THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE
[Illustration]
THE SEA-CHARM
OF
VENICE
BY
STOPFORD A. BROOKE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND CO.
1907
_All rights reserved._
THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE
When Attila came storming into Europe, his conquests may be said to
have given rise to two great sea-powers. His rush on the north along
the Baltic shores probably caused so much pressure on the continental
English, that many of them, all the Engle especially, left their lands,
found another country in Britain, and gave it the name of England. It
is now, and has been for some centuries, the mistress of the seas, both
in commerce and in war. But when Attila drove his war-plough southward,
he crossed the Alps, and descended on the cities of the plain between
Trieste and the Po. When he reached Altinum, Aquileia, and the other
towns bordering on the lagoon, the Roman nobles, many of whom might
be called merchant princes, and their dependants fled to Torcello, to
Rialto, and to other islands where, before the conqueror came, they had
established depôts for their trading, where the fishermen and boatmen
were already in their pay. When the Goths followed the invading track
of Attila, the emigration of the Roman inhabitants of the mainland to
the lagoon continued year after year; and out of this emigrant flight
grew Venice, the Queen of the Sea.
England was Teutonic, Venice was Roman; and as in England the Teuton
destroyed the influence of Rome, so the Teutonic invasion of Italy,
with all its new elements, never touched Venice. The Gothic influence
left her uninfluenced. She alone in Italy was pure Roman. The English
race was mixed with the Celtic race, but the Teutonic elements
prevailed. But Venice was unmixed. She was always singularly Roman
right down to the dreadful days of her final conquest, so that it may
well be said that Manin was _ultimus Romanorum_. In constitution, in
laws, in traditions, in the temper of her citizens, in manners, in her
greatness, her splendour, even in her unbridled luxury and her decay,
she was Roman to the end. Italy was transmuted by the Goth, but not
Venice.
But owing to her origin she was _Rome at Sea_; and being on the edge
of a sea which naturally carried her war and trade to the East, she
was more of eastern than of western Rome. Byzantium, not the Italian
Rome, was her nursing mother, and poured into her the milk of her art,
her commerce, and her customs. By this, also, she remained outside of
Italy, and her position, anchored in the sea off the Italian coast,
is, as it were, a symbol of her double relation to Western and Eastern
Rome. Whatever change took place in her Roman nature was made by the
spirit of the sea on which she had made her home. Commerce was forced
upon her, and it was not difficult for her to take it up, for the Roman
senators and patricians of Altinum, Padua, Concordia, and Aquileia
who took refuge on the islands, had been traders before they founded
Venice, and only developed more fully in Venice that commerce which
they had practised on the mainland. Aquileia had been for years before
the barbaric invasion the emporium of a trade with Byzantium and the
Danube. The trade was transferred to Venice. It did not, then, arise in
Venice, but it was so greatly increased during the centuries that the
new city held the east in fee. From every port on the Mediterranean,
and from lands and seas beyond that inland lake, the trade of east
and west poured into Venice. To protect her commerce she became a
sea-power. Her struggle for centuries with the pirates formed her
navy and her seamen, both Venetians and mercenaries, into the mighty
instrument of naval war they became when the strife with the pirates
closed in victory. But her captains, her senators, the great dukes who
led the navy into battle, led it for the sake of her commerce, and
were themselves, as Shakespeare made Antonio, “royal merchants,” such
as they had been of old in Padua, Altinum, and Aquileia; and always
Romans. Wherever then we touch Venice we touch the sea out of which she
was born, by which she was nursed, and which when she reached her full
age, she wedded and commanded.
To realize the origins of the city, and this sea-spirit in her history
and her life, to recall in memory the centuries she lasted, and to feel
the sentiment of the splendid sorrow, strife and glory of the tale,
it is well to row to Torcello, to climb to the top of the cathedral
tower, and to look out from the low-arched windows, north and south,
east and west. The door used always to be open, and it was easy to
reach the upper chamber among the bells. Thence, as the voyager gazes
to the north and west, he sees the high dim peaks of the Alpine chain
from whose passes the Hun and the Goth descended. Below him stretches
to the sea the misty plain where the cities of the old Venetia lay,
which Attila advancing from the east gave up to fire and to slaughter,
which Theodoric and Alboin afterwards ruined more completely. From
these and from all the villages of the plain, the Roman nobles with
their dependants fled to the islands of the lagoon which our voyager
sees spreading north and south at his feet for many miles of blue and
silver water. Below the tower are the deep-grassed meadows and dreary
shores of Torcello which the people of Altinum, a third part of whom
took flight from Attila, covered as the years went on with noble
palaces, streets, bridges, and gardens. The cathedral they built was
built with the very marbles which had adorned, and the stones which
had raised, the churches and houses of Altinum. Pillars, capitals,
the pulpits, the chair of the bishop, the marble screen of the choir,
the font, the pavement, belonged to their church on the land. They
were still Venetians. As they increased, and as the emigration from
other cities continued, the dwellers in the older Venetia colonized
Mazzorbo, Burano, Murano, and Malamocco. The islands lie before our
eyes as we look from the southern windows of the tower. And noblest of
all, at the end of the long slow curving line of the deep channel among
the marshes, is Rivo Alto on whose islands the Venetians fixed their
capital at last.
