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.
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