THE GRAND CANAL

The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best might

perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to belong to the

splendid square which bears the patron’s name and which is the centre

of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as

Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and

gaping, of circulating without a purpose, and of staring--too often with

a foolish one--through the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality

makes their doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the

modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite technically a

“street,” the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less normal; and I hasten

to add that I am glad not to find myself studying my subject under the

international arcades, or yet (I will go the length of saying) in the

solemn presence of the church. For indeed in that case I foresee I

should become still more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block

that inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path

of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to expression.

“Venetian life” is a mere literary convention, though it be an

indispensable figure. The words have played an effective part in the

literature of sensibility; they constituted thirty years ago the title

of Mr. Howells’s delightful volume of impressions; but in using

them to-day one owes some frank amends to one’s own lucidity. Let me

carefully premise therefore that so often as they shall again drop

from my pen, so often shall I beg to be regarded as systematically

superficial.

Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end,

and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities

resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else

has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of

resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so

discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for

the graves. It has no flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation

perhaps--and the thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money

and little red books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible

visitors in the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is

only a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at the

door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff,

to see how dead it is. From this _constatation_, this cold curiosity,

proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The

shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon

it for a living; they are the custodians and the ushers of the great

museum--they are even themselves to a certain extent the objects of

exhibition. It is in the wide vestibule of the square that the polygot

pilgrims gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera

in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the

lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why,

in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the

purchasers and from the vendors of _ricordi_. The _ricordi_ that we

prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides--best of all on the

noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in

its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied

Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore--has not a brand new café

begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that introduces us

most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its

first spell, and to which a thousand artists, not always with a talent

apiece, have paid their tribute. We pass into the Piazzetta to look down

the great throat, as it were, of Venice, and the vision must console us

for turning our back on St. Mark’s.

We have been treated to it again and again, of course, even if we have

never stirred from home; but that is only a reason the more for catching

at any freshness that may be left in the world of photography. It is in

Venice above all that we hear the small buzz of this vulgarising voice

of the familiar; yet perhaps it is in Venice too that the picturesque

fact has best mastered the pious secret of how to wait for us. Even

the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her

saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all

the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped

buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps

disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the

woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which

she looks in the direction of her old-fashioned Byzantine neighbour;

and the juxtaposition of two churches so distinguished and so different,

each splendid in its sort, is a sufficient mark of the scale and range

of Venice. However, we ourselves are looking away from St. Mark’s--we

must blind our eyes to that dazzle; without it indeed there are

brightnesses and fascinations enough. We see them in abundance even

while we look away from the shady steps of the Salute. These steps are

cool in the morning, yet I don’t know that I can justify my excessive

fondness for them any better than I can explain a hundred of the other

vague infatuations with which Venice sophisticates the spirit. Under

such an influence fortunately one need n’t explain--it keeps account

of nothing but perceptions and affections. It is from the Salute steps

perhaps, of a summer morning, that this view of the open mouth of

the city is most brilliantly amusing. The whole thing composes as if

composition were the chief end of human institutions. The charming

architectural promontory of the Dogana stretches out the most graceful

of arms, balancing in its hand the gilded globe on which revolves the

delightful satirical figure of a little weathercock of a woman. This

Fortune, this Navigation, or whatever she is called--she surely needs no

name--catches the wind in the bit of drapery of which she has divested

her rotary bronze loveliness. On the other side of the Canal twinkles

and glitters the long row of the happy palaces which are mainly

expensive hotels. There is a little of everything everywhere, in

the bright Venetian air, but to these houses belongs especially the

appearance of sitting, across the water, at the receipt of custom,

of watching in their hypocritical loveliness for the stranger and the

victim. I call them happy, because even their sordid uses and their

vulgar signs melt somehow, with their vague sea-stained pinks and drabs,

into that strange gaiety of light and colour which is made up of the

reflection of superannuated things. The atmosphere plays over them like

a laugh, they are of the essence of the sad old joke. They are almost

as charming from other places as they are from their own balconies,

and share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which

consists of being both the picture and the point of view.