There, tremulous in the sea-mist is the shining expanse of water before
the Ducal Palace, and the towers of the great city, in whose splendour
and power ended the misery and the struggle of the flight. No view
makes a deeper impression on the historian. But when that impression
has been realized, there will steal into his mind, if he have with him
the spirit of imagination, another impression; one of curious charm,
a charm half of nature and half of humanity, a charm not of the land,
but of the sea. In that charm there is the breath of the salt winds
and the life of the dark blue waves which beyond Venice he sees from
Torcello breaking in flashing foam on the Lido which defends the lagoon
and shelters the city. It is a charm that rises to his heart, not only
from the gay tossing of the Adriatic, but from the quiet, glittering,
silver-gray expanse of the tidal lagoon in which the islands sleep like
cattle on the meadows of the land. And of this charm and all it means
and has made Venice, I shall attempt to write.
To write on Venice when many have written so well on her; to describe
her, when she has been described from the Angel that, so short a time
ago, watched over her on the Campanile to the islands on the far
lagoon, seems almost an impertinence. But I have loved Venice for many
years, and the record of any individual impressions received from her
may have the interest which belongs to personal feeling. Moreover, in
this little essay I shall limit myself to one subject--to the charm
and the life which are added to Venice by the presence of the sea, to
the influence which the sea has had on her beauty, on the character of
her art, and on the imagination of those who visit her. What influence
the sea had on her history--that immense subject--does not come within
the scope of this essay. It is only concerned with her beauty, her
charm, as they are bound up with the sea; it is not, save incidentally,
concerned with her history.
In her constitution, in her history, in her people, in her position,
in her art, and in her sea-power and commerce, Venice, among Italian
towns, stands alone. She only is built, not by the sea, but in the
sea, born not on the beach of ocean, but like Aphrodité, from beneath
her heart. It is this difference which, entering into all her lesser
charms, gives them their distinction, their wild, remote, and natural
grace. Other great towns belong to humanity and art; even when they are
sea-ports they are of the land, and are the creation of the land. But
Venice, full of her own humanity, wrought into beauty by the art of
her children, raised from the waves by the labour of those who loved
her, belongs only to the sea, and seems to be the creation, not only of
man, but of great Nature herself. Her streets are streams of the sea,
and were planned by the will of the sea. The great path which, curling
like a serpent, divides her city; by which her palaces of business,
pleasure, and government were built; on which her history displayed
itself for centuries in thanksgiving or sorrow, in pomp or in decay; is
a sea-river ebbing and flowing, and brings day by day, into her midst,
the winds of ocean for her life, the fruits of ocean for her food,
the mystery of ocean for her beauty. This presence and power of the
living sea, running through Venice like blood through a man, makes her
distinctive charm. It is the charm of the life of Nature herself, added
to the life of her art and the life of her humanity.
There are times when this impression is profound. To stand in the dawn,
before the city is awake, on the quay of the Schiavoni, when the East
beyond the Lido is flushing like a bride, and the morning star grows
dim above the sea, is to forget that the stones on which we stand,
the palaces and churches, bridges and towers, were built by man’s wit
or set up for his business and his pleasure. They rose, we think, out
of the will and creative passion of the Sea. The sky and the clouds
descended to bestow on them other light and colour than those of the
sea; the winds, in their playing, flung the bridges over the channels
of the tide and the sunlight knit them into strength; but these were
only the artists that adorned, it was the sea that built, the city.
Lest we should lose the power of this dream, we will not watch the
buildings grow solid in the growing light, but keep our eyes on the
broad expanse of the lagoon, shimmering in silver-gray out to the Port
of Lido, where the silver meets the leaping blue of the Adriatic. The
whole water-surface is alive, though it seem asleep, with the swift
rushing of the tide. Around the angles of the quay, over the marble
steps, all along the smooth stones of the wall, up the narrow canals,
looping past the piles, swirling against the boats, the musical water
ripples; and in every motion, change, and whirl, as in the main
movement of the whole lagoon, the life of Nature in this her kingdom
of the sea, full of force, pleasure, and joy in her own loveliness,
is overwhelming. It masters the spirit of the gazer, and he becomes
himself part of her sea-passion, living in the stream of her sea-being.
There is silence everywhere. The quay is deserted, and if a belated
sailor pass by, the sound of his footstep seems to mingle with the
crying of the sea birds and the plash of the water. And in the silence,
the impression that Nature alone exists, that the city is her work and
that man is nothing, is deepened for the moment into an unforgettable
reality.
A similar impression is made on the voyager who rows at the dead of
night, when the sky is full of stars, out into the lagoon half way
between Venice and the Lido. The city, with its scattered lights,
has no clear outlines; it rises like an exhalation from the sea. The
campaniles are white ghosts that appeal to the dark blue heavens. Below
them, the crowd of buildings wavers in the sea-mist like a shaken
curtain. The city, seen thus in the tremulous starlight, is, we think,
a dream-conception which, in high imagination, the God of the sea,
resting far below on his couch of pearl, has thrown into such form as
his wandering will desires. No human art has made its wonder.
