The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi Volume I Part 8

The occasional origin of the _Fiabe_, on which I have already insisted, accounts for their want of plastic unity, their jumble of oddly contrasted ingredients. They were not the spontaneous outgrowth of artistic genius seeking to fuse the real and the fantastic in an ideal world of the imagination; but monsters begotten by an accident, which the creative originality of a highly-gifted intellect turned to excellent account. Gozzi's predilection for burlesque, his satirical propensity and fondness for moralising on the foibles of his age, found easy vent in the peculiar form he had discovered by a lucky chance. But these motives were not subordinated to the higher coherence of imaginative poetry. His fancy, command of dramatic situations, intuition into character, rhetorical eloquence, and inexhaustible inventiveness expatiated in the region of caprice and wonder. Yet we do not feel that he has succeeded in harmonising these divers elements with the spiritual instinct of an Aristophanes or a Shakespeare. Probably he did not seek to do so. The numerous reflections on the _Fiabe_, which are scattered up and down his works, prove that art for art's sake was far from being the leading consideration in their production. They remained with him pastimes, which had partly a practical, partly a didactic purpose--convenient vehicles for indulging his literary bias and airing his ethical opinions--serviceable ammunition in the battle against men whom he regarded as impostors and pretenders--excellent means of putting money into the purses of his proteges, the actors, and of keeping himself in favour with his friends, the actresses. To the last they retained something of the _punctilio_, which, as he says, inspired him at the outset.

VII.

In all his _Fiabe Gozzi_ employed the four Masks and the Servetta, Smeraldina.[81] He not unfrequently wrote the whole part of a mask, so that nothing remained for impromptu acting but "gag" and _lazzi_.

Truffaldino's role, however, was invariably left to improvisation; perhaps in compliment to Sacchi's talents and his prominent position.

The other masks were dealt with as Gozzi thought best. When the dialogue acquired dramatic or satirical importance, he wrote it out for them. On ordinary occasions he intrusted the whole or a considerable portion of each scene to their extempore ability, only indicating the movement of the plot in a _scenario_. The parts of the masks were treated in dialect and prose. The serious actors, who had to sustain the scheme of the fable, as lovers, magicians, queens, fairies, good and evil spirits, spoke in Tuscan blank verse, occasionally heightened by the use of Martellian rhymed couplets at thrilling moments of the action. Thus it will be seen that the text of Gozzi's plays offers every condition of dramatic utterance, from mere stage-directions, through carefully dictated prose, up to rhetorical soliloquies and dialogues in verse of several descriptions. His dexterity as a playwright is shown in the tact with which he employed these various resources.

The handling of the five fixed characters is masterly throughout.

Whether Gozzi writes their lines or only indicates a theme for their impromptu declamation, he shows himself in perfect sympathy with an intelligent and practised group of actors. The humour of the man comes out to best advantage in this department. His language is most idiomatic and spontaneous here. Here too we find his raciest characters.

Powerfully conceived and boldly projected, each comic personage breathes and moves with vivid realism. Study of the Masks, as Gozzi treated them, makes us feel what a wonderful thing of plastic beauty the _Commedia dell' Arte_ must have been. Here, in a work of carefully considered literary art, we have its long tradition and its manifold capacities preserved for us. Reading a _Fiaba_ is like opening a bottle of rare old wine. The bouquet of the fragrant vintage exhales into the chamber, and we taste the bloom of bygone summers. But the very conditions under which Gozzi exhibited this side of his dramatic mastery render translation impossible. In a translation the colours of the dialects are lost. The gradations of style, pa.s.sing from a laconically worded _scenario_ through half-dialogue into elaborated scenes, are bound to disappear. Tuned to a foreign language, our inward eye and ear fail to reconstruct the _lazzi_, which rendered this part of the drama humorous.

That is why Schiller's _Turandot_ is inferior to Gozzi's; and yet, when Schiller selected this piece for the German stage, he showed a right artistic instinct. It is the one in which the fable predominates, and can best be separated from the humours of the Masks.

