king to the cemetery,
that strange and impossible museum of modern sculpture, where the dead
are multiplied by an endless apparition of crude marble shapes, the
visions of the vulgar hacked out in dazzling, stainless white stone.
What would we not give for such a "document" from the thirteenth century
as this cemetery has come to be of our own time. It is the crude
representation of modern Italian life that you see, realistic, unique,
and precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words. All
the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the
modern world, is expressed there with a naivete that is, by some
miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that
thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because
someone loved them and they were of no account. The husk of the
immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and
disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the grocer, horribly wrapped in
everlasting marble, has put on ignominy for evermore; while the
plebeian, bewildered by the tyranny of life, crouches over his dead
wife, for ever afraid lest death tap him too on the shoulder. How the
wind whistles among these immortal jests, where the pure stone of the
Carrara hills has been fashioned to the ugliness of the middle classes.
This is the supreme monument not of Genoa only, but of our time. In that
grotesque marble we see our likeness. For there is gathered in
indestructible stone all the fear, ostentation, and vulgar pride of our
brothers. Ah, poor souls! that for a little minute have come into the
world, and are eager not altogether to be forgotten; they too, like the
ancients, have desired immortality, and, seeing the hills, have sought
to establish their mediocrity among them. Therefore, with an obscene and
vulgar gesture, they have set up their own image as well as they could,
and, in a frenzied prayer to an unknown God, seem to ask, now that
everything has fallen away and we can no longer believe in the body,
that they may not be too disgusted with their own clay. Thus in frenzy,
fear, and vanity they have carved the likeness of that which was once
among the gods.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. P. Villari: Primi due Secoli della Storia di Firenze (2^o
Edizione), vol. i. p. 246.

[2] See Le Mesurier, _Genoa: Five Lectures_, Genoa, A. Donath, 1889, a
useful and informing book, to which I am indebted for more than one
curious fact.

[3] S