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.
IX
But it is, after all, not in Nievo or Scudo, nor even in Longhi and Goldoni, that one comes closest to the vanished Venice of the eighteenth century.
In the Museo Correr, on the Grand Canal, there has recently been opened a room containing an assemblage of life-sized mannikins dressed in the various costumes of the sette cento.
Here are the red-robed Senator, the proud Procuratessa in brocade and Murano lace, the Abatino in his plum coloured taffeta coat and black small-clothes, the fashionable reveller in bauto and mask, the lacquey in livery of pale-blue silk, the lawyer, the gondolier, the groom, and the noble Marquess in his hunting-dress of white buckskin. Surely nowhere else does one come into such actual contact with that little world which was so essentially a world of appearances—of fine clothes, gay colours and graceful courtly attitudes. The mannikins indeed are not graceful. The Cavaliere Leandro can no longer execute a sweeping bow at the approach of the Procuratessa, or slip a love-letter into the muff of the charming Angelica; the Senator may stare as haughtily as he pleases at the Abate and the lawyer, without compelling those humble clients to stir an inch from his path; and the noble Marquess, in his spotless buckskin leggings and gauntlets, will never again be off to shoot thrushes from a “bird-tower” in the Euganeans. But the very rigidity of their once supple joints seems an allegory of their latter state. There they stand, poor dolls of destiny, discarded playthings of the gods, in attitudes of puzzled wonder, as if arrested in their revels by the stroke of the dread Corsican magician—for it was not Death but Napoleon who “stepped tacitly and took them” from the plots and pleasures, the sunshine and music of the canals, to that pale world of oblivion where only now and then some dreamer curious of the day of little things revisits their melancholy ghosts.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
The spelling of non-English words was not checked.