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 sun-litten 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.