Читать книгу: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876», страница 17

A NEW MUSEUM AT ROME

A new museum of sculpture at Rome! One would have thought that it could hardly be needed. Besides three vast collections—that of the Lateran, that of the Capitol, and that wondrous world of antique sculpture at the Vatican, itself, in fact, three museums, and each of the three alone matchless in the world—we have the work of the hands that lived and worked here a couple of thousands of years ago in every villa, in every garden, almost at every corner. And yet we need, and have just established, another museum of ancient sculpture. We are now cutting new lines of streets—not, as you are doing, on the surface of a soil that has never been moved save by the forces of Nature since first the Creator divided the sea from the dry land, but—among the débris of the successive civilizations of more than three thousand years. The laying of our gas- and water-pipes breaks the painting on the walls of banquet-halls whose last revel was disturbed by the irruption of the barbarian. Our "main drainage" lies among the temples of gods whose godlike forms are found mutilated and prostrate among the fallen columns and tumbled architraves and cornices of their shrines.

But if no awe of the mighty past prevents the speculator and contractor of our day from marching his army of excavators in an undeviating and unyielding line impartially athwart the temples, the palaces, the theatres, the baths of the perished world beneath their feet, yet in these days of ours the work is done reverently, at least so far as not only to respect, but to gather up with the most scrupulous care, every available fragment of the art, and even of the common life, of those vanished generations. If the day shall come when some future people shall yet once again build their city on this same eternal site, and some future social cataclysm shall have overwhelmed the works and civilization of the present time, those future builders will not find walls constructed in great part of the fragments of statues and the richly-carved friezes of yet older builders and artists, as we have found. The Romans of the present day are, it must be admitted, fully alive to the inappreciable value of the wondrous heritage they possess in this kind; and every fragment of it is carefully and jealously gathered and stored. And hence is the need of a new museum, and hence will be the need of other new museums—who shall say how many? For truly this Roman soil seems inexhaustible in buried treasures. There seems no likelihood that the vein should be exhausted or die out. Every now and then the excavators come upon "a fault," as the miners say, but the vein is soon struck again.

And so the new museum at the Capitol has been rendered necessary. It was inaugurated on the 25th of February in this year. It consists of twelve rooms or galleries, part of which occupy the site of the apartments which used to contain the archives, now moved to other quarters, and part, including a large octagonal hall, the principal feature of the new museum, have been newly constructed on ground which used to be the garden of the Conservatori, the ancient municipal officers of the city, so called. The entrance is by the main staircase of the palazzo of the Conservatori, which is the building that forms the side of the square of the Capitol to the right hand of the visitor as he ascends the magnificent flight of steps from the Via di Ara Coeli. The steep sides of the Capitoline Hill on either side of these steps has been recently turned into a very well-kept and pretty garden, among the lawns and shrubberies of which the attention of the stranger, as he ascends, may be attracted by a neatly-painted iron cage in front of the mouth of a little cavern in the rock, which is inhabited by a she-wolf in memorial of the earliest traditions of the place. Memorials, indeed, are not wanting at every step, and from the first window of the staircase as the visitor ascends to the museum on the first floor he may look down on the Tarpeian Rock.

The public functionaries of all sorts here do so much of their work in a manner which gives rise to much discontentment among the Romans, and would by the people of better-ruled countries be deemed wholly intolerable, that it is a pleasure to be able to say that upon this occasion the municipality has done what it had to do thoroughly well. The galleries and rooms of the new establishment are decorated in admirably good taste in the Pompeian style, the walls being colored in panels and borders of blue and red on a buff ground. They are excellently well lighted, and the visitor is not hunted round the rooms by an attendant anxious only to get his tedious task over, but is allowed to wander about among the treasures around him at his own discretion, and to spend the whole day there, or as much of it as lies between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., if he pleases. A sufficient catalogue, accompanied by a map of the place, is purchasable at the doors for a couple of francs, and the visitor is required to pay half a franc for his entrance. This last regulation is in accordance with a law recently passed by the legislature establishing an entrance-fee at the doors of all public galleries and museums throughout Italy. Heretofore the entrance to all such places was entirely free. But, seeing that the country really needs the assistance to be obtained from this source, it cannot be said to be acting otherwise than reasonably in making such a charge; and probably no one of the thousands who come to Italy to profit by her artistic treasures will ever grudge the payment of the small fee demanded; the only question being whether the measure is on the whole a profitable one financially, of which I do not feel quite sure.

