They Still Make But A Poor Show
There Beside The Treasures Of Herculaneum, Where The Excavation Of A Few
Streets And Houses Has Yielded Costlier And Lovelier Things Than All The
Lengths And Breadths Of Pompeii.
But not for this would I turn against
Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesthetically enriched me beyond my first.
I keep the vision of it under
that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and
the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have
been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle
slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than
alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is
curiously without pathos; Newport in ruins might not be touching;
possibly all skeletons or even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii
is a skeleton, or at the most a mummy, of the past.
Seeing what antiquity so largely was, however, one might be not only
resigned but cheerful in the ef-facement of any particular piece of it;
and for a help to this at Pompeii I may advise the reader to take with
him a certain little guide-book, written in English by a very courageous
Italian, which I chanced to find in Naples. Though it treats of the
tragical facts with seriousness, it is not with equal gravity that one
reads that sixteen years before the Vesuvian eruption "the region had
been shaken by strong sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants
to forsake precipitately their habitations. But being the amazement up,
they got one's home again as soon as the earth was quiet and all fear
and sadness went off by memory." Signs of the final disaster to follow
were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were crossed by
currents of carbonic acid; "the domestic animals were also very sensible
of the approaching of the scourge; they lost the habitual vivacity, and
having the food in disgust, had from time to time to complain with
mournful wailings, without justified reasons. . . . The sky became of a
thick darkness, . . . interrupted only by flashes of light which the
lava riverberated, by the bloody gliding of the thunderbolts, by the
incandescence of enormous projectiles, thrown to an incommensurable
highness. . . . Death surprised the charming town; houses and streets
became the tombs of the unhappies hit by an atrocious torture."
The author's study of the life of Pompeii is notable for diction which,
if there were logic in language, would be admirable English, for while
yet in his mind it must have been "very choice Italian." He tells us
that "Pompei's dwellings are surprising by their specific littleness,"
and explains that "Pompei inhabitants, for the habitudes of the climate
could allow, lived almost always to the open sky," just as the Naples
inhabitants do now. "They got home only to rest a little, to fulfill
life wants, to be protected by bad weather.
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