The life of a generation is computed by biological statisticians at thirty-three years. Three generations would thus make ninety-nine years. A century brings such changes in thought and things that the excerpts from the Times of a hundred years ago read like the journalism of another planet.
The bequests by which eleven old gentlewomen of a certain parish, that has been swept away, receive groats of an abolished currency, on a day that has disappeared from the calendar, to perpetuate the memory of a benevolent megalomaniac, would, on a similar principle, be limited to the natural run of a century. It is enough to be allowed a dead finger in the pie of proximate posterity; “a century not out” must never be written over any human will or institution.
If this time-limit seems a trifle harsh, apply it, dear reader, not to your own creed, but to something esoteric, like the doctrine of the Dalai Lamas of Tibet, which has for so many centuries paralysed a priest-ridden Asiatic population. Do you think this theory of reincarnation deserved a longer run than three generations?
THE GAY DOGES: OR THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SOCIALISM
“Dieses Prunkschiff ist ein rechtes Inventariënstück, woran man sehen kann, was die Venetianer waren, und sich zu sein dünkten.”
Goethe: Italiänische Reise.
I
But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St. Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote defective moral sympathies, as of the Pharaohs building their treasure-cities on the labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of sorrow and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet? What great soul could find expression in gilt, or even in gold? ’Tis a reflection on the character of the Doges of Venice that everywhere in their palace is a sense of over-gilded ceilings. Even when the Masters have made a firmament of frescoes, the massive flamboyant framing weighs like a torrid haze on a weary land. Art is overlaid and obliterated by gold. What wonder Religion too is soon asphyxiated in these flaming halls of Council—the Doge ceases to kneel to the Madonna, he stands before Venice Enthroned between Mars and Neptune. It is Juno who from a ceiling-fresco pours gold on Venice, and in the heavy gilded picture of Zelotti, the Magnificent Ten could behold Venice Seated on the World. What sly satirist was it who—over the choir of St. Mark’s—crucified Christ on a cross of gold?
In “The Merchant of Venice,” ’tis the Duke of Morocco who chooses the golden casket; I feel sure ’twas Bassanio, the Venetian. Not that I do not hate the leaden casket more. Portia should have gone with a field of buttercups in June.
Of all expressions of human greatness, metallic sheen is the most banal. I have never recovered from the shock of learning that the Greeks gilded their temples, and though I can now with even a spice of zest imagine them shining afar from their headlands in a golden glory, I would have preferred to keep my vision of austere columns and noble pediments; and I am grateful to Time, that truer artist, for having refined away that assertive aureola.