Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846

These volumes, then, as we have said, will neither replace Murray, nor form a substitute for Eustace. Neither is their interest mainly owing to mere vivid or literal portraiture; by painting in words, as an artist would do by forms and colours, and enrolling before us a visible panorama, such as might present a clear image of the scenes described here to those who had never witnessed them. Their charm – for a charm, we trust, they will have to a considerable number of readers – arises simply from the truth with which they seize, and the happy expression in which they embody, the spirit of the spot; marking, by a few expressive touches, the moral as well as the physical aspect of the scene, and awakening in the reader a train of associations often novel in conception, as well as felicitous in expression; but which appear in general so congenial and appropriate, that we are willing to persuade ourselves they are a reproduction of thoughts, and dreams, and fancies, which had occurred to ourselves in contemplating the same objects. Hence it is to those, who have already witnessed the scenes described, that these volumes address themselves. They do not paint pictures, but revive impressions; they call up or steady imperfectly defined images; bring forward into light struggling memories; – and, by a union of brief description, classic or historical allusions, picturesque and significant epithets, and reflections hinted at, rather than wrought out, they very successfully accomplish their object – that of realizing to the eye of the mind that distinctive and prevailing expression which each aspect of nature, like each movement of the human face, wears in itself, and is calculated to awaken in others – cheerful, sombre, majestic, or awe-inspiring, according to the nature of the scene, the associations past and present with which it is surrounded, and the conditions, or, as a painter would term it, accidents under which it has been viewed.

While we say that Mr Whyte has generally been very successful in his aim, we must not be understood to express by any means an unqualified probation of the taste in which these volumes are conceived, or the plan on which they are constructed. The train of reflection is sometimes too obviously an afterthought – not spontaneously evoked at the moment by the influences of the scene, but evidently devised and wrought up into point and apparent application by a subsequent process. We have dreams which were never dreamt, and reveries which are any thing but involuntary. There are too many Tristram Shandy transitions, sundry cockneyisms in expression, (we use the word in a wide sense,) and one or two jokes which make the blood run cold. Lastly, we are compelled to say that we repose much more confidence in the writer's taste in architecture than in painting. It is enough to say that he evinces no feeling for the more simple and majestic compositions of Raphael; while the powerful contrasts, and magic of light and shadow displayed by Guercino and Tintoret, seem to exercise an undue fascination on his mind. It is only to the injurious effect produced by these blemishes that we can attribute the slender success with which the volumes have been attended; for at this moment we do not recollect having seen them noticed by any of those who assume to themselves the right of distributing the rewards and punishments of criticism.

Let us now look at one or two of Mr Whyte's sketches of Rome, or rather of the train of thought called up by wanderings among its ruins, tracing the broken sweep of its ancient walls, or wandering among the stately aqueducts and nameless tombs of its dreary Campagna.

Fragments of Italy and the Rhineland. London: 1841.

A Pilgrim's Reliquary. By the Rev. T. H. Whyte, M.A. London: 1845.

The Walls of Rome

"I wonder whether it be the fault of mine own inattention, or the absence of good taste in others, that I have heard and read so little of the Walls of Rome! To me they rank among the few, out of all the Wonders of the Eternal City that have exceeded my expectations. Solitude, their peculiar characteristic, has great charms for a companionless enthusiast like myself: it is, moreover, a description of solitude, the very reverse of melancholy. Mile after mile have I repeatedly roamed along the outer Pomœrium of those solitary rampires, and encountered perhaps a goatherd and his pretty flock, the tinkle of whose bells formed the only accompaniment to the honey notes of the blackbird: – or, perhaps, in sonorous solemnity, some great Bell would suddenly boom upon the silence, and be taken up in various tones from a hundred quarters, no vestige, mean time, of Minster or Monastery being visible; nothing but that enormous Adamantine Circlet rearing itself into the sky on one side, and the gateways and walls of villas and vineyards occupying the other. You might fancy those tolling chimes belonging to some City hidden by Enchantment.

