Loitering in Pleasant Paths

by Marion Harland

The streets are all alleys, like this first, laid with heavy polygonal blocks of tufa, and grooved—most deeply and sharply at the corners—by wheels. The ruts of Glaucus’ chariot-wheels! But what were the dimensions of the bronze vehicle “of the most fastidious and graceful fashion,” drawn by two horses of Parthian breed that “glided rapidly” by others of the same build between these blocks of buildings? Or was there a Pompeian law requiring those who went in a certain direction to proceed by specified streets?

We were not prepared for the difficulty of ascertaining which was the West End of the town which Glaucus tells Clodius, “had the brilliancy of luxury without the lassitude of its pomp.” Nearly every house has a shop attached to it. “Stalls” we would style them, in which the brick counter, formerly covered with marble, takes up at least half the room. The shops were closed at night by wooden doors or shutters filling up the entire width of the front. These, having decayed or burned away, the visitor steps from the street into the cell walled in on three sides, and roofless. The entrance to the dwelling had no connection whatever with the stall built on to it. If this was the proprietor’s abode, he, in genuine Epicurean fashion, “sank the shop” out of work-hours. It is supposed that the wealthier citizens rented their street-fronts at a high rate, to tradespeople, without the consequent depreciation of gentility that would befall a member of New York uppertendom, were he to “live over” or back of a “store.” Another surprise was the band-box tenements in which people who made more account of ease and beauty than of their own immortality, contrived to live. The vestibule, running beside the shop-wall from the street into the Lilliputian mansion, is scarcely five feet wide in some of the best houses. The court-yard behind is not larger than a square table-cloth; the fountain-basin in the middle resembles a big punch-bowl. Beyond this, separated now by a marble or paved walk, formerly, also, by a curtain that could be raised or lowered, is a larger court. This part of the building was devoted to such public dealings as the owner might have with the outer world. Here he received office-seekers, beggars and book-agents; paid bills and gave orders. The family court—the peristylium—was still further back, and usually raised by the height of a marble step above the second. This was enclosed by pillars, painted red, a quarter of the way up,—the rest white. Another curtain shut in this sanctum from the general gaze. In the middle of the court was a flower-bed, its centre a fountain. About these three courts were built dining-room, kitchen, dressing- and bed-rooms and other family apartments. The upper stories were of wood and usually occupied as servants’ dormitories. These have slowly mouldered away, having been, some think, calcined by the hot ashes. There are, of course, variations upon this plan, and some mansions of respectable size without the commercial attachment, but the above may serve as an outline draught of the typical Pompeian dwelling, even of the richer classes.

“Have you read the ‘Last Days of Pompeii?’” the guide amazed us by saying when we had wandered in his wake for an hour.

We had a copy with us and showed it to him. He believed it to be an Italian work, it presently appeared, having read it in that language, sans preface, we suppose, for he also accepted it as sober, veracious history. We allowed ourselves to share his delusion in beholding the plot of ground—a sheet would have covered it—in which Nydia tended the flowers of Glaucus; the shrine of the Penates at the back of the peristyle; the triclinum—or banqueting-room in which the young Greek supped with Lepidus, Pansa, Sallust, Clodius and his umbra; where the slave-carver “performed that office upon the Ambracian kid to the sound of music, his knife keeping time, beginning with a low tenor, and accomplishing the arduous feat amidst a magnificent diapason.”

The apartment is, like the others, small but well-proportioned, and the frescoes are still quite distinct. We allotted places to the host and his several guests about an imaginary table, the guide smiling at our animated interest without a misgiving that the dramatis personæ were dream-children of Signore Bulwer’s brain. I dare not attempt his Italianization of the noble author’s title. Workmen were repairing the step by which we left the inner court for the tablium, or master’s office. An accident had shivered the marble sheathing and several bits were cast aside as worthless. With the guide’s sanction, I pocketed them, and afterward had them made into dainty little salvers, purely clear as the finest Parian, or the enamored Glaucus’ ideal of Ione—“that nymph-like beauty which for months had shone down upon the waters of his memory.”

