Il Corvo was produced at Milan in the summer of 1761, and at Venice in October 1761. Il Rè Cervo appeared in January 1762; Turandot perhaps in the same month; La Donna Serpente in October 1762; Zobeide in November 1763; I Pitocchi Fortunati in November 1764; Il Mostro Turchino in December of the same year; L'Augellino Belverde in January 1765; Zeim, Rè de'Geni in November 1765. These, with L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie, form the ten Fiabe. After the production of Zeim, Gozzi judged that the vein had been worked out, and turned his attention to adaptations of Spanish dramas for the stage.
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 protegés, 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 rôle, 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, passing 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 class, 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 associations 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 appetite and brazen disregard for moral rectitude. This general conception of the character explains the transformation of Tartaglia, in the Three Oranges, into the Tartaglia of the Augellino Belverde.
Brighella 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 assumes 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 circumstance, 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 assumes the rôle 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.