| "Pur troppo io so che buon scrittor non sono, |
| E che ai fonti miglior non ho bevuto." |
| ("Too well I know that I am no good writer, |
| And that I have not drunk at the best fountains.") |
Proceeding next to Abbé Chiari. In him I found a brain inflamed, disordered, bold to rashness, and pedantic; plots dark as astrological predictions; leaps and jumps demanding seven-league boots; scenes isolated, disconnected from the action, foisted in for the display of philosophical sententious verbiage; some good theatrical surprises, some descriptions{114} felicitous in their blunt naiveté; pernicious ethics; and, as for the writer, I found him one of the most turgid, most inflated, nay, the most turgid, the most inflated, of this century. I once saw a sonnet of his, printed and posted on the shops in Venice; it was composed to celebrate the recovery from illness of a patrician, and began with this verse:—
| "Sull'incude fatal del nostro pianto." |
| ("Upon the fatal anvil of our tears.") |
Nothing more need be said. With such monstrosities in metre, he had the courage to proclaim himself a modern Pindar. Goldoni he looked down upon like some gull of the lagoons. Yet, such as he was, Chiari succeeded in mystifying a thousand empty brains, who admired him without understanding a line he wrote.
It is not to be wondered at if a Goldoni and a Chiari, with a few disciples and adherents, were able to create a temporary furore, when we consider that this furore flamed up in the precincts of the theatres. Here all the population was divided into hostile camps, and each party was so blind and bewitched as not to recognise the infinite superiority of Goldoni as a comic playwright over his rival.
What is the force of righteous indignation when a vogue of this sort has been launched on its career? That of Goldoni and Chiari was bound to run its natural course, and when it died away, the{115} other, which I have described in the foregoing chapter, the vogue of immoderate, unnatural, incorrect enthusiasts, so-styled sublime philosophers, came in, who discovered new worlds in literature, and who are fawning now upon the young men of our days, threatening new vocabularies, nay, new alphabets, treating antiquity as a short-sighted idiot, and involving humanity in an undistinguishable chaos of literary follies.
With regard to the mania created by Goldoni and Chiari, as may easily be imagined, I looked upon it as a fungus growth upon opinion, worthy at the best of laughter. I deemed that, at any rate, I had the right to be the master of my own thoughts; and a trifle in verse which I wrote for my amusement, without the intention of sending it to press, was the accidental cause of obliging me to maintain my views against these poets by a series of good-natured jeux d'esprit. My real friends know that I harboured no envy, no sentiment of rivalry against them and their swamps of volumes in octavo. Any one who has the justice to remember that I was a mere amateur in literature, giving away gratis whatever issued from my pen, will agree with my friends, and acknowledge that I was prompted by a disinterested zeal in the cause of pure and unaffected writing. May Heaven pardon those, and there are many of them, who have held me up for detestation as a malignant satirist, seeking to found my{116} own fame and fortune upon the ruin of others! The players and publishers would be able to disabuse them of this notion. But I do not choose to beg for testimonials to my generosity; and perhaps I have not told the whole truth about it in the chapter already written upon my own character.[22]
It was in the year 1757 then that I composed the little book in verse which I have mentioned, closely following the style of good old Tuscan masters, and giving it the title of La Tartana degl'influssi per l'anno bisestile 1757.[23] This little work contained a gay critique in abstract on the uses and abuses of the times. It was composed upon certain verses of that obscure Florentine poet Burchiello, which I selected as prophetic texts for my own disquisitions. It took the humour of our literary club, and I dedicated it to a patrician of Venice, Daniele Farsetti, to whom I also gave the autograph, without retaining any copy for my own use. This Cavaliere, a man of excellent culture, and a Mecænas of the Granelleschi, wishing to give me an agreeable surprise, and thinking perhaps that he would meet with difficulty in getting the poem printed at Venice, sent it to Paris to be put in type, and distributed the few copies which were struck off among his friends in Venice.
This trifling volume might have gone the round{117} of many hands, affording innocent amusement by its broad and humorous survey over characters and customs, if a few drops of somewhat pungent ink, employed in lashing the bad writers of those days, had not played the part of venomous and sacrilegious asps. Goldoni, besides being a regular deluge of dramatic works, had in him I know not what diuretic medicine for composing little things in verse, songs, rhyming diatribes, and other such-like poems of a very muddy order. This gift he now exercised, while putting together a collection of panegyrics on the patrician Veniero's retirement from the rectorship of Bergamo, to vent one of his commonplace terza-rima rigmaroles against my Tartana degli influssi. He abused the book as a stale piece of mustiness, an inept and insufferable scarecrow; treating its author as an angry man who deserved compassion, because (he chose to say) I had wooed fortune in vain. Many other polite expressions of the same stamp adorned these triplets.
Meanwhile, the famous Signor Lami, who at that time wrote the literary paper of Florence, thought my Tartana worthy of notice in his journal, and extracted some of its stanzas on the decadence and corruption of the language. Padre Calogerà, too, who was then editing the Giornale de' Letterati d'Italia, composed and published praises on it, which were certainly above its merits. I flatter myself that my readers will not think I record these facts out of{118} vanity. I was not personally acquainted with either Lami or Calogerà. It is not my habit to correspond with celebrated men of letters in order to manufacture testimonials out of their civil and flattering replies. I do not condescend to wheedle journalists and reviewers into imposing on the credulity of the public by calling bad things good and good things bad in my behoof. I have always been so far sensible as to check self-esteem, and to appreciate my literary toys at their due worthlessness. Writers who by tricks of this kind, extortions, canvassings, and subterfuges, seek to gratify their thirst for fame, and to found a reputation upon bought or begged for attestations, are the objects of my scorn and loathing. For Lami and Calogerà I cherished sentiments of gratitude. I seemed to find in them a spirit kindred to my own, and a conviction that I had uttered what was useful in the cause of culture.