Italian Hours

Two Old Houses and Three Young Women

There are times and places that come back yet again, but that,

when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a

little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight

fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this

time that he is capable of taking none. He has his own way--he

makes it all right. It now becomes just a part of the charming

solicitation that it presents precisely a problem--that of giving

the particular thing as much as possible without at the same time

giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations,

proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a

little art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm

to his work, and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three

pictures.

I

The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means

the first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate "style"

of which we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old

Venice and elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has

brought about the decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it

were, intensified and consecrated the style? There is an

ambiguity about it all that constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear

old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation,

her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not

lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is

simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar

to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some

happy justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere

arrested by the poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice

being, accordingly, at every point, what we most touch, feel and

see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of her dignity; a

consequence, we become aware, by the way, sufficiently

discouraging to the general application or pretension of style,

and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the

original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be

the ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and

moreover there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments,

solid survivals, hold up their heads and decline to ask for a

grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to keep one's

pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder

stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of

doom and decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may

be said of course; and it is doubtless only in Venice that you

gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most beautiful

is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, going--

that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part of

your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want

so desperately to read history into everything?

You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do

it, I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there

with longer knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and

shimmers, that the night is the real time. It perhaps even

wouldn't take much to make you award the palm to the nights of

winter. This is certainly true for the form of progression that

is most characteristic, for every question of departure and

arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect

vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the

indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't

see and all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and

obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated

to your doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you

are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as innocent so

mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent to

protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly

Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens

the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and

gold. The splendid day is good enough for them; what is

best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among

clustered pali and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a

great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the

general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open

from them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall

and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow

stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is,

that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a

single item of it of which the association isn't noble. Hold to

it fast that there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival

by water. Hold to it that to float and slacken and gently bump,

to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few

guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and

then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps

on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these things

constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may

sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It's so stately that

what can come after?--it's so good in itself that what, upstairs,

as we comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at

any rate, that if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a

carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a tram-car, and

hurtles, projectile-like, out of a "lightning-elevator," she

alights from the Venetian conveyance as Cleopatra may have

stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be yet in store

for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy the

support most opposed to the "momentum" acquired. The beauty of

the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so

scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life

of our day--and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness,

the felicities of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together,

the last of calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room

with a rush.

Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying

to frame is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the

sense of a scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of

something dissuasive and distributive in the very air of the

place, a suggestion, under the fine old ceilings and among types

of face and figure abounding in the unexpected, that here were

many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest rendering of a

scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of

discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the

value of the unexpected for such occasions--with due

qualification, naturally, of its degree. Unexpectedness pure and

simple, it is needless to say, may easily endanger any social

gathering, and I hasten to add moreover that the figures and

faces I speak of were probably not in the least unexpected to

each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of variety--

Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It is

only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from afar--

brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the branch-

-that I attempt to give you the little drama; beginning with the

felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable

fact that he was the only representative of his class. The whole

of the rest of the business was but what he saw and felt and

fancied--what he was to remember and what he was to forget.

Through it all, I may say distinctly, he clung to his great

Venetian clue--the explanation of everything by the historic

idea. It was a high historic house, with such a quantity of

recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that one

grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might

even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was

having was just the very last. Wasn't it certainly, for instance,

no mere illusion that there is no appreciable future left for

such manners--an urbanity so comprehensive, a form so

transmitted, as those of such a hostess and such a host? The

future is for a different conception of the graceful altogether--

so far as it's for a conception of the graceful at all. Into that

computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these

representative products of an antique culture, at least, and one

of which the secret seems more likely than not to be lost, were

not common, nor indeed was any one else--in the circle to which

the picture most insisted on restricting itself.

Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or

very fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious "value" on an

occasion that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the

complexity of its references. Such old, old women with such old,

old jewels; such ugly, ugly ones with such handsome, becoming

names; such battered, fatigued gentlemen with such inscrutable

decorations; such an absence of youth, for the most part, in

either s*x--of the pink and white, the "bud" of new worlds; such

a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for a good

deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was

clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was

that about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path

of even the most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be

rudely inexact--it was in honour of youth and freshness that we

had all been convened. The fian****** of the last--unless

it were the last but one--unmarried daughter of the house had

just been brought to a proper climax; the contract had been

signed, the betrothal rounded off--I'm not sure that the civil

marriage hadn't, that day, taken place. The occasion then had in

fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of

heroes, a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair

Austrian blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or

less shining recent ancestors, a very famous paternal

grandmother, who had played a great part in the political history

of her time and whose portrait, in the taste and dress of 1830,

was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The grand-daughter of this

celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her and, by a

fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a manner

exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and

amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great

Venetian beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped

the great Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense

of the suitable, or in any case with a splendid generosity--

since on the ideally suitable character of so brave a

human symbol who shall have the last word? This responsible agent

was at all events the beauty in the world about whom probably,

most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly

propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the

one thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the

possibility of ever discussing it. There were plenty of

suggestive subjects round about, on the other hand, as to which

the exchange of ideas would by no means necessarily have dropped.

