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 coarse 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 passionate 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 surpass 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 passion of Prince Calaf passes through it like a thread of silver. In the Rè 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 Hell. 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 Sarchè, in Zeim Rè de' Genj, passing 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 passionate and highly-wrought. It seems to call for music, such music as Mozart invented for the Zauberflöte. 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 Aïda 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 passages 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]
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 institutions, 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 Ré 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: