Chapter VIII: Part 8

And if at times we may thus see the past in the present, at other times we may dream the present back into the past. Night, the worker of so many miracles, holds a key with which we may unlock in Venice the secret of bygone times. There are hours on the lagoons when even in daylight the forgotten ages live again and we may keep company with whom we will, but in the heart of the city it is by night that we may lay hand on the pulse of her ancient life, and feel it warm to our touch, beating slow but constant behind the commotion, often the desecration, of later times. The flow of the Grand Canal is less troubled than by day: it has intervals of peace in which it may sink into the broad, dark calm of Carpaccio’s waters. Palace after palace, in fearless and unstudied alternations of Byzantine, Gothic, Ogival, Renaissance, Barocco, tower above us, their pillars and balconies gleaming in faint light of moon or lamp: we seem almost to trace upon their surface the forms of men and beasts, and to clothe them once more in the gold and colour which Venice learned of her lagoons. By day we feast upon the tints still left to fall upon the waters, we praise the aged snow of crumbling stone or the shades of twisted columns, or the rich profusion of the pale Cà d’Oro. But what do we know of Venice when she shone upon the waters in true regality, a monument of all the glory that the heart or eye of man could conceive? No one has left us any detailed record of the frescoed façades of the Venetian palaces, whether on the Grand Canal or in the remoter waterways; only here and there we catch a glimpse of them on the canvases of contemporary painters. It is provokingly general among the travellers or native-lovers of Venice, who set themselves to praise her in words, to find that they have chosen a medium incapable of achieving what it was asked to do, and to throw down their weapon in the moment of trial, struck dumb by the immense wonder of their theme. They cease from their task before, it seems to us, they have well begun it, always anticipating the stinging tongue of the dragon, Incredulity. We could well forgive them their inadequacy, so frankly recognised, had they but attempted a mere catalogue of some of the frescoes on the walls. Now, it is at night alone that we can repeople them; that, as we pass along, we can look up and read into the shadowy spaces those brilliant chronicles of beauty, power and pride. It is, indeed, a heavy fate that awaits in Venice the artist who must work in words; colour and music can draw nearer, can almost attain to the reality itself; and yet by words also there is something to be conveyed of her enduring beauty. The fact which words can compass may be so told that there is born from it a sentiment of that rich atmosphere which is beyond the reach of words; they may remind or may awaken wonder, itself a new sense with which to apprehend. Even words may tell of the water snake of green and gold that writhes and gleams hour after hour in the faintly stirred depths of the canal, a creature that in the world above is a dull grey upright pole; or of golden treasures, once the refuse of the calli, transformed to splendour as they float out over the lagoon; or of the sudden lapping of the water under the wind down the north lagoon at midnight, that breaks the smooth image of the moon into a thousand ripples and passes in a wave that makes the dim lamps tremble into the narrow waterways of the city.

But it is not only the waterways of Venice that at night are eloquent of the past, that seem to take once more their ancient shape and venture near for colloquy: the streets and squares and churches are full of spirits, not unkindly, not afraid, less silent and secretive than in the busy day, when they are lonely among a people careless of them, with other thoughts, other needs and other destinies. Many a porch or gable or wide-projecting roof, or sculpture of fantastic beast or naïve saint or kneeling angel, seems to step out and call upon us in the night, catching in us perhaps as we pass by some touch of sympathy with the enduring soul of the past. One must be late indeed in Venice to secure untroubled peace. Ever and again, even after midnight, the silence of the great white campos is broken by a group scattered here and there before the door of a café; voices in eager talk will echo under a low portico, a sleepy child will clatter by in wooden pattens. But in the low-beamed, dimly lighted courts, or on the dark steps at the water-side, under some deserted sotto-portico, the sounds of the present strike across us like distant voices in a dream. The one night that lies over all the ages draws our spirit into harmony with these stones and lapping waters, that have stood through change and stress of time, that have outlived solemnity and joyous festival and have passed from gentle usage and glorious vesture into the custody of the poorest, into neglect and decay. What talk have not these courtyards overheard, what rich vesture has not swept through them, what noble thoughts and high hopes have not confided in their silence? And on the dirty steps where the children sit and play and throw their refuse into the water, what carpets have not been spread, what proud feet have not pressed to pass into the gondola and join the triumphant processional of Venice in her prime?

