The Grand Canal

The honour of representing the plan and the place at their best
might perhaps appear, in the City of St. Mark, properly to
belong to the splendid square which bears the patron's name and
which is the centre of Venetian life so far (this is pretty. well
all the way indeed) as Venetian life is a matter of strolling and
chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of circulating without a
purpose, and of staring--too often with a foolish one--through
the shop-windows of dealers whose hospitality makes their
doorsteps dramatic, at the very vulgarest rubbish in all the
modern market. If the Grand Canal, however, is not quite
technically a "street," the perverted Piazza is perhaps even less
normal; and I hasten to add that I am glad not to find myself
studying my subject under the international arcades, or yet (I
will go the length of saying) in the solemn presence of the
church. For indeed in that case I foresee I should become still
more confoundingly conscious of the stumbling-block that
inevitably, even with his first few words, crops up in the path
of the lover of Venice who rashly addresses himself to
expression. "Venetian life" is a mere literary convention, though
it be an indispensable figure. The words have played an
effective part in the literature of sensibility; they constituted
thirty years ago the title of Mr. Howells's delightful volume of
impressions; but in using them to-day one owes some frank amends
to one's own lucidity. Let me carefully premise therefore that so
often as they shall again drop from my pen, so often shall I beg
to be regarded as systematically superficial.

Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an
end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy
of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of
tombs. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such
tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance.
Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a
crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. It has no
flowers in its hands, but, as a compensation perhaps--and the
thing is doubtless more to the point--it has money and little red
books. The everlasting shuffle of these irresponsible visitors in
the Piazza is contemporary Venetian life. Everything else is only
a reverberation of that. The vast mausoleum has a turnstile at
the door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as
per tariff, to see how dead it is. From this constatation,
this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, the prosperity,
the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, the
beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living; they are the
custodians and the ushers of the