Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/163

Rh was neither graceful nor charming. But while we may allow him literary qualities finer than those of all but a very few English travellers, and own him an ingenious and interesting observer, we cannot accept his view of any alien "peeple" as philosophical. His survey of the Signory of Venice is thoroughly entertaining, but his conversation with those "gentlemen of Venice" with whom he so much loved to speak, in the intervals of looking up the glass industry at Murano, does not seem to have supplied him a perspective for a very luminous view of their actual political character; or if it did, he scarcely invites his reader to share its advantages with him. He takes note of the successive changes by which Venice became the strongest and closest aristocracy from the widest democracy, but not with such effect as to leave them strongly stamped upon the imagination or to render them significant. Perhaps no contemporary observer could have detected in the Venice which Howell surveyed in the seventeenth century the facts and reasons of her inevitable decay. He, at any rate, saw her flourishing in immortal youth, with a glorious perpetuity before her, though in the retrospect she can be seen to have entered long before on the course of disease and death, which was not to end for yet more than two hundred years. Yet it is to be said of him that he was not, with all his fond admiration of Venice, a sentimental adorer, and the peculiar Venetian myth, the superstition of a state all dramatic incident, darkling intrigue, and ruthless tyranny, had no root in him. The seeds of this were to be sown after the fall of Venice, and to find their nurture in the deposits of that flood of romanticism which swept over the European world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As far as any complicity in that folly is concerned, Howell is as guiltless as Mr. McClellan, and for his time and place he is almost equally modern.

What Mr. McClellan has done, and done so well as to give his performance almost unique value, is to have given us a view of the Venetian oligarchy which is modern in this time and place, in the year 1904, and in the city of New York. He has conceived of Venice, as some one was sure at last to conceive of Venice, as the most strictly businesslike state that ever existed, a state built upon commercial principles, rather than moral and political ideals, and destined to endure as long as the business conditions continued propitious. She was a business enterprise, and if she failed at last, she escaped for a thousand years the doom which awaits ninety-five per cent, of all business enterprises. She was the New York, she was the Chicago, she was the Dawson City of her day; and she was not the less so because history and fancy so richly clothe her in the picturesqueness of the past. But it does not follow that because she was so modern, our modernity should evolve in her direction. We are a part of the English evolution, and it appears that we have not yet completed the democratic solution from aristocratic origins, which Mr. McClellan makes us observe was reversed in the Venetian process evolving an aristocracy from democratic origins. Whatever end we are going on to, the end that she attained with an unexampled perfection was a commercial patriciate in which feudalism and populism were alike sacrificed. The highest nobles and the lowest plebeians were thrust aside together by the successful plutocrats who formed themselves into a new aristocracy and became the state. After several coups d'état had culminated in the closing of the Grand Council under the Doge Pietro Gradenigo, that ossification of Venice began which so long had the effect of strength, that three hundred years later it gave the lively Howell the impression of immortal youth.

Mr. McClellan, of course, is not the first to bring the fact to the reader's consciousness; it has been the common property of philosophical observers since the fall of Venice, but his sense of the Venetian oligarchy as "the machine" is a contribution to the philosophy of the subject which is fairly his own. His notion of the involution, rather than the evolution of a national life, is very interesting and suggesting, and it seems to be the one thing absolutely new in his study. Other things in it are more or less derivative from former surveys of the subject, but it had remained for him to formulate if not to originate this. It