And surely, in those days, young nobles would come splashing in on horseback, riding with naked limbs on an almost naked horse, carrying probably a spear, and cantering ostentatiously through the throng of red-brown, full-limbed, smooth-skinned peasants. A Lucumo, even, sitting very noble in his chariot driven by an erect charioteer, might be driving in at sundown, halting before the temple to perform the brief ritual of entry into the city. And the crowding populace would wait; for the Lucumo of the old days, glowing ruddy in flesh, his beard stiffly trimmed in the Oriental style, the torque of gold round his neck, and the mantle or wrap bordered with scarlet falling in full folds, leaving the breast bare, he was divine, sitting on the chair in his chariot in the stillness of power. The people drew strength even from looking at him.
The chariot drew a little forward, from the temple: the Lucumo, sitting erect on his chair in the chariot, and bare-shouldered and bare-breasted, waits for the people. Then the peasants would shrink back in fear. But perhaps some citizen in a white tunic would lift up his arms in salute, and come forward to state his difficulty, or to plead for justice. And the Lucumo, seated silent within another world of power, disciplined to his own responsibility of knowledge for the people, would listen till the end. Then a few words — and the chariot of gilt bronze swirls off up the hill to the house of the chief, the citizens drift on to their houses, the music sounds in the dark streets, torches flicker, the whole place is eating, feasting, and as far as possible having a gay time.
It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home, songless and meaningless. We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead. Today in Italy, in the hot Italian summer, if a navvy working in the street takes off his shirt to work with free, naked torso, a policeman rushes to him and commands him insultingly into his shirt again. One would think a human being was such a foul indecency altogether that life was feasible only when the indecent thing was as far as possible blotted out. The very exposure of female arms and legs in the street is only done as an insult to the whole human body. ‘Look at that! It doesn’t matter!’
Neither does it! But then, why did the torso of the workman matter?
At the hotel, in the dark emptiness of the place, there are three Japanese staying: little yellow men. They have come to inspect the salt works down on the coast below Tarquinia, so we are told, and they have a Government permit. The salt works, the extracting of salt from the pools shut off from the low sea, are sort of prisons, worked by convict labour. One wonders why Japanese men should want to inspect such places, officially. But we are told that these salt works are ‘very important’.
Albertino is having a very good time with the three Japanese, and seems to be very deep in their confidence, bending over their table, his young brown head among the three black ones, absorbed and on the qui vive. He rushes off for their food — then rushes to us to see what we want to eat.
‘What is there?’
‘Er — c’è — ’ He always begins with wonderful deliberation, as if there was a menu fit for the Tsar. Then he breaks off suddenly, says: ‘I’ll ask the mamma!’ — darts away — returns, and says exactly what we knew he’d say, in a bright voice, as if announcing the New Jerusalem: ‘There are eggs — er — and beefsteak — et and there are some little potatoes.’ We know the eggs and beefsteak well! However, I decide to have beefsteak once more, with the little potatoes — left over by good fortune from lunch — fried. Off darts Albertino, only to dart back and announce that the potatoes and beefsteak are finished (‘by the Chinese,’ he whispers), ‘but there are frogs.’ ‘There are what?’ ‘Le rane, the frogs!’ What sort of frogs?’ ‘I’ll show you!’ Off he darts again, returns with a plate containing eight or nine pairs of frogs’ naked hind-legs. B. looks the other way and I accept frogs — they look quite good. In the joy of getting the frogs safely to port, Albertino skips, and darts off: to return in a moment with a bottle of beer, and whisper to us all the information about the Chinese, as he calls them. They can’t speak a word of Italian. When they want a word they take the little book, French and Italian. Bread? — eh? They want bread. Er! — Albertino gives little grunts, like commas and semicolons, which I write as er! Bread they want, eh? — er! — they take the little book — here he takes an imaginary little book, lays it on the tablecloth, wets his finger and turns over the imaginary leaves — bread! — er! — p — you look under ‘p’ — er! — ecco! pane! — pane! — si capisce! — bread! they want bread. Then wine! er! take the little book (he turns over imaginary little leaves with fervour) — er! here you are, vino! — pane, e vino! So they do! Every word! They looked out name! Er! you! Er! I tell him, Albertino. And so the boy continues, till I ask what about le rane? Ah! Er! Le rane! Off he darts, and swirls back with a plate of fried frogs’ legs, in pairs.
