IN this latter point the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to
imitate him; he begins to lead a life that is, before all things,
good-humoured: unless, indeed, he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be
put out of his good-humour by Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends
among the pictures are his best hours in Venice, and I am ashamed of
myself to have written so much of common things when I might have been
making festoons of the names of the masters. But, when we have covered
our page with such festoons, what more is left to say? When one has
said Carpaccio and Bellini, Tintoretto and the Veronese, one has struck
a note that must be left to resound at will. Everything has been said
about the mighty painters, and it is of little importance to record
that one traveller the more has found them to his taste. “Went this
morning to the Academy; was very much pleased with Titian's
'Assumption.'“ That honest phrase has doubtless been written in many a
travellers diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of it's author.
But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must, moreover, not
expose our deepest feelings. Since I have mentioned Titian's
“Assumption,” I must say that there are some people who have been less
pleased with it than the gentleman we have just imagined. It is one of
the possible disappointments of Venice, and you may, if you like, take
advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. It imparts a look of
great richness to the side of the beautiful room of the Academy on
which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three works less
known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a passion. “The
'Annunciation' struck me as coarse and superficial”: that was once
written in a simple-minded travellers note-book. At Venice, strange to
say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his adoption is
far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London, Florence,
Dresden, Munich,—these are the homes of his greatness. There are other
painters who have but a single home, and the greatest of these is
Tintoretto. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who make with
him the dazzling Venetian trio. Paul Veronese may be seen and measured
in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines in Paris
and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar
Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery
see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet
of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in crimson
pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight.
You may sit before it for an hour, and dream you are floating to the
water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old beggar, with one of
the handsomest heads in the world—he has sat to a hundred painters for
Doges, and for personages more sacred—has a prescriptive right to
pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to hold out a greasy,
immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice, in fact, to see the other
masters, who form part of your life while you are there, and illuminate
your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one's relation to
them; for the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much
an extension and adjunct of the actual world, that it seems almost
invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to another. Nowhere
(not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects
and the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite) do
art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous. All
the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian air and the
Venetian history, are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all
the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left
upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the waves.
That is the perpetual interest of the place,—that you live in a
certain sort of knowledge, as in a rosy cloud. You don't go into the
churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; you go into
them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the things
that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter, and life was
so pictorial that art could not help becoming so. With all diminutions,
life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extraordinary freshness
to one's perception of the great Venetian works. You judge of them not
as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you enjoy them because
they are so social and so actual. Perhaps, of all works of art that are
equally great, they demand least reflection on the part of the
spectator,—they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. Reflection
only confirms your admiration, but it is almost ashamed to show it's
head. These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that
we feel there is reason as well in such an address. But it is hard, as
I say, to express all this, and it is painful as well to attempt
it—painful, because in the memory of vanished hours, so filled with
beauty, the sense of present loss is overwhelming. Exquisite hours,
enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have
always a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May
and June come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice is not
smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence and
Rome; but the sea and sky themselves seem to blossom and rustle. The
gondola waits at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will
take your place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion, in
Venice, should, of course, be of the sex that discriminates most
finely. An intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly
intelligent, and it makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be aware
that she cannot help looking graceful as she glides over the waves. The
handsome Pasquale, with uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in
a general way, from observation of your habits, that your intention is
to go to see a picture or two. It perhaps does not immensely matter
what picture you choose: the whole affair is so charming. It is
charming to wander through the light and shade of intricate canals,
with perpetual architecture above you and perpetual fluidity beneath.
It is charming to disembark at the polished steps of a little empty
campo—sunny, shabby square, with an old well in the middle, an old
church on one side, and tall Venetian windows looking down. Sometimes
the windows are tenantless; sometimes a lady in a faded dressing-gown
is leaning vaguely on the sill. There is always an old man holding out
his hat for coppers; there are always three or four small boys dodging
possible umbrella-pokes while they precede you, in the manner of
custodians, to the door of the church.