The vicissitudes of Gozzi's reputation turn upon the different views which have been taken of his merits in relation to Goldoni. In Italy the balance of opinion tends to sink against him. Baretti, that fiery member of Sam Johnson's club, the fierce opponent of Goldoni, pronounced at first in Gozzi's favour, lamented that he could not bring Garrick to one of his plays, proposed to translate the Fiabe into English, and swore that Gozzi stood next to Shakespeare in dramatic genius. But when Baretti read the Fiabe in print, he declaimed against the buffooneries of the Masks, and dropped his enthusiasm. Tommasei found no words too strong to express his contempt for a writer whose genius he denied, and whose character inspired him with repugnance. Tommasei was a champion of Goldoni. Omitting further details, it is enough to say that Italy has elected to ignore Gozzi and to deify Goldoni. The causes are not far to seek. Gozzi's vogue depended partly upon controversy and satire. It was confined to the locality of Venice. His plays required the co-operation of the Masks; and these expired in his own lifetime. Moreover, they appealed to a rare combination of sensibilities, romantic and humorous, which is not common in Italy. Lastly, for their proper mounting on the stage, they demanded an expenditure of ingenuity and money, which their fading popularity prohibited. Goldoni, on the other hand, suited the temper of the growing age by his simplicity, his truth to nature, his realism, and the freshness of eternal youth which lends charm to the facile productions of his amiable genius. His comedies can be put upon the stage without the least difficulty; and they afford scope for the display of varied talents in actors of several descriptions.
In Germany Gozzi enjoyed wide posthumous reputation, not as a playwright with the public, but as a poet among men of letters. He was early chosen, during the Sturm und Drang period, to perform the part of champion of Romantic against Classical forms of art. How mistaken this view of Gozzi really is, I have attempted to prove. Yet if critics ignore what Gozzi wrote about the origin of his Fiabe, and keep out of sight his intentions while composing them—if they only regard the printed plays—it is not difficult to make him assume this false position. Franz A. C. Werthes translated the Fiabe into German so early as 1777-79, and published them at Bern. No less than twelve separate versions of selected plays have since appeared, up to the date 1877.[92] Among these may be mentioned Schiller's Turandot, which was executed from the translation of Werthes, and a reproduction of I Pitocchi Fortunati by Paul Heyse. Schlegel introduced the Fiabe to public notice, emphasising their value as specimens of the Romantic style, and connecting them with the indigenous art of Italy. Hoffmann declared his enthusiasm for Gozzi; and if he did not borrow motives from the Fiabe and the Memoirs for his own fantastic productions, he undoubtedly regarded their author as a genius of the same species as himself. Wagner, I may parenthetically observe, based one of his earliest operatic productions on La Donna Serpente. It was composed in 1833, and was first exhibited at Munich in 1888. To follow the several steps by which Gozzi came to be regarded in Germany as a Romanticist, snuffed out by the Revolution, would lead me beyond the limits of this introduction. I suspect that he was known there mainly in the translation of Werthes, and that his works were quarried as a mine of motives by writers of romantic tendencies, who lacked invention. There is a pocket edition of the Fiabe in Italian, 3 vols., published by Hitzig, 1808.
The German conception of Gozzi as a Romantic poet of the purest water spread to France. It took the French imagination just when the Romantic movement was at its height. Philarète Chasles treated his works from the point of view of Spanish dramatic literature. Paul de Musset pounced upon the Memoirs, condensed them into a small volume with considerable literary ability, and so ingeniously manipulated their text in the process as to create the illusion that Gozzi had pronounced himself to be in fact what his German admirers found in him. This clever travesty of Gozzi's autobiography presented him to the world as the victim of sprites, the creature of his own inventions, the plaything of superstition, instead of the caustic, practical, sometimes dissembling, and often sinister, man of thwarted passion, violent caprice, hard head, and conservative heart, who will presently be revealed in my version of the Memoirs. I do not blame Paul de Musset for his literary escapade. I understand his motive, and appreciate the joke. He wanted, at one and the same time, to place Gozzi, as the Germans had already placed him, among the fathers of Romanticism, and also to construct a telling novel of adventure out of the copious materials furnished by the Memoirs. But, by so doing, Paul de Musset misled writers who had no access to the sole edition of Gozzi's Memorie, or who were perhaps too careless to seek this document out. Among these I may mention M. Paul Royer, the translator of five of Gozzi's Fiabe into French,[93] and Vernon Lee, the talented authoress of a deservedly popular book entitled Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.[94] Both of these distinguished writers have fallen into the trap laid for them by Paul de Musset, and have accepted a false conception of the man who forms the subject of these volumes.
Gozzi, who plumed himself upon his Democritean philosophy of laughter, his Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of every wayward stroke of fortune, would have been the first to smile sardonically, yet not without a touch of benignant humour, upon the mask he has been made to wear by Germans and by Frenchmen. English critics, with the exception of Vernon Lee, have had little or nothing to do with him up to this date.[95] Let the man speak for himself in the account of his own life, which I now for the first time present to the multitude of English readers.
August 8, 1888.
CARLO GOZZI.
I.
My Pedigree and Birth.
THERE are people foolish enough to make every family history the object of their ridicule and satire. For the sake of wits of this sort I shall give a short but truthful account of my ancestry, in order that they may have something to quiz.