SALVE VENETIA!
Venice is the most personal of all cities in the world, the most feminine, the most comparable to a woman, the least dependent, for her individuality, upon her inhabitants, ancient or modern. What would Rome be without the memory of the Cæsars? What would Paris be without the Parisians? What was Constantinople like before it was Turkish? The imagination can hardly picture a Venice different from her present self at any time in her history. Where all is colour, the more brilliant costumes of earlier times could add but little; a general exodus of her inhabitants to-day would leave almost as much of it behind. In the still canals the gorgeous palaces continually gaze down upon their own reflected images with placid satisfaction, and look with calm indifference upon the changing generations of men and women that glide upon the waters. The mists gather upon the mysterious lagoons and sink away again before the devouring light, day after day, year after year, century after century; and Venice is always there herself, sleeping or waking, laughing, weeping, dreaming, singing or sighing, living her own life through ages, with an intensely vital personality which time has hardly modified, and is altogether powerless to destroy. Somehow, it would not surprise those who know her, to come suddenly upon her and find that all human life was extinct within her, while her own went on, strong as ever; nor yet, in the other extreme, would it seem astonishing if all that has been should begin again, as though it had never ceased to be, if the Bucentaur swept down the Grand Canal to the beat of its two hundred oars, bearing the Doge out to wed the sea with gorgeous train; if the Great Council began to sit again in all its splendour; if the Piazza were thronged once more with men and women from the pictures of Paris Bordone, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Titian; if Eastern shipping crowded the entrance to the Giudecca, and Eastern merchants filled the shady ways of the Merceria. What miracle could seem miraculous in Venice, the city of wonders?...
Venice was Venice from the first, and is Venice still, a person in our imagination, almost more than a place.... ‘Venice’ calls up a dream of colour, of rich palaces and of still water, and at the name there are more men who will think of Shylock and Othello than of Enrico Dandolo, or Titian, or Carlo Zeno, or Vittor Pisani....
Who seeks true poetry, said Rossi, writing on Venice, will find it most abundantly in the early memories of a Christian nation; and indeed the old chronicles are full of it, of idyls, of legends, and of heroic tales. Only dream a while over the yellow pages of Muratori, and presently you will scent the spring flowers of a thousand years ago, and hear the ripple of the blue waves that lent young Venice their purity, their brilliancy, and their fresh young music. You may even enjoy a pagan vision of maiden Aphrodite rising suddenly out of the sea into the sunshine, but the dream dissolves only too soon; grace turns into strength, the lovely smile of the girl-goddess fades from the commanding features of the reigning queen, and heavenly Venus is already earthly Cleopatra.
It is better to open our arms gladly to the beautiful when she comes to us, than to prepare our dissecting instruments as soon as we are aware of her presence.... And so with Venice; she is a form of beauty, and must be looked upon as that and nothing else; not critically, for criticism means comparison, and Venice is too personal and individual, and too unlike other cities to be fairly compared with them; not coldly, for she appeals to the senses and to the human heart, and craves a little warmth of sympathy; above all, not in a spirit of righteous severity, for he who would follow her story must learn to forgive her almost at every step.
She has paid for her mistakes with all save her inextinguishable life; she has expiated her sins of ill-faith, of injustice and ingratitude, by the loss of everything but her imperishable charm.
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD.
WRITTEN AT VENICE
Not only through the golden haze
Of indistinct surprise.
With which the Ocean-bride displays
Her pomp to stranger eyes;—
Not with the fancy’s flashing play,
The traveller’s vulgar theme,
Where following objects chase away
The moment’s dazzling dream;
Not thus art thou content to see
The City of my love,—
Whose beauty is a thought to me
All mortal thoughts above;—
And pass in dull unseemly haste,
Nor sight nor spirit clear,
As if the first bewildering taste
Were all the banquet here!
When the proud sea, for Venice’ sake,
Itself consents to wear
The semblance of a land-locked lake,
Inviolably fair;
And, in the dalliance of her isles,
Has levelled his strong waves,
Adoring her with tenderer wiles
Than his own pearly caves....
