I saw the sea-serpent at Naples, though not in the Aquarium. Its colossal bulk was humped sinuously along the bay. ’Twas the Vesuvius range, stretching mistily. Mariners have perchance constructed the monster from such hazy glimpses of distant reefs. Still, no dragon has wrought more havoc than this mountain, which smokes imperturbably while the generations rise and fall. Beautiful the smoke, too, when it grows golden in the setting sun, and the monstrous mass turns a marvellous purple. We wonder men should still build on Vesuvius—betwixt the devil and the deep sea—yet the chances of eruption are no greater than the chances of epidemic in less salubrious places, as the plague-churches of Italy testify.

But should a new eruption overwhelm Pompeii, and its first record be lost, there were a strange puzzle for the antiquarians of the fiftieth century exhuming its cosmopolitan population; blonde German savages in white pot-hats, ancient Britons in tweeds, extinct American cycle-centaurs; incongruously resident amid the narrow streets and wide public buildings of a prehistoric Roman civilisation.

Pompeii is buried some twenty feet deep. The Middle Ages walked over these entombed streets and temples and suspected nothing. But all towns are built on their dead past, for earth’s crust renews itself as incessantly as our own skin. We walk over our ancestors. There are twenty-seven layers of human life at Rome.

It needs no earth-convulsions, no miracles of lava. One generation of cities succeeds another. Nature, a pious Andromache, covers up their remains as softly as the snow falls or the grass grows. When man uncovers them again, he finds stratum below stratum, city below city, as though the whole were some quaint American structure of many storeys which the earth had swallowed at a single gulp, and not with her stately deglutition. At Gezer in Palestine Macalister has been dissecting a tumulus which holds layers of human history as the rocks hold layers of earth-history. Scratch the mound and you find the traces of an Arab city, slice deeper and ’tis a Crusaders’ city; an undercut brings you to the Roman city whence—by another short cut—you descend to the Old Testament; to the city that was dowered to Solomon’s Egyptian Queen, to the Philistine city, and so to the Canaanite city. But even here Gezer is but at its prime. You have sunk through all the Christian era, through all the Jewish era, but fifteen centuries still await your descent. Down you delve—through the city captured by Thotmes III, through the city of the early Semites, till at last your pick strikes the Hivites and the Amorites, the cave-men of the primitive Gezer. Infinitely solemn such a tumulus in its imperturbable chronicling, with its scarabs and altars, its spear-heads and its gods, the bones of its foundation-sacrifices yet undecayed. The Judgment Books need no celestial clerks, no recording angels; earth keeps them as she rolls. In our eyes, too, as we gaze upon this ant-heap of our breed, a thousand years are but as a day—nay, as a dream that passeth in the night. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a mound. Beside Gezer, Pompeii and Herculaneum are theatrical, flamboyant, the creatures of a day, the parvenus of the underworld.

Mentally, too, strange ancestral strata lie in our deeps, even as the remains of an alimentary canal run through our spine and a primitive eye lies in the middle of our brain—that pineal gland in which Descartes located the soul. Sometimes we stumble over an old prejudice or a primitive emotion, prick ourselves with an arrow of ancestral conscience, and tremble with an ancient fear. Mayhap in slumber we descend to these regions, exploring below our consciousness and delving in the catacombs of antiquity.

The destruction of Pompeii was effected, however, not by Vesuvius, but by the antiquarian. He it was to whom Pompeii fell as a spoil, he who turned Pompeii from a piece of life to a piece of learning, by transporting most of its treasures to a museum. The word is surely short for mausoleum. For objects in a museum are dead, their relations with life ended. Objects partake of the lives of their possessors, and when cut off are as dead as finger-nails. A vase dominating the court of a Pompeian house and a vase in the Naples Museum are as a creature to its skeleton. What a stimulation in the one or two houses left with their living reality—their frescoes and their furniture, their kitchens and middens! ’Tis statues that suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly rows. A statue is an Æsthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the close of a vista. See that sunlit statue of Meleager in the grounds of the Villa Medici, at the end of a green avenue, with pillar and architrave for background, and red and white roses climbing around it, and imagine how its glory would be shorn in a gallery. The French have remembered to put the Venus of Milo at the end of a long Louvre corridor, which she fills with her far-seen radiance. These collections of Capolavori—these Apollos and Jupiters, and Venuses and Muses, dumped as close as cemetery monuments—are indeed petrified. The fancy must resurrect them into their living relations with halls and courtyards, temples and piazzas, shrines and loggias. The learned begin to suspect that the polytheism of Greece and Rome is due to the analogous aggregation of local gods, each a self-sufficing and all-powerful divinity in its own district. When there were so many deities, their functions had to be differentiated, as we give a different shade of meaning to two words for the same thing. Were one to collect the many Madonnas in Italy, one might imagine Christianity as polytheistic as Paganism.

