Venice: An Early Impression - Page 2

between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low
black domes of the church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as
is consistent with the preservation of reason.

The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and
generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their
profits in this line. Everything the attention touches holds it,
keeps playing with it--thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the
atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting
himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contemplation
beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The
light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to
Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them all.
You should see in places the material with which it deals--slimy
brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and
sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft
iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred
nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue
against every object of vision. You may see these elements at
work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you should
choose the finest day in the month and have yourself rowed far
away across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion
you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that
longing for pure radiance which animated her great colourists.
It is a perfect bath of light, and I couldn't get rid of a fancy
that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere on some hurrying
cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light to see--
nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected by
a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by
a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market-
gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh
century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of
unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and
she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of
weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied. I
stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow inlet and walked
along the grass beside a hedge to the low-browed, crumbling
cathedral. The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy,
overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the
suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for
all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I
mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it.

A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I
remember none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna.
There was no life