IV

Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city of the Doges reduced

to earning its living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was

a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on Riva Schiavoni

and looking out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment

indeed in simply getting into the place and observing the queer

incidents of a Venetian installation. A great many persons contribute

indirectly to this undertaking, and it is surprising how they spring

out at you during your novitiate to remind you that they are bound up

in some mysterious manner with the constitution of your little

establishment. It was an interesting problem for instance to trace the

subtle connection existing between the niece of the landlady and the

occupancy of the fourth floor. Superficially it was none too visible, as

the young lady in question was a dancer at the Fenice theatre--or when

that was closed at the Rossini--and might have been supposed absorbed by

her professional duties. It proved necessary, however, that she should

hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and a pair of black kid

gloves with one little white button; as also, that she should apply a

thick coating of powder to her face, which had a charming oval and a

sweet weak expression, like that of most of the Venetian maidens,

who, as a general thing--it was not a peculiarity of the land-lady’s

niece--are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. You soon recognise

that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon you behold from a

habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything Venetian.

Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San

Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success

beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the

immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not

whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a

great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the

whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the

leading colour in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink,

and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs

very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright

sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon

and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident

brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always burnt out,

as it were, always exquisitely mild.

Certain little mental pictures rise before the collector of memories at

the simple mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved. When

I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages,

it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica

and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the

stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of

the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St.

Mark’s. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch

of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it

gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier’s

cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the

stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like

a camel’s back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her

characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float

beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it

sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out

of which the long arm of a white June rose--the roses of Venice are

splendid--has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other

side of this small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows

and balconies--balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under

which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy

water-steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and

the whole place is enchanting.

{Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE}

It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice.

The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when he

is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the moment

a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to entertain.

Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and while you rest

your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away. But

in truth Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind.

The effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic,

and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your

_milieu_. All nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically

that such hours should be devoted to collecting impressions. Afterwards,

in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your impressions

into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn’t always

fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge

of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances

of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant

entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey

floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there

were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the

anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva,

seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm--warm

to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole

place was in a glow. The sea took on a thousand shades, but they were

only infinite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of

began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard

of weather-stained stucco, every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of

sky above a _calle_, began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters

say, to “compose.” The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which

played across it like huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied

and spotted it allover; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a

distance, precisely like every other.

There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious

impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it,

but, thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and

of the same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible,

as you see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was

always the same silhouette--the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its

head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with

the grotesquely-graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines,

as may be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the

“second position” of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist

upward in a freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate.

One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in

the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful

in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the

grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way

in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over

their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and

the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in

profile, in a gondola that passes you--see, as you recline on your own

low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the

sky--it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek

frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend--if you choose

him happily--and on the quality of the personage depends a good deal

that of your impressions. He is a part of your daily life, your double,

your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think, either like their

gondolier or hate him; and if they like him, like him very much. In this

case they take an interest in him after his departure; wish him to be

sure of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers and tell their

friends to be certain to “secure” him. There is usually no difficulty in

securing him; there is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier.

Nothing would induce me not to believe them for the most part excellent

fellows, and the sentimental tourist must always have a kindness for

them. More than the rest of the population, of course, they are the

children of Venice; they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its

essence, with its silence, with its melancholy.

When I say they are associated with its silence I should immediately add

that they are associated also with its sound. Among themselves they are

an extraordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the _traghetti_,

where they always have some sharp point under discussion; they bawl

across the canals; they bespeak your commands as you approach; they defy

each other from afar. If you happen to have a _traghetto_ under your

window, you are well aware that they are a vocal race. I should go even

further than I went just now, and say that the voice of the gondolier is

in fact for audibility the dominant or rather the only note of Venice.

There is scarcely another heard sound, and that indeed is part of the

interest of the place. There is no noise there save distinctly human

noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It

is all articulate and vocal and personal. One may say indeed that Venice

is emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place

because there is nothing to interfere with its being caught by the ear.

Among the populace it is a general family party. The still water carries

the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at a distance of half

a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and they don’t like trouble. Their

delightful garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a

long _conversazione_. This language, with its soft elisions, its

odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants and other

disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly human and accommodating.

If your gondolier had no other merit he would have the merit that he

speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit even--some people perhaps

would say especially--when you don’t understand what he says. But he

adds to it other graces which make him an agreeable feature in your

life. The price he sets on his services is touchingly small, and he

has a happy art of being obsequious without being, or at least without

seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost

lyrical gratitude. In short he has delightfully good manners, a merit

which he shares for the most part with the Venetians at large. One

grows very fond of these people, and the reason of one’s fondness is the

frankness and sweetness of their address. That of the Italian family

at large has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian manner there is

something peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old, that

it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it hasn’t

been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn’t

a genius for stiff morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in that

direction. It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the

true, and has been accused of cultivating the occasion to grasp and

to overreach, and of steering a crooked course--not to your and my

advantage--amid the sanctities of property. It has been accused further

of loving if not too well at least too often, of being in fine as little

austere as possible. I am not sure it is very brave, nor struck with its

being very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the amenities

of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is

better company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations

of industry and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie

and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to

please and to be pleased.

V

In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to

imitate him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy;

unless indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour

by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his

best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of

common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of

the masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons

what more is left to say? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the

Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to

resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters, and

it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to

his taste. “Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with

Titian’s ‘Assumption.’” That honest phrase has doubtless been written

in many a traveller’s diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of

its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must

moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have

mentioned Titian’s “Assumption” I must say that there are some people

who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just

imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you

may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it.

It imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of

the Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three

works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a

passion. “The ‘Annunciation’ struck me as coarse and superficial”: that

note was once made in a simple-minded tourist’s book. At Venice, strange

to say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption

is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence,

Dresden, Munich--these are the homes of his greatness.

There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of

these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who

make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen and

measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines

in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of

Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National

Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping

at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in

crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London

twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating

to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar who

has one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to a hundred

painters for Doges and for personages more sacred--has a prescriptive

right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a

greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very fact to see

the other masters, who form part of your life while you are there, who

illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one’s

relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar,

so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems

almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other.

Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the

real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so

exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so

consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian

air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the

palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions

they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance

upon the waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you

live in a certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don’t go

into the churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets;

you go into them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of

the things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter,

and life was so pictorial that art couldn’t help becoming so. With

all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an

extraordinary freshness to one’s perception of the great Venetian works.

You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and

you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all

works of art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the

part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed.

Reflection only confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show

its head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense

that even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret’s

“Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple”--they are still more

familiar.

But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well

to attempt it--painful because in the memory of vanished hours so filled

with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite

hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to

have always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings

of May and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice isn’t

smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and Rome;

but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola

waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will take your

place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice

should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An

intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it

makes no woman’s perceptions less keen to be aware that she can’t help

looking graceful as she is borne over the waves. The handsome Pasquale,

with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a general way,

from observation of your habits, that your intention is to go to see

a picture or two. It perhaps doesn’t immensely matter what picture

you choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to wander

through the light and shade of intricate canals, with perpetual

architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is charming

to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty _campo_--a sunny

shabby square with an old well in the middle, an old church on one

side and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes the windows are

tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown leans vaguely on

the sill. There is always an old man holding out his hat for

coppers; there are always three or four small boys dodging possible

umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to

the door of the church.