Part 19

If it were day, what a different scene we should have on this twisting sea-serpent of a Grand Canal. Venice would then be a sparkling vision resplendent with every sea charm, tinted with pinks and opals and pearls, and as changeful and full of caprice as any other coquette. Instead of this spangle of stars above, we should have a vast expanse of pale-blue sky, cloudless and glittering, and the misty reflections that now sink faintly deep down into these dark waters would vanish before a stream so azure and brilliant that it would seem as if a portion of the sky above had been cut and fitted between the palace fronts below. And how these mellow old churches and houses would glow and their wavering shadows shake in the stream! The exquisite traceries on balcony, arch, and column would seem carven of ivory, and from under the red-tiled eaves grim heads of stone would stare down over sculptured cornices and peep out through delicate quatrefoils and creamy foliations. And into these wonder-palaces the eager sun would peer to see the lofty ceilings all frescoed and gilded, the floors of colored marbles, the carven furniture and faded rich hangings, and the deep and arched recesses that overlook the gardens in the rear. And what gardens! Mellow brick walls festooned in pale-blue wistaria and lined with hedges of white thorn, a solemn cypress in either corner, clumps of fig-trees and mulberry and golden magnolia, airy grapevine pergolas of slender, osier-bound willow, little paths snugly bordered with box, trellises of gorgeous roses, and here and there some antique statue or rude stone urn half hidden in color masses of scarlet pomegranates and snowy lilies.

The day-life of this famed waterway is very gay and picturesque. Here is both energy and idleness, and jolly friendships and laughter and light-heartedness. Deep-laden market scows pass ponderously by, piled high with fruits and vegetables, the rowers singing at their oars or shouting voluble greetings. Fishermen step slowly along, balancing baskets on their heads. Swarthy, black-eyed women, in dark skirts and gay neckerchiefs and with mauve-colored shawls falling gracefully from head to waist, throng the _riva_ shops and bargain over purchases with violent gestures and eager earnestness. Priests returning from mass in rusty black cassocks loiter among the noisy groups and are received with profound bows and reverent touches of the cap. Husky, barefooted girl water-carriers, known as the _bigolanti_, stride by with copper vessels hanging from the yoke across their shoulders and offer you a supply for a _soldo_. Up the intersecting canals endless processions are passing over the arching bridges, and you pause, perhaps, to observe the varied life from a place by the rail: girl bead-stringers with wooden trays full of turquoise bits; garrulous pleasure parties off for the Lido; laboring boatmen, breaking out into song; old men and women shuffling along to gossip and quarrel around the carven well-heads of the little _campi_; and now and then some withered old aristocrat on his way to have coffee and chess at Florian’s and then a solemn smoke over the “Gazetta di Venezia” before the Caffè Orientale in the warm morning sun of the _riva_ of the Schiavoni.

How well the Foscari Palace, there, looks by night. The Foscari Palace—poor old Foscari! It is a sad but glowing chapter his name recalls. Here lived the great Doge, the least serene of all their Serenities. Grown old in power and worn with foreign wars, his heart broke over the treason of his worthless son, and the helpless, sobbing old man, no longer of use, was deposed by The Ten in his tottering age. The very next day he died—and there, in that palace. Just now, when the red-fire glowed, a pale campanile stood out of the gloom to the right and beyond the palace; that is where they buried him, in the church of the Frari. With belated reverence and remorseful at having dishonored him a few hours since, they proceeded to make history in Venice with the splendor of his obsequies. They clothed him in cloth of gold, set his ducal cap upon his head, buckled on his golden spurs, and laid his great sword by his side. And thus in solemn pomp, attended by nobles and lighted by countless tapers, the pageant passed out of San Marco, crossed the Rialto, and came at last to the church of the Frari. And there what is left of Doge Foscari lies to this day. It is not a poor place to be in, either. The bones of Titian and Canova are beside him, a Titian masterpiece glorifies the choir, and on the opposite wall are two altar pieces of Bellini’s so lovely as to mark the very zenith of Venetian art.