I dare not enlarge here upon the variety of shades and complexions given to the five fixed types of character, according as the plot demanded more or less of serious action from the several personages. This inquiry would be interesting, since it reveals their singular elasticity beneath a master's touch. It must, however, be left to amateurs of curiosities in art. The development of the subject in detail implies previous acquaintance with the ten _Fiabe_, and would involve a lengthy dissertation. Some general points may, nevertheless, be indicated.

Pantalone retains marked psychological outlines under all his transformations. He is the good-humoured, honourable, simple-hearted Venetian of the middle cla.s.s, advanced in years, Polonius-like, with stores of worldly wisdom, strong natural affections, and healthy moral impulses. Gozzi has drawn the character in a favourable light, purging away those baser a.s.sociations which gathered round it during two centuries of the _Commedia dell' Arte_. His Pantalone recalls the Cortesani, described in a chapter of the Memoirs; but a touch of senility has been added, which lends comic weakness to the type.

Tartaglia stammers, and preserves something of the knave in his composition, burnished with Neapolitan abandonment to appet.i.te and brazen disregard for moral rect.i.tude. This general conception of the character explains the transformation of Tartaglia, in the _Three Oranges_, into the Tartaglia of the _Augellino Belverde_.

Brigh.e.l.la is an intriguing, self-interested individuality, trying to turn the world round his fingers, and not succeeding, or succeeding only by some lucky accident. He frequently a.s.sumes the form of a simpleton befooled by his short-sighted cunning.

Truffaldino blossoms before us as an ubiquitous and chameleon-like creature of caprice and humour; the liberal, carnal, careless boon-companion; the genial rogue and witty fool; bred in the kitchen; uttering words of wisdom from his belly rather than his brains; pliable, fit for all occasions; a prodigious coward; trusty in his own degree; taking the mould of fate and circ.u.mstance, adapting himself to external conditions; understanding nothing of the higher sentiments and awful destinies which rule the drama; but turning up at its conclusion with a rogue's own luck in the place he started from, and on which his heart is set, the larder. He runs like an inexpressibly comic thread of staring scarlet through the warp and woof of Gozzi's many-coloured loom. The most serious use made of him is when, in the _Augellino Belverde_, for purposes of pungent parody, Gozzi invests him with the vizard of a Machiavellian egotist. At the close of that supremely caustic scene, Truffaldino drops his disguise, and willingly a.s.sumes the role of a domestic buffoon. Our author's trenchant irony, that "smile on the lips with venom in the heart," of which Goldoni wrote so lucidly, that touch of bitterness which renders him akin to Swift, was displayed by a stroke of genius here. Truffaldino, the whelp whose antics dispelled melancholy, becomes for once in Gozzi's hands a stick wherewith to beat the dog of modern science.

Smeraldina, under her numerous manifestations, maintains the lineaments of vulgar womanhood. Sometimes a good mother or nurse, sometimes a shifty waiting-woman, sometimes a bl.u.s.tering amazon, sometimes a bad wife or would-be virgin, she never soars into the regions of ideality, and mates eventually with Truffaldino, if she escapes from being burned for blundering atrocities upon the road to commonplace felicity.

With these fixed characters, which form the most delightful ingredients of the _Fiabe_, Gozzi interweaves a fairy-tale, abounding in magic, flights of capricious fancy, marvels, transformations, perilous adventures. There is always a conflict of beneficent and malignant supernatural powers, ending in the triumph of good over evil, the reward of innocence, and the punishment of crime. There is a fate to which the heroes and heroines are subject, and which can only be overcome by protracted trials, by patience through dark years, by sustained endurance, terrible struggles, and faith in supernatural protectors.

Thus the texture of the _Fiabe_ is similar to that of our pantomimes, except that in the former the fairy-tale and the harlequinade are interwoven instead of being disconnected.

