232 THE STONES OF VENICE

M. Ongania’s,¹ with such illumination as those New Lamps contain-Lunar or Gaseous, enabling pursy Britannia to compare, at her ease, her own culminating and co-operate Prosperity and Virtue with the past wickedness and present out-of-pocketness of the umquhile Queen of the Sea.

§ 2. Allowing to the full for the extreme unpleasantness of the facts recorded in this book to the mind of a people set wholly on the pursuit of the same pleasures which ruined Venice, only in ways as witless as hers were witty, I think I can now see a further reason for their non-acceptance of the book’s teaching, namely, the entire concealment of my own personal feelings throughout, which gives a continual look of insincerity to my best passages. Everybody praised their “style,” partly because they saw it was stippled and laboured, and partly because for that stippling and labouring I had my reward, and got the sentences often into pleasantly sounding tune. But nobody praised the substance, which indeed they never took the trouble to get at; but, occasionally tasting its roughness here and there, as of a bitter almond put by mistake into a sugarplum, spat it out, and said, “What a pity it had got in.”

If, on the contrary, I had written quite naturally, and told, as a more egoistic person would, my own impressions, as thinking those, forsooth, and not the history of Venice, the most important business to the world in general, a large number of equally egoistic persons would have instantly felt the sincerity of the selfishness, clapped it, and stroked it, and said, “That’s me.”

To take an instance in what seemed to me then a little matter, but has become since an important one. In the article of the index,² “Ponte de’ Sospiri,” the reader will find the influence of that building on the public mind ascribed chiefly to the “ignorant sentimentalism of Byron.”

Now, these words are precisely true; and I knew them

¹ [For M. Ongania as publisher, see Vol. X., Introduction, p. lii. Florian’s café on the south side of the Piazza is well known to every visitor to Venice.]

² [See below, Venetian Index, p. 433.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]