to look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but
beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas and
columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly painted and
gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the least, and crowding
severally upon one another, without relation or proportion. Their mass
is supremely tasteless, almost senseless; that mob of architectural
incongruities was not only without collective beauty, but it was without
that far commoner and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This
has come to it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word
vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome in
tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at least
paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I doubt if it
would have been even photographable to anything but a picture post-card
effect.

But as yet I wandered in the Forum safe from the realization of its
ugliness when it was in its glory. I cannot say that even now it is
picturesque, but it is paintable, and certainly it is pathetic. Stumps
of columns, high and low, stand about in the places where they stood in
their unbroken pride, and though it seems a hardship that they should
not have been left lying in the kindly earth or on it instead of being
pulled up and set on end, it must be owned that they are scarcely
overworked in their present postures. More touching are those
inarticulate heaps, cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there
together and waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and
translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must always
be remembered that when they were coherent they were only beautiful
parts of a whole that was brutally unbeautiful. We have but to use the
little common-sense which Heaven has vouchsafed some of us in order to
realize that Rome, either republican or imperial, was a state for which
we can have no genuine reverence, and that mostly the ruins of her past
can stir in us no finer emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the
sake of knowledge, and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of
human interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody,
archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their
recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the grave
of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as dramatic a
spectacle a