The fairy-tale is always treated in a serious spirit. The didactic allegory, on which the author set such store, and which he regarded as the main purpose of his art, finds expression here. The fairy-tale is romantic, pathetic, heroic, sometimes acutely tragic. Gozzi interests himself in the creatures of fantastic fiction, and forces them to utter tones which vibrate in our entrails. Some scenes, written under the high pressure of dramatic strum, stir tears by their poignancy, by the accents of grief and anguish on the lips of _fantoccini._ It is a singular species of art, soaring by spasms and short gasps to dramatic sublimity, casting flashes of electric light on human nature in the garb of puppets, then pa.s.sing away by abrupt transitions into mechanical improbabilities and burlesque absurdities--an art for marionettes rather than living actors, yet withal so vivid that able representation on the stage might translate it to our senses as an allegory of the masquerade world in which man lives:--

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

The Masks take part in the action, generally as subordinate personages, sometimes as persons of the first rank, never as mere accessories to move laughter, nor as a stationary chorus. In this way the comic element is ingeniously connected with the tragic and didactic. This sounds like a contradiction of what I have said above, about the want of plastic unity in Gozzi's work. Yet the two apparently contradictory statements are true together. Gozzi interweaves the wires of humour and romance with remarkable skill. But he does not fuse them into one poetic substance. He fails to create an ideal world in which both tragedy and comedy are necessary to the spiritual order, as are the systole and diastole of the heart to an organised being. Though interlaced, they stand apart, each upon its own clearly defined basis. You pa.s.s from the one sphere to the other, and have sudden shocks communicated to your sensibility. There is a lack of atmosphere in the wonderfully brilliant and exciting picture, an absence of spontaneous transition from this mood to that, a suggestion that the playwright's sympathies have been touched to diverse issues by divers portions of his task. Very probably, the atmosphere, which I have indicated as wanting in the _Fiabe_, may have been communicated by the interaction of the members of Sacchi's troupe upon the stage at Venice. But this is only tantamount to admitting that Gozzi understood the theatre. It does not prove that he was a dramatic poet in the highest sense of that term. Had he been this, we should have submitted to his magic wand while reading him. That is precisely what we wish to do, and cannot always actually do. His _Fiabe_ remain stupendous sketches in a style of audacious and suggestive originality. They are not the inevitable products of creative genius, fusing and informing--the children of imagination, "dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce."

Had Gozzi been a great spontaneous poet, or a consummate artist, this invention of the dramatised _Fiaba_ might have become one of the rarest triumphs of artistic fancy. It is difficult to state precisely what his work misses for the achievement of complete success. Perhaps we shall arrive at a conclusion best by inquiry into points of style and details of execution.

VIII.

By singular irony of accident, the author of the _Fiabe_, though he dealt so much in the fantastic, the marvellous, and the pathetic, was far more a humorist and satirist than a poet in the truer sense. Of sublime imagery, lyrical sweetness or intensity, verbal melody and felicity of phrase, there is next to nothing in his plays. The style, except in the parts written for the Masks, is coa.r.s.e and slovenly, the versification hasty, the language diffuse, commonplace, and often incorrect. Yet we everywhere discern a lively sense of poetical situations and the power of rendering them dramatically. The resources of Gozzi's inventive faculty seem inexhaustible; and our imagination is excited by the energy with which he forces the creations of his capricious fancy on our intelligence. The pa.s.sionate volcanic talent of the man almost compensates for his lack of the finer qualities of genius.

What he wants is not the power of poetical conception, but the power of poetical projection; and the defects of his work seem due to the partly contemptuous, partly didactic, mood in which he undertook them. It would be difficult to surpa.s.s the pathos of Jennaro's devotion to his brother in _Il Corvo_, or the dramatic intensity of Armilla's self-sacrifice at the conclusion of that play. _Turandot_ is conceived throughout poetically. The melancholy high-strung pa.s.sion of Prince Calaf pa.s.ses through it like a thread of silver. In the _Re Cervo_, Angela has equal beauty. Her love of the man in the king, and her discernment of her real husband under his transformation into the person of a decrepit beggar, are humanly and allegorically touching. Cherestani, the Persian fairy, who loves a mortal in spite of the doom attending her devotion, is admirably presented at the opening of _La Donna Serpente_. The subterranean labyrinth of lost women, degraded to monstrous shapes by their tyrannical seducer, in _Zobeide_, merits comparison with one of the _bolge_ in Dante's h.e.l.l. Its horror is almost appalling. The love of Barbarina for her brother in _L'Augellino Belverde_, which melts the stony hardness of the girl's heart, and changes her from a vain worldling to a woman capable of facing any danger, is no less romantic than Jennaro's love in _Il Corvo_. The picture of Pantalone and his daughter Sarche, in _Zeim Re de' Genj_, pa.s.sing their quiet life aloof from cities on the borders of an enchanted forest, touches our imagination with something of the charm we find in _Cymbeline_. _Il Mostro Turchino_ is romantically pa.s.sionate and highly-wrought. It seems to call for music, such music as Mozart invented for the _Zauberflote_.

