Well, the next question is, whether the English and Venetians, when they could be amused with these toys, were more foolish than now, when they can only be amused with steam merry-go-rounds.
Below St. George’s land at Barmouth, large numbers of the English populace now go to bathe. Of the Venetians, beyond St. George’s island, many go now to bathe on the sands of Lido. But nobody thinks of playing a play about queens and fairies, to the bathers on the Welsh beach. The modern intellectual teacher erects swings upon the beach. There the suspended population oscillate between sea and sky, and are amused. Similarly in Venice, no decorative painter at Lido thinks of painting pictures of St. Nicholas of the Lido, to amuse the modern Venetian. The white-necktied orchestra [[343]]plays them a ‘pot-pourri,’ and their steamer squeaks to them, and they are amused.
And so sufficiently amused, that I, hearing with sudden surprise and delight the voice of native Venetian Punch last night, from an English ship, and instantly inquiring, with impatience, why I had not had the happiness of meeting him before, found that he was obliged to take refuge as a runaway, or exile, under the British Flag, being forbidden in his own Venice, for evermore—such the fiat of liberty towards the first Apostolic Vicar thereof.
I am willing, however, for my own part, to take Carpaccio a step farther down in the moral scale still. Suppose that he painted this picture, not even to amuse his public—but to amuse himself!
To a great extent I know that this is true. I know,—(you needn’t ask how, because you can’t be shown how,—but I do know, trust me,) that he painted this picture greatly to amuse himself, and had extreme delight in the doing of it; and if he did not actually believe that the princess and angels ever were, at least he heartily wished there had been such persons, and could be.
Now this is the first step to real faith. There may never have been saints: there may be no angels,—there may be no God. Professors Huxley and Tyndall are of opinion that there is no God: they have never found one in a bottle. Well: possibly there isn’t; [[344]]but, my good Sheffield friends, do you wish there was? or are you of the French Republican opinion—“If there were a God, we should have to shoot him” as the first great step towards the “abolition of caste” proposed by our American friends?[2]
You will say, perhaps,—It is not a proper intellectual state to approach such a question in, to wish anything about it. No, assuredly not,—and I have told you so myself, many a time. But it is an entirely proper state to fit you for being approached by the Spirits that you wish for, if there are such. And if there are not, it can do you no harm.
Nor, so long as you distinctly understand it to be a wish, will it warp your intellect. “Oh, if I had but Aladdin’s lamp, or Prince Houssain’s carpet!” thinks the rightly-minded child, reading its ‘Arabian Nights.’ But he does not take to rubbing his mother’s lamps, nor to squatting on scraps of carpet, hopefully.
Well—concerning these Arabian nights of Venice and the Catholic Church. Carpaccio thinks,—“Oh, if there had but been such a Princess as this—if there could but be! At least I can paint one, and delight myself in the image of her!”
Now, can you follow him so far as this? Do you really wish there were such a Princess? Do you so much as want any kind of Princess? Or are your aims fixed on the attainment of a world so constituted [[345]]that there shall be no Princesses in it any more,—but only Helps in the kitchen, who shall “come upstairs to play the piano,” according to the more detailed views of the American Socialist, displayed in our correspondence.