He is an amusing and vivacious boy, yet underneath a bit sad and wistful, with all his responsibility. The following day he darted to show us a book of views of Venice, left behind by the Chinese, as he persists in calling them, and asks if I want it. I don’t. Then he shows us two Japanese postage stamps, and the address of one of the Japanese gentlemen, written on a bit of paper. The Japanese gentleman and Albertino are to exchange picture postcards. I insist that the Japanese are not Chinese. ‘Er!’ says Albertino. ‘But the Japanese are also Chinese!’ I insist that they are not, that they live in a different country. He darts off, and returns with a school atlas. ‘Er! China is in Asia! Asia! Asia!’ — he turns the leaves. He is really an intelligent boy, and ought to be going to school instead of running an hotel at the tender age of fourteen.
The guide to the tombs, having had to keep watch at the museum all night, wants to get a sleep after dawn, so we are not to start till ten. The town is already empty, the people gone out to the fields. A few men stand about with nothing doing. The city gates are wide open. At night they are closed, so that the Dazio man can sleep: and you can neither get in nor out of the town. We drink still another coffee — Albertino’s morning dose was a very poor show.
Then we see the guide, talking to a pale young fellow in old corduroy velveteen knee-breeches and an old hat and thick boots: most obviously German. We go over, make proper salutes, nod to the German boy, who looks as if he’d had vinegar for breakfast — and set off. This morning we are going out a couple miles, to the farthest end of the necropolis. We have still a dozen tombs to look at. In all, there are either twenty-five or twenty-seven painted tombs one can visit.
This morning there is a stiff breeze from the south-west. But it is blowing fresh and clear, not behaving in the ugly way the libeccio can behave. We march briskly along the highway, the old dog trundling behind. He loves spending a morning among the tombs. The sea gives off a certain clearness, that makes the atmosphere doubly brilliant and exhilarating, as if we were on a mountain-top. The omnibus rolls by, from Viterbo. In the fields the peasants are working, and the guide occasionally greets the women, who give him a sally back again. The young German tramps firmly on: but his spirit is not as firm as his tread. One doesn’t know what to say to him, he vouchsafes nothing, seems as if he didn’t want to be spoken to, and yet is probably offended that we don’t talk to him. The guide chatters to him in unfailing cheerfulness, in Italian: but after a while drops back with evident relief to the milder company of B., leaving me to the young German, who has certainly swallowed vinegar some time or other.
But I feel with him as with most of the young people of today: he has been sinned against more than he sins. The vinegar was given him to drink. Breaking reluctantly into German, since Italian seems foolish, and he won’t corne out in English, I find, within the first half-mile, that he is twenty-three (he looks nineteen), has finished his university course, is going to be an archaeologist, is travelling doing archaeology, has been in Sicily and Tunis, whence he has just ret
urned; didn’t think much of either place — mehr Schrei wie Wert, he jerks out, speaking as if he were throwing his words away like a cigarette-end he was sick of; doesn’t think much of any place; doesn’t think much of the Etruscans — nicht viel wert; doesn’t, apparently, think much of me; knows a professor or two whom I have met; knows the tombs of Tarquinia very well, having been here, and stayed here, twice before; doesn’t think much of them; is going to Greece; doesn’t expect to think much of it; is staying in the other hotel, not Gentile’s, because it is still cheaper: is probably staying a fortnight, going to photograph all the tombs, with a big photographic apparatus — has the Government authority, like the Japs — apparently has very little money indeed, marvellously doing everything on nothing — expects to be a famous professor in a science he doesn’t think much of — and I wonder if he always has enough to eat.
