There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the
brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or
even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may
take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking
none. He has his own way--he makes it all right. It now becomes just
a part of the charming solicitation that it presents precisely a
problem--that of giving the particular thing as much as possible without
at the same time giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations,
proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a little
art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm to his work,
and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three pictures.
I
The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means the
first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate “style” of which
we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old Venice and
elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has brought about the
decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it were, intensified
and consecrated the style? There is an ambiguity about it all that
constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear old Venice has lost her complexion,
her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has
so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the
case is simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar
to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some happy
justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere arrested by the
poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice being, accordingly, at
every point, what we most touch, feel and see, we end by assuming it to
be of the essence of her dignity; a consequence, we become aware, by the
way, sufficiently discouraging to the general application or pretension
of style, and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the
original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be the
ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and moreover
there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments, solid survivals,
hold up their heads and decline to ask for a grain of your pity. Well,
one knows of course when to keep one’s pity to oneself; yet one clings,
even in the face of the colder stare, to one’s prized Venetian privilege
of making the sense of doom and decay a part of every impression.
Cheerful work, it may be said of course; and it is doubtless only in
Venice that you gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most
beautiful is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness,
going--that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part
of your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so
desperately to read history into everything?
You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do it,
I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there with longer
knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and shimmers, that the
night is the real time. It perhaps even wouldn’t take much to make you
award the palm to the nights of winter. This is certainly true for the
form of progression that is most characteristic, for every question
of departure and arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of
this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the
indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and
all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and obscure arrest is
a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when
the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea. Nowhere
else is anything as innocent so mysterious, nor anything as mysterious
so pleasantly deterrent to protest. These are the moments when you are
most daringly Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other
aliens the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and
gold. The splendid day is good enough for _them_; what is best for you
is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered _pali_ and
softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that
play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance.
The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a basement
tremendously tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts
the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is,
that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn’t a single
item of it of which the association isn’t noble. Hold to it fast that
there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival by water. Hold to
it that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low,
dark _felze_ and make the few guided movements and find the strong
crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass
up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these
things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may
sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It’s so stately that what
can come after?--it’s so good in itself that what, upstairs, as we
comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at any rate, that
if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a carriage, tumbles out of a
cab, flops out of a tram-car, and hurtles, projectile-like, out of
a “lightning-elevator,” she alights from the Venetian conveyance as
Cleopatra may have stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be
yet in store for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy
the support most opposed to the “momentum” acquired. The beauty of
the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so
scientifically applied to us, from behind, by the terrible life of our
day--and in the fact that, as the elements of slowness, the felicities
of deliberation, doubtless thus all hang together, the last of
calculable dangers is to enter a great Venetian room with a rush.
Not the least happy note, therefore, of the picture I am trying to frame
is that there was absolutely no rushing; not only in the sense of a
scramble over marble floors, but, by reason of something dissuasive and
distributive in the very air of the place, a suggestion, under the
fine old ceilings and among types of face and figure abounding in the
unexpected, that here were many things to consider. Perhaps the simplest
rendering of a scene into the depths of which there are good grounds of
discretion for not sinking would be just this emphasis on the value of
the unexpected for such occasions--with due qualification, naturally, of
its degree. Unexpectedness pure and simple, it is needless to say, may
easily endanger any social gathering, and I hasten to add moreover
that the figures and faces I speak of were probably not in the least
unexpected to each other. The stage they occupied was a stage of
variety--Venice has ever been a garden of strange social flowers. It
is only as reflected in the consciousness of the visitor from
afar--brooding tourist even call him, or sharp-eyed bird on the
branch--that I attempt to give you the little drama; beginning with the
felicity that most appealed to him, the visible, unmistakable fact that
he was the only representative of his class. The whole of the rest of
the business was but what he saw and felt and fancied--what he was
to remember and what he was to forget. Through it all, I may say
distinctly, he clung to his great Venetian clue--the explanation of
everything by the historic idea. It was a high historic house, with such
a quantity of recorded past twinkling in the multitudinous candles that
one grasped at the idea of something waning and displaced, and might
even fondly and secretly nurse the conceit that what one was having was
just the very last. Wasn’t it certainly, for instance, no mere illusion
that there is no appreciable future left for such manners--an urbanity
so comprehensive, a form so transmitted, as those of such a hostess and
such a host? The future is for a different conception of the graceful
altogether--so far as it’s for a conception of the graceful at all. Into
that computation I shall not attempt to enter; but these representative
products of an antique culture, at least, and one of which the secret
seems more likely than not to be lost, were not common, nor indeed
was any one else--in the circle to which the picture most insisted on
restricting itself.
Neither, on the other hand, was anyone either very beautiful or very
fresh: which was again, exactly, a precious “value” on an occasion
that was to shine most, to the imagination, by the complexity of its
references. Such old, old women with such old, old jewels; such ugly,
ugly ones with such handsome, becoming names; such battered, fatigued
gentlemen with such inscrutable decorations; such an absence of youth,
for the most part, in either sex--of the pink and white, the “bud” of
new worlds; such a general personal air, in fine, of being the worse for
a good deal of wear in various old ones. It was not a society--that was
clear--in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that
about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the
most successful little girl. Yet also--let me not be rudely inexact--it
was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The
_fiançailles_ of the last--unless it were the last but one--unmarried
daughter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the
contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off--I’m not sure that
the civil marriage hadn’t, that day, taken place. The occasion then had
in fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of heroes,
a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair Austrian
blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or less shining recent
ancestors, a very famous paternal grandmother, who had played a great
part in the political history of her time and whose portrait, in the
taste and dress of 1830, was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The
grand-daughter of this celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her
and, by a fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a
manner exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and
amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great Venetian
beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped the great
Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense of the suitable,
or in any case with a splendid generosity--since on the ideally suitable
_character_ of so brave a human symbol who shall have the last word?
This responsible agent was at all events the beauty in the world about
whom probably, most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly
propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the one
thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the possibility
of ever discussing it. There were plenty of suggestive subjects round
about, on the other hand, as to which the exchange of ideas would by no
means necessarily have dropped. You profit to the full at such times by
all the old voices, echoes, images--by that element of the history of
Venice which represents all Europe as having at one time and another
revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which
gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets,
broken fortunes and wounded hearts.