The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton Volume I Part 9

BATCH No. 2.

(This blank represents three weeks.)

[Sidenote: Sept. 16.]

"_September 16._--Many happy returns of the day, dear Gussy! The other day I took a pair of scales, and put into the one vessel the price you would have to pay for the postage of a congratulatory letter to be received by you on your birthday, and into the other a pleasure which a surprise might afford you; the postage outweighed its rival; so I wrote no letter. If my directions have been attended to, you will, no doubt, have received a far more satisfactory outward and visible sign of my good wishes.

[Sidenote: Sept. 18.]

"_September 18._--The same to you, Papa!... _Can the river offer its fountain a drink?_

[Sidenote: Pebble I.]

[Sidenote: Sept. 19.]

[Sidenote: I lucubrate,]

[Sidenote: when I consider, &c. &c.,]

[Sidenote: whereas, &c. &c.,]

[Sidenote: and even then, &c. &c.,]

"Three weeks (apparently months) have elapsed since I last soared on the descriptive pinion; now, and only now, on the eve of my departure from Venice, I find time and leisure again to pour on the past a libation of pen and ink. I resume the quill with a feeling of disheartenment. With what intentions did I begin to write this (journal)? Had I not hoped to note down, at once and in all their freshness, my emotions and impressions just as I should receive them?

and to speak also sometimes of the thousand little incidents that fall in one's path, and which form the arabesque round the chapter of life?

And how are my hopes fulfilled? Behold me, on the morning of the last day, the day of parting, packing, paying, and pa.s.sports, forced to throw in a hurried and disconnected heap a few general remarks concerning what I have seen and heard and felt and found, and not found, during my stay in the home of t.i.tian. And even that, how difficult! For in this short stay, sight has succeeded sight, emotion has followed emotion, in one continued merry-go-round; I have been alternately grave and gay, melancholy and jocose, dejected and enraptured; add to this that in my mind, as in the dissolving views, one picture always effaces its predecessor, and you will at once perceive that I am in the position of a man trying to see the pebbles at the bottom of a muddy brook, or his natural face in a basin of gruel.

[Sidenote: but you know, &c.]

"Now, I again repeat what I made a preliminary condition: that I send you the pebbles, loose and disjointed, and that I don't undertake to make a necklace of them.

"'But whose fault is all this?' (I hear you ask).

[Sidenote: besides, it's not my fault]

"During my stay here (I continue, without attending to your question) I have been up nearly every day _before the sun_ (about five o'clock), and after working and tearing about the town all day, towards evening I was not sorry to....

"Do you guess how it was I wrote so little?

[Sidenote: A little digression]

"Here a little observation obtrudes itself to my notice. Man (for there is nothing like throwing your own frailties on mankind in general) is born with an irresistible tendency to talk _at something or somebody_; eighteen pages back I was talking to n.o.body; or, if I did address anything, it was that very vague personage, the future; now I find myself getting more and more personal; _you's_, I expect, will soon get up to fifty per cent.

[Sidenote: Pebble II.]

[Sidenote: A picture.]

[Sidenote: (Parenthetic Pebble about Gondolas.)]

"Venice! Mighty word, city of endless a.s.sociations, image that fills the mind! What impressions has it left on me? I shrink from answering a question so difficult to answer _fairly_, and from dissecting a point of such intricate anatomy. Whilst I think it over, I will give you a picture or two to look at; you shall have a peep out of the window where I sit writing. It is early morning, everything is cool and calm, in silent, almost breathless expectation of the not yet risen sun. Before your eyes rises one of the most splendid views in Europe, that of the Grand Ca.n.a.l from the steps of the Academy; the stately, dark green street of waters reflects on its wide-spreading mirror the grey and crumbling palaces, and the lovely form of Sta.

Maria della Salute, with her domes of dazzling white. Not a ripple mars its glossy surface, except where, at rare intervals, some silent gondola glides swiftly along, scattering the sparkling drops from its graceful oar, or where, here and there, the playful 'aura mattutina'

has left too rough a kiss upon its slumbering cheek. No sound is heard, but the distant, even, measured chimes, that seem to be rocking on the silence of the morning. Along its marge, singly, or cl.u.s.tering in close array beneath roofs of vine-covered trellis, lie the far-famed, ebon-coloured, swiftly gliding gondolas of Venice.

'Gondolas!' Whilst the sun is rising, let me say a word or two on gondolas. It has always excited my great surprise that these barks, which are graceful almost beyond imagination, are, in point of fact, in their present shape the offspring of a period, next to our own, the most execrable in point of taste which the world has produced. I mean the end of the seventeenth, or rather the beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet, so it is. In the time of Carpaccio and the Bellinis they were queer, tolerably uncouth contrivances, about two-thirds of their present length, pointed and equally curved at both ends, so as to resemble as nearly as possible a slice of melon, dead of the cholera.