You profit to the full at such times by all the old voices,

echoes, images--by that element of the history of Venice which

represents all Europe as having at one time and another revelled

or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which gives

you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets,

broken fortunes and wounded hearts.

II

There had been, on lines of further or different speculation, a

young Englishman to luncheon, and the young Englishman had proved

"sympathetic"; so that when it was a question afterwards of some

of the more hidden treasures, the browner depths of the old

churches, the case became one for mutual guidance and gratitude--

for a small afternoon tour and the wait of a pair of friends in

the warm little campi, at locked doors for which the

nearest urchin had scurried off to fetch the keeper of the key.

There are few brown depths to-day into which the light of the

hotels doesn't shine, and few hidden treasures about which pages

enough, doubtless, haven't already been printed: my business,

accordingly, let me hasten to say, is not now with the fond

renewal of any discovery--at least in the order of impressions

most usual. Your discovery may be, for that matter, renewed every

week; the only essential is the good luck--which a fair amount of

practice has taught you to count upon-of not finding, for the

particular occasion, other discoverers in the field. Then, in the

quiet corner, with the closed door--then in the presence of the

picture and of your companion's sensible emotion--not only the

original happy moment, but everything else, is renewed. Yet once

again it can all come back. The old custode, shuffling about in

the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the old curtain

that isn't much more modern than the wonderful work itself. He

does his best to create light where light can never be; but you

have your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes

of your less confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess

the treasure. These are the refined pleasures that Venice has

still to give, these odd happy passages of communication and

response.

But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other

communications that day, as there were certainly other responses.

I have forgotten exactly what it was we were looking for--without

much success--when we met the three Sisters. Nothing requires

more care, as a long knowledge of Venice works in, than not to

lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I had so successfully

done my best to preserve it that I could at that moment

conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we

might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where

the three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a

big campo, and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory

that it was very much out of the way. They took us promptly in

hand--they were only walking over to San Marco to match some

coloured wool for the manufacture of such belated cushions as

still bloom with purple and green in the long leisures of old

palaces; and that mild errand could easily open a parenthesis.

The obscure church we had feebly imagined we were looking for

proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters' parish; as to

which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey void and

of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I have

now quite lost the identity. This was the effect of the charming

beneficence of the three sisters, who presently were to give our

adventure a turn in the emotion of which everything that had

preceded seemed as nothing. It actually strikes me even as a

little dim to have been told by them, as we all fared together,

that a certain low, wide house, in a small square as to which I

found myself without particular association, had been in the far-

off time the residence of George Sand. And yet this was a fact

that, though I could then only feel it must be for another day,

would in a different connection have set me richly

reconstructing.

Madame Sand's famous Venetian year has been of late immensely in

the air--a tub of soiled linen which the muse of history, rolling

her sleeves well up, has not even yet quite ceased energetically

and publicly to wash. The house in question must have been the

house to which the wonderful lady betook herself when, in 1834,

after the dramatic exit of Alfred de Musset, she enjoyed that

remarkable period of rest and refreshment with the so long

silent, the but recently rediscovered, reported, extinguished,

Doctor Pagello. As an old Sandist--not exactly indeed of the

premi** heure, but of the fine high noon and golden

afternoon of the great career--I had been, though I confess too

inactively, curious as to a few points in the topography of the

eminent adventure to which I here allude; but had never got

beyond the little public fact, in itself always a bit of a thrill

to the Sandist, that the present Hotel Danieli had been the scene

of its first remarkable stages. I am not sure indeed that the

curiosity I speak of has not at last, in my breast, yielded to

another form of wonderment--truly to the rather rueful question

of why we have so continued to concern ourselves, and why the

fond observer of the footprints of genius is likely so to

continue, with a body of discussion, neither in itself and in its

day, nor in its preserved and attested records, at all positively

edifying. The answer to such an inquiry would doubtless reward

patience, but I fear we can now glance at its possibilities only

long enough to say that interesting persons--so they be of a

sufficiently approved and established interest--render in some

degree interesting whatever happens to them, and give it an

importance even when very little else (as in the case I refer to)

may have operated to give it a dignity. Which is where I leave

the issue of further identifications.

For the three sisters, in the kindest way in the world, had asked

us if we already knew their sequestered home and whether, in case

we didn't, we should be at all amused to see it. My own

acquaintance with them, though not of recent origin, had hitherto

lacked this enhancement, at which we both now grasped with the

full instinct, indescribable enough, of what it was likely to

give. But how, for that matter, either, can I find the right

expression of what was to remain with us of this episode? It is

the fault of the sad-eyed old witch of Venice that she so easily

puts more into things that can pass under the common names that

do for them elsewhere. Too much for a rough sketch was to be seen

and felt in the home of the three sisters, and in the delightful

and slightly pathetic deviation of their doing us so simply and

freely the honours of it. What was most immediately marked was

their resigned cosmopolite state, the effacement of old

conventional lines by foreign contact and example; by the action,

too, of causes full of a special interest, but not to be

emphasised perhaps--granted indeed they be named at all--without

a certain sadness of sympathy. If "style," in Venice, sits among

ruins, let us always lighten our tread when we pay her a visit.

