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
further end of it with a sort of dazzling silver 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 fond spectator 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, polished by the knees of
innumerable worshippers; but in other large stretches 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 club-house 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, and 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 as 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 molten 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 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; 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 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 of the fraternity 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 grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age.
{Illustration: FLAGS AT ST. MARK’S VENICE}