Or, since Gozzi had little in common with the gracious spirit of Mozart, we might wish that this wild fable had fallen into the hands of Verdi.

The composer of _Ada_ would have given it the wings of immortality.

Gulindi, by the way, in this last fable, is a terrible portrait of the Messalina-Potiphar's-wife.

In selecting these pa.s.sages for emphatic praise, I wish to call attention to the power and beauty of Gozzi's conception. Not as finished literature, but as the raw material of dramatic presentation, are they admirable. They need the life of action, the adjuncts of scenery, the illusion of the stage. And for this reason it seems to me that, by means of prudent adaptation, the _Fiabe_ might furnish excellent _libretti_ to composers of opera. This is a hint to musicians of the school of Wagner--to that rare dramatic genius, Boito! Could the Masks be revived, and their burlesque parts be spoken on the stage, while orchestra and song were reserved for the serious elements of the fable, I feel convinced that a new and fascinating work of art might still be evolved from such pieces as _La Donna Serpente_ and _Il Mostro Turchino_.[82]

[Ill.u.s.tration: IL DOTTORE (1653)

_Ill.u.s.trating the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, or Impromptu Comedy_]

But this is a digression, which has for its object to indicate the region in which Gozzi's chief merit as a playwright seems to me to lie.

The satire, which forms so prominent a feature in the _Fiabe_, impairs their artistic harmony. So far as this is literary (in the _Tre Melarancie_, _Il Corvo_, and elsewhere), it has lost its interest at the present day. So far as it is philosophical and didactic (as in _L'Augellino Belverde_ and _Zeim_), it tends to break the unity of effect by the author's over-earnestness. So far as it is purely ethical, as in _Zobeide_, Gozzi loads his palette with colours too sinister and sombre. Perhaps, the political touches of satire in _I Pitocchi Fortunati_ are the lightest and most genially used. Gozzi, as we have seen already, was a confirmed conservative. An optimist as regarded the inst.i.tutions, religion, and social manners of the past, he was a bitter pessimist in all that concerned the changes going on around him. The new literature, the new philosophy, the new luxury, the new libertinism, which seemed to be flooding Italy from France, were the objects of his hatred and abhorrence. Calmon, in the _Augellino Belverde_, expresses Gozzi's personal convictions and beliefs in their fullest extent.

But the following speech may be extracted from _Zeim Re de Genj_ as a fair summary of his social stoicism.[83] A Princess of Balsora, who has been brought up by one of the capricious tricks of fortune as a slave is speaking:

"Who am I? That I know not. An old man, With snows upon his beard, in snow-white robes Attired, of serious and austere aspect, Reared me beneath a humble cottage roof.

He told me that one day upon the bank Of foaming Tigris, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, He found me; peradventure by my kin Abandoned, the cast fruit of shame and scorn.

This good man taught me I was born to serve, To suffer, to endure; and that I ought To bow beneath the will of supreme Heaven.

'Providence, holy, in her ways unknown,'

He said, 'rules all things: in the scale ordained Of human beings great folk have their seat; And so, by steps descending through all ranks, Down to the lowest folk, men live and work Subordinate. Ah! do not be seduced, (He often warned me) by sophistic sages, Who bent on malice paint of liberty False lures for mortals, your own place to quit, The order due designed by Heaven for man!

These sophists breed confusion, anarchy, Duty neglected at the cost of peace; They stir up murders, thefts, impieties, And glut with blood the shambles of the state.

