The Merchant of Venice

“ The merchant prince in his office was served by a staff of clerks who had their share in the success of his ventures. The arrival of any merchant's galleys was a matter for rejoicing to the whole community and was announced by the great bell of St Mark's. Venice, in short, from the commercial point of view was a great joint-stock company for the exploitation of the East, and the patricians were its directors.
The life of a Venetian noble could be filled to the full if he so desired. Politics, diplomacy, trade, arms were all open to him ”

“ At this period the Venetians were masters of the coast of Dalmatia, and the islands of Cyprus, Candia, and a great part of the Morea, and had almost monopolized the trade of Egypt and the East. The first great attempt to humble Venice was made in the beginning of the 16th century, when the famous league of Cambrai, of which Pope Julius the Second was the real author, though the Emperor of Germany, and the kings of France and Spain were parties to it, was framed for the avowed purpose of completely subduing her, and partitioning her territories. ”

“ The merchant-patrons of Venice are quite uninterested in the solving of problems. They pay a price, and they want a good show of colour and gilding for their money. Presently they buy from outside, and a half-hearted imitation of foreigners is the best ambition of Venetian artists. Art, it has been said, does not declare itself with true spontaneity till it feels behind it the weight and unanimity of the whole body of the people. ”

“ Sometimes by the marriage of a son or daughter of the Doge with the heir of a kingdom or a prince of Constantinople, sometimes by the subjugation of a common foe, Venice wove new threads of intercourse with the East. She always took payment for benefits she conferred in wider trading advantages. Her merchant vessels were not private adventures, they represented state enterprise and were under the control of the central government, travelling with the fleet and capable of reinforcing it at need. ”

“ As we think of all this tediousness for everybody concerned in Venetian commerce in the Middle Ages, from the Doge down to the humblest servitor of them all, the commerce of the present day, with our labor-saving machinery, our swift sailing-vessels, and space-annihilating steam-engines, seems insignificant in a way.
John B. Marsh, in his "Stories of Venice and the Venetians," gives an account of the experiences of a merchant fleet, which has a special interest, as Christopher Columbus acted a prominent part in the story, which Mr. Marsh claims is authenticated in the state papers. ”

“ Beginning early in life these patricians were trained for their duties by service in the navy and in the merchant marine, or by employment in the government of the various cities, islands, and territories included in the long stretch of coastwise empire. Knowing that Venice lived by commerce they made every effort by war, diplomacy, and private enterprise, to extend that commerce. ”

“ During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could not pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the Venetians who were for ever increasing their colonies in the Ægean Sea, in Asia Minor and in Egypt.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had grown to two hundred thousand, which made Venice the biggest city of the Middle Ages. The people were without influence upon the government which was the private affair of a small number of rich merchant families. ”

“ Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffè more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery—nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell{222} every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates. ”

“ In this way they soon became prosperous, and their numbers increased so rapidly, that in the year 697 they made application to the Emperor to be elected into a body politic, and obtained authority to elect a chief, to whom they gave the name of Duke or Doge. The town, continuing to increase, gradually extended its buildings to the adjacent islands, and, at the same time, acquired considerable tracts of territory on the mainland, then inhabited by the Veneti, from whence the rising city is supposed to have borrowed its name of Venetia or Venice. ”

“ Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them they are not worth the search. ”

“ The whole place is in a blaze of light from the multitude of coffee houses which line the arcades. The busy hum of chattering crowds, and the lively strains of music which fill the air, render it almost a scene of enchantment, the effect of which is much heightened by its contrast with the stillness and solitude of the remainder of the city. The commerce of Venice brings hither a great crowd of strangers from all parts of the Mediterranean,—Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Dalmatians, Moors, and all the trading population of Europe. ”

“ The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy."
The far-famed place of St. Mark, with its ancient Church, the Rialto and its Bridge, the Canals and Gondolas, the Historic Columns, the Ducal Palace, and the Council Chamber, are successively presented to the spectator. Venice is re-peopled with the past, affording truth to the eye, and reflection to the mind.
The introduction of the Princes of Morocco and Arragon at Belmont, hitherto omitted, is restored, for the purpose of more strictly adhering to the author's text, and of heightening the interest attached to the episode of the caskets. ”

“ Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice—a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush. Ere we reach the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset has faded. ”