Nearer to our eyes the islands lie outstretched like sea-creatures,
risen from the depths to behold the stars and to rest from their
labours. The boats which lie at anchor against the tide do not belong
to man, but are the chariots of Amphitrite and her crew. And in the
profound silence we hear the deep breathing of the sea, a marvellous,
soft, universal sound; and perceive, half awed and half delighted, the
rise and fall of her restless and pregnant breast. And then man and
his work no longer fill the voyager’s imagination. He is absorbed into
Nature. The starry sky above, the living sea below, are all he knows;
and the sea is the greatest, for it takes into its depths the trembling
of every star, and the white wavering of palace and tower, church and
bridge, and marble quay.
This impression, received in twilight or at night, rules the thousand
impressions made in daylight by the art and life of Venice. The “mighty
Being” of the sea, with its eternal mystery, penetrates and pervades,
and is mistress of the humanity of the city. The ancient life of Venice
was in harmony with this, and what remains of that life is still lovely
and inspiring. The modern life of Venice tends day by day to be out of
tune with this, and has violated its beauty with amazing recklessness.
No reverence, no tenderness for the spirit of the place has prevented
a hundred desecrations, which might have been avoided if men had cared
for beauty as well as for commerce, if the men had even known what
beauty was, if they had even for an hour realized the spirit of the
place or the spirit of the sea.
In days before the railway and its bridge had done away with the
island apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance
to drop through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and
come upon the far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing
slowly, see, through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls,
churches, palaces, rise slowly one after another, out of the breast of
the waters--silver and rose and gold out of sapphire, azure, and pale
gray--a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean.
We forgot that fairyland had been driven from the earth, and saw, or
dreamed we saw, the city of Morgan le Fay, or the palaces of the Happy
Isles where the Ever-young found refuge in the sea--so lovely and so
dim the city climbed out of the deep.
That vision is gone, but even now there are few visions more startling
in their charm than that which befalls the weary traveller when coming
out of the dark station he finds himself suddenly upon the marble
quay, with a river of glittering water before his eyes, fringed with
churches, palaces, and gardens; the broad stream alive with black
gondolas, shouts in his ears like the shouting of seamen; and, lower
in note and cry, but heard more distinctly than all other sounds, the
lapping of the water on the steps of stone, the rushing of the tide
against the boats. Midst all the wonders of the city, this it is which
first seizes on his heart. It is the first note of the full melody of
charm which the sea in Venice will play upon his imagination for many a
happy day.
The waters that make her unique are in themselves beautiful. Were
they like those of many lagoons, they might be stagnant, and lose the
loveliness of vital movement. But they are tidal waters, and though
the ordinary tide does not rise much more than a foot or two, yet its
living rush is great, and passes twice a day through the lagoons and
streets of Venice. It streams in at the openings in the _lidi_, at
the ports of Malamocco, Chioggia, Lido and Tre Porti, with the force
and swiftness of an impetuous river, and these four water-systems, in
their meetings and retreats, fill the lagoon with incessant movement,
with clashing, swirling, and sweeping currents. Then, the tide does not
always keep at this low level. When the attractions of the sun and moon
combine, it rises higher and floods and washes out the canals, and when
the angry south, blowing fiercely up Adria, has piled up the waters at
the head of the gulf, they block in the falling tide. It cannot escape
from the lagoon, and it races from the Public Gardens to the Dogana.
There it divides to fill the Giudecca and the Grand Canal to the height
of seven or eight feet. The canals rise, the calli are flooded and the
squares, and the Piazza is a lake, and the Piazzetta. Gondolas ply
up to the doors of Saint Mark’s and to the Ducal Palace. The water
falls as swiftly as it rises. There is no lack of life in the Venetian
lagoon. Freshness, incessant change and joy minister to the beauty of
these waters.
They are of the sea, but the temper of the sea in them is distinctive.
The sea, uncircumscribed, at the mercy of its own wild nature, is
beautiful or terrible, but it is too vast, too noisy, too desirous
of destruction, even in calm too suggestive of anger, to awaken that
peculiar charm in which temperance, quietude, a certain obedience or
sacrifice for use, are always elements. But Venice lies in a gentle sea
which loves to give itself away. Her sea is guarded by long banks of
sand, pierced here and there by those openings through which the tide
arrives. Within these is the wide lagoon, lying in a sheltered place,
dotted with islands sleeping on silver sheets of shining water. And
in the midst is the city with all its towers. It is thus penetrated
and encompassed by the life and beauty of the sea; but it is the sea
tamed to a love of rest; made temperate, even in furious wind, by the
barriers its own force has built to shield its favoured daughter;
keeping its natural freedom and love of movement, but obedient to the
laws of help, and sacrificing its reckless and destroying will in
order to do the work that rivers do for men; preserving thus, along
with its own wild charm, the charm also of the great streams that
bless the earth. The sea, then which makes Venice unique, has lost its
recklessness and terror. But it has not lost its beauty. And its beauty
has become as it were spiritual, for it has subdued itself to be more
beautiful through service. It was then not only in pride, but also in
gratitude and love, that the Doge wedded the sea, and cast into her
breast his ring, and cried, “We espouse thee, sea, in token of true and
perpetual dominion.”
