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 only 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 it is easy to admire it, it

is not so easy to live in it. After you have been there a week, and the

bloom of novelty has rubbed off, you wonder whether 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 _caffès_--the Piazza, as I

say, has resolved itself into a sort of 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 its charm; that you invite its exquisite

influence to sink into your spirit. The place is as changeable as a

nervous woman, and you know it only when you know all the aspects of its

beauty. It has high spirits or low, it is pale or red, gray or pink,

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

always interesting and almost always sad; but it 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 there, like the author of these lines, about

the middle of March, a certain amount of disappointment is possible. He

had not been there 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 it 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 Caffè 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 _caffès_. 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.