BOOKS.
STUDIES IN VENETIAN HISTORY.* THE real Venice is little known to the world at large. The common traveller sees the aesthetic charm of her site and architecture, and is familiar with her Titians and Bellinis. But her diplomacy, her Constitution, her finance, are in the main unstudied regions. Only the curious historian explores them, for their record is in a wilderness of archives to which the tourist has no access. And yet, if the truth be told, the Venetians were not primarily an artistic people, and the real life of the city was little touched by the art which has made her name famous. As Mr. Brown says in his preface, "it was a fringe, an adornment, the outcome of commercial and con- stitutional well-being ; bearing the imprint of its birthplace, it is true, and eminently characteristic of Venice, but, neverthe- less, merely a flower whose roots must be looked for else- where." Bishop Creighton says very truly that the Venetian State was a "joint-stock company for the exploitation of the East." For centuries she was the only part of Europe not preoccupied with theological and parochial squabbles, but living always in touch with a wider world. Her history is the most variegated pattern in the whole European web, but that history is not to be understood by the careless traveller. Mr. Brown, knowing Venice as probably no other Englishman has ever known it, gives us in this book a series of studies in some of the features of the Venetian common- wealth and a set of pictures of some of the great scenes and figures of her story. His scholarship is profound, but he wears his learning lightly, and these essays are as remarkable for their grace of style and vivid portraiture as for their sound historical judgment. The book will be prized by all lovers of the enchanted city as an illuminating guide to the essentials of her past.
The studies fall under two types,—the investigation of the Constitutional and economic policy of the State, and the re- telling of some of her famous tales. In the first essay we are given the history of the city of the Rialto, the beginning of modern Venice, which was formed under the pressure of Frankish invasion out of the democracy of Malamocco and the aristocracy of Heraclea. To the aristocrats the Court of Byzantium had always the major attraction. The colony owed it a titular obedience, and at the same time admitted by her acts the authority of the Frankish Kings. The balance leaned to one side or the other according to the proclivities of the governing class, till the people in the end took the matter into their own hands, and proclaimed themselves neither Lombard nor Byzantine, but Venetian. In the second essay —on Tiepolo's conspiracy—we reach the first of the great Constitutional crises. The new aristocracy based on com- merce aimed at extinguishing the people constitutionally and consolidating themselves into the supreme power behind a formal ducal authority. The Doge came to be merely the mouthpiece of the new party, and the closing of the Maggior Consiglio to all who did not belong to a narrow circle of great houses prevented fresh blood from ever leavening the auto- cracy. The Doge, as Mr. Brown says, may have been dux in foro, but he was also serous in consilio, and virtually c,aptivus in palutio. Tiepolo's conspiracy was undertaken on behalf of the elder aristocracy and the old Constitution of Venice, and it attempted to enlist democratic support. The usual Italian revolution of the Middle Ages ended in the establishment of Signori, but after the Tiepoline conspiracy "Venice found herself not under the rule of a single tyrant, an individual who might be assassinated and who was doomed, sooner or later, to extinction with his whole race, but with the
• Stwlies in the History of Venice. By Horatio F. Brown. 2 vola. London John Hurray. [188. net.] permanent unassailable Ten as her Lord." It destroyed her democracy, but it made her for centuries the one stable element in Northern Italy. In other ehapters Mr. Brown explores some of the curious byways of their government. The chapter on the Venetian Constitution is one of the clearest statements we know of the most enduring oligarchy of which history has any record. Valuable, too, is the account of Venetian commercial policy. Venice was primarily a depot, a distributing centre for merchandise, but she soon developed many lucrative industries, which were carefully fostered by her Government. Commercially that Govern- ment was always paternal, and, unique in history, it exercised a literary censorship over books published in order that the credit of her presses might not go down. She owed her success to her geographical position, her enterprise, and in a sense to her trade policy. But a series of events, beginning with the fall of Constantinople and the rise of the Turk, and ending with the discovery of the Cape passage and the rise of English and Dutch commerce, shifted the centre of gravity away from her, and other nations began to use the lesson of protection she had taught against her. Perhaps the chapter which sheds moat light on the spirit of mediaeval Venice is that on "Political Assassination." The Republic, like all Italy, was prepared to hire bravos to get rid of awkward opponents, but she was curiously businesslike in her methods. One of these bravos, Brother John of Ragusa, appreciated her commercial spirit, for he put in a tender for assassinations based on a careful tariff. The Grand Turk was to cost 500 ducats ; lesser potentates 50 each; the Pope 100; and the King of Spain 150 ducats, with travelling expenses added.
