Afternoon brings ceremonious visits, when grand ladies, sailing in their hoops, salute each other, and beaux make legs on entering a drawing-room, and lacqueys hand round chocolate on silver salvers. Dancing-lessons may perhaps be assigned to this part of the day; a spruce French professor teaching his fair pupil how to drop a curtsey, or to swim with solemn grace through the figures of the minuet. At night we are introduced to the hall of the Ridotto; patricians in toga and snow-white periwig hold banks for faro beneath the glittering chandeliers; men and women, closely masked, jostle each other at the gambling-tables, where sequins and ducats lie about in heaps. The petty houses, or casini, now engage attention. Here may be seen a pair of stealthy,{349} muffled libertines hastening to complete an assignation. Then there are meetings at street-corners or on the landing-places of traghetti—mysterious figures flitting to and fro in wide miraculous bautte beneath the light of flickering flambeaux. Both men and women in these nocturnal scenes wear muffs, trimmed with fur, and secured around their waist by girdles.
Theatres, masked balls, banquets and coffee-houses, music-parties in villa-gardens, the assemblies of literary coteries, promenades on the piazza, and Carnival processions, obtain their due share of attention from this vigilant observer. But, as is the way with Longhi, only episodes are treated. He does not, like some painters of our own time—like Mr. Frith, R.A., for instance—attempt to bring the accumulated details of a complex scene before us. He leaves the context of his chosen incident to be divined.
The traffic of the open streets—quack-doctors on their platforms with a crowd of gaping dupes around them, mountebanks performing tricks, the criers of stewed plums and sausages, fortune-tellers, itinerant musicians, improvisatory poets bawling out their octave stanzas, cloaked serenaders twangling mandolines—such motives may be found in fair abundance among Longhi's genre-pieces. Nor does he altogether neglect the country. Many of his pictures are devoted to hunting-parties, riding-lessons, shooting and fishing, all the amusements of the Venetian villeggiatura. Peasants lounging over their wine or pottage{350} at a rustic table are depicted with no less felicity than the beau and coquette in their glory. The grimy interior of a village-tavern is portrayed with the same gusto as a fine lady's gilt saloon.
V.
Longhi used to tell Goldoni that they—the painter and the playwright—were brethren in Art; and one of the poet's sonnets records this saying:—
| "Longhi, tu che la mia Musa sorella |
| Chiami del tuo pennel che cerca il vero." |
It seems that their contemporaries were alive to the similar qualities and the common aims of the two men; for Gasparo Gozzi drew a parallel between them in a number of his Venetian Gazzetta. Indeed the resemblance is more than merely superficial. Longhi surveyed human life with the same kindly glance and the same absence of gravity or depth of intuition as Goldoni. They both studied Nature, but Nature only in her genial moods. They both sincerely aimed at truth, but avoided truths which were sinister or painful.
This renders the designation of Venetian Hogarth peculiarly inappropriate to Longhi. There is neither tragedy nor satire, and only a thin silvery vein of humour, in his work. Indeed it may be questioned{351} whether he was in any exact sense humorous at all. What looks like humour in some of his pictures is probably unconscious. In like manner he lacked pathos, and never strove to moralise the themes he treated. Where would Hogarth be if we excluded Gargantuan humour, Juvenalian satire, stern morality, and cruel pathos from his scenes of social life? Longhi is never gross and never passionate. With a kind of sensitive French curiosity, he likes to graze the darker and the coarser side of life, and pass it by. He does not want to probe the cancers of the human breast, or to lay bare the festering sores of vice. What would become of Hogarth if he were deprived of his grim surgical anatomy? Neither in the heights nor in the depths was Longhi at home—neither in the region of Olympian poetry nor in the purgatory of man's sin and folly. He sailed delightfully, agreeably, across the middle waters of the world, where steering is not difficult.
In all this Goldoni resembles him, except only that Goldoni had a rich vein of cheerful humour. It would be therefore more just to call Longhi the Goldoni of painting than the Venetian Hogarth.
Longhi's portrait, unlike that of Goldoni, betrays no sensuousness. He seems to have had a long, refined face, with bright, benignant black eyes, a pleasantly smiling mouth, thin lips, and a look of gently subrisive appreciation rather than of irony or sarcasm. The engraving by which I know his{352} features suggests an intelligent, attenuated Addison—not a powerful or first-rate man, but a genially observant superior mediocrity.