The first landing-place of the vast staircase and the ante-room at the top of it are lined with the more interesting and perfect of the pagan inscriptions which the recent movements of the soil have brought to light. Of course, the majority of these present no specialties distinguishing them from the thousands of similar inscriptions with which the world has long since been familiar. But there are some among them which contribute useful fragments of knowledge to the attempts of our antiquaries to construct a satisfactory plan of the ancient city—dedications of statues, showing what god or goddess inhabited such or such a shrine, and the like. The letters of these inscriptions have been rendered more easily legible by restoring the scarlet coloring of them, as has been done in the case of those at the Vatican.

The visitor next enters a very long corridor or gallery giving access to the various halls and rooms, and adorned with a series of modern busts of the men of whom Italy has most reason to be proud. Some among them are of much merit.

Then comes the gallery of the bronzes. In this department the late finds have been very numerous and extremely interesting. Among the objects which will immediately attract the visitor's eye as he enters the principal room are a litter and a biga or chariot. In both cases of course only fragments of the bronze remain, but they are sufficient to have enabled skilled antiquaries to reconstruct the entire litter and the entire chariot. The latter is very specially interesting. The plates of embossed and chiseled bronze which encased the body of the chariot are figured with admirably-worked subjects in basso-rilievo, many of them relating to the "wondrous tale of Troy." This invaluable specimen was the gift to the museum of that eminent and liberal archæologist, Signor A. Castellani, of whose matchless collection of Etruscan jewelry I wrote in a former number of this Magazine. The remaining portions of the bronze- and iron-work of the litter, with its arrangement of poles for carrying it, somewhat after the fashion of a sedan-chair, though the whole of the apparatus is much lighter, are more fragmentary, but yet sufficient for the reconstruction of a specimen illustrative to the classical reader of many a passage in the ancient writers. Under No. 10 the visitor will find the small statue of an hermaphrodite in bronze, fashioned as the bearer of a lamp—a statue of very great delicacy and beauty.

The next room is that of the medals and coins, the number of which will probably surprise the visitor not a little. The gold coins and the better-preserved and more interesting specimens are shown single under cleverly-arranged glass cases. The more ordinary results of the finds which are almost daily being made have been consigned in promiscuous heaps to huge glass vases, whose tops, however, are carefully sealed down. The large collections of the æs rude signatum of the consular and of the imperial families, in bronze, in silver and in gold, together with some mediæval specimens, are ranged around the walls.

Then we come to the sculpture, the main scope of the new museum, which is distributed in a large vestibule, in a noble octagonal central hall and in a long gallery. It was an excellent idea, adding much to the interest which every stranger in Rome will take in the museum, to place on each specimen a placard specifying the locality in which it was discovered and the date of the finding. And this information is admirably supplemented by a map hung against the wall showing in detail the relative positions of all the places which have yielded up these long-buried treasures. The number of specimens of sculpture is in all one hundred and thirty-three; and it is impossible, without letting this notice run to an immoderate length, to attempt to give an adequate account of the various objects, or even of the principal among them. There is a richly-ornamented and very characteristic head of Commodus, which really looks as if it might have come from the sculptor's hands yesterday. A colossal bust of Mæcenas, also the gift of Signor Castellani, a bust of Tiberius, a small statue of the child Hercules, a Venus Anadyomene, may be, and many others might be, mentioned. The last-named is a very lovely statue of a young girl entirely nude. The archæologists have chosen to call it a Venus, but it is to my thinking clear that it never was intended for the laughter-loving goddess. The expression of the face is perfectly and beautifully chaste, and indeed a little sad. I should say that it must have been a nymph coming from the bath, and just about to clothe herself with the drapery thrown over a broken column at her knee as soon as she shall have completed the arrangement of her tresses, with which her hands are (or, alas! were, for the arms are wanting) engaged.

