Chapter 49

CHAPTER XLIX [Hanged with a Golden Rope]

One lingers about the Cathedral a good deal, in Venice. There is a
strong fascination about it--partly because it is so old, and partly
because it is so ugly. Too many of the world's famous buildings fail of
one chief virtue--harmony; they are made up of a methodless mixture
of the ugly and the beautiful; this is bad; it is confusing, it is
unrestful. One has a sense of uneasiness, of distress, without knowing
why. But one is calm before St. Mark's, one is calm in the cellar; for
its details are masterfully ugly, no misplaced and impertinent beauties
are intruded anywhere; and the consequent result is a grand harmonious
whole, of soothing, entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness.
One's admiration of a perfect thing always grows, never declines; and
this is the surest evidence to him that it IS perfect. St. Mark's is
perfect. To me it soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it
was difficult to stay away from it, even for a little while. Every time
its squat domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling;
whenever they reappeared, I felt an honest rapture--I have not known any
happier hours than those I daily spent in front of Florian's,
looking across the Great Square at it. Propped on its long row of low
thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast
warty bug taking a meditative walk.

St. Mark's is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it
seems the oldest, and looks the oldest--especially inside.

When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired
but not altered; the grotesque old pattern is preserved. Antiquity has
a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it. One day
I was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking up at an
ancient piece of apprentice-work, in mosaic, illustrative of the command
to "multiply and replenish the earth." The Cathedral itself had seemed
very old; but this picture was illustrating a period in history which
made the building seem young by comparison. But I presently found an
antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date
assigned to the piece of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large
as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had
been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth. Contrasted with the
inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were
flippantly modern--jejune--mere matters of day-before-yesterday. The
sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence
of this truly venerable presence.

St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer of the
profound and simply piety of