But what of ancient Venice? We sometimes despair of re-creating her. We ponder on Rialto, we watch her lights from the lagoons, we go in and out among her calli, peering into door and courtyard, climbing an outer stair, penetrating the recesses of sotto-portico or cellar; and many records we find of the life which once she lived, but all belong to the Venice of that second age, when she was already an established city. We cannot depopulate her and see again that company of islands gathered together in the lagoon, of various shapes and sizes, some covered with wood and undergrowth, others rising with bare backs from the water, with large and lonely outposts lying at greater distance here and there. Yet now and again come days when the spirit even of this remoter period returns to its well-nigh forgotten grave, the days when Venice lies under the rule of the rain-clouds. The inner waterways of the city lie dead like opaque marble under the dancing drops; but down the ways that lead from the lagoons the wind pours strong and restless from the sea, beating the water against the walls and into the damp vaults, a challenge from the sea to the city, from the sea unbridled and insurgent--yet not insurgent, for it has never submitted to her sway. Within Venice, along the slippery streets, there is gloom and desolation; the sun is the only visitor to whom her heart stands ever open; she would shut her gates if she could to these wild beings of cloud and wind, these houseless, grey pilgrims that, at no bidding of hers, come and claim lodging with her as they take their nomad way. I know not what of the old, wild fisher heart comes to visit Venice in these days; phantoms of old time are borne in on the gusty winds from the sea and the lagoon, and the commanding voice of the sea wind they must have known so well seems to clothe them with substantial life. Into the mist vanishes the frescoed Venice of high pomp and festival, the Venice of regal Bucintoro and banqueting of kings, of brilliant policy and stem civic control. A still deeper oblivion receives the Venice of small joys and small sorrows, of Longhi and Goldoni; and the excitement of the formless past creeps into us, when yet the future was to make--the hard life of the first dwellers upon the islands, acute and mobile in their hourly traffic with wind and sea.

There is a corner of Venice little known to the stranger, or even to Venetians themselves, except as a passage to the cemetery of San Michele, but not less loved on that account by those who are happy enough to have their lot cast there. The breezes blow with a freshness that is rare in the more confined spaces of the city or on the Grand Canal; the tide sets into the Sacca della Misericordia full and fresh from the northern lagoon, still beating with the pulse of the open sea. This favoured, this unique corner of Venice is a large square basin of water, open on one side to the lagoon. Venice, at one time, could boast of many such, but one by one they have been filled in with earth, and in the sixteenth century, when the neighbouring Fondamente Nuove were built, the Sacca della Misericordia itself narrowly escaped inclusion in the paved parade that was to unite the whole of North Venice from Santa Giustina to Sant’ Alvise. The fiat had gone forth, but happily it remains as yet unfulfilled, and the Sacca is still a harbour for the _zattere_, the timber rafts that are brought down from the mountains, and set here to season awhile, in sight of their old home, till at last they are borne away to do service in the works of man. A tiny hut of planks without a door is set up here and there upon the rafts, and a couple of dogs are continually upon the prowl. Something in this woodyard, the building of the rafts, the lapping of the inflowing tide against them, its waves twisted in some angle into a petulant restlessness, seems to carry us back to the primeval days before the historic settlement of the fugitives from the great mainland cities, back to the manners of the humble fishermen who lived a hard and frugal life among the low islands of the Adriatic, in constant commerce with their patron the sea, in constant vigilance against his aggression.

The night-lapping of the waves against the Sacca della Misericordia calls to mind the two toiling fishermen of Theocritus, whose life must have been strangely like that of the first dwellers on the Rivo Alto. Let us quote from Mr. Andrew Lang’s translation. “Two fishers on a time together lay and slept: they had strown the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall. Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars and an old coble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailor’s caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door, nor a watch-dog: all things, all to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.” This is a page for the history of Venice in her infancy, or rather for the history of that earlier time when Venice was as yet unborn. Out among the islands of the lagoon, which on a calm, vague day of summer seem to hover in the atmosphere upon a silver haze, among those luminous paths of chrysophrase and porphyry, mother-of-pearl and opal, we shall still find some footsteps of these first Venetians unerased by tract of time.

Perhaps it is at Sant’ Erasmo that the print is clearest; there are few materials that we cannot find here for reconstruction of the primeval settlement. There are the rush-roofed shelters of the boats and the rude landing-stages; there are the low, white _capane_ roofed with thatch or tiles, the long, narrow, stagnant waterways, the high, grassy levels bordering the water; there are fields of reeds, and thickets or fringes of rustling poplars; there are _valli_ where the fish stir and leap and gleam continuously, breaking the smooth water into a thousand ripples; there is the broad, central waterway, and countless lesser channels and pools among the reeds, where one may see a boat slowly winding, guided perhaps by children, their little figures standing out against the desolate landscape, the silence broken by no voice but theirs. Thus must Venice have been in her infancy. And if from among these lonely waterways and grassy flats of Sant’ Erasmo we look forward into the future, we can anticipate the gradual evolution of a city such as Venice was afterwards to be. The building of the first mud-huts; the driving of the first close-set clumps of piles to support more solid structures; the filling of marsh-pools and strengthening of foundations; the light wooden bridges thrust across the water, as one may see them on the Lido to-day; the transition from houses of wood to houses of brick and stone, from thatch to tiles; the building of churches on the higher ground, each with its plot of grass about it; the paving of the most frequented ways, the construction of wells and chimneys, of paved campo and fondamenta; till we reach at last the city of palaces, of temples and of towers, the city of sumptuous and varied colour, the _Venezia nobilissima_ of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

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