EVENING IN THE PIAZZETTA.
The Scuola di San Rocco is the supreme monument to Tintoretto’s poetic, as to his plastic genius. If we are justified in feeling that his understanding of the life of Christ may be a true touchstone of a man’s philosophy, it will become a matter of first interest to us to know how so profound a thinker as Tintoretto approached the subject. There is no lack here indeed of tragic depth. The Temptation of Christ is sufficient alone to vindicate Tintoretto as gifted with understanding above his fellows. Another might have compassed the tumultuous, beautiful earth-spirit, with muscular, proud, uplifted arms, and face burning with desire; but who else could have added that touch of impotence to his restless, aspiring gesture, or have dreamed the tenderness in the lovely, sorrowful face of Christ that looks down on this radiant creature of desire, entirely without judgment or stern denial, but as if too remote from the appeal to make reply? The exceeding pathos of this picture would have been missed if Lucifer, the brightest of the spirits that fell, were a whit less radiant; if Christ’s face had one shade less of compassion in its wondering aloofness. And for our last example we may choose a picture in which the strength of Tintoretto is realised in quietness so complete that a hush seems to lie about it. No painting of his is greater in conception than that of Christ before Pilate. The moment he has chosen is that in which Pilate performs his vain ablution before the multitude who lightly accept the guilt he attempts to transfer, in the awful cry, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Tintoretto has set Pilate’s face in shadow: a single ray falls across the pillar behind his head. He looks away from Christ but not towards the crowd: he has spoken: he would fain make an end of this drama. It is the fine, thoughtful, astute face of a Venetian councillor that Tintoretto has depicted. Christ stands before him in the full light—removed only by a single step—a motionless white figure above the restless crowd, complete in control, gathered into himself and folded in a great silence and calm; yet not now more alone than when the crowds cried after him day and night for a sign. His head is bowed upon his breast: his closely folded robe follows the slight curve of his body: his bound hands lie nerveless in their cords: yet beside the strength of this bound prisoner the animation of the foreground figure who grips the cord is impotence indeed. Most wonderful of all perhaps is the contrast of a busy scribe at his table below the judgment-seat, pausing with suspended pen for the words that shall convict, with the majestic, motionless figure of Christ. We seem to hear the words proceeding from those closed lips: he would utter them so, not moving. It is less the originality of this picture that impresses us than its profound directness and truth, comparable only to the story it illustrates. In understanding none has surpassed the conception of that single, solitary figure, face to face with the vast fabric of the judgment-hall, weighted with its burden of custom and tradition; none has more profoundly imagined the tragic triumph in that entire loneliness of the great and good before the tribunal of man.
Chapter Eleven
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES
On an evening of late September Venice revealed herself to one of her lovers amidst a spectacle beyond any range of dreams. Evening was closing in upon the city with cloud and breeze. In the church of San Giorgio Maggiore the Tintorettos gleamed dimly from the walls; daylight was gone. But in the tower high overhead, clear of the shadows of confining buildings, the day had still a course to run. The tide was low, and land and water stretched out in interchanging coils of olive and azure beneath a purple storm-cloud, whilst ever against the bar of the Lido rolled the sea, dyed with that celestial blue that sometimes steals from the Adriatic into the basin of San Marco to prostrate itself at the conquering Lion’s feet. And there lay Venice, her form outlined against a flood of pearl, the water bending in a tender, luminous bow behind her towers. Far away, across the mysterious expanse of low lagoon, Torcello and Burano gleamed out in startling pallor against the storm, amid a wild confusion of dark earth and glittering water. The Northern Alps were hidden in darkness at the horizon, but westward across the mainland the clear, sharp peaks of the Euganean hills rose up behind the city’s pearly halo, behind the deep blue of the surging lowlands, in almost unearthly outline against the sunset sky. In front of them a livid fire rolled sullenly along the valley, sending up purple smoke into the cloud. The storm genie, summoned by nether powers, was descending to his fearful tryst behind the Euganeans, but, as he sank, he bent his face upon the pale form of Venice, his enchantress, and the fire of his wonder and of his adoration kindled in all her slumbering limbs a glow of responsive life. A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their retinue—this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures. For Venice is not a dead body: she is a living soul. Overflowing all moulds in which we may think to contain her, she reveals herself continually in new mystery, new wonder. We spoke of Venice as being paved with sky, and every day there is cast upon her pavement a fresh revelation of changefulness and beauty. A thousand forms and patterns move in procession over the water, passing each instant into something “rich and strange,” a fleeting succession of aerial designs drawn with tremulous pencil in colours which never lived on the palette of a mortal artist. There is a body of truth at the root of the old fancy which gifted water-maidens with subtler, more perilously powerful allurements than their sisters of the land. Their element is mutability, but they are not soulless, as men have said: it is only that their soul is as the soul of water—luminous, flowing, mutable, reflective, musical, profound: for, though they are mutable, they are not shallow; it is a part of their being that they should be susceptible of change. They cannot tire their victims, they whose beauty is continually renewed; and yet it may be that men do well to fear them, for they have secret communings with things men do not dream of. Venice has held men, she holds them still, with the fascination of a water spirit; they yield to her, they grasp her, but she is still before them, never mastered, never fully known. Let those for whom conquest is the ideal in love beware of Venice the incomparable, the uncompassable: they who would win her must have power to worship what they cannot comprehend, they must desire to leave her spirit free. Then she will unfold her heart to them, she will give herself in a moment when the pursuit is still. And to those who can receive the gift, she will give herself again and yet again; only they must come freshly expectant of each fresh revelation, not clinging to past impressions, not claiming a memory to be revived. For each renewal is a transformation, and we must bring new senses to receive it, senses alive and fresh as earth each morning to the touch of the old sun ever new.
