The sea-charm of Venice

by Stopford A. Brooke

This impression, received in twilight or at night, rules the thousand impressions made in daylight by the art and life of Venice. The “mighty Being” of the sea, with its eternal mystery, penetrates and pervades, and is mistress of the humanity of the city. The ancient life of Venice was in harmony with this, and what remains of that life is still lovely and inspiring. The modern life of Venice tends day by day to be out of tune with this, and has violated its beauty with amazing recklessness. No reverence, no tenderness for the spirit of the place has prevented a hundred desecrations, which might have been avoided if men had cared for beauty as well as for commerce, if the men had even known what beauty was, if they had even for an hour realized the spirit of the place or the spirit of the sea.

In days before the railway and its bridge had done away with the island apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance to drop through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and come upon the far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing slowly, see, through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls, churches, palaces, rise slowly one after another, out of the breast of the waters—silver and rose and gold out of sapphire, azure, and pale gray—a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean. We forgot that fairyland had been driven from the earth, and saw, or dreamed we saw, the city of Morgan le Fay, or the palaces of the Happy Isles where the Ever-young found refuge in the sea—so lovely and so dim the city climbed out of the deep.

That vision is gone, but even now there are few visions more startling in their charm than that which befalls the weary traveller when coming out of the dark station he finds himself suddenly upon the marble quay, with a river of glittering water before his eyes, fringed with churches, palaces, and gardens; the broad stream alive with black gondolas, shouts in his ears like the shouting of seamen; and, lower in note and cry, but heard more distinctly than all other sounds, the lapping of the water on the steps of stone, the rushing of the tide against the boats. Midst all the wonders of the city, this it is which first seizes on his heart. It is the first note of the full melody of charm which the sea in Venice will play upon his imagination for many a happy day.

The waters that make her unique are in themselves beautiful. Were they like those of many lagoons, they might be stagnant, and lose the loveliness of vital movement. But they are tidal waters, and though the ordinary tide does not rise much more than a foot or two, yet its living rush is great, and passes twice a day through the lagoons and streets of Venice. It streams in at the openings in the lidi, at the ports of Malamocco, Chioggia, Lido and Tre Porti, with the force and swiftness of an impetuous river, and these four water-systems, in their meetings and retreats, fill the lagoon with incessant movement, with clashing, swirling, and sweeping currents. Then, the tide does not always keep at this low level. When the attractions of the sun and moon combine, it rises higher and floods and washes out the canals, and when the angry south, blowing fiercely up Adria, has piled up the waters at the head of the gulf, they block in the falling tide. It cannot escape from the lagoon, and it races from the Public Gardens to the Dogana. There it divides to fill the Giudecca and the Grand Canal to the height of seven or eight feet. The canals rise, the calli are flooded and the squares, and the Piazza is a lake, and the Piazzetta. Gondolas ply up to the doors of Saint Mark’s and to the Ducal Palace. The water falls as swiftly as it rises. There is no lack of life in the Venetian lagoon. Freshness, incessant change and joy minister to the beauty of these waters.

They are of the sea, but the temper of the sea in them is distinctive. The sea, uncircumscribed, at the mercy of its own wild nature, is beautiful or terrible, but it is too vast, too noisy, too desirous of destruction, even in calm too suggestive of anger, to awaken that peculiar charm in which temperance, quietude, a certain obedience or sacrifice for use, are always elements. But Venice lies in a gentle sea which loves to give itself away. Her sea is guarded by long banks of sand, pierced here and there by those openings through which the tide arrives. Within these is the wide lagoon, lying in a sheltered place, dotted with islands sleeping on silver sheets of shining water. And in the midst is the city with all its towers. It is thus penetrated and encompassed by the life and beauty of the sea; but it is the sea tamed to a love of rest; made temperate, even in furious wind, by the barriers its own force has built to shield its favoured daughter; keeping its natural freedom and love of movement, but obedient to the laws of help, and sacrificing its reckless and destroying will in order to do the work that rivers do for men; preserving thus, along with its own wild charm, the charm also of the great streams that bless the earth. The sea, then which makes Venice unique, has lost its recklessness and terror. But it has not lost its beauty. And its beauty has become as it were spiritual, for it has subdued itself to be more beautiful through service. It was then not only in pride, but also in gratitude and love, that the Doge wedded the sea, and cast into her breast his ring, and cried, “We espouse thee, sea, in token of true and perpetual dominion.”

