The sea-charm of Venice

by Stopford A. Brooke

Moreover, the water itself, being always in motion, always reflecting or taking shadows, always harmonizing itself with its comrades in land or sky, always making a subtle music in answer to human action upon it—adds these romantic and lovely elements to the business and pleasure of the town. Below, in the water, the clumsiest barge is accompanied by its soft ideal; and the lovers, leaning over the balcony, see their happiness smile on them from the water.

The same thing, some aver, may be said of a Dutch town full of canals. Partly, that is true; but the canals only carry the heavy business of these towns, and in Venice all human life, in its gaiety and beauty as well as its work, is on the water. Moreover, the water itself, not half stagnant like the canals of Holland, is always thrilling with its own ebbing and flowing, has its own fine spirit, and takes, as I have often thought, its own share and pleasure in all that is done upon it. Life answers there to life—living Nature to living man.

Not apart from this element of charm are other forms of it. The mystery and music of moving water, the sense of unknown depths and its wonder, the impression of the infinite which gathers into us from the sea, are all brought by the tides in Venice into the midst of a bustling city, vividly concerned with the material, the finite, and the practical. We feel the wonder and secret of Nature playing round our business. In a moment we are touched into imaginative worlds. We may pass with ease from buying and selling into poetry, from materialism into mystery. This has its surprising charm.

The element of noiselessness increases this impression of poetic mystery. The Venetians themselves make noise enough. They are a gay and passionate people on the surface, and their open-air life makes them open in speech. The air is full of shouting, but the rattle and shattering and trampling of wheels and horses over stony roads which wears out life so rapidly in towns on land, is never heard in Venice. And there are numberless lanes of quiet water where the crowd of gondolas never comes, and where the only sound is the wash of water on the stones and the murmur of the acacias above our head. The quiet sea has stolen into the streets, and all that is beautiful in their architecture, their history, and their daily life, creeps into the study of our imagination with more impressive grace because of the peace. As to the quiet of the lagoon it is like the solemn quiet of the desert. In ten minutes from the quay we are in the midst of a silence deeper even than that of the lonely hills. The silence listens to itself, and we can scarcely believe in the turmoil of the world or the battle in our own heart. This has its healing charm.

Then, also, the nearness and universal presence of the waters makes man more alive to the beauty of the few things which belong to the land in Venice. There are no woods, no parks, no great gardens, no wealth of foliage or grass, but what there is of flowers and trees and grassy spaces is more lovingly observed than on the land. The great fig trees which drop their broad foliage over the walls, the little groves of soft acacia which stand beside some of the churches, the tiny plots of green verdure in the squares, the tall oleanders ablaze with white and ruddy flowers, the climbing vines that twine amongst the carved stone work, the rare small gardens with their black cypresses, white lilies, golden fruit; the one stone pine dark against the sky, the scarlet flash of the pomegranate, the tumbled wealth of a single rose tree, might all be thought little of in an Italian town. They are common there and multitudinous. But here, at Venice, in the midst of the waters they are strange; they surprise and enchant. They are always observed; all their beauty is felt.

Amid all this water-world, and the human life which uses it and loves it, there is one place where it is fairest and most used by man. It is the great expanse of water at the entrance of the Grand Canal, opposite the Ducal Palace, in whose surface is reflected the Campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore on its island, the dome of the Church of Our Lady of Safety, and the tower of the Dogana. From the Dogana runs out to the south the broad canal which divides Venice from the islands of the Giudecca. In the opposite direction the glittering surface spreads away to the port of the Lido, where between the Lido and San Andrea the lagoon opens into the main sea. On these waters, in the past and present, have collected, and still collect, the ships and barks that have carried on the wars, the commerce, and the fishing life of Venice.

I do not describe the scene, but the glancing, dazzling water, the blue expanse, seem as if they had been designed by Nature to harmonize with the swiftness and dash of the warlike spirit and warwork of ancient Venice, with the splendour of her commerce and the merchandise it brought, with the magnificence of her religion and the dignity of her government, whose noblest observances and pageants were displayed on these shining waters.

It is one of the enchantments of Venice that it is so easy for imaginative knowledge, impelled and kindled to its work by this glistening and splendid water-world, to recreate upon it the vivid life of the past; to see the long war-galleys pass out into the Adriatic, beating the water into foam; to watch the ships from all the Orient disembark their costly goods and men from the tribes of the East on the quays; to picture the many hued and stately processions from the sea to the palace of the Duke, from San Marco to the sea. A splendid vision! A little reading, some careful study of the pictures in the Accademia, and the voyager can crowd, as he stands on the Piazzetta, that gleaming mirror of sea with a hundred scenes of glory, beauty, use and charm in war and peace.

Little now remains of that wonderful sea-glory, and the beauty of its ships is departed. Some merchant boats lie stern to stern along the quays of the Giudecca, black and built like boxes. Steamboats carrying heavy goods, now and then a great liner, scream and hiss in the lagoon. The war-galleys of Venice are replaced by ironclads. All the outward romance of this great sheet of water is gone. It cannot be helped, and we must put our regret by, lest we should spoil or under-rate the present; but some reverence, some care might be given to the memory of the glorious past, and this scene at least might have been saved from desecration. It was possible a few years ago for imagination still to create the glory of the past upon these waters; it was only the steamers that forced us to remember the present, and when they did not scream they were not offensive. But not long ago, and right between the Lido and the public gardens, blocking the most beautiful view of Venice from the Lido, an iron foundry, with tall chimneys outpouring black smoke, was established on the Island of Santa Elena. I have already referred to this contemptuous destruction of loveliness. It is a miserable comfort that the foundry has failed. But the mischief done is irreparable.

One part, however, of that past is still existing on Venetian waters. The fishing boats—the Bragozzi—are much the same as they were in the days when the city held “the East in fee and was the safeguard of the West.” They carry us back even to remoter times when only a few huts had been built on the sandbanks, and the dwellers in the little group of islands lived by fishing. They have been comrades of the whole history of Venice.