A statement so plain by a man of Beyle’s authority deserves some attention. The first question which arises in connection with his assertion is naturally, what work Buratti had done before 1817, when Byron began the composition of Beppo.[271] After a dissipated boyhood, Buratti had become a member of the Corte dei Busoni, a pseudo-Academy which devoted its attention chiefly to satire. Although he was the author of several early lampoons, his first political satire was recited in 1813 among a party of friends at the home of Counsellor Galvagna in Venice. It is, in substance, a lamentation over the fate of Venice, with invective directed against the French army of occupation; Malamani styles it “a masterpiece of subtle sarcasm.” Eventually, through the treachery of apparent friends, the verses came to French ears, and Buratti was imprisoned for thirty days, his punishment, however, being somewhat lightened by powerful patrons. Shortly after this episode, he circulated some quatrains of a scurrilous nature on Filippo Scolari, a pedantic youth who had criticised contemporary literary men in a supercilious way. For these insults, Scolari tried to have Buratti apprehended again, but the latter, although he was forced to sign an agreement to write no more satires, received only a reprimand. During this period he had also directed several pasquinades at an eccentric priest, Don Domenico Marienis, who seems to have been a general object of ridicule in Venice.
Such, according to Malamani, was the extent of Buratti’s work up to 1816. His masterpiece, the Storia dell’ Elefante, was not written until 1819, too late to have been a strong influence even on Don Juan. Of this early satiric verse, no one important poem was composed in ottava rima. The poems, all short and of no especial value as literature, used the Venetian dialect, as far removed from pure Tuscan as Scotch is from English. Their most noticeable characteristic is their prevailing irony, a method of satire of which Byron only occasionally availed himself. With these facts in mind, and with the additional knowledge that Byron was unquestionably influenced by the burlesque writers, it is improbable that Beyle’s theory deserves any credence. Beyle has made it clear that Byron, at one time, read Buratti’s work with interest; but he has failed to show how the English poet could have acquired anything, either in matter or in style, from the Italian satirist.[272]
Of other Italian poems sometimes mentioned as possibly contributing something to Don Juan, no one is worth more than a cursory notice. La Secchia Rapita, by Tassoni (1565–1635), is a genuine mock-heroic, the model for Boileau’s Lutrin and, to some extent, for Pope’s Rape of the Lock. So far as can be ascertained, Byron has no reference either to the author or to his poem; and since La Secchia Rapita preserves consistently the grand style, applying it to trivial subjects, it has little in common with Byron’s satires.[273]
With Il Ricciardetto, by Forteguerri (1675–1735), Byron was better acquainted. Indeed Foscolo, without giving proof for his conclusion, suggested that it might have offered some ideas to the English writer. The Italian poem, completed about 1715, after having been composed, according to tradition, at the rate of a canto a day, contains thirty cantos in ottava rima. It is an avowed burlesque, in which heroes of Carolingian romance are degraded to buffoons, Rinaldo becoming a cook and Ricciardetto a barber. In it, as Foffano says, “the marvellous becomes absurd, the sublime, grotesque, and the heroic, ridiculous.” Forteguerri’s design, however, was not directly satiric, and he was seldom a destructive critic. His mission was solely to divert his readers. Byron refers to Lord Glenbervie’s rendering of the first canto of Il Ricciardetto (1822) as most amusing,[274] but he seems to have had no great interest in the original.
A point has now been reached where it is practicable to frame some generalizations as to the extent and nature of Byron’s indebtedness to the Italians. For his subject-matter, he owed them something. The Catharine II episode in Don Juan may have been suggested by Il Poema Tartaro; an occasional unimportant incident or situation may have been taken or modified from the work of Casti or Pulci. On the whole, however, Byron’s material was either original or drawn from other sources than the Italians. Even though Byron and Casti so frequently satirize the same institutions and theories, it is improbable that this is more than coincidence, the result of the natural opposition which similar abuses aroused in men so alike in temperament and intellect.
In his manner, however, Byron was profoundly affected, so much so that his own statement about Beppo—“The style is not English, it is Italian”—[275] is in exact accordance with the impression which Beppo, as well as Don Juan, makes on the reader. He learned, in part from Casti, and later from Berni and Pulci, the use of the burlesque method; he adopted their discursive style, with its opportunities for digression and self-assertion, and made it a channel for voicing his own beliefs as well as for speaking out against his enemies. Accepting the hint offered by their tendency to colloquial speech, he lowered the tone of his diction and addressed himself often directly to his readers. Moreover, he acquired the habit of shifting suddenly from seriousness to absurdity, from the pathetic to the grotesque, in the compass of a single stanza. His wrath, at first untempered, was now softened by a new attitude of skepticism which turned him more to irony and mockery than to violent rage.
In utilizing the octave for his own satires, he gave it a freedom of which it had never before been made capable in English; and, by a clever employment of double and triple rhymes, and by the constant use of run-on lines and stanzas, he adjusted the measure to the conversational flow of his verse.
At a time, then, when his youthful narrowness was developing into the maturity that comes only from experience, and when, therefore, he was most susceptible to broadening influences, Byron, fortunately for his satire, was brought into contact with the Italian spirit. The result was that Don Juan joined many of the most powerful features of English Bards with the lighter elements of Berni and Casti.
The beauty of Byron’s satire at its finest in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, lies in the welding of the direct and indirect methods, in the interweaving of invective with burlesque, in such a way that the poems seem to link the spirit of Juvenal with the spirit of Pulci. The consequence is a variety of tone, a widening of scope, and a considerable increase in effectiveness. Byron’s general attacks are relieved from the charge of futility; his vindictiveness is mitigated by humor and a touch of the ridiculous; and his aggressiveness, though it does not disappear, is sometimes changed to a cynical tolerance.