This gentle manner of the sea, in its service through the narrow
streets of the city, in the narrow lanes of the lagoon, and over its
shallow banks, forced the boat the Venetians built up into the shape
of the gondola, and compelled the mode of rowing it. And both these,
being the work of Nature as well as of man, are beautiful. This long,
subtly-curved boat, with its uptossed stem and stern, rigid in reality,
but seeming to be (so swift it is to answer the slightest touch of the
oar) as lithe and undulating as a serpent, leaning somewhat to one
side, so that it wavers a little as it moves as if it were a wave of
the sea, and gliding on its flattened bottom over shallow waters in
silent speed, seems like some creature of the sea herself. Coloured
black, it is brightened with polished brass and steel. The _ferro da
prova_ is the beak of polished steel which looks out from the bows
of the boat, with a blade at the top like a hatchet, and below it
six teeth, like those of the bone of the saw-fish. It flashes over
the water and flashes in the water. It is a sea-ornament, descended
from the rostrum of a Roman warship. Then the brass ornaments of the
arm-rests are most frequently sea-beasts--dolphins, and the sea-horses
of Venice. Everywhere the boat has been the child of the sea.
Yet it is human; it grew like a child, a youth, modified from year
to year into its shape, its character, till it reached its manhood;
absolutely fitted for the work it had to do, for the circumstances
of the city through the narrow water-ways of which it had to move,
and for the wants of all classes of its citizens. The circumstances
were peculiar; the needs of the citizens were most various. It fits
them all. The natural, therefore, and the human mingle in it more
harmoniously than in any other boat. It is distinctive as Venice is
distinctive; it has its own sentiment, its own charm; but it seems
also to share in the sentiment and beauty of the sea. The cries of its
rowers are like the cries of seamen. In its movement is the softness,
ease, and grace of the subdued obedient waters over which it glides.
Then there is the way of rowing it, on one side, by a single rower.
When there are two rowers half the charm is lost. The second rower
labouring at his oar in front of the sitter removes the pleasant,
psychical illusion that the boat moves by its own will. There is almost
an intellectual pleasure in the rowing and steering of a gondola by the
single oar behind. If the gondolier be a master of his craft, he will
make his boat move through a crowded canal, or glide round the angles
of a narrow water lane, as swiftly, as softly as a serpent through the
branches of a tree. He will pass within an inch of a corner without
touching it, as he turns the boat round within its own length. He will
stop it at full speed in a few seconds. It obeys him so magically that
the voyager in it, who does not see the rower, often dreams that the
boat moves of itself according to a spirit in it, like the bark which
bore Ogier the Dane, flying over the sea by its own desire, to Morgana.
This beauty of the boat, its ways and manners, are the result of the
sea-situation, and have the charm of the sea.
Then, again, this strange, soft sea, so tempered into gentlehood,
brings through its quietude another element of charm into Venice. It
reflects all things with a wonderful perfection. Whatever loveliness
is by its side it makes more lovely. Shallow itself, it seems deep;
and the towers and palaces of Venice in all their colours descend and
shine among other clouds and in another sky below. All outlines of
sculpture and architecture, of embossment, in wall and window; all play
of sunshine and shade; all the human life in balcony, bridge or quay,
on barge or boat, are in the waters as in a silent dream--revealed in
every line and colour, but with an exquisite difference in softness and
purity. All Nature’s doings in the sky are also repeated with a tender
fidelity in the mirror of the lagoon--morning light, noonday silver,
purple thunder cloud in the afternoon, sunset vapours, the moon and
stars of night--and not only on the surface, but also, it seems, in an
immeasurable depth. To look over the side of the boat into the water is
to cry, “I see infinite space.”
That is part of this charm of the reflecting water. But this only
belongs to Nature and the feeling her beauty awakens. There is another
charm in this work of the water. Whatever pleasure the living and
varied movement of a great town, whatever interest its activities,
bring to men, is doubled, so far as charm is concerned, in Venice. For
they are exercised on water as well as on land, and their movements and
methods are different on each. The sights of life are doubly varied.
The land has its own way with them; the water has another way with them.
Moreover, the water itself, being always in motion, always reflecting
or taking shadows, always harmonizing itself with its comrades in
land or sky, always making a subtle music in answer to human action
upon it--adds these romantic and lovely elements to the business
and pleasure of the town. Below, in the water, the clumsiest barge
is accompanied by its soft ideal; and the lovers, leaning over the
balcony, see their happiness smile on them from the water.
The same thing, some aver, may be said of a Dutch town full of canals.
Partly, that is true; but the canals only carry the heavy business of
these towns, and in Venice all human life, in its gaiety and beauty as
well as its work, is on the water. Moreover, the water itself, not half
stagnant like the canals of Holland, is always thrilling with its own
ebbing and flowing, has its own fine spirit, and takes, as I have often
thought, its own share and pleasure in all that is done upon it. Life
answers there to life--living Nature to living man.
