Italian Hours

Venice

It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure

there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything

to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of

times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to

visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find

a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and

you will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it. There

is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one

has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of

photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as

about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as

familiar as the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to

speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-

lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said

about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It

would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to

say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having

no information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten

the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I

hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love

with his theme.

I

Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after

extracting half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable

quantity of fame from it. We all may do the same, after it has

served our turn, which it probably will not cease to do for many

a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin who beyond anyone helps

us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several aids to

depression in the shape of certain little humorous--ill-humorous--

pamphlets (the series of St. Mark's Rest) which embody

his latest reflections on the subject of our city and describe

the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are

numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have

spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled--an

admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty.

Fortunately one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one

hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose.

This queer late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised

and condensed issue of the Stones of Venice, only one

little volume of which has been published, or perhaps ever will

be) is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to

children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and

might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess. It is,

however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just.

There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author

has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and

scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and

flashes with the love of his subject--a love disconcerted and

abjured, but which has still much of the force of inspiration.

Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she has

had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man

of splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has

made her the world's. There is no better reading at Venice

therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can

separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit,

the moralism tout propos, the queer provincialities and

pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may

doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all--without

criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is

a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous

thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as

much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for

all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle--a

thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it

is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call

their own--little more than the bare privilege of leading their

lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are

decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their

opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life

presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in

this meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better

terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain.

They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear

bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist

at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy to say that

one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would

make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number

of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is

painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not

equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom

upon a dog's allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine

and leisure and conversation and beautiful views form the greater

part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a

successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a

handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the

good and the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that

if the civilisation of a society is measured by the number of its

needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be

feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor

figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery,

doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases

the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a

beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way

to enjoy Venice is to follow the example of these people and make

the most of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the

place are simple; this may be maintained even under the

imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure

than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine

Tintoret or strolling into St. Mark's,--abominable the way one

falls into the habit,--and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon

the windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than

hanging over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's.

It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is

composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to

which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest--

otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is

good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best

thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for

Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you

often--to linger and remain and return.

II

The danger is that you will not linger enough--a danger of which

the author of these lines had known something. It is possible to

dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible

and intelligent manner. There are travellers who think the place

odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find

themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous. The

sentimental tourist's sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has

too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original;

to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. The

Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that

admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march

through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is

nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude

is completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can

only turn your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his

want of delicacy. But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the

fault of the rest of the world. The fault of Venice is that,

though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy to live with as

you count living in other places. After you have stayed a week

and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can

accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits

become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new

ones of an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired

of your gondola (or you think you are) and you have seen all the

principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a

dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as

impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into

a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the

Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have

visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible sign-boards

dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you

have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at

the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a

shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon

and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are

obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you

miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail,

and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a

sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked

to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the

irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by

the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out

toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The

canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where

you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window

and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell

bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their

wares at you, where the same tightly-buttoned officers are for

ever sucking the same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in

front of the same caf*--the Piazza, as I say, has resolved

itself into a magnificent tread-mill. This is the state of mind

of those shallow inquirers who find Venice all very well for a

week; and if in such a state of mind you take your departure you

act with fatal rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is

not--with all deference to your personal attractions--that of

your companions who remain behind; for though there are some

disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as

the visitors. The conditions are peculiar, but your intolerance

of them evaporates before it has had time to become a prejudice.

When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and

you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to

Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the

fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to

sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman,

whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty.

She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink,

cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour.

She is always interesting and almost always sad; but she has a

thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy

accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these things; you

count upon them; they make part of your life. Tenderly fond you

become; there is something indefinable in those depths of

personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The

place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and

conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress

it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows

up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is very

true that if you go, as the author of these lines on a certain

occasion went, about the middle of March, a certain amount of

disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit for several

years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had

suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full

possession and you tremble for what they may do. You are reminded

from the moment of your arrival that Venice scarcely exists any

more as a city at all; that she exists only as a battered peep-

show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in

the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the Academy with

their uproar. The English and Americans came a little later. They

came in good time, with a great many French, who were discreet

enough to make very long repasts at the Caff Quadri, during

which they were out of the way. The months of April and May of

the year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favourable season

for visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de-

place had marked them for his own and held triumphant

possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible

brassy voice, which resounds all over the place, and has,

whatever language he be speaking, the accent of some other idiom.