"Still, as I have proceeded in my mood, half enjoying, half moralizing the scene, those hundred towers, like Titan warders placed around the Seven Hills, would each after each look down upon me from their high and silent stations; till, as I came to know them, they seemed to meet my gaze with the sedate and pleasant welcome of a venerable friend. They were the incessant associates of my solitude, and I was never wearied of them. Of a surety their vast Circuit (fifteen miles) gives ample time and space enough for rumination!

"Their colossal cubits are the most perfect exemplar of Architectural sublimity. Their dismantled Battlements have no Watchman but Antiquity, no Herald but Tradition, and hear no clamour louder than the Church or Convent bells, or the dirge which the wind wails over them through the melancholy Cypress and the moaning Pine. The broad old belt of short flowery turf at the base, the Violet, the Gilliflower, and the vermilion spotted Mignonette, on their breast, and the chaplet of wilding shrubs upon their brows, give them a charm in the most common-place observation. With me, truant as I have been to the Classic page, it seemed a natural process of my desultory mind, to revert from a contemplation of such pensive dreamy realities of waking enjoyment as I have described, to visions, startling in their august grandeur, of the everlasting past, – visions of their great Architect, Aurelian; of their greater Restorer, Belisarius!

"These monstrous walls! I cannot divest myself of a certain awe and fascination, as if of a supernatural appearance, which attracts and detains me about them; not even the Colosseum more. There seems something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey – and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles. It is as though one should wrap a triumphal robe about a corpse, or place a giant's helmet upon a skeleton's skull. It is no poetical figure to look upon them as an eternal satire upon the great littleness of empire. The melancholy pride of their dimensions needs not the hollow wind, which howls around their towers, or the wondering sun, which lingers over their shrubby ramparts, to proclaim in the ears of thrones and senates the warning of Rome's ambition, the moral of Rome's downfall! It is but a poor recompense to their present unhonoured solitude, that their melancholy battlements are emblazed at intervals with the pontifical escutcheons. Those triple tiaras and cross keys, so perpetually recurring, do not half so much consecrate as they are themselves consecrated by the lonely bulwarks of this desolated city of the Cæsars!"

The Villa Borghese

"With the exception of an ostentatious parade of paltry equipages, tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some haunted place, it appears to be beloved and frequented only by the apparitions of an obsolete race. Yet many minds will find it infinitely more congenial thus, than amidst all the popular splendours of its holy week.

"Her tranquillity, nay, her very desolation, is enchanting. The summer's-day circuit of the Seven Hills seems all your own. You wander whither you will, meeting few, and disturbed by none. In short, the very antiquity of the place is one perpetual novelty, and its grave monotony a serene recreation. I write this in the Villa Borghese, beneath groves of acacias, redolent with odours, and booming with myriads of bees, the yellow hay in aromatic quiles, pitched like pavilions below the old red walls of Rome, and nightingales and blackbirds contending in gushes of ecstatic song!

"Though not new to me, I had little conception of the intrinsic loveliness of the Villa Borghese till to-day. Picture to yourself a large village of the most variegated and romantic character; Church, casino, albergo, and farm, scattered amidst the turfy glades of a forest; and that forest composed of such trees as the beech, the elm, the ilex, and, above all, the sovereign pinaster, whose enormous trunks seem to have condescended to arrange themselves into avenues; the most charmingly artificial glades of the glossiest verdure, and vistas haunted by legions of dim waning statues; hero or demigod, nymph or faun, for ever intermingling but never interfering with each other; their various places of rendezvous emblazed with flowers of a thousand colours, and flashing with fountains of the most graceful fancies possible; while every vista discloses some antique portico, or rotunda, or vestibule of those gems that men call temples! Picture these scenes on some such May-day as this, the dark evergreens rejoicing in the rain-drops, and the new-born leaves of silky green, transparent with the moisture, which had reluctantly ceased to shine on their delicate tapestries. Crown all this with a country palace, of lofty Italian magnificence, a treasure-house of antiquity, painting, and sculpture, disclosing the statues, frescoes, and gilding, of its noble façade and massive campaniles, at the extremity of its darkest grove of evergreens, glittering in this rainbow sunlight, and you may have some impression of the Villa Borghese.

