THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.
The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic
vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some
morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that
there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in
nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer,
and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark,
standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its
innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than
a Greek lyric.
“All has suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange,”
in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
baptism in the sea.
And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into
vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and
step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads
high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine
green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching
their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their
leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well,
with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought forever into the stone.
Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where
you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under
our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates
of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable
balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames,
gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if
the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very
places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of
your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet
more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the
Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down
to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian’s brood vacantly
over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when
suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up
in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of
the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed,
and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side.
Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in,
comes back and throngs the place with motley company,--dominoes,
harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even
the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little
mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits
Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia
that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of
Saint Mark,--and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square,
demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to
create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.
But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for
your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay,
what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she
will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this
great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not
this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan
ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book “that
line from Byron”? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in
their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from
their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were
powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of
politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their
families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year
spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There
alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery
touched one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last
seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it
would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little
balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene
upon the water under us.
And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will
not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English,
who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted
gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike,
from the “Pa’ty” traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to
the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age,
ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt
to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back
seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all
have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they
all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair
tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland
and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they
always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the
Piazza, and at Florian’s, and St. Mark’s, and the Ducal Palace; and the
young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed
the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile
the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and
are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d’hôte of
their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there
with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that
this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will
all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe
there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they
are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all
countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through
which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the
English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental
peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private
English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.
They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of
the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public
Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind
the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the
Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon
is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad
trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had
dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and
died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice
grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and
farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get
it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal
opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy,
when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all
tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the
corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and
from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony.
When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and
angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the
neighborhood of that part of the “Palace of Art,” whereon
“The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
Burnt like a fringe of fire.”
And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in
not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists
are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is
splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.
It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon
the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups
in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the
Italians, who live out-of-doors.
The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the
pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls.
We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond
interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and
contrast with a ferocious bull-dog--boule-dogue he called him, I
suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I
fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism
to life--the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from
sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about
him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their
brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we
enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in
whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who
frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like
a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain
luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those
fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in
which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again
this was merely conjecture. The general’s glance may have had no such
power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from
it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the
brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of
his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way
than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They
represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and
perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were
very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and
as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to
smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the
swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal
in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular
compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant
and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the
pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden
oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I
would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the
crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of
legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.
About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market,
bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into
the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the
boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out
again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily
happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved
Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet
seemed to rest.
At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those _freschi_, which
once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are
peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible.
The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense
barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military
bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and
then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the
display,--though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official,
has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns,
and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red,
and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands
breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite
of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the
Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon
the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to
light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and
spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone
that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and
fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music
have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know
them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days,
people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At
intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned
during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers’ spectral
shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not
care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
forlorn than she is.
Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal
are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with
a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats
in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any
one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon,
whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either
gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her
great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The
rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind
enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other
persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the
dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the
cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a
small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats
from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the
commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and
gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in
childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind
of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy
river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony,
I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit
way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled
in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely
irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who,
ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark
furious resentment of my longing.
Far different from the picture presented by this boat’s progress--the
peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could
not mar--was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when
one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable
outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite
at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the
boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and
belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and
commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the
bows of their boats, with murderous looks,
“Con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,
Sì che parea che l’aer ne temesse,”
and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful
challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the
enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s
heads.
But the storm burst in words.
“Figure of a pig!” shrieked the Venetian, “you have ruined my boat
forever!”
“Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!” returned the countryman, “and it
was my right to enter the canal first.”
They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of
dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally
questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third
and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins
and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats
asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled
opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of
comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a _pas seul_
of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the
countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended
the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The
Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere
demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the
countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the
danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult
in the wildest excesses of insult: “Ah-heigh! brutal executioner!
Ah, hideous headsman!” _Da capo._ I now know that these people never
intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well
pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter.
But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my
disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had
not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.
There was some compensation for me--coming, like all compensation, a
long while after the loss--in the spectacle of a funeral procession
on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only
possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose
coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of
three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the
bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for
one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its
glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad
cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and
his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times
he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad
in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing
else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to
Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat,
were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her
blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its
crown.