Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be, of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely, and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark. Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe, as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the encroachments of modern democracy.
To the Oriental plane we must add the date-palm: not indeed as strange now to the Italian eye, nor as very abundant in classical times; but as certainly more abundant then than now; an exception to the general law which we have indicated of the increasing prevalence of Southern forms of vegetation. The date-palm in Italy is, after all, but an occasional exotic. Mayer, the painstaking German author of a book on ‘Naples and the Neapolitans,’ says there are scarcely a dozen or two of them in the gardens of that city and its suburbs. There are eight or ten only in Rome, says M. Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit. It dwells uncomfortably, in the uncongenial neighbourhood of the pine; for in America and other unsophisticated regions, the natural limit of the palm ends where that of the pine begins. Picturesque as its solitary form often is, in the villa garden, or behind the convent wall, we cannot look at it without thinking of some poor captive Saracen maiden, shivering at the door of a Northern crusading baron. Even on the coast of the Riviera, where it appears to thrive the most, it affords a melancholy sight when writhing under the icy Mistral, which ever and anon turns the flank of the precarious barrier of the Maritime Alps, and whirls its blasts of snow-dust against the broad leaves. It appears in many of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw suggests that this does not prove it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.[[7]] “Vulgo in Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it in the ‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’ is still more to the point, when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds, among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for making cordage.
“Thus we perceive,” concludes our naturalist, “that the vegetable world, and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the ancient Pompeians enjoyed a great superiority over the moderns in respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their descendants.”
But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’ in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark forward and abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was about to fall.
“In peggio
Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida
Ai putridi nipoti
L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema
De’ miseri vendetta.”
For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection; but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality.