The Harbours of England. Ruskin John
upon the charm of a boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do, it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";9 and to find Tennyson—although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a very marshy and punt-like character—at last, in his highest inspiration, enter in where the wind began "to sweep a music out of sheet and shroud."10 But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had known all manner of traveling; had been borne through vacancy on the shoulders of chimeras, and lifted through upper heaven in the grasp of its spirits; but yet I do not remember that he ever expresses any positive wish on such matters, except for a boat.
"Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend,
So that no change nor any evil chance
Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be
That even satiety should still enhance
Between our souls their strict community:
And that the bounteous wizard then would place
Vanna and Bice, and our Lapo's love,
Companions of our wandering, and would grace
With passionate talk, wherever we might rove,
Our time, and each were as content and free
As I believe that thou and I should be."
And of all the descriptions of motion in the Divina Commedia, I do not think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there is no stroke of laboring oar, for his wings are the sails.
"My preceptor silent yet
Stood, while the brightness that we first discerned
Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew
The pilot, cried aloud, 'Down, down; bend low
Thy knees; behold God's angel: fold thy hands:
Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed.
Lo! how all human means he sets at nought;
So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail
Except his wings, between such distant shores.
Lo! how straight up to heaven he holds them reared,
Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes,
That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.'
"As more and more toward us came, more bright
Appeared the bird of God, nor could the eye
Endure his splendor near: I mine bent down.
He drove ashore in a small bark so swift
And light, that in its course no wave it drank.
The heavenly steersman at the prow was seen,
Visibly written blessed in his looks.
Within, a hundred spirits and more there sat."
I have given this passage at length, because it seems to me that Dante's most inventive adaptation of the fable of Charon to Heaven has not been regarded with the interest that it really deserves; and because, also, it is a description that should be remembered by every traveler when first he sees the white fork of the felucca sail shining on the Southern Sea. Not that Dante had ever seen such sails;11 his thought was utterly irrespective of the form of canvas in any ship of the period; but it is well to be able to attach this happy image to those felucca sails, as they now float white and soft above the blue glowing of the bays of Adria. Nor are other images wanting in them. Seen far away on the horizon, the Neapolitan felucca has all the aspect of some strange bird stooping out of the air and just striking the water with its claws; while the Venetian, when its painted sails are at full swell in sunshine, is as beautiful as a butterfly with its wings half-closed.12 There is something also in them that might remind us of the variegated and spotted angel wings of Orcagna, only the Venetian sail never looks majestic; it is too quaint and strange, yet with no peacock's pride or vulgar gayety,—nothing of Milton's Dalilah:
"So bedecked, ornate and gay
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the Isles
Of Javan or Gadire
With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
Sails filled and streamers waving."
That description could only have been written in a time of vulgar women and vulgar vessels. The utmost vanity of dress in a woman of the fourteenth century would have given no image of "sails filled or streamers waving"; nor does the look or action of a really "stately" ship ever suggest any image of the motion of a weak or vain woman. The beauties of the Court of Charles II., and the gilded galleys of the Thames, might fitly be compared; but the pomp of the Venetian fisher-boat is like neither. The sail seems dyed in its fullness by the sunshine, as the rainbow dyes a cloud; the rich stains upon it fade and reappear, as its folds swell or fall; worn with the Adrian storms, its rough woof has a kind of noble dimness upon it, and its colors seem as grave, inherent, and free from vanity as the spots of the leopard, or veins of the seashell.
Yet, in speaking of poets' love of boats, I ought to have limited the love to modern poets; Dante, in this respect, as in nearly every other, being far in advance of his age. It is not often that I congratulate myself upon the days in which I happen to live; but I do so in this respect, that, compared with every other period of the world, this nineteenth century (or rather, the period between 1750 and 1850) may not improperly be called the Age of Boats; while the classic and chivalric times, in which boats were partly dreaded, partly despised, may respectively be characterized, with regard to their means of locomotion, as the Age of Chariots, and the Age of Horses.
For, whatever perfection and costliness there may be in the present decorations, harnessing, and horsing of any English or Parisian wheel equipage, I apprehend that we can from none of them form any high ideal of wheel conveyance; and that unless we had seen an Egyptian king bending his bow with his horses at the gallop, or a Greek knight leaning with his poised lance over the shoulder of his charioteer, we have no right to consider ourselves as thoroughly knowing what the word "chariot," in its noblest acceptation, means.
So, also, though much chivalry is yet left in us, and we English still know several things about horses, I believe that if we had seen Charlemagne and Roland ride out hunting from Aix, or Cœur de Lion trot into camp on a sunny evening at Ascalon, or a Florentine lady canter down the Val d'Arno in Dante's time, with her hawk on her wrist, we should have had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can have now. But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides of Carthage, or glowed with crusaders' shields above the bays of Syria, could give to any contemporary human creature such an idea of the meaning of the word Boat, as may be now gained by any mortal happy enough to behold as much as a Newcastle collier beating against the wind. In the classical period, indeed, there was some importance given to shipping as the means of locking a battle-field together on the waves; but in the chivalric period, the whole mind of man is withdrawn from the sea, regarding it merely as a treacherous impediment, over which it was necessary sometimes
Prologue to
I am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care the forms of mediæval shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined the sails of the shipping represented are square.
It is not a little strange that in all the innumerable paintings of Venice, old and modern, no notice whatever had been taken of these sails, though they are