I AM reading Nietzsche and Tolstoi. Each tells me that the morality of the day is all wrong, and that he has discovered the one true way of salvation. Life, cries Nietzsche, strength, sunshine, beauty. Death, cries Tolstoi, abnegation, pity, holiness.'tisall as old as the hills, and withal so simple that one wonders why Nietzsche should have needed eleven volumes to say it in and Tolstoi endless pamphlets. I never can understand the lengths to which some authors go in self-repetition. Half the books are written to prove that water is dry, and the other half that it's wet. If you would only stop and think just for one moment, cries Tolstoi, you would at once see what a ridiculous life you are leading and you would refuse to lead it any longer. Stop and think! Ay, but'tisdifficult thinking to-day.
It will be all over and done with so long-by the time you read this-that the Triple Alliance may be in three pieces; but for the moment the complications of European politics alternately startle and depress my day with furious cannonades of honour from an Italian gunboat and brazen dronings of national anthems from a German band. For the young man whom Tolstoi has described as the most comic figure in Europe, coming to meet Umberto I. in Venice, inconsiderately stationed his yacht just outside my window; and though he is gone at last, Gott sei Dank, the echoes of him still linger in irrelevant cannon-shots that send the pigeons scurrying in mad swoops; while, as if removed from the oppression of his presence, the band of the Hohenzollern plays London music-hall tunes all day long, commencing, significantly enough, with "Oh, Mr. Porter, what a funny man you are!" I never realised how international is our music-hall till I heard Italians staggering home at midnight, singing "Two lovely black eyes" in choice Venetian. A beautiful yacht this Hohenzollern , as large as an Atlantic liner: I suppose an Imperial yacht is like an Imperial pint. 'T was a great moment when it sailed in round a bend, slow and serene-a glorious white vessel, radiant with flags, stately and majestic in its movement as a sonnet of Milton, and about it a black swarm of gondolas, those of the noble families equipped with half a dozen gondoliers in green, yellow, or blue liveries, and at the stern of each boat a trail of silk. And the dense crowds huzzahed, and the band played "God Save the Queen," only in German, so that it meant, Heil dir im Siegeskranz. And after that came the Italian national air, which isn't an anthem, but a quick march, and so lacks dignity. The "Wacht am Rhein" made a half-hearted effort to be present, but in the night we had the Emperor's own "Sang an Aegir," stuck in the middle of a Wagner programme. Beyond this, compliment could scarcely go.
This brazen air was the one jar on the poetry of a spectacle possible only in Venice. Imagine it! Wagner played on a floating fairy-pagoda, built as of gold flame, and shot with green and red, on the broad bosom of St. Mark's basin, in the divine night, the stars seen hanging diversely in free space, not stuck like gold-headed nails in a dark ceiling; and in the mystery of the darkness, the domes and spires and palaces of Venice, and the dim creeping boats, and the quivering reflections of the illuminated Imperial vessel; and across the narrow track of luminous water made by the Pagoda-that glittered with a fantastic splendour as of Aladdin and Arabian nights-sudden gondolas gliding from darkness to darkness, the beautiful curve of the prow sharply revealed, the gondolier growing semi-transparent and quivering with light, a strange half-demoniac figure bestriding his black bark. And, mingled with the music, the hum of multitudes and the tramp of feet and the silence of the vast night. All as Nietzsche's poem on Venice hath it-"Gondeln, Lichter, Musik." Yes, they play politics prettily on the Grand Canal-the finest street in Europe. Does it matter much what is the game? Cannons and colour, bands and decorations, bread and circuses, emperors uncovering to us, beautiful queens waving dainty handkerchiefs-this is what lies behind the dry Treaties of the history books. A few short weeks back we had been very angry with our King, and had talked of Republics and what not. But the dead men in Abyssinia are dead, and we are alive, and the Bengal fire on the palaces is really very picturesque. If we would only stop and think-just for one moment! But there's the rub.
