While living on the mainland these animosities had wider space in which to play, and were therefore less dangerous, less explosive. But in the lagoons, under stress of suffering, and owing to confinement and juxtaposition, they became intensified, exaggerated, and perilous. There was a double problem before the growing Venetian population which required to be solved before Venice and the Venetians could, with any justice, be considered a place and a people. First, the various and largely hostile populations who had taken refuge in the lagoon had to be reconciled to each other; and secondly, they had to be reconciled to their new home, to be identified with it and made one with it.
The lagoon achieved both reconciliations; the isolation of its waters, their strangeness, gradually created the feeling of unity, of family connection, among the diverse and hostile components of the population, till a fusion took place between the original and the immigrant inhabitants, and between the people and their home, and Venice and the Venetians emerge upon the history of the world as an individual and full-grown race. But this reconciliation and identification were not accomplished at once. They cost many years of struggle and of danger. The unification of Venice is the history of a series of compromises, an historical example of the great law of selection and survival.
THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR[53]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
Venice the beautiful city ended, pagan-like, as did its sisters the Greek republics, through nonchalance and voluptuousness. We find, indeed, from time to time, a Francis Morosini, who like Aratus and Philopoemen, renews the heroism and victories of ancient days; but, after the seventeenth century, its bright career is over. The city, municipal and circumscribed, is found to be weak, like Athens and Corinth, against powerful military neighbors who either neglect or tolerate it; the French and the Germans violate its neutrality with impunity; it subsists and that is all, and it pretends to do no more. Its nobles care only to amuse themselves; war and politics with them recede in the background; she becomes gallant and worldly....
But the evening of this fallen city is as mellow and as brilliant as a Venetian sunset. With the absence of care gaiety prevails. One encounters nothing but public and private fêtes in the memoirs of their writers and in the pictures of their painters. At one time it is a pompous banquet in a superb saloon festooned with gold, with tall lustrous windows and pale crimson curtains, the doge in his simarre dining with the magistrates in purple robes, and masked guests gliding over the floor; nothing is more elegant than the exquisite aristocracy of their small feet, their slender necks and their jaunty little three-cornered hats among skirts flounced with yellow or pearly gray silks.
At another it is a regatta of gondolas and we see on the sea between San-Marco and San-Giorgio, around the huge Bucentaur[54] like a leviathan cuirassed with scales of gold, flotillas of boats parting the water with their steel becks. A crowd of pretty dominos, male and female, flutter over the pavements; the sea seems to be of polished slate under a tender azure sky spotted with cloud-flocks while all around, as in a precious frame, like a fantastic border carved and embroidered, the Procuraties, the domes, the palaces and the quays thronged with a joyous multitude, encircle the great maritime Venetian sheet....
In truth they never concern themselves with religion except to repress the Pope; in theory and in practise, in ideas and in instincts, they inherit the manners, customs and spirit of antiquity, and their Christianity is only a name. Like the ancients, they were at first heroes and artists, and then voluptuaries and dilettanti; in one as in the other case they, like the ancients, confined life to the present. In the eighteenth century they might be compared to the Thebans of the decadence who, leagued together to consume their property in common, bequeathed what remained of their fortunes on dying to the survivors at their banquets. The carnival lasts six months; everybody, even the priests, the guardian of the capucins, the nuncio, little children, all who frequent the markets, wear masks. People pass by in processions disguised in the costumes of Frenchmen, lawyers, gondoliers, Calabrians and Spanish soldiery, dancing and with musical instruments; the crowd follows jeering or applauding them. There is entire liberty; prince or artizan, all are equal; each may apostrophize a mask. Pyramids of men form "pictures of strength" on the public squares; harlequins in the open air perform parades. Seven theaters are open. Improvizators declaim and comedians improvize amusing scenes. "There is no city where license has such sovereign rule." ...
The Chiogga campaign is the last act of the old heroic drama; there, as in the best days of the ancient republics, a besieged people is seen to save itself against all hope, artizans equipping vessels, a Pisani conqueror undergoing imprisonment and only released to renew the victory, a Carlo Zeno, surviving forty wounds, and a doge of seventy years of age; a Contarini, who makes a vow not to leave his vessel so long as the enemy's fleet is uncaptured, thirty families, apothecaries, grocers, vintners, tanners admitted among the nobles, a bravery, a public spirit like that of Athens under Themistocles and of Rome under Fabius Cunctator. If, from this time forth, the inward fire abates we still feel its warmth for many long years, longer kept up than in the rest of Italy, and sometimes demonstrating its power by sudden outbursts.