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_ It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief
severity of a Roman winter is already past, and when violets and
daisies begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The
sculptor came out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and
walked briskly along the Appian Way.
For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and
famous road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman
avenues. It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between
brick and plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so
high as almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The
houses are of most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor
homelike and social; they have seldom or never a door opening on the
wayside, but are accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably
upon the traveller through iron-grated windows. Here and there
appears a dreary inn or a wine-shop, designated by the withered bush
beside the entrance, within which you discern a stone-built and
sepulchral interior, where guests refresh themselves with sour bread
and goats'-milk cheese, washed down with wine of dolorous acerbity.
At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an
ancient tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high
and broken mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth,
all molten by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each
tomb were composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected,
they were cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble,
artfully wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and
were rendered majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs.
This antique splendor has long since been stolen from the dead, to
decorate the palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to
the dishonored sepulchres, except their massiveness.
Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien
from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their
gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements,
and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here
you may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and
olive-trees, perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms
a precipice of fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There
is a home on that funereal mound, where generations of children have
been born, and successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost
of the stern Roman whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other
sepulchres wear a crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which
throw out a broad sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to
be a thousand years of age. On one of them stands a tower, which,
though immemorially more modern than the tomb, was itself built by
immemorial hands, and is now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast
fissure of decay; the tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as
firm as ever, and likely to endure until the last trump shall rend it
wide asunder, and summon forth its unknown dead.
Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion.
Ambitious of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers
might just as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole
of a columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard,
without a headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than
otherwise, to think that all these idle pains have turned out so
utterly abortive.
About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile, sepulchral in its
original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of
great blocks of hewn stone, on a vast, square foundation of rough,
agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other
ruinous tombs. But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far
better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so
long since had time begun to crumble the supplemental structure, and
cover it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and
thick festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel
and donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella's
husband could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics,
had only sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus
of battles, long ages after her death.
A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian
Way, and directed his course across the Campagna, guided by tokens
that were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a
distance, the Claudian aqueduct was striding over fields and
watercourses. Before him, many miles away, with a blue atmosphere
between, rose the Alban hills, brilliantly silvered with snow and
sunshine.
He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and
sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to make acquaintance with
him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature
gambolled along, now before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at
him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy
head, as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear,
he came galloping up, like a charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a
sudden, when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the
Campagna at the slightest signal of nearer approach. The young,
sportive thing, Kenyon half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like
the heifer that led Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in
spite of a hundred vagaries, his general course was in the right
direction, and along by several objects which the sculptor had noted
as landmarks of his way.
In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy form of animal
life, there was something that wonderfully revived Kenyon's spirits.
The warm rays of the sun, too, were wholesome for him in body and soul;
and so was a breeze that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the
sole purpose of breathing upon his cheek and dying softly away, when
he would fain have felt a little more decided kiss. This shy but
loving breeze reminded him strangely of what Hilda's deportment had
sometimes been towards himself.
The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these genial and
delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so happy with mere life,
in spite of a head and heart full of doleful thoughts, anxieties, and
fears, which ought in all reason to have depressed him. It was like
no weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy;
certainly not in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side
either of heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry, as it
would have been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather
than what we New Englanders recognize in our idea of spring. But
there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely
affectionate, which the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled, and,
as it were, tickled Kenyon's heart with a feeling partly of the
senses, yet far more a spiritual delight. In a word, it was as if
Hilda's delicate breath were on his cheek.
After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour, he reached a
spot where an excavation appeared to have been begun, at some not very
distant period. There was a hollow space in the earth, looking
exceedingly like a deserted cellar, being enclosed within old
subterranean walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made
accessible by a narrow flight of stone steps. A suburban villa had
probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of Rome, and these
might have been the ruins of a bathroom, or some other apartment that
was required to be wholly or partly under ground. A spade can
scarcely be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things,
without hitting upon some discovery which would attract all eyes, in
any other land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of
precious marble, coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper,
you break into columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed
apartments that look like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.
The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and sat down on a
block of stone. His eagerness had brought him thither sooner than the
appointed hour. The sunshine fell slantwise into the hollow, and
happened to be resting on what Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless
fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed by the
crumbling down of earth.
But his practised eye was soon aware of something artistic in this
rude object. To relieve the anxious tedium of his situation, he
cleared away some of the soil, which seemed to have fallen very
recently, and discovered a headless figure of marble. It was earth
stained, as well it might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but
at once impressed the sculptor as a Greek production, and wonderfully
delicate and beautiful. The head was gone; both arms were broken off
at the elbow. Protruding from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld
the fingers of a marble hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a
little further search enabled him to find the other. Placing these
limbs in what the nice adjustment of the fractures proved to be their
true position, the poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she
retained her modest instincts to the last. She had perished with them,
and snatched them back at the moment of revival. For these
long-buried hands immediately disposed themselves in the manner that
nature prompts, as the antique artist knew, and as all the world has
seen, in the Venus de' Medici.
"What a discovery is here!" thought Kenyon to himself. "I seek for
Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good or ill?"
In a corner of the excavation lay a small round block of stone, much
incrusted with earth that had dried and hardened upon it. So, at
least, you would have described this object, until the sculptor lifted
it, turned it hither and thither in his hands, brushed off the
clinging soil, and finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly
discovered statue. The effect was magical. It immediately lighted up
and vivified the whole figure, endowing it with personality, soul, and
intelligence. The beautiful Idea at once asserted its immortality,
and converted that heap of forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect
to the mind, if not to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with
snowy lustre; nor was the impression marred by the earth that still
hung upon the exquisitely graceful limbs, and even filled the lovely
crevice of the lips. Kenyon cleared it away from between them, and
almost deemed himself rewarded with a living smile.
It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the
Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied with the small head,
the narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous
statue, and its mouth such as nature never moulded, should see the
genial breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one
of the few works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood,
and that, moreover, without prejudice to its divinity.
Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have found! How
happened it to be lying there, beside its grave of twenty centuries?
Why were not the tidings of its discovery already noised abroad? The
world was richer than yesterday, by something far more precious than
gold. Forgotten beauty had come back, as beautiful as ever; a goddess
had risen from her long slumber, and was a goddess still. Another
cabinet in the Vatican was destined to shine as lustrously as that of
the Apollo Belvedere; or, if the aged pope should resign his claim, an
emperor would woo this tender marble, and win her as proudly as an
imperial bride!
Such were the thoughts with which Kenyon exaggerated to himself the
importance of the newly discovered statue, and strove to feel at least
a portion of the interest which this event would have inspired in him
a little while before. But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix
his mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be reckoned a
consummate artist, because there was something dearer to him than his
art; and, by the greater strength of a human affection, the divine
statue seemed to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of
worthless fragments.
While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of
small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the Campagna; and soon his frisky
acquaintance, the buffalo-calf, came and peeped over the edge of the
excavation. Almost at the same moment he heard voices, which
approached nearer and nearer; a man's voice, and a feminine one,
talking the musical tongue of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his
four footed friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a
contadina, making gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge
of the hollow space. _
Read next: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLVII - THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
Read previous: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLV - THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES
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