for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed
were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less
citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or
Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still
due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the
flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from
entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which
exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast
of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans
themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood
which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any
Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the
line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after
time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from
the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian
to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so
it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of
Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic
influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol
lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The
strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers
borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they
were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It
is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice
brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of
the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire
passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin
could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."
It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the
barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of
the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new
feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself
the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who
followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names
and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven
Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of
Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names
stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to
Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the
Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before
the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of
Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of
the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and
settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to
the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and
his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left
behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old
social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in
his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his
dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original
form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents
never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to
the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of
Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of
tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary,
bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the
present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate
against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and
present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as
his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
ten centuries before him.
It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so
unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the
peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its
decay. Elsewhere the history of mediaeval Italy sprang from the
difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors,
between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the
twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna,
were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new
people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge
embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of
Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The
famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a
recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into
the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the
struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the
annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of
the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediaeval sense of
the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard
barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the
strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The
shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to
independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government
of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from
disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only
because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians
Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were
houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but
bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
masonry.
Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one
place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth
century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles.
Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was
strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities,
as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The
Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had
always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant
still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes
described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger
commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade
which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What
the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at
Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.
The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and
rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the
mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be
more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing
was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had
grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not
restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately
patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only
the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization
which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant
of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the
petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish
away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it
scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler
classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans,
rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'
TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
II.
VENICE AND TINTORETTO.
The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory
over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace
and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were
in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of
Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of
the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and
aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less,
her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France,
of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her
Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal
reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No
policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish
occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round
the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade
with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the
blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.
On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out
in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier
palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino
along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth
century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was
the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature
and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the
first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of
Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of
modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione,
Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.
The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined
as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace
fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory
of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to
restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are
two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its
physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch
of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front
of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are
beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over
the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of
strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the
eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas,
and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves
are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has
become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed
them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of
gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself
is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long
golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the
light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower
naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps
are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here
or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue,
while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden
candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the daemoniac whose
cure forms the subject of the picture.
But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the
architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On
the right the houses are wholly of mediaeval type, the flat
marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them
splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very
waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns
the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the
early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has
modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it
altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its
base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of
their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the
continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch,
while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each
broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a
"note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold
wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of
gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In
another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one
sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of
interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter
marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the
contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings
of mediaeval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed
to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over
Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.
Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's
picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the
one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from
the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the
"little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His
works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.
Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San
Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most
precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is
Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the
contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty
masterpieces and the great mediaeval church of the Frari which stands
beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings
together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age,
its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of
human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.
Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a
classification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and
intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his
works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.
Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her
splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting,
as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints,
priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is
never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and
glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in
earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on
the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has
ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal
cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The
"want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the
Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as
there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the
commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in
San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of
the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing
figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His
side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and
seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo
of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the
twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters
bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy,
unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.
The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal
mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine
artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little
faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and
knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with
heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as
ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived
and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in
saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San
Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove
sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean
plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work
unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in
the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder
at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one
wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its
clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from
the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the
mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast
banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first
stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at
the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has
felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on
whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of
earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.
What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great
series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history
of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were
really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her
exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal
Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when
death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form,
throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel
wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it
is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In
the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central
cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His
figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths
are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more
unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of
the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the
divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye
falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can
hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the
State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double
row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais
at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long
fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background
the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising
from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two
kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds
between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the
heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not
one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself
from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead
Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a
mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could
have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning
that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief
interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had
ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful
submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which
her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The
terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after
Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening,
lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into
powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead
Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true
nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so
shameful a fall?
THE DISTRICT VISITOR.
It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District
Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical
movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of
the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of
mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the
mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and
ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of
to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular
morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the
same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into
every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than
the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"
she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The
way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through
their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and
fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty
floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the
advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and
gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion
for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and
improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for
the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole
life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of
the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there
is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her
theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in
Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"
himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District
Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are
generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be
at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue
Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for
her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children
go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go
to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home
or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing
personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.
His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District
Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him
alone.