I have been happy enough to get two of my faithful scholars to work upon it for me; and they have deciphered it nearly all—much more, at all events, than I can tell you either in this Fors, or in several to come. [[340]]
His message is written in the Venetian manner, by painting the myths of the saints, in his own way.
If you will look into the introduction to the ‘Queen of the Air,’ you will find it explained that a great myth can only be written in the central time of a nation’s power. This prophecy of Carpaccio’s may be thought of by you as the sweetest, because the truest, of all that Venice was born to utter: the painted syllabling of it is nearly the last work and word of her’s in true life. She speaks it, and virtually, thereafter, dies, or begins to die.
It is written in a series of some eighteen to twenty pictures, chiefly representing the stories of St. Ursula, St. George, and St. Jerome.
The first, in thoughtful order, of these, the dream of St. Ursula, has been already partly described in Fors; (August, 1872, p. 14). The authorities of the Venetian Academy have been kind enough to take the picture down and give it me to myself, in a quiet room, where I am making studies, which I hope will be of use in Oxford, and elsewhere.
But there is this to be noted before we begin; that of these three saints, whose stories Carpaccio tells, one is a quite real one, on whose penman’s work we depend for our daily Bible-bread. Another, St. George, is a very dimly real one,—very disputable by American faith, and we owe to him, only in England, certain sentiments;—the Order of the Garter, and sundry sign-boards [[341]]of the George and Dragon. Venice supposed herself to owe more to him; but he is nevertheless, in her mind also, a very ghostly saint,—armour and all too light to sink a gondola.
Of the third, St. Ursula, by no industry of my good scholars, and none has been refused, can I find the slightest material trace. Under scholarly investigation, she vanishes utterly into the stars and the æther,—and literally, as you will hear, and see, into moonshine, and the modern German meaning of everything,—the Dawn.[1] Not a relic, not a word remains of her, as what Mr. John Stuart Mill calls “a utility embodied in a material object.”
The whole of her utility is Immaterial—to us in England, immaterial, of late years, in every conceivable sense. But the strange thing is that Carpaccio paints, of the substantial and indisputable saint, only three small pictures; of the disputable saint, three more important ones; but of the entirely ærial saint, a splendid series, the chief labour of his life.
The chief labour;—and chief rest, or play, it seems also: questionable in the extreme as to the temper of Faith in which it is done.
We will suppose, however, at first, for your better [[342]]satisfaction, that in composing the pictures he no more believed there ever had been a Princess Ursula than Shakspeare, when he wrote Midsummer Night’s Dream, believed there had been a Queen Hippolyta: and that Carpaccio had just as much faith in angels as Shakspeare in fairies—and no more. Both these artists, nevertheless, set themselves to paint, the one fairies, the other angels and saints, for popular—entertainment, (say your modern sages,) or popular—instruction, it may yet appear. But take it your own way; and let it be for popular amusement. This play, this picture which I am copying for you, were, both of them we will say, toys, for the English and Venetian people.