Room No. 10 contains a very extensive and most interesting collection of ancient pottery. There are many of the painted vases with which the world has become so well acquainted, and which, as being the more showy objects, will on his first entrance attract the eye of the visitor. But if he will with loving patience examine the vast numbers of utensils of every sort which have been with the utmost care sifted, one might almost say, from out of the mass of débris which the recent excavations have thrown up, he will find an amount of suggestive illustration of the old pagan life of two thousand years ago which cannot fail to interest and instruct him.

T.A.T.

OUR FOREIGN SURNAMES

It is interesting as well as amusing to read the foreign names upon the signs in the streets of our cities and towns, and observe the number of nationalities thereon represented, together with the peculiarities of form and meaning displayed by the names themselves.

German names meet the eye everywhere, and are usually very outlandish in appearance, while many of them have significations which are conspicuously and ludicrously inappropriate. For example, a lager-beer saloon in one of our large cities is kept by Mr. Heiliggeist ("Holy Ghost"); a cigar-shop in another place belongs to Mr. Priesterjahn ("Prester John"); while the pastor of a devout German flock in a third locality is the Rev. Mr. Wuestling ("low scoundrel"). The Hon. Carl Schurz, too, is hardly the sort of man to be named "apron," though it is certainly true that his name is in this country sometimes pronounced "Shirts."

Other branches of the great Teutonic family have many representatives among us, and their names seem, to the uninitiated, even more fearfully and wonderfully constructed than those of their German cousins. It produces a good deal of surprise in the mind of an American to see on the sign of a tradesman from Belgium the familiar name of Cox spelled "Kockx;" and the Norwegian patronymic Trondhjemer ("Drontheimer"), though a very mild specimen of the language, has a formidable aspect to the general beholder.

The German-Hebrew names display such an exuberant Eastern fancy in their composition as to suggest the inquiry whether they are not really but German translations of their possessors' original Oriental titles. It is not unlikely that this was the origin of names like Rosenthal ("Vale of Roses"), Lilienhain ("Meadow of Lilies"), Liebenstrom ("Stream of Love"), and Goldenberg ("Golden Mount").

The Teutonic names, whether German, Scandinavian or Flemish, do not, as a rule, seem by any means so unpronounceable as those pertaining to foreigners of Slavonic race. The Russian, Polish and Bohemian appellations, which occur frequently in some sections of our country, so often begin with the extraordinary combination cz that many Americans, believing that nothing but a convulsive sneeze could meet the necessities of such a case, decline trying to pronounce them at all. But the difficulties which these Slavonic names apparently offer would, in a great measure, be removed by a uniform system of orthography. The combination cz, for instance, corresponds to our ch, and the Polish cognomen Czajkowski becomes much less exasperating when spelled, as it would be in English, "Chycovsky." The same thing is true, to a great extent, of the Hungarian names, which are not rare in our larger cities. They, too, would be greatly simplified to us by being spelled according to English rules. A very frequent combination in Hungarian names, that of sz is really the same as our ss; while s without the z is pronounced sh. The Hungarian name Szemelenyi under our system of spelling would therefore be "Semelenye," which is less discouraging.

The foreign names in the United States that really present the most serious difficulties to the native citizen are unquestionably the Welsh. Some of the obstacles to easy pronunciation may even in their case be removed by adaptation to our orthography; as is shown by the name Hwg ("hog"), which would be spelled by us "Hoog." But there are so many sounds in Welsh that are not only unknown, but almost inconceivable to English-speaking people, that the difficulties would still be very far from being overcome. And some of these peculiar utterances are expressed in Welsh by combinations of the Roman characters which in English stand for familiar and simple sounds; so that an attempt to reduce the two languages to a common system of spelling would not be at all easy. The combination ll stands in Welsh for a terrific gurgling, gasping sound, which when once heard swiftly puts an end to all the romantic associations that the name of Llewellyn has derived from history and poetry.

