Italian Hours

The Grand Canal

The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best

might perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to

belong to the splendid square which bears the patron's name and

which is the centre of Venetian life so far (this is pretty. well

all the way indeed) as Venetian life is a matter of strolling and

chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of circulating without a

purpose, and of staring--too often with a foolish one--through

the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality makes their

doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the

modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite

technically a "street," the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less

normal; and I hasten to add that I am glad not to find myself

studying my subject under the international arcades, or yet (I

will go the length of saying) in the solemn presence of the

church. For indeed in that case I foresee I should become still

more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block that

inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path

of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to

expression. "Venetian life" is a mere literary convention, though

it be an indispensable figure. The words have played an

effective part in the literature of sensibility; they constituted

thirty years ago the title of Mr. Howells's delightful volume of

impressions; but in using them to-day one owes some frank amends

to one's own lucidity. Let me carefully premise therefore that so

often as they shall again drop from my pen, so often shall I beg

to be regarded as systematically superficial.

Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an

end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy

of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of

tombs. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such

tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance.

Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a

crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. It has no

flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation perhaps--and the

thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money and little red

books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible visitors in

the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is only

a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at

the door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as

per tariff, to see how dead it is. From this constatation,

this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, the prosperity,

the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, the

beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living; they are the

custodians and the ushers of the great museum--they are even

themselves to a certain extent the objects of exhibition. It is

in the wide vestibule of the square that the polygot pilgrims

gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera

in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of

Venice, the lamentable difference, is most easily measured there,

and that is why, in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must

turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of

ricordi. The ricordi that we prefer are gathered

best where the gondola glides--best of all on the noble waterway

that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement

at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied Piazzetta

(forgive me, shade of St. Theodore--has not a brand new caf

begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that

introduces us most directly to the great picture by which the

Grand Canal works its first spell, and to which a thousand

artists, not always with a talent apiece, have paid their

tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down the great

throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us for

turning our back on St. Mark's.

We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we

have never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more

for catching at any freshness that may be left in the world of

photography. It is in Venice above all that we hear the small

buzz of this vulgarising voice of the familiar; yet perhaps it is

in Venice too that the picturesque fact has best mastered the

pious secret of how to wait for us. Even the classic Salute waits

like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is more

ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists

have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped

buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide

steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine

air of the woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred

assurance with which she looks in the direction of her old-

fashioned Byzantine neighbour; and the juxtaposition of two

churches so distinguished and so different, each splendid in its

sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range of Venice.

However, we ourselves are looking away from St. Mark's--we must

blind our eyes to that dazzle; without it indeed there are

brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance

even while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These

steps are cool in the morning, yet I don't know that I can

justify my excessive fondness for them any better than I can

explain a hundred of the other vague infatuations with which

Venice sophisticates the spirit. Under such an influence

fortunately one need n't explain--it keeps account of nothing but

perceptions and affections. It is from the Salute steps perhaps,

of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of the city

is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if

composition were the chief end of human institutions. The

charming architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the

most graceful of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on

which revolves the delightful satirical figure of a little

weathercock of a woman. This Fortune, this Navigation, or

whatever she is called--she surely needs no name--catches the

wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested her rotary

bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles and

glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly

expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in

the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially

the appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of

custom, of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the

stranger and the victim. I call them happy, because even their

sordid uses and their vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague

sea-stained pinks and drabs, into that strange gaiety of light

and colour which is made up of the reflection of superannuated

things. The atmosphere plays over them like a laugh, they are of

the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost as charming from

other places as they are from their own balconies, and share

fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which

consists of being both the picture and the point of view.