Not apart from this element of charm are other forms of it. The
mystery and music of moving water, the sense of unknown depths and
its wonder, the impression of the infinite which gathers into us from
the sea, are all brought by the tides in Venice into the midst of a
bustling city, vividly concerned with the material, the finite, and the
practical. We feel the wonder and secret of Nature playing round our
business. In a moment we are touched into imaginative worlds. We may
pass with ease from buying and selling into poetry, from materialism
into mystery. This has its surprising charm.
The element of noiselessness increases this impression of poetic
mystery. The Venetians themselves make noise enough. They are a gay
and passionate people on the surface, and their open-air life makes
them open in speech. The air is full of shouting, but the rattle and
shattering and trampling of wheels and horses over stony roads which
wears out life so rapidly in towns on land, is never heard in Venice.
And there are numberless lanes of quiet water where the crowd of
gondolas never comes, and where the only sound is the wash of water
on the stones and the murmur of the acacias above our head. The quiet
sea has stolen into the streets, and all that is beautiful in their
architecture, their history, and their daily life, creeps into the
study of our imagination with more impressive grace because of the
peace. As to the quiet of the lagoon it is like the solemn quiet of the
desert. In ten minutes from the quay we are in the midst of a silence
deeper even than that of the lonely hills. The silence listens to
itself, and we can scarcely believe in the turmoil of the world or the
battle in our own heart. This has its healing charm.
Then, also, the nearness and universal presence of the waters makes
man more alive to the beauty of the few things which belong to the
land in Venice. There are no woods, no parks, no great gardens, no
wealth of foliage or grass, but what there is of flowers and trees and
grassy spaces is more lovingly observed than on the land. The great
fig trees which drop their broad foliage over the walls, the little
groves of soft acacia which stand beside some of the churches, the tiny
plots of green verdure in the squares, the tall oleanders ablaze with
white and ruddy flowers, the climbing vines that twine amongst the
carved stone work, the rare small gardens with their black cypresses,
white lilies, golden fruit; the one stone pine dark against the sky,
the scarlet flash of the pomegranate, the tumbled wealth of a single
rose tree, might all be thought little of in an Italian town. They are
common there and multitudinous. But here, at Venice, in the midst of
the waters they are strange; they surprise and enchant. They are always
observed; all their beauty is felt.
Amid all this water-world, and the human life which uses it and loves
it, there is one place where it is fairest and most used by man. It
is the great expanse of water at the entrance of the Grand Canal,
opposite the Ducal Palace, in whose surface is reflected the Campanile
of San Giorgio Maggiore on its island, the dome of the Church of Our
Lady of Safety, and the tower of the Dogana. From the Dogana runs out
to the south the broad canal which divides Venice from the islands of
the Giudecca. In the opposite direction the glittering surface spreads
away to the port of the Lido, where between the Lido and San Andrea
the lagoon opens into the main sea. On these waters, in the past and
present, have collected, and still collect, the ships and barks that
have carried on the wars, the commerce, and the fishing life of Venice.
I do not describe the scene, but the glancing, dazzling water, the blue
expanse, seem as if they had been designed by Nature to harmonize with
the swiftness and dash of the warlike spirit and warwork of ancient
Venice, with the splendour of her commerce and the merchandise it
brought, with the magnificence of her religion and the dignity of her
government, whose noblest observances and pageants were displayed on
these shining waters.
It is one of the enchantments of Venice that it is so easy for
imaginative knowledge, impelled and kindled to its work by this
glistening and splendid water-world, to recreate upon it the vivid life
of the past; to see the long war-galleys pass out into the Adriatic,
beating the water into foam; to watch the ships from all the Orient
disembark their costly goods and men from the tribes of the East on
the quays; to picture the many hued and stately processions from the
sea to the palace of the Duke, from San Marco to the sea. A splendid
vision! A little reading, some careful study of the pictures in the
Accademia, and the voyager can crowd, as he stands on the Piazzetta,
that gleaming mirror of sea with a hundred scenes of glory, beauty,
use and charm in war and peace.
Little now remains of that wonderful sea-glory, and the beauty of its
ships is departed. Some merchant boats lie stern to stern along the
quays of the Giudecca, black and built like boxes. Steamboats carrying
heavy goods, now and then a great liner, scream and hiss in the lagoon.
The war-galleys of Venice are replaced by ironclads. All the outward
romance of this great sheet of water is gone. It cannot be helped,
and we must put our regret by, lest we should spoil or under-rate the
present; but some reverence, some care might be given to the memory of
the glorious past, and this scene at least might have been saved from
desecration. It was possible a few years ago for imagination still
to create the glory of the past upon these waters; it was only the
steamers that forced us to remember the present, and when they did not
scream they were not offensive. But not long ago, and right between
the Lido and the public gardens, blocking the most beautiful view of
Venice from the Lido, an iron foundry, with tall chimneys outpouring
black smoke, was established on the Island of Santa Elena. I have
already referred to this contemptuous destruction of loveliness. It is
a miserable comfort that the foundry has failed. But the mischief done
is irreparable.