It's no use stopping and thinking, unless everybody else will stop and think at the same time. For you cannot refuse to lead a life that everybody is leading, unless you are willing to be crushed by the revolutions of the social machinery. Socialists, for instance, are often twitted with not "behaving as sich." But socialists say that socialism should be the law of the land: they do not say that it is practicable for an odd man here and there to be a socialist in a world of individualists. Tolstoi, to be of effect, would have to move all mankind at once to renounce its ways, to abjure the lust of the eye and the pride of life. And he would have to keep on moving it, or back it would roll. Mazzini and the unification of Italy-what words to conjure with! But Mazzini is dead, and how much of Italy is alive!'tismore like a great show-place, supported by its visitors, than a real, live country. Stop and think!'tisperhaps better not to think, for fear we should stop. William II., at any rate-he is not likely to stop and think. This young man-from all I have observed since he became my neighbour-lives a highly coloured dramatic existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour and sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have pleased Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a lover of the strong and the splendid, this German gentleman who is just off to Vienna to prance at the head of fifteen hundred horsemen. While he lived opposite me, it was all excursions and alarums. As a neighbour an emperor is distinctly noisy. The local comic papers suggested that, as a universal genius, Guglielmo II. would at once set about rowing a two-oared sandolo. But this difficult feat Guglielmo did not essay, being convoyed more comfortably in a long-boat by a brawny crew. Curious, by the way, that transformation of William! They announce plays here by G. Shakespeare, the divine Guglielmo.
'T is all very well for Guglielmo, the gondola of Avon, to invite us to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings; and in a city of departed Doges and lost glories't is easy to moralise over earthly greatness. But kings are not always dead, and I daresay as William II. in his cocked hat gazed from the quarter-deck of the Hohenzollern at the marvellous but untenanted Palace of the ancient Bridegrooms of the Sea, he felt that a living lion is better than a dead Doge. And yet it is a strange life, a king's. What an unreal universe of flags and cannons and phrases must monarchs inhabit! Do they think that the streets are always gay with streamers and bunting and triumphal arches, always thunderous with throats of men or guns, always impassable? Do they imagine their subjects spend their whole lives in packed black masses, waving hats? Poor kings! I always class them with novelists for ignorance of real life. And to think that they can only get to know life from novels! If they would only stop, and think! But even when they do stop, they never seem to think. Napoleon on St. Helena never faced realities, aggressively pompous to the end. Then there is Don Carlos, whom I miss in my afternoon stroll. He who might have dazzled us with divinity is visibly a feather-less biped. The poor, mock king had to leave Venice because his brother-sovereigns would not have called upon him. For Don Carlos still keeps up the form and style of a crowned head, and remains the last of the Bourbons, a picturesque ruin, reproach to a blasphemous generation, heedless of the divine right of kings.
And the "divinity that doth hedge a king" can be kept up nowhere so cheaply as in Venice. Venice is the dress-coat of cities, making all men equal. Well might Wordsworth dub her "the eldest child of liberty"! For in the streets of Venice you cannot drive or ride-walk you must. No gleaming broughams, no spanking steeds: nothing-be you monarch or mendicant-but your two legs. 'Tis strange, in a land of no horses, to find Venetians styled "Cavalier" for title of honour. They should surely be called "Gondoliers." For the gondola is your only chance of display. Rich Americans may flaunt it with four gondoliers and print "Palazzo" on their visiting-cards. But doctors and lawyers live in Palaces, and even a moderate purse can keep a horseless carriage. And your St. Mark's Square, which is the largest drawing-room in the world, is also the most democratic. Ladies of quality j
ostle shawled street-walkers, a German sailor galls the kibe of a beautiful Browning duchess, officers with showy epaulettes glitter among respectable shopkeepers; helmeted cuirassiers, Austrian admirals, policemen with coloured tufts like lamp-cleaners, German baronesses, bouncing bonnes with babies, garlic-scented workingmen, American schoolgirls, and kings in exile, are mixed pell-mell, all in perfect freedom and equality, and, though in the shadow of St. Mark's Church, quite Christian. And an Italian crowd is also Christian in its freedom from crush. It does not turn a fete into a fight and a concourse into a competition. Thus, as the Prince Consort was amused to find we English said of our pleasure-parties, all "passes off well." Except when there is rain. And the heavens threw unmistakable cold water on the Triple Alliance. The day of the Emperor's stay was the one wet day Venice had known for months-so dank and chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long and heavily, though the London meteorologists registered sunshine,
Cadeva dal cielo la neve Con tutta la sua quiete.
