What I have learnt about Venice, Venice as a person, has come to me more or less unconsciously, from living on the Zattere, where I could see the masts of ships and the black hulls of barges, whenever I looked out of my windows on the canal of the Giudecca; from sitting night after night outside a café in the Piazza, listening to the military band, watching people pass, thinking of nothing, only singularly content to be there; from strolling night after night down to the promontory of the Dogana, and looking into the darkness of the water watching a man catching fish in a net like a shrimping net, while the sound of the mandolines and of the voices of singers who sat in lantern-lighted gondolas outside the windows of the hotels on the Grand Canal came to me in a double chorus, crossing one another in a strange, not inharmonious confusion of tunes; and especially from the Lido, that long, narrow bank between the lagoon and the Adriatic, to whose seaward side I went so often, merely to be there, on the sand beyond the bathing-huts, watching the quietude of the sea. On the horizon there would be a long, tall line of fishing-boats, their red sails floating against the pearl grey of the sky like the painted wings of great moths, spread for flight; as you gazed at them, they seemed to stand there motionless; then, as you looked away for a moment and looked back again, one of them would have vanished suddenly, as if it had gone down into the sea. And the water, which rippled so gently against the sand at my feet, had something of the gentleness of colour of that water which wanders about the shores of Ireland. It shone, and seemed to grow whiter and whiter, as it stretched out towards the horizon, where the fishing-boats stood up in their long, tall fine against the sky; it had the delicacy, the quietude of the lagoon, with, in those bright sails, the beckoning of a possible escape from the monotony of too exquisite things....
Melancholy ... is an element in the charm of Venice; but a certain sadness is inherent in the very sound and colour of still water, and a little of the melancholy which we now feel must always have been a background of shadow.... Why is it, then, that the melancholy of Venice is the most exquisite melancholy in the world? It is because that melancholy is no nearer to one’s heart than the melancholy in the face of a portrait. It is the tender and gracious sadness of that beautiful woman who leans her face upon her hands in a famous picture in the Accademia. The feast is over, the wine still flushes the glass on the table, the little negro strikes his lute, she listens to the song, her husband sits beside her, proudly: something not in the world, a vague thought, a memory, a forgetfulness, has possessed her for the moment, setting those pensive lines about her lips, which have just smiled, and which will smile again when she has lifted her eyelids.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
A SEA-VIEW
Translated by Baroness Swift.
Before me spreads the sea, clear and serene;
Upon its shore a wave flows to and fro,
A sky reflecting, bright as beryl’s sheen,
A sky resplendent with the sunlight’s glow.
A snowy sail, afar, in ether blue,