And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains,
and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its
source, not checked, directed, utilised, but gushing forth
uncontrollably through every fissure of the brown walls and reeking
streets--love and hatred, mirth and folly, impudence and greed, going
naked and unashamed as the lazzaroni on the quays. The variegated
surface of it all was fascinating to Odo. It set free his powers of
purely physical enjoyment, keeping all deeper sensations in abeyance.
These, however, presently found satisfaction in that other hidden beauty
of which city and plain were but the sumptuous drapery. It is hardly too
much to say that to the trained eyes of the day the visible Naples
hardly existed, so absorbed were they in the perusal of her buried past.
The fever of excavation was on every one. No social or political problem
could find a hearing while the subject of the last coin or bas-relief
from Pompeii or Herculanaeum remained undecided. Odo, at first an amused
spectator, gradually found himself engrossed in the fierce quarrels
raging over the date of an intaglio or the myth represented on an
amphora. The intrinsic beauty of the objects, and the light they shed on
one of the most brilliant phases of human history, were in fact
sufficient to justify the prevailing ardour; and the reconstructive
habit he had acquired from Crescenti lent a living interest to the
driest discussion between rival collectors.
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