In t.i.tian's day the shape began to taper out a little, and the iron points or k.n.o.bs, _at both ends_, rose to a greater height, and were enriched with a serrated ornament; but they did not a.s.sume their present slender proportions and graceful ornament, _at the prow only_, till the eighteenth century; as also the mysterious and exquisitely comfortable little cabins or coffins, which now surmount them, and which formerly were open _behind and before_, forcing the pa.s.senger to sit upright! They contained then the rudiment of an idea of grace, which took its natural growth and development in spite of man.

Meanwhile, for I have been watching him, the sun has appeared above the horizon; not that I see his own, real, glorious face, for he is hidden behind an ancient palace, but I see his reflection glowing in the eye of nature. First a gentle, tremulous, golden light began to steal along the dappled morning sky, warning all the little, distant, fleecy clouds to shake their plumes, for that it was going to begin; then, of course, the water took up the tune; and then (it was fit the biggest building should set the example) the 'Salute' a.s.sumed a saffron hue, and gradually one by one all the palaces on one side of the Ca.n.a.l, right up to our windows, and, did not you notice? your own face took quite a shine. For a while you yourself and everything round you seems wrapped in a trance; presently you begin to write. How is this? The whole picture begins to dance and quiver. Our Lady della Salute glows with a deeper blush, and trembles. Then, suddenly, her redness vanishes, her glorious countenance sparkles, and she raises her stately form in a garment of burnished silver; the gondolas that nestle round her feet, and hem in the whole length of the Ca.n.a.l, seem like a fillet of sparkling gems around a web of emerald and gold; the sky is a sea of light; the sun is in the wide heavens--it's time for breakfast. Waiter, coffee and rolls!

[Sidenote: I am reminded,]

"'Do you mean,' I hear you urge, 'to come to the point, and tell us how you like Venice?'

[Sidenote: but take no notice.]

[Sidenote: Pebble IV.]

"Another picture! (pretending not to hear). The same scene, but under a different aspect. How different! Just now it was a scene of dawning life, a burst of gladness--now it is a mild, a gentle dream, an Italian moonlight night, a _Venetian_ moonlight night--calm, clear, soft, fancy stirring. You lean idly out of the window; there are two of you, or ought to be, but you don't say anything to one another; you are rocked in silence; you feel the sweet, warm breath of night pa.s.s over your cheek; you think of Shakespeare's exquisite verses on what he never saw but with the eye of his boundless fancy; you are sitting with Jessica and Lorenzo (that is his name, I think) on a bank of violets; you are anxiously waiting for Portia and her company; your ear is attentive to every sound; presently a sweet, half-heard strain, like a distant echo, dawns on your ear; then it is lost again; again it swells, and seems to glide gently along the shadowy waters towards you, nearer, still nearer. You see a track of gleaming light along the water, and at intervals a shower of tiny stars; it's no illusion; they glide along towards you, the voices that rose from the distant waters; they are almost beneath your window. Quick, quick, a gondola; a dozen or more musicians, with every kind of instrument, sit together in a bark, and alternately play and sing lovely melodies by the musicians of Italy. As long as the strain lasts the oar is suspended, and the floating orchestra drifts slowly along with the slowly ebbing tide; round it, a cl.u.s.ter of gondolas, full of breathless listeners whose very soul seems to melt with the delicious sounds, and combine with them--at least, you can answer for yourself, for you are one of them.

Those are moments which you, I am sure, will never forget.

[Sidenote: You interrupt me, but I take no notice.]

"'You are beating about the bush, we want an ans....'

[Sidenote: Pebble V.]

"Another picture! (taking no notice of you)--a bit of Giorgione, coloured by Veronese. You are in an _atelier_; pictures and sketches in different stages of advancement lie about the tables and cover the easels; at one end of the room you see a large cupboard; its open doors betray within layers of rich old silks and damasks, some made up, some in pieces, as they were found at the antiquary's; further, an old mandoline, that perhaps could tell of the days of t.i.tian. Through the large, gaping window you look upon a group of the most picturesque Venetian houses, with their fanciful basket-shaped chimneys and irregular windows and thousand-fold tints; the foreground is gracefully supplied by a screen of slender, net-like trees, amongst which heavy-laden vines wreathe in fanciful festoons. But where is Werner? the amiable inmate of this charming snuggery; where his pupils? Ah, I hear them! Hark! in the garden, a merry laugh, a clattering of cups, a sound of several voices, a suggestion of enjoyment; you rush to the scene of action; on your road you nearly break your neck over a table covered with the remains of a hearty dinner. A few yards further, you see half-a-dozen young men (of course artists) stretched, in every variety of ingeniously comfortable att.i.tude, on a temporary floor of Turkey carpets, in a cool, clear, shady spot beneath arches of roof-weaving vines; in the middle, at comfortable arm's length, coffee, and heaps of purple grapes, whilst the intervals of conversation are filled by affectionate and earnest appeals to long Turkish pipes. You approach; you are recognised; seized by the hand, thrown down on the carpet; and presently you perceive that an entire afternoon is gone by! But that afternoon becomes a landmark to you. May not such reminiscences well endear a place to one's memory?

