Letters from Italy/Chapter 11

I have in mind two kinds of underground cities: ruined cities of people who once lived on the surface of the earth, and underground necropolises of the dead. Pompeii, Palatinum, Ostia, and the catacombs of Rome, Naples, or Sicily. Volcanic ashes have covered Pompeii with a layer five meters thick%; I do not know what has shrouded Ostia with a three meter layer of pretty brown earth; Palatinum has buried itself in its own mass of brickwork. The hill Aventinum still slumbers, and probably beneath it is a smaller underground city. If you dig anywhere with a spade you will find masonry, arches, and square foundation-stones. Then if all this is called baths, a palace, or a theatre of this or that Cæsar, people come along and stare at it. Sometimes it covers an enormous area, sometimes it resembles our cellars: Pompeii or Ostia show you here and there a fragment of the sunny side of an antique dwelling, pretty houses, atria with basins for water, southern delights of sun, air, and water. At Ostia you will find handsome mosaic floors, at Pompeii interesting and graceful frescoes, but everywhere columns, capitals, capitals, fragments of statuary, beautifully carved cornices, all resembling ​disconnected words or detached verses from the marble-like, sparkling speech of antiquity, so perfect in form. On the whole these cities and streets, these externally ungraceful houses, were quite as narrow and dirty as those of to-day, equally full of noise, vermin, damp washing, cats and goats, evil odours and shells as any paltry alley by the Tiber.

But amid all this roaring, crowded, suffocating anthill there were a magnificent forum, a theatre, a basilica, temples, splendid baths, triumphal arches, palatial barracks, and other Imperial foundations, pompous edifices and monuments, just the same as a thousand years later other Emperors and Popes built in honour of other deities or dynasties. The world does not change too thoroughly. In many respects antiquity has anticipated our civilisation, for instance it inexorably constructed streets in quadrangular form like those in Chicago of to-day, or invented a standardised dwelling industry as has modern America. Here they were decidedly not prodigal in inventiveness. It might be said that the Latin spirit proceeded along straight and positive lines, affecting in private regular mechanical luxury, but in public undertakings aiming at greater ostentation; a spirit of very little creativity, with hard and standardised taste, inclined to Baroque proportions and excess, more quantitative than qualitative, but on the whole artistically inefficient. The Hellenistic Greeks constructed ​their best stucco-work, their incredible magic chisel achievements in the most sparkling marble for this arid and haughty Latin; they regularly chiselled more artistically, wavily, in Baroque manner as though materials offered no resistance at all. But the Latin suffering from ennui, ever unsatisfied with the colossal statues of the Cæsars and the aerial tenderness of Hellenistic reliefs, began to purchase the severe, rigid Egyptian statues and to pray in the wondrous temples of the Mithra religion. Just examine in the Roman museums the mass of Egyptian plastic work introduced by the ancient Romans.

Well then, into this Roman world entered Christianity and shattered its traditions with astounding vigour. At first it crept underground and hollowed out the catacombs; according to legends this was a consequence of persecution—but throughout my life I have never read of persecution of Christians in Sicilian Syracuse, and that is where the largest catacombs are found. Much more likely is here the awakening of some far older pre-historic underground tradition: at least in Sicily there are gigantic grotto necropolises from the Siculian era, necropolises which have transformed whole mountain ranges into regular honeycombs of caves. And let us look at the catacombs of San Callisto or Sant’Agnese fuori; here is plainly not a subterranean refuge of men in flight, but a complicated effect of mole-like ​instinct; and the ancient churches took root below ground, at least as regards crypts. A Kabyle legend relates that the primal parents of the human race emerged from underground. It is true that Christian art in its beginnings fastened on the mechanical Latin style; but then it was immediately “spoilt,” simplified, acquired sanctified immobility, tectonic organisation, severe plastic purity, so that the transition from Latinto Early Christian art bears every sign rather of overthrow than of development. It is as if there entered a new element not only cultural, not only social, but directly ethnic; as though there came forward some primal human material which could not be adapted to the arid Latin civilisation. I should say that with Christianity there revived certain subterranean creatures—the Morlocks—of which Wells writes: a people who from their underworld brought with them a passion for shade, enclosed and quiet spaces, severe intimacy, and immobile forms. Christianity gave them conceptions and pictorial representations; the crude antique gave them primal elements of form; and this primitive, unexhausted ethnical characteristic, which had nothing to say in their Latin world, now at length speaks, acts, and sings; out of little stones it put together sacred and graceful mosaics, which belong to twilight art. It contracts the Roman basilica into a closed nave, rapidly discovers its sculptural style, and as soon as opportunity offers reaches a hand to ​the northern barbarians and receives from them Romanesque architecture.

Forgive me, I am a layman and write all this as a novel; perhaps it is all expert nonsense or things known for a century. But I must bring what I see into relationship. The subversion which Christianity signifies in the Roman world disquiets and provokes me like few romantic phenomena under the sun. Ignorance commits no sin.