Part 12
In Venice the gondoliers know by heart long passages from Ariosto and Tasso, and often chant them with a peculiar melody. But this talent seems at present on the decline:--at least, after taking some pains, I could find no more than two persons who delivered to me in this way a passage from Tasso. Goldoni, in his life, however, notices the gondolier returning with him to the city: ‘He turned the prow of the gondola towards the city, singing all the way the twenty-sixth stanza of the sixteenth canto of the “Jerusalem Delivered.”’ ... Lord Byron has told us that with the independence of Venice the song of the gondoliers has died away.
‘In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more.’
There are always two concerned, who alternately sing the strophes. We know the melody eventually by Rousseau, to whose songs it is printed; it has properly no melodious movement, and is a sort of medium between the _canto fermo_ and the _canto figurato_; it approaches to the former by recitativical declamation, and to the latter by passages and course, by which one syllable is detained and embellished.
I entered a gondola by moonlight: one singer placed himself forwards and the other aft, and thus proceeded to St. Georgio. One began the song: when he had ended his strophe the other took up the lay, and so continued the song alternately. Throughout the whole of it, the same notes invariably returned, but, according to the subject-matter of the strophe, they laid a greater or a smaller stress, sometimes on one and sometimes on another note, and indeed changed the enunciation of the whole strophe, as the object of the poems altered....
We got out upon the shore, leaving one of the singers in the gondola, while the other went to the distance of some hundred paces. They now began to sing against one another, and I kept walking up and down between them both, so as to leave him who was to begin his part. I frequently stood still and hearkened to the one and to the other.
Here the scene was properly introduced. The strong declamatory, and, as it were, shrieking sound, met the ear from far, and called forth the attention; the quickly succeeding transitions, which necessarily required to be sung in a lower tone, seemed like plaintive strains succeeding the vociferations of emotions or of pain. The other, who listened attentively, immediately began where the former left off, answering him in milder or more vehement notes, according as the purport of the strophe required. The sleepy canals, the lofty buildings, the splendour of the moon, the deep shadows of the few gondolas that moved like spirits hither and thither, increased the striking peculiarity of the scene, and amidst all these circumstances it was easy to confess the character of this wonderful harmony.
It suits perfectly well with an idle solitary mariner, lying at length in his vessel at rest on one of these canals, waiting for his company, or for a fare; the tiresomeness of which situation is somewhat alleviated by the songs and poetical stories he has in memory. He often raises his voice as loud as he can, which extends itself to a vast distance over the tranquil mirror; and as all is still around, he is as it were in a solitude in the midst of a large and populous town. Here is no rattling of carriages, no noise of foot passengers: a silent gondola glides now and then by him, of which the splashing of oars is scarcely to be heard.
At a distance he hears another, perhaps utterly unknown to him. Melody and verse immediately attach the two strangers: he becomes the responsive echo to the former, and exerts himself to be heard as he had heard the other. By a tacit convention they alternate verse for verse; though the song should last the whole night through, they entertain themselves without fatigue; the hearers, who are passing between the two, take part in the amusement.
This vocal performance sounds best at a great distance, and is then inexpressibly charming, as it only fulfils its design in the sentiment of remoteness. It is plaintive, but not dismal in its sound, and at times it is scarcely possible to refrain from tears....
I was told that the women of Lido, the long row of islands that divides the Adriatic from the lagoons, particularly the women of the extreme districts of Malamocco and Pelestrina, sing in like manner the works of Tasso to these and similar tunes.
They have a custom, when their husbands are fishing out at sea, to sit along the shore in the evenings and vociferate these songs, and continue to do so with great violence, till each of them can distinguish the responses of her own husband at a distance.
How much more delightful and more appropriate does this song show itself here, than the call of a solitary person uttered far and wide, till another equally disposed shall hear and answer him! It is the expression of a vehement and hearty longing, which yet is every moment nearer to the happiness of satisfaction.
ISAAC D’ISRAELI.
