The sea-charm of Venice

by Stopford A. Brooke

England was Teutonic, Venice was Roman; and as in England the Teuton destroyed the influence of Rome, so the Teutonic invasion of Italy, with all its new elements, never touched Venice. The Gothic influence left her uninfluenced. She alone in Italy was pure Roman. The English race was mixed with the Celtic race, but the Teutonic elements prevailed. But Venice was unmixed. She was always singularly Roman right down to the dreadful days of her final conquest, so that it may well be said that Manin was ultimus Romanorum. In constitution, in laws, in traditions, in the temper of her citizens, in manners, in her greatness, her splendour, even in her unbridled luxury and her decay, she was Roman to the end. Italy was transmuted by the Goth, but not Venice.

But owing to her origin she was Rome at Sea; and being on the edge of a sea which naturally carried her war and trade to the East, she was more of eastern than of western Rome. Byzantium, not the Italian Rome, was her nursing mother, and poured into her the milk of her art, her commerce, and her customs. By this, also, she remained outside of Italy, and her position, anchored in the sea off the Italian coast, is, as it were, a symbol of her double relation to Western and Eastern Rome. Whatever change took place in her Roman nature was made by the spirit of the sea on which she had made her home. Commerce was forced upon her, and it was not difficult for her to take it up, for the Roman senators and patricians of Altinum, Padua, Concordia, and Aquileia who took refuge on the islands, had been traders before they founded Venice, and only developed more fully in Venice that commerce which they had practised on the mainland. Aquileia had been for years before the barbaric invasion the emporium of a trade with Byzantium and the Danube. The trade was transferred to Venice. It did not, then, arise in Venice, but it was so greatly increased during the centuries that the new city held the east in fee. From every port on the Mediterranean, and from lands and seas beyond that inland lake, the trade of east and west poured into Venice. To protect her commerce she became a sea-power. Her struggle for centuries with the pirates formed her navy and her seamen, both Venetians and mercenaries, into the mighty instrument of naval war they became when the strife with the pirates closed in victory. But her captains, her senators, the great dukes who led the navy into battle, led it for the sake of her commerce, and were themselves, as Shakespeare made Antonio, “royal merchants,” such as they had been of old in Padua, Altinum, and Aquileia; and always Romans. Wherever then we touch Venice we touch the sea out of which she was born, by which she was nursed, and which when she reached her full age, she wedded and commanded.

To realize the origins of the city, and this sea-spirit in her history and her life, to recall in memory the centuries she lasted, and to feel the sentiment of the splendid sorrow, strife and glory of the tale, it is well to row to Torcello, to climb to the top of the cathedral tower, and to look out from the low-arched windows, north and south, east and west. The door used always to be open, and it was easy to reach the upper chamber among the bells. Thence, as the voyager gazes to the north and west, he sees the high dim peaks of the Alpine chain from whose passes the Hun and the Goth descended. Below him stretches to the sea the misty plain where the cities of the old Venetia lay, which Attila advancing from the east gave up to fire and to slaughter, which Theodoric and Alboin afterwards ruined more completely. From these and from all the villages of the plain, the Roman nobles with their dependants fled to the islands of the lagoon which our voyager sees spreading north and south at his feet for many miles of blue and silver water. Below the tower are the deep-grassed meadows and dreary shores of Torcello which the people of Altinum, a third part of whom took flight from Attila, covered as the years went on with noble palaces, streets, bridges, and gardens. The cathedral they built was built with the very marbles which had adorned, and the stones which had raised, the churches and houses of Altinum. Pillars, capitals, the pulpits, the chair of the bishop, the marble screen of the choir, the font, the pavement, belonged to their church on the land. They were still Venetians. As they increased, and as the emigration from other cities continued, the dwellers in the older Venetia colonized Mazzorbo, Burano, Murano, and Malamocco. The islands lie before our eyes as we look from the southern windows of the tower. And noblest of all, at the end of the long slow curving line of the deep channel among the marshes, is Rivo Alto on whose islands the Venetians fixed their capital at last.

There, tremulous in the sea-mist is the shining expanse of water before the Ducal Palace, and the towers of the great city, in whose splendour and power ended the misery and the struggle of the flight. No view makes a deeper impression on the historian. But when that impression has been realized, there will steal into his mind, if he have with him the spirit of imagination, another impression; one of curious charm, a charm half of nature and half of humanity, a charm not of the land, but of the sea. In that charm there is the breath of the salt winds and the life of the dark blue waves which beyond Venice he sees from Torcello breaking in flashing foam on the Lido which defends the lagoon and shelters the city. It is a charm that rises to his heart, not only from the gay tossing of the Adriatic, but from the quiet, glittering, silver-gray expanse of the tidal lagoon in which the islands sleep like cattle on the meadows of the land. And of this charm and all it means and has made Venice, I shall attempt to write.