(Down from heaven fell the snow With all its quietness.)
This perfect description of snowfall-which I found rudely chalked on the wall of a Venetian alley-could never have been conceived in the Italy of popular imagination. The superstition about Italian sunshine is like that about Italian beauty. If the country about Florence is the loveliest in Europe, surely the plain of Lombardy around Padua is the ugliest-a land of symmetrical tree-stumps and stony villas flaunting themselves on the roadway in pompous publicity.
In Venice the Emperor seemed specially to irritate the elements. The illuminations were extinguished by a terrific torrent that sent the people pattering away into the black, starless night, gleaming with rain and fire; and to-night when the imperial band attempted to play "Sang an Aegir" again, the heavens fell, and audience and orchestra vanished in the twinkling of a gas-lamp, while the pavement of the Piazza glittered golden as the facade of St. Mark's with dancing reflections, and the lights burnt blue in the wind. Yes, though the papers next day said the Emperor's Song was applauded enthusiastically, Jupiter Pluvius at least never plays the courtier, and Boreas must be a rude reminder to monarchs of their essential humanity. Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the colds of kings. In the daylight I chanced upon a rough wooden platform, bordered with plush and surrounded by tawdry terraces of coloured, glass cups. This was the fairy, Aladdin-like Pagoda. And such, methinks, are kings, on closer acquaintance. How majestic seemed William II., and Humbert, the Kaiserin and Queen Margherita, when, massed in our thousands on the Piazza, we clamoured for a glimpse of them: how inaccessible and star-like when, after much exciting but irrelevant shadow pantomime, they actually appeared on the balcony of the Palace, as if to feed us like the pigeons we had displaced! With what tumultuous rapture did we behold their faces! Stop and think! You cannot stop and think. Enthusiasm is a microbe, and is independent of its object: even so we could yawn over Punch and Judy, if the crowd assembled to yawn. Republicans who came to sneer remained to cheer.
'Tis comic this, And comic that, And clown on royal pay, But 'tis "Long live unser Kaiser!" When the band begins to play.
And humanity has need of leaders, heroes-'t is a primal instinct. The Jews had Jehovah himself for sovereign, but nothing would content them but a real man-king, who should rule them and judge them and go out before them in war. Kings were leaders once, but in modern days they are only symbols, just as flags are: the whole force of the nation is behind them, and they stand for home and country. This it is that gives them majesty and divinity.'tisa case of transformation of function, an old institution adapted to new uses, and valuable partly as giving colour to life, partly for preventing the evils which Gibbon so pregnantly showed to be inseparable from any system of primacy not based on an immutable heredity. The trouble is when the flag wishes to order the march.
An unbroken tradition has kept up the old phrases of loyalty, and so what wonder if a king sometimes takes them seriously! "Le roi le veult" not unnaturally leads sometimes to a king willing. And also we are not quite conscious of the transformation; it has come about so gradually that no one knows when kings ceased to be leaders, and when they became flags, and so with the new feeling blend confusedly strands of the old. We English have abolished the sovereign, but we are too loyal to say so. In Germany the sovereign has refused to be a symbol, and in a country over-civilised in thought and under-civilised in action, he has had a pretty good innings. I must confess I do not find this attitude of his merely ridiculous. It forces clearly upon the modern world the question of kingship, whether it is to be a sham or a reality. Unpopular as William II. has made himself by his martinet methods-ridiculous, if you will-yet there is only one step from the ridiculous to the sublime. In a flippant age he takes himself seriously, has a sense of a responsible relation to his people. Have you seen the cartoon he designed to inspire the nations of the West to league together for the protection of their ideals against the races of the East? The thought may be trite, the philosophy leagues behind the doctrines of the Berlin Aufgeklarter, but it shows a soul above card-playing or court-gossip. What a noble chance there would be for a modern sovereign who should really be the head of his people, on a par with the culture of his age, in harmony with its highest ideals, fostering all that is finest in life and character, in art and thought! Snobbishness would be converted to useful ends, and courtiers would become philosophers out of sheer flattery. But such a Platonic king is scarcely to be looked for: the training is so bad.
