A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Stones of Venice [introductions]

J >> John Ruskin >> Stones of Venice [introductions]







CHAPTER II.

[FIRST OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]

THE THRONE.


SECTION I. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in
which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the
countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of
the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had
surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest,
scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the
long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for
the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of
sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of
the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men,
an equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller than that which, as I endeavored to describe
in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as
his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but
that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some
slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are
far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy;
but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than
atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the
midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the
mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast
sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the
north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black
weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal,
under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the
ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue,
soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps
beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our
own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and
changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun
declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly
named "St. George of the Seaweed." As the boat drew nearer to the city,
the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one
long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and
willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua
rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage
of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended
themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the
craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole
horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing
through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back
into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away
eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty
fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of
evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea,
until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer
burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it
magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the
gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were
reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not
through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight
opened the long ranges of columned palaces,--each with its black boat
moored at the portal,--each with its image cast down, beneath its feet,
upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of
rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the
palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent;
when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the
gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," [Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's
Cry."] struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the
mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of
the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the
boat's side, and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of
silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its
sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,
[Footnote: Appendix II, "Our Lady of Salvation."] it was no marvel that
the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene
so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its
history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her
existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the
fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the
mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that
all which in nature was wild or merciless,--Time and Decay, as well as
the waves and tempests,--had been won to adorn her instead of to
destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which
seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well
as of the sea.

SECTION II. And although the last few eventful years, fraught with
change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their
influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the
noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only
by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and
though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated
ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has
been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin,
and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are
little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the
imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the
importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and
disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so
surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there
must be no permission during the task which is before us. The impotent
feeling of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may
indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which
they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from
the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their
own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are
in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the
objects of which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern
fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of
decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into
dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow
deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the
centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever
saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless
interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his
great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty
years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city
have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries,
that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their
tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the
Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the
novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of
the Church of La Salute,--the mighty Doges would not know in what spot
of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the
great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs
had been brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of
_their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the
delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court,
and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have
sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail
over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and gather them forth,
and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous
a thousand-fold than that which now exists, yet not created in the
day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built
by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of
nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped
by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the
true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and
trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long
denied her dominion.

SECTION III. When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no
feature by which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange
sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and the Apennines, and
enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain
upon itself causes a vast difference in the character of the
distribution of its débris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and
sediment which the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the
plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here
and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm
substrata to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which
descend from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern
slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain
bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks
out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain
washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of
the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky
barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which
continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of
the ruins of ages.

SECTION IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by
insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which
appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually;
the main fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the
Po and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment
to the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly
expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part
of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of
brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these
same pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to
check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona. The
finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the
rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however
pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of
the great chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay before
they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown
down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the
eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of course builds
forward the fastest; on each side of it, north and south, there is a
tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less liable to rapid
change than the delta of the central river. In one of these tracts is
built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE.

SECTION V. What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this
great belt of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place
to inquire. It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the
Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of
from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided
into long islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank
and the true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and
other rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the
neighborhood of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most
places of a foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at
low tide, but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding
channels, from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to
the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets,
consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to
be built upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the
contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low
water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of
seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance
by the confluence of several large river channels towards one of the
openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a
clouded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which
appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at different
periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according to their
size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents and
churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and
encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.

SECTION VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet
(varying considerably with the seasons; [Footnote: Appendix III, "Tides
of Venice."]) but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause
continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a
reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land
is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the
form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages:
there is a channel, some three miles wide, between the city and the
mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy
breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic,
but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city's
having been built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its
true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of
piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in
spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the
quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance
before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But
the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty
inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and
at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark
plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches
of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of
the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the
fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five
feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow
the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea
water like the ruts upon a. wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes
upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed
that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to
and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is
often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of higher
ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what
it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the
windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the
melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of
the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls
and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright
investiture and, sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the
waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness
beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools, or the seabirds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the
horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for
his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the
sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children
were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and
yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let
it be remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things
which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole
existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or
compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the
sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would
again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had
stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of
the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and
bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in other
parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have
become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the
tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the
water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible:
even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in
landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps: and the
highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance
halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood
and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water,
a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of
water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city
would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the
peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.

SECTION VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast
between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the
romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he
have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers
into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of
the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have
understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the
void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand!
How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us
most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then
in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how
little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy
margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among
their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and _the only preparation
possible_, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden
clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white
scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather
and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the
East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendor.




CHAPTER III.

[SECOND OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]

TORCELLO.


SECTION I. Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which
near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a
higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass,
raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow
creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for
some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburnt weeds
whitened with webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool
beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On
this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic
type, which if we ascend towards evening (and there are none to hinder
us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we
may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of
ours. Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid
ashen gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and
purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted
sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming
hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic
mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of
space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its
level gloom. To the very horizon, on the north-east; but, to the north
and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it,
and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched
with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at
momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bars of sand; to the
south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and
pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and
almost beneath our feet, on the same field which sustains the tower we
gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them little larger than
cottages (though built of stone, and one adorned by a quaint belfry),
the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more than
the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable
church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see
little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the
sunlight separates in one glowing mass from the green field beneath and
gray moor beyond. There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor
any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie like a little
company of ships becalmed on a far-away sea.

SECTION II. Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches
of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather,
there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set
shapes of clustered palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the
southern sky.

Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood,--TORCELLO
and VENICE.

Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this
day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances
of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires
mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices
mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames
rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of its
people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the
paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they
left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of
the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending
up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the
temple of their ancient worship. Let us go down into that little space
of meadow land.

SECTION III. The inlet which runs nearest to the base of the campanile
is not that by which Torcello is commonly approached. Another, somewhat
broader, and overhung by alder copse, winds out of the main channel of
the lagoon up to the very edge of the little meadow which was once the
Piazza of the city, and there, stayed by a few grey stones which present
some semblance of a quay, forms its boundary at one extremity. Hardly
larger than an ordinary English farmyard, and roughly enclosed on each
side by broken palings and hedges of honeysuckle and briar, the narrow
field retires from the water's edge, traversed by a scarcely traceable
footpath, for some forty or fifty paces, and then expanding into the
form of a small square, with buildings on three sides of it, the fourth
being that which opens to the water. Two of these, that on our left and
that in front of us as we approach from the canal, are so small that
they might well be taken for the out-houses of the farm, though the
first is a conventual building, and the other aspires to the title of
the "Palazzo publico," both dating as far back as the beginning of the
fourteenth century; the third, the octagonal church of Santa Fosca, is
far more ancient than either, yet hardly on a larger scale. Though the
pillars of the portico which surrounds it are of pure Greek marble, and
their capitals are enriched with delicate sculpture, they, and the
arches they sustain, together only raise the roof to the height of a
cattle-shed; and the first strong impression which the spectator
receives from the whole scene is, that whatever sin it may have been
which has on this spot been visited with so utter a desolation, it could
not at least have been ambition. Nor will this impression be diminished
as we approach, or enter, the larger church to which the whole group of
building is subordinate. It has evidently been built by men in flight
and distress, [Footnote: Appendix IV, "Date of the Duomo of Torcello."]
who sought in the hurried erection of their Island church such a shelter
for their earnest and sorrowful worship as, on the one hand, could not
attract the eyes of their enemies by its splendor, and yet, on the
other, might not awaken too bitter feelings by its contrast with the
churches which they had seen destroyed.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.