One part, however, of that past is still existing on Venetian waters.
The fishing boats--the Bragozzi--are much the same as they were in the
days when the city held “the East in fee and was the safeguard of the
West.” They carry us back even to remoter times when only a few huts
had been built on the sandbanks, and the dwellers in the little group
of islands lived by fishing. They have been comrades of the whole
history of Venice.
These barks are still beautiful, and make more beautiful the waters
on which they sail. Their bow still keeps that noble, subtle, and
audacious curve which every artist loves. It is painted on either
side with various designs fitted to carry the eye forward with the
rush of the boat through the waters--angels blowing trumpets, the
virgin leaning forward in impassioned listening--and these, in many
colours, glimmer from far on the sight, and are often seen shining in
the wave below. On the dark sails, of which there are two, the sun,
the stars, angel heads, St. George and the Dragon, St. Anthony, the
Virgin in glory, symbolic designs, a radiant sun, geometrical patterns,
are painted in orange, blue and pale sea-green on the dark body of
the sail, which is generally of deep red. The orange is most often
introduced in bands or patterns among the red: and when the fishermen
take pleasure in their coloured patterns, the blue, green, and white
are added to the orange.
It is a wonderful sight to see these fishing barks drawn up along the
great quay from the public gardens to the Ducal Palace, with all
their sails hoisted after a stormy day, to dry in the gay sunlight.
From end to end the long line burns with the colours of which the
Venetian painters were so enamoured. It is as delightful to stand on
the sea-wall on the Lido, near the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, where
the lagoon opens into the Adriatic, and watch these barks coming in
from the sea, one by one; glowing in the lovely light, changing the
waters below into orange, red, and black, edged with gold. Sometimes,
grouped into a mass, they cluster together in the deep places of the
canals, or lie in a changing crowd together near the mouth of the
Piave, nets, mast and sails one glow of shifting colour. Sometimes,
when fine weather comes after the storm which has driven home the whole
fleet, they all go out together, and the whole lagoon seems full of
their glory, as pushing through the water-lanes, they cross one another
and interweave a dance of colour and of freedom. Sometimes, as the
sun sets, one of them, anchored alone, takes into the hollow of its
sail the whole blaze of the globe of fire as it sinks over the Euganean
hills.
These pictures are taken out of the realm of mere artistic pleasure by
thoughts of the hard labour and the rough struggle of the fishers’ toil
for wife and children as they sail on stormy Adria. Indeed, they are as
full of humanity as of beauty. They have also the charm of historical
sentiment. The first fugitives to Rialto saw these barks much as we
see them. The builders of the city, its early merchants and warriors,
its voyagers and artists, the Dukes that fought the son of Charles
the Great, or harried the nests of the Dalmatian pirates, or subdued
the Orient; the ambassadors who sued or defied the Senate, visitors
from every quarter of the globe, the luxurious wretches who degraded,
and the cowardly crew who sold Venice; the patriots who defended her;
those who mourned under the yoke of Austria, those who rejoiced in the
great deliverance--one and all have looked with many a thought that
charmed their heart upon the fishing boats of Venice. With them Venice
began; by them she has been fed from the beginning even until now. They
are a vital part of her sea charm.
The live lagoon itself is of endless interest. It has quite a little
population of its own. Boys and men, clothed only in a loose shirt,
and with the glowing skin the sun and sea create, move to and fro over
the shallow spaces fishing for sea-spoil, sometimes white against the
purple arch of the stormy sky, sometimes like a pillar of rose in the
setting sun; and their slow, unremitting labour, which means for them
no more than an escape from starvation, makes one ashamed to think so
much of beauty, unless we bind it up with the trouble of the world.
A livelier, more comfortable population is that of the birds. I have
only seen gulls in the lagoon, but they fly, in great delight and
with less talk than in the north, about the cluster of islands near
Torcello, and feed in flocks over the shallows when the tide leaves
the sea-grasses bare; animating, enlivening the desolate shores, and
gossiping so gaily that for the moment of our notice of them, it is
hard to believe that a thousand years of the rise, the glory and the
decay of a great people have been represented on the waters and the
islands they make their pasture and their playground.
The islands in the lagoon are full of charm. I do not speak of Torcello
or Burano, the first of which is famous in the pages of Ruskin, and the
other inhabited by a crowd of fisher-folk and lace-makers; or of those
closely knit to Venice itself, such as Murano, San Giorgio, or those
of the Giudecca; nor even of San Michele, where the dead of Venice
lie washing in the water; though it was once a place I visited every
week when the small blue butterfly was born. The old wall was still
there and its decayed brickwork, and I used to fancy that the souls
of the dead were in the azure insects that never ceased to flit in
whirling, silent flight among the wild grass and over the tombstones
of that solitary place--souls so small, so courteous to one another,
so beautiful in colour and in movement that I thought the charm of the
sea had entered into their nature, that they desired to charm, but were
unconscious of their charm.
