by Henry James
“Paraissez Navarrins, Maures, Castillans!”
To an ingenuous American the Théâtre Français may yet offer an aesthetic education.
A EUROPEAN SUMMER: FROM VENICE TO STRASSBURG
March 1873
Bridge of Sighs, Venice, ca. 1850.
THERE WOULD BE MUCH TO SAY ABOUT THAT GOLDEN CHAIN of historic cities which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very names—Brescia, Verona, Mantua, Padua—are an ornament to one’s phrase; but I should have to draw upon recollections now three years old, and to make my short story a long one. Of Verona and Venice only have I recent impressions, and even to these I must do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had done before, toward the end of a summer’s day, when the shadows begin to lengthen, and the light to glow, and found that the attendant sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same last intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse of the lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precursive flight of your imagination; then the liquid level, edged far off by its band of undiscriminated domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, however, as excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows of the train; then your long rumble on the immense white railway bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn (very properly) by Mr. Ruskin, between the old and the new approach to Venice, does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge, save for one little fact—that the key-note of the great medley of voices borne back from the exit is not “Cab, sir!” but “Barca, signore!” I don’t mean, however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though, for my own part, I hold that, to a fine, healthy appetite for the picturesque, the subject cannot be too diffusely treated. Meeting on the Piazza, on the evening of my arrival, a young American painter, who told me that he had been spending the summer at Venice, I could have assaulted him, for very envy. He was painting, forsooth, the interior of Saint Mark’s. To be a young American painter unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things, and satisfied with their wholesome, light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond of color, of sea and sky, and anything that may chance between them; of old lace, and old brocade, and old furniture (even when made to order); of time-mellowed harmonies on nameless canvases, and happy contours in cheap old engravings; to spend one’s mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one’s afternoons anywhere, in church or camp, on canal or lagoon, and one’s evenings in starlight gossip at Florian’s, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly 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 one may safely be.
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 eye rests on is effective, pictorial, harmonious—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 staring 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 on which it works—slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and sky seem to meet halfway, to blend their tones into a kind of 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 of 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 sympathize with that longing for pure radiance which animated her great colorists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I could not 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 poignant embodiment of unheeded decline. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and it 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, honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce, once for all, the attempt to express; but you may be sure, whenever I mention such a spot, that it is something delicious. A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember none so audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was no life there but the visible tremor of the brilliant air and the cries of half-a-dozen young children, who dogged our steps and clamored for coppers. These children, by the way, were the handsomest little brats in the world, and each was furnished with a pair of eyes which seemed a sort of protest of nature against the stinginess of fortune. They were very nearly as naked as savages, and their little bellies protruded like those of infant Abyssinians in the illustrations of books of travel; but as they scampered and sprawled in the soft, thick grass, grinning like suddenly translated cherubs, and showing their hungry little teeth, they suggested forcibly that the best assurance of happiness in this world is to be found in the maximum of innocence and the minimum of wealth. One small urchin—framed, if ever a child was, to be the joy of an aristocratic mamma—was the most expressively beautiful little mortal I ever looked upon. He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his grave; and yet here he was, running wild among these sea-stunted bushes, on the lovely margin of a decaying world, in prelude to how blank, or to how dark, a destiny? Verily, nature is still at odds with fortune; though, indeed, if they ever really pull together, I’m afraid nature will lose her picturesqueness. An infant citizen of our own republic, straight-haired, pale-eyed, and freckled, duly darned and catechised, marching into a New England school-house, is an object often seen and soon forgotten; but I think I shall always remember, with infinite tender conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic strand. Yet all youthful things at Torcello were not cheerful, for the poor lad who brought us the key of the Cathedral was shaking with an ague, and his melancholy presence seemed to point the moral of forsaken nave and choir. The church is admirably primitive and curious, and reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome—St. Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century, and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement is not inferior to that of St. Mark’s. But the terribly distinct apostles are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms—intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics—passionless, even in their heresy.
I had been curious to see whether, in the galleries and churches of Venice, I should be disposed to transpose my old estimates—to burn what I had adored, and to adore what I had burned. It is a sad truth, that one can stand in the Ducal Palace for the first time but once, with the deliciously ponderous sense of that particular half-hour being an era in one’s mental history; but I had the satisfaction of finding at least a great comfort in a short stay—that none of my early memories were likely to change places, and that I could take up my admirations where I had left the
m. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian supremely beautiful, and Tintoret altogether unqualifiable. I repaired immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the smaller of Tintoret’s two great Crucifixions, and when I had looked at it awhile, I drew a long breath, and felt that I could contemplate any other picture in Venice with proper self-possession. It seemed to me that I had advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond that another art—inspired poetry—begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space, in which Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the excitement into which he plunged me, when I first learned to know him; but the glow of that comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I fear, that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to utter my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, mysterious lapses, and fitful intermissions; but, when the list of his faults is complete, he still seems to me to remain the most interesting of painters. His reputation rests chiefly on a more superficial sort of merit—his energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his being, as Théophile Gautier says, le roi des fougueux. These qualities are immense, but the great source of his impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, has often seemed to me but a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence, in dealing with the great Venetians, sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of the “Rape of Europa” is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other genius of supreme good taste. Titian was, assuredly, a mighty poet, but Tintoret—Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his greatest works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the conflict between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In Tintoret, the problem is practically solved, and the alternatives so harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to say where one begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose melts into the most ethereal poetry, and the literal and imaginative fairly confound their identity. This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret’s great merit, to my mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the germ of a scene, it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which make one’s observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than a kind of supplementary experience of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a much looser specification, as their treatment of any subject which Tintoret has also treated abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with its scattered variety and brilliancy, in Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” in the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of Tintoret’s illustration of the theme, at the Salute Church. To compare his “Presentation of the Virgin,” at the Madonna dell’ Orto, with Titian’s, at the Academy, or his “Annunciation” with Titian’s, close at hand, is to measure the essential difference between observation and imagination. One has certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one has called him an observer. Il y mettait du sien, as the French say, and I use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehensions, infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or to easily-balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic combinations—or, rather, leaves them ungauged. It was the whole scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld, in a flash of inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his perceptions; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar, individual, unprecedented, which he committed to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his “Last Supper,” at San Giorgio—its long, diagonally-placed table, its dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground—with the usual formal, almost mathematical, rendering of the subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret’s work the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically—with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush. Thanks to this fact, his works are signally grave, and their almost universal and rapidly increasing decay does not relieve their gloom. Nothing, indeed, can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendor of their great chambers like gaunt, twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children’s children, Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and stained, of the great “Bearing of the Cross,” at San Rocco, will live and die without knowing the largest eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity to the place, recall, as vividly as possible, while you linger at San Rocco, the painter’s singularly interesting portrait of himself, at the Louvre. The old man looks out of the canvas from beneath a brow as sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to wear, if he stood at your side, gazing at his rotting canvases. It is not whimsical to fancy it the face of a man who felt that he had given the world more than the world was likely to repay. Indeed, before every picture of Tintoret, you may remember this tremendous portrait with profit. On one side, the power, the passion, the illusion of his art; on the other, the mortal fatigue of his spirit. The world’s knowledge of Tintoret is so small that the portrait throws a doubly precious light on his personality; and when we wonder vainly what manner of man he was, and what were his purpose, his faith, and his method, we may find forcible assurance there that they were, at any rate, his life—and a very intense one.