THE danger is that you will not linger enough,—a danger of which the
author of these lines had known something. It is possible to dislike
Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent
manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who
are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others
were only more numerous. The sentimental tourists only quarrel with his
Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone;
to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making
discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little
wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you
march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers. There is
nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is
completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can only turn
your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his want of
delicacy. But this is not the fault of Venice: it is the fault of the
rest of the world. The fault of Venice is that, though it is easy to
admire it, it is not so easy to live in it. After you have been there a
week, and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off, you wonder whether you
can accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits
become impracticable, and you find yourself obliged to form new one's
of an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired of your
gondola (or you think you are), and you have seen all the principal
pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by
your gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he
were an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have
walked several hundred times around the Piazza, and bought several
bushels of photographs. You have visited the antiquity-mongers, whose
horrible sign-boards dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand
Canal; you have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed
at the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a
shipboard-feeling,—to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon and the
Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and
encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual
exercise. You try to take a walk, and you fail, and meantime, as I say,
you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's
cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are
sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across
the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with
his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific
stroke. The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza,
where you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window
and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell
bead-bracelets and “panoramas” are perpetually thrusting their wares at
you, where the same tightly buttoned officers are forever sucking the
same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the same
caffès,—the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself into a sort of
magnificent tread-mill. This is the state of mind of those shallow
inquirers who find Venice all very well for a week; and if in such a
state of mind you take your departure, you act with fatal rashness. The
loss is your own, moreover; it is not,—with all deference to your
personal attractions,—that of your companions who remain behind; for
though there are some disagreeable things in Venice, there is nothing
so disagreeable as the visitors. The conditions are peculiar, but your
intolerance of them evaporates before it has had time to become a
prejudice. When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain,
and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice.
It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of
it's charm; that you invite it's exquisite influence to sink into your
spirit. The place is as changeable as a nervous woman, and you know it
only when you know all the aspects of it's beauty. It has high spirits
or low, it is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan,
according to the weather or the hour. It is always interesting and
almost always sad; but it has a thousand occasional graces, and is
always liable to happy accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of
these things; you count upon them they make part of your life. Tenderly
fond you become; there is something indefinable in those depths of
personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place
seems to personify itself to become human and sentient, and conscious
of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess
it; and, finally, a soft sense of possession grows up, and your visit
becomes a perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go there,
like the author of these lines, about the middle of March, a certain
amount of disappointment is possible. He had not been there for several
years, and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city had suffered
an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full possession, and you
tremble for what they may do. You are reminded, from the moment of your
arrival, that Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; that it
exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of
savage Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace
and the Academy with their uproar. The English and Americans came a
little later. They came in good time, with a great many French, who
were discreet enough to make very long repasts at the Caffè Quadri,
during which they were out of the way. The months of April and May, of
the year 1881, were not, as a general thing, a favourable season for
visiting the Ducal Palace and the Academy. The valet-de-place had
marked them for his own and held triumphant possession of them. He
celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy voice, which resounds all
over the place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the accent
of some other idiom. During all the spring months in Venice these
gentry abound in the great resorts, and they lead their helpless
captives through churches and galleries in dense, irresponsible groups.
They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about
the bridges and the doors of the caffès. In saying just now that
I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that
assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of
this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The peddlers and
commissioners ply their trade—often a very unclean one—at the very
door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into the
sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling
with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about
St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great
bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.