This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand

Canal, adds a difficulty to any control of one's notes. The Grand

Canal may be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony

of a high and well-loved palace--the memory of irresistible

evenings, of the sociable elbow, of endless lingering and

looking; or it may evoke the restlessness of a fresh curiosity,

of methodical inquiry, in a gondola piled with references. There

are no references, I ought to mention, in the present remarks,

which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. A rhapsody of

Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are

finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the

palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to

remember in the immense array were less insignificant. There are

many I delight in that I don't know, or at least don't keep,

apart. Then there are the bad reasons for preference that are

better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of association

and recollection. These things, as one stands on the Salute

steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out of the

row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green

shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the

very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn't call

by a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice,

these many years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very

friendliest house in all the wide world, and it has, as it

deserves to have, the most beautiful position. It is a real

porto di mare, as the gondoliers say--a port within a

port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all in

with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense

iridescence is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite

colour on which it may fancy itself the heart of the wonderful

prism. We wave to it from the Salute steps, which we must

decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a grateful hand across the

water, and turn into the big white church of Longhena--an empty

shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American family and a

German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, are

gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at

nothing in particular.

For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional

temple to gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to

which we quickly pay our respects, and which we are glad to have

for ten minutes to ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty,

is not the finest of the master's; but it serves again as well

as another to transport--there is no other word--those of his

lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was an early

rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the

supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us

than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in

general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine

Tintoret still carries us back, calling up not only the rich

particular vision but the freshness of the old wonder. Many

things come and go, but this great artist remains for us in

Venice a part of the company of the mind. The others are there in

their obvious glory, but he is the only one for whom the

imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. "The

Marriage in Cana," at the Salute, has all his characteristic and

fascinating unexpectedness--the sacrifice of the figure of our

Lord, who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever

perspective, and the free, joyous presentation of all the other

elements of the feast. Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness,

does the picture give us no impression of a lack of what the

critics call reverence? For no other reason that I can think of

than because it happens to be the work of its author, in whose

very mistakes there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin has spoken

with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the row of

heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they

sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better

example of the roving independence of the painter's vision, a

real spirit of adventure for which his subject was always a

cluster of accidents; not an obvious order, but a sort of peopled

and agitated chapter of life, in which the figures are submissive

pictorial notes. These notes are all there in their beauty and

heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a kind to make the

principle of selection seem in comparison timid, yet the sense of

"composition" in the spectator--if it happen to exist--reaches

out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the spirit

of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular

question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the

high fellowship of Tintoretto.

If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge

which discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more

comprehensively, to the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble

Palazzo Foscari--is too much of a curve to be seen at any one

point as a whole, it represents the better the arched neck, as it

were, of the undulating serpent of which the Canalazzo has the

likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note in our passage

a hundred component "bits," with the baffled sketcher's sense,

and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian

fatalism, the baffled sketcher's temper. It is the early palaces,

of course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could

take them one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand

air. The fairest are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and

there are few, alas, so fair as to have been completely protected

by their beauty. The ages and the generations have worked their

will on them, and the wind and the weather have had much to say;

but disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the bruises of

their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing

like them in the world, and the long succession of their faded,

conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang a

promenade historique of which the lesson, however often we

read it, gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable

dignity to Venice. We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked

to-day in their very curves, of the early middle-age, in the

exquisite individual Gothic of the splendid time, and in the

cornices and columns of a decadence almost as proud. These things

at present are almost equally touching in their good faith; they

have each in their degree so effectually parted with their pride.

They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, and we

hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of

them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission

are far less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put

them to. We have botched them and patched them and covered them

with sordid signs; we have restored and improved them with a

merciless taste, and the best of them we have made over to the

pedlars. Some of the most striking objects in the finest vistas

at present are the huge advertisements of the curiosity-shops.

The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their

opinion, and it is easy to see how well they know they can

confound you with an unanswerable question. What is the whole

place but a curiosity-shop, and what are you here for yourself

but to pick up odds and ends? "We pick them up for you,"

say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked in dollars, "and

who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well plucked, we

add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the bouquet?"