This double character, which is particularly strong in the Grand Canal,

adds a difficulty to any control of one’s notes. The Grand Canal may

be practically, as in impression, the cushioned balcony of a high and

well-loved palace--the memory of irresistible evenings, of the

sociable elbow, of endless lingering and looking; or it may evoke the

restlessness of a fresh curiosity, of methodical inquiry, in a gondola

piled with references. There are no references, I ought to mention, in

the present remarks, which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness.

A rhapsody of Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues

are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the

palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to remember in

the immense array were less insignificant. There are many I delight in

that I don’t know, or at least don’t keep, apart. Then there are the bad

reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet

bribery of association and recollection. These things, as one stands on

the Salute steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out

of the row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green

shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the

very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn’t call by

a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice, these many

years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very friendliest house in all

the wide world, and it has, as it deserves to have, the most beautiful

position. It is a real _porto di mare_, as the gondoliers say--a port

within a port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all

in with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense iridescence

is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite colour on which it may

fancy itself the heart of the wonderful prism. We wave to it from the

Salute steps, which we must decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a

grateful hand across the water, and turn into the big white church of

Longhena--an empty shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American

family and a German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches,

are gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at

nothing in particular.

For there is nothing particular in this cold and conventional temple to

gaze at save the great Tintoretto of the sacristy, to which we quickly

pay our respects, and which we are glad to have for ten minutes to

ourselves. The picture, though full of beauty, is not the finest of the

master’s; but it serves again as well as another to transport--there

is no other word--those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when

Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was

almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say

to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in

general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret

still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision

but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this

great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind.

The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for

whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up. “The

Marriage in Cana,” at the Salute, has all his characteristic and

fascinating unexpectedness--the sacrifice of the figure of our Lord,

who is reduced to the mere final point of a clever perspective, and the

free, joyous presentation of all the other elements of the feast.

Why, in spite of this queer one-sidedness, does the picture give us no

impression of a lack of what the critics call reverence? For no other

reason that I can think of than because it happens to be the work of its

author, in whose very mistakes there is a singular wisdom. Mr. Ruskin

has spoken with sufficient eloquence of the serious loveliness of the

row of heads of the women on the right, who talk to each other as they

sit at the foreshortened banquet. There could be no better example

of the roving independence of the painter’s vision, a real spirit of

adventure for which his subject was always a cluster of accidents; not

an obvious order, but a sort of peopled and agitated chapter of life,

in which the figures are submissive pictorial notes. These notes are all

there in their beauty and heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a

kind to make the principle of selection seem in comparison timid,

yet the sense of “composition” in the spectator--if it happen to

exist--reaches out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the

spirit of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular

question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the high

fellowship of Tintoretto.

If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge which

discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more comprehensively, to

the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble Palazzo Foscari--is too much

of a curve to be seen at any one point as a whole, it represents the

better the arched neck, as it were, of the undulating serpent of which

the Canalazzo has the likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note

in our passage a hundred component “bits,” with the baffled sketcher’s

sense, and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian

fatalism, the baffled sketcher’s temper. It is the early palaces, of

course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could take them

one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand air. The fairest

are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and there are few, alas, so

fair as to have been completely protected by their beauty. The ages and

the generations have worked their will on them, and the wind and the

weather have had much to say; but disfigured and dishonoured as they

are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin,

there is nothing like them in the world, and the long succession of

their faded, conscious faces makes of the quiet waterway they overhang

a _promenade historique_ of which the lesson, however often we read it,

gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice.

We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very

curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of

the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost

as proud. These things at present are almost equally touching in their

good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with

their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might,

and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of

them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission are far

less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have

botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs; we

have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of

them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects

in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the

curiosity-shops.

The antiquity-mongers in Venice have all the courage of their opinion,

and it is easy to see how well they know they can confound you with an

unanswerable question. What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and

what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? “We pick

them up _for_ you,” say these honest Jews, whose prices are marked

in dollars, “and who shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well

plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the

bouquet?” They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and

their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote

to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their

thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with

the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a

moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense

of her contradictions sinks to rest--the grimace of an over-strained

philosophy. It’s rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing.

