Venetian Life | Page 7

place has also languished and dwindled year
by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and heavier
burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and
despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole
province of Venetia.
The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The
Austrians have a casino, and they give balls and parties, and now and
then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice
as a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a
people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are
obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing

enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and
Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics,
though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union
with Italy at any cost.]
Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound
to neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party
or the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of
German threw him on his arrival among people of that race, was always
regarded as the enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his
principles were of the most vivid republican tint in the United States.
The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight
modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more
impatient, that _bisogna, una volta o l'altra, romper il chiodo_, (sooner
or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people of
indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression, I
suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy.
They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait
forever in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their
national character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look
somewhat more closely at the spirit of their demonstration.
For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its
peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a
glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and
giving it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but
failing that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I
must be faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.

CHAPTER II.
ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.
I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday
and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five

o'clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer
weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the
large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for
myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station,
inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my
wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a
gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came,
for my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every
traveler recollects,--the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore,
and affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to
be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them gransieri, or
crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this
poverino [Footnote: Poverino is the compassionate generic for all
unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who
decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the
Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his
fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and
he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would
like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink my
body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that he
ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now
whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him
empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he
had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing,
for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether- spirit,
so to speak, was dulled