Chapter 15

The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less, her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France, of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible. On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.

The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas, and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue, while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the dæmoniac whose cure forms the subject of the picture.

But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On the right the houses are wholly of mediæval type, the flat marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch, while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a "note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings of mediæval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.

Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the "little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries. Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty masterpieces and the great mediæval church of the Frari which stands beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age, its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards. Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a classification of mankind founded on æsthetic refinement and intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men. Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting, as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints, priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The "want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy, unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.

The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.

What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form, throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening, lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so shameful a fall?

THE DISTRICT VISITOR.

It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter" she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master" himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor. His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him alone.

Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But, fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?" are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family. Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace, and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on her giddiness and love of finery.

The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.

But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire, by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of "Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices. Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs. D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The "five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice, remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions, to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.