There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic cities
which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names--Brescia,
Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one’s phrase; but I should
have to draw upon recollections now three years old and to make my short
story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions,
and even to these must I do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as
I had done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows
begin to lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant
sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last
intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the
lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to
the precursive flight of your imagination; then the liquid level,
edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon
distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads
multiply at the windows of the train; then your long rumble on the
immense white railway-bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast
drawn, and very properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new
approach, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the
lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the
station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge save for
one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of voices borne
back from the exit is not “Cab, sir!” but “Barca, signore!”
I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of
his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the
supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to
a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can’t be too diffusely
treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young
American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just
where I found him, I could have assaulted him for very envy. He was
painting forsooth the interior of St. Mark’s. To be a young American
painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied
with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond
of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them; of
old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even when made to order); of
time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases and happy contours in cheap
old engravings; to spend one’s mornings in still, productive analysis
of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere, in
church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in star-light
gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the
two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the
church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the
preservation of reason.
The mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous
observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line.
Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it--thanks
to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned,
white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you,
as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of
Venetian “effect.” The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with
all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist
of them all. You should see in places the material with which it
deals--slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay.
Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft
iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred
nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against
every object of vision. You may see these elements at work everywhere,
but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day
in the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to
Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to
know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which
animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I
couldn’t get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere
on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light
to see--nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected
by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a
meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners
and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is
impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse.
Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere
mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left
impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow
inlet and walked along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed,
crumbling cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in
Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the
suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the
attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a
spot enchantment lurks in it.
A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember
none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was
no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of
half-a-dozen young children who dogged our steps and clamoured for
coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in
the world, and, each was furnished with a pair of eyes that could only
have signified the protest of nature against the meanness of fortune.
They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies
protruded like those of infant cannibals in the illustrations of books
of travel; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass,
grinning like suddenly-translated cherubs and showing their hungry
little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of
happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and
the minimum of wealth. One small urchin--framed, if ever a child was, to
be the joy of an aristocratic mamma--was the most expressively beautiful
creature I had ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh
in his grave; and yet here he was running wild among the sea-stunted
bushes, on the lonely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how
blank or to how dark a destiny? Verily nature is still at odds with
propriety; though indeed if they ever really pull together I fear nature
will quite lose her distinction. An infant citizen of our own republic,
straight-haired, pale-eyed and freckled, duly darned and catechised,
marching into a New England schoolhouse, is an object often seen and
soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember with infinite tender
conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the
Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful,
for the poor lad who brought us the key of the cathedral was shaking
with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of
forsaken nave and choir. The church, admirably primitive and curious,
reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome--St. Clement
and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the
twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement
not inferior to that of St. Mark’s. But the terribly distinct Apostles
are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers
presenting arms--intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their
stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival
of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much
beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics--passionless even
in their heresy.
I had been curious to see whether in the galleries and temples of Venice
I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates--to burn what I had
adored and adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth that one can stand
in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously
ponderous sense of that particular half-hour’s being an era in one’s
mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least--a great
comfort in a short stay--that none of my early memories were likely to
change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left
them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian
supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired
immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the
smaller of Tintoret’s two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked
at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other
picture in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me I had
advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another
art--inspired poetry--begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and
Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius,
reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which
Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to which
he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow of that
comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear,
that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter my
impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impotence. In
his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses and fitful
intermissions; but when the list of his faults is complete he still
remains to me the most _interesting_ of painters. His reputation rests
chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed
productivity, his being, as Théophile Gautier says, _le roi des
fougueux_. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his
impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was
not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and
such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a
great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the
great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking
even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it
seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of “The Rape
of Europa” is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other
genius of supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but
Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works
you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas,
and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism
dies the most natural of deaths. In his genius the problem is
practically solved; the alternatives are so harmoniously interfused that
I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends.
The homeliest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and
the imaginative fairly confound their identity.
This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret’s great merit, to my mind, was
his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the
germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity,
an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one’s
observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than
a kind of supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are
content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any
subject that the author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also
treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than
that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with
its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,”
at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of
Tintoret’s illustration of the theme at the Salute church. To compare
his “Presentation of the Virgin,” at the Madonna dell’ Orto, with
Titian’s at the Academy, or his “Annunciation” with Titian’s close at
hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and
imagination. One has certainly not said all that there is to say for
Titian when one has called him an observer. _Il y mettait du sien_,
and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension,
infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or
to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic
combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene
that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of inspiration intense
enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perception; and it was the whole
scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprecedented, that he committed
to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his “Last
Supper,” at San Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky
spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled,
gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground--with the
customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which
impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than
comprehension. You get from Tintoret’s work the impression that he
_felt_, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human
life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that
never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of
his brush. Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their
almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn’t relieve their
gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of
Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of
them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great
chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children’s
children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name;
and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed
and stained, of the great “Bearing of the Cross” in that temple of his
spirit will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art.