During all the spring months in Venice these gentry abound in the

great resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through

churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They infest

the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about the

bridges and the doors of the caf*. In saying just now that I was

disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that

assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The

condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal.

The pedlars and commissioners ply their trade--often a very

unclean one--at the very door of the temple; they follow you

across the threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve,

and hiss into your ear, scuffling with each other for customers.

There is a great deal of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether,

and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this

exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.

III

It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a

great spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have

little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The

restoration of the outer walls, which has lately been so much

attacked and defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the

necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in a position

to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it is

one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing

necessity have people of taste lately had to resign themselves.

Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all semblance of

beauty has vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that the

external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less

impressive only than that of the still comparatively uninjured

interior. I know not what is the measure of necessity in such a

case, and it appears indeed to be a very delicate question. To-

day, at any rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and

marble which, to the eye of the traveller emerging from the

narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the further

end of it with a sort of dazzling silver presence--to-day this

lovely vision is in a way to be completely reformed and indeed

well-nigh abolished. The old softness and mellowness of colour--

the work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt

sea--is giving way to large crude patches of new material which

have the effect of a monstrous malady rather than of a

restoration to health. They look like blotches of red and white

paint and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of a noble

matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest-

looking thing conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or as

the morning's paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake a

scientific quarrel with these changes; we admit that our

complaint is a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in

united Italy must doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must

endeavour to believe that it is through innumerable lapses of

taste that this deeply interesting country is groping her way to

her place among the nations. For the present, it is not to be

denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than

the result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she

was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-

day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless too soon

to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to

forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside as well

there has been a considerable attempt to make the place more

tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered.

What I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark and

rugged old pavement--those deep undulations of primitive mosaic

in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended

resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not

the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house of images;

but from a considerable portion of the church it has now

disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement

remains as recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked,

uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite,

polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers; but in other

large stretches the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the

ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have taken the floor of

a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian

and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and

when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the

Times about the whole business and holding meetings to

protest against it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as

they heard or heeded the rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies

and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they took

a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the

Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking;

the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of

existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people

have to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I

must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension

of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one.

The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the

best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of

Venice, open Th****** Gautier's ltalia, and you will

see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because

there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it;

the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple

of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass

in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and

friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark. There are

moments, after all, when the church is comparatively quiet and

empty, and when you may sit there with an easy consciousness of

its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into any

Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at

the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I

just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-

show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the

worst, an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the molten colour

that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its

richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded and yet all so

brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures,

bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through the

glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them

catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes

nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or

perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching;

there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The

church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of

surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and

kneel upon and lean against--it is from this the effect proceeds.

In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may

go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook.

It is a treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are

usually three or four of the fraternity with their easels set up

in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy

to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable

attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid.

But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the

great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the

lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the

tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image

spotted with dull, crooked gems--if you cannot paint these things

you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old

benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many

generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of

which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness,

with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with

honourable age.

[Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK'S VENICE]

IV

Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges

reduced to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its

keenness, there was a great deal of entertainment to be got from

lodging on Riva Schiavoni and looking out at the far-shimmering

lagoon. There was entertainment indeed in simply getting into the

place and observing the queer incidents of a Venetian

installation. A great many persons contribute indirectly to this

undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring out at you

during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up in

some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little

establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to

trace the subtle connection existing between the niece of the

landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it

was none too visible, as the young lady in question was a dancer

at the Fenice theatre--or when that was closed at the Rossini--

and might have been supposed absorbed by her professional duties.

