To return to Venice. In the year 1819 an English traveller asked for a song of a man who was reported to have once chanted Tasso alla barcaruolo; the old gondolier shook his head. "In times like these," he said, "he had no heart to sing." Foreign visitors had to fall back on the beautiful German music, at the sound of which Venetians ran out of the Piazza, lest they might be seduced by its hated sweetness. Meanwhile the people went on singing in their own quarters, and away from the chance of ministering to their masters' amusement. It is even probable that the moral casemate to which they fled favoured the preservation of their old ways, that of poetising included. Instead of aiming at something novel and modern, the Venetian wished to be like what his fathers were when the flags on St Mark's staffs were not yellow and black. So, like his fathers, he made songs and sang songs, of which a good collection has been formed, partly in past years, and partly since the black-and-yellow standard has given place, not, indeed, to the conquered emblems of the Greek isles, but to the colours of Italy, reconquered for herself.
Venetian folk-poesy begins at the cradle. The baby Venetian, like most other babies, is assured that he is the most perfect of created beings. Here and there, underlying the baby nonsense, is a dash of pathos. "Would you weep if I were dead?" a mother asks, and the child is made to answer, "How could I help weeping for my own mamma, who loves me so in her heart?" A child is told that if he asks his mother, who is standing by the door, "What are you doing there?" she will reply, "I am waiting for thy father; I wait and wait, and do not see him coming; I think I shall die thus waiting." The little Venetian has the failings of baby-kind all the world over; he cries and he laughs when he ought to be fast asleep. His mother tells him that he was born to live in Paradise; she is sure that the angels would rejoice in her darling's beauty. "Sleep well, for thy mother sits near thee," she sings, "and if by chance I go away, God will watch thee when I am gone."
A christening is regarded in Venice as an event of much social as well as religious importance. By canon law the bonds of relationship established by godfatherhood count for the same as those of blood, for which reason the Venetian nobles used to choose a person of inferior rank to stand sponsor for their children, thus escaping the creation of ties prohibitive of marriage between persons of their own class. In this case the material responsibilities of the sponsor were slight—it was his part to take presents, and not to make them. By way of acknowledging the new connection, the child's father sent the godfather a marchpane, that cake of mystic origin which is still honoured and eaten from Nuremberg to Malaga. With the poor, another order of things is in force. The compare de l'anelo—the person who acted as groomsman at the marriage—is chosen as sponsor to the first-born child. His duties begin even before the christening. When he hears of the child's birth, he gets a piece of meat, a fowl, and two new-laid eggs, packs them in a basket, and despatches them to the young mother. Eight days after the birth comes the baptism. On returning from the church, the sponsor, now called compare de San Zuane, visits the mother, before whom he displays his presents—twelve or fifteen lire for herself; for the baby a pair of earrings, if it be a girl; and if a boy, a pair of boy's earrings, or a single ornament to be worn in the right ear. Henceforth the godfather is the child's natural guardian next to its parents; and should they die, he is expected to provide for it. Should the child die, he must buy the zogia (the "joy"), a wreath of flowers now set on the coffins of dead infants, but formerly placed on their heads when they were carried to the grave-isle in full sight of the people. This last custom led to even more care being given to the toilet of dead children than what might seem required by decency and affection. To dress a dead child badly was considered shameful. Tradition tells of what happened to a woman who was so miserly that she made her little girl a winding-sheet of rags and tatters. When the night of the dead came round and all the ghosts went in procession, the injured babe, instead of going with the rest, tapped at its mother's door and cried, "Mamma, do you see me? I cannot go in procession because I am all ragged." Every year on the night of the dead the baby girl returned to make the same reproach.
Venetian children say before they go to bed:
Bona sera ai vivi,
E riposo ai poveri morti;
Bon viagio ai naveganti
E bona note ai tuti quanti.
There is a sort of touching simplicity in this; and somehow the wish of peace to the "poor dead" recalls a line of Baudelaire's—