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| THE WESTERN VENICE BY MOONLIGHT - It is the
crowning
glory of Carlyle that he wrote "Sartor Resartus" - The Tailor Mended.
In that wonderful book, which it is held that only a few can
understand, he deals, first, with the masks and conventions afforded
by clothes. After he has indulged his fancy, satire and ridicule
with the power of fine clothes, and the effect of rags, he passes to
the more serious and poetic treatment of his subject, which is to
show that even as a man's clothes are but the covering of his body,
so his words, his acts, his life, and his hopes, are but a leaping
down orally from Adam of some thoughts, beliefs, ideas and emotions
toward which he is like the man in the hippodrome who holds the hoop,
or helps the performance along. The truth of this dictum was to be
felt in Jackson Park, especially in the moonlight, where it would be
apparent to the thoughtful visitor that the scene could not have
existed had not Venice previously existed. Hither had leaped, across
the centuries, across the seas, all that was beautiful and sacred in
the Bride of the Adriatic. The corpse, the body, the mask of
murders, wars, conspiracies and torture had stayed behind; the music
of the oars, the white shining arches of the palaces, the columns of
St. Mark, the gondoliers, the blue sky and glistening waters, in the
midst of three hundred millions of the world's wealth piled round
about, was here, a Venice resurrected from its crimes and glorified. |
