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:
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 Cunto de li Cunti. 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 Massillo 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, passion, 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 assumed 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 passion of humanity.
Having recapitulated the chief features of the Fiabe in their later form, I will now analyse 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 Brighella, who now appears in the character of a burlesque poet and seer. His pindaric prophecies and exaggerated flights of passion, 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 assiduous 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.