Venice: An Early Impression

There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic

cities which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very

names--Brescia, Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one's

phrase; but I should have to draw upon recollections now three

years old and to make my short story a long one. Of Verona and

Venice only have I recent impressions, and even to these must I

do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had done before,

toward the end of a summer's day, when the shadows begin to

lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant

sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same

last intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse

of the lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has

added speed to the precursive flight of your imagination; then

the liquid level, edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated

domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, however, as

excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows of the

train; then your long rumble on the immense white railway-bridge,

which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very

properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new approach,

does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon

like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the

station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge

save for one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of

voices borne back from the exit is not "Cab, sir!" but "Barca,

signore!"

I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every

phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice

beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though for

my own part I hold that to a fine healthy romantic appetite the

subject can't be too diffusely treated. Meeting in the Piazza on

the evening of my arrival a young American painter who told me

that he had been spending the summer just where I found him, I

could have assaulted him for very envy. He was painting forsooth

the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American painter

unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied

with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye;

fond of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance

between them; of old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even

when made to order); of time-mellowed harmonies on nameless

canvases and happy contours in cheap old engravings; to spend

one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered

shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in church or

campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light

gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly

between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low

black domes of the church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as

is consistent with the preservation of reason.

The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and

generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their

profits in this line. Everything the attention touches holds it,

keeps playing with it--thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the

atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting

himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contemplation

beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The

light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to

Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them all.

You should see in places the material with which it deals--slimy

brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and

sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft

iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred

nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue

against every object of vision. You may see these elements at

work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you should

choose the finest day in the month and have yourself rowed far

away across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion

you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that

longing for pure radiance which animated her great colourists.

It is a perfect bath of light, and I couldn't get rid of a fancy

that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere on some hurrying

cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light to see--

nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected by

a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by

a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-

gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh

century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of

unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and

she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of

weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied. I

stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow inlet and walked

along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, crumbling

cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy,

overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the

suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for

all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I

mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it.

A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I

remember none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna.

There was no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and

the cries of half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and

clamoured for coppers. These children, by the way, were the

handsomest little brats in the world, and, each was furnished

with a pair of eyes that could only have signified the protest of

nature against the meanness of fortune. They were very nearly as

naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those

of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books of travel; but

as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grinning

like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry little

teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of

happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of

innocence and the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed,

if ever a child was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was

the most expressively beautiful creature I had ever looked upon.

He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave; and yet here

he was running wild among the sea-stunted bushes, on the lonely

margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank or to how

dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with propriety;

though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature

will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own

republic, straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned

and catechised, marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an

object often seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always

remember with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by,

this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all

youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad

who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking with an ague,

and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken

nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious,

reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St.

Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical

mosaics of the twelfth century and the patchwork of precious

fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But

the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead gold

backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms--intensely

personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems

to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive

orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much

beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics--

passionless even in their heresy.

I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of

Venice I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates--to

burn what I had adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad

truth that one can stand in the Ducal Palace for the first time

but once, with the deliciously ponderous sense of that particular

half-hour's being an era in one's mental history; but I had the

satisfaction of finding at least--a great comfort in a short

stay--that none of my early memories were likely to change places

and that I could take up my admirations where I had left them. I

still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian

supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I

repaired immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which

contains the smaller of Tintoret's two great Crucifixions; and

when I had looked at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I

could now face any other picture in Venice with proper self-

possession. It seemed to me I had advanced to the uttermost limit

of painting; that beyond this another art--inspired poetry--

begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all

joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach

forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which

Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to

which he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow

of that comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I

fear, that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to

utter my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the

impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, mysterious

lapses and fitful intermissions; but when the list of his faults

is complete he still remains to me the most interesting of

painters. His reputation rests chiefly on a more superficial

sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his

being, as Th****** Gautier says, le roi des fougueux.

These qualities are immense, but the great source of his

impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line

that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had

such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce

figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose

eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns

his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter

of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing

matters too far, and the author of "The Rape of Europa" is,

pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other genius of

supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but

Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his

greatest works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old

doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the conflict

between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In

his genius the problem is practically solved; the alternatives

are so harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to

say where one begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose

melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and the

imaginative fairly confound their identity.

