Genoa Has Rather A Bad Name For Its Hotels, But We Had Found This One Charming, Perhaps Because When We Had Objected To Going Five Flights Up The Landlord Had Led Us Yet A Floor Higher, That We Might Walk Into The Garden.

It is so in much of Genoa, where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid contrast between the levels of the front door and the back gate.

Many of the streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages; when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of stairs. It cannot he denied, either, that the steep incline gives a charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and driveways and trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi (there is a Via Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and village, and ought to be a dozen), compactly built, but giving here and there over the houses' shoulders glimpses of the gardens lurking behind them, is of a dignity full of the energy which a flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts. Without the inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never have got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo Santo; and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by involuntarily straining forward from our places. But the Campo Santo was richly worth the effort, for to visit that famous cemetery is to enjoy an experience of which it is the unique opportunity.

I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity - in others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only inferior artists who have abandoned themselves 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 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.

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