mshawpyle's Full Review: John Julius Norwich - Paradise Of Cities: Venice I...
I regret to note, for those not already aware of the sad news, that Ed Grover is fallen ill, having been diagnosed with lung cancer. It is time and past time that just tribute were paid.
Hazlitt wrote, of Coleridge, that Coleridge was overborne by ‘… the endless volume of his waking dreams. Cloud rolls over cloud; one train of thought suggests and is driven away by another; theory after theory is spun out of the bowels of his brain, not like the spider’s web, compact and round, a citadel and a snare, built for mischief and for use; but, like the gossamer, stretched out and entangled without end, clinging to every casual object, flitting in the idle air, and glittering only in the ray of fancy.’
If ever there were a city of gossamer, yet one also fit for mischief and for use, a citadel and a snare, it was, surely, Venice in the XIXth Century, after the destruction at Bonaparte’s hands of La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic. If ever there were a serene recounting of the Venetian past after the glory was departed, it is, of course, that of Lord Norwich, the pre-eminent historian of Venice, Byzantium, and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and a man after Ed’s own heart by Ed’s own statement. I wrote, long ago, that
John Julius, 2d Viscount Norwich, is the son of Alfred Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill’s indispensable lieutenant in the struggle against Nazism, and Lady Diana Cooper, nee Manners, the society beauty who was the daughter of the duke of Rutland. This is worthy of mention only because Norwich’s background so informs his work, which is generally ‘all compound’ of high politics, statecraft, a cynical view of the great, and a profound ęsthetic sensibility;
to which Ed noted, ‘I knew this would be something I could get into, especially the “cynical view” part.’ Indeed.
But if Norwich maintains a cynical view of statecraft, he is no such fool as to assert cynicism’s sophistries in the face of beauty and memory; and in the pastel- and watercolor-Venice that emerged from the fall of the Republic and the successive occupations of Bonaparte and the Habsburgs, he has found a terrible beauty born. Yet not terrible, perhaps, for it is the beauty of the once-great, the Wordsworthian Gothic beauty – odd as the Gothic ideal ever was to Venice – that Norwich finds in this dethroned Venice, so apt to his pen: the beauty of the ruins of Tintern Abbey, the beauty that GKC so deftly captured in describing a memorable woman:
She was one of those handsome women who will always be handsome, because the beauty is not in an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the head and features. But though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour, there was a look in her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows wasted her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple.
It is perhaps no accident that the bare ruin’d choirs of the Abbey that inspired Wordsworth were Catholic, that GKC was Catholic, and that GKC evokes the images of a ruined Greek temple, for the beauty of Venice is at once a Classical, a Catholic, and a part-Byzantine beauty. Nor perhaps is it coincidence that Norwich and the subjects of most of his set-pieces, through whose eyes and deeds and words we see the Venice of dreams, were Englishmen responding to an un-English and foreign beauty, as mediated through Wordsworthian Romanticism.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
That was the question Venice posed its visitors in the days of its long fall from power and glory, and Browning was one of those who had spent time enough in Venice to ask it.
To answer it – if it is answerable – Norwich spares no pains in examining the soul and the kissing both, and does so (which is the most effortful thing in the world) seemingly effortlessly. His method is a sort of via negativa, and the portrait that emerges is in some sense a silhouette; his answers, or the data that allow the reader to answer Browning’s challenge if he will, are in the portraits of those who asked the question, in their own ways, confronted with the dream and reality of XIXth Century Venice.
And what a cast they are, to be sure. Bonaparte, of course, who cared neither for soul nor for kissing. Manin and Garibaldi and the Revolutionaries of 1848, who sought the kiss of battle and saw their souls as measured by the ideals of the Risorgiomento. Wagner, who conceived of the soul as superior to kissing, and Byron, who cared nothing for the former and pursued the latter, scandalously, all his life long. Rawdon and Horatio Brown, the first great ęsthetes in the Berenson mould, who mediated all things through art and repressed any impulses to kisses that accorded with their souls. Henry James, allusive and tortured; Ruskin, as tortured in his way: all soul, rendered terrified by kissing. Whistler and Turner and John Singer Sargent, for whom the soul’s work was the delicate, chaste kiss of art, of brush on canvas. Symonds and Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo,’ scandalous in their kisses and louche loves, suspended excruciatingly between the soul’s call and the carnal kiss. Browning, who of all of them was best able to integrate the kiss and the soul.
These are the eyes through which Norwich invites us to see the part-worn Venice of the days of resignation and absorption. These are the stories, deftly depicted as always, brief lives and sudden illuminating scenes as perfect as miniatures by Hilyard or Holbein, as wash-delicate and evocative as Whistler’s sketches.
These small, superb set-pieces shed the fullest and most lambent light, the light of Turner’s brush, upon the Venice of dreams and dreamlike reality, where mischief and its uses were the snare, and all things wore the mask of Carnival: gossamer, glittering only in the ray of fancy
And yet, in the end, it was in Venice that Byron, in the very midst of another of his scandalous loves, penned perhaps his most nearly perfect lyric, ‘So We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ – not that he didn’t resume a-roving within the week:
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
It is that persistence of soul, so apt to my occasion here, that persistence of soul alike in men and in places and their history and influence, that is Norwich’s great subject, and that his pen so well adorns.
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