Daughter, respect the great, love them, endure What in they lot seems bitter, woo content, And stifle that snake envy in thy breast!

In the just eyes of Heaven a great man's acts, Rightly performed, have no superior merit To those of servants rightly done; the road Toward immortality lies open unto kings And children of the people; 'tis all one.

Only the soul that suffers and is strong, Finds happiness.' So spake the firm old man; And firmly, in his strength of soul unshaken, He sold me slave; so I account me blessed, As you shall trust me for a faithful slave."

IX.

Gozzi drew the subjects of his _Fiabe_ from divers sources. The chief of these was a book of Neapolitan fairy-tales called _Il Pentamerone del Cavalier Giovan Battista Basile, ovvero lo c.u.n.to de li c.u.n.ti_. This collection enjoyed great vogue in Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is still worthy of attentive study by lovers of comparative folklore. Some of the motives of the _Fiabe_ have been traced to the _Posilipeata di Ma.s.sillo Repone_, the _Biblioteca dei Genj_, the _Gabinetto delle Fate_, the _Arabian Nights_, and those Persian and Chinese stories which were fashionable a hundred and fifty years ago. It was Gozzi's habit to interweave several tales in one action; and this renders researches into the texture of his dramatic fables difficult. But the inquiry is not one of great importance, and may well be dismissed until the star of Gozzi shall reascend the heavens, if time's whirligig should ever bring about this revenge.

_L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie_ is both the simplest in construction and also the most artistically perfect of the ten _Fiabe._ In it alone the fairy-tale and the Masks are brought into complete harmony. No serious note breaks the burlesque style of the piece, while a sustained parody of Chiari's and Goldoni's mannerisms lends it the interest of satire. As he advanced, Gozzi gradually changed the form of his original invention.

That fusion of fairy-tale and impromptu comedy in subordination to literary satire, which distinguishes the _Tre Melarancie_, was never repeated in his subsequent performances. The fable, with its romance, pathos, pa.s.sion, adventure, magic marvels, and fantastic transformations, began to detach itself against the comedy. Both formed essential factors in Gozzi's later work; but the links between them became more and more mechanical. Satire, in like manner, did not disappear; but this was either used occasionally and by accident, or else it absorbed the whole allegory. The three ingredients, which had been so genially combined in the first piece, were now disengaged and treated separately. The sunny light of sportive humour, which bathed that wonder-world of fabulous absurdity, darkened as the clouds of didactic purpose gathered. The fairy-tale acquired an inappropriate gravity. Becoming aware of his dramatic talent, Gozzi a.s.sumed the tone of tragedy. He treated the loves and hatreds, the trials and triumphs, the vices and virtues, the heroism and the baseness, of his puppets seriously. Nevertheless, he preserved the preposterous accidents of the fable. On those enchantments, whimsical oracles of fate, metamorphoses, talking statues, monsters, good and wicked genii, he was of course unable to bestow the same reality as on his human characters. Yet, having carried the latter out of the sphere of burlesque, he had to maintain a tone of realism with the former. But he could not wield the Prospero's wand of imaginative insight which brings the supernatural and the incredible within the range of actualities. Thus the marvellous elements of the fable remained stiff and artificial beside the natural pathos and pa.s.sion of humanity.

Having recapitulated the chief features of the _Fiabe_ in their later form, I will now a.n.a.lyse _L'Augellino Belverde._

X.

Many years have elapsed since Tartaglia married Ninetta. His father is dead, and he has fallen under the malignant influence of the Queen-Mother, Tartagliona. She persuades him that Ninetta has given birth to a pair of puppies, male and female, whereas the twins are really a fine boy and girl, called Renzo and Barbarina. Ninetta is condemned to be buried alive; and Pantalone, Tartaglia's minister, receives commission to drown the supposed puppies. Instead of executing these orders, Pantalone sews the children up in oil-cloth, and sets them floating down a river. They are found and rescued by Smeraldina, a woman of good heart, who is married to the dissolute and worthless Truffaldino, a pork-butcher. When the play opens, eighteen years are supposed to have elapsed since the burial of Ninetta. All this while she has been kept alive by the Beautiful Green Bird, who is the King of Terradombra, condemned to take this form by magic arts. The Green Bird also has become the lover of Barbarina. Meanwhile Tartagliona is being courted by Brigh.e.l.la, who now appears in the character of a burlesque poet and seer. His pindaric prophecies and exaggerated flights of pa.s.sion, alternating with the lowest language of the proletariate, afford excellent opportunities for caricature.

