LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE
It is almost impossible for any one who is at all familiar with the voluminous amount of literature relating to the history and to the art of Venice, to refrain from quoting, voluntarily or involuntarily, what he has read and absorbed concerning “the dangerous and sweet-charmed town,” which Ruskin calls a golden city paved with emerald, and which Goethe said is a city which can only be compared with itself. Comparisons in Venice are certainly as odorous as are some of its canals, while many of its streets are not only paved with emerald, but are frescoed now with glaring End-of-the-Nineteenth-Century advertisements of dentifrice and sewing-machines.
That which first strikes the observant stranger in Venice, to-day, is the fact that the Venetians have absolutely and entirely lost their grip upon the beautiful. Nothing on earth can be finer than the art of its glory; nothing in the world can be viler than the so-called art of its decadence. That the descendants of the men who decorated the palaces of five or six hundred years ago could have conceived, or endured, the wall-papers, the stair-carpets, and the hat-racks in the Venetian hotels of the present, is beyond belief. Whatever is old is magnificent, from the madonnas of Gian Bellini to the window of the Cicogna Palace on the Fondamenta Briati. Whatever is new is ugly, from the railway-station at one end of the Grand Canal to the gas-house at the other. And the iron bridges, and the steamboats, and the drop-curtain in the Malibran Theatre are the worst of all.
When the English-speaking and the English-reading visitors in Venice, for whom this volume is written, overcome the feeling that they are predestined to fall into one of the canals before they leave the city; when they become accustomed to being driven about in a hearse-shaped, one-manned row-boat; when they have been shown all the traditional sights, have bought the regulation old brass and old glass, have learned to draw smoke out of the long, thin, black, rat-tailed straw-covering things the Venetians call cigars—when they have seen and have done all these, they will find themselves much more interested in the house in which Byron lived, and in the perfectly restored palace in which Browning died, than in the half-ruined, wholly decayed mansions of all the Doges who were ever Lord Mayors of Venice. The guide-books tell us where Faliero plotted and where Foscari fell, where Desdemona suffered and where Shylock traded; but they give us no hint as to where Sir Walter Scott lodged or where Rogers breakfasted, or what was done here by the many English-speaking Men of Letters who have made Venice known to us, and properly understood. Upon these chiefly it is my purpose here to dwell.
Venice, with all her literature, has brought forth but few literary men of her own. There are but few poets among her legitimate sons, and few were the poets she adopted. The early annalists and the later historians were almost the only writers of importance who were entitled to call her mother; and to most of these she has been, though kindly, little more than a step-mother or a mother-in-law.
Shakspere, who wrote much about Venice, and who probably never saw it, remarked once that all the world’s a stage. Venice, even now, is a grand spectacular show; and no drama ever written is more dramatic than is Venice itself. Mr. Howells prefaces his Venetian Life by an account of the play, and the by-play, which he once saw from a stage-box in the little theatre in Padua, when the prompters, and the scene-shifters, and the actors in the wings, were as prominent to him as were the tragedians and comedians who strutted, and mouthed, and sawed the air with their hands, in full view of the house; and he adds: “It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and that I had been suffered to see this Venice, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to everyday, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua.” It has been my own good fortune to spend, at various seasons, a short time in the pit—“on a standee ticket”—just to drop in for a moment now and then, when the performance is nearly over, and to look not so much at the broken-down stage and its worn-out settings, not so much at the actors and at the acting, as to study the audiences, the crowds of men and women in parquet, gallery, and boxes, who have been sitting for centuries through the different thrilling acts of the great plays played here; and have applauded, or hissed, as the case may be.