In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil
was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries
through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the
evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered
among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for
turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time,
the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be
anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller, than that which, as I endeavoured to
describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of
Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of
Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its
buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great
towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance,
and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers
out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible
that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of
the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling
lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets
bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds,
the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in
knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all
proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city
rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa,
but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued
into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a
field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of
the lonely island church, fitly named "St. George of the Seaweed." As
the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had
just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its
northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple
pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three
smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots,
and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the
chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of
jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of
misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and
itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite
upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up
behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the
great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick
silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when
its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was
entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep
inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the
traveller's sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces,--each
with its black boat moored at the portal,--each with its image cast
down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze
broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the
extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal
curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi;[136] that
strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern,
graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike
circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stalì,"[137]
struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty
cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the splash of the
water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's
side; and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of
silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with
its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of
Salvation,[138] it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply
entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so
strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.
Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state,
rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature
was wild or merciless,--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and
tempests,--had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might
still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed
for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.
And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the
face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on
Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble
landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a
glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though
many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins,
there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect
has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her
origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at
least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of
the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to
repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is
ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its
remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the
imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before
us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of
this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those
mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and
they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see
them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as
fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of
protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to
have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing
of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the
first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name
is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed
that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of
Venice;[139] no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which
the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which
Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was
erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after
Faliero's death;[140] and the most conspicuous parts of the city have
been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries,
that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari[141] could be summoned from
their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance
of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favourite
subject, the novelist's favourite scene, where the water first narrows
by the steps of the Church of La Salute,--the mighty Doges would not
know in what part of the world they stood, would literally not
recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose
ingratitude, their grey hairs had been brought down with bitterness to
the grave. The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous
masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in
many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal,
where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred
years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task to
glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image
of the lost city; more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now
exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor by the
ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts,
contending against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that
its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination,
but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and
solitary scene, whose restless tides and trembling sands did indeed
shelter the birth of the city, but long denied her dominion.
When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the
great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself
causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution of its
debris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediment which the
torrents on the other side of the Alps bear into the plains are
distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to
appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from
the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the
Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the
two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their
battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from
their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the
Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky
barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences
which continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the
accumulation of the ruins of ages.
I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by insisting on the
singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many
centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the main fact
with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and its
great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to the
sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly expressed
by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part of large
rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick; and
was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these same
pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to check
the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona.[142] The
finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the
rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that,
however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the
foot of the great chain, they become of the colour and opacity of clay
before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once
thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land
along the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of
course builds forward the fastest; on each side of it, north and south,
there is a tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less liable
to rapid change than the delta of the central river. In one of these
tracts is built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE.
What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this great belt
of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place to inquire.
It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the Adige to those
of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to
five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long
islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the
true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighbourhood
of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a
foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide,
but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels,
from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to the run
of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated,
some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built
upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary,
it has not reached the sea level; so that, at the average low water,
shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of
seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance
by the confluence of several large river channels towards one of the
openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a
crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which
appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at
different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according
to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents
and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and
encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.
The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying
considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is
enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main
canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At
high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of
Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or
gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide,
between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide
between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the
lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the
impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean,
although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully,
betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deepwater channels,
which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge
sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded
waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the uplifted
level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low
tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over
the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is
seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of sea-weed, of gloomy
green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its
associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this
salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by
tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often
so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till
their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea water like the
ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the ground
at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the
banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the
uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly
oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of higher ground bears
some fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what it was once,
let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some
unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let
him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that
still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the
islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright investiture and
sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black
desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night,
pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful
silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools,
or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he
will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with
which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation.
They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and
strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be
the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the
great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be
remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which
no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence
and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by
the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had
deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and
again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges
beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian
architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an
ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the
Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome,
and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only
a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the
doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there
is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without
setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides
sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance halls.
Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and
ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a
treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of
water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city
would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the
peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this
faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic
conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have
felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid
rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh
waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little
could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were
shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their
desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the
glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all
the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which
were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and
feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a
preparation, and _the only preparation possible_, for the founding of a
city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the
earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and
to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the
burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour.
[136] The palace of the Camerlenghi, beside the Rialto, is a
graceful work of the early Renaissance (1525) passing into Roman
Renaissance. [Adapted from Ruskin.]
[137] Signifying approximately "Keep to the right."
[138] See note 1, p. 129.
[139] _Childe Harold_, 4. 1.
[140] _Marino Faliero_, 3. 1. 22 ff.
[141] Dandolo [c. 1108-1205] and Foscari [1372-1457] were among the
most famous of Venetian Doges.
[142] In the battle of Custozza, 1848, the Austrians defeated the
Piedmontese.