You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and,

in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft

splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of

the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate

lives that must have been, that might still be, led there. You

reconstruct the admirable house according to your own needs; leaning on

a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of the little green gardens

with which, for the most part, such establishments are exasperatingly

blessed, and end by feeling it a shame that you yourself are not in

possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you

are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your

gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not

your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes

to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tempered, or

perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real participation. If you

have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian

home and to lead your life a little in the painted chambers that still

echo with one of the historic names, you have entered by the shortest

step into the inner spirit of the place. If it did n’t savour of

treachery to private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of

these delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as

a splendid example of the old palatial type. But I can only do so in

passing, with a hundred precautions, and, lifting the curtain at the

edge, drop a commemorative word on the success with which, in this

particularly happy instance, the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy,

the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time, adjust

themselves to the great gilded, relinquished shell and try to fill it

out. A Venetian palace that has not too grossly suffered and that is not

overwhelming by its mass makes almost any life graceful that may be

led in it. With cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a

pre-established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and

its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and

its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in

the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself

for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted

stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of

playing children comes in behind from the campo, nor the way the old

ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors. It gives you

practically the essence of the matter that we are considering, for

beneath the high balconies Venice comes and goes, and the particular

stretch you command contains all the characteristics. Everything has its

turn, from the heavy barges of merchandise, pushed by long poles and the

patient shoulder, to the floating pavilions of the great serenades, and

you may study at your leisure the admirable Venetian arts of managing a

boat and organising a spectacle. Of the beautiful free stroke with which

the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never,

in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the

large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves

forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the

fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the

hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier

(like the solitary horseman of the old-fashioned novel) is, I confess,

a somewhat melancholy figure. Perched on his poop without a mate, he

re-enacts perpetually, in high relief, with his toes turned out, the

comedy of his odd and charming movement. He always has a little the

look of an absent-minded nursery-maid pushing her small charges in a

perambulator.

But why should I risk too free a comparison, where this picturesque and

amiable class are concerned? I delight in their sun-burnt complexions

and their childish dialect; I know them only by their merits, and I am

grossly prejudiced in their favour. They are interesting and touching,

and alike in their virtues and their defects human nature is simplified

as with a big effective brush. Affecting above all is their dependence

on the stranger, the whimsical stranger who swims out of their ken, yet

whom Providence sometimes restores. The best of them at any rate are

in their line great artists. On the swarming feast-days, on the strange

feast-night of the Redentore, their steering is a miracle of ease. The

master-hands, the celebrities and winners of prizes--you may see them

on the private gondolas in spotless white, with brilliant sashes and

ribbons, and often with very handsome persons--take the right of way

with a pardonable insolence. They penetrate the crush of boats with

an authority of their own. The crush of boats, the universal sociable

bumping and squeezing, is great when, on the summer nights, the ladies

shriek with alarm, the city pays the fiddlers, and the illuminated

barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The

barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by

the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are

not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be

an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that shouldn’t touch them with

indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the

prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the

new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, at their

best, keep up the immemorial tradition. The Venetians have had from the

beginning of time the pride of their processions and spectacles, and

it’s a wonder how with empty pockets they still make a clever show. The

Carnival is dead, but these are the scraps of its inheritance. Vauxhall

on the water is of course more Vauxhall than ever, with the good fortune

of home-made music and of a mirror that reduplicates and multiplies.

The feast of the Redeemer--the great popular feast of the year--is a

wonderful Venetian Vauxhall. All Venice on this occasion takes to the

boats for the night and loads them with lamps and provisions. Wedged

together in a mass it sups and sings; every boat is a floating arbour,

a private _café-concert_. Of all Christian commemorations it is the most

ingenuously and harmlessly pagan. Toward morning the passengers repair

to the Lido, where, as the sun rises, they plunge, still sociably, into

the sea. The night of the Redentore has been described, but it would be

interesting to have an account, from the domestic point of view, of its

usual morrow. It is mainly an affair of the Giudecca, however, which is

bridged over from the Zattere to the great church. The pontoons are laid

together during the day--it is all done with extraordinary celerity and

art--and the bridge is prolonged across the Canalazzo (to Santa Maria

Zobenigo), which is my only warrant for glancing at the occasion. We

glance at it from our palace windows; lengthening our necks a little, as

we look up toward the Salute, we see all Venice, on the July afternoon,

so serried as to move slowly, pour across the temporary footway. It is

a flock of very good children, and the bridged Canal is their toy. All

Venice on such occasions is gentle and friendly; not even all Venice

pushes anyone into the water.

