It is easy to feel and to say something obvious about Venice. The
influence of this sea-city is unique, immediate, and unmistakable. But
to express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when the
first astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when the
spirit of the place has been harmonised through familiarity with our
habitual mood, is difficult.
Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture. From our earliest
visits, if these have been measured by days rather than weeks, we carry
away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon
cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the
orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths
of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sunlitten haze; of
music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for
mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen
clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth's proudest painters,
cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a
queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These
reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness
and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the
solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of
evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its
grave in mud and brine.
These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable.
They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures,
toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the
brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this
primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of
melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the
richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first
experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of
unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of
that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices
of violin and clarinette. To the contrasted passions of our earliest
love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my
present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in
more tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far
away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering
fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render
something of the patterns I behold.