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
farther end of it with a sort of dazzling, silvery 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
wondering tourist 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, and polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers; but in
other large sections 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 clubhouse 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 Théophile Gautier's _Italia_, 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, 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 like 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 moulten 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 it is 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; and 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 it 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 painters, 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
gray bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age.