But from the same high windows we catch without any stretching of the

neck a still more indispensable note in the picture, a famous pretender

eating the bread of bitterness. This repast is served in the open air,

on a neat little terrace, by attendants in livery, and there is no

indiscretion in our seeing that the pretender dines. Ever since the

table d’hôte in “Candide” Venice has been the refuge of monarchs in want

of thrones--she would n’t know herself without her _rois en exil._ The

exile is agreeable and soothing, the gondola lets them down gently. Its

movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it

rocks all ambitions to sleep. The proscript has plenty of leisure to

write his proclamations and even his memoirs, and I believe he has

organs in which they are published; but the only noise he makes in the

world is the harmless splash of his oars. He comes and goes along the

Canalazzo, and he might be much worse employed. He is but one of the

interesting objects it presents, however, and I am by no means sure

that he is the most striking. He has a rival, if not in the iron

bridge, which, alas, is within our range, at least--to take an immediate

example--in the Montecuculi Palace. Far-descended and weary, but

beautiful in its crooked old age, with its lovely proportions, its

delicate round arches, its carvings and its disks of marble, is the

haunted Montecuculi. Those who have a kindness for Venetian gossip like

to remember that it was once for a few months the property of Robert

Browning, who, however, never lived in it, and who died in the splendid

Rezzonico, the residence of his son and a wonderful cosmopolite

“document,” which, as it presents itself, in an admirable position, but

a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the

curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seventeenth century

pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance,

a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing

sea-horse, decorates immensely--and within, as well as without--the wide

angle that it commands.

There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari,

just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century,

a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official

uses--it is the property of the State--it looks conscious of the

consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our

range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless. It is visibly

“kept up”; perhaps it is kept up too much; perhaps I am wrong in

thinking so well of it. These doubts and fears course rapidly through my

mind--I am easily their victim when it is a question of architecture--as

they are apt to do to-day, in Italy, almost anywhere, in the presence

of the beautiful, of the desecrated or the neglected. We feel at such

moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and

lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice,

seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious. I am on

firm ground in rejoicing in the little garden directly opposite our

windows--it is another proof that they really show us everything--and in

feeling that the gardens of Venice would deserve a page to themselves.

They are infinitely more numerous than the arriving stranger can

suppose; they nestle with a charm all their own in the complications of

most back-views. Some of them are exquisite, many are large, and even

the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour,

with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals,

in the hunt for amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all.

The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the

greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the

reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is

countless, I think the lapping water loves them most. They are numerous

on the Canalazzo, but wherever they occur they give a brush to the

picture and in particular, it is easy to guess, give a sweetness to the

house. Then the elements are complete--the trio of air and water and of

things that grow. Venice without them would be too much a matter of the

tides and the stones. Even the little trellises of the _traghetti_ count

charmingly as reminders, amid so much artifice, of the woodland nature

of man. The vine-leaves, trained on horizontal poles, make a roof

of chequered shade for the gondoliers and ferrymen, who doze there

according to opportunity, or chatter or hail the approaching “fare.”

There is no “hum” in Venice, so that their voices travel far; they

enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams. I beg the reader

to believe that if I had time to go into everything, I would go into the

_traghetti_, which have their manners and their morals, and which

used to have their piety. This piety was always a _madonnina_, the

protectress of the passage--a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red

spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have

gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for _bric-a-brac_.

The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism--a faith

consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures

has been left, however--the Madonnetta which gives its name to a

_traghetto_ near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone

inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult

of removal. _Pazienza_, the day will come when so marketable a relic

will also be extracted from its socket and purchased by the devouring

American. I leave that expression, on second thought, standing; but I

repent of it when I remember that it is a devouring American--a lady

long resident in Venice and whose kindnesses all Venetians, as well as

her country-people, know, who has rekindled some of the extinguished

tapers, setting up especially the big brave Gothic shrine, of painted

and gilded wood, which, on the top of its stout _palo_, sheds its

influence on the place of passage opposite the Salute.

