CORNETO OF THE TARQUINS

Corneto stands upon a rocky hill that overlooks the Mediterranean, three miles away and below, over a dead-flat plain of marsh and fever. It is the town of the Tarquins. Its name is still ‘The Tarquinian.’ Its gate is the Tarquinian Gate. That great lordship still hangs over Corneto; the family that gave Kings to Rome. They might return after twenty-five centuries and find the place still their own; for it is still Etruscan, and, what is more, Etruria has here risen from the dead. The thousand tombs have sent back to the light strong faces in stone, and stone coffins sculptured with the fates of the soul, and vases carrying every picture of that life, and the ornaments of women—still to be worn. The spirits have refused to leave that ground.

It was the sacred and perhaps the chief of the Etruscan cities—the one lying most to seaward, and that which had outside its wall a national cemetery stretching for miles to the east and the south. Above the sharp precipice to the landward, where the wall stands most forbidding and with its most ancient foundations apparent, a man sees from the ramparts that cluster of mountains, the old volcanoes, which are the makers of an undying race; the burnt land of Tuscany, mother of Gods and Kings. None knows whence the blood came, or sprung from the very earth or brought in from oversea; but that same soil where the old fire smoulders underground and where the silent craters hold very wide lakes of water high above the world in their rims, that same igneous dust which subtly strengthens the vine, made the Etrurian people and through them the iron laws, the subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed on Rome and from which we all inherit.

For, indeed, the business of the soul and the doom of man haunted this people. On the day when I watched the mountains to the east from the walls of the Tarquinian crags—mountains of Orvieto, of Volterra, of all the federation—angry storms swept those summits, and the Sirocco piled clouds above the heights and veiled them here and there with rain; though westward, towards the sea, it was already clear. It was under such storms a man could best brood over the sweep of slope and barren rising down, which hid (save for small entries of white against the dark wrack) the miles of tombs.

I did not descend among them, among those dead. I did no more than walk out through the early evening into their vast, deserted field. I came back before the end of the day to look at the great stone coffins which have been gathered in the museum of the town.

Though that museum is a lovely palace of the later Middle Ages, I found no shock of discontinuity between the time of the tombs thousands of years ago, of the palace five centuries ago and my own time in the quiet town. All had grown; and, what was more, the domination of the founders has so impressed itself upon Corneto that the oldest things and the latest are in the same air.

With what majesty are the stone faces upon those very ancient coffins hewn! I saw one there of a young man not awakened, as it were, from sleep, but upon the point of waking; the face turned to the left in a complete repose which had yet about it something stern; half the head was lost in the material, left rough, from which the whole was carved, suggesting those modern tricks which Rodin affected and vulgarised. Here, in this immemorial thing, there was no suggestion of trick or effort. Some instinct, not a willed effort, prompted the man who chiselled it to leave uncarven the body of stone upon which the profile reposed. On the sides of the coffin beneath were sculptured those dreadful figures which in the dark origins of religion (or, more probably, the dark inheritance of some fall and failure from a better creed) peopled the places below the earth.

It would seem that this ancient nation thought of the soul in its passage as something hunted; yet there was here no note of terror—which is always unworthy of art, a weakness and a defilement—but there was certainly a note of darkness and of peril. More, still, was there a certitude of immortality. For though it be true, as it is true, that the full doctrine of immortality which has made Europe the head of the world, came to us ultimately from the islands of the Atlantic Sea; though it be true, as it is true, that the last edges of the West, the great salt cliffs of Ireland, of Brittany and of the Hebrides, are first found possessed of that revelation and sent it in a distorted message through Britain and Gaul, till at last it awakened even Syria; yet here in these Etruscan tombs, as in the Egyptian, the quality of immortality was apparent; an adumbration or a memory: confused, I think; perhaps without dogma, and therefore unrooted; but certainly there.

This marriage of living and of dying, this obsession with the passing of the soul, was apparent again in the superb figure of a matron, upon whose tomb the sculptor had revived what was surely her very body; for never have I seen any stone living more intensely with personality.

There was little or no action. It was a head raised, and the shoulders with it slightly; the movement of a strong frame attending to some speech, but still reclining and fully in repose. There was no pretence to beauty, not even to a beauty lost, in that face of middle age, but a singular majesty and a full bearing of that burden which we, the Christians, in our later age, call also the duty of living. Of what sons was she the mother? Of what soldier the widow, or of what lord? What fields were the fortune of the great family from whom she inherited? What slaves of what household thronged her funerals?

If ever there was a face made for ever, it is that face! I shall come back to it again. For Corneto, once seen, is a place to which a man returns as he returns to the Capitol or to his home. Corneto, once seen, inhabits the mind and becomes an habitation for the mind. For there you have the impress, memorial and perpetuation of a great people, wholly preoccupied with the great business not only of life, but of death.

Were I to add also something on the strength of that dead mother’s face, I might mislead my readers; for clearly this people were not concerned with strength save as a means to an end. Nor did the artist know, I think, when he made that superb head and fixed its life and its death for eternity (of so much eternity as there is in even the hardest stone) that he would give to one coming so long after any message of strength. He was concerned rather with a purpose fulfilled and with the dignity and completion of the woman whom he thus established. Therein might be seen all the affair: the bearing of children; the governance of a household: the loss of this and that affection and companionship; and all, whatever losses beside, make up the burden of mankind. Therein also was the last descent out of the light of the sun; the loss of the light of the sun; the last and mortal loss of all. The weight of a lifetime, so borne, was in that face, and a resolute acceptance of the end.

When I had left my long contemplation of that face, I went up upon the ramparts of the city and looked out over the sea. The hills run down abruptly, lovely enough. The flat between it and the surf line has nothing of our northern sea-sides, nothing enjoyable or livable, but rather is it a barrier where men do not live. Also the sea, empty of sails at the ending of that day, enhanced the effect of desertion and silence. The sun was sinking unclouded into the even line of the Mediterranean. The storm clouds had gathered up far to the east in a mass of gloom upon the mountains. All was the symbol of life ending and darkness beyond.

Then I thought to myself, as I so looked westward from the wall, how men might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not whence it came, nor whither it goes.

For there is no introduction to Corneto. These great dead, their powerful art, their living, immortal stones, spring out from a remote beginning, with no hint of what power formed them; nor did they themselves pretend to tell us, nor, I think, did they themselves pretend to know what origin there might be for so much, so greatly made; their walls, their ritual, their tombs, their effigies!

This place, how many thousands pass in a week along the main line that runs below Corneto from the north: from Leghorn, from Genoa, from the slime of the Riviera, from Paris, from London, all on their way to the hotels of Rome. And how many know what they are passing?

They are passing the things of life and of death.

THE END.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.