This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my

mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had

conceived the germ of a scene it defined itself to his

imagination with an intensity, an amplitude, an individuality of

expression, which makes one's observation of his pictures seem

less an operation of the mind than a kind of supplementary

experience of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a much

looser specification, as their treatment of any subject that the

author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also treated

abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than

that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate

with its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage

of Cana," at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling,

completeness of Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the

Salute church. To compare his "Presentation of the Virgin," at

the Madonna dell' Orto, with Titian's at the Academy, or his

"Annunciation" with Titian's close at hand, is to measure the

essential difference between observation and imagination. One has

certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one

has called him an observer. Il y mettait du sien, and I

use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension,

infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or

to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic

combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole

scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of

inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his

perception; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar,

individual, unprecedented, that he committed to canvas with all

the vehemence of his talent. Compare his "Last Supper," at San

Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky

spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its

startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground-

-with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the

subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in

elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's

work the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great,

beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as

Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that never ceased to

beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.

Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their

almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve

their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great

collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is

settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the

sombre splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight

phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as

things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of

them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and

stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross" in that temple of

his spirit will live and die without knowing the largest

eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity

to the place recall as vividly as possible while you linger at

San Rocco the painter's singularly interesting portrait of

himself, at the Louvre. The old man looks out of the canvas from

beneath a brow as sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a

stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to wear if he stood

at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It isn't whimsical

to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had given the

world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before

every picture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous

portrait with profit. On one side the power, the passion, the

illusion of his art; on the other the mortal fatigue of his

spirit. The world's knowledge of him is so small that the

portrait throws a doubly precious light on his personality; and

when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and what were

his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible

assurance there that they were at any rate his life--one of the

most intellectually passionate ever led.

Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any

conditions a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of

my own memory of it is deepened by a subsequent ten days'

experience of Germany. I rose one morning at Verona, and went to

bed at night at Botzen! The statement needs no comment, and the

two places, though but fifty miles apart, are as painfully

dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your

delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German

scenery, German art and the German stage--on the lights and

shadows of Innsbr**, Munich, N******* and Heidelberg; but just

as I was about to put pen to paper I glanced into a little volume

on these very topics lately published by that famous novelist and

moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau, the fruit of a summer's observation

at Homburg. This work produced a reaction; and if I chose to

follow M. Feydeau's own example when he wishes to qualify his

approbation I might call his treatise by any vile name known to

the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing it

superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing

and judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade,

lest some more enlightened critic should come and hang me with

the same rope. Its sum and substance was to have been that--

superficially--Germany is ugly; that Munich is a nightmare,

Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its charming castle) and

even N******* not a joy for ever. But comparisons are odious,

and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may laugh

at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried

away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an

introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the

oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a

lovely August afternoon in the Roman arena--a ruin in which

repair and restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly

practised that it seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The

vast stony oval rose high against the sky in a single clear,

continuous line, broken here and there only by strolling and

reclining loungers. The massive tiers inclined in solid monotony

to the central circle, in which a small open-air theatre was in

active operation. A small quarter of the great slope of masonry

facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in which the

narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest step

figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the

performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with

a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in

the good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was

deemed so superbly able to shift for itself I know not--very

possibly the same drama that I remember seeing advertised during

my former visit to Verona; nothing less than La Tremenda

Giustizia di Dio. If titles are worth anything this product

of the melodramatist's art might surely stand upon its own legs.

Along the tiers above the little group of regular spectators was

gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers, who, although

beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous breadth

of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece. It

was all deliciously Italian--the mixture of old life and new, the

mountebank's booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the antique

circus, the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the

loungers and idlers beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun-

warmed stones. I never felt more keenly the difference between

the background to life in very old and very new civilisations.

There are other things in Verona to make it a liberal education

to be born there, though that it is one for the contemporary

Veronese I don't pretend to say. The Tombs of the Scaligers, with

their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their

exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I

can't profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully

comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep

architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind

one by one, after infinite tranquil contemplation. But even to

the hurried and preoccupied traveller the solemn little chapel-

yard in the city's heart, in which they stand girdled by their

great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is one of the

most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth of

artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else

are the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence

of manlier art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful

churches--several with beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa

Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a structure of high antiquity

and of the most impressive loveliness. The nave terminates in a

double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into which you descend

and where you wander among primitive columns whose variously

grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an

upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest

effect. I shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity

that I received from the great nave of the building on my former

visit. I then decided to my satisfaction that every church is

from the devotional point of view a solecism that has not

something of a similar absolute felicity of proportion; for

strictly formal beauty seems best to express our conception of

spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San Zenone is

deepened by its single picture--a masterpiece of the most serious

of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna.

1872