236 THE STONES OF VENICE

Saint! you never read a line of a Father! you never heard of such a thing as a Potestas! How can you possibly expect to know whether they are ill done or well, or to get an inch farther forward anyhow? The whole canvas must remain for you, to the end of days, a mere big rag all over dirty streaks and blotches, as if Venice had wiped her last palette clean for ever with it. Which indeed she effectually did.

“But if I’m really good, and mean to try to see it, what’s to be done?”

Well, you’ve got to read Homer all through, first, very carefully; then with increasing care, the Prophet Ezekiel; then, also with always increasing care, the Gospel of St. John, and then-I’ll tell you what to do next.

“But have you?”

I should rather think so! I knew the Iliad and Odyssey and most of the Apocalypse more or less by heart before I was twelve years old: and have worked under them as my tutors ever since. The Gospel of St. John, everybody, in my young days, knew at least something about, and I’ve read it myself some thousand times, syllable by syllable. That’s all mere alphabetical work, the knowing it; but, after knowing it, you’ve got to believe some of it, and hope to believe more; and then, as I told you, I will tell you what next to do, for then you will begin to understand some of the things I’ve been saying for this last twenty years, and they will lead you as far as, I will not say Tintoret, for you would have to spend another college-residence in actual painter’s work before you could make much of him; but as far as Gentile Bellini and Giorgione; and the rest is according to the time and faculty you can dispose of.

§ 5. When I wrote the passages about Tintoret reprinted in the following index, I had myself only got far enough to understand his chiaroscuro, and his mysticism in the direction in which it resembled Turner’s; his properly Venetian mysticism,-the language of signs and personages, (Iconographie

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