THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN PAINTINGS.
“Und aber nach zweitausend Jahren
Kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.”
“Et puis nous irons voir, car décadence et deuil
Viennent toujours après la puissance et l’orgueil,
Nous irons voir....”
We are so much accustomed to depend on the four great literary languages for the whole body of our information and amusement, that it occurs to few to consider that ignorance of other European dialects involves any inconvenience at all, except to those who have occasion to visit the countries in which they are spoken. Yet there is much of really valuable matter which sees the light only in the minor tongues, especially those of the industrious North, and with which the world has never been made familiar through translation. Joachim Frederic Schouw, the Danish botanist, is one of the writers of our day who has suffered most prejudicially both to his own fame and to the public from having employed only his native language. For his writings are not only valuable in a scientific point of view, but belong to the most popular order of scientific writing, and would assuredly have been general favourites, had not the bulk of them remained untranslated. His ‘Tableau du Climat de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared in French, and is a standard work. A little collection of very brief and popular essays, entitled ‘The Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been translated both into German and English. One of these, styled ‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is founded on a rather novel idea. The paintings on the walls of the disinterred houses of that city contain (among other things) many landscape compositions. Sometimes these are accessory to historical representations. But they often merely portray the scenery of ordinary out-door life. The old decorators of the Pompeian chambers had indeed an evident taste for those trivial tricks of theatrical deception, which are still very popular in Italy. Their verdure, sky, and so forth, seem often as if meant to impose on the spectator for a moment as realities; and are, therefore, executed in a “realistic” though sketchy style. “Consequently,” says Schouw, “the observation of the plants which are represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns them now.”
We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were. Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he beheld it.
The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that red gleam of the slow river of fire,
“A cui riluce