VIII
On a quiet canal not far from the church of the Frari there stands an old palace where, in a series of undisturbed rooms, may be seen the very setting in which the personages of Goldoni and Longhi played out their social comedy.
The Palazzo Querini-Stampaglia was bequeathed to the city of Venice some fifty years since by the last Count Querini, and with its gallery, its library and its private apartments has since then stood open to a public which never visits it. Yet here the student of Venetian backgrounds may find the unchanged atmosphere of the eighteenth century. The gallery, besides some good paintings of earlier schools, contains a large collection of Bellotti’s pictures, representing all the great religious and popular festivals of Venice, as well as a half-dozen Longhis and a charming series of genre-pictures by unknown artists of his school.
Of far greater interest, however, are the private apartments, with their seventeenth and eighteenth century decorations still intact, and the walls lined with the heavy baroque consoles and arm-chairs so familiar to students of Longhi’s interiors, and of the charming prints in the first edition of Goldoni. Here is the typical chambre de parade, with its pale-green damask curtains and bed-hangings, and its furniture painted with flowers on a ground of pale-green laque; here the tapestried saloon with its Murano chandeliers, the boudoir with looking-glass panels set in delicately carved and painted wreaths of flowers and foliage, and the portrait-room hung with pictures of the three great Querini: the Doge, the Cardinal and the Admiral. Here, too, is the long gallery, with a bust of the Cardinal (a seventeenth-century prince of the Church) surrounded by marble effigies of his seven bravi: a series of Berniniesque heads of remarkable vigour and individuality, from that of the hoary hang-dog scoundrel with elf-locks drooping over an evil scowl, to the smooth young villain with bare throat and insolent stare, who seems to glory in his own sinister beauty.
These busts give an insight into a different phase of Italian life: the life of the violent and tragical seventeenth century, when every great personage, in the Church no less than in the world, had his bodyguard of hardened criminals, outlaws and galley-slaves, who received sanctuary in their patron’s palace, and performed in return such acts of villany and violence as the Illustrissimo required. It seems a far cry from the peaceable world of Goldoni and Longhi to this prelate surrounded by the effigies of his hired assassins; yet bravi, though no longer openly acknowledged or immortalized in marble, lurked in the background of Italian life as late as the end of the eighteenth century, and Stendhal, who knew Italy as few foreigners have known it, declares that in his day the great Lombard nobles still had their retinue of bauli, as the knights of the stiletto were called in the Milanese.
It is not in art only that the bravi have been commemorated. Lovers of “I Promessi Sposi,” the one great Italian novel, will not soon forget the followers of Don Rodrigo; and an idea of the part they played at the end of the eighteenth century may be obtained from the pages of Ippolito Nievo’s “Confessioni di un Ottuagenario,” that delightful book, half romance, half autobiography, which, after many years of incredible neglect, has just been republished in Italy. Ippolito Nievo, one of Garibaldi’s young soldiers, was among those who perished in the wreck of the Ercole, on the return from Palermo in 1860. He was but twenty-nine at the time of his death, and it is said that his impatience to see a lady to whom he was attached caused him, despite the entreaties of his friends, to take passage in the notoriously unseaworthy Ercole. Four years earlier he had written the “Confessioni,” a volume which, for desultory charm and simple rendering of domestic incidents, is not unworthy to take rank with “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” while its capricious heroine, La Pisana, is as vivid a creation as Goethe’s Philina or (one had almost said) as the Beatrix of Thackeray.
Ippolito Nievo was himself a native of the Veneto, and intimately acquainted, through family tradition, with the life of the small towns and villa-castles of the Venetian mainland at the close of the eighteenth century. The “Confessioni” picture the life of a young lad in a nobleman’s castle near the town of Portogruaro, and later in Venice; and not the least remarkable thing about the book is the fact that, at a period when other Italian novelists were depicting the high-flown adventures of mediæval knights and ladies, its young author, discarding the old stage-properties of romanticism, should have set himself to recording, with the wealth of detail and quiet humour of a Dutch genre-painter, the manners and customs of his own little corner of Italy, as his parents had described it to him. Nievo’s account of the provincial nobles in the Veneto shows that to the very end of the eighteenth century, mediæval customs, with all their violence and treachery, prevailed within a day’s journey of polished and peaceful Venice. His nobles in their fortified castles, of which the drawbridges are still raised at night, have their little trains of men-at-arms, composed in general of the tattered peasantry on their estates, but sometimes of professional fighters, smugglers or outlaws, who have been taken into the service of some truculent lord of the manor; and Nievo describes with much humour the conflicts between these little armies, and the ruses, plots and negotiations of their quarrelsome masters.
In another novel, published at about the same time, Pietro Scudo, a Venetian who wrote in French, has drawn, with far less talent, a picture of another side of Venetian life: the life of the musical schools and the Opera, which George Sand had attempted to represent in “Consuelo.” Scudo’s book, “Le Chevalier Sarti,” has fallen into not unmerited oblivion. It is written in the insipid style of the romantic period—that style which Flaubert, in a moment of exasperation, described as “les embêtements bleuâtres du lyrisme poitrinaire”; and its heroine, like Châteaubriand’s unhappy Madame de Beaumont, dies of the fashionable ailment of the day, une maladie de langueur. The book, moreover, is badly constructed to the verge of incoherence, and the characters are the stock mannikins of romantic fiction; yet in spite of these defects, Scudo has succeeded (where George Sand failed) in reproducing the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Venice. He has done this not by force of talent but by the patient accumulation of detail. Though not the most important feature in the construction of a good historical novel, this is an essential part of the process. George Sand, however, was above such humble methods. Totally lacking in artistic sensibility and in its accompanying faculty, the historic imagination, she was obliged to confine herself to the vaguest generalities in describing scenes and manners so alien to the “romantic” conception of life. Nature and passion were the only things which interested her, and in the Venice of the eighteenth century there was no nature and little passion. Hence the Venetian scenes of “Consuelo” give the impression of having been done de chic, while Scudo’s bear the impress of an unimaginative accuracy. In “Le Chevalier Sarti” the lover of “decadent” Venice will find innumerable curious details, descriptions of life in the villas of the Brenta, of concerts in the famous Scuole, carnival scenes at the ridotto, and parties fines at the Orto di San Stefano, the favourite resort of the world of gallantry; while the minor characters of the book, who have escaped the obligatory romanticism of the hero and heroine, help to make up the crowded picture of a world as bright and brittle as a sun-shot Murano glass.