Venice, when she was most glorious, did but catch and imprison in her stones those matchless harmonies of fleeting colour which the sun still lavishes upon her waters. And there is a season of the year which, with sun and mist co-operating, hangs once again her pale walls with their ancient splendour, and plays a noble part in the revival of the past. With the first days of autumn the scirocco begins to wind about the heart of her plants and creepers, and to steal into their veins. Swiftly they yield to the intoxication. Under the folds of the grey mist-mantle, they drink draught after draught of her brave wine. But another touch is needed to draw out the virtues of that liquor: after Circe, Apollo. He bends his look upon them, and they yield their stores, decking once more the walls of Venice with frescoes of scarlet, green and gold, paving once more her waterways with their old-accustomed pomp. In the Sacca della Misericordia this natural fresco has a peculiarly beautiful effect; for upon the spaces of water between the rafts that float there, the rich creepers, interwoven among the trees of the garden of the Spiriti, fling an enchanted carpet of chequered crimson and green upon a pale rose ground, covering the whole expanse, save for one space whereon is set the pale blue watermark of the sky. One may make rare studies here of the carpets and bright mats that are to be seen hung out in the pictures of the old Venetian masters. They did not copy from the East alone, or rather they copied from a greater East, whose treasures travel through a rarer element than water day after day to the shores of the western world. The complete stillness of the pools in the Sacca, undisturbed by any passing steamboat, and even unruffled by the motion of a gondola, through the protection of the intervening rafts, gives the rich pattern a durability unattainable in the waters of the canals. There is only, as it were, a faint breathing of the surface, enough to give perpetual interchange and commerce among the bold brush-strokes of colour—incessant, subtle weaving of new harmonies upon the ground-bass—the shadows deepening or relaxing, when sometimes an insect dips or a fish rises and starts a fairy circle at a touch that spreads among the colours until its delicate life is lost.
A PALACE DOOR.
And if at times we may thus see the past in the present, at other times we may dream the present back into the past. Night, the worker of so many miracles, holds a key with which we may unlock in Venice the secret of bygone times. There are hours on the lagoons when even in daylight the forgotten ages live again and we may keep company with whom we will, but in the heart of the city it is by night that we may lay hand on the pulse of her ancient life, and feel it warm to our touch, beating slow but constant behind the commotion, often the desecration, of later times. The flow of the Grand Canal is less troubled than by day: it has intervals of peace in which it may sink into the broad, dark calm of Carpaccio’s waters. Palace after palace, in fearless and unstudied alternations of Byzantine, Gothic, Ogival, Renaissance, Barocco, tower above us, their pillars and balconies gleaming in faint light of moon or lamp: we seem almost to trace upon their surface the forms of men and beasts, and to clothe them once more in the gold and colour which Venice learned of her lagoons. By day we feast upon the tints still left to fall upon the waters, we praise the aged snow of crumbling stone or the shades of twisted columns, or the rich profusion of the pale Cà d’Oro. But what do we know of Venice when she shone upon the waters in true regality, a monument of all the glory that the heart or eye of man could conceive? No one has left us any detailed record of the frescoed façades of the Venetian palaces, whether on the Grand Canal or in the remoter waterways; only here and there we catch a glimpse of them on the canvases of contemporary painters. It is provokingly general among the travellers or native-lovers of Venice, who set themselves to praise her in words, to find that they have chosen a medium incapable of achieving what it was asked to do, and to throw down their weapon in the moment of trial, struck dumb by the immense wonder of their theme. They cease from their task before, it seems to us, they have well begun it, always anticipating the stinging tongue of the dragon, Incredulity. We could well forgive them their inadequacy, so frankly recognised, had they but attempted a mere catalogue of some of the frescoes on the walls. Now, it is at night alone that we can repeople them; that, as we pass along, we can look up and read into the shadowy spaces those brilliant chronicles of beauty, power and pride. It is, indeed, a heavy fate that awaits in Venice the artist who must work in words; colour and music can draw nearer, can almost attain to the reality itself; and yet by words also there is something to be conveyed of her enduring beauty. The fact which words can compass may be so told that there is born from it a sentiment of that rich atmosphere which is beyond the reach of words; they may remind or may awaken wonder, itself a new sense with which to apprehend. Even words may tell of the water snake of green and gold that writhes and gleams hour after hour in the faintly stirred depths of the canal, a creature that in the world above is a dull grey upright pole; or of golden treasures, once the refuse of the calli, transformed to splendour as they float out over the lagoon; or of the sudden lapping of the water under the wind down the north lagoon at midnight, that breaks the smooth image of the moon into a thousand ripples and passes in a wave that makes the dim lamps tremble into the narrow waterways of the city.