, after death. They are more
noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or
at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of
them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness
out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of
night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and
flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at
that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not
easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made
flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming
been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have
been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to
how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror,
against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The
nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards
Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose
creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of
the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to
those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the
bodies of their dear friends and relatives....
Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for
something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the
kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he
be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the
body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who,
during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's
fleeting outline - so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that
every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and
texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a
suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in
the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm.
Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.
Alatri
What brought me to Alatri?
Memories of a conversation, by Tiber banks, with Fausto, who was born
here and vaunted it to be the fairest city on earth. Rome was quite a
passable place, but as to Alatri - -
"You never saw such walls in all your life. They are not walls. They are
precipices. And our water is colder than the Acqua Marcia."
"Walls and water say little to me. But if the town produces other
citizens like yourself - - "
"It does indeed! I am the least of the sons of Alatri."
"Then it must be worthy of a visit...."
In the hottest hour of the afternoon they deposited me outside the city
gate at some new hotel - I forget its name - to which I promptly took an
unreasoning dislike.