If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place recall
as vividly as possible while you linger at San Rocco the painter’s
singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old
man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless
twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him
to wear if he stood at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It
isn’t whimsical to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had
given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed before
every picture of Tintoret you may remember this tremendous portrait with
profit. On one side the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on
the other the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world’s knowledge of
him is so small that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his
personality; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and
what were his purpose, his faith and his method, we may find forcible
assurance there that they were at any rate his life--one of the most
intellectually passionate ever led.
Verona, which was my last Italian stopping-place, is in any conditions
a delightfully interesting city; but the kindness of my own memory of it
is deepened by a subsequent ten days’ experience of Germany. I rose one
morning at Verona, and went to bed at night at Botzen! The statement
needs no comment, and the two places, though but fifty miles apart, are
as painfully dissimilar as their names. I had prepared myself for your
delectation with a copious tirade on German manners, German scenery,
German art and the German stage--on the lights and shadows of Innsbrück,
Munich, Nüremberg and Heidelberg; but just as I was about to put pen
to paper I glanced into a little volume on these very topics lately
published by that famous novelist and moralist, M. Ernest Feydeau,
the fruit of a summer’s observation at Homburg. This work produced a
reaction; and if I chose to follow M. Feydeau’s own example when he
wishes to qualify his approbation I might call his treatise by any vile
name known to the speech of man. But I content myself with pronouncing
it superficial. I then reflect that my own opportunities for seeing and
judging were extremely limited, and I suppress my tirade, lest some more
enlightened critic should come and hang me with the same rope. Its sum
and substance was to have been that--superficially--Germany is ugly;
that Munich is a nightmare, Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its
charming castle) and even Nüremberg not a joy for ever. But comparisons
are odious, and if Munich is ugly Verona is beautiful enough. You may
laugh at my logic, but will probably assent to my meaning. I carried
away from Verona a precious mental picture upon which I cast an
introspective glance whenever between Botzen and Strassburg the
oppression of external circumstance became painful. It was a lovely
August afternoon in the Roman arena--a ruin in which repair and
restoration have been so watchfully and plausibly practised that it
seems all of one harmonious antiquity. The vast stony oval rose high
against the sky in a single clear, continuous line, broken here and
there only by strolling and reclining loungers. The massive tiers
inclined in solid monotony to the central circle, in which a small
open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great
slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in
which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest
step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the
performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with
a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the
good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so
superbly able to shift for itself I know not--very possibly the same
drama that I remember seeing advertised during my former visit to
Verona; nothing less than _La Tremenda Giustizia di Dio_. If titles
are worth anything this product of the melodramatist’s art might surely
stand upon its own legs. Along the tiers above the little group of
regular spectators was gathered a free-list of unauthorised observers,
who, although beyond ear-shot, must have been enabled by the generous
breadth of Italian gesture to follow the tangled thread of the piece.
It was all deliciously Italian--the mixture of old life and new, the
mountebank’s booth (it was hardly more) grafted on the antique circus,
the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the loungers and idlers
beneath the kindly sky and upon the sun-warmed stones. I never felt more
keenly the difference between the background to life in very old and
very new civilisations. There are other things in Verona to make it
a liberal education to be born there, though that it is one for
the contemporary Veronese I don’t pretend to say. The Tombs of the
Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies,
their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can’t
profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended
and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such
as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil
contemplation. But even to the hurried and preoccupied traveller the
solemn little chapel-yard in the city’s heart, in which they stand
girdled by their great swaying curtain of linked and twisted iron, is
one of the most impressive spots in Italy. Nowhere else is such a wealth
of artistic achievement crowded into so narrow a space; nowhere else are
the daily comings and goings of men blessed by the presence of _manlier_
art. Verona is rich furthermore in beautiful churches--several with
beautiful names: San Fermo, Santa Anastasia, San Zenone. This last is a
structure of high antiquity and of the most impressive loveliness. The
nave terminates in a double choir, that is a sub-choir or crypt into
which you descend and where you wander among primitive columns whose
variously grotesque capitals rise hardly higher than your head, and an
upper choral plane reached by broad stairways of the bravest effect. I
shall never forget the impression of majestic chastity that I received
from the great nave of the building on my former visit. I then decided
to my satisfaction that every church is from the devotional point of
view a solecism that has not something of a similar absolute felicity
of proportion; for strictly formal beauty seems best to express our
conception of spiritual beauty. The nobly serious character of San
Zenone is deepened by its single picture--a masterpiece of the most
serious of painters, the severe and exquisite Mantegna.
{Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA}
1872