Italian Hours | Page 5

To- day, at any rate, that admirable harmony of faded mosaic
and marble which, to the eye of the traveller emerging from the narrow
streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the further end of it with a sort
of dazzling silver presence--to-day this lovely vision is in a way to be
completely reformed and indeed well-nigh abolished. The old softness
and mellowness of colour-- the work of the quiet centuries and of the
breath of the salt sea--is giving way to large crude patches of new
material which have the effect of a monstrous malady rather than of a
restoration to health. They look like blotches of red and white paint and
dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of a noble matron. The
face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest- looking thing
conceivable--as new as a new pair of boots or as the morning's paper.
We do not profess, however, to undertake a scientific quarrel with these
changes; we admit that our complaint is a purely sentimental one. The
march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be looked at as a
whole, and one must endeavour to believe that it is through
innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is
groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is
not to be denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than
the result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was of old a
passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to- day burn everything
that she has adored. It is doubtless too soon to judge her, and there are
moments when one is willing to forgive her even the restoration of St.
Mark's. Inside as well there has been a considerable attempt to make
the place more tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously
suffered. What I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark
and rugged old pavement--those deep undulations of primitive mosaic
in which the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended
resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether intended or not the
analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house of images; but from

a considerable portion of the church it has now disappeared.
Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement remains as recent
generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with
porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of
innumerable worshippers; but in other large stretches the idea imitated
by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the model they
have taken the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I
think no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for such
differences; and when, a year ago, people in England were writing to
the Times about the whole business and holding meetings to
protest against it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as they heard or
heeded the rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies and partly asses.
Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they took a good deal of
disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day
that such trouble may be worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly
endeavours to conceive a state of existence in which personal questions
are so insipid that people have to look for grievances in the wrongs of
brick and marble. I must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had
the pretension of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired
one. The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the
best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice,
open Théophile Gautier's ltalia, and you will see. These writers
take it very seriously, and it is only because there is another way of
taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that offers itself after you
have been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is hot in the great
Square, and you pass in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of
habit and friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark. There
are moments, after all, when the church is comparatively quiet and
empty, and when you may sit there with an easy consciousness of its
beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into any Italian
church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the ladies, you
rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of; you treat
the place as an orifice in the peep- show. Still, it is almost a spiritual
function--or, at the worst, an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the
molten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air