The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 1/130

Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest

the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the

sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first,

after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble

and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his

death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian

Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still

shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,

although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps

corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here,

likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand

years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close

at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,

but assaulted by a snake.

From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad

stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of

the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus,

right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate

Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing

over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with

ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches,

built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very

pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little

way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening

space--rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky

brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut

in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay

and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half finished

wall.

We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those

blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian,

venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous

statues in the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that

state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague

sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density

in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present

moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and

interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this

medium, our narrative--into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial

threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of

human existence--may seem not widely different from the texture of all

our lives.