"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned."
But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire social epoch—the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.
"Well, and it was graceful of them—they'd break talk off and afford
—She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions: "Must we die?"—
"Those commiserating sevenths—'Life might last! we can but try!'"
The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to."
"So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'
Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."
. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that he, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:
". . . You know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction—you'll not die, it cannot be!
As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" . . .