stones those matchless harmonies of fleeting colour which the sun still
lavishes upon her waters. And there is a season of the year which,
with sun and mist co-operating, hangs once again her pale walls with
their ancient splendour, and plays a noble part in the revival of
the past. With the first days of autumn the scirocco begins to wind
about the heart of her plants and creepers, and to steal into their
veins. Swiftly they yield to the intoxication. Under the folds of the
grey mist-mantle, they drink draught after draught of her brave wine.
But another touch is needed to draw out the virtues of that liquor:
after Circe, Apollo. He bends his look upon them, and they yield
their stores, decking once more the walls of Venice with frescoes of
scarlet, green and gold, paving once more her waterways with their
old-accustomed pomp. In the Sacca della Misericordia this natural
fresco has a peculiarly beautiful effect; for upon the spaces of water
between the rafts that float there, the rich creepers, interwoven among
the trees of the garden of the Spiriti, fling an enchanted carpet
of chequered crimson and green upon a pale rose ground, covering
the whole expanse, save for one space whereon is set the pale blue
watermark of the sky. One may make rare studies here of the carpets
and bright mats that are to be seen hung out in the pictures of the
old Venetian masters. They did not copy from the East alone, or rather
they copied from a greater East, whose treasures travel through a
rarer element than water day after day to the shores of the western
world. The complete stillness of the pools in the Sacca, undisturbed
by any passing steamboat, and even unruffled by the motion of a
gondola, through the protection of the intervening rafts, gives the
rich pattern a durability unattainable in the waters of the canals.
There is only, as it were, a faint breathing of the surface, enough to
give perpetual interchange and commerce among the bold brush-strokes
of colour--incessant, subtle weaving of new harmonies upon the
ground-bass--the shadows deepening or relaxing, when sometimes an
insect dips or a fish rises and starts a fairy circle at a touch that
spreads among the colours until its delicate life is lost.
[Illustration: A PALACE DOOR.]
And if at times we may thus see the past in the present, at other
times we may dream the present back into the past. Night, the worker
of so many miracles, holds a key with which we may unlock in Venice
the secret of bygone times. There are hours on the lagoons when even
in daylight the forgotten ages live again and we may keep company
with whom we will, but in the heart of the city it is by night that
we may lay hand on the pulse of her ancient life, and feel it warm
to our touch, beating slow but constant behind the commotion, often
the desecration, of later times. The flow of the Grand Canal is less
troubled than by day: it has intervals of peace in which it may sink
into the broad, dark calm of Carpaccio’s waters. Palace after palace,
in fearless and unstudied alternations of Byzantine, Gothic, Ogival,
Renaissance, Barocco, tower above us, their pillars and balconies
gleaming in faint light of moon or lamp: we seem almost to trace upon
their surface the forms of men and beasts, and to clothe them once more
in the gold and colour which Venice learned of her lagoons. By day we
feast upon the tints still left to fall upon the waters, we praise
the aged snow of crumbling stone or the shades of twisted columns,
or the rich profusion of the pale Cà d’Oro. But what do we know of
Venice when she shone upon the waters in true regality, a monument of
all the glory that the heart or eye of man could conceive? No one has
left us any detailed record of the frescoed façades of the Venetian
palaces, whether on the Grand Canal or in the remoter waterways;
only here and there we catch a glimpse of them on the canvases of
contemporary painters. It is provokingly general among the travellers
or native-lovers of Venice, who set themselves to praise her in words,
to find that they have chosen a medium incapable of achieving what
it was asked to do, and to throw down their weapon in the moment of
trial, struck dumb by the immense wonder of their theme. They cease
from their task before, it seems to us, they have well begun it, always
anticipating the stinging tongue of the dragon, Incredulity. We could
well forgive them their inadequacy, so frankly recognised, had they
but attempted a mere catalogue of some of the frescoes on the walls.
Now, it is at night alone that we can repeople them; that, as we pass
along, we can look up and read into the shadowy spaces those brilliant
chronicles of beauty, power and pride. It is, indeed, a heavy fate that
awaits in Venice the artist who must work in words; colour and music
can draw nearer, can almost attain to the reality itself; and yet by
words also there is something to be conveyed of her enduring beauty.