He certainly is a fretful and peevish, even if in some ways silent and stoical, young man. Nicht viel wert! — not much worth — doesn’t amount to anything — seems to be his favourite phrase, as it is the favourite phrase of almost all young people today. Nothings amounts to anything, for the young.
Well, I feel it’s not my fault, and try to bear up. But though it is bad enough to have been of the war generation, it must be worse to have grown up just after the war. One can’t blame the young, that they don’t find that anything amounts to anything. The war cancelled most meanings for — them.
And my young man is not really so bad: he would even rather like to be made to believe in something. There is a yearning pathos in him somewhere.
We have passed the modern cemetery, with its white marble headstones, and the arches of a medieval aqueduct mysteriously spanning a dip, and left the highroad, following a path along the long hill-crest, through the green wheat that flutters and ripples in the sea-wind like fine feathers, in the wonderful brilliance of morning. Here and there are tassels of mauve anemones, bits of verbena, many daisies, tufts of camomile. On a rocky mound, which was once a tumulus, the asphodels have the advantage, and send up their spikes on the bright, fresh air, like soldiers clustered on the mount. And we go along this vivid green headland of wheat — which still is rough and uneven, because it was once all tumuli — with our faces to the breeze, the sea-brightness filling the air with exhilaration, and all the country still and silent, and we talk German in the wary way of two dogs sniffing at one another.
Till suddenly we turn off to an almost hidden tomb — the German boy knows the way perfectly. The guide hurries up and lights the acetylene lamp, the dog slowly finds himself a place out of the wind, and flings himself down: and we sink slowly again into the Etruscan world, out of the present world, as we descend underground.
One of the most famous tombs at this far-off end of the necropolis is the Tomb of the Bulls. It contains what the guide calls: un po’ di pornografico! — but a very little. The German boy shrugs his shoulders as usual: but he informs us that this is one of the oldest tombs of all, and I believe him, for it looks so to me.
It is a little wider than some tombs, the roof has not much pitch, there is a stone bed for sarcophagi along the side walls, and in the end wall are two doorways, cut out of the rock of the end and opening into a second chamber, which seems darker and more dismal. The German boy says this second chamber was cut out later, from the first one. It has no paintings of any importance.
We return to the first chamber, the old one. It is called the Tomb of the Bulls from the two bulls above the doorways of the end wall, one a man-faced hull charging at the ‘po’ di pornografico’, the other lying down serenely and looking with mysterious eyes into the room, his back turned calmly to the second bit of a picture which the guide says is not ‘pornografico’ — ’because it is a woman.’ The young German smiles with his sour-water expression.
Everything in this tomb suggests the old East: Cyprus, or the Hittites, or the culture of Minos of Crete. Between the doorways of the end wall is a charming painting of a naked horseman with a spear, on a naked horse, moving towards a charming little palm-tree and a well-head or fountain-head, on which repose two sculptured, black-faced beasts, lions with queer black faces. From the mouth of the one near the palm-tree water pours down into a sort of altar-bowl, while on the far side a warrior advances, wearing a bronze helmet and shin-greaves, and apparently menacing the horseman with a sword which he brandishes in his left hand, as he steps up on to the base of the well-head. Both warrior and horseman wear the long, pointed boots of the East: and the palm-tree is not very Italian.
This picture has a curious charm, and is evidently symbolical. I said to the German: ‘What do you think it means?’ ‘Ach, nothing! The man on the horse has come to the drinking-trough to water his horse: no more!’ ‘And the man with the sword?’ ‘Oh, he is perhaps his enemy.’ ‘And the black-faced lions ?’ ‘Ach nothing! Decorations of the fountain.’ Below the picture are trees on which hang a garland and a neck-band. The border pattern, instead of the egg and dart, has the sign of Venus, so called, between the darts: a ball surmounted by a little cross. ‘And that, is that a symbol?’ I asked the German. ‘Here no!’ he replied abruptly. ‘Merely a decoration!’ — which is perhaps true. But that the Etruscan artist had no more feeling for it, as a symbol, than a modern house-decorator would have, that we cannot believe.