A pause in the music of the serenade brings us suddenly back to the Venice of to-night. A vast scramble is in progress. We jostle and scrape forward another few yards. The _barca_ sends a light hose-spray to right, left, and in front in a desperate effort to clear a passage. Dilatory or helpless gondoliers are lightly sprinkled, and all those of us who a moment since had been envying their good positions now basely give way to howls of joy. No use to struggle: all gondoliers are alike in such a crush. A champion Castellani is no better than Paolo, if he _is_ strong enough to bend copper _centesimi_ pieces between thumb and finger. Presently we stop. The tumult rages, good-naturedly and jolly, as the jockeying goes on for improved positions. And then there falls a sudden silence. A tenor is singing the “Cielo e Mar” of “La Gioconda.” You lie at full length on the cushions, the gondola lifting slowly with an indolent sway, and under the spell of the dreamy, witching music you watch the smoke of your cigar as it drifts up and over and out and away toward the little streets in the dark.

Ah, little streets of Venice; under whatever name of _calle_ or _corto_ or _salizzada_, you are just the same—bedraggled and delightful! What rare surprises are always reserved for each revisit—an overlooked doorway, a balcony, some sculptured detail! If the house-fronts are plastered and patched—still they are picturesquely discolored. If the fantastic windows are out of plumb the gay shutters, nevertheless, are charmingly faded and there are pretty faces behind the bars. The roofs let in the rain—but how rookish and rickety they are. The battered doors are low—but they have knockers that are ponderous and imposing. Name plates are surprisingly large and keyholes deep and cavernous. The stirrup-handled bell-wires run almost to the tiny iron balconies, away up under the oval windows of the eaves—those little balconies that for ages have never refused sympathetic regard for the hum of slippered feet on the stone pavements below. And there are weathered store-fronts with corrugated iron shutters and gilt signs on black boards; and under your feet in the pavement are odd little slits for water to run off in, that remind you of openings in letter-drops at home. There, too, are the shops whose modest output arrays the Venetian poor to such advantage, and there are the stores and markets where they bargain for _frittole_ of white flour and oil, or _polenta_ of ground corn, and personally pick out their sardines at ten for a penny, or indulge in a fine _brunrino_ as large as a trout. There one sees picturesque lanterns and gay little window-boxes full of flowers away up among the chimneys and tin waterpipes. The rooms, perhaps, seem dark and gloomy to us of modern houses, but you stop with a thrill of delight at the happiness in the voice that carols a gay air from “Traviata” somewhere in their depths, and you look up with a smile at the bright bird that loves that dark cage. Some carping and fussy visitors may compare these rude homes to the dungeons under the “Leads” beyond the Bridge of Sighs, but how could they consistently be other than they are, venerable and dirty, with splotches of paint and charcoal markings and half-effaced pencil-drawings, of cracked plaster full of holes, and all toned down by time and weather to a uniform mellow gray! Of course, such critics accept, with all Italy, the proud ones with the marble tablets that tell that Marco Polo lived there, or Petrarch, or Titian, or Garibaldi, but the nameless and undistinguished many are quite as worth preserving. Thus one appreciates the inspiration of the authorities and applauds their industry in profusely tacking up those little ovals of blue tin with the jealous warning in white letters, “Divieto di Affisione”—that is, “Don’t spoil these walls with placards!” So, peace, harping Philistine, to whom nothing is ever hallowed! Though your emotions are thin and your enthusiasms a-chill, respect these little byways; and if not for themselves, then for where they bring you—to fascinating curiosity shops of the antiquarians up the back courts; to charming _campi_ where you stand by graven well-heads, wonderwist in the lengthening shadows of historic churches; to lichen-grown bridges, themselves pictures, arched over sunny canals overhung by gabled windows and flanked by garden walls pale blue with wistaria; or (could you have forgotten?) to nothing less than the great Piazza itself and glittering San Marco, the supreme jewel-casket of the world.

