Invited to “introduce” certain pages of cordial and faithful
reminiscence from another hand, {1}
{1} “Browning in Venice,” being Recollections of the late Katharine
De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J. (_Cornhill Magazine_,
February, 1902).}
in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I undertook
that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--so passed and gone
to-day is so much of the life suggested. Those who fortunately knew Mrs.
Bronson will read into her notes still more of it--more of her subject,
more of herself too, and of many things--than she gives, and some may
well even feel tempted to do for her what she has done here for
her distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many
pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so far as
society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were concerned, almost
in sole possession; she had become there, with time, quite the prime
representative of those private amenities which the Anglo-Saxon abroad
is apt to miss just in proportion as the place visited is publicly
wonderful, and in which he therefore finds a value twice as great as at
home. Mrs. Bronson really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled
generations and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as
it were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless
good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited petitioners,
the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly making or fondly
renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city.
{Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE}
Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid church
of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the balcony over the
water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole
of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in
this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the
genial _padrona_ as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of
curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass,
and few were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of
hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no more--it
had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and the long,
pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy sojourns at anchor,
the reluctant departures that made Ca’ Alvisi, as was currently said,
a social _porto di mare_--is, for remembrance and regret, already a
possession of ghosts; so that, on the spot, at present, the attention
ruefully averts itself from the dear little old faded but once
familiarly bright façade, overtaken at last by the comparatively vulgar
uses that are doing their best to “paint out” in Venice, right and
left, by staring signs and other vulgarities, the immemorial note of
distinction. The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant
clung to her perfect, her inclusive position--the one right place that
gave her a better command, as it were, than a better house obtained by
a harder compromise; not being fond, moreover, of spacious halls and
massive treasures, but of compact and familiar rooms, in which her
remarkable accumulation of minute and delicate Venetian objects could
show. She adored--in the way of the Venetian, to which all her taste
addressed itself--the small, the domestic and the exquisite; so that she
would have given a Tintoretto or two, I think, without difficulty, for
a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old
silver.
The general receptacle of these multiplied treasures played at any rate,
through the years, the part of a friendly private-box at the constant
operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the
cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its
withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy--when
not indeed slightly difficult--polyglot talk, artful _bibite_, artful
cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all
that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so,
take up and put down the topic, cause delicate tobacco and little
gilded glasses to circulate, without ever leaving her sofa-cushions or
intermitting her good-nature. She exercised in these conditions, with
never a block, as we say in London, in the traffic, with never an
admission, an acceptance of the least social complication, her positive
genius for easy interest, easy sympathy, easy friendship. It was as if,
at last, she had taken the human race at large, quite irrespective of
geography, for her neighbours, with neighbourly relations as a matter
of course. These things, on her part, had at all events the greater
appearance of ease from their having found to their purpose--and as if
the very air of Venice produced them--a cluster of forms so light and
immediate, so pre-established by picturesque custom. The old bright
tradition, the wonderful Venetian legend had appealed to her from the
first, closing round her house and her well-plashed water-steps, where
the waiting gondolas were thick, quite as if, actually, the ghost of
the defunct Carnival--since I have spoken of ghosts--still played some
haunting part.
Let me add, at the same time, that Mrs. Bronson’s social facility, which
was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious
thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its
discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked
of all these, perhaps, was her attachment to Robert Browning. Nothing in
all her beneficent life had probably made her happier than to have found
herself able to minister, each year, with the returning autumn, to his
pleasure and comfort. Attached to Ca’ Alvisi, on the land side, is a
somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace, which she had
annexed to her own premises mainly for the purpose of placing it, in
comfortable guise, at the service of her friends. She liked, as she
professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand;
and here succeeded each other, through the years, the company of the
privileged and the more closely domesticated, who liked, harmlessly, to
distinguish between themselves and outsiders. Among visitors partaking
of this pleasant provision Mr. Browning was of course easily first. But
I must leave her own pen to show him as her best years knew him.
The point was, meanwhile, that if her charity was great even for the
outsider, this was by reason of the inner essence of it--her perfect
tenderness for Venice, which she always recognised as a link. That was
the true principle of fusion, the key to communication. She communicated
in proportion--little or much, measuring it as she felt people more
responsive or less so; and she expressed herself, or in other words her
full affection for the place, only to those who had most of the same
sentiment. The rich and interesting form in which she found it in
Browning may well be imagined--together with the quite independent
quantity of the genial at large that she also found; but I am not sure
that his favour was not primarily based on his paid tribute of such
things as “Two in a Gondola” and “A Toccata of Galuppi.” He had more
ineffaceably than anyone recorded his initiation from of old.
She was thus, all round, supremely faithful; yet it was perhaps after
all with the very small folk, those to the manner born, that she made
the easiest terms. She loved, she had from the first enthusiastically
adopted, the engaging Venetian people, whose virtues she found touching
and their infirmities but such as appeal mainly to the sense of humour
and the love of anecdote; and she befriended and admired, she studied
and spoiled them. There must have been a multitude of whom it would
scarce be too much to say that her long residence among them was their
settled golden age. When I consider that they have lost her now I fairly
wonder to what shifts they have been put and how long they may not have
to wait for such another messenger of Providence. She cultivated their
dialect, she renewed their boats, she piously relighted--at the top of
the tide-washed _pali_ of traghetto or lagoon--the neglected lamp of the
tutelary Madonnetta; she took cognisance of the wives, the children, the
accidents, the troubles, as to which she became, perceptibly, the most
prompt, the established remedy. On lines where the amusement was happily
less one-sided she put together in dialect many short comedies, dramatic
proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as
a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the
young persons of her circle--often, when the case lent itself, by the
wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian
lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant
delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly
sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and
amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to
the good; for the philosophy of their patroness was as Venetian as
everything else; helping her to accept experience without bitterness
and to remain fresh, even in the fatigue which finally overtook her, for
pleasant surprises and proved sincerities. She was herself sincere to
the last for the place of her predilection; inasmuch as though she had
arranged herself, in the later time--and largely for the love of “Pippa
Passes”--an alternative refuge at Asolo, she absented herself from
Venice with continuity only under coercion of illness.
At Asolo, periodically, the link with Browning was more confirmed than
weakened, and there, in old Venetian territory, and with the invasion
of visitors comparatively checked, her preferentially small house became
again a setting for the pleasure of talk and the sense of Italy. It
contained again its own small treasures, all in the pleasant key of the
homelier Venetian spirit. The plain beneath it stretched away like a
purple sea from the lower cliffs of the hills, and the white _campanili_
of the villages, as one was perpetually saying, showed on the expanse
like scattered sails of ships. The rumbling carriage, the old-time,
rattling, red-velveted carriage of provincial, rural Italy, delightful
and quaint, did the office of the gondola; to Bassano, to Treviso,
to high-walled Castelfranco, all pink and gold, the home of the great
Giorgione. Here also memories cluster; but it is in Venice again that
her vanished presence is most felt, for there, in the real, or certainly
the finer, the more sifted Cosmopolis, it falls into its place among
the others evoked, those of the past seekers of poetry and dispensers
of romance. It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing,
melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many
days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct,
settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository
of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed
with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the
defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have
seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But
such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them--only with
the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes. Mrs.
Bronson’s case was beautifully different--she had come altogether for
others.