III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 193

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 humour 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 labour, 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 developments 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,* 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.¹ In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which

* See Appendix 9 [p. 264].

¹ [Compare the description, in Modern Painters, Vol. V. pt. ix. ch. ix. § 1, of the Venetian senators-”fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, implacable-every word a fate.”]

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