Our steps were in fact, I am happy to think, almost soft enough

for a death-chamber as we stood in the big, vague sala of

the three sisters, spectators of their simplified state and their

beautiful blighted rooms, the memories, the portraits, the

shrunken relics of nine Doges. If I wanted a first chapter it was

here made to my hand; the painter of life and manners, as he

glanced about, could only sigh--as he so frequently has to--over

the vision of so much more truth than he can use. What on earth

is the need to "invent," in the midst of tragedy and comedy that

never cease? Why, with the subject itself, all round, so

inimitable, condemn the picture to the silliness of trying not to

be aware of it? The charming lonely girls, carrying so simply

their great name and fallen fortunes, the despoiled

decaduta house, the unfailing Italian grace, the space so

out of scale with actual needs, the absence of books, the

presence of ennui, the sense of the length of the hours and the

shortness of everything else--all this was a matter not only for

a second chapter and a third, but for a whole volume, a

d****** and a sequel.

This time, unmistakably, it was the last--Wordsworth's

stately "shade of that which once was great"; and it was

almost as if our distinguished young friends had consented

to pass away slowly in order to treat us to the vision. Ends are

only ends in truth, for the painter of pictures, when they are

more or less conscious and prolonged. One of the sisters had been

to London, whence she had brought back the impression of having

seen at the British Museum a room exclusively filled with books

and documents devoted to the commemoration of her family. She

must also then have encountered at the National Gallery the

exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of

her ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a

dignity before the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough,

none the less, to have seen this precious work taken down from

the wall of the room in which we sat and--on terms so far too

easy--carried away for ever; and not too young, at all events, to

have been present, now and then, when her candid elders,

enlightened too late as to what their sacrifice might really have

done for them, looked at each other with the pale hush of the

irreparable. We let ourselves note that these were matters to put

a great deal of old, old history into sweet young Venetian faces.

III

In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far

from being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe

it--in countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked

by the guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It

is behind the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick

and that the multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find

their application. The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast

of the year in Florence, and it seemed to me on that night that I

could have scattered about me a handful of these signs. I had the

pleasure of spending a couple of hours on a signal high terrace

that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the galleries that open

out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant curious

question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new

manners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there

is still no getting over it that they are not good enough for

many of the great places. This was one of those scenes, and its

greatness came out to the full into the hot Florentine evening,

in which the pink and golden fires of the pyrotechnics arranged

on Ponte Carraja--the occasion of our assembly--lighted up the

large issue. The "good people" beneath were a huge, hot, gentle,

happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling river as well

as sky, were delicate and charming; the terrace connected the two

wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the

close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, offered

to a lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist.

Wherever he stood--on the broad loggia, in the cluster of

company, among bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the

presence of the mixed masters that led him from wall to wall--

such a seeker for the spirit of each occasion could only turn it

over that in the first place this was an intenser, finer little

Florence than ever, and that in the second the testimony was

again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What did they do,

in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society, smaller

and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars,

but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants--what

did they do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their

"state" at its highest--and we know of many ways in which it must

have broken down--how did they live in them without the aid of

variety? How did they, in minor communities in which every one

knew every one, and every one's impression and effect had been

long, as we say, discounted, find representation and emulation

sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of thinking of it,

however, is doubtless that we are not able to say. This leaves us

with the conviction that does them most honour: the old

generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that

they liked it, and they could bore themselves--to say nothing of

each other, when it came to that--better in noble conditions than

in mean ones.

It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I

most thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound

and beautiful house more directly spoke. If one had always been

homesick for the Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, here was a chance, and a better one than ever, to

taste again of the cup. Many of the pictures--there was a

charming quarter of an hour when I had them to myself--were bad

enough to have passed for good in those delightful years. Shades

of Grand-Dukes encompassed me--Dukes of the pleasant later sort

who weren't really grand. There was still the sense of having

come too late--yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and

this dream. My business was to people the place--its own business

had never been to save us the trouble of understanding it. And

then the deepest spell of all was perhaps that just here I was

supremely out of the way of the so terribly actual Florentine

question. This, as all the world knows, is a battle-ground, to-

day, in many journals, with all Italy practically pulling on one

side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the other: I

speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The

"improvement," the rectification of Florence is in the air, and

the problem of the particular ways in which, given such

desperately delicate cases, these matters should be understood.

The little treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate

case-- more delicate perhaps than any other in the world save

that of our taking on ourselves to persuade the Italians that

they mayn't do as they like with their own. They so absolutely

may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It will

take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all

probably muster to convince them that their own is, by an

ingenious logic, much rather ours. It will take more

subtlety still to muster for them that dazzling show of examples

from which they may learn that what in general is "ours" shall

appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a triumph of

taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in

short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am

afraid that if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo

illusions and invoke the irrelevant, it was because I could

think, in the conditions, of no better way to meet the acute

responsibility of the critic than just to shirk it.

[1899.]