It proved necessary, however, that she should hover about the

premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid gloves with

one little white button; as also, that she should apply a thick

coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a

sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens,

who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-

lady's niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You

soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon

you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of

everything Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the

great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly

Palladian church a success beyond all reason. It is a success of

position, of colour, of the immense detached Campanile, tipped

with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because San

Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn,

faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has

a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading

colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink,

and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue

occurs very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink;

the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale

whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is

indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never

fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always

exquisitely mild.

Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of

memories at the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places

he has loved. When I hear, when I see, the magical name I have

written above these pages, it is not of the great Square that I

think, with its strange basilica and its high arcades, nor of the

wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the

well- poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor

the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark's. I

simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch of

green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly;

it gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the

gondolier's cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of

splash in the stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which

has an arch like a camel's back, with an old shawl on her head,

which makes her characteristic and charming; you see her against

the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to

fill the whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind

the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June

rose--the roses of Venice are splendid--has flung itself by way

of spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water-

way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies--

balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a

cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water-

steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and

the whole place is enchanting.

[Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE]

It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in

Venice. The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his

window, when he is not floating about with that delightful sense

of being for the moment a part of it, which any gentleman in a

gondola is free to entertain. Venetian windows and balconies are

a dreadful lure, and while you rest your elbows on these

cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But in truth Venice

isn't in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The

effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic,

and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of

your milieu. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to

you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to collecting

impressions. Afterwards, in ugly places, at unprivileged times,

you can convert your impressions into prose. Fortunately for the

present proser the weather wasn't always fine; the first month

was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the matter from

an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive

gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertainment

in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of

the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were

charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the

anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the

Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all

turned warm--warm to the eye as well as to other senses. After

the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea took on

a thousand shades, but they were only infinite variations of

blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the

thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard of weather-

stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky

above a calle, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the

painters say, to "compose." The lagoon was streaked with odd

currents, which played across it like huge smooth finger-marks.

The gondolas multiplied and spotted it allover; every gondola and

gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like every other.

There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious

impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in

it, but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and

colour, and of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as

little as possible, as you see it pass before you. From my

windows on the Riva there was always the same silhouette--the

long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and throwing it back

a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with the grotesquely-

graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, as may be,

more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the "second

position" of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist

upward in a freedom of movement which that functionary would

deprecate. One may say as a general thing that there is something

rather awkward in the movement even of the most graceful

gondolier, and something graceful in the movement of the most

awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace predominates,

and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, from

their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their

tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and the

regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in

profile, in a gondola that passes you--see, as you recline on

your own low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted

up against the sky--it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an

image on a Greek frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very

good friend--if you choose him happily--and on the quality of

the personage depends a good deal that of your impressions. He is

a part of your daily life, your double, your shadow, your

complement. Most people, I think, either like their gondolier or

hate him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this case

they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be

sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and

tell their friends to be certain to "secure" him. There is

usually no difficulty in securing him; there is nothing elusive

or reluctant about a gondolier. Nothing would induce me not to

believe them for the most part excellent fellows, and the

sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for them. More

than the rest of the population, of course, they are the children

of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its

essence, with its silence, with its melancholy.

When I say they are associated with its silence I should

immediately add that they are associated also with its sound.

Among themselves they are an extraordinarily talkative company.

They chatter at the traghetti, where they always have some

sharp point under discussion; they bawl across the canals; they

bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy each other from

afar. If you happen to have a traghetto under your window,

you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even

further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the

gondolier is in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the

only note of Venice. There is scarcely another heard sound, and

that indeed is part of the interest of the place. There is no

noise there save distinctly human noise; no rumbling, no vague

uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is all articulate and

vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice is

emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the

place because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught

by the ear. Among the populace it is a general family party. The

still water carries the voice, and good Venetians exchange

confidences at a distance of half a mile. It saves a world of

trouble, and they don't like trouble. Their delightful garrulous

language helps them to make Venetian life a long

conversazione. This language, with its soft elisions, its

odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other

disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and

accommodating. If your gondolier had no other merit he would have

the merit that he speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even-

-some people perhaps would say especially--when you don't

understand what he says. But he adds to it other graces which

make him an agreeable feature in your life. The price he sets on

his services is touchingly small, and he has a happy art of being

obsequious without being, or at least without seeming, abject.