But the wistful “Cielo e Mar” is ended, and we move along to opposite the Accademia, treasure-temple of Venetian art. You uncovered just then, my comrade of the night, and out of reverence to the Titian Assumption, I dare say. I uncovered, too, but it was to the madonnas and saints of Giovanni Bellini. Do you know them well? No? Not the Santa Conversazione? Ah, then life still holds a delight in reserve for you.

A sudden great and universal hush has fallen on canal and shore. Another tenor, sweet and vibrant as a bell, breathes that tenderest of all serenades, the one from “Don Pasquale.” At all times irresistible, it seems doubly so now. The faces that you see are grave and eager and transported. The silence and rapt attention is a tribute beyond words to composer and singer; and where else but in Italy would a multitude hush to a whisper when music sounds, and break into wild tumult when it ceases? A few weeks here, and one comes to understand that music is the very breath and life of these people. The vagabond Venetian, penniless but happy, comes out of his doze in a corner of a sunny _riva_ and before his mouth has settled from its yawn it is rounded into a song. A bottle of cheap wine, a loaf of bread, and a guitar provide joy enough for an army in the family parties of the poor that float out on to the lagoon in rough market gondolas at sunset. Verdi and Rossini make work light for women, walk to business with the men, and hum comfort and courage all day. And so one needs to be discreet and silent when a solo begins or be prepared for an instant and tempestuous rebuke. But there seems little need for a warning to-night, with the hand of Venice so strong upon us.

Between serenades one takes his ease on the cushions and looks about on the people around him. Some one begins to whistle the jolly old “Carnival of Venice,” and it is promptly taken up on all sides, bolder spirits even venturing upon the variations. A German gives us the Fatherland’s version, about the hat that had three corners. An enormous Spaniard near at hand bellows a fragment of “I Pagliacci,” and is thunderously applauded. His friends, embarrassed but elated, urge him on to a second effort, which is received with indifference. On his third attempt he is hissed. Such is the caprice of an open-air audience in Italy.

The jolly stag party in the gondola to the right presses upon us the hospitality of the capacious hamper, which we decline with a thousand thanks and in gestures more intelligible than our pidgin-Italian. At our elbow two slender American women in black provide excellent eavesdropping entertainment. Here is talk to our liking, thrilling with the names of men of fame who knew and loved this Venice. “Just over there, Helen, is the palace where Browning lived and died. What an elaborate place for a poet! Howells lived next door, you know, when he wrote his ‘Venetian Life.’ These places are ever so much finer than the one farther down where Goldoni wrote his comedies. Oh, don’t you know the Goldoni house? It is this side the Rialto, just opposite the Byron Palace with the blue-striped gondola posts.” “I think,” says the other, “that the memories are quite as rich farther on. At the Hotel Europa, you remember, Chateaubriand once lived, and so did George Eliot; and from there you can see the Danieli where George Sand and Alfred de Musset sought happiness but only found misery.” At mention of the Europa the face of her friend is transfigured and our own hearts beat high in sympathy with the reverence of the lowered voice: “Wagner wrote ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Europa. He died in the palace where the three trees stand, away down beyond the Rialto.” Oh, deathless Venice! Oh, universal Love! They marvel at this elfin world—the English father, mother, and son in the gondola ahead.

“It is a mode of mind.”

“Or a form of hypnosis; a psychological phase.”

The boy turns from the distant fairy candles of San Marco and regards them with amaze and disapproval. His enthusiasms are keen and a-quiver and the freshness of life’s morning is on his face. “Don’t analyze,” he says. “Just breathe it and feel it.” The parents exchange amused glances and smile indulgently. “‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,’” quotes the father under his breath; but we know, and they know, that they have been answered.

