Two Old Houses and Three Young Women

There are times and places that come back yet again, but that,
when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a
little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight
fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this
time that he is capable of taking none. He has his own way--he
makes it all right. It now becomes just a part of the charming
solicitation that it presents precisely a problem--that of giving
the particular thing as much as possible without at the same time
giving it, as we say, away. There are considerations,
proprieties, a necessary indirectness--he must use, in short, a
little art. No necessity, however, more than this, makes him warm
to his work, and thus it is that, after all, he hangs his three
pictures.

I

The evening that was to give me the first of them was by no means
the first occasion of my asking myself if that inveterate "style"
of which we talk so much be absolutely conditioned--in dear old
Venice and elsewhere--on decrepitude. Is it the style that has
brought about the decrepitude, or the decrepitude that has, as it
were, intensified and consecrated the style? There is an
ambiguity about it all that constantly haunts and beguiles. Dear
old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation,
her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not
lost a shred of her distinction. Perhaps indeed the case is
simpler than it seems, for the poetry of misfortune is familiar
to us all, whereas, in spite of a stroke here and there of some
happy justice that charms, we scarce find ourselves anywhere
arrested by the poetry of a run of luck. The misfortune of Venice
being, accordingly, at every point, what we most touch, feel and
see, we end by assuming it to be of the essence of her dignity; a
consequence, we become aware, by the way, sufficiently
discouraging to the general application or pretension of style,
and all the more that, to make the final felicity deep, the
original greatness must have been something tremendous. If it be
the ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and
moreover there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments,
solid survivals, hold up their heads and decline to ask for a
grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to keep one's
pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder
stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of
doom and decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may
be said of course; and it is doubtless only in Venice that you
gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most beautiful
is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, going--
that, I think, is the monstrous