For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost lyrical

gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit

which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large.

One grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one's

fondness is the frankness and sweetness of their address. That of

the Italian family at large has much to recommend it; but in the

Venetian manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. One

feels that the race is old, that it has a long and rich

civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn't been blessed by

fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn't a genius

for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that

direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the

true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp

and to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your

and my advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been

accused further of loving if not too well at least too often, of

being in fine as little austere as possible. I am not sure it is

very brave, nor struck with its being very industrious. But it

has an unfailing sense of the amenities of life; the poorest

Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is better company than

persons of his class are apt to be among the nations of industry

and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie and

steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire

to please and to be pleased.

V

In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last

to imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all

things easy; unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to

be put out of humour by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends

among the pictures are his best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed

to have written so much of common things when I might have been

making festoons of the names of the masters. Only, when we have

covered our page with such festoons what more is left to say?

When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the

Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to resound at

will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and it

is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to

his taste. "Went this morning to the Academy; was very much

pleased with Titian's 'Assumption.'" That honest phrase has

doubtless been written in many a traveller's diary, and was not

indiscreet on the part of its author. But it appeals little to

the general reader, and we must moreover notoriously not expose

our deepest feelings. Since I have mentioned Titian's

"Assumption" I must say that there are some people who have been

less pleased with it than the observer we have just imagined. It

is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you may if

you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it.

It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful

room of the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains

two or three works less known to fame which are equally capable

of inspiring a passion. "The 'Annunciation' struck me as coarse

and superficial": that note was once made in a simple-minded

tourist's book. At Venice, strange to say, Titian is altogether a

disappointment; the city of his adoption is far from containing

the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, Munich

--these are the homes of his greatness.

There are other painters who have but a single home, and the

greatest of these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio

and Bellini, who make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The

Veronese may be seen and measured in other places; he is most

splendid in Venice, but he shines in Paris and in Dresden. You

may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in

November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see

the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the

feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in

crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold

London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you

are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a

certain old beggar who has one of the handsomest heads in the

world--he has sat to a hundred painters for Doges and for

personages more sacred--has a prescriptive right to pretend to

pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a greasy

immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see the

other masters, who form part of your life while you are there,

who illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to

express one's relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is

so near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the

spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one owes

more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in

Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and

the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do

art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so

consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the

Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and

ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all

the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to

tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the

perpetual interest of the place--that you live in a certain sort

of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go into the churches

and galleries by way of a change from the streets; you go into

them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the

things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter,

and life was so pictorial that art couldn't help becoming so.

With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives

an extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great

Venetian works. You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a

man of the world, and you enjoy them because they are so social

and so true. Perhaps of all works of art that are equally great

they demand least reflection on the part of the spectator--they

make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. Reflection only

confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show its head.

These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that

even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret's

"Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple"--they are still

more familiar.

But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful

as well to attempt it--painful because in the memory of vanished

hours so filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss

oppresses. Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and silence, to

have known them once is to have always a terrible standard of

enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May and June come back with

an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn't smothered in flowers at

this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome; but the sea and

sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits at

the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your

place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in

Venice should of course be of the s*x that discriminates most

finely. An intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly

intelligent, and it makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be

aware that she can't help looking graceful as she is borne over

the waves. The handsome Pasquale, with uplifted oar, awaits your

command, knowing, in a general way, from observation of your

habits, that your intention is to go to see a picture or two. It

perhaps doesn't immensely matter what picture you choose: the

whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander through the

light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual architecture

above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming to

disembark at the polished steps of a little empty campo--a

sunny shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church

on one side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the

windows are tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown

leans vaguely on the sill. There is always an old man holding out

his hat for coppers; there are always three or four small boys

dodging possible umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the

manner of custodians, to the door of the church.

