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Page 33
So let it be here, Beloved, that some of our soon-to-be happiness opens
and shuts its eyes: for truly Venice is a sleepy place. I am wanting,
and taking, nine hours' sleep after all I do!
Outside coming over the flats from Padua, she looked something like a
manufacturing town at its ablutions,--a smoky chimney well to the fore:
but get near to her and you find her standing on turquoise, her feet set
about with jaspers, and with one of her eyes she ravishes you: and all
her campanile are like the "thin flames" of "souls mounting up to God."
That is from without: within she becomes too sensuous and civic in her
splendor to let me think much of souls. "Rest and be indolent" is the
motto for the life she teaches. The architecture is the song of the
lotos-eater built into stone--were I in a more florid mood I would have
said "swan-song," for the whole stands finished with nothing more to be
added: it has sung itself out: and if there is a moral to it all, no
doubt it is in Ruskin, and I don't wont to read it just now.
What I want is you close at hand looking up at all this beauty, and
smiling when I smile, which is your way, as if you had no opinions of
your own about anything in which you are not a professor. So you will
write and agree that I am to have the pleasure of this return to look
forward to? If I know that, I shall be so much more reconciled to all
the joy of the things I am seeing now for the first time: and shall see
so much better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are here helping me.
Here is love, dearest! help yourself to just as much as you wish for;
though all that I send is good for you! No letter from you since
Florence, but I am neither sad nor anxious: only all the more your
loving.
LETTER XXXVII.
Beloved: The weather is as gray as England to-day, and much rainier. To
feel it on my cheeks and be back north with that and warmer things, I
would go out in it in the face of protests, and had to go alone--not
Arthur even being in the mood just then for a patriotic quest of the
uncomfortable. I had myself oared into the lagoons across a racing current
and a driving head-wind which made my gondolier bend like a distressed
poplar over his oar; patience on a monument smiling at backsheesh--"all
comes to him who knows."
Of course, for comfort and pleasure, and everything but economy, we have
picked up a gondolier to pet: we making much of him, and he much out of
us. He takes Arthur to a place where he can bathe--to use his own
expression--"cleanly," that is to say, unconventionally; and this
appropriately enough is on the borders of a land called "the Garden of
Eden" (being named so after its owners). He--"Charon," I call him--is
large and of ruddy countenance, and talks English in blinkers--that is
to say, gondola English--out of which he could not find words to summon
me a cab even if it were not opposed to his interests. Still there are
no cabs to be called in Venice, and he is teaching us that the shortest
way is always by water. If Arthur is not punctually in his gondola by 7
A.M., I hear a call for the "Signore Inglese" go up to his window; and
it is hungry Charon waiting to ferry him.
Yesterday your friend Mr. C---- called and took me over to Murano in a
beautiful pair-oared boat that simply flew. There I saw a wonderful apse
filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-black figure of
the Madonna, ten heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me
become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands leaning up the bend with
two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor is all
mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; the architecture classic
in the grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is like the spirit of God
moving on the face of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesying to the dry
bones.
The Colleoni is quite as much more beautiful in fact and seen full-size
as I had hoped from all smaller reproductions. A fine equestrian figure
always strikes one as enthroned, and not merely riding; if I can't get
that, I consider a centaur the nobler creature with its human body set
down into the socket of the brute, and all fire--a candle burning at
both ends: which, in a way, is what the centaur means, I imagine?
Bellini goes on being wonderful, and for me beats Raphael's Blenheim
Madonna period on its own ground. I hear now that the Raphael lady I
raved over in Florence is no Raphael at all,--which accounts for it
being so beautiful and interesting--to _me_, I hasten to add. Raphael's
studied calmness, his soul of "invisible soap and imperceptible water,"
may charm some; me it only chills or leaves unmoved.
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