GONDOLIERS AND THEIR SONGS
The gondolas, which everybody knows are black, and give an air of melancholy at first sight, yet are nothing less than sorrowful; it is like painting the lively Mrs. Cholmondeley in the character of Milton’s
‘Pensive nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure’--
as I once saw her drawn by a famous hand, to show a Venetian lady in her gondola and zendaletta, which is black like a gondola, but wholly calculated like that for the purposes of refined gallantry. So is the nightly rendezvous, the café and casino; for whilst Palladio’s palaces serve to adorn the Grand Canal and strike those who enter Venice with surprise at its magnificence, those snug retreats are intended for the relaxation of those who inhabit the more splendid apartments and are feigned with exertions of dignity and necessity of no small expense.... I have asked several friends about the truth of what one has been always hearing in England--that the Venetian gondoliers sing Tasso’s and Ariosto’s verses in the streets at night, sometimes quarrelling with each other concerning the merits of their favourite poets; but what I have been told since I came here of their attachment to their respective masters, and secrecy when trusted by them in love affairs, seems far more probable, as they are proud to excess when they serve a nobleman of high birth, and will tell you with an air of importance that the house of Memmo, Monsenigo, or Gratterola has been served by their ancestors for these eighty or perhaps a hundred years, transmitting pride thus from generation to generation, even when that pride is but reflected only like the mock rainbow of a summer sky. But hark! while I am writing this peevish reflection in my room, I hear some voices under my window answering each other upon the Grand Canal. It is--it is the gondolieri sure enough; they are at this moment singing to an odd sort of tune, but in no unmusical manner, the flight of Erminia from Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem.’
MRS. PIOZZI (1785).
A GONDOLIER OF CHIOGGIA
‘Drink, my friends! _vive la joyeuse Italie, et Venise la belle_!... I am, as you know, the son of a Chioggia fisherman. Nearly all the natives of this shore have the thorax well developed, and possess strong voices, which would be beautiful also, if not early injured by struggles, when at sea, with the noise of the wind and waves.... The Chioggiotes are a handsome race. They say that a great French painter, Leopolo Roberto, is now occupied in illustrating their beauty in a picture, which he will allow no one to see. Though, as you perceive, my complexion is sufficiently robust, my father, in comparing me with my brothers, considered me so frail and delicate, that he would not teach me either to throw the line, or to manage skiff or fishing-boat. He showed me only how to handle an oar with both hands, to row a small boat, and sent me to gain a living at Venice, in the capacity of assistant gondolier of the place. It was a great relief and humiliation for me to enter thus into servitude, to quit my paternal home, the borders of the sea, and the honourable and perilous profession of my ancestors. But I had a fine voice, and knew many fragments of Ariosto and Tasso. I might make a lively gondolier, and gain, with time and patience, fifty francs a month in the service of amateurs and strangers.... Taste for poetry and music develops itself among us sons of the people. We had, and we still have (though the custom threatens to be lost) our bards and our poets, whom we call _cupidons_; rhapsodical travellers, who bring us from the central provinces incorrect notions of the mother-tongue, modified--I should better say enriched, with all the genius of the northern and southern dialects. Men of the people like us, gifted at the same time with memory and imagination, they never care for mixing their fantastic improvisations with the creations of poets. Always taking, and leaving some new phrase in their passage, they embellish the language and the text of their authors with an inconceivable confusion of idioms. They might well be called the preservers of the instability of language in the literature of the frontier provinces. Our ignorance accepts, without appeal, the decisions of this walking academy; and you have had occasion, at times, to admire the energy and the grotesque Italian of our poets, in the mouths of the singers of the lagoons. It is noon on Sunday after Grand Mass, upon the public place of Chioggia, or of an evening in the cabarets on the banks, that these rhapsodists delight a numerous and impassioned audience by their recitations mingled with song and declamation. The _cupido_ usually stands upon a table, and plays from time to time a symphony or finale after his fashion, upon some kind of instrument; sometimes the Calabrian pipe, sometimes the violin, flute, or guitar. The Chioggiotes, cold and phlegmatic in appearance, listen and smoke at first, with an imperturbable and almost disdainful air; but at the noble battle of Ariosto’s heroes, at the death of Paladins, the rescue of ladies, and the defeat of giants, the audience are aroused, become animated, utter cries, excite themselves so effectually, that pipes and glasses fly into pieces, the seats and the tables are overturned, and often the _cupido_, about to fall the victim to the enthusiasm he has called forth, is forced to take flight, while the _dilettanti_ spread themselves through the country in pursuit of an imaginary ravisher with cries of ‘_d’amazza! d’amazza!_ kill the monster! kill the coward! bravo, Astolphe! courage, brave comrade!’ It is thus these men of Chioggia, intoxicated with the fumes of tobacco, wine, and poetry, take to their boats, declaiming to the winds and waves broken fragments of these delirious epic poems.
GEORGE SAND.
