Critical Studies

by Ouida

The timid public huddles together, mute, submissive, and afraid, shorn of its fleeces like a flock of sheep, but not daring to complain.

Those who do so dare are either ignored, or, if they give trouble, are repressed. The gondoliers of Venice have again and again risen against the ruin of their livelihood by the 'black devils' of the vaporetti, but force is at once called in and they are brutally silenced, flung into prison, and deprived of their licence, i.e., of their daily bread. Because it is so picturesque a calling, and the balancing of the oar looks so easy a work, those who are outside it do not realise the hardships of a gondolier. In summer, if Venice be full, it is well enough, and brings a fair, though never a high, wage; but in the other seasons it is a life of great and continual exposure and fatigue. In cold weather, and Venice is intensely cold in the winter solstice, the long vigils on the traghetto are most tedious and trying, especially through the long chill nights. When the icy winds blow in from the Alps or the Adriatic, the gondolier stands exposed to all their fury, whilst the passenger he carries sits warm and sheltered under the felze.

Strong and lithe in form, often handsome in feature, almost invariably intelligent and acquainted with legend and verse, invariably courteous and well-bred, the gondolier should have received the utmost attention from his rulers. It is painful to know that no body of men has ever been so slighted, so injured, and so wantonly outraged.

There is nowhere any more interesting and deserving community than the Venetian gondoliers, and few more worthy of regard; yet they have been dealt with as though they were no more than so much scum of the sea. Their long-established rights receive no consideration, and their injuries no compensation.

If the vote of Venice could have been honestly polled, no steam-boat would ever have been allowed on the Grand Canal, as, if the vote of Florence could have been honestly polled, the centre of Florence would be now standing untouched, and would have remained untouched for many a generation.

Meanwhile, it is said, by those competent to judge, that the great Murazzi, which protect Venice from the onslaught of the sea in winter storm, and which we all know so well as we pass out from the Lido by the Bar of Malamocco to Chioggia, are being dangerously undermined by the attacks of the high tides in rude weather, and require costly and immediate repair. It is in vain that this most necessary work is urged upon the Government in Rome. The Government neither undertakes it itself, nor allows Venetians to undertake it. For any foolish, needless disfiguring work, such as the installation of the electric light in the ducal palace, against which Venetians in vain protested, the Government is always ready to waste millions. But for a work of obvious and vital necessity, such as that of the strengthening of the Murazzi, it has not a soldo to spare.

The architecture of Venice has the fragility as it has the fairness of the dianthus or the gemmia of the sea; its walls and buttresses and foundations are plunged into salted, sanded mud; its piles grow green and brown and purple with weed; its snowy marbles and its ruddy stones are mirrored in rippling or in stagnant water; they tremble under the vibrations caused by the accursed paddle-boats; they quiver, like living things, under the knife, as the engines roar and the cog-wheels turn. Assailed as the city is within by the invasion of steam and barbarism, it is entirely certain that she could not resist the force of the inrushing waters if the Murazzi were ever to yield to the pressure of a winter sea; and it is unhappily quite possible that the gigantic barrier of the sea-walls may give way on some day of unusually high tides and violent tempest, and the city herself will then be overwhelmed beneath the Adriatic waters.

Who would care if this were her fate?

The contractors, and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators would have the pleasure and profit of building a spick and span new town, north-east of Mestre: all tiresome reminiscences of the Lion of St Mark would have sunk with the bronze horses underneath the waves.

Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy, which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by Italian deputies, syndics, and municipalities, and by those foreign companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their gates.