Surely may we delight to pause
On our care-goaded road,
Refuged from Time’s most bitter laws
In this august abode.
Come out upon the broad lagoon,
Come for the hundredth time,
Our thoughts shall make a pleasant tune,
Our words a worthy rhyme;
And thickly round us we will set
Such visions as were seen,
By Titian and by Tintoret,
And dear old Gian Bellin,—
And all their peers in art, whose eyes,
Taught by this sun and sea,
Flashed on their works whose burning dyes,
That fervent poetry;
And wove the shades so thinly-clear
They would be parts of light
In northern climes, whose frowns severe
Mar half the charms of sight.
Did ever shape Paolo drew
Put on such brilliant tire,
As Nature, in this evening view,
This world of tinted fire?
The glory into whose embrace,
The lady seeks to rise,
Is but reflected from the face
Of these Venetian skies.
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.
VENICE THE ENCHANTRESS
Venice has long borne in the imagination of the world a distinctive position, something of the character of a great enchantress, a magician of the seas. Her growth between the water and the sky; her great palaces, solid and splendid, built, so to speak, on nothing; the wonderful glory of light and reflection about her; the glimmer of incessant brightness and movement; the absence of all those harsh, artificial sounds which vex the air in other towns, but which in her are replaced by harmonies of human voices, and by the liquid tinkle of the waves—all these unusual characteristics combine to make her a wonder and a prodigy. While there are scarcely any who are unmoved by her special charm, there are some who are entirely subdued by it, to whom the sight of her is a continual enchantment, and who never get beyond the sense of something miraculous, the rapture of the first vision. Not only does she ‘shine where she stands,’ which even the poorest cluster of human habitations will do in the light of love: but all those walls, with the mist of ages like a bloom of eternal youth upon them—all those delicate pinnacles and carven-stones, the arches and the pillars and the balconies, the fretted outlines that strike against the sky—shine too as with a light within that radiates into the clear sea-air; and every ripple on the great water-way, and every wave on the lagoon, and each little rivulet of a canal, like a line of light between the piles of masonry, which are themselves built of pearl and tints of ocean shells, shines too with an ever-varied, fantastic, enchanting glimmer of responsive brightness. In the light of summer mornings, in the glow of winter sunsets, Venice stands out upon the blue background, the sea that brims upwards to her very doors, the sky that sweeps in widening circles all around, radiant with an answering tone of light. She is all wonder, enchantment, the brightness and the glory of a dream. Her own children cannot enough paint her, praise her, celebrate her splendours; and to outdo if possible that patriotic enthusiasm has been the effort of many a stranger from afar....
Where is the poet, where the prophet, the princes, the scholars, the men whom, could we see, we should recognize wherever we met them, with whom the whole world is acquainted? They are not here. In the sunshine of the Piazza, in the glorious gloom of San Marco, in the great council-chambers and offices of State, once so full of busy statesmen, and great interests, there is scarcely a figure recognizable of all, to be met with in spirit—no one whom we look for as we walk, whose individual footsteps are traceable wherever we turn. Instead of the men who made her what she is, who ruled her with so high a hand, who filled her archives with the most detailed narratives, and gleaned throughout the world every particular of universal history which could enlighten and guide her, we find everywhere the great image—an idealisation more wonderful than any in poetry—of Venice herself, the crowned and reigning city, the centre of all their aspirations, the mistress of their affections, for whom those haughty patricians of an older day, with a proud self-abnegation which has no humility or sacrifice in it, effaced themselves, thinking of nothing but her glory....
Though there is no record of that time when Dante stood within the red walls of the arsenal, and saw the galleys making and mending, and the pitch fuming up to heaven—as all the world may still see them through his eyes—yet a milder scholarly image, a round smooth face, with cowl and garland, looks down upon us from the gallery, all blazing with crimson and gold, between the horses of San Marco, a friendly visitor, the best we could have, since Dante left no sign behind him, and probably was never heard of by the magnificent Signoria. Petrarch stands there, to be seen by the side of the historian-doge, as long as Venice lasts: but not much of him, only a glimpse, as in the Venetian way, lest in contemplation of the poet we should for a moment forget the Republic, his hostess and protector—Venice, the all-glorious mistress of the seas, the first object, the unrivalled sovereign of her children’s thoughts and hearts.