VI

The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a

masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels

and sacristies. Many a noble work is perched behind the dusty

candles and muslin roses of a scantily-visited altar; some of

them indeed, hidden behind the altar, suffer in a darkness that

can never be explored. The facilities offered you for approaching

the picture in such cases are a mockery of your irritated wish.

You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety

ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the

custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see

just enough to be sure it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a

divine head, of a fig tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is

impenetrable mystery. You renounce all hope, for instance, of

approaching the magnificent Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in

Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that

shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce it with chagrin

and pain. Behind the high altar in that church hangs a Baptism of

Christ by Cima which I believe has been more or less repainted.

You make the thing out in spots, you see it has a fullness of

perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff neck and

promise yourself consolation in the Academy and at the Madonna

dell' Orto, where two noble works by the same hand--pictures as

clear as a summer twilight--present themselves in better

circumstances. It may be said as a general thing that you never

see the Tintoret. You admire him, you adore him, you think him

the greatest of painters, but in the great majority of cases your

eyes fail to deal with him. This is partly his own fault; so many

of his works have turned to blackness and are positively rotting

in their frames. At the Scuola di San Rocco, where there are

acres of him, there is scarcely anything at all adequately

visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper story. It is

true that in looking at this huge composition you look at many

pictures; it has not only a multitude of figures but a wealth of

episodes; and you pass from one of these to the other as if you

were "doing" a gallery. Surely no single picture in the world

contains more of human life; there is everything in it, including

the most exquisite beauty. It is one of the greatest things of

art; it is always interesting. There are works of the artist

which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty more

radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a reality, an

execution so splendid. The interest, the impressiveness, of that

whole corner of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its

gorgeous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to

a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see

appears to suffer less from the incursions of travellers. It is

one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar, and the author of

these lines has always had the good fortune, which he wishes to

every other traveller, of having it to himself. I think most

visitors find the place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They

walk about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here and

there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which the

painter has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and

bewildered by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by

strange glimpses of unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely

footsteps on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure,

finding themselves again, with a sense of release from danger, a

sense that the genius loci was a sort of mad white-washer

who worked with a bad mixture, in the bright light of the

campo, among the beggars, the orange-vendors and the

passing gondolas. Solemn indeed is the place, solemn and

strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall

scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like

area an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it and

dense and difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not

happy, inasmuch as it, lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It

is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco,

but conscious, reluctant mortality.

Fortunately, however, we can turn to the Ducal Palace, where

everything is so brilliant and splendid that the poor dusky

Tintoret is lifted in spite of himself into the concert. This

deeply original building is of course the loveliest thing in

Venice, and a morning's stroll there is a wonderful illumination.

Cunningly select your hour--half the enjoyment of Venice is a

question. of dodging--and enter at about one o'clock, when the

tourists have flocked off to lunch and the echoes of the charming

chambers have gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no

brighter place in Venice--by which I mean that on the whole there

is none half so bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through

the great windows from the glittering lagoon and shimmers and

twinkles over gilded walls and ceilings. All the history of

Venice, all its splendid stately past, glows around you in a

strong sealight. Everyone here is magnificent, but the great

Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you in a

silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky

burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white

colonnades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first

gentlemen and ladies in the world both render homage and receive

it. Their glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea and

their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of Venice. The

mixture of pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art and

patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. Never was a

painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater

delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and

feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. He revels in

the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, multiplies himself there

with the fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses

itself into the blue. He was the happiest of painters and

produced the happiest picture in the world. "The Rape of Europa"

surely deserves this title; it is impossible to look at it

without aching with envy. Nowhere else in art is such a

temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity

combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and

gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving

groves, of youth, health, movement, desire--all this is the

brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter.