They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and

their establishments are huge and active. They administer the

antidote to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you

never cross their thresholds. If you take this step you are lost,

for you have parted with the correctness of your attitude. Venice

becomes frankly from such a moment the big depressing dazzling

joke in which after all our sense of her contradictions sinks to

rest--the grimace of an over-strained philosophy. It's rather a

comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. You have bad

moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in the

intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft

splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with

anger of the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of

the delicate lives that must have been, that might still be, led

there. You reconstruct the admirable house according to your own

needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of

the little green gardens with which, for the most part, such

establishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling it

a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (I take for

granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in

imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your

gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind,

be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that

Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy

is tempered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real

participation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the

hospitality of an old Venetian home and to lead your life a

little in the painted chambers that still echo with one of the

historic names, you have entered by the shortest step into the

inner spirit of the place. If it did n't savour of treachery to

private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of these

delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as

a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so

in passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain

at the edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which,

in this particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the

modern sympathy, the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest

fruit of time, adjust themselves to the great gilded,

relinquished shell and try to fill it out. A Venetian palace that

has not too grossly suffered and that is not overwhelming by its

mass makes almost any life graceful that may be led in it. With

cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a pre-

established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty

and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its

moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting

expressions. If in the absence of its masters you have happened

to have it to yourself for twenty-four hours you will never

forget the charm of its haunted stillness, late on the summer

afternoon for instance, when the call of playing children comes

in behind from the campo, nor the way the old ghosts seemed to

pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you practically

the essence of the matter that we are considering, for beneath

the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular

stretch you command contains all the characteristics. Everything

has its turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by

long poles and the patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of

the great serenades, and you may study at your leisure the

admirable Venetian arts of managing a boat and organising a

spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which the gondola,

especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, in

the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and

the large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw

themselves forward to a constant recovery has the double value of

being, at the fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The

people from the hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace,

the solitary gondolier (like the solitary horseman of the old-

fashioned novel) is, I confess, a somewhat melancholy figure.

Perched on his poop without a mate, he re-enacts perpetually, in

high relief, with his toes turned out, the comedy of his odd and

charming movement. He always has a little the look of an absent-

minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a perambulator.

But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this

picturesque and amiable class are concerned? I delight in their

sun-burnt complexions and their childish dialect; I know them

only by their merits, and I am grossly prejudiced in their

favour. They are interesting and touching, and alike in their

virtues and their defects human nature is simplified as with a

big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence on

the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken,

yet whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any

rate are in their line great artists. On the swarming feast-

days, on the strange feast-night of the Redentore, their steering

is a miracle of ease. The master-hands, the celebrities and

winners of prizes--you may see them on the private gondolas in

spotless white, with brilliant sashes and ribbons, and often with

very handsome persons--take the right of way with a pardonable

insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with an authority of

their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable bumping and

squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies shriek

with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated

barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the

Canal. The barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now

they are towed by the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists

before the hotels, are not to my sense the greatest seduction of

Venice; but it would be an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that

shouldn't touch them with indulgence. Taking one nuisance with

another, they are probably the prettiest in the world, and if

they have in general more magic for the new arrival than for the

old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their best, keep up the

immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the beginning

of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and it's a

wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The

Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its inheritance.

Vauxhall on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with

the good fortune of home-made music and of a mirror that

reduplicates and multiplies. The feast of the Redeemer--the great

popular feast of the year--is a wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All

Venice on this occasion takes to the boats for the night and

loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged together in a mass

it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour, a private

caf-concert. Of all Christian commemorations it is the

most ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the

passengers repair to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they

plunge, still sociably, into the sea. The night of the Redentore

has been described, but it would be interesting to have an

account, from the domestic point of view, of its usual morrow. It

is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is bridged

over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid

together during the day--it is all done with extraordinary

celerity and art--and the bridge is prolonged across the

Canalazzo (to Santa Maria Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for

glancing at the occasion. We glance at it from our palace

windows; lengthening our necks a little, as we look up toward the

Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon, so serried as

to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is a flock

of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All

Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all

Venice pushes anyone into the water.

But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching

of the neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a

famous pretender eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is

served in the open air, on a neat little terrace, by attendants

in livery, and there is no indiscretion in our seeing that the

pretender dines. Ever since the table d'h** in "Candide" Venice

has been the refuge of monarchs in want of thrones--she would n't

know herself without her rois en exil. The exile is

agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its

movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by

little it rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty

of leisure to write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I

believe he has organs in which they are published; but the only

noise he makes in the world is the harmless splash of his oars.