This gentle manner of the sea, in its service through the narrow streets of the city, in the narrow lanes of the lagoon, and over its shallow banks, forced the boat the Venetians built up into the shape of the gondola, and compelled the mode of rowing it. And both these, being the work of Nature as well as of man, are beautiful. This long, subtly-curved boat, with its uptossed stem and stern, rigid in reality, but seeming to be (so swift it is to answer the slightest touch of the oar) as lithe and undulating as a serpent, leaning somewhat to one side, so that it wavers a little as it moves as if it were a wave of the sea, and gliding on its flattened bottom over shallow waters in silent speed, seems like some creature of the sea herself. Coloured black, it is brightened with polished brass and steel. The ferro da prova is the beak of polished steel which looks out from the bows of the boat, with a blade at the top like a hatchet, and below it six teeth, like those of the bone of the saw-fish. It flashes over the water and flashes in the water. It is a sea-ornament, descended from the rostrum of a Roman warship. Then the brass ornaments of the arm-rests are most frequently sea-beasts—dolphins, and the sea-horses of Venice. Everywhere the boat has been the child of the sea.

Yet it is human; it grew like a child, a youth, modified from year to year into its shape, its character, till it reached its manhood; absolutely fitted for the work it had to do, for the circumstances of the city through the narrow water-ways of which it had to move, and for the wants of all classes of its citizens. The circumstances were peculiar; the needs of the citizens were most various. It fits them all. The natural, therefore, and the human mingle in it more harmoniously than in any other boat. It is distinctive as Venice is distinctive; it has its own sentiment, its own charm; but it seems also to share in the sentiment and beauty of the sea. The cries of its rowers are like the cries of seamen. In its movement is the softness, ease, and grace of the subdued obedient waters over which it glides.

Then there is the way of rowing it, on one side, by a single rower. When there are two rowers half the charm is lost. The second rower labouring at his oar in front of the sitter removes the pleasant, psychical illusion that the boat moves by its own will. There is almost an intellectual pleasure in the rowing and steering of a gondola by the single oar behind. If the gondolier be a master of his craft, he will make his boat move through a crowded canal, or glide round the angles of a narrow water lane, as swiftly, as softly as a serpent through the branches of a tree. He will pass within an inch of a corner without touching it, as he turns the boat round within its own length. He will stop it at full speed in a few seconds. It obeys him so magically that the voyager in it, who does not see the rower, often dreams that the boat moves of itself according to a spirit in it, like the bark which bore Ogier the Dane, flying over the sea by its own desire, to Morgana. This beauty of the boat, its ways and manners, are the result of the sea-situation, and have the charm of the sea.

Then, again, this strange, soft sea, so tempered into gentlehood, brings through its quietude another element of charm into Venice. It reflects all things with a wonderful perfection. Whatever loveliness is by its side it makes more lovely. Shallow itself, it seems deep; and the towers and palaces of Venice in all their colours descend and shine among other clouds and in another sky below. All outlines of sculpture and architecture, of embossment, in wall and window; all play of sunshine and shade; all the human life in balcony, bridge or quay, on barge or boat, are in the waters as in a silent dream—revealed in every line and colour, but with an exquisite difference in softness and purity. All Nature’s doings in the sky are also repeated with a tender fidelity in the mirror of the lagoon—morning light, noonday silver, purple thunder cloud in the afternoon, sunset vapours, the moon and stars of night—and not only on the surface, but also, it seems, in an immeasurable depth. To look over the side of the boat into the water is to cry, “I see infinite space.”

That is part of this charm of the reflecting water. But this only belongs to Nature and the feeling her beauty awakens. There is another charm in this work of the water. Whatever pleasure the living and varied movement of a great town, whatever interest its activities, bring to men, is doubled, so far as charm is concerned, in Venice. For they are exercised on water as well as on land, and their movements and methods are different on each. The sights of life are doubly varied. The land has its own way with them; the water has another way with them.