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 reachedAltinum, 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 Venicewas 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 wasultimus 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 wasRome 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 wasmade 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, bothVenetians 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 alwaysto 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 whichhad 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, watchedover 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. Sheonly 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 andflowing, 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 theirplaying, 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 whitewavering 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 bridgehad 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, witha 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 thelidi, 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 forcehas 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. Theferro da provais 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 theboat, 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 theafternoon, 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 itscomrades 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 charmare 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 intowns 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 nowoods, 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 humanlife 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 anddash 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 theywere 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 quayfrom 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 colourand 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 gullsin 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 Lidoclaims 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 outon 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 andfertile. 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 anoble 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 itis 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, forso 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 flatstones 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 tothe 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 droveThe living spray along the sunny airInto our faces; the blue heavens were bare,Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forthHarmonising with solitude, and sentInto our hearts aereal merriment.So, as we rode, we talked.

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 towersand 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, SanGiorgio 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, andover 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 sundescends 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.

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