To write on Venice when many have written so well on her; to describe her, when she has been described from the Angel that, so short a time ago, watched over her on the Campanile to the islands on the far lagoon, seems almost an impertinence. But I have loved Venice for many years, and the record of any individual impressions received from her may have the interest which belongs to personal feeling. Moreover, in this little essay I shall limit myself to one subject—to the charm and the life which are added to Venice by the presence of the sea, to the influence which the sea has had on her beauty, on the character of her art, and on the imagination of those who visit her. What influence the sea had on her history—that immense subject—does not come within the scope of this essay. It is only concerned with her beauty, her charm, as they are bound up with the sea; it is not, save incidentally, concerned with her history.

In her constitution, in her history, in her people, in her position, in her art, and in her sea-power and commerce, Venice, among Italian towns, stands alone. She only is built, not by the sea, but in the sea, born not on the beach of ocean, but like Aphrodité, from beneath her heart. It is this difference which, entering into all her lesser charms, gives them their distinction, their wild, remote, and natural grace. Other great towns belong to humanity and art; even when they are sea-ports they are of the land, and are the creation of the land. But Venice, full of her own humanity, wrought into beauty by the art of her children, raised from the waves by the labour of those who loved her, belongs only to the sea, and seems to be the creation, not only of man, but of great Nature herself. Her streets are streams of the sea, and were planned by the will of the sea. The great path which, curling like a serpent, divides her city; by which her palaces of business, pleasure, and government were built; on which her history displayed itself for centuries in thanksgiving or sorrow, in pomp or in decay; is a sea-river ebbing and flowing, and brings day by day, into her midst, the winds of ocean for her life, the fruits of ocean for her food, the mystery of ocean for her beauty. This presence and power of the living sea, running through Venice like blood through a man, makes her distinctive charm. It is the charm of the life of Nature herself, added to the life of her art and the life of her humanity.

There are times when this impression is profound. To stand in the dawn, before the city is awake, on the quay of the Schiavoni, when the East beyond the Lido is flushing like a bride, and the morning star grows dim above the sea, is to forget that the stones on which we stand, the palaces and churches, bridges and towers, were built by man’s wit or set up for his business and his pleasure. They rose, we think, out of the will and creative passion of the Sea. The sky and the clouds descended to bestow on them other light and colour than those of the sea; the winds, in their playing, flung the bridges over the channels of the tide and the sunlight knit them into strength; but these were only the artists that adorned, it was the sea that built, the city.

Lest we should lose the power of this dream, we will not watch the buildings grow solid in the growing light, but keep our eyes on the broad expanse of the lagoon, shimmering in silver-gray out to the Port of Lido, where the silver meets the leaping blue of the Adriatic. The whole water-surface is alive, though it seem asleep, with the swift rushing of the tide. Around the angles of the quay, over the marble steps, all along the smooth stones of the wall, up the narrow canals, looping past the piles, swirling against the boats, the musical water ripples; and in every motion, change, and whirl, as in the main movement of the whole lagoon, the life of Nature in this her kingdom of the sea, full of force, pleasure, and joy in her own loveliness, is overwhelming. It masters the spirit of the gazer, and he becomes himself part of her sea-passion, living in the stream of her sea-being. There is silence everywhere. The quay is deserted, and if a belated sailor pass by, the sound of his footstep seems to mingle with the crying of the sea birds and the plash of the water. And in the silence, the impression that Nature alone exists, that the city is her work and that man is nothing, is deepened for the moment into an unforgettable reality.

A similar impression is made on the voyager who rows at the dead of night, when the sky is full of stars, out into the lagoon half way between Venice and the Lido. The city, with its scattered lights, has no clear outlines; it rises like an exhalation from the sea. The campaniles are white ghosts that appeal to the dark blue heavens. Below them, the crowd of buildings wavers in the sea-mist like a shaken curtain. The city, seen thus in the tremulous starlight, is, we think, a dream-conception which, in high imagination, the God of the sea, resting far below on his couch of pearl, has thrown into such form as his wandering will desires. No human art has made its wonder.

Nearer to our eyes the islands lie outstretched like sea-creatures, risen from the depths to behold the stars and to rest from their labours. The boats which lie at anchor against the tide do not belong to man, but are the chariots of Amphitrite and her crew. And in the profound silence we hear the deep breathing of the sea, a marvellous, soft, universal sound; and perceive, half awed and half delighted, the rise and fall of her restless and pregnant breast. And then man and his work no longer fill the voyager’s imagination. He is absorbed into Nature. The starry sky above, the living sea below, are all he knows; and the sea is the greatest, for it takes into its depths the trembling of every star, and the white wavering of palace and tower, church and bridge, and marble quay.