MRS. OLIPHANT.
VENICE
White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden pistils with their seeds.
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest!
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
VENETIAN ENCHANTMENT
Can you fancy a city without a horse in it, or a carriage, where not even a van or a truck disturbs the stillness, where your household possessions are moved on the witching first of May in boats, and you drift along in a gondola to your merry-makings or your funerals? Such a city is Venice, where, as Browning wrote, ‘the sea the street is.’ I went out of the railroad-station into a gondola, and the enchantment began. I felt the spell, at once, of this unique city,—this one only Venice in all the world. Everywhere were gondolas,—gondolas moored at the quay, waiting for passengers; gondolas drawn up in front of palaces, waiting for their freight of dark-eyed Venetian girls; gondolas threading the mazes of the little canals, or sweeping down the Grand Canal, and drawing near each other now and then for a chat between the occupants.
All these gondolas are painted black. This is in accordance with an ancient law of the Republic, passed once upon a time when the decorations of the fascinating water-carriages were becoming too sumptuous for Republican morals. But even now many of the gondolas are very elegant. They are long and slender in shape, with a high beak pointed with steel; they are often superb in carving. Inside the little house in which you sit are soft cushions, and gilt-framed mirrors in which the piquant, dark-eyed faces of the Italian girls behold themselves in fascinating reflection....
Venice is a city of palaces. Three-quarters of them are unoccupied now, save by the stranger within her gates, who hires them for a season. But they are wonderfully beautiful, with their superb architecture and their great variety of colouring. Nothing could be more delightful than a sail down the Grand Canal at sunset, unless it be one by moonlight.
At sunset, after the warmest day, the air is cool. The sky is crimson above you, and the water which laps around your black keel is crimson also. Everybody has come out to enjoy the delicious coolness and shadow. You meet your friends, and exchange greetings with them as you would in the Casino at Florence or the Central Park in New York. The old palaces catch the sunset glory, and glow in it with a splendour as radiant as their memories. Busy waiters are arranging the out-of-door tables in front of the cafés in the grand piazza of San Marco for their evening custom. You drift on and on, till the sunset glory fades, and a new glory, purer and paler, has arisen,—the glory of the moon.
Everybody raves about moonlight in Venice, and well they may, for there is nothing on earth so enchanting. You forget the far-off world,—that old, hard world, where waggons rattle, and horses stumble and fall, and people are tired, and duns harass you, and time and tide wait for no man. In this enchanted Venice, it seems to you, no one is ever sad, or cross, or weary. You think that here, at least, you could be reconciled to an earthly immortality. The feeling is universal. A rich Englishman, while I was there, leased one of the old palaces for twenty-five years to come, and was busily adorning it with gems of art. He put into it old Venetian glasses, strange mirrors with nymphs and roses painted on them, such as were the glory of Venice long ago. His silver was wrought by the men of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. In his hall were marble statues sculptured by long-forgotten hands. His chairs and tables were carved by cunning workmen who had turned to dust. Everything was of the past, except the flowers, which everywhere ran riot. Marble vases, rifled from tombs, were full of glowing crimson roses. Bright-hued blossoms filled the windows, vines trailed over the walls, fragrance as of a thousand gardens flooded the rooms.
‘Twenty-five years!’ cried a friend, who was looking on at the lavish adornment of the old palace. ‘Are you sure you will be contented here so long?’
‘If not, it is hopeless,’ was the answer, ‘for I’ve tried the rest of the world, and found it wanting. Year after year Venice has drawn me back again with her charm, always new, though so old. If she fails to content me, there is nothing left but to go to heaven.’
And there are those who think, having reached Venice, that they have gone very nigh to heaven. At least, let us fancy it is that Island of the Blest which the old voyageurs used to seek....
