Italian Hours | Page 7

of the great Square that I think, with its strange basilica
and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with
the stately steps and the well- poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the
low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St.

Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city--a patch of
green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it
gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's
cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness.
A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel's back,
with an old shawl on her head, which makes her characteristic and
charming; you see her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of
the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it sinks even into the opaque
water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white
June rose--the roses of Venice are splendid--has flung itself by way of
spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water- way is a
great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies-- balconies on
which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking
doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water- steps. It is very hot
and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting.
[Illustration: A NARROW CANAL, VENICE]
It is poor work, however, talking about the colour of things in Venice.
The fond spectator is perpetually looking at it from his window, when
he is not floating about with that delightful sense of being for the
moment a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola is free to
entertain. Venetian windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and
while you rest your elbows on these cushioned ledges the precious
hours fly away. But in truth Venice isn't in fair weather a place for
concentration of mind. The effort required for sitting down to a
writing-table is heroic, and the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside
the brilliancy of your milieu. All nature beckons you forth and
murmurs to you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to
collecting impressions. Afterwards, in ugly places, at unprivileged
times, you can convert your impressions into prose. Fortunately for the
present proser the weather wasn't always fine; the first month was wet
and windy, and it was better to judge of the matter from an open
casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive gondoliers.
Even then however there was a constant entertainment in the view. It
was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of the lagoon was stroked
the wrong way by the wind. Then there were charming cool intervals,

when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the whole
gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly
white. Later it all turned warm--warm to the eye as well as to other
senses. After the middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The sea
took on a thousand shades, but they were only infinite variations of
blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of began to flush in the thick
sunshine. Every patch of colour, every yard of weather- stained stucco,
every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky above a calle,
began to shine and sparkle--began, as the painters say, to "compose."
The lagoon was streaked with odd currents, which played across it like
huge smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied and spotted it
allover; every gondola and gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely
like every other.
There is something strange and fascinating in this mysterious
impersonality of the gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, but,
thanks to their all being of the same size, shape and colour, and of the
same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as possible, as you
see it pass before you. From my windows on the Riva there was always
the same silhouette--the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and
throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not to move, with the
grotesquely- graceful figure on the poop. This figure inclines, as may
be, more to the graceful or to the grotesque--standing in the "second
position" of the dancing-master, but indulging from the waist upward in
a freedom of movement which that functionary would deprecate. One
may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in
the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something
graceful in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of
course the grace predominates, and nothing