Travellers’ Venice: Some Images for Byron and Shelley

TRAVELLERS' VENICE: SOME IMAGES FOR BYRON AND SHELLEY MILTON WILSON 'Venice is ... a mirror held up to its own shimmering image - the central conceit on which it has evolved.' So writes Mary McCarthy of the city of canals and glassworks. She adds, moving from one companion of Narcissus to another, 'and no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before.'! My essay takes this last dictum for granted, not merely as an excuse for plagiarism, but as an historical principle too. Venetian images do not begin, they just persist. Even when a discoverable beginning really exists, it is hard to believe that you have really located it. Take, for example, one of Miss McCarthy's own favourite images. A friend of hers 'observes that the gondolas are like hearses; I was struck by the novelty of the fancy until I found it, two days later, in Shelley.... Now I find it everywhere." It is unlikely that she found it anywhere in the Renaissance. Neither Hoby, Thomas, Lewkenor, Coryate, Moryson, Howell, Lassels, nor (so far as I know) any other English commentator of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries uses it.' On the contrary, to Renaissance observers the gondola was a pleasant, agile vessel, noted for speed, convenience, and manoeuverability, rather than for anything particularly sinister or gloomy. The blackness of its canopy and hull was prescribed by a series of sumptuary laws intended to restrict private extravagance . The law had to be repeatedly reenacted because it was always being evaded. Not until the end of the seventeenth century was the process of standardization complete. In any case, noone seemed to confuse economy with solemnity. In the seventeenth century the favourite English adjectives for gondolas are 'pretty' and 'neat.' 'Very neat,' says Moryson, 'and covered all save the ends with black cloth.' 'Very pretty things,' says the much-used handbook of Maximilian Misson, 'light and of a pleasant make.' For Richard Lassels, first Englishman to speak of the Grand Tour, they are 'pretty neat black boats." It seems a long way from the pretty boat of the seventeenth century to the 'funereal bark' of Julian and Maddalo. But, while Shelley no doubt has his own reasons for the phrase, the basis of the image had already been established for over half a century. In the reign of George the Third few UTQI Volume XLlIl, Number 2, Winter 1974 94 MILTON WILSON visitors to Venice who published letters, memoirs, or guidebooks failed to call a gondola a hearse. Although an old-fashioned travellers' aid like Thomas Nugent's The GrandTour may still inform us in the 1778 edition (following Misson) that 'gondolas are very pretty boats, extremely light, and of a pleasant structure," George Edward Ayscough's Letters from an Officer in the Guards to His Friends in England, also published in 1778, offers a more fashionable description: A gondola, Sir, is a long black boat, rowed, or rather pushed along by two men standing upright. Towards the end of it there is a small room, with little sliding windows and a curtain. .. ; they are really commodious enough; but as they are obliged to be all painted and lined with black, I cannot help thinking they resemble hearses, and, of course, convey melancholy ideas: besides, I have often told you I hate the sea, and all that belongs to it.6 As a guardsman and a landlubber, Ayscough may have extra cause for melancholy; but the melancholy itself he shares with others. With Christopher Hervey, for example, who thought the town 'very melancholy with all those black hearses gliding along the watery streets of it'; with J.G. Lemaistre , who asks us to imagine a gondola as 'a hearse, such as dead bodies are carried on in England, placed on a boat of the ordinary size of those employed on the Thames'; even with Mrs Thrale, who quotes II Penseroso ,7 It is easy to attribute the image and its attendant melancholy to the same tendencies that gave rise to the graveyard poets and gloomy egoists of the age of sensibility. Even so, there is no convincing historical reason why the sufficiently gloomy seventeenth century...