ART IN FAIRYLAND.

VENICE SKETCHED FROM A GONDOLA. BY CHARLES KENT.

T really matters nothing how, for the first time in your life, you enter Venice. Whether it be in winter or in summer, by night or by day, on board a steamboat or ensconced in a railway carriage. Once you have actually quitted packet or station, once you have fairly stepped into your gondola, and are afloat among the hundred islands, so long as your sojourn there shall last, you are launched in a scene of enchantment. My own acquaintance with the beautiful city began under circumstances that any one might have regarded as unpropitious-approaching it, as I did, in the grey dawn and blighting cold of a Sunday morning in November. Yet, for all that, I was not in the least degree disillusioned. During the night I had crossed the Adriatic from Trieste, and was now entering the lagoon on board the Dalmatia just as the day was breaking. Rapidly as the light increased, gradually as the city was neared, the dream of a lifetime was surpassed by the waking reality. It was thus already, piecemeal, while I was yet standing on the deck of the steampacket, gazing over the bulwarks at the Riva Schiavoni-immediately fronting from the North the Isola San Giorgio. But when, soon after this, one's valise, and wraps, and minor impedimenta had been tossed down to the expectant gondolier, in whose picturesque conveyance, in another moment, I found myself seated in solitary state, skimming over the waters of the Grand Canal, past the familiar Dogana (even though never seen before, so instantly recognised, thanks to Canaletto and others, to say nothing of photography), as my boat swerves to the right up a narrow water-way, and thence, in and out, among the overshadowing houses-adieu! for the time being to simply every-day existence, to mere common-place and matter-of-fact. My destination is soon reached the landing-place, that is, leading across the threshold of the Grand Hotel Victoria, known until yesterday as the Regina d'Ingleterra. Thawed back into something like an ordinary sense of warmth before a crackling wood fire, which I have caused at once to be kindled on the old-fashioned hearth of my apartment, and enjoying, besides the glow, my first taste of Venetian cookery in a thoroughly Italian breakfast, I eagerly sally forth immediately afterwards, alternately afloat and

me

afoot, upon my wanderings, hither and thither, through all the windings of that wonderful labyrinth of city and sea-Venice, for more than a thousand years the Bride of the Adriatic. From that moment, from that very forenoon, my recollections of Venice begin to date in their integrity. Thenceforth, not upon the instant, it is true, but later on, in the retrospect, they assume to themselves a certain air of substance and consistency. The peregrinations I then entered upon were in no way made systematically. Whithersoever I listed, I went ; now alone, now at the chance suggestion of my gondolier, now under the guidance of the intelligent cicerone happily engaged to direct my footsteps, once in a way, for several hours together. It is only after carefully threading the mazes of that amphibious capital, and then recalling to mind long afterwards what one has there been examining,. that it is possible to realise even proximately the marvellous variety, profusion, and splendour of the magnificent spectacle that has been witnessed. While you are viewing it, you are for the most part dazzled and bewildered. It is subsequently, when your wanderings are over, when you come to look back at all you have been seeing in Venice, that you are at length enabled to regard scenes, localities, structures, masterpieces, with anything like a due sense of their relative proportions, of their full artistic significance, and of their grand historical associations. Summoning back to recollection, at this moment, the hall and galleries I have there traversed, the churches and palaces I have there visited, the shining perspective of those liquid highways and byways intersecting one another in such endless diversity, but above all, the lavish grandeur of the decorations squandered upon the walls of all those noble edifices, I can still in imagination wander again through Venice, whenever I so please, as through a world of Art in Fairyland.

Time out of mind the peninsula of Italy has been likened to a boot-to one of the long tight-fitting boots, a hessian or a wellington. Precisely in the same way I can't help seeing a resemblance in the general outline of the archipelago on which the city of Venice is built to a boot of Charles I., or of one of the Cavaliers. The Italian boot, as will be remembered, lies at an angle in the Mediterranean, as though, according to someone's whimsical remark, it were momentarily withdrawn, preparatory to giving a kick in the back to Sicily. The Cavalier boot of Venice, instead of being in any way so placed, however, lies horizontally, it might be said, toe downwards, at the north-western corner of the Adriatic, the broad bucket-shaped top of it directed landwards. Roughly trace such an outline exactly in that position, and you will have at once before you the frame or

outer-tracing of a plan of Venice. On the block or ball of the heel, mark San Pietro di Castello, the first landmark you sight on approaching the city, as I did, from the Adriatic. Nearly at the middle of the Cavalier's shin jot down the grandest of all the Venetian piazzas, the Piazza di San Marco. Almost opposite to this, pendant, as it were, from the tip of the tassel, or laced fringe, define the stand-point of the Dogana. There it is, as might be said, between the boot and the tassel, that appears the entrance to the main thoroughfare — watery like all the other thoroughfares and nearly all the no-thoroughfares of Venice-the Canale Grande. This broad highway, which meanders in an eccentric series of bends through the chief part of the great sea-city, has been compared in its twisted outline to a reversed or inverted . Otherwise described, it might be spoken of as, in shape, like a distorted sickle-the butt-end of the handle of it placed on the rough sketch of the Cavalier boot between the front of the boot and the tassel-point, already mentioned, of the Doganathe contorted extremity of the bent blade of the reaping-hook, representing the Grand Canal, coming out about the middle of the broad end or opening of the boot lying towards the mainland. As nearly as possible midway at the curve of the sickle, in other words at almost the very centre of Venice, spanning the wide current of the winding Grand Canal, is the noble, historic, single arch of the renowned Ponte di Rialto. Symbolled thus in homely fashion, by the pencilling of a reaper's sickle on the boot of a Cavalier, you will have sketched for yourself off-hand the salient points in the outline of a chart of Venice. But Venice itself, as you have beheld it from your gondola, as you have examined its quays, and domes, and pinnacles, and palaces, while you glided among them, giving place to one another in seemingly endless diversity, as though the blade of your gondolier's oar were nothing less than the wand of a necromancer-how by any possibility can that be symbolised? As well attempt to describe the changes of a dream, to enumerate the fluctuating hues and appearances of the clouds at sunset, to delineate, either with written words or with the aid of pigments from a palette, the sheen and glory and glamour of a mirage or of the fata morgana. What Lady Morgan called that "Rome of the Ocean" is but another "phantom of delight" in one's remembrance of it. Floating like the swan at Yarrow, "double swan and shadow," one thinks of it as compounded of all the elements, and yet as, distinctly, belonging to none among them. I hardly know whether it strikes me as being in form or in colour the more beautiful. Variety in itself, according to the proverb, has a certain charm and grace and fascination of its own.