Among the islands, though perhaps it cannot justly be called an island,
_The Lido_ claims the greater interest. It extends, right opposite to
Venice, for five miles--a long low ridge of heaped-up sand, a quarter
of a mile broad--from San Nicolo to Malamocco. It is the chief guard
of Venice from the Adriatic. At each end is a passage to the open sea
whose dark blue waves break on the white, brown, and yellow sand of
its sea-ward side; on the other, the ripples of the lagoon lap the
low wall which looks out on Venice across the quiet water. At the
northern end stands the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, one of the patron
Saints of the city; in its apse the Venetians lodged the bones of the
saint they had stolen with all the cleverness of Ulysses. His spirit
watched for their welfare and defended the great port of their town.
At a short distance from the Church we come to the very point of the
Lido. Opposite is the Fort of San Andrea and the long island of San
Erasmo, the first of a succession of Lidi curving inwards like a bow
to the mainland near the mouth of the Piave, and sheltering Torcello,
Burano and other islands in the northern lagoon. In days gone by,
this succession of low-lying shores was clothed with pines--as the
coral islands of the Pacific are with palms--a dark, green, narrow,
flower-haunted wood, which, rising as it were out of the breast of the
sea, must have charmed the mind with a hundred fantasies. Not a tree of
it is left, though the soil is rich and fertile. Between San Erasmo
and the Lido the deep sea-channel opens out to Adria--an historic
strait of waters--through which a thousand thousand ships have gone
out for war and trade and pleasure in all the splendour of the past,
and returned with music, victory and treasure. It was through this
opening that the Doge, attended by all the warriors, ecclesiastics,
counsellors, statesmen and great merchants of Venice, in his gorgeous
galley, moved by some hundred oars, and surrounded by all the boats
of Venice, with music, and shouting and triumph, went forth to wed
the sea, and dropped along with holy-water his ring over the stern
with equal humility and pride. It was here that on a night of furious
storm the three great saints who cared for the safety of the Republic,
St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicolas, delivered Venice from the
demon-ship which was bringing from the sea pestilence and destruction
on the faithful city. Everyone knows the legend, and a noble picture
in the Accademia tells the story of how the fisherman--whose boat St.
Mark had hired to take him at dead of night through a roaring gale to
San Giorgio Maggiore and then to San Nicolo--brought to the Doge in
the morning the ring St. Mark, before he embarked on this expedition,
had taken from the treasury of his Church. “Give that,” he said, as
returning, he landed on the Piazzetta, “to the Doge, and bid him send
it back to my Church.” And the Doge, knowing the ring, believed the
story of the night. Nor is this the only record in art of the legend.
There is an unfinished picture attributed to Giorgione of the three
Saints in their fishing boat meeting at the mouth of the Lido the
ship of hell, and repelling it with the Cross. The sea is tossed into
violent surges, huge masses edged with fiery foam, over which the
deep-bellied purple clouds are driven by the tempest. The demons man
the racing ship that seems to shiver as it is suddenly stayed in the
very entrance of the port. Clouds and sea in raging storm, lit by the
flashing of the lightning in the collied night, are represented in so
modern a manner, and with so modern a feeling for nature, that it seems
as if Turner’s spirit had entered into the pencil of Giorgione.
So wild a sea is rarely seen breaking on the Lido. On the whole, the
long low shore, save when the Scirocco drives the sand in a river
through the air, is peaceful enough; and there are few chords of
colour stranger or more strangely attractive than the dark sapphire
sea leaping in joy and with the sound of trampling horses on the pale
yellow belt of sand fringed with the green meadows, with acacia, maize,
and fig trees, with the pale leaves of the Canne, and with the low
plants, sea-holly, dry reeds, and thistles which grow on the edge of
the sand where the last breath of the foam-drift plays upon them--blue,
yellow, and various green, mingling together, for so it often seemed
to me, into a mystic harmony.
The meadows near San Nicolo, dotted with low acacia shrub, are
lovely--a place of beloved repose and beauty. Between them and the
landing stage at Sant’ Elisabetta was once the rude neglected Jewish
Cemetery. The grave-stones are all collected now and placed within an
ugly walled-space with a small chapel, and an iron-railed gate. No
history, no sentiment can collect round this hideous enclosure. It was
but right and reverent to redeem the tombstones from careless neglect;
but it might have been done with some feeling for beauty. When first
I knew Venice, the grave-stones lay entangled and overgrown with tall
lush grasses, dwarf acacias white with blossom, and wild-flowers. In
spring the daffodils were gay and golden there; in summer the wild rose
threw its trailers and its starry flowers over their desolation. Some
stones stood erect, others had fallen. The flat stones lay at every
angle; and on all of them long inscriptions in Hebrew recorded the love
and honour paid to the departed by the persecuted race, who were forced
to lay their dead on this wild and uninhabited shore. The place was
full of history. It symbolised the unhappy fortunes of the race in the
days of enmity and persecution. Here Shylock and Tubal, I thought, were
housed at last. Here rested many a Jew, whose life was as noble as that
of Shylock was base. The flowers had taken care of them, and woven over
them a web of beauty. Nature had repaired the cruelty and intolerance
of man. I should have bought the whole ground and surrounded it with a
low wall, had I been a Jew; and tended the flowers, and left the place
to itself. The birds and the insects loved it. It was as pathetic as it
was beautiful.