But the most perfect visualising of a god’s statue in its local setting will not annul that half-death which sets in with the statue’s loss of worship. These fair visions of Pallas and Juno, shall they ever touch us as they touched the pious Pagan? Nay, not all our sense of lovely line and spiritual grace can replace that departed touch of divinity.

The past has indeed its glamour for us, which serves perhaps as compensation for what we lose of the hot reality, but an inevitable impiety clings to our inquisitive regard, to our anxious exhumation of its secrets. Unless we go to it with our emotions as well as our intellect, prepared to extract its spiritual significance and to warm ourselves at the fire of its life and pour a libation to the gods of its hearth, a wilderness of archÆological lore will profit us little. A man is other than his garments and a people than its outworn shell.

There is perhaps more method than appears at first sight in the madness of the Turk, who reluctantly permits the scientific explorer to dig up the past but insists that once he has unearthed his historic treasure, his buried streets and temples, ay, of old Jerusalem itself, he shall cover them up again. The dead past is to bury its dead. Death, whether in citizens or their cities, is sacred. Cursed be he who turns up their bones to the sun. And who will not sigh over the mummies, doomed to be served up in museums after five thousand years of dignified death? Princesses and potentates were they in their lives; how could they dream, as they were borne in their purpureal litters through the streets of the Pharaohs, that they would make a spectacle for barbarians on wet half-holidays? And thou, Timhotpu, prefect of the very Necropolis of Thebes in the eighteenth dynasty, how couldst thou suspect that even thy gilded sarcophagus would be violated, thy golden earrings wrenched off, thy mortuary furniture stolen, and thy fine figure exhibited to me in the Turin Museum, turned into a grey char under thy winding-sheet! The very eggs placed in the tombs of thy cemetery have kept their colour better: one feels that under heat they might still hatch a hieroglyphic chicken. But thou art for evermore desiccated and done with.

Saddest of all is the fate of the immortals: goddesses of the hearth and gods of the heaven are alike swept into the museum-limbo. They are shrunk to mythology, they who once charioted the constellations. For mythology dogs all theologies, and one god after another is put on the bookshelf.

All roads lead to the museum. Thither go our old clothes, our old coins, our old creeds, and we wonder that men should ever have worn steel armour or cast-iron dogmas. Gazing at the Pompeian man, that “cunning cast in clay,” whose clutch at his money-bags survives his bodily investiture, who does not feel as one from another planet surveying an earth pygmy? What strange limited thoughts were thine, O Pompeian of the first century! I warrant thou hadst not even heard of the Man of Nazareth: how small thine atlas of the world, not to say thy chart of the heavens! Poor ignoramus—so unacquainted with all that hath happened since thy death! How wise and weighty thou wast at thy table, recumbent amidst thy roses, surrounded by those gay frescoes of Cupids and Venuses; with what self-satisfaction thou didst lay down the Roman law, garlanded as to thy narrow forehead!

But if ’tis easy to play the Superman with this fusty provincial, ’tis not hard to smell the museum must in our own living world. Too many people and things do not know they are essentially of the museum: have the arrogance to imagine they are contemporary. How full of life seems the cannon as it belches death! Yet ’tis but an uncouth, noisy creature, long since outgrown and outmoded among the humanised citizens of the planet; some day it will be hunted out like the wolf and the boar, with a price upon its mouth.

’Tis to the stage that extinct human types betake themselves by way of after-life—the theatre serving as the anthropological museum—but there are some that linger unconscionably on this side of the footlights. Bigots, for example, have an air of antediluvian bipeds, monstrous wildfowl that flap and shriek. I even gaze curiously at Gold Sticks and pages of the Presence. They are become spectacular, and to be spectacular is to be well on the way to the museum. Mistrust the spasmodic splendour—leap of the dying flame. Where traditions must be pored over, and performers rehearsed, it has become a play; is propped on precedent instead of uplifted by sap. The passion for ritual is one of the master-passions of humanity. Yet stage properties can never return to the world of reality. The profession will tell you that they are sold off to inferior theatres, never to the real world outside. What passes into the museum can never repass the janitor.

On the leaders of life lies in each generation the duty of establishing the museum-point. The museum-point in thought, art, morals. No matter that obsolete modes prevail in the vulgar world: do the ladies allow the mob to dictate their fashions? Hath a bonnet existence because it survives in Seven Dials or the Bowery? Is a creed alive because it flourishes in Little Bethel? Man is one vast being, and the thought of his higher nerve-centres alone counts: generation hands the torch to generation. Doubtless the lower ganglia are not always ready for the new conception. But such considerations belong to Politics, not to Truth. At the worst the map must be made while the march is preparing.