The Marble Faun Volume 2 - Page 123/157

How exceedingly absurd! All men, from the date of the earliest

obelisk,--and of the whole world, moreover, since that far epoch, and

before,--have made a similar demand, and seldom had their wish. If they

had it, what are they the better now? But, even while you taunt yourself

with this sad lesson, your heart cries out obstreperously for its small

share of earthly happiness, and will not be appeased by the myriads of

dead hopes that lie crushed into the soil of Rome. How wonderful

that this our narrow foothold of the Present should hold its own so

constantly, and, while every moment changing, should still be like a

rock betwixt the encountering tides of the long Past and the infinite

To-come!

Man of marble though he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable.

Looking back upon Hilda's way of life, he marvelled at his own blind

stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with no

stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered. Being

so innocent, she had no means of estimating those risks, nor even a

possibility of suspecting their existence. But he--who had spent

years in Rome, with a man's far wider scope of observation and

experience--knew things that made him shudder. It seemed to Kenyon,

looking through the darkly colored medium of his fears, that all modes

of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and

that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute

and wicked cities.

For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated

cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal

life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with

woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to

other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them

with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high

aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if

it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a

population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and

if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all

care, remorse, and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the

confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic, and incited by

fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin. Here was a soldiery who felt

Rome to be their conquered city, and doubtless considered themselves the

legal inheritors of the foul license which Gaul, Goth, and Vandal have

here exercised in days gone by.

And what localities for new crime existed in those guilty sites,

where the crime of departed ages used to be at home, and had its long,

hereditary haunt! What street in Rome, what ancient ruin, what one place

where man had standing-room, what fallen stone was there, unstained with

one or another kind of guilt! In some of the vicissitudes of the city's

pride or its calamity, the dark tide of human evil had swelled over it,

far higher than the Tiber ever rose against the acclivities of the

seven hills. To Kenyon's morbid view, there appeared to be a contagious

element, rising fog-like from the ancient depravity of Rome, and

brooding over the dead and half-rotten city, as nowhere else on earth.

It prolonged the tendency to crime, and developed an instantaneous

growth of it, whenever an opportunity was found; And where could it be

found so readily as here! In those vast palaces, there were a hundred

remote nooks where Innocence might shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses

there were unsuspected dungeons that had once been princely chambers,

and open to the daylight; but, on account of some wickedness there

perpetrated, each passing age had thrown its handful of dust upon the

spot, and buried it from sight. Only ruffians knew of its existence, and

kept it for murder, and worse crime.