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 sole 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 she is easy to admire, she is
not so easy to live with as you count living in other places. After you
have stayed a week and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if
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 cafés--the Piazza, as I say,
has resolved itself into a 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 her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink
into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you
know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high
spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or
wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting
and almost always sad; but she 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, as the author
of these lines on a certain occasion went, about the middle of March, a
certain amount of disappointment is possible. He had paid no visit 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 she 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 cafés. 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.