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF BYZANTINE WELL HEAD. Venice, 1852 By permission of Mr. S. Pepys c.o.c.kerell]

"'Well, then, I suppose....' (say you).

"Never mind, let me continue.

[Sidenote: More where the rest came from.]

"Another impression. You are sitting, early in the morning, in a s.p.a.cious, picturesque court; you have got your sketch-book, and you are busily poring over a drawing of a beautiful old Saracenic well; you are intent on doing it well, on cutting out that friend you have got with you. Presently you are seized with a peculiar sensation; you have heard, all of a sudden, the voice of an old, old friend, who speaks to you of things you don't see round you; a veil falls from your eyes; you feel that you have missed something for some time past; a vision rises before your eyes--a sweet vision of wooded hills and gra.s.sy fields, teeming with a thousand wild flowers and sending forth a sweet smell, and of flowing streams, of _fresh_ waters, of birds singing merrily as they fly from tree to tree, and swing on the slender branches; and then you remember that you dwell in a mysterious city, closed in by the salty sea. Who was the friend that called up these lively images in your mind? It was a poor, solitary, wandering _Bee_. But he suggested something else to you, the roaming honey-gatherer--he reminded you of _freedom_; reminded you that Freedom had no home _there_; and he made you _feel_ how much you had felt it, how much you had been unconsciously haunted by the breath of oppression that hovers over poor, browbeaten Venice, and whose pestilence clings to its rocky sh.o.r.e, as the rankling seaweed to the skirts of its palaces. Poor Venice! once resounding with joyous voices, now its walls seem, as you pa.s.s them, to mutter mournfully of arrests, condemnations, executions! Its narrow streets re-echo with the heavy tread of exulting soldiers, with the watchword of a foreign tongue. Palaces and convents are become barracks and infirmaries, and Slavonian troopers loll and spit where the proudest lords and loveliest ladies of Venice used to a.s.semble to the banquet or the ball. But I turn away from such sad reflections, lest they may seem to outweigh all the delight that I have spoken of before.

[Sidenote: Pebble VI.]

[Sidenote: What I think about it.]

"I have rehea.r.s.ed to you a few of my impressions for good and for evil, and I think that was the only way of answering your (imaginary) questions. I need make no apologies for not _describing_ Venice to you, as you have all seen it, and it is a place the image of which does not easily fade. I might say a word or two about the Venetians.

Whatever some people may say (and, if I am not mistaken, Byron amongst them), the female Venetian type, such as it is transmitted to us by t.i.tian, Giorgione, Pordenone, &c. (_i.e._ stout, tall, round-faced, small-mouthed, _Roxolane-nosed_) has either totally disappeared, or only manifests itself to a chosen few; one feature only I recognise, and that is a profusion of fine hair, which they plait in the most elaborate manner. A thing that rather puzzles those who go to Venice with the idea of seeing _t.i.tians_ and _Veroneses_ at the windows and in the streets, is that the women have altogether left off dyeing their hair auburn as they used in former times. To show you that vanity made the fair s.e.x go through the greatest personal discomfort as far back as the sixteenth century, I will tell you what the process of dyeing was. On the top of nearly every house in Venice is a kind of terrace-like scaffold, or scaffold-like terrace ('you pays your money and takes your choice'), which has the n.o.ble vocation of drying linen; in former days, however, they were built for a different purpose. In the middle of the day, during the greatest heat of the sun, the party anxious to impart to her hair a tint between sugar-candy and radishes repaired to these _lofty_ spots, and there regularly bleached her hair in the following manner: she put on her head the _brim_ of a large straw hat, so that the top of the head was exposed to all the power of the sun, whilst the face and neck were kept in the shade. Through the hole thus left in the middle of this extraordinary headgear the whole of the hair was drawn, and spread out as much as possible; which done, different kinds of waters, made for the express purpose, were pa.s.sed over it by means of a little sponge fastened to the top of a reed.

History does not give the exact number of _coups-de-soleil_ caught in this manner; a few, I should imagine. However, I can warrant the accuracy of my statement, which is borrowed from a contemporary author of the highest standing. The men of Venice are neither handsome in the face nor well made in the body. The Venetian dialect is amusing; in the mouth of a woman, if well spoken, it is pretty, musical, childlike, lisping; but in the mouth of a man, for the most part, muddy, stammering, unintelligible.