But all such foreign—or, more strictly speaking, un-English—names, after being in this country a generation or two, become, in a certain sense, "acclimated." They undergo a change in pronunciation, in spelling, or in both, which removes, in effect, the difficulties that originally characterized them. In this way the German names Schneider, Meyer, Kaiser, Kraemer, Schallenberger, Schwarzwaelder, and a host of others have become, respectively, Snyder, Myers, Keyser, Creamer, Shellabarger, Swartswelder, etc. Sometimes, too, an American name more or less similar in sound or meaning has been taken or given in place of the original German title; as when Loewenstein ("Lion-rock") was exchanged for Livingston, and Albrecht ("Albert") for Allbright.

The old "Knickerbocker" names of the Middle States have, in most instances, retained their Dutch spelling intact, but have generally been subjected to a similar process of adaptation in sound. The same may be said of the French names in this country. Their spelling has, as a rule, been preserved, while their sound has been Americanized. In this way De Rosset has acquired the pronunciation Derrozett, and Jacques has come to be called either Jaquess or Jakes. Many French patronymics, such as the old South Carolina Huguenot name Marion, exhibiting nothing peculiarly French in their forms, are now pronounced entirely in accordance with our rules, and their national origin is preserved by tradition alone. Some French titles, however, having undergone only a partial change in pronunciation, survive in a hybrid form as to sound, though their spelling remains unaltered. Specimens of this class may be found in such names as Huger, pronounced "Huzhée;" Fouché, commonly called "Fooshée;" and Deveraux or Devereux, now converted into "Débro" or "Dévroo." The only very noticeable change that has taken place in the orthography of our French names is that the article has been joined to the noun in many cases where they were originally separate. In this way La Ramie, La Rabie, La Reintrée, etc. are now usually spelled Laramie, Larabie (or, in some instances, Larrabee), Lareintree, etc.; the pronunciation of the newer form being Americanized in the usual way. But this change in form is one which might easily have occurred even in France.

Most of these French and Dutch names have been in the country for a comparatively long time, and, indeed, many of them date back to the early colonial period. Like the Spanish-American names of Texas, California, Florida and Louisiana, to which the same rule generally applies, they belonged to members of organized foreign communities, proportionately large enough to preserve their names from a complete assimilation with the ideas of the English-American population. And in a lesser degree this is also true of those early German emigrants, mainly from the Palatinate, who settled in Pennsylvania, Western Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley.

The tendency at the present day, however, seems to be strongly in favor of the process mentioned first—that of changing the sound of the names to suit American ears, and altering the spelling so as to conform to the new pronunciation. There is every indication that this will be done with regard to a very large majority of the foreign surnames that have been introduced among us within the last fifty years, or which may be brought into our country in the future. And as the changes so made are quite arbitrary, the result will be that the future student of American nomenclature will often be sorely puzzled by some of the surnames to which his attention shall be drawn.

W.W.C.

THE NEW FRENCH ACADEMICIAN

No institution of its kind holds so eminent a place in the esteem of a great country as the Académie Française. The elections are always a matter of interest, largely shared by the cultivated Revue-des-Deux-Mondes-reading world of both hemispheres; and the last election was one which excited fully as much attention as most of its predecessors. M. John Lemoinne, who at length summoned up courage to present himself as a candidate, was born in London in Waterloo year, 1815, and has for a long period, probably thirty years, been, through the Journal des Débats, in some sort a European power. His selection to fill the seat of M. Jules Janin is in every way appropriate. Indeed, it seems strange that he should have been contented to wait until he was sixty-one to come forward for that distinction.