“ It is enough, indeed, to account for the grandeur of Venice that in course of centuries, from the security of her position, the growth and energy of her population, and the regularity of her government at a period when these sources of prosperity were rare, she became the great emporium of the Mediterranean—all that Carthage, Corinth and Athens had been in a former age on a scene the most remarkable in the world for its fertility and facilities of traffic,—and that as Italy and other parts of the Western empire became again more settled her commerce found always a wider range. ”

“ A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their retinue—this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures. ”

“ In days before the railway and its bridge had done away with the island apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance to drop through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and come upon the far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing slowly, see, through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls, churches, palaces, rise slowly, one after another, out of the breast of the waters—silver and rose and gold out of the sapphire, azure, and pale grey—a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean. ”

“ It has scarcely lasted an hour; but you are tired from a long journey; you soon fall asleep from weariness, hardly asking yourself, in the first uncertainty and fatigue, over what Styx you have sailed, what strange city you have traversed, and whether you have not been the dupe of a dream. In the morning you rush out upon the balcony, and there, amidst dazzling fight and a very debauch of colours, with a shimmering of pearl and silver, triumphant upon the waters of her lagoon, you behold that Venice which you have never seen except in Byron, in Otway, Musset, and George Sand. ”

“ This expansion of the trade of Venice resulted in the rapid development of the wealthier classes, with a growing tendency to draw together for the purpose of securing to themselves the entire direction of Venetian politics in order to dominate Venetian commerce. ”

“ It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies--with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce--with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos--with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars. In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless--forgotten and utterly insignificant. ”

“ Her unique position made Venice the chief market for all the East, and her supremacy in the Levant forbade all rivals to attempt competing with her; but if she thus deprived other nations of the privileges of commerce, she protected them from the Turk. She was a bulwark that could neither be ignored nor overthrown. Every branch of commerce was made tributary to her, and her coffers were always full. She expended her wealth at home, encouraging her workers in metals, glass, and mosaics, and the manufactures of silk and wool, as well as in cherishing the fine arts and improving the city. ”

“ Venetian galleys were engaged in trade with Persia and Arabia, at Ormuz. Continued tidings of the vast resources of silk, spices and gems in China and India came in. The door of the farther East had been half-opened. Venice was agog with rumors of the riches of the Indies and the Pope had more than once sent emissaries to find the land of Prester John.
“Consider, my lord—” Clavijo bowed to Contarini—“the marvel that I have seen. It is no less than a city of brazen walls, in the desert where a hundred caravan routes meet. ”

“ In 829 two Venetian merchants, Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello, with ten galleys, were trading clandestinely in the port of Alexandria, just at the time when the Caliph of Egypt was building a splendid palace, and for its decoration was contemplating denuding all the Christian temples of their treasures and ornaments. Hearing this, these merchants feared that the Church of St. Mark, where that Evangelist was honorably reposing, would be desecrated; and they determined if possible to {305} rescue the sacred body and bear it to Venice. ”

“ But the Venetian habitually incrusted his work with nacre; he built his houses, even the meanest, as if he had been a shell-fish,—roughly inside, 272 mother-of-pearl on the surface: he was content, perforce, to gather the clay of the Brenta banks, and bake it into brick for his substance of wall; but he overlaid it with the wealth of ocean, with the most precious foreign marbles. You might fancy early Venice one wilderness of brick, which a petrifying sea had beaten upon till it coated it with marble: at first a dark city—washed white by the sea foam. ”

“ The third, or Ornamental style, could scarcely arise in any other state of Italy than Venice. Venice was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade or naval prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering the means, and, in their turn, fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a system, what could the Art be more than the parasite? ”

“ It is only concerned with her beauty, her charm, as they are bound up with the sea; it is not, save incidentally, concerned with her history.
In her constitution, in her history, in her people, in her position, in her art, and in her sea-power and commerce, Venice, among Italian towns, stands alone. She [Pg 10] only is built, not by the sea, but in the sea, born not on the beach of ocean, but like Aphrodité, from beneath her heart. It is this difference which, entering into all her lesser charms, gives them their distinction, their wild, remote, and natural grace. ”

“ The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it--thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them all. ”

“ Modesty can never have been a Venetian characteristic; nor is it now, when Venice is only a museum and show place. All the Venetians—the men, that is,—whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; for if its walls do not bear witness, glorious and chromatic, to the greatness of a Doge, it is merely because the greatness of the Republic requires the space. In this room, for example, we find Tiepolo allegorizing Venice as the conqueror of the sea. ”