t of mere levity. I said, in the fifth chapter, that the Venetians
were distinctively a serious people, serious, that is to say, in the
sense in which the English are a more serious people than the French;
though the habitual intercourse of our lower classes in London has a
tone of humor in it which I believe is untraceable in that of the
Parisian populace. It is one thing to indulge in playful rest, and
another to be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure: and gaiety of heart
during the reaction after hard labor, and quickened by satisfaction in
the accomplished duty or perfected result, is altogether compatible
with, nay, even in some sort arises naturally out of, a deep internal
seriousness of disposition; this latter being exactly the condition of
mind which, as we have seen, leads to the richest developements of the
playful grotesque; while, on the contrary, the continual pursuit of
pleasure deprives the soul of all alacrity and elasticity, and leaves it
incapable of happy jesting, capable only of that which is bitter, base,
and foolish. Thus, throughout the whole of the early career of the
Venetians, though there is much jesting, there is no levity; on the
contrary there is an intense earnestness both in their pursuit of
commercial and political successes, and in their devotion to
religion,[45] which led gradually to the formation of that highly
wrought mingling of immovable resolution with secret thoughtfulness,
which so strangely, sometimes so darkly, distinguishes the Venetian
character at the time of their highest power, when the seriousness was
left, but the conscientiousness destroyed. And if there be any one sign
by which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to the very
life, by a school of portraiture which has never been equalled (chiefly
because no portraiture ever had subjects so noble),--I say, if there be
one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is this
deep pensiveness and solemnity. In other districts of Italy, the dignity
of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly
owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly raised or idealized
his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of
the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which
has most perfectly taken the color of his own mind; and the least
impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been
unaffected and unmodified po