If I may not go into those of the palaces this devious discourse has

left behind, much less may I enter the great galleries of the Academy,

which rears its blank wall, surmounted by the lion of St. Mark, well

within sight of the windows at which we are still lingering. This

wondrous temple of Venetian art--for all it promises little from

without--overhangs, in a manner, the Grand Canal, but if we were so much

as to cross its threshold we should wander beyond recall. It contains,

in some of the most magnificent halls--where the ceilings have all

the glory with which the imagination of Venice alone could over-arch a

room--some of the noblest pictures in the world; and whether or not

we go back to them on any particular occasion for another look, it is

always a comfort to know that they are there, as the sense of them on

the spot is a part of the furniture of the mind--the sense of them close

at hand, behind every wall and under every cover, like the inevitable

reverse of a medal, of the side exposed to the air that reflects,

intensifies, completes the scene. In other words, as it was the

inevitable destiny of Venice to be painted, and painted with passion, so

the wide world of picture becomes, as we live there, and however much we

go about our affairs, the constant habitation of our thoughts. The truth

is, we are in it so uninterruptedly, at home and abroad, that there

is scarcely a pressure upon us to seek it in one place more than in

another. Choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come

to you. This is manifestly why I have not, I find myself conscious, said

more about the features of the Canalazzo which occupy the reach between

the Salute and the position we have so obstinately taken up. It is

still there before us, however, and the delightful little Palazzo Dario,

intimately familiar to English and American travellers, picks itself out

in the foreshortened brightness. The Dario is covered with the loveliest

little marble plates and sculptured circles; it is made up of exquisite

pieces--as if there had been only enough to make it small--so that it

looks, in its extreme antiquity, a good deal like a house of cards that

hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch. An old Venetian

house dies hard indeed, and I should add that this delicate thing,

with submission in every feature, continues to resist the contact of

generations of lodgers. It is let out in floors (it used to be let as

a whole) and in how many eager hands--for it is in great

requisition--under how many fleeting dispensations have we not known and

loved it? People are always writing in advance to secure it, as they

are to secure the Jenkins’s gondolier, and as the gondola passes we

see strange faces at the windows--though it’s ten to one we recognise

them--and the millionth artist coming forth with his traps at the

water-gate. The poor little patient Dario is one of the most flourishing

booths at the fair.

The faces in the window look out at the great Sansovino--the splendid

pile that is now occupied by the Prefect. I feel decidedly that I

don’t object as I ought to the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. Their pretensions impose upon me, and the imagination peoples

them more freely than it can people the interiors of the prime. Was not

moreover this masterpiece of Sansovino once occupied by the Venetian

post-office, and thereby intimately connected with an ineffaceable first

impression of the author of these remarks? He had arrived, wondering,

palpitating, twenty-three years ago, after nightfall, and, the first

thing on the morrow, had repaired to the post-office for his letters.

They had been waiting a long time and were full of delayed interest, and

he returned with them to the gondola and floated slowly down the Canal.

The mixture, the rapture, the wonderful temple of the _poste restante_,

the beautiful strangeness, all humanised by good news--the memory of

this abides with him still, so that there always proceeds from the

splendid waterfront I speak of a certain secret appeal, something that

seems to have been uttered first in the sonorous chambers of youth. Of

course this association falls to the ground--or rather splashes into the

water--if I am the victim of a confusion. _Was_ the edifice in question

twenty-three years ago the post-office, which has occupied since, for

many a day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper

steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these years I

have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the sentiment, at any

rate, is that such a great house has surely, in the high beauty of its

tiers, a refinement of its own. They make one think of colosseums and

aqueducts and bridges, and they constitute doubtless, in Venice, the

most pardonable specimen of the imitative. I have even a timid kindness

for the huge Pesaro, far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even

than the coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want

of consideration for the general picture, which the early examples so

reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a modern

hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost equally the

modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred do, I must add,

for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them less. They make even the

most elaborate material civilisation of the present day seem woefully

shrunken and _bourgeois_, for they simply--I allude to the biggest

palaces--can’t be lived in as they were intended to be. The modern

tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of

Achilles. He occupies the place, but he doesn’t fill it, and he has

guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are

far at the Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take

advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end. The long

straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch

of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest,

but it contains most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all

these centuries it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city;

for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the

houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they

reckon with them--have chosen them; here alone the lapping seaway seems

to confess itself an accident.

