CHAPTER XIX. VENICE;-BYRON AND THE GONDOLIERS. How Byron knew Venice! You may admire the fourth canto of Childe Harold at Hammerfest, or at Sant Iago de Cuba without ever having approached one inch nearer to the world in which we live, but you cannot appreciate its merits justly until you have been in Venice. Of all the countless numbers who have made their theme of the Adriatic wonder, none (and that is saying a great deal), none have known it, felt it, loved it, painted it like him. He is as it were penetrated by the very essence of Venetianism; and when you have once read Childe Harold, I defy you to go to Venice without his verses recurring at every instant to your memory-they stare at you from the curiously carved stonework of the dogal palace, from the Bridge of Sighs, from the burning Riva, from the worn * The word is none of my coining; it is the invention of a writer, who, in our own immediate day, is one amongst the number of the most intelligent lovers of Venice, Madame Ida de Düringsfeld, a pavement of the Piazzetta, from the walls of that giant chamber, wherein is perpetuated the dark sentence against Faliero; they wail in the night wind, and spring forth in every monotonous appeal of the Gondolieri upon the Traghetti.-No! believe me, once in Venice, Byron is inseparable from you and from it-I am not a Byronian, never was one; I am of those who think that to Byron, as a man, injustice was done most wanton and absurd, but as a poet, I would unregrettingly sacrifice all he ever wrote save the following: first, the one work which is immortal, and which with every succeeding year must be more frankly recognized as being so; and next, with a very very few of his smaller fugitive pieces, the third, but above all the fourth canto of Childe Harold-beyond this, I do not think I should feel any considerable regret, if nothing of his had ever appeared in print. This I think it necessary to say, in order to ward off from myself the accusation of blind Byronism to which so many of lay themselves open, and in order also that I may be believed to be impartial, when I repeat that in Venice his memory positively haunts you. my sex I was determined to scrutinize the feeling, d'en avoir raison, as the French say, and accordingly I went to what I conceived to be its very source: the Palazzo Mocenigo.A dark, lofty, dingy entrance hall at the top of the stairs opens into a long vast gallery, the windows of which look to the great canal-to the right is a large drawing-room furnished in crimson damask, and out of that a smaller saloon-both are as they were when he occupied them— German author, of great talent, whose little work, entitled "Am Canal Grande," adds a brilliant leaf to her well-earned literary crown. the books he read last lie upon the tables, the sofas and chairs he sat on are placed as at the hour of his departure -the portraits of the old Doges of the House of Mocenigo, hang gloomy round the walls, and on the tables are yet uneffaced inkstains-traces material of immaterial thought -all this is left of him, and shall I tell you? Byron is less to be found here than anywhere else. I can, it is true, almost fancy him, as he lived and wrote; his bodily form is re-constituted by all this reality, but with that I have nothing to do, and truly has he himself said: "The beings of the mind are not of clay, And multiply in us a brighter ray And more beloved existence, that which Fate Now this is" dull life" whence are absent these "being of the mind." What is by far more living than all the rest in the Palazzo Mocenigo is a portrait of Catarina Corner, La Regina-the wife of Lusignan, and Queen of Cyprus. Such a strange portrait to be that of a Patrician Dame of Venice, and one who, above all, had such a history! She is delicate, diminutive, almost doll-like with her teint de lys et de roses-but so deliciously pretty! a bergère of Watteau, a nymphe, a grande dame, anything most affected, and elegant, most frivolous and rococoand this was the famous Queen!-one does feel so inclined to make her a réverence de cour and call her " Madame la Marquise." When the lamp upon the table beneath her, cast its rays upon her miniature features, and upon the jewelled crown beside her, and when for hours they were alone in that red room, what could she say to Byron? I repeat it, she lives in these ancient walls, but the poet does not. They were the home of him who died at Missolonghi, nothing more,-he is dead-whereas he who will never die lives on elsewhere. Listen to the waves as they ripple over the stone steps of La Salute, what do they say? Margherita! Go to the Rialto, and as much as Shylock, you will recall Childe Harold.-Here is the proof of the hold Byron has laid on Venice: that there is not a spot, however hallowed by the supreme glory of other names, that does not echo his. By the side even of Shakspere you do not lose sight of him; the fame of Tasso and Petrarch seem to unite with his, and the warlike sonority of such names as Dandolo and Foscari,* do not overwhelm him. As you return from the Lido towards evening, and your gondola in rounding the point of the Dogana, absolutely swims in sunlight, look on the right hand at that small fretted balcony surcharged with ornaments and arabesques as a Moorish edifice-tradition says-there dwelt Othello. When the moon rises blue over the blue waters, as you float past that palace, you fancy you see at its open casement a fair form, the white flutter of a veil,-and on the still wind comes to your fancy a faint sound-is it the harp whose notes accompany the song of the willow? or is it on the Lagoon the solitary gondolier chanting the regrets of Francesca?... * This is the more curious, too, as the work, more particularly consecrated by Byron to the latter, "The two Foscari" is about as mediocre a production as can well be conceived. "Nessun maggior dolore Ch'il ricordarsi del tempo felice Shakspere, Dante, Rossini, muses of music and poetry! Francesca and Desdemona, visions of the past—all take possession of you, and the surrounding solitude is peopled; but as you gaze upon the mysterious edifice, and like to think Othello did live there,* the chances are, that as you watch its ruin, the moon's rays may trace in fantastic characters upon the walls : "Her palaces are mould'ring to the shore." I tell you, do what you will, you cannot escape Byron. "You may have seen all the cities of the world," says Montesquieu, "and yet be surprised when you arrive in Venice." When we arrived there, so dense a fog hung over it, that at the foot of the Zecca you could not discern the Campanile. It was cold, damp, and the fog, as it rose, melted into a drizzling, mizzling, melancholy rain. stepped into the gondola, which looked like a floating hearse, we steered down the Canal Grande, every palace on whose banks seemed but a monument of misery, we stopped at We * The Venetians delight in histories of Othello. They tell you, as a matter of history, that the Moor killed his wife in a most barbarous way. He entered her room, with his confidential servant; they, together, beat her to death, and then set fire to the house (it took place in Cyprus), in order that the crime should be concealed, and the death of Desdemona be laid to the account of the flames. This version is the really historical one. Tradition says, the Moor was killed on the Lido, in a duel against the three brothers of his wife, who suspected foul play with respect to their sister. Desdemona was a Malipieri. VOL. II. C C |