The presence of kings makes places abnormal and out of character, but in Venice it rather gives one a sense of the true Venice, she that once held the gorgeous East in fee. For the Venice of every day only escapes vulgarity by force of beauty: she lives up to the English and German tripper, borders her great Piazza with photograph shops, and counts on the sentimental traveller to feed her pigeons. Oh, that trail of the tourist over Europe, falsifying the very things he went out for to see! "Coelum rion animum mutant," said the Roman poet long ago of travellers, but the modern traveller carries his sky with him. Instead of "Venice in London" 'tis London in Venice. Carefully fenced off from the local life by his table d'hote, it is rarely that the Briton comes to understand that he and not the native is the foreigner, the forestiere. Cities on show are never real; they are like people posturing before a camera, instead of being taken au naturel. And "the season" is the time in which they are least real. Too many Cooks' tourists spoil the broth. Cities en fete are masked and prankt, and the spring in Italy is like one long Forestieri day. At the church of Eremitani in Padua I was taken to see some Mantegnas at a side-altar while a very devout congregation was celebrating Eastertide, and the verger unlocked a gate and pocketed his tip with undiminished piety. How apt an image of life, these Italian churches-some of us praying and some of us sightseeing! It must be confusing to the celestial bookkeepers to distinguish the Bibles from the Baedekers. And while the real Venice is as unreal as the real Florence or the real Rome, Venice welcoming her king gives one a truer impression of the Venice of our dreams, the Queen of the seas in the brave days of old. Let us forget the steamboats and the iron bridges, let us make believe that the Hohenzollern is the great Bucentaur, in which the Doge went out to wed the Adriatic and which that arch-Philistine Napoleon broke up. For the Venice of every day is a dead city, with nothing left of its ancient glories but wealth. Though the millions be reckoned in lire, there are over a hundred millionaires in Venice. But of that mighty artistic and religious impulse which produced countless churches and palaces, pictures and frescoes, which strewed the very street walls with spirited sculpture, and warmed even parochial offices with priceless paintings, there is as little trace as of the indomitable e
nergy that founded a great Republic on wooden piles and guarded it from the sea by dykes and from its enemies by the sea. The escutcheons of its great families are fast becoming archaeological, and Americans and Jews inhabit their palaces. How great a power Venice was I never realised till I was permitted to see the Archives. It takes three-quarters of an hour to walk through these galleries of town records. Miles of memorandums, wildernesses of reports, acres of ambassadors' letters from every court in Europe, written in cipher with inter-bound Italian translations. I tried to find the report of the ambassador at the Court of St. James anent the execution of Charles I., but gave up hopeless, oppressed by the musty myriads of volumes, and found comfort in the signature of Queen Elizabeth, surely the most regal autograph in the world, like some ship going out against the Armada with swelling canvas and pennants streaming. There's a woman after Nietzsche's heart-strong, splendid, and unscrupulous. If Nietzsche had married her, he might have changed his philosophy. What a diplomatist, this Englishwoman! To this day the Direttore of the Archives of Venice swears by her. Those awesome Archives! The reports of the Council of Ten alone stretch away through vasty halls of death. And then people talk of writing history! How fortunate that the exact details of royal, political and military events are as unessential as they are unattainable! Real history consists mainly of the things that haven't happened-the millions of everyday lives, sunrise and sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the bargains in the market-place. The reading of Clio's blood-stained scroll would be unbearable, were it not for the reflection that all the important things have been left out-the myriads of sunny mornings that dawned on the "Dark Ages," and filled creation with the joy of life; the hopes and loves throbbing in the great obscure mass of humanity; the individual virtues and victories that co-existed with the decadence of great empires; the vast ocean of consciousness of which History just skims the surface. And now all that great Venetian life is over, the dreaded Council of Ten is as the dust that covers its reports, and the Doge's Palace is a spectacle for tourists at a franc a head. Great Caesar dead and turned to show. And those who pay the franc scarcely seem to reflect that princes and artists did not live and die in Italy to help young British or German couples over their honeymoon; that Dandolo and Foscari, Sansovino and Tintoretto, passed away with no suspicion of that latter-day trinity-Bride, Bridegroom, and Baedeker. Strange that that which was so real to themselves is so romantic to us! Such is the transmutation of time, which can colour with poetry things much more prosaic than life in ancient Venice. Nothing of us that doth fade
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