Severally They May Have Been
Cultivated And Interesting People; And That Blooming Maiden May Really
Have Been The Blue Flower Of Romance That She Looked Before She Began To
Dine.
We were entering upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our
first, and I was glad to find there were so many things I had left
unseen or had forgotten.
First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I
went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram
following the bed of a torrential river which was now dry except in the
pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as always in
Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of art; their
husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their _fiances,_ were at work
with them, not, indeed, washing the linen, but spreading to dry it in
snowy spaces over the clean gravel. On either bank of the stream newly
finished or partly finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity
of the city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be
too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its convenience
to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon our train was
carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed to be intending to
spend the day there. Some had wreaths and flowers, and were clearly
sorrowing friends of the dead; others, with their guide-books, were as
plainly mere sight-seers, and these were Italians as well as strangers,
gratifying what seems the universal passion for cemeteries. In our own
villages the graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young
people and the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint
of English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts took
them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this was often
the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble aesthetic instincts
found their first expression in the attempt to dignify or beautify the
homes of the dead. Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew
how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the
effect was of a collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it
was touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not
otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo
at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one
quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa. It makes you the helpless
confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond
aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity
and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local
civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.
My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in
quantity from the first and second. There seemed more of the things,
better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which
rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with
allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank.
The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where
the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead
in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground enclosed by the
cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a
colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect.
It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in
itself the multitudinous passions, wills, and hopes expressed in those
incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one
cannot deny them.
The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the
long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the
Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of
brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan,
you are aware of the North - its strenu-ousness, its enterprise, its
restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the
gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini
came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of
Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is
heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic
beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice
might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her
art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh
and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it;
her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of
the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk
and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice,
the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment
and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a
people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant,
impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then
furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made
her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years;
under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802,
when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte,
she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years
before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various
quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to
suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her
French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause
not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa
fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three
hundred years after the Republic of Florence.
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