ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five
o’clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of
my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for
my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler
recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and
affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them _gransieri_, or
crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
_poverino_ [Footnote: _Poverino_ is the compassionate generic for all
unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink
my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that
he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so
to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey
from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the
bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise,
as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he
issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless
strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how
quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the
harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent
into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this
enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count
you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of
such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell
you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret
forever.
For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle
of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the
dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief,
and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that
uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so,
unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the
forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper
time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them;
but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the
sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there,
and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty
and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and
unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and
safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this
was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles
of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense
and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in
Venice.
Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light
into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner
lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven
with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness,
and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague
feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was
part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to
the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and
unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not
Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts?
That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated
imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the
Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause
was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the
future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when,
slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the
foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and
rang again, while their passenger
“Divided the swift mind,”
in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles
and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against every
thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at
once faded from his thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers
to make him pay a florin too much.
So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my
arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I
would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and
alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the
first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the
beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full
of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its
unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me
citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in
the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt
at home--indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur
only very imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
marvelous city, I found the good company of
“The fair, the old;”
and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and
I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
relief.
My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left
me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible
from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for
my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to
surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden
brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable
churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me
prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen:
if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting
squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight
in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that
reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out
with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered
casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the
noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque
gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic
with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the
lofty windows with obsolete hats.
I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
the brilliancy of St. Mark’s and the glittering streets of shops that
branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little
oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines
of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and
deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches.
I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft
night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from
the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli
Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a
solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its
moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the
vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the
Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and
casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also
down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty
and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and
palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola
drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise
and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the
undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black
against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore
had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music
of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of
the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those
trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart
of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused
the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.
But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and
whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how
low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that
moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle
of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little
court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most
interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the
air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant
berry, and all day long this patient old man--sage, let me call him--had
turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open
fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now
that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and
the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and
venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur
in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive
types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had
the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the
squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious
grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had
been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and
doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly
and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and
lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after
it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and
glorified him--then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond
art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
magnificence.
At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the
aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked
Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and
whom I often noted from the windows of the little caffè there, where you
get an excellent _caffè bianco_ (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one
to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly
with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of
the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than
olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of
lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket
and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity
of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes.
Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and
“Took the soul
Of that waste place with joy;”
and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw
his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved
ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus
embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there
was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric
magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the
energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was
coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw
reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of
dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed
sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to
architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and
being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was
in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the
pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It
was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door
life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great
part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do,
and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of
this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common
indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits
of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable
when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill
long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary
study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt
the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world,
remote from incentive and sensation.
For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith
indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her
stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God’s purpose of a great moving,
anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as
after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity
possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and
useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of
the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad
condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with
it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own;
and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it
was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling
masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly
blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of
omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals,
and palaces. One’s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is
more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the
city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there
might have been some incentive to keep one’s thoughts and words from
lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But
now, what matter?