The fact which words can compass may be so told that there is born
from it a sentiment of that rich atmosphere which is beyond the reach
of words; they may remind or may awaken wonder, itself a new sense
with which to apprehend. Even words may tell of the water snake of
green and gold that writhes and gleams hour after hour in the faintly
stirred depths of the canal, a creature that in the world above is a
dull grey upright pole; or of golden treasures, once the refuse of the
calli, transformed to splendour as they float out over the lagoon; or
of the sudden lapping of the water under the wind down the north lagoon
at midnight, that breaks the smooth image of the moon into a thousand
ripples and passes in a wave that makes the dim lamps tremble into the
narrow waterways of the city.
But it is not only the waterways of Venice that at night are eloquent
of the past, that seem to take once more their ancient shape and
venture near for colloquy: the streets and squares and churches are
full of spirits, not unkindly, not afraid, less silent and secretive
than in the busy day, when they are lonely among a people careless of
them, with other thoughts, other needs and other destinies. Many a
porch or gable or wide-projecting roof, or sculpture of fantastic beast
or naïve saint or kneeling angel, seems to step out and call upon us in
the night, catching in us perhaps as we pass by some touch of sympathy
with the enduring soul of the past. One must be late indeed in Venice
to secure untroubled peace. Ever and again, even after midnight, the
silence of the great white campos is broken by a group scattered here
and there before the door of a café; voices in eager talk will echo
under a low portico, a sleepy child will clatter by in wooden pattens.
But in the low-beamed, dimly lighted courts, or on the dark steps at
the water-side, under some deserted sotto-portico, the sounds of the
present strike across us like distant voices in a dream. The one night
that lies over all the ages draws our spirit into harmony with these
stones and lapping waters, that have stood through change and stress of
time, that have outlived solemnity and joyous festival and have passed
from gentle usage and glorious vesture into the custody of the poorest,
into neglect and decay. What talk have not these courtyards overheard,
what rich vesture has not swept through them, what noble thoughts and
high hopes have not confided in their silence? And on the dirty steps
where the children sit and play and throw their refuse into the water,
what carpets have not been spread, what proud feet have not pressed to
pass into the gondola and join the triumphant processional of Venice in
her prime?
But what of ancient Venice? We sometimes despair of re-creating her.
We ponder on Rialto, we watch her lights from the lagoons, we go in
and out among her calli, peering into door and courtyard, climbing an
outer stair, penetrating the recesses of sotto-portico or cellar; and
many records we find of the life which once she lived, but all belong
to the Venice of that second age, when she was already an established
city. We cannot depopulate her and see again that company of islands
gathered together in the lagoon, of various shapes and sizes, some
covered with wood and undergrowth, others rising with bare backs from
the water, with large and lonely outposts lying at greater distance
here and there. Yet now and again come days when the spirit even of
this remoter period returns to its well-nigh forgotten grave, the days
when Venice lies under the rule of the rain-clouds. The inner waterways
of the city lie dead like opaque marble under the dancing drops; but
down the ways that lead from the lagoons the wind pours strong and
restless from the sea, beating the water against the walls and into
the damp vaults, a challenge from the sea to the city, from the sea
unbridled and insurgent--yet not insurgent, for it has never submitted
to her sway. Within Venice, along the slippery streets, there is gloom
and desolation; the sun is the only visitor to whom her heart stands
ever open; she would shut her gates if she could to these wild beings
of cloud and wind, these houseless, grey pilgrims that, at no bidding
of hers, come and claim lodging with her as they take their nomad way.
I know not what of the old, wild fisher heart comes to visit Venice in
these days; phantoms of old time are borne in on the gusty winds from
the sea and the lagoon, and the commanding voice of the sea wind they
must have known so well seems to clothe them with substantial life.
Into the mist vanishes the frescoed Venice of high pomp and festival,
the Venice of regal Bucintoro and banqueting of kings, of brilliant
policy and stem civic control. A still deeper oblivion receives the
Venice of small joys and small sorrows, of Longhi and Goldoni; and the
excitement of the formless past creeps into us, when yet the future was
to make--the hard life of the first dwellers upon the islands, acute
and mobile in their hourly traffic with wind and sea.