And

nowhere else can there be seen such abounding variety architecturally. Not one palazzo is the counterpart of another. Each has an individuality of its own, as indeed also for that matter has each minor tenement. Built up solidly as they are from the very water's edge, rising as many of the noble structures do to a great elevation, constructed as all the public edifices are of ponderous and costly materials reared in the grandest proportions, midway apparently between sea and air, the aspect of the whole scene is simply magical or miraculous. The marvellous effect of this one perceives at a glance immediately on one's arrival there. Stepping for example just for a moment on to the Molo in front of the Palazzo Ducale, and looking back across the entrance to the Grand Canal towards the Dogana, you seem to recognise there at once the visible type of it all on the other side of the glittering current, where the domed summit runs up into an aërial turret, upon the topmost pinnacle of which is a golden orb, poised above which again in midair, upon the extreme point of one foot à la Taglioni, with a gossamer scarf blown out sailwise in its extended hands, is the Cupidon effigy of Fortune. Graceful yet majestic, at one and the same instant, though the architectural effects produced by the fairylike structure of this veritable Aphrodite among the capitals of Europe unquestionably are, its distinctive characteristic after all seems to me to be discernible in the glory of its colouring. This in truth is what struck me the most forcibly in regard to Venice at the first moment of my approaching it. Entering it, as I have said, on a grey wintry morning, I noted first of all even then the opaline flush of the varied hues by which the whole scene was irradiated. The very decay and dilapidation observable there in all directions, add no doubt considerably to the prevailing effect thus produced of a general and dominant warmth of colouring. Beautiful and all aglow as it is, its beauty is pathetically perfected as by a hectic flush of consumption. If its ultimate doom can be described as in any way hidden even from conjecture, one would say that, meanwhile,

Concealment, like a worm i' the bud,

Feeds on its damask cheek.

What one sees there is a city that is still resplendent, but a city that is decayed and that is decaying. Toned by age, rivelled by time, the picture it presents to view is perhaps for that very reason as a work of art just simply in its perfection. The Venetian houses, as a rule, are one mass of chipped, and cracked, and peeled-off, and dropped-away, stucco or stone veneering-revealing ruddy glimpses of the raw rough brickwork underneath. It looks no doubt as if, to

ensure its material prosperity, it needed the advent of a Trajan, having as his Minister of Public Works, as his worthy and unstinting Ædile, a Haussmann of Renovation. Already, indeed, during these last few years, one or two private palaces and public buildings have in point of fact had their façades completely reconstructed—the effect thereby produced being in no way detrimental. Venice is, at those few points, what a royal ruler of the place would probably like to see it throughout. But even if it were possible to have it comprehensively renovated it would lose, in the very process of its renewal, what is now the secret of its witchery - the sense of a ruin that defies reparation, the visible attestation of a series of historical calamities from which there is no hope of that sometime Queen of the Adriatic ever emerging. Even before actually sighting Venice, I had a sort of foretaste of what has been here noted as to the glories of her colouring, namely, through the charming effect produced by the fishing boats going out to sea as we were entering the lagoon, their patched sails of varied tints resembling in their motley dyes a fading autumn leaf, paler or deeper yellow ripening here and there in one corner to the richest scarlet or the darkest crimson. They were like shreds of the splendid colouring of Venice, blowing past me as I neared it. Its sumptuous wealth in that dominant characteristic I think I first began to realise in earnest, however, when I passed in through the porchway of its great cathedral church of San Marco. The interior of that wonderful temple is like the interior of a most precious casket, upon the whole surface of which the priceless gems it is designed to preserve are most lavishly and exquisitely encrusted. The sheer magnificence of the colouring there, and the gorgeous profusion of gold throughout that colouring-gold indeed, as one may say, forming the background of the elaborate picture-gold being the tissue, so to speak, upon which all the manifold dyes are overlaid or embroidered-not along the walls only, but upon the concave surface of the domed and arched ceilings-it would be difficult to afford anything like an adequate notion of by mere written language. Wherever the materials are not gold or pigments they are marbles of the most beautiful and rare descriptions-marbles full of colour, streaked and pied and dappled, and for the most part of the darkest and most luscious hues. The antique pavement of the building is one glorious tesselation or enamelling of these rare marbles in designs of the most intricate character the whole being so ancient and seemingly so rich in every sense, like an aromatic conserve or a spiced and candied cake, that there is nothing like an uniform level preserved. The floor of San Marco, in fact, is all up hill and down