ISLAND AND LAGOON
My windows look upon a garden, the west side of which is bounded by the walls of a convent, while towards the east it juts out into the lagoon, in the form of a little peninsula. The garden is charmingly situated, but little frequented. It is my custom every morning ... to spend a few moments at the window ... to see the sun rise over the Adriatic.... I recommend exactly this station, the most eligible one, perhaps, in all Venice, to enjoy so splendid a prospect in perfection. A purple twilight hangs over the deep, and a golden mist on the lagoon announces the sun’s approach. The heavens and the sea are wrapped in expectant silence. In two seconds the orb of day appears, casting a flood of fiery light upon the waves. It is a sight of enchantment! SCHILLER.
Chioggia, like Venice, is built upon a foundation of wooden piles.... One meets sailors and fishermen at every step. Whoever appears in a perruque, or a cloak, is regarded as an aristocrat--a rich man; the cap and overcoat are here the insignia of the poor. The situation is certainly extremely lovely, but it does not bear comparison with Venice. SCHILLER.
PLEASANT MURANO
I passed in a gondola to pleasant Murano, distant about a little mile from the citie, where they make their delicate Venice glasses, so famous over al Christendome for the incomparable finenes thereof, and in one of their working houses made a glasse my selfe. Most of their principall matter whereof they make their glasses is a kinde of earth which is brought thither by sea from Drepanum, a goodly haven towne of Sicilie, where Æneas buried his aged father Anchises. This Murano is a very delectable and populous place, having many faire buildings both publique and private, and divers very pleasant gardens. The first that inhabited it were those of the towne Altinum, bordering upon the sea coast, who in the time of the Hunnes invasion of Italy, repaired hither with their wives and children, for the securitie of their lives, as other borderers also did at the same time to those Islands, where Venice now standeth. Here did I eate the best oysters that ever I did in all my life. They were indeede but little, something lesse than our Wainflete oysters about London.... By the way, betwixt Venice and Murano I observed a most notable thing, whereof I had often heard long before, a faire monastery of Augustinian monkes built by a second Flora or Lais. I meane a rich Cortezan of Venice, whose name was Margarita Æmiliana. I have not heard of so religious a worke done by so irreligious a founder in any place of Christendome: belike she hoped to make expiation unto God by this holy deede for the lascivious dalliances of her youth, but _tali spe freti sperando pereant_.
THOMAS CORYAT (1611).
MURANO
The decay of the city of Venice is, in many respects, like that of an outwearied and aged human frame; the cause of its decrepitude is indeed at the heart, but the outward appearances of it are first at the extremities. In the centre of the city there are still places where some evidence of vitality remains, and where, with kind closing of the eyes to signs, too manifest even there, of distress and declining fortune, the stranger may succeed in imagining, for a little while, what must have been the aspect of Venice in her prime. But this lingering pulsation has not force enough any more to penetrate into the suburbs and outskirts of the city; the frost of death has there seized upon it irrevocably, and the grasp of mortal disease is marked daily by the increasing breadth of its belt of ruin. Nowhere is this seen more grievously than along the great north-eastern boundary, once occupied by the smaller palaces of the Venetians, built for pleasure or repose; the nobler piles along the Grand Canal being reserved for the pomp and business of daily life. To such smaller palaces some garden ground was commonly attached, opening to the water-side; and, in front of these villas and gardens, the lagoon was wont to be covered in the evening by gondolas: the space of it between this part of the city and the island group of Murano being to Venice, in her time of power, what its parks are to London; only gondolas were used instead of carriages, and the crowd of the population did not come out till towards sunset, and prolonged their pleasures far into the night, company answering to company with alternate singing.
If, knowing this custom of the Venetians, and with a vision in his mind of summer palaces lining the shore, and myrtle gardens sloping to the sea, the traveller now seeks this suburb of Venice, he will be strangely and sadly surprised to find a new but perfectly desolate quay, about a mile in length, extending from the arsenal to the Sacca della Misericordia, in front of a line of miserable houses built in the course of the last sixty or eighty years, yet already tottering to their ruin; and not less to find that the principal object in the view which these houses (built partly in front and partly on the ruins of the ancient palaces) now command is a dead brick wall, about a quarter of a mile across the water, interrupted only by a kind of white lodge, the cheerfulness of which prospect is not enhanced by his finding that this wall encloses the principal public cemetery of Venice. He may, perhaps, marvel for a few moments at the singular taste of the old Venetians in taking their pleasure under a churchyard wall; but on further inquiry, he will find that the building on the island, like those on the shore, is recent, that it stands on the ruins of the Church of St. Cristoforo della Pace; and that, with a singular, because unintended, moral, the modern Venetians have replaced the Peace of the Christ-bearer by the Peace of Death, and where they once went, as the sun set daily, to their pleasure, now go, as the sun sets to each of them, for ever, to their graves.