'When God hath shower'd the earth;'

"Such silence and solemnity, that you would never dream you were near the busy haunt of men, were it not, that a long linked diapason of bells, modulated by every possible inflection of their lofty language, convinced you that you were basking amidst all this voluptuous quiet, beneath the walls of a concealed city, and that city – Rome!"

The Ruins. – The Campagna

"This afternoon we drove along the Via Appia Nova. The sun, rolling his chariot amidst a cavalcade of wild clouds, along the ruddy array of shattered arches, variegating the grassy plain with its uncouth palatial and sepulchral ruins, in ebony and gold, illuminated the purple and green recesses of the Sabine hills, and caressing with capricious fleetness their woody towers and towns, bequeathed to the north a calm blue vault, wherein, as in some regal hall of state, the dome of St Peter's, the rotunda of the Colosseum, the vast basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore, and San Giovanni Laterana, that embattled sepulchre of Cecilia, and those lofty masses of the Pamfilipine, which hovered in the horizon like a feathery vapour, proclaim the illustrious domicile of Rome.

"The Temple of the Divus Rediculus (or whatever other title it may rejoice in) is one of those lovely little phantasies of architecture that one might imagine a London citizen would have coveted for a summer-house. The brilliant contrast between its vermilion pilasters and its pale yellow wall, the delicate moulding of its slender bricks and the elaborate elegance of its decoration, not to omit its pleasing, though diminutive proportions, arising from the wild green turf of this melancholy region, can scarcely fail of affecting with at least a spark of fancy, the flattest spirit of this work-day world. For my own part, I should be much less disposed to pronounce it a temple than a tomb; and, in fact, the whole appearance of this wide dull tract seems eminently adapted to sepulchral piles. It is most melancholy, most funereal; and even that glorious sun, and those majestic aqueducts, soaring, as they do, to salute his lustre, and to emulate his glory, cannot efface the feeling, that such a scene, and such memorials, should be visited only in the gloom of a sad and stormy sky; either amidst the sympathetic moans of an autumnal tempest, or the waning and mournful glimpses of an autumnal twilight."

The Colosseum

"It was the twilight, that brief, that exquisite interval, which flings its purporoseate veil between the palace gates of day and night. You might have fancied it the car of Diana rolling on to some Olympian festival, and preceded by Venus, the only other planet visible in the sky. What a canopy! – Not the gaudiest velabrum that the ostentatious munificence of her Cæsars extended above its gilded cordage, ever equalled the empyrean pomp of this soft sky. Never could the artificial rains of perfumed water surpass the dewy fragrance that steals around from evening's thousand urns.

"I say it was the twilight when we entered these gloomy corridors, whose solemn circuit uncoils its colonnades around the lordly pile; but before we had traversed half their extent night began her reign, and when we entered the arena it was difficult to say whether those faintly flushed skies, that single sparkling star, or the pallid hectic of the youthful moon produced the pathetic light that illuminated this enormous architecture.

"As it now stands, the Colosseum is indeed a wreck, rendered absolutely frightful by repair; and whether by sunlight or moonlight, compels you to lament the 'melancholy activity' which, utterly inadequate to the restoration of its pristine glory, has deprived it of all those adventitious ornaments, trees, and herbage, and a thousand beautiful flowers, which, if they could not conceal, at least served to soften its injuries, and which mitigated the desolation they were unable to repair.

"Of course a thousand imaginations and memories hunt each other through one's head and heart in such a place and at such an hour as this, but to-night there were realities, which, where they do not dispel, must always reinforce such phantasies.

"Before the steps of the great cross in the centre, garnished with all the emblems of the passion, knelt a respectably dressed group, apparently father, mother, and daughter, absorbed in a rapture of devotion. The lamps were lighted before the fourteen shrines, which Benedict the Fourteenth erected around the arena, and flung a dusky light upon the successive stagioni of our Saviour's sufferings, by which each is distinguished; and we saw a solitary peasant, in the dark costume of his country, evidently faint and toil-worn, rise from his oraisons at one shrine, only to sink upon his knees before another.

"Ah! it was at once a simple and sagacious stroke of that priestly sovereign, who, in these prophaned ruins, planted the Cross, and, by a mightier spell than the magician's wand, arrested the rapacity of its patrician plunderers!"