He comes and goes along the Canalazzo, and he might be much worse

employed. He is but one of the interesting objects it presents,

however, and I am by no means sure that he is the most striking.

He has a rival, if not in the iron bridge, which, alas, is within

our range, at least--to take an immediate example--in the

Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but beautiful in its

crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its delicate round

arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the haunted

Montecuculi. Those who have a kindness for Venetian gossip like

to remember that it was once for a few months the property of

Robert Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in

the splendid Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful

cosmopolite "document," which, as it presents itself, in an

admirable position, but a short way farther down the Canal, we

can almost see, in spite of the curve, from the window at which

we stand. This great seventeenth century pile, throwing itself

upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, a certain upward

toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing sea-

horse, decorates immensely--and within, as well as without--the

wide angle that it commands.

There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic

Foscari, just below it, one of the noblest creations of the

fifteenth century, a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty.

Dedicated to-day to official uses--it is the property of the

State--it looks conscious of the consideration it enjoys, and is

one of the few great houses within our range whose old age

strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly "kept up";

perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in thinking so

well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my

mind--I am easily their victim when it is a question of

architecture--as they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost

anywhere, in the presence of the beautiful, of the desecrated or

the neglected. We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr.

Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence.

This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a

pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on firm

ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our

windows--it is another proof that they really show us everything-

-and in feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page

to themselves. They are infinitely more numerous than the

arriving stranger can suppose; they nestle with a charm all their

own in the complications of most back-views. Some of them are

exquisite, many are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful

understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that

edge their foundations. On the small canals, in the hunt for

amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all. The tangle of

plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the greenness

makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the

reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these

is countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are

numerous on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a

brush to the picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give

a sweetness to the house. Then the elements are complete--the

trio of air and water and of things that grow. Venice without

them would be too much a matter of the tides and the stones. Even

the little trellises of the traghetti count charmingly as

reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature of man.

The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof of

chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there

according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching

"fare." There is no "hum" in Venice, so that their voices travel

far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I

beg the reader to believe that if I had time to go into

everything, I would go into the traghetti, which have

their manners and their morals, and which used to have their

piety. This piety was always a madonnina, the protectress

of the passage--a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red spark

of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have

gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for bric-a-

brac. The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to

Nihilism--a faith consistent happily with a good stroke of

business. One of the figures has been left, however--the

Madonnetta which gives its name to a traghetto near the

Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone inserted ages

ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult of

removal. Pazienza, the day will come when so marketable a

relic will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the

devouring American. I leave that expression, on second thought,

standing; but I repent of it when I remember that it is a

devouring American--a lady long resident in Venice and whose

kindnesses all Venetians, as well as her country-people, know,

who has rekindled some of the extinguished tapers, setting up

especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted and gilded

wood, which, on the top of its stout palo, sheds its

influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute.

If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse

has left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the

Academy, which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of

St. Mark, well within sight of the windows at which we are still

lingering. This wondrous temple of Venetian art--for all it

promises little from without--overhangs, in a manner, the Grand

Canal, but if we were so much as to cross its threshold we should

wander beyond recall. It contains, in some of the most

magnificent halls--where the ceilings have all the glory with

which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a room--

some of the noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not we

go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it

is always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of

them on the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind--the

sense of them close at hand, behind every wall and under every

cover, like the inevitable reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to

the air that reflects, intensifies, completes the scene. In other

words, as it was the inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted,

and painted with passion, so the wide world of picture becomes,

as we live there, and however much we go about our affairs, the

constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth is, we are in it

so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there is scarcely a

pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in another.

Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come to

you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself conscious,

said more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the

reach between the Salute and the position we have so obstinately

taken up. It is still there before us, however, and the

delightful little Palazzo Dario, intimately familiar to English

and American travellers, picks itself out in the foreshortened

brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest little marble

plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite pieces

--as if there had been only enough to make it small--so that it

looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of

cards that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch.

