Chapter 14

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet Æneas in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays Æneas not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."

Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne Æneas to the Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, hæc patria est." Æneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part of his memory as of the things that were.[11]

Æneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes "majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the Æneid reflects the terror of that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality, the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.

It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness. It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods" were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world.

A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.

"Dî tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti, Præmia digna ferant!"

The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of Æneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine order. Man was greater than his fate:--

"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur, Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."

There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which Æneas addresses himself to his final combat:--

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis."

But the "dîs aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid. We close it as we close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of Æneas, but his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of Æneas becomes Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "Dextræ se parvus Iulus Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis."

"His steps scarce matching with my stride."

Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.

[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari, Quem regno Hesperiæ fraudo et fatalibus arvis."

[4] "Quibus Hector ab oris Expectate venis?"

[5] "Cur dextræ jungere dextram Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"

[6] "O sola infandos Trojæ miserata labores."

[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."

[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."

[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammæ."

[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."

[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissæ."

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

I.

VENICE AND ROME.

It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water, from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west, where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the mosaics of St. Mark.

Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate, its people, its government were not what government or people or patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed, or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.

Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."

It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary, bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State ten centuries before him.

It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its decay. Elsewhere the history of mediæval Italy sprang from the difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors, between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna, were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediæval sense of the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted masonry.

Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles. Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities, as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello. The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans, rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

II.

VENICE AND TINTORETTO.