Do not sketches such as these revive for us all those feelings which Rome awakened in ourselves, bringing back the clime, the sky, the loneliness, the mingled feeling of grandeur and situation – the gentle melancholy with which the eternal city impresses even the least imaginative mind? To us they appear to embody more of the poetry of travel than many a work which figures under the mask of poesy.

How much has been written on Venice, from Schiller and Radcliffe to Madame de Staël and Madame Dudevant! and yet we hardly know if any one, with the exception of the last, has more completely imbued his mind with the peculiar spirit of Venice, or reflected its impressions with more truth than Mr Whyte. Schiller, indeed, and Mrs Radcliffe, had never witnessed the scenes they described; their portraiture is the result merely of reading and description, warmed and vivified by the glow of their own imagination. Hence the glimpses of Venice conveyed in Schiller's beautiful fragment of the Armenian, are mere general outlines – true enough so far as they go, but faintly drawn, and destitute, as we might say, of local colour. Mrs Radcliffe's moonlight landscapes – masques and music – exhibit with great beauty one aspect of the city, but only one.

Very different are the Venetian Sketches of Madame Dudevant. She has drunk in the inspiration of Venice on the spot, has penetrated the very heart of its mystery, and reproduces the impressions which an intimacy with its peculiarities produces, with a degree of truth, force, and poetical feeling, that impart the most captivating charm to her Venetian Letters. Mr Whyte's Fragments exhibit much of the same sensibility, the same just perception of the spirit of Venice; and though they have not that brilliancy of style which the pictures of the French authoress possess, there is often even in this respect great beauty both of thought and expression. Mr Whyte, indeed, took the right course to enable him thoroughly to understand and appreciate Venice. Instead of confining himself to the stately vision of the Grand Canal, or the wizard magnificence of St Mark's, he seems to have habitually traced all the lesser canals; the little Rii, which, like small veins, shoot off from the great arteries of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca, carrying the circulation of the Adriatic through this unique city; exploring their high, dark, and narrow recesses, pondering on the strange contrasts of misery and magnificence, squalid filth and luxurious ornament, which they present side by side; and heightening the impression thus created, by selecting all varieties of aspects, from the bright flashing sunshine pouring down into these dark chasms, as into a well, to the shadowy evening, the magic contrasts of moonlight, the gloom of wind and rain howling through the balconies, driving the ocean wave impetuously through these water-ways, and beating against their thousand bridges; or those thunder-storms – nowhere more magnificent than at Venice – where the gleam of the lightning forms so fearful a contrast with the Cimmerian gloom of the canal, and the peals are reverberated with such magnificence from those piles of masonry with which they are lined. There is, indeed, no spectacle that can be conceived, more impressive than some of these smaller canals, particularly if you enter them towards sundown. You glide into a gulf of buildings, rising high on each side – almost meeting above your head – most of them ruinous and dilapidated, sinking by piecemeal into the green element which they have displaced for centuries, but which, through the slow agency of the sap and mine, is visibly resuming his oozy empire. You pass some church with its unfinished marble face. Again, a set of poor rickety and mean edifices follow; when suddenly you come upon some pile of massy grandeur, looming gigantic in the twilight, in whose colossal, but beautiful proportions, you can trace the hand of Sammichele or Sansovino. You come nearer, and perceive the fretted windows broken, stuffed with rags, and patched with paper; rough boards nailed up against the gilded beams; grand portals, of which the doors have disappeared, allowing the eye to penetrate into a dark perspective within: perhaps a sign-board over-tops a glorious cornice of grim masks or armorial bearings; and from latticed windows, on which Palladio had lavished all the delicate beauty of his architecture, some flaunting and gaudy rags are hung out to dry. You enquire what is the building, and to whom it belongs, and you are answered: It is the palace of one of the classic nobility of ancient Venice – now tenanted by a Hebrew, who lets out the apartments at so many lire a month!

But let Mr Whyte speak for himself.