An old Venetian house dies hard indeed, and I should add that

this delicate thing, with submission in every feature, continues

to resist the contact of generations of lodgers. It is let out in

floors (it used to be let as a whole) and in how many eager

hands--for it is in great requisition--under how many fleeting

dispensations have we not known and loved it? People are always

writing in advance to secure it, as they are to secure the

Jenkins's gondolier, and as the gondola passes we see strange

faces at the windows--though it's ten to one we recognise them--

and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the

water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most

flourishing booths at the fair.

The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino--the

splendid pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel

decidedly that I don't object as I ought to the palaces of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their pretensions impose

upon me, and the imagination peoples them more freely than it can

people the interiors of the prime. Was not moreover this

masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian post-

office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable

first impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived,

wondering, palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall,

and, the first thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-

office for his letters. They had been waiting a long time and

were full of delayed interest, and he returned with them to the

gondola and floated slowly down the Canal. The mixture, the

rapture, the wonderful temple of the poste restante, the

beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news--the memory of

this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from

the splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal,

something that seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous

chambers of youth. Of course this association falls to the

ground--or rather splashes into the water--if I am the victim of

a confusion. Was the edifice in question twenty-three

years ago the post-office, which has occupied since, for many a

day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper

steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these

years I have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the

sentiment, at any rate, is that such a great house has surely, in

the high beauty of its tiers, a refinement of its own. They make

one think of colosseums and aqueducts and bridges, and they

constitute doubtless, in Venice, the most pardonable specimen of

the imitative. I have even a timid kindness for the huge Pesaro,

far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even than the

coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want of

consideration for the general picture, which the early examples

so reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a

modern hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost

equally the modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred

do, I must add, for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them

less. They make even the most elaborate material civilisation of

the present day seem woefully shrunken and bourgeois, for

they simply--I allude to the biggest palaces--can't be lived in

as they were intended to be. The modern tenant may take in all

the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies

the place, but he doesn't fill it, and he has guests from the

neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are far at the

Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take

advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end.

The long straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the

great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a

hundred objects of interest, but it contains most the bright

oddity of its general Deluge air. In all these centuries it has

never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason

or other it is the only part of Venice in which the houses look

as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they reckon

with them--have chosen them; here alone the lapping seaway seems

to confess itself an accident.

[Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE]

There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty

perspective, in which, with its immense field of confused

reflection, the houses have infinite variety, the dullest

expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we imagine, for Lord Byron,

who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo palaces, where the

writing-table is still shown at which he gave the rein to his

passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened by so

delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece

and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other

immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness.

Some of the most touching relics of early Venice are here--for it

was here she precariously clustered--peeping out of a submersion

more pitiless than the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the

picture falls off and a comparative commonness suffuses it.

There is a wide paved walk on either side of the Canal, on which

the waterman--and who in Venice is not a waterman?--is prone to

seek repose. I speak of the summer days--it is the summer Venice

that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are drawn up at

the fondamenta, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue

cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour

anywhere else there would be enough in their tanned

personalities. Half the low doorways open into the warm interior

of waterside drinking-shops, and here and there, on the quay,

beneath the bush that overhangs the door, there are rickety

tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the amusement of

character and of detail? The tone in this part is very vivid, and

is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of the

patchy miscellaneous houses--the faces of fat undressed women and

of other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from

balconies once doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of

the earth come thousands of miles to envy them. The effect is

enhanced by the tattered clothes hung to dry in the windows, by

the sun-faded rags that flutter from the polished balustrades--

these are ivory-smooth with time; and the whole scene profits by

the general law that renders decadence and ruin in Venice more

brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this extraordinary

place golden in tint and misery couleur de rose. The

gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the

poor market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic.

The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly

speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of

course two ways of taking it--from the water or from the upper

passage, where its small shops and booths abound in Venetian

character; but it mainly counts as a feature of the Canal when

seen from the gondola or even from the awful vaporetto.