Beyond it is the Church of St. Elizabeth where the bathers land. Five
minutes’ walk takes one across from the lagoon to the seashore,
bordered by hillocks of shifting sand “matted with thistles and
amphibious weeds,” and itself close to the blue incoming of the waves,
luminous with shells, and hard enough to ride on with a great pleasure,
such pleasure as Byron and Shelley had day by day
for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aereal merriment.
So, as we rode, we talked.
So Shelley wrote, and then described how he crossed the Lido to the
lagoon and looked on the sunset. And to this day there are few changes
more impressive than when the traveller leaves the seashore, with the
freshness of the waves and the solitude of the sea-beach in his heart,
and, crossing to the other side, looks forth on the still slumber of
the lagoon, and on the towers and peopled houses of the white and
golden city, such a city--at the evening hour when all the sky behind
is in a glory of crimson, pearl, and azure--as Galahad beheld when
from the lofty cliff above the Ocean, he rode across the waves to be
received at the glimmering gates with trumpets sounding, with songs and
welcome by the angelic and the saintly host.
The Lido has its interest, but the greater charm belongs to the remoter
islands, each alone in the waste of water, and with attractive names.
It is their habit on slumbrous days to float in air and not on the
water. A silver line of sunny mist stretches right across the base
of the island, and on this it rests, as if it wished to join the
sky. This sportive ethereality is one of the wanton wiles with which
they bewilder the voyager’s imagination. Their names are romantic.
San Lazzaro, Santa Elena, San Giacomo del Palude, San Francesco del
Deserto, Il Spirito, La Grazia, San Giorgio in Alga. Each had its
monastic church in ancient days, and from every part of the lagoon the
bells then sweetly rang over the receptive water at morning, noon, and
evening. Of all these monasteries only two remain, San Francesco del
Deserto and San Lazzaro. Only in these is the Church still served,
the cloister and the cells still intact, the garden still cultivated,
the cypress and poplar garth still a place of musing; and only at San
Francesco, by the corner of the isle that looks to Venice, is there one
stone pine, a Tuscan stranger in the alien north. The rest of the small
islands and their churches are desecrated, used for state and municipal
purposes, with the exception of Torcello and Burano.
There is perhaps no more beautiful row in Venice than, as the sunset
begins in September days, to take the gondola out of the mouth of the
Giudecca and make our winding way to St. George of the Seaweed, set
lovely in the lonely waters that look towards the Euganean Hills.
Around it lie the shallower sea-marshes near the mainland, and when the
gold of the sunset strikes them, they flame like emerald beds of fire.
The tower of the island church used to rise, thin and black, with two
upper windows through which the sun poured two shafts of light, against
the south-western glow--a beacon seen far and wide, a memorial tower
that in its silence held a thousand thoughts. It is now destroyed. It
was not in the way; it might have been kept for the sake of beauty by
a few clamps; but this was too much for modern Venice. I resented its
departure bitterly. One consolation remained. When the boat drew near
the angle of the island, there stood, and still stands, set high on
the angle of the wall, an image of the Virgin, rudely carved, but with
grave simplicity and faith. She held her son in her arms. On her head
was an iron crown, engrailed, and over her head an iron umbrella with
a fringe of beaten iron. She looked towards Venice with blessing and
protection, and claimed her right in Venice. She was a Virgin for the
people and of the people, a gentle, lowly born, working woman, with
a face of sorrow and strength, such as we may see every day in the
small squares of Venice when the people gather round the well. And yet
there was such nobility, love, motherhood, and so much sweet spirit
in her air, so much of watching to protect and guard the sea and its
fisher-folk, that I cried when I saw her first, and afterwards in my
soul when I passed her, Ave Maria, Maris Stella!
There is somewhere another Virgin on another island, with also her lamp
at night and her canopy, but I forget where she stands. Wherever she
is, she is the same benign and lonely person, the Madonna Protectrix of
the sailor and the lagoon.
The row home from this island as the sun descends to its rest on
autumn evenings, is of an extraordinary splendour and beauty. The
little wavelets of the lagoon are ebony in shade and blazing gold on
the side where the light falls. The sea-banks turn a golden brown, and
their grasses seem to change into the warm green of the deep sea. The
sky drops from liquid and pellucid blue to pearl, and then to orange,
crimson and gold. The wild lights fall on the city which grows slowly
on the eyes, and every tower is a tower of fire. And behind, beyond St.
George of the Seaweed, but towards the left, are the triangled Euganean
Hills, down the sides of the greatest of which I have often seen the
sun roll like a wheel, such a wheel as Ezekiel saw in vision. Shelley
saw them at this sunset hour.
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles--
And then--as if the Earth and Sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent.
Again and again I have seen this apparent transparency of the peaks.
That Shelley recorded it is one example of how closely he observed
nature, and how accurately he recorded her doings. Much more might be
said of the islands; but this seems enough. Each of them, right away to
the Piave on one side and to Chioggia on the other, has its history,
its religion, and its ruin.