I gave up for the moment. Above the picture is a sentence lightly written, almost scribbled, in Etruscan. ‘Can you read it?’ I said to the German boy. He read it off quickly — myself, I should have had to go letter by letter. ‘Do you know what it means ?’ I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nobody knows.’
In the shallow angle of the roof the heraldic beasts are curious. The squat centre-piece, the so-called altar, has four rams’ heads at the corners. On the right a pale bodied man with a dark face is galloping up with loose rein, on a black horse, followed by a galloping bull. On the left is a bigger figure, a queer galloping lion with his tongue out. But from the lion’s shoulders, instead of wings, rises the second neck of a dark-faced, bearded goat: so that the complex animal has a second, backward-leaning neck and head, of a goat, as well as the first maned neck and menacing head of a lion. The tail of the lion ends in a serpent’s head. So this is the proper Chimaera. And galloping after the end of the lion’s tail comes a winged female sphinx.
‘What is the meaning of this lion with the second head and neck?’ I asked the German. He shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘Nothing!’ It meant nothing to him, because nothing except the ABC of facts means anything to him. He is a scientist, and when he doesn’t want a thing to have a meaning it is, ipso facto, meaningless.
But the lion with the goat’s head springing backwards from its shoulders must mean something, because there it is, very vivid, in the famous bronze Chimaera of Arezzo, which is in the Florence museum, and which Benvenuto Cellini restored, and which is one of the most fascinating bronzes in the world. There, the bearded goat’s head springs twisting backwards from the lion’s shoulders, while the right horn of the goat is seized in the mouth of the serpent, which is the tail of the lion whipped forward over his back.
Though this is the correct Chimaera, with the wounds of Bellerophon in hip and neck, still it is not merely a big toy. It has, and was intended to have, an exact esoteric meaning. In fact, Greek myths are only gross representations of certain very clear and very ancient esoteric conceptions, that are much older than the myths: or the Greeks. Myths, and personal gods, are only the decadence of a previous cosmic religion.
The strange potency and beauty of these Etruscan things arise, it seems to me, from the profundity of the symbolic meaning the artist was more or less aware of. The Etruscan religion, surely, was never anthropomorphic: that is, whatever gods it contained were not beings, but symbols of elemental powers, just symbols: as was the case earlier in Egypt. The undivided Godhead, if we can call it such, was symbolized by the mundum, the plasm-cell with its nucleus: that which is the very beginning; instead of, as with us, by a persona
l god, a person being the very end of all creation or evolution. So it is all the way through: the Etruscan religion is concerned with all those physical and creative powers and forces which go to the building up and the destroying of the soul: the soul, the personality, being that which gradually is produced out of chaos, like a flower, only to disappear again into chaos, or the underworld. We, on the contrary, say: In the beginning was the Word! — and deny the physical universe true existence. We exist only in the Word, which is beaten out thin to cover, gild, and hide all things.
The human being, to the Etruscan, was a bull or a ram, a lion or a deer, according to his different aspects and potencies. The human being had in his veins the blood of the wings of birds and the venom of serpents. All things emerged from the blood-stream, and the blood-relation, however complex and contradictory it might become, was never interrupted or forgotten. There were different currents in the blood-stream, and some always clashed: bird and serpent, lion and deer, leopard and lamb. Yet the very clash was a form of unison, as we see in the lion which also has a goat’s head.
But the young German will have nothing of this. He is a modern, and the obvious alone has true existence for him. A lion with a goat’s head as well as its own head is unthinkable. That which is unthinkable is non-existent, is nothing. So, all the Etruscan symbols are to him non-existent and mere crude incapacity to think. He wastes not a thought on them: they are spawn of mental impotence, hence negligible.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 802