The great curve of its single arch is much to be commended,

especially when, coming from the direction of the railway-

station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the perfect

picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs

of the little shops make from the water a graceless collective

hump, and the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of

the bridge--like the arches of all the bridges--is the

waterman's friend in wet weather. The gondolas, when it rains,

huddle beside the peopled barges, and the young ladies from the

hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the communication of

insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and the

jewellers of this celebrated precinct--they have their immemorial

row--make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a

universal market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The

produce of the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers

announce their presence. All one's senses indeed are vigorously

attacked; the whole place is violently hot and bright, all

odorous and noisy. The churning of the screw of the

vaporetto mingles with the other sounds--not indeed that

this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. But

Just here the little piers of the resented steamer are

particularly near together, and it seems somehow to be always

kicking up the water. As we go further down we see it stopping

exactly beneath the glorious windows of the Ca'd'Oro. It has

chosen its position well, and who shall gainsay it for having

put itself under the protection of the most romantic facade in

Europe? The companionship of these objects is a symbol; it

expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice.

Perfect, in its prime, was the marble Ca'd'Oro, with the noble

recesses of its loggie, but even then it probably never

"met a want," like the successful vaporetto. If, however,

we are not to go into the Museo Civico--the old Museo Correr,

which rears a staring renovated front far down on the left, near

the station, so also we must keep out of the great vexed question

of steam on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we prudently

kept out of the Accademia. These are expensive and complicated

excursions. It is obvious that if the vaporetti have

contributed to the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed

by fate, and to that of the palaces, whose foundations their

waves undermine, and that if they have robbed the Grand Canal of

the supreme distinction of its tranquillity, so on the other hand

they have placed "rapid transit," in the New York phrase, in

everybody's reach, and enabled everybody--save indeed those who

wouldn't for the world--to rush about Venice as furiously as

people rush about New York. The suitability of this consummation

needn't be pointed out.

Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so

fast now that we have only time to note in how clever and costly

a fashion the Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been

reconstructed and restored. It is a glare of white marble

without, and a series of showy majestic halls within, where a

thousand curious mementos and relics of old Venice are gathered

and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures I fear I may

perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable living

Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the

celebrated Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals

and their long sticks. Wonderful indeed today are the museums of

Italy, where the renovations and the belle ordonnance

speak of funds apparently unlimited, in spite of the fact that

the numerous custodians frankly look starved. What is the

pecuniary source of all this civic magnificence--it is shown in a

hundred other ways--and how do the Italian cities manage to

acquit themselves of expenses that would be formidable to

communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays the

bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance of

sculpture, with which every piazzetta of almost every

village is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an answer to

the puzzling question, but observe instead that we are passing

the mouth of the populous Canareggio, next widest of the

waterways, where the race of Shylock abides, and at the corner of

which the big colourless church of San Geremia stands gracefully

enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its wide lateral footways

and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St. John an

admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the

most infantile of the Venetian processions.

The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of

interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the

Cornaro, of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which

cluster about the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence

of the Comte de Chambord and still that of his half-brother, in

spite too of the big Papadopoli gardens, opposite the station,

the largest private grounds in Venice, but of which Venice in

general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form of

irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water.

The rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and

malachite, all a cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness,

and here too, opposite, on the top of its high steps, is San

Simeone Profeta, I won't say immortalised, but unblushingly

misrepresented, by the perfidious Canaletto. I shall not stay to

unravel the mystery of this prosaic painter's malpractices; he

falsified without fancy, and as he apparently transposed at will

the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the particular

view that may have constituted his subject. It would look exactly

like such and such a place if almost everything were not

different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the

wall; but it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other

elements quite fail to correspond. One's confusion is the

greater because one doesn't know that everything may not really

have changed, even beyond all probability--though it's only in

America that churches cross the street or the river--and the

mixture of the recognisable and the different makes the ambiguity

maddening, all the more that the painter is almost as attaching

as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed and

porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for

the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to

have a Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in

the presence of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo-

-there is a charm in the old pink warehouses on the hot

fondamenta--that he has something much better. He looks up

and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his surprise after all,

his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace of the

station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though

it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it

is the end of the Grand Canal.

1892.