Gorgeous silks and priceless tapestries and rare Oriental stuffs have doubtless often hung from the balconies of the palace on the right in the great gala days of the wonderful past when the Carnival lasted half a year. The law had not yet ruled that all gondolas must be a uniform solemn black, and the cradle-like boat of to-day, for all its brass dolphins and carven scenes from the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” would have cut a sorry figure beside the sumptuous ones of an earlier time, with their mountings of silver and gold, profusion of rich colors, upholstery of enormous value, and bearing owners of fabulous wealth whose names were written in the city’s Book of Gold. Ah, those were the triumphant days when foreign princes waited, half a hundred at a time, to have the judgment of the Venetian Senate on the affairs of their states; when royalty was no unusual spectacle on the Piazza of San Marco; when the argosies of the world, “with portly sail,” came to anchor in these waters; when Dante and Petrarch were received as ambassadors; when the Admirable Crichton would be tossed a hundred ducats for amusing the Senate with an extemporized Latin oration; and when his Serenity, the Doge, on Ascension Day fared forth in dazzling splendor to espouse the sea from the throne of his sumptuous Bucentoro. The glory of that old and powerful Venice can never pass from the memory of men. Whole libraries preserve it in imperishable record. It is interesting, too, to note how it affected bygone visitors just as it does us to-day—as when one turns the pages of John Evelyn’s “Diary” and smiles to see how soon it was after his “portmanteau” had been “visited” at the Dogana customs-offices that he pronounced the Merceria to be “one of the most delicious streets in the world for the sweetness of it,” and learned with amaze of the skill and rapidity of Venetian artisans who, while King Henry III of England was one day visiting the Arsenal, built a galley, rigged, and finished it for launching, and cast a cannon of sixteen thousand pounds and put it on board,—and all while his Majesty was having luncheon. There was, indeed, a great deal of the marvelous about men who could contrive glass goblets so sensitive as to betray the presence of poison, or who could at so early an age make such exquisite books as the Aldine classics, to the despair of publishers for hundreds of years to follow.

Just now, in the fitful glare of red-lights, hundreds of eager Venetian faces, transported as always by the spirit of Carnival, were seen in excited groupings in every nook and corner of the neighboring _fondamente_. One thinks how different is the present scene from those these people are accustomed to look upon on other nights. You would find them then in the little family squares whose corners are shrines of the Virgin set with flowers and illumined with candles. Husband and wife will, perhaps, have spent the early evening in gallery seats at the Teatro Goldoni, and Giovanni, weary with a long day at the _traghetto_, would have finished thumbing the headlines of the day’s “L’ Adriatico” and would now have his friends about him, and Maria would let the _bambino_ stay up a little longer, and all would feast with prodigious merriment and satisfaction on the ever-popular _soupe au pidocchi_,—which is mussel-broth flavored with spices,—to be followed by Chioggia eels and white wine of Policella. Neighboring women would, of course, drop in for their dearly loved gossip, hatless, with silver pins fastening their blue-black hair, coral beads around their necks, and draping shawls thrown over their bright waists. And presently some withered old coffee-roaster would drag himself in with his fragrant ovens glowing, the bright flames leaping, and toffee-venders would plead for sales. With the ease of sleight-of-hand a guitar suddenly makes its appearance out of nowhere and everybody enthusiastically joins in some haunting, languorous, dreamy _villotte_ dear to the hearts of Venetians. Just around the corner lounging groups would be scattered before café doors and voices would be humming in low, eager talk. The usual wrangling and bargaining would be in progress at the cooking-stalls piled high with fish and garlic, _polenta_, cabbages, and apples. In near-by _trattorie_ with sanded floors artistic bohemia, with ambition numbed by the latest African sirocco, battens on bowls of macaroni in a turmoil of smoke and confusion. In the dark interior of a neighboring wineshop one would find the wonderful golden-browns that Rembrandt loved, as a single oil lamp glows on the weathered faces of a circle of old cronies. And somewhere, just at hand, a gondolier’s weird and fascinating cry of “Ah, Stalì!” would be heard; and all about them Venice would be crooning her ancient lullaby in the ceaseless, low lapping of water on stone steps.

