“Costernata è la corte epicurea
E venne a Toctabei la diarrea.”[234]
The exiled Empress, coming upon her old favorite, Tomasso, cries,
“Ah, non m’inganno no, quegli è Tomasso
Mel dice il core e lo cognosco al naso.”[235]
No reader of Don Juan needs to be reminded how often Byron cuts short a sentimental passage with a remark which makes the entire situation ridiculous. The secret of this continual interplay between gravity and absurdity had never been mastered by Frere; undoubtedly it is one of the tricks for which Byron was particularly indebted to Casti and to Casti’s predecessors, Pulci and Berni.
Casti’s style and language is usually flat and insipid, undistinguished by beauty or rhythm. “His diction,” says Foscolo, “is without grace or purity.” He is often coarse and unnecessarily obscene. These considerations make it improbable that Byron could have been affected by Casti’s poetic style, for, despite the sensuousness of some portions of Don Juan, the English poet rarely allowed himself to sink into the positive indecencies so common in Casti’s work.
On the other hand, the two men are united by their aims and motives. With all that is petty and offensive in Casti’s satire, there is mingled a real love of liberty and an unswerving hatred of despotism. No other poet in English or Italian literature of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attempted an indictment of his age, at once so hostile and so comprehensive as those which Casti and Byron tried to make. More significant still, Casti, unlike Pulci, Berni, and Frere, was modern in spirit, and played with vital questions in society and government. He was close to Byron’s own epoch, and the objects of his wrath, as far as systems and institutions are concerned, were the objects of Byron’s satire. Up to a certain point, too, Byron followed Casti’s methods: he is colloquial, discursive, and gossipy; he cares little for plot structure; he employs irony and mockery, as well as invective; and he skips, in a single stanza, from seriousness to absurdity. The differences between the two poets are to be attributed chiefly to the Englishman’s genius and powerful personality. He was more of an egotist than Casti, more vehement, more straightforward, more impulsive, and was able to fill Don Juan with his individuality as Casti was never able to do with Gli Animali Parlanti and Il Poema Tartaro.
Certain facts in the relationship between Casti and Byron seem, then, to be clear. At a period before the composition of Beppo, Byron had read and enjoyed in the original Italian, the Novelle and Gli Animali Parlanti. Numerous features in Beppo and Don Juan which resemble characteristics of Casti’s poems had, apparently, existed combined in no English work before Byron’s time. In addition, internal evidence makes it a possibility that Byron was familiar with Il Poema Tartaro, and that he borrowed from it something of its material and its spirit. The probability is that Byron was influenced, to an extent greater than has been ordinarily supposed, by the example and the methods of Casti.
Byron’s acquaintance with Pulci and Berni did not, apparently, begin until after the publication of Beppo. On March 25, 1818, he wrote Murray, in speaking of Beppo: “Berni is the original of all—Berni is the father of that kind of writing, which, I think, suits our language, too, very well.”[236] On February 21, 1820, while he was busy with his translation of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, he said of Pulci’s poem, to Murray: “It is the parent, not only of Whistlecraft, but of all jocose Italian poetry.”[237] These assertions indicate that Byron classed Beppo and Don Juan with the work of the Italian burlesque writers, eventually coming to recognize Pulci as the founder of the school.