No Sophistry Or Convention Of Drapery In
The Scene Could Have Conveyed Its Pathos Half So Well, Or Indeed At
All.
It does make you shudder, I allow; it sets your teeth on edge; but then,
if you are a
Real man or woman, it brings the lump into your throat; the
smile fails from your lip; you pay the tribute of genuine pity and awe.
I will not pretend that I was so much moved by the meeting in heaven of
a son and father: the spirit of the son in a cutaway, with a derby hat
in his hand, gazing with rapture into the face of the father's spirit in
a long sack-coat holding his marble bowler elegantly away from his side,
if I remember rightly. But here the fact wanted the basis of simplicity
so strong in the other scene; in the mixture of the real and the ideal
the group was romanticistic.
There are innumerable other portrait figures and busts in which the
civic and social hour is expressed. The women's hair is dressed in this
fashionable way or that; the men's beards are cut in conformity to the
fashion or the personal preference in side whiskers or mustache or
imperial or goatee; and their bronze or marble faces convey the
contemporary character of aristocrat or bourgeois or politician or
professional. I do not know just what the reader would expect me to say
in defence of the full-length figure of a lady in _decollete_ and
trained evening dress, who enters from the tomb toward the spectator as
if she were coming into a drawing-room after dinner. She is very
beautiful, but she is no longer very young, and the bare arms, which
hang gracefully at her side, respond to an intimation of _embonpoint_ in
the figure, with a slightly flabby over-largeness where they lose
themselves in the ample shoulders. Whether this figure is the fancy of
the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished
to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not
know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father
and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was
that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings
from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo
Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her
ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable and
touching dignity.
If I am giving the reader the impression that I went to the Campo Santo
in my last stop at Genoa, I am deceiving him; I record here the memories
of four years ago. I did not revisit the place, but I should like to see
it again, if only to revive my recollections of its unique interest. I
did really revisit the Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived
the pleasure I had known before in its wonderful Van Dycks.
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