It is hard indeed to recall the beginnings of the city, and the time when a few sand-ridges just rose above the surface of the motionless lagoon, like the backs of dozing whales in a summer sea. The fishermen from the mainland saw the resemblance too, and called them ‘backs’—‘dorsi’—giving some of them names which like ‘Dorso duro’ have clung to them until our own time, and will perhaps live on, years hence, among other generations of fishermen when Venice shall have disappeared into the waste of sand and water, out of which her astonishing personality grew into being, and in which it has flourished and survived nearly fifteen centuries.
We are not concerned scientifically with the origin of the Venetian people or of their name; we need not go back with Romanin to the legendary days of the first great struggle between Asia and Europe, in the hope of proving that the Venetians were of the great Scythian race and took the side of Troy against the injured Atrides; it matters not at all whether the Venetians were the same as the Eneti, whether Eneti was a Greek name signifying those that ‘went in,’ the ‘Intruders,’ or whether it came from the Syriac Hanida, meaning a ‘Pilgrim.’ Venice did not begin under the
EVENING IN THE LAGOON
walls of Troy, nor even in the great Roman consular province of the mainland that bore the name and handed it down. Venice began to exist when Europe rang with the cry of fear—‘The Huns are upon us!’—on the day when the first fugitives, blind with terror, stumbled ashore upon the back of one of the sand whales in the lagoon, and dared not go back.
Venice was Venice from the first, and is Venice still, a person in our imagination, almost more than a place. To most people her name does not instantly suggest names of great Venetians, as ‘Florence’ suggests the Medici, as ‘Rome’ suggests the Cæsars and the Popes, as ‘Paris’ suggests Louis XIV. and Bonaparte, as ‘Constantinople’ suggests the Sultan and ‘Bagdad’ the Caliphs. ‘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. Without much reading and some study it is almost impossible to realise that Venice was once a great European power and a weighty element in the alternating equilibrium and unrest of nations; Venice seems to-day a capital without a country, an empress without an empire, and one thinks of her as having always existed simply in order to be always herself, a Venice for Venice’s sake, as it were, and not for the purpose of exercising any power, nor as the product of extraneous forces concentrated at a point and working towards a result.
These considerations may explain the charm felt by all those who know her, and the attraction, also, which is in most books that treat her as an artistic and romantic whole, complete in herself, to be studied, admired, and perhaps worshipped, with only an occasional allusion to her political history. So, too, one may account for the dry dulness and uncharming prosiness of most books that profess to tell the history of Venice impartially and justly. There is no such thing as impartial history, and impartial justice is an empty phrase, as every lawyer knows. It is only the second-rate historian, or the compiler of school primers, who does not take one side or the other in the struggles he describes; and a judge who feels no instinctive sympathy for right against wrong, while as yet but half proved, can never be anything but a judicial hack and a legal machine.
Preface Chron. Alt.
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