Happy the artist who could entertain such a vision; happy the

artist who could paint it as the masterpiece I here recall is

painted.

The Tintoret's visions were not so bright as that; but he had

several that were radiant enough. In the room that contains the

work just cited are several smaller canvases by the greatly more

complex genius of the Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost

simple in their loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity.

They have kept their brightness through the centuries, and they

shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a

piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest

things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild

flowers of execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in

the dark corners of all of the Tintoret's work. "Pallas chasing

away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to the picture;

and it represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance

administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as if

to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this

push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her

arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its

rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her

enchanting head with the effort--a head which has all the

strange fairness that the Tintoret always sees in women--and the

soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these members, over which

the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as pretty an

example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the

Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great "Paradise," which

unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of its

multitudinous circles in one of the other chambers? If it were

not one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the

biggest, and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at

first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this

quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a

magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this

composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in

a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though

as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and

there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits

to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have

been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms the treasure

of that apartment?

VII

Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and we know of no

work of art more complete. The picture is in three compartments;

the Virgin sits in the central division with her child; two

venerable saints, standing close together, occupy each of the

others. It is impossible to imagine anything more finished or

more ripe. It is one of those things that sum up the genius of a

painter, the experience of a life, the teaching of a school. It

seems painted with molten gems, which have only been clarified by

time, and is as solemn as it is gorgeous and as simple as it is

deep. Giovanni Bellini is more or less everywhere in Venice,

and, wherever he is, almost certain to be first--first, I mean,

in his own line: paints little else than the Madonna and the

saints; he has not Carpaccio's care for human life at large, nor

the Tintoret's nor the of the Veronese. Some of his greater

pictures, however, where several figures are clustered together,

have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane. There is one

of them on the dark side of the room at the Academy that contains

Titian's "Assumption," which if we could only see it--its

position is an inconceivable scandal--would evidently be one of

the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So too is the Madonna

of San Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place, ever so much

too high, but so mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and

accompanied, that the proper attitude for even the most critical

amateur, as he looks at it, strikes one as the bended knee. There

is another noble John Bellini, one of the very few in which there

is no Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo--a St. Jerome, in a red

dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks and with a landscape of

extraordinary purity behind him. The absence of the peculiarly

erect Madonna makes it an interesting surprise among the works of

the painter and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it

has brilliant beauty and the St. Jerome is a delightful old

personage.

The same church contains another great picture for which the

haunter of these places must find a shrine apart in his memory;

one of the most interesting things he will have seen, if not the

most brilliant. Nothing appeals more to him than three figures of

Venetian ladies which occupy the foreground of a smallish canvas

of Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the high altar of San

Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian by birth, but few

of his productions are to be seen in his native place; few indeed

are to be seen anywhere. The picture represents the patron-saint

of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the worldly

votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand together on the

left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them

are in profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator.

This face and figure are almost unique among the beautiful things

of Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer with the

impression of having made, or rather having missed, a strange, a

dangerous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. The lady, who is

superbly handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth

century, and she remains for the mind the perfect flower of that

society. Never was there a greater air of breeding, a deeper

expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a goddess--as if

she trod without sinking the waves of the Adriatic. It is

impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the

aristocratic spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This

magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle,

and so quiet that in comparison all minor assumptions of

calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm. But for all this there are

depths of possible disorder in her light-coloured eye.

I had meant however to say nothing about her, for it's not right

to speak of Sebastian when one hasn't found room for Carpaccio.

These visions come to one, and one can neither hold them nor

brush them aside. Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the

delightful--it's not for want of such visitations, but only for

want of space, that I haven't said of him what I would. There is

little enough need of it for Carpaccio's sake, his fame being

brighter to-day--thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Ruskin has held

up to it--than it has ever been. Yet there is something

ridiculous in talking of Venice without making him almost the

refrain. He and the Tintoret are the two great realists, and it

is hard to say which is the more human, the more various. The

Tintoret had the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio, who had the

advantage of more newness and more responsibility, sailed nearer

to perfection. Here and there he quite touches it, as in the

enchanting picture, at the Academy, of St. Ursula asleep in her

little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel visits

her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his study at S.

