Part 2

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.