{Illustration: PALAZZO MONCENIGO, VENICE}

There are persons who hold this long, gay, shabby, spotty perspective,

in which, with its immense field of confused reflection, the houses have

infinite variety, the dullest expanse in Venice. It was not dull, we

imagine, for Lord Byron, who lived in the midmost of the three Mocenigo

palaces, where the writing-table is still shown at which he gave the

rein to his passions. For other observers it is sufficiently enlivened

by so delightful a creation as the Palazzo Loredan, once a masterpiece

and at present the Municipio, not to speak of a variety of other

immemorial bits whose beauty still has a degree of freshness. Some of

the most touching relics of early Venice are here--for it was here she

precariously clustered--peeping out of a submersion more pitiless than

the sea. As we approach the Rialto indeed the picture falls off and a

comparative commonness suffuses it. There is a wide paved walk on either

side of the Canal, on which the waterman--and who in Venice is not a

waterman?--is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days--it is

the summer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are

drawn up at the _fondamenta_, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue

cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere

else there would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low

doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and

here and there, on the quay, beneath the bush that overhangs the door,

there are rickety tables and chairs. Where in Venice is there not the

amusement of character and of detail? The tone in this part is very

vivid, and is largely that of the brown plebeian faces looking out of

the patchy miscellaneous houses--the faces of fat undressed women and of

other simple folk who are not aware that they enjoy, from balconies once

doubtless patrician, a view the knowing ones of the earth come thousands

of miles to envy them. The effect is enhanced by the tattered clothes

hung to dry in the windows, by the sun-faded rags that flutter from the

polished balustrades--these are ivory-smooth with time; and the whole

scene profits by the general law that renders decadence and ruin

in Venice more brilliant than any prosperity. Decay is in this

extraordinary place golden in tint and misery _couleur de rose_. The

gondolas of the correct people are unmitigated sable, but the poor

market-boats from the islands are kaleidoscopic.

The Bridge of the Rialto is a name to conjure with, but, honestly

speaking, it is scarcely the gem of the composition. There are of course

two ways of taking it--from the water or from the upper passage, where

its small shops and booths abound in Venetian character; but it mainly

counts as a feature of the Canal when seen from the gondola or even from

the awful _vaporetto_. The great curve of its single arch is much to

be commended, especially when, coming from the direction of the

railway-station, you see it frame with its sharp compass-line the

perfect picture, the reach of the Canal on the other side. But the backs

of the little shops make from the water a graceless collective hump, and

the inside view is the diverting one. The big arch of the bridge--like

the arches of all the bridges--is the waterman’s friend in wet weather.

The gondolas, when it rains, huddle beside the peopled barges, and

the young ladies from the hotels, vaguely fidgeting, complain of the

communication of insect life. Here indeed is a little of everything, and

the jewellers of this celebrated precinct--they have their immemorial

row--make almost as fine a show as the fruiterers. It is a universal

market, and a fine place to study Venetian types. The produce of

the islands is discharged there, and the fishmongers announce their

presence. All one’s senses indeed are vigorously attacked; the whole

place is violently hot and bright, all odorous and noisy. The churning

of the screw of the _vaporetto_ mingles with the other sounds--not

indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal.

But Just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly

near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water.

As we go further down we see it stopping exactly beneath the glorious

windows of the Ca’d’Oro. It has chosen its position well, and who

shall gainsay it for having put itself under the protection of the

most romantic facade in Europe? The companionship of these objects is

a symbol; it expresses supremely the present and the future of Venice.

