hemselves to the excesses of
fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough
poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors
of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful
impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a
realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact
is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and
unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are
gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which
bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early
eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and
daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I
recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back,
embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother
toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe
in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the
artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as
true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their
faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of
art used to do with their historical and scriptural people--he has put
them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to
deny him a convincing logic. 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 conformit