Renzo and Barbarina, growing up in the house of the pork-butcher, have improved their minds by a.s.siduous reading of French philosophical treatises sold for waste paper. This education has persuaded them that all human actions and affections proceed from self-love, and that it is the duty of rational beings to preserve a cold impartiality, indifferent to emotions, regardless of comfort and vain pleasures, governed only by the dictates of the reason. Accident reveals to them that Smeraldina is not their mother, and that they are nameless foundlings. They determine to go forth alone, and seek their fortunes in the world. The scene in which they take leave of their kindly warm-hearted foster-mother is excellent. Gozzi has painted a pair of consummate prigs, whose natural instincts have been perverted by a false theory of life, and who have learned to call that reason which is really inhumanity. They tell Smeraldina that her unselfish charity to the foundling infants was a form of self-love, and that her continued attention to them for the last eighteen years had no higher motive.

Having quitted Smeraldina, with the loftiest airs of condescension, they set forth upon their travels. Getting lost in the wilderness, it begins to dawn upon them that self-love is one of the cardinal facts of human nature, to which even the most philosophical characters, when threatened with death by cold and famine, are subject. In the midst of these reflections, they are terrified with an earthquake and sudden darkness.

A statue appears walking toward them, who informs them that he too was once a miserable philosopher, who petrified his own humanity and that of others by perverse principles a.n.a.logous to those which have infected them. Consequently, he was doomed to be a statue, lying lifeless and inert among the rubbish of neglected things, until one of Renzo's and Barbarina's ancestors rescued him from filth and set him up in a garden of the city. This benefit he now means to repay by watching over the twins. First of all, he ardently desires to save them from the petrifaction which awaits all souls made frigid by a false philosophy.

Next, he tells them that, though he knows the secret of their parentage, he may not reveal it. They have a dreadful doom impending over them; and their eventual happiness can only be secured by the a.s.sistance of the Green Bird. His own name in the world was Calmon; and he has now become the King of Images:[84]--

"Molti viventi Sono forse piu statue, ch'io non sono.

Tu proverai qual forza abbia una statua, E come simulacro un uom diventi."

Then Calmon gives the twins a stone. They are to return to the city, and Barbarina is to throw the stone down before the royal palace. They will immediately become rich. In any great disaster, let them call on Calmon.

In this way Gozzi allegorises his own prejudice against the cold and shallow theories of society, which were infiltrating Italy from France.

The second act reveals Tartaglia. He is the victim of remorse, haunted by the memory of Ninetta, whom he buried alive in a hole beneath the scullery-sink. There is the floor on which she used to walk. There is the kitchen where she fluttered in the form of a dove. "O spirit of Ninetta, where art thou?" Tartaglia preserves the burlesque note of his Mask. Only one friend remains to him, his old henchman Truffaldino; but Truffaldino has become a pork-butcher, and forgotten him. Truffaldino at this juncture appears. He too gives himself philosophical airs, without concealing his gross appet.i.tes and greedy love of self. Tartaglia kicks him out of doors, and then pa.s.ses to a scene of vituperation against his wicked mother, Tartagliona, the Queen of Tarocchi,[85] who has been the cause of all his misery. Tartagliona shows the worst side of her coa.r.s.e malignant nature in the ensuing altercation, and departs vowing vengeance.

Her only consolation is that she is beloved by Brigh.e.l.la, the most famous poet of the age:[86]--

"Non mancano In me vezzi, e lusinghe, ond' al mio fianco Fedel sia sempre. Ah, non vorrei, che alfine Le mie finezze a lui, negli altri amanti Desta.s.ser gelosia."