The Bridge of Sighs

"The Canal Orfano, the Ponte di Sospiri! what a day to behold these long pictured images of darknes and terror, for the first time! Such a blaze of May sunshine, such a soothing repose broken by a few distant bells or the nearer laugh of the gay Gondoliers. I looked upon the narrow, immured waters under the Bridge of Sighs, then to the high arch that like the heavy embossed clasp of some old solemn book united its decorated Gothic Piles (those volumes of bloody Story) on either side, and instead of shuddering at inquisitions and racks, and Piombi and Pozzi, as in common decency I ought, away fled my intractable thoughts to merry England's old Sabbath Chimes, her village spires, village greens, village elm lanes, and decent peasantry.

"Yet those high and antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they could, beneath the triumph of such a glorious sun; that light to which their aspect once was hateful, and their deeds untold.

"My gondolier dipt his oar into the canal just under the Bridge of Sighs, and at half its length it was arrested by a hollow substance which he told me was the marble roof of the Pozzi, whose unfathomable tiers of dungeons stretched one under another beneath this dreadful water gallery. It was not here, however, that the secret midnight drownings took place, (as I had fancied,) but in that widest, deepest portion of the Canal Orfano, far out in the Lagoons situated between the towery Isola Servilio and the lovely groves and monastery of San Grazia. This murder-hole of the Adriatic is called Marani, and to this day it is forbidden to fish in its accursed depth. To-day it looks not only innocent, but gloriously bright.

"I was out in the Lagoons this evening, for the purpose of visiting by twilight that solitary Isle of St Clements, where Monks exchange the voluntary seclusion for penal dungeons, (l'un vaut bien l'autre!) the sky glowing with its last light, lingered over its tall belfry and few old trees, and a sea as smooth as a crystal pavement slept at the base of its grim walls, all in vain; Campanile, Convent, Grove, and that pyramidal Powder Magazine, looked obdurately sullen enough to tell their own uses, had I not known their chronicle."

The Small Canals

"I thence directed my gondolier to row under the Bridge of Sighs, through the intricacies of the interior canals; and if ever a man wished to be fed to the full with solemn, ay, appalling gloom, he may be gratified by following my example. From the weltering surface of a labyrinth of channels, let him look up till it wearies him, to the awful roofs of the mansions, whose walls of immeasurable height, and scarfed with black masses of shadow and glaring moonlight, seem to close over his head and to barricade his path, as they interlace and confound each other in endless circuits; and he will have quite enough to kindle the torch of his darker imagination, even if he did not know those tremendous gulfs of masonry to be Venice, and those heart-sinking portals and windows of barbaric sculpture, the homes of her inexorable oligarchy. Yes, you may anticipate Naples, you may picture to yourself Rome, and Florence may have fulfilled much of your previous fancies; but no conception can prepare you for Venice.

"What enchantment lingers still about every stone of this mourning city! My affection for her dismantled palaces is almost morbid.

'Like an unrighteous and an unburied ghost,'

do I nightly haunt that Tartarus of antique masonry, the interior canals of Venice, uniformly entering or departing from them by the Bridge of Sighs. To me their hideous height, their appalling gloom, (for the meridian cannot touch their waters, and the moon glides like a spectre over their huge parapets,) their bewildering intricacies, their joyless weltering floods, the countless bridges, each with its sculptured monster-heads yawning as if to swallow up the silently sweeping gondola in its arch of shadow; their deep dead silence only broken by the sullen plash of the oar, the dreary word of warning uttered by the gondoliers before turning a sharp angle, or the shrill rattling creak of innumerable crickets; but principally those old Gothic posterns with deep-ribbed archways, like rat-holes in proportion to the enormous piles, and their thresholds level with the water, some blockaded with ponderous doors, others developing their long withdrawn passage by a lamp, that not only makes darkness visible, but frightful; while others (as in the Martinengo palace to-night) disclose wide pillared halls, and stately staircases, and moonlight courts – to me, I say, all these attributes of the interior of Venice are irresistible. Were you to see these old porticos by a summer's daylight, you would not fail to find an old fig tree in broad leaf and full of fruit, or a lattice-work of vine, most pleasantly green in its deep court, where sun and shadow hold divided reign; while the hundred shaped windows of those gloomy walls are variegated with geranium and carnation, and perhaps a sweet dark eye fairer than either.