Italy, the Magic Land

by Lilian Whiting

VI
THE GLORY OF A VENETIAN JUNE

I have been between Heaven and Earth since our arrival at Venice. The Heaven of it is ineffable—never had I touched the skirts of so celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water up between all that gorgeous color and carving, the enchanting silence, the music, the gondolas,—I mix it all up together, and maintain that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, no second Venice in the world.

Mrs. Browning, in the June of 1850.

The first glimpse of enchanted Venice, as her towers and marble palaces rise wraith-like from the sea, is an experience that can never fade from memory. Like a mirage, like a vision invoked by some incantation or magician’s spell, the scene prefigures itself, bringing a thrill of some vague and undefined memory, as if a breath floated by,—

“An odor from Dreamland sent,
That makes the ghost seem nigh me,
Of a splendor that came and went;
Of a life lived somewhere,—I know not
In what diviner sphere,—
Of memories that stay not and go not,”

which eludes all translation into words. Nor does the spell dissolve and vanish when put to the test of one’s actual sojourn in the Dream City. It is an experience outside the boundaries of the ordinary day and daylight world, as if one were caught up into the ethereal realm to find a city

“. . . of gliding and wide-wayed silence
With room in the streets for the soul.”

The sense of remoteness from common life could hardly be greater if one were suddenly swept away to some far star, blazing in the firmament; or if Charon had rowed him over the mystic river and he had entered the abodes of life on the plane beyond. Even the hotel becomes an enchanted palace whose salons, luxuriously decorated, open by long windows on marble balconies overhanging the Grand Canal. Dainty little tables piled with current reading matter, in French, English, and Italian, stand around; the writing-desks are sumptuous, filled with every convenience of stationery; and the matutinal coffee and rolls are served the guest in any idyllic niche wherein he chooses to ensconce himself, regardless of the regulation salle-à-manger. One looks across the Grand Canal to the beautiful Church of Santa Maria della Salute. The water plashes against the marble steps as gondolas glide past; the blue sky of Italy reflects itself in the waters below, until one feels as if he were floating in the air between sea and sky. In the heart of the city, with throngs of people moving to and fro, all is yet silence, save the cry of the gondolier, the confused echo of voices from the people who pass, and here and there the faint call of a bird. No whir and rush of electric cars and motors; no click of the horses’ feet on the asphalt pavement—no pavement, indeed, and no horses, no twentieth-century rush of life. It is Venice, it is June, and the two combine to make an illuminated chapter. To live in Venice is like being domesticated in the heart of an opal. How wonderful it is to drift—a sky above and a sky below—on still waters at sunset, with the Dream City mirrored in the depths, every shade of gold and rose and amber mirrored back,—the very atmosphere a sea of color, recalling to one Ruskin’s words that “none of us appreciate the nobleness and the sacredness of color. Of all God’s gifts to man,” he continues, “color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. Color is the sacred and saving element.” If the enthusiasm in these words savor of exaggeration, Venice is the place that will lure one to forgetfulness of it. One is simply conscious of being steeped in color and revelling in a strange loveliness. One no longer marvels at the glory of Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. They but interpreted on canvas the shining reality. A charming writer on Venice has well said:—

“The aspects of Venice are as various, as manifold, as the hues held in solution upon her waters beneath a sirocco sky. There is a perpetual miracle of change; one day is not like another, one hour varies from the next; there is no stable outline such as one finds among the mountains, no permanent vista, as in a view across a plain. The two great constituents of the Venetian landscape, the sea and the sky, are precisely the two features in nature which undergo most incessant change. The cloud-wreaths of this evening’s sunset will never be repeated again; the bold and buttressed piles of those cloud-mountains will never be built again just so for us; the grain of orange and crimson that stains the water before our prow, we cannot be sure that we shall look upon its like again. . . . One day is less like another in Venice than anywhere else. The revolution of the seasons will repeat certain effects; spring will chill the waters to a cold, hard green; summer will spread its breadth of golden light on palace front and water way; autumn will come with its pearly-gray sirocco days, and sunsets flaming a sombre death; the stars of a cloudless winter night, the whole vast dome of heaven, will be reflected in the mirror of the still lagoon. But in spite of this general order of the seasons, one day is less like another in Venice than anywhere else; the lagoon wears a different aspect each morning when you rise, the sky offers a varied composition of cloud each evening as the sun sets. Words cannot describe Venice, nor brush portray her ever-fleeting, ever-varying charm. Venice is to be felt, not reproduced; to live there is to live a poem, to be daily surfeited with a wealth of beauty enough to madden an artist to despair.”

It was in the autumn of 1882 that the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks, later Bishop of Massachusetts, visited Venice and wrote of San Marco:—