Italian Hours

Casa Alvisi

Invited to "introduce" certain pages of cordial and faithful

reminiscence from another hand, [1]

[1] "Browning in Venice," being Recollections of the late

Katharine De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J.

(Cornhill Magazine, February, 1902).]

in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I

undertook that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--

so passed and gone to-day is so much of the life suggested.

Those who fortunately knew Mrs. Bronson will read into her notes

still more of it--more of her subject, more of herself too, and

of many things--than she gives, and some may well even feel

tempted to do for her what she has done here for her

distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many

pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so

far as society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were

concerned, almost in sole possession; she had become there, with

time, quite the prime representative of those private amenities

which the Anglo-Saxon abroad is apt to miss just in proportion as

the place visited is publicly wonderful, and in which he

therefore finds a value twice as great as at home. Mrs. Bronson

really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled generations

and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as it

were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless

good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited

petitioners, the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly

making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city.

[Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE]

Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid

church of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the

balcony over the water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal,

seems to find the key-hole of the great door right in a line with

it; and there was something in this position that for the time

made all Venice-lovers think of the genial padrona as thus

levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and

sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few

were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of

hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no

more--it had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and

the long, pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy

sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures that made Ca'

Alvisi, as was currently said, a social porto di mare--is,

for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts; so

that, on the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts

itself from the dear little old faded but once familiarly bright

fa***, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar uses that

are doing their best to "paint out" in Venice, right and left, by

staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of

distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the

tenant clung to her perfect, her inclusive position--the one

right place that gave her a better command, as it were, than a

better house obtained by a harder compromise; not being fond,

moreover, of spacious halls and massive treasures, but of compact

and familiar rooms, in which her remarkable accumulation of

minute and delicate Venetian objects could show. She adored--in

the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste addressed itself-

-the small, the domestic and the exquisite; so that she would

have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for

a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right

old silver.

The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at

any rate, through the years, the part of a friendly private-box

at the constant operatic show, a box at the best point of the

best tier, with the cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole

scene and with its withdrawing rooms behind for more detached

conversation; for easy--when not indeed slightly difficult--

polyglot talk, artful bibite, artful cigarettes too,

straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all that

belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so,

take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little

gilded glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-

cushions or intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these

conditions, with never a block, as we say in London, in the

traffic, with never an admission, an acceptance of the least

social complication, her positive genius for easy interest, easy

sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if, at last, she had taken

the human race at large, quite irrespective of geography, for her

neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter of course.

These things, on her part, had at all events the greater

appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose--and

as if the very air of Venice produced them--a cluster of forms so

light and immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom.

The old bright tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had

appealed to her from the first, closing round her house and her

well-plashed water-steps, where the waiting gondolas were thick,

quite as if, actually, the ghost of the defunct Carnival--since

I have spoken of ghosts--still played some haunting part.

Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson's social

facility, which was really her great refuge from importunity, a

defence with serious thought and serious feeling quietly

cherished behind it, had its discriminations as well as its

inveteracies, and that the most marked of all these, perhaps, was

her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in all her beneficent

life had probably made her happier than to have found herself

able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his

pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca' Alvisi, on the land side,

is a somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace,

which she had annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose

of placing it, in comfortable guise, at the service of her

friends. She liked, as she professed, when they were the real

thing, to have them under her hand; and here succeeded each

other, through the years, the company of the privileged and the

more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to distinguish

between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking of

this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first.

But I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew

him. The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even

for the outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it--

her perfect tenderness for Venice, which she always recognised as

a link. That was the true principle of fusion, the key to

communication. She communicated in proportion--little or much,

measuring it as she felt people more responsive or less so; and

she expressed herself, or in other words her full affection for

the place, only to those who had most of the same sentiment. The

rich and interesting form in which she found it in Browning may

well be imagined--together with the quite independent quantity of

the genial at large that she also found; but I am not sure that

his favour was not primarily based on his paid tribute of such

things as "Two in a Gondola" and "A Toccata of Galuppi." He had

more ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation from of

old.

She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps

after all with the very small folk, those to the manner born,

that she made the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the

first enthusiastically adopted, the engaging Venetian people,

whose virtues she found touching and their infirmities but such

as appeal mainly to the sense of humour and the love of anecdote;

and she befriended and admired, she studied and spoiled them.

There must have been a multitude of whom it would scarce be too

much to say that her long residence among them was their settled

golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly

wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may

not have to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She

cultivated their dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously

relighted--at the top of the tide-washed pali of traghetto

or lagoon--the neglected lamp of the tutelary Madonnetta; she

took cognisance of the wives, the children, the accidents, the

troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most prompt,

the established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily

less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies,

dramatic proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms

permanently arranged as a charming diminutive theatre, she caused

to be performed by the young persons of her circle--often, when

the case lent itself, by the wonderful small offspring of humbler

friends, children of the Venetian lower class, whose aptitude,

teachability, drollery, were her constant delight. It was

certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly sweet

might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and

amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to

the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian

as everything else; helping her to accept experience without

bitterness and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally

overtook her, for pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She

was herself sincere to the last for the place of her

predilection; inasmuch as though she had arranged herself, in the

later time--and largely for the love of "Pippa Passes"--an

alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from Venice

with continuity only under coercion of illness.

At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed

than weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the

invasion of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially

small house became again a setting for the pleasure of talk and

the sense of Italy. It contained again its own small treasures,

all in the pleasant key of the homelier Venetian spirit. The

plain beneath it stretched away like a purple sea from the lower

cliffs of the hills, and the white campanili of the

villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse

like scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-

time, rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy,

delightful and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano,

to Treviso, to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the

home of the great Giorgione. Here also memories cluster; but it

is in Venice again that her vanished presence is most felt, for

there, in the real, or certainly the finer, the more sifted

Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among the others evoked,

those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers of romance. It

is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing,

melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after

many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy

instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a

sort of repository of consolations; all of which to-day, for the

conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its

unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted,

the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there

something that no other place could give. But such people came

for themselves, as we seem to see them--only with the egotism of

their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs. Bronson's

case was beautifully different--she had come altogether for

others.