friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark. There are
moments, after all, when the church is comparatively quiet and
empty, and when you may sit there with an easy consciousness of
its beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go into any
Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at
the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I
just spoke of; you treat the place as an orifice in the peep-
show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function--or, at the
worst, an amorous one--to feed one's eyes on the molten colour
that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its
richness. It is all so quiet and sad and faded and yet all so
brilliant and living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures,
bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through the
glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them
catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes
nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or
perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching;
there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The
church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of
surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and
kneel upon and lean against--it is from this the effect proceeds.
In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may
go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook.
It is a treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are
usually three or four of the fraternity with their easels set up
in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy
to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable
attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid.
But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the
great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the