There are few places more prolific of temptations to the purse than this city by the sea. You could spend a small fortune in photographs; and no photographs are so beautiful as those of Venice, with her water-ways, her sumptuous architecture, and her picturesque gondolas. You go a few steps from the photographer’s, and pause before the window of a shop for the sale of antiquities. If you have any imagination at all, you are fascinated at once. You find here quaint rings, as old as the days of the Doges; lace which generations of by-gone marquises have worn, and which time has turned to the hue of amber; fans behind which the dear, dead women, with their red-gold hair that Titian painted, blushed and bloomed and sighed and flirted. Here are shoe-buckles glittering with diamonds; here, in short, are a thousand relics of a beauty-loving and luxurious past; and you cannot turn away from them until you have bought something by way of talisman, wherewith to conjure back the shades of dead days and faded glories.
You see long lines of shops, full of the Venetian mosaic, and of the Venetian gold-work, which is the daintiest that you can imagine. Here is Salviati’s priceless glass. It is Salviati who has rediscovered the secrets of the old glass-makers. He will tell you that there can be no such thing as a lost art, while the human brain retains its former power; and in this matter of glass-making, at least, he has proved his own theories. Such wonderful colours, such wonderful shapes, such exquisite designs, can be found nowhere else. It almost converts one to Spiritualism, this exceptional success of Salviati’s, and makes you think that the ghosts of some of the old glass-makers have been whispering their long-forgotten secrets into his ears. You have fingered all the morning round this captivating piazza of San Marco, with its shops full of temptations, and now the bronze Vulcans of the clock-tower march out and strike the hour of two, and retire again; and just as they beat their retreat you see one of the prettiest sights in Venice. Long ago—at the beginning of the thirteenth century, so the story runs,—Admiral Dandolo, while besieging Candia, received intelligence by means of carrier-pigeons which greatly aided him. He then sent the birds to Venice with the news of his success; and since that period their descendants have been carefully cherished and greatly prized by the Venetians. Every day, at two o’clock the doves are fed at the expense of the city.... Venice! You can pass your dreamy days there in the luxury of an absolute repose. No other place is like it for beauty, and certainly no other is like it for restfulness.... Gay belles, who have tired themselves out by a busy winter in Rome or Florence, betake themselves to this City of the Sea, and win back their roses in its quiet. Its spell is on you from the first moment you arrive. It seems to me no one could ever leave it willingly; and if only the post could be abolished, and no letters would come to call you back to the world outside, you might stay there for ever without knowing it,—like the monk who laid his ear so close to heaven that he heard in his dream the songs of Paradise, and awoke to find that he had been listening to them for a thousand years.
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
A VISION OF VENICE
Behold! a waking vision crowns my soul
With beatific radiance, and the light
Of shining hope;—a golden memoried dream
That clings unto my youth, as clung the strange
Leonine phantom to that mystic man,
Lean Paracelsus. It has grown with me
Like destiny, or that which seems to be
My destiny, ambition: and its glow
Inflames my fancy, as if some clear star
Had burst in silvery light within my brain.
From the smooth hyaline of that far sea
The pictured Adriatic rises, fair
As dream, a kingly-built and tower’d town;
Column and arch and architrave instinct
With delicatest beauty; overwrought
With tracery of interlacèd leaves
For ever blooming on white marble, hush’d
In everlasting summer, windless, cold:
The city of the Doges!
From the calm
Transparent waters float some thrilling sounds
Of Amphionic music, and the words
Are Tasso’s, where he passions for his love,
That lady Florentine so lily-smooth,
Clothed on with haughtiness!
At the black stair
Of palace rising shadowy from the wave,
Two singing gondolieri wait a freight
Of loveliness. A tremulous woman, robed
In dazzling satin, and whose dimpled arms
Shine through their veil diaphanous, floats down
From the wide portal; and the ivory prow
Of the soft-cushion’d gondola (as she
Steps lightly from the marble to her place)
Dips, rises, dips again; and through the blue
Swift glides into the sunset.