The foundation of the Academy is directly traceable to the meetings of men of science at the house of M. Courart—who, early in the seventeenth century, was for forty years its first secretary—but it unquestionably owes to Richelieu a habitation and a name. It was formed with the special object of preserving accuracy in the French language, to which Frenchmen have been wont to pay an almost exclusive attention, but by the election of M. Lemoinne the Academy will have at least one member who is no less acquainted with another tongue.

Every one will remember old Miss Crawley's rage when she found that Becky was trading on her connection with the democratic-aristocratic spinster to make her way into the Faubourg St. Germain. Too impatient to write in French, the old lady posted off a furious disavowal of the little adventuress in vigorous vernacular, but, adds the author, as Madame la Duchesse had only passed twenty years in England, she didn't understand one word. It may be hoped that the new Academician will, in conjunction with the new minister of public instruction, Mr. Waddington, who is a Rugby and Cambridge man, have some effect in arousing his countrymen to the study which they have heretofore so strangely neglected of a tongue which threatens to obliterate in time the inconveniences occasioned by the Tower of Babel. English is every day more and more spoken, and French less and less.

In delivering his address of welcome to M. Lemoinne, M. Cavillier Fleury said: "You are one of the creators of the discussion of foreign affairs in the French papers: you gave them the taste for interesting themselves in the concerns of foreign countries. Few of us before steam had shortened distance really knew England. Voltaire had by turns glorified and ridiculed it; De Staël had shown it to us in an agreeable book; the witty letters of Duvergier de Hauranne had revealed the secrets of its electoral system. Your correspondence of 1841 completed the work." He might pertinently have added, "Because you are about the only French newspaper writer who ever thoroughly understood the English language, and could thus avoid ridiculous blunders."

It has been observed that the Débats almost exclusively supplies the Academy with its contingent of publicists—a circumstance accounted for by that journal being jealous of the purity of its language, and in other respects preserving a high and dignified standard. It has, indeed, for an unusually long period enjoyed its reputation. French and Belgian newspapers are very much of a mystery to an Anglo-Saxon. They seem to flourish under conditions impracticable to American or English journals. The Indépendance Belge and the Journal des Débats lie before us. Neither of them contains sufficient advertisements to make up three of our columns, yet their expenses must, we should suppose, especially in the case of the Débats, published as it is where prices are so high, be very large. Both these papers contain articles evidently the work of able hands, and in the case of the Indépendance the foreign correspondence must be a very costly item, forming, as it frequently does, five columns of a large page. The price of each is twenty centimes—high, certainly, for a single sheet.

It has often been observed, too, that French newspaper-men seem exceptionally well off. They frequent costly cafés, occasionally indulge in petits soupers in cabinets particuliers, and, altogether, taking prices into account, appear to be in the enjoyment of larger means than their brethren of the pen elsewhere. Of course, the success of a French newspaper is, even in the absence of advertisements, intelligible in the case of the Figaro or Petit Journal, with their circulation of 70,000 and 150,000 a day; but in the case of such papers as the Débats, whose circulation is not very large, it is difficult to explain.

The position of a journalist in Paris seems to stand in many respects higher than elsewhere. Of course, the fact of contributions not being anonymous adds immeasurably to the writer's personal importance, if it also gets him into scrapes. Elsewhere, editors are men of mark, and certainly no one in the journalistic world can possibly be made more of than Mr. Delane in London. But the editorial writers in his paper, who would in Paris be men of nearly as much mark as rising members of Parliament in England, are completely "left out in the cold," gaining no reputation even among acquaintance, since they are required to preserve the strictest secrecy as to their connection with the paper. Altogether, we are disposed to believe that Paris—official "warnings," press prosecutions and possible duels notwithstanding—must be accepted as the journalist's paradise. To be courted, caressed and feared is as much as any reasonable newspaper writer can expect, and a great deal more than he is likely to get out of his work elsewhere.

R.W.