All together and forward once more, to opposite the church of the Salute. We have lost our recent neighbors and have an entirely new set. The changes in the grouping are like the shuffling units of a kaleidoscope. A brilliant company is gathered on the balconies of Desdemona’s Palace, but Othello is not among them—another piece of calculated devilty, no doubt, on the part of the crafty Iago! Still, Portia is there from flowery Belmont and with her are Jessica and Lorenzo. The music is now from melodious old “Dinorah,” charmingly rendered and just as soothing as the first time one ever heard it. The Salute stands out impressively in her great domes and elaborate spirals. It is beautiful, of course, by night, but then if it were day we might run inside and revel in Titians and Tintorettos. The fantastic columns fade and flash as the red and green fires smoulder or flame, and the gilded Fortuna on the dome of the adjoining Dogana catches some of the glitter and generously sends it on to the Seminario in the rear.

Some one calls my name from among the oleanders of the Britannia terrace, just opposite. What a delight to be known by name in this charmed city! I look up at the adjoining hotel and there are the windows of my room, and I know that within in the dark my clothing and articles of travel lie about. With secret wonder I whisper to myself that I, after all the years of waiting and hoping, _I_ am actually a part of Venice!

One might think there could not possibly be any more gondolas in all the city outside of to-night’s tremendous gathering; but even now you could find them floating lazily about the lagoons, or away out toward the Lido where the moist winds are ruffling the water and the distant Bride of the Sea seems only some sort of bright exhalation. Theirs is a languorous and listless drifting and their dim lamps waver slowly like glowworms. Little need there for the musical wails of “Ah, Premì!” “Ah, Stalì!” Little of such complaint as Byron made that gondoliers are songless, for one could not ask for more plaintive and soothing melody than the low, passionate crooning of the barefooted boy at the oar. And, perhaps, in the musky dark of silent canals more gondolas than one are even now stealing lightly and with love’s devious purposes under the fretted balconies of the star-eyed daughters of Venice, while Beppo muffles his oar to the warning of Tom Moore:—

“Row gently here, my gondolier; So softly wake the tide, That not an ear on earth may hear Save hers to whom we glide!”

It seems weeks since, in the cool of this very morning, out at the little island of Burano, I lunched under shady locusts in the quiet garden of “The Crowned Lion.” It was a pleasant stop on the way to deserted old Torcello—Torcello that mothered Venice, but now sleeps, a clutter of grass-grown ruins, in the appalling stillness of her weedy canals and thickets of blackberry hedges. Within a cable length of where our gondola is now resting a black, tarry fishing-bark tugs at anchor. If it were day and her sails were set, one could not help being delighted over the oranges and reds and blues of her patched and weathered canvas, the curve of the elaborately painted bow, and the spirited air of the curious figurehead. Unchanged survivors of the fading Past are these sturdy old _bragozzi_ of Chioggia, and one could not ask for a braver show than they present when they hoist their painted sails to dry in one long line from the Public Gardens to the Doge’s Palace.

It was at Chioggia that we loitered, a few days back, and fed on picturesqueness to satiety. We have but to close our eyes—and there are the grizzled old fellows in red _berrettas_, trousers rolled to their wiry brown knees and great hoops of yellow gold in their ears. When the midday sun was hottest we found them sitting in the shade of their fishing-boats’ sails, mending their nets with wooden bodkins and brown twine. In the old days, when the hand of Venice was all-powerful in this part of the world, the Chioggians were the gayest and most picturesque people of these islands. Artists still consider them the purest types of Venetians, but they are a sad and melancholy lot now, as if burdened with the heritage of glorious memories. It seemed to me that the old men were the happiest living things in Chioggia; then, perhaps, came the boys, then the girls, and last of all the women—and the older the women the gloomier. The flirt of a sober mantilla is the nearest they ever come nowadays to gayety.