Oh, the glow
Of that rich sunset dims whate’er I see
In this my own dear valley! O’er the hills—
Those craggy Euganean hills, whose peaks
Wedge the clear crystalline—a blazonry
Of clouds pavilion’d, folded, interwound
Inextricably, load the breezeless west
With awe and glory. The effulgence gleams
Upon a vision’d Belmont, home of her
Who loved as Shakespeare’s women do; and gleams
Upon those walls wherein Othello’s spear
Stabb’d clinging innocence; where the poor wife,
The lone Cassandra Belvidera, gave
Her soul in martyrdom to love and woe.
And shall I never that far town behold,
Crested with sparkling columns, fiery towers,
Praxitelean masonry?—behold
Venice, the mart of nations, ere I die?
By Heaven! her common merchants princes were
Unto two continents; her traffickers
The honourable of the earth! she stood
A crownèd city, and the fawning sea
Licked her white feet; and the eternal sun
Kissed with departing beam her brow of snow!
Woe to this Venice, with her crown of pride!
The Lady of the kingdoms, the perfection
Of beauty, and the joy of the whole earth!
Through her pavilions shall the crannying winds
Whistle, and all her borders in the sea
Crumble their Parian wonder. Woe to her,
Whose glorious beauty is a fading flower!
Her sober-suited nightingales, with notes
Of smooth liquidity and softened stops,
Solace the brakes; and ’mid her ancient streets
Tawny, the gleaming and harmonious sea
Makes silvery melody of by-gone days.
Oh, white Enchantment! Ocean-spouse of old!
When thy high battlements and bulging domes,
By sunset purpled, trembled in the wave!
Now o’er thy towers the Lord hath spread His hand,
And as a cottage shalt thou be removed;
Like Nineveh, or cloudy Babylon!
DAVID GRAY.
SPECTRAL VENICE
‘I know another sight,’ said the Moon, ‘the spectre of a city. Whenever the jetty fountains splash into the marble basins, they seem to me to be telling the story of the floating city. Yes, the spouting water may tell of her, the waves of the sea may sing of her fame! On the surface of the ocean a mist often rests, and this is her widow’s veil. The Bridegroom of the Sea is dead; his palace and his city are his mausoleum. Dost thou know this city? She has never heard the rolling of wheels or the hoof-tread of horses in her streets, through which the fish swim, while the black gondola glides spectrally over the green water. I will show you the place,’ continued the Moon, ‘the largest square in it, and you will fancy yourself transported into the city of a fairy-tale. The grass grows rank among the broad flag-stones, and in the morning twilight thousands of tame pigeons flutter around the solitary lofty tower. On three sides you find yourself surrounded by cloistered walks. In these the silent Turk sits smoking his long pipe; the handsome Greek leans against the pillar, and gazes at the upraised trophies and lofty masts, memorials of power that is gone. The flags hang down like mourning scarves. A girl rests there; she has put down her heavy pails filled with water, the yoke with which she has carried them rests on one of her shoulders, and she leans against the mast of victory. This is not a fairy-palace you see before you yonder, but a church; the gilded domes and shining orbs flash back my beams; the glorious bronze horses up yonder have made journeys, like the bronze horse in the fairy-tale; they have come hither, and gone hence, and have returned again. Do you notice the variegated splendour of the walls and windows? It looks as if Genius had followed the caprices of a child, in the adornment of these singular temples. Do you see the winged lion on the pillar? The gold glitters still, but his wings are tied; the lion is dead, for the King of the Sea is dead; the great halls stand desolate, and where gorgeous painting hung of yore, the naked wall now peers through. The lazzaroni sleeps under the arcade, whose pavement in old times was to be trodden only by the feet of the high nobility. From the deep wells, and perhaps from the prisons by the Bridge of Sighs, rise the accents of woe, as at the time when the mandolino was heard in gay gondolas, and the golden ring was cast from the Bucentaur to Adria, the Queen of the Seas. Adria! shroud thyself in mists; let the veil of thy widowhood shroud thy form, and clothe in the weeds of woe the mausoleum of thy bridegroom—the marble, spectral Venice!’
HANS ANDERSEN.