The silence that has its home in the deserted city is something to dream of,—not describe. The town is swept and clean—doubtless cleaner than when the gargoyles on the fountains at every other corner gushed with fresh winter. That the Pompeians were a thirsty race, water- as well as wine-bibbers,—is distinctly proved by the hollows worn in the stone sides of these enclosed hydrants, just where a man would rest his hand and lean his whole weight to swing his body around in order to bring his lips in contact with the stream from the carved spout. No. 27 showed us how it was done and by the simple action made stillness and solitude more profound. Thousands of swarthy hands—the callous palms of laborer and peasant,—must have rested thus for hundreds of years to produce such abrasion of the solid stone. And here were he and five pale-faced strangers,—the only living things in sight in a street of yawning shop-fronts, built in compact blocks; to the right a grove of columns and expanse of tessellated flooring—the Temple of Justice, to which none now resorted, to which none would ever come again for redress or penalty, while Time endures. Wherever the eye fell were temples of deities whose names live only in mythology and in song, the shrines and fanes of a dead Religion. This was the strangest sight of all;—in this professedly Christian land, temples and altars with the traces of slain and bloodless sacrifices that had smoked upon them, to Mercury and Jupiter and Venus. There was the temple of Isis—whose statue we saw, subsequently, in the Neapolitan Museum,—with the chamber where the priests held their foul orgies, and the secret passage by which they reached the speaking-tube concealed in the body of the goddess; and the room in which Calenus and Burbo were found. An earthquake may have overthrown upper chambers and toppled down images but yesterday. Yet it is a city in which there is not the sign of a cross, or other token that Christ was born and died; whose last inhabitants and worshippers ate, drank, married and were given in marriage in the name of Juno, while He walked the earth.

I have said that Pompeii is a band-box edition that looks like a caricature of a town in which men once lived and traded and reveled. The bed-rooms in the houses of Glaucus, Sallust, Pansa and even in Diomed’s Villa, are no larger than the wardrobe closet of a Philadelphia mechanic’s wife. A brick projection fills up one side. On this the bed was laid. In some there are no windows; in others were slits to admit air, but through which, owing to the thickness of the walls and the contiguity of other buildings, little light could have entered. The positive assertion of guide-books that window-glass was unknown to the Pompeians is contradicted by the recent excavation of a house in which a fragment of a pane still adheres to one of these apertures. We saw it and can testify that it was a bit of indubitable glass, set firmly in its casing. How Julia and Ione contrived to light their dressing-rooms sufficiently to make such toilettes as we see in ancient paintings, baffles our invention when we look at the glimmering loop-holes and the tiny lamps that held but a few thimblefuls of perfumed oil. Bulwer calls the cubicula and boudoirs “petty pigeon-holes,” but alleges that these darkened chambers were “the effect of the most elaborate study”—that “they sought coolness and shade.” We are dubious, in reading further of the fair Julia’s toilette-appointments, that her “eye, accustomed to a certain darkness, was sufficiently acute to perceive exactly what colors were the most becoming—what shade of the delicate rouge gave the brightest beam to her dark glance,” etc. In one house of the better—i. e.—larger sort—is a really cozy boudoir, almost big enough to accommodate two people, a dressing-table and a chair. The floor is in mosaic, wrought, as was the Pompeian fashion, of bits of marble, black and white, less than half-an-inch square, set with cement. The central design is a pretty conceit of three doves, rifling a jewel-casket of ropes of pearls. This work, like the image of the bear in the house to which it has given its name, is covered with coarse sand to protect it from the weather. “The fierce dog painted”—in mosaic—“on the threshold” of Glaucus’ house, has been removed, with the immense “Battle of Darius and Alexander,” to the Naples museum.

The variety and affluence of decoration in these dollhouses is bewildering to the Occidental of this century. Every inch of wall and floor was crowded with pictures in fresco and mosaic; statues in bronze and marble adorned recess and court, and if the pearl-ropes perished with her who wore them, there are enough cameos and intaglios of rarest design and cutting; chains, bracelets, tiaras, finger and earrings and necklaces, in the Neapolitan Museum, to indicate what were the other riches of the despoiled casket.

I wish I could talk for awhile about this Museum, so unlike any other in the world. Of its statuary, vases and paintings; of the furniture, so odd and yet so beautiful, taken from the unroofed dwellings; of the contents of baker’s, grocer’s, fruiterer’s, artist’s, jeweller’s and druggist’s shops; of the variety of household implements that were familiar to us through others of like pattern upon the shelves of our own pantries and kitchens. Of patty-pans, fluted cake-moulds with funnels in the middle; of sugar-tongs; ice-pitchers and coffee-urns; of chafing-dishes, colanders and tea-strainers; sugar-scoops and flour-sifters. Of just such oval “gem”-pans, fastened together by the dozen, as I had pleased myself by buying the year before—as “quite a new idea.” When I finally came upon a sheet-iron vessel, identical in size and form with those that await the scavenger upon Fifth Avenue sidewalks; beheld the dent made by the kick of the Pompeian street-boy, the rim scorched by red-hot ashes “heaved” into it by the scullion whose untidiness and irresponsibility foreshadowed the nineteenth-century “help”—I sank upon the edge of a dismantled couch that may have belonged to the Widow Fulvia, profound respect for the wisdom of the Preacher filling my soul and welling up to my tongue!

“Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See! this is new?’ It hath been already of old time which was before us.”