[Illustration: ZATTERE.]
There is a corner of Venice little known to the stranger, or even
to Venetians themselves, except as a passage to the cemetery of San
Michele, but not less loved on that account by those who are happy
enough to have their lot cast there. The breezes blow with a freshness
that is rare in the more confined spaces of the city or on the Grand
Canal; the tide sets into the Sacca della Misericordia full and fresh
from the northern lagoon, still beating with the pulse of the open sea.
This favoured, this unique corner of Venice is a large square basin of
water, open on one side to the lagoon. Venice, at one time, could boast
of many such, but one by one they have been filled in with earth, and
in the sixteenth century, when the neighbouring Fondamente Nuove were
built, the Sacca della Misericordia itself narrowly escaped inclusion
in the paved parade that was to unite the whole of North Venice from
Santa Giustina to Sant’ Alvise. The fiat had gone forth, but happily it
remains as yet unfulfilled, and the Sacca is still a harbour for the
_zattere_, the timber rafts that are brought down from the mountains,
and set here to season awhile, in sight of their old home, till at
last they are borne away to do service in the works of man. A tiny hut
of planks without a door is set up here and there upon the rafts, and
a couple of dogs are continually upon the prowl. Something in this
woodyard, the building of the rafts, the lapping of the inflowing
tide against them, its waves twisted in some angle into a petulant
restlessness, seems to carry us back to the primeval days before the
historic settlement of the fugitives from the great mainland cities,
back to the manners of the humble fishermen who lived a hard and frugal
life among the low islands of the Adriatic, in constant commerce with
their patron the sea, in constant vigilance against his aggression.
The night-lapping of the waves against the Sacca della Misericordia
calls to mind the two toiling fishermen of Theocritus, whose life must
have been strangely like that of the first dwellers on the Rivo Alto.
Let us quote from Mr. Andrew Lang’s translation. “Two fishers on a
time together lay and slept: they had strown the dry sea-moss for a
bed in their wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall.
Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the
fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with
sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the
seines, two oars and an old coble upon props. Beneath their heads was
a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailor’s caps. Here was all
their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door, nor
a watch-dog: all things, all to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty
was their sentinel. They had no neighbour by them, but ever against
their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.” This is a page for the
history of Venice in her infancy, or rather for the history of that
earlier time when Venice was as yet unborn. Out among the islands
of the lagoon, which on a calm, vague day of summer seem to hover
in the atmosphere upon a silver haze, among those luminous paths of
chrysophrase and porphyry, mother-of-pearl and opal, we shall still
find some footsteps of these first Venetians unerased by tract of time.
Perhaps it is at Sant’ Erasmo that the print is clearest; there are few
materials that we cannot find here for reconstruction of the primeval
settlement. There are the rush-roofed shelters of the boats and the
rude landing-stages; there are the low, white _capane_ roofed with
thatch or tiles, the long, narrow, stagnant waterways, the high, grassy
levels bordering the water; there are fields of reeds, and thickets or
fringes of rustling poplars; there are _valli_ where the fish stir and
leap and gleam continuously, breaking the smooth water into a thousand
ripples; there is the broad, central waterway, and countless lesser
channels and pools among the reeds, where one may see a boat slowly
winding, guided perhaps by children, their little figures standing
out against the desolate landscape, the silence broken by no voice
but theirs. Thus must Venice have been in her infancy. And if from
among these lonely waterways and grassy flats of Sant’ Erasmo we look
forward into the future, we can anticipate the gradual evolution of a
city such as Venice was afterwards to be. The building of the first
mud-huts; the driving of the first close-set clumps of piles to support
more solid structures; the filling of marsh-pools and strengthening of
foundations; the light wooden bridges thrust across the water, as one
may see them on the Lido to-day; the transition from houses of wood
to houses of brick and stone, from thatch to tiles; the building of
churches on the higher ground, each with its plot of grass about it;
the paving of the most frequented ways, the construction of wells and
chimneys, of paved campo and fondamenta; till we reach at last the city
of palaces, of temples and of towers, the city of sumptuous and varied
colour, the _Venezia nobilissima_ of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.