Giorgio Schiavoni. This latter work is a pearl of sentiment, and

I may add without being fantastic a ruby of colour. It unites the

most masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of

feeling, and he who has it well in his memory will never hear the

name of Carpaccio without a throb of almost personal affection.

Such indeed is the feeling that descends upon you in that

wonderful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where this

most personal and sociable of artists has expressed all the

sweetness of his imagination. The place is small and

incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the

custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable,

but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Ruskin has

written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid to enjoyment,

though I can't but think the generous artist, with his keen

senses and his just feeling, would have suffered to hear his

eulogist declare that one of his other productions--in the Museo

Civico of Palazzo Correr, a delightful portrait of two Venetian

ladies with pet animals--is the "finest picture in the world." It

has no need of that to be thought admirable; and what more can a

painter desire?

VIII

May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then

the days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more

beautiful than the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the

morning and more golden than ever as the day descends. She seems

to expand and evaporate, to multiply all her reflections and

iridescences. Then the life of her people and the strangeness of

her constitution become a perpetual comedy, or at least a

perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and

you spend days between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though

the Lido has been spoiled. When I first saw it, in 1869, it was a

very natural place, and there was but a rough lane across the

little island from the landing-place to the beach. There was a

bathing-place in those days, and a restaurant, which was very

bad, but where in the warm evenings your dinner didn't much

matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that

stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united

Italy and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. A

little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom and a

third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic.

There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and

a teatro diurno. The bathing-establishment is bigger than

before, and the restaurant as well; but it is a compensation

perhaps that the cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however,

you won't scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy

platform under which bathers dart and splash, and which looks

out to where the fishing-boats, with sails of orange and crimson,

wander along the darkening horizon. The beach at the Lido is

still lonely and beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the

cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset is classical

and indispensable, and those who at that glowing hour have

floated toward the towers that rise out of the lagoon will not

easily part with the impression. But you indulge in larger

excursions--you go to Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and

Chioggia. Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply

interesting little cathedral of the eighth century, which stood

there on the edge of the sea, as touching in its ruin, with its

grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, as the bleached bones

of a human skeleton washed ashore by the tide, has now been

restored and made cheerful, and the charm of the place, its

strange and suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed.

It will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the

lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and admire the

wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks--and bad manners, I am

sorry to say--can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated

for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its children, and

it is a fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold about

it every one of them shows you a handsome face. The children

assail you for coppers, and in their desire to be satisfied

pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano,

and you carry away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical,

but altogether pictorial impression; the impression of bright-

coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls

with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression,

with splendid heads of hair and complexions smeared with powder,

faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and

little wooden shoes that click as they go up and down the steps

of the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons with lustrous

tresses and high tempers, massive throats encased with gold

beads, and eyes that meet your own with a certain traditional

defiance. The men throughout the islands of Venice are almost as

handsome as the women; I have never seen so many good-looking

rascals. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending their nets, or

lounge at the street corners, where conversation is always high-

pitched, or clamour to you to take a boat; and everywhere they

decorate the scene with their splendid colour--cheeks and

throats as richly brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks--

their sea-faded tatters which are always a "costume," their soft

Venetian jargon, and the gallantry with which they wear their

hats, an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense

Venetian curls. If you are happy you will find yourself, after a

June day in Venice (about ten o'clock), on a balcony that

overhangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad ledge, a

cigarette in your teeth and a little good company beside you. The

gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface gleams here and there

from their lamps, some of which are coloured lanterns that move

mysteriously in the darkness. There are some evenings in June

when there are too many gondolas, too many lanterns, too many

serenades in front of the hotels. The serenading in particular is

overdone; but on such a balcony as I speak of you needn't suffer

from it, for in the apartment behind you--an accessible refuge--

there is more good company, there are more cigarettes. If you are

wise you will step back there presently.

1882.