Perfect, in its prime, was the marble Ca’d’Oro, with the noble recesses

of its _loggie_, but even then it probably never “met a want,” like the

successful _vaporetto_. If, however, we are not to go into the Museo

Civico--the old Museo Correr, which rears a staring renovated front

far down on the left, near the station, so also we must keep out of the

great vexed question of steam on the Canalazzo, just as a while since we

prudently kept out of the Accademia. These are expensive and complicated

excursions. It is obvious that if the _vaporetti_ have contributed to

the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of

the palaces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if

they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its

tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed “rapid transit,” in

the New York phrase, in everybody’s reach, and enabled everybody--save

indeed those who wouldn’t for the world--to rush about Venice as

furiously as people rush about New York. The suitability of this

consummation needn’t be pointed out.

Even we ourselves, in the irresistible contagion, are going so fast now

that we have only time to note in how clever and costly a fashion the

Museo Civico, the old Fondaco dei Turchi, has been reconstructed and

restored. It is a glare of white marble without, and a series of showy

majestic halls within, where a thousand curious mementos and relics of

old Venice are gathered and classified. Of its miscellaneous treasures

I fear I may perhaps frivolously prefer the series of its remarkable

living Longhis, an illustration of manners more copious than the

celebrated Carpaccio, the two ladies with their little animals and their

long sticks. Wonderful indeed today are the museums of Italy, where

the renovations and the _belle ordonnance_ speak of funds apparently

unlimited, in spite of the fact that the numerous custodians

frankly look starved. What is the pecuniary source of all this civic

magnificence--it is shown in a hundred other ways--and how do the

Italian cities manage to acquit themselves of expenses that would be

formidable to communities richer and doubtless less aesthetic? Who pays

the bills for the expressive statues alone, the general exuberance

of sculpture, with which every _piazzetta_ of almost every village

is patriotically decorated? Let us not seek an answer to the puzzling

question, but observe instead that we are passing the mouth of the

populous Canareggio, next widest of the waterways, where the race of

Shylock abides, and at the corner of which the big colourless church of

San Geremia stands gracefully enough on guard. The Canareggio, with its

wide lateral footways and humpbacked bridges, makes on the feast of St.

John an admirable noisy, tawdry theatre for one of the prettiest and the

most infantile of the Venetian processions.

The rest of the course is a reduced magnificence, in spite of

interesting bits, of the battered pomp of the Pesaro and the Cornaro,

of the recurrent memories of royalty in exile which cluster about the

Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, once the residence of the Comte de Chambord

and still that of his half-brother, in spite too of the big Papadopoli

gardens, opposite the station, the largest private grounds in Venice,

but of which Venice in general mainly gets the benefit in the usual form

of irrepressible greenery climbing over walls and nodding at water. The

rococo church of the Scalzi is here, all marble and malachite, all a

cold, hard glitter and a costly, curly ugliness, and here too, opposite,

on the top of its high steps, is San Simeone Profeta, I won’t say

immortalised, but unblushingly misrepresented, by the perfidious

Canaletto. I shall not stay to unravel the mystery of this prosaic

painter’s malpractices; he falsified without fancy, and as he apparently

transposed at will the objects he reproduced, one is never sure of the

particular view that may have constituted his subject. It would look

exactly like such and such a place if almost everything were not

different. San Simeone Profeta appears to hang there upon the wall; but

it is on the wrong side of the Canal and the other elements quite fail

to correspond. One’s confusion is the greater because one doesn’t

know that everything may not really have changed, even beyond all

probability--though it’s only in America that churches cross the street

or the river--and the mixture of the recognisable and the different

makes the ambiguity maddening, all the more that the painter is almost

as attaching as he is bad. Thanks at any rate to the white church, domed

and porticoed, on the top of its steps, the traveller emerging for

the first time upon the terrace of the railway-station seems to have a

Canaletto before him. He speedily discovers indeed even in the presence

of this scene of the final accents of the Canalazzo--there is a charm in

the old pink warehouses on the hot _fondamenta_--that he has something

much better. He looks up and down at the gathered gondolas; he has his

surprise after all, his little first Venetian thrill; and as the terrace

of the station ushers in these things we shall say no harm of it, though

it is not lovely. It is the beginning of his experience, but it is the

end of the Grand Canal.

1892.