To most readers the book will appeal chiefly by its collection of romantic tales. It is true, as Mr. Brown says, that Venice " demanded and secured the effacement of the individual," but there are a few records which escape the civic monotony. Mr. Brown has gleaned industriously in the archives, and has brougbe forth some curious gossip. From a literary point of view the little essay called "An International Episode," which tells the sad tale of Salen and Dorotea, but more especially expounds the romance of old libraries, is the best thing in the book. Excellent, too, is the account of the marriage of Ibrahim, that renegede Slav, to the daughter of the Grand Turk. Of the greater stories, the most dramatic is the famous tragedy of Marino Falier, the Doge of Venice whose portrait in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio is represented only by a black curtain. Byron has misread the tale. It was no revolt of an enlightened democrat against tyranny, but the inexplicable freak of an old and distinguished man who hoped to make himself a tyrant by the help of the seafaring and merchant classes. This, at any rate, was the view of Petrarch, who was a con- temporary and a friend of Faller. The fact that the populace failed him when the crisis came shows that they did not regard him as fighting their battles. Another high tale of treason is that of the Spanish Terror, engineered by the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, with the help of sundry adventurers in Venice. The Republic got wind of the plot, and silently nipped it in the bud, so that the citizens when they woke on the morning of May 18th, 1618, found two corpses each hung by a leg to the gibbet in the Piazza. The story of Carmagnola, that Piedmontese soldier of fortune who, after establishing the power of Filippo Visconti in Milan and enlarging his domains, went over to the service of Venice, is told at length. He was not a great soldier—few of the adventurers were—and so far as be is concerned Venice seems to have behaved well. It was only after be bad drawn vast revenues for doing nothing and dabbled much in treachery that she enticed him to her and made an end of him. The noblest Venetians who appear in Mr. Brown's pages are two Church- men,—the Cardinal Contarini and Paolo Sarpi. Contarini attempted the hopeless task of reforming the Church from within, and, like Erasmus, he failed. Few more attractive figures are to be found in that epoch of transition than the philosopher whose Venetian blood drove him into the life of action. 'The interest of his life and the pathos of his failure lay in this, that he was at once something more and iomething less than a politician or a philosopher." Paolo Sarpi bad something of the same creed, but he had a spice of intransigence which stiffened him into a great fighter. A physical scientist of the &St rank, he owes his historical importance to his eminence as an ecclesiastical lawyer. He opposed the' temporal pretensions of Rome so stoutly that Venice won in the quarrel. Mr. Brown truly calls him an "Old Catholic." He attacked the Roman Curia, not the Church, of which he was a devout son. He had the lawyer-historian's instinct against secession. Diodato the reformer, who hoped to win him from Rome, wrote of him :—" Sarpi is rooted in that most dangerous maxim that God cares nothing for externals, pro- vided the mind and the heart are in pure and direct relation with Himself." The man who regards externals as of small account is not the maker of popular revolutions.
We have left to the end two papers which are of special interest to Englishmen. One on the relations of Cromwell and Venice includes a Report of the Venetian Ambassador on. the Protectorate which contains some curious and shrewd remarks on the character of the Protector. The second is a careful study of the Shakespearean references to Venice,_ which reveals an extraordinary and exact knowledge of detail. Shakespeare knew that to go from Belmont—i.e., Montebello— to Venice it was necessary to go by the ferry-boat which started from Padua, and that the exact distance between that city and Belmont was twenty miles. In the characters of Portia and Shylock we have pure Venetian types, and the atmosphere of the Rialto is correctly rendered. Shakespeare knew that• Frankfort was the chief German city which traded with Venice, that the Venetian ladies wore high pattens, and he calls the police "officers of night "—i.e., Signori di Nolte—the • correct title. "Sound as a fish," the proverb which Launce quotes to Speed, is the Venetian Sano come un pesce. It is most unlikely that the great dramatist was ever "out of England," but by force of his quick ear and his poet's imagina- - tion it was "as if he saw it all."
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