Yet the power of Nature cannot be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of man. The broad tides still ebb and flow brightly about the island of the dead, and the linked conclave of the Alps know no decline from their old pre-eminence, nor stoop from their golden thrones in the circle of the horizon. So lovely is the scene still, in spite of all its injuries, that we shall find ourselves drawn there again and again at evening out of the narrow canals and streets of the city, to watch the wreaths of the sea-mist weaving themselves like mourning veils around the mountains far away, and listen to the green waves as they fret and sigh along the cemetery shore.
But it is morning now: we have a hard day’s work to do at Murano, and our boat shoots swiftly from beneath the last bridge of Venice, and brings us out into the open sea and sky.
The pure cumuli of cloud lie crowded and leaning against one another, rank beyond rank, far over the shining water, each cut away at its foundation by a level line, trenchant and clear, till they sink to the horizon like a flight of marble steps, except where the mountains meet them, and are lost in them, barred across by the grey terraces of those cloud foundations and reduced into one crestless bank of blue, spotted here and there with strange flakes of wan, aerial greenish light, strewed upon them like snow. And underneath is the long dark line of the mainland fringed with low trees; and then the wide-waving surface of the burnished lagoon trembling slowly, and shaking out into forked bands of lengthening fight the images of the towers of cloud above. To the north, there is first the great cemetery wall, then the long stray buildings of Murano, and the island villages beyond, glittering in intense crystalline vermilion, like so much jewellery scattered on a mirror, their towers poised apparently in the air a little above the horizon, and their reflections, as sharp and vivid and substantial as themselves, thrown on the vacancy between them and the sea. And thus the villages seem standing on the air; and, to the east, there is a cluster of ships that seem sailing on the land; for the sandy line of the Lido stretches itself between us and them, and we can see the tall white sails moving beyond it, but not the sea, only there is a sense of the great sea being indeed there, and a solemn strength of gleaming light in the sky above.
The most discordant feature in the whole scene is the cloud which hovers above the glass furnaces of Murano; but this we may not regret, as it is one of the last signs left of human exertion among the ruinous villages which surround us. The silent gliding of the gondola brings it nearer to us every moment; we pass the cemetery, and a deep sea-channel which separates it from Murano, and finally enter a narrow water-street, with a paved footpath on each side, raised three or four feet above the canal, and forming a kind of quay between the water and the doors of the houses. These latter are, for the most part, low, but built with massy doors and windows of marble or Istrian stone, square set, and barred with iron; buildings evidently once of no mean order, though now inhabited only by the poor. Here and there an ogee window of the fourteenth century, or a doorway deeply enriched with cable mouldings, shows itself in the midst of more ordinary features; and several houses, consisting of one story only carried on square pillars, forming a short arcade along the quay, have windows sustained on shafts, of red Verona marble, of singular grace and delicacy. All now in vain: little care is there for their delicacy or grace among the rough fishermen sauntering on the quay with their jackets hanging loose from their shoulders, jacket and cap and hair all of the same dark-greenish sea-grey. But there is some life in the scene more than is usual in Venice; the women are sitting at their doors knitting busily, and various workmen of the glass-houses sifting glass-dust upon the pavement, and strange cries coming from one side of the canal to the other, and ringing far along the crowded water, from vendors of figs and grapes, and gourds, and shellfish; cries partly descriptive of the eatables in question, but interspersed with others of a character unintelligible in proportion to their violence, and fortunately so, if we may judge by a sentence which is stencilled in black, within a garland, on the whitewashed walls of nearly every other house in the street, but which, how often soever written, no one seems to regard: ‘Bestemme non più. Lodate Gesù.’
We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated boats full of all manner of nets, that look as if they could never be disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides; and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up into the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it, some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass a considerable church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square opposite to it with a few acacia-trees, and then find our boat suddenly seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled into the tide-way of one of the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the town of Murano into two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed only by one wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current, looking at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly knowing if there be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the sunshine glows on their ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles on the rushing of the green water by the grass-grown quay. It needs a strong stroke of the oar to bring us into the mouth of another quiet canal on the farther side of the tide-way, and we are still somewhat giddy when we run the head of the gondola into the sand on the left-hand side of this more sluggish stream, and land under the seat end of the Church of San Donato, the ‘Matrice’ or ‘Mother’ Church of Murano.
JOHN RUSKIN.
THE GLASS FURNACES OF MURANO