Parini, “a poor sickly priest,” led an uneventful life in Milan until the overthrow of Austrian rule by the French invasion, when he came forward prominently in public affairs, and earned credit by his good sense and moderation. He died in 1799, aged seventy. He was a high-minded man of austere morality.

Another poet of the eighteenth century deserves no less fame than Parini, but has remained comparatively unknown from having written in dialect. It is his compensation to be as decidedly at the head of the Sicilian lyrists as Petrarch is at the head of the Tuscan; nor is Sicilian in any degree a rude or barbarous idiom. Schools of Sicilian poetry existed in the thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but all previous celebrities were eclipsed by the brilliant achievements of GIOVANNI MELI (1740-1815). Meli can hardly be paralleled either with Burns or with our English Theocritus, William Barnes, for he possesses neither Burns’s tragic pathos and withering satire, nor Barnes’s power of realistic description. But he rivals Burns in simplicity and melody, and is capable of much loftier lyric flights than Barnes; and if his satire does not brand or scathe, it smiles and sparkles with genial humour. The lightness, ease, and grace of his songs cannot be exceeded; his pastorals are worthy of a countryman of Theocritus; and his mock-heroics, Don Quixote, and the Origin of the World, though evincing less of poetical inspiration, are effluences of genuine humour. His employment of the Sicilian dialect was highly favourable to his genius by exempting him from all obligation to write with academical constraint. It is most interesting to find Wordsworth’s plea for a return to nature anticipated by a Sicilian of the generally stiff and affected eighteenth century. One of the most marked features of his poetry is its lively and dramatic character, arising from the close observation of national types, apparently just as they were observed by the ancient writers of Sicilian mimes, Sophron and Epicharmus. “As in antiquity,” says Paul Heyse, “so at this day, idyll, song, and mime are the species of poetical composition allotted as the Sicilian heritage.” Meli represented the national genius to perfection. His life was uneventful. He is represented as an amiable, sensible, unassuming man, as much of a Bacchus as consistent with sobriety, and as much of an Anacreon as comported with an utter ignorance of Greek, an abate of the old school, attached, but not in a perverse or bigoted manner, to the ancient social order, which, by the aid of British ships and troops, maintained itself better in Sicily than elsewhere in Italy.

The licentious poems of the Abate GIOVANNI BATTISTA CASTI (1721-1803) deserve attention from their influence on Byron’s Don Juan, and also from the veiled political character of many of them. Casti, an accomplished traveller and acquainted with many distinguished men, belongs, like Talleyrand, both to the old time and to the new. Attached by habit and taste to the polished and frivolous society of the ancient régime, his sympathies were nevertheless liberal. He satirised Catherine the Second, and when exiled from Vienna on that account, had the spirit to resign his Austrian pension. The Animali Parlanti a satire upon the rule of the stronger in political life, and thus an interesting revival of the old conception of Reynard the Fox, is his best work.

It is remarkable that the age of Richardson and Fielding in England, and Marivaux and Prevost d’Exiles in France, should have produced no novelist of reputation in Italy. The imitation of even such world-famed books as the Nouvelle Héloise and Werther was reserved for a later generation. One romancer acquired some celebrity—Count ALESSANDRO VERRI (1741-1816), who hit upon, or borrowed from Wieland, the idea of resorting for his themes to antiquity. His Notti Romane, Saffo, and Erostrato are all works of merit, and the first-named was probably not without influence upon Landor.

On the whole, the history of the Italy of the eighteenth century is in most departments, intellectual and political, that of a patient recovering from a formidable malady by slow but certain stages. Much is lost, never to return. The relation of Italy to the rest of Europe is no longer that of Athens to Sparta or Bœotia, as in the sixteenth century; but neither, as in the seventeenth, is she estranged from the general current of European thought. Her intellectual position may be read in the very portraits of her eminent men, who in general display the placid eighteenth-century type, and might as well have been Frenchmen or Englishmen as Italians. They were writers of signal merit and utility, but, Vico excepted, not men of creative genius, and the national mind might easily have degenerated into mediocrity but for the tremendous convulsions of the end of the century. In one province, however, she stood apart and supreme during nearly the whole of the age—the drama, with or without musical accompaniment, which must form the subject of our next chapter.

CHAPTER XXII
THE COMEDY OF MASKS—THE OPERA—DRAMA
OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century, if chiefly remarkable in Italian literary history for the dawn of national regeneration, and the assimilation of literature to the type prevailing in other European countries, is also memorable as the period when Italian dramatists first acquired a European renown. This recognition may be considered to date from the production of Count Maffei’s Merope in 1714, and from the summons of Apostolo Zeno to Vienna a few years afterwards. These two men represented, one, the classical tragedy, which, notwithstanding its conventional acceptance, has ever remained an exotic in Italy; the other, that special creation of Italian genius, the musical play or opera. Later in the century, Alfieri and Metastasio carried both forms nearer to perfection, and Goldoni gave his country a comedy at once brilliant and regular. Yet the genuine dramatic life of the nation is to be found in the commedia dell’ arte, or Comedy of Masks, contemned by the learned, but dear to the people, which, except for a brief interval in the hands of Carlo Gozzi, failed to clothe itself with literary form, but has pervaded the theatres of Europe in the costume of harlequin, columbine, and pantaloon.

As the simplest, the commedia dell’ arte is probably the oldest form of the drama. There can be no question that the Greek rustics who smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed, virtually enacted the same parts as the Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants, who, inheriting this rude entertainment from Roman times, preserved it through the Middle Ages, until it assumed new importance in the general awakening of the sixteenth century. The original wine-lees gave place to masks, and as masks cannot be varied ad infinitum, the characters became limited to a few well-defined and salient types. Hence every piece had substantially the same personages; although the Italian comedy allows of numerous variations upon its four stock parts. This caused the dialogue to be mainly extemporaneous; and as comedy is more easily extemporised than tragedy, the pieces tended more and more towards farce. At the same time, “the fertility of fancy, quickness of intelligence, facility of utterance, command of language, and presence of mind,” indispensable to a good impromptu comedian, bestowed a certain regularity upon the performance. The actor was obliged to observe the conditions imposed by the character he represented, conventional as this was: if he enacted Pantaloon, he must not comport himself as Brighella or the Doctor, and vice versâ. As in the Indian drama, the comic passages were usually in dialect; the serious, if any, in cultivated language. Despised as literature, these pieces attained great popularity even beyond the limits of Italy, especially in Paris, where they divided public favour with the national theatre for a hundred and fifty years. As, however, they were mainly improvised, and no care was taken of such parts as might chance to be written down, they have virtually perished. No literary relic of their palmy days seems to exist except the scenarios or skeleton plans of some of them, mere outlines to be filled up by the performers. Modern readers will hardly obtain a better idea of their spirit than from Vernon Lee’s inimitable Prince of the Hundred Soups, a fantastic tale laid in the seventeenth century, the culminating period of these dramatic impromptus, towards the close of which they began to yield to the musical drama. Their capability of real dramatic excellence is revealed by two more recent developments—the improved Pulcinello farces of FRANCESCO CERLONE, a Neapolitan tailor, who, in the later half of the eighteenth century, “lifted,” says Scherillo, “Pulcinello from the crowd of masks, and made him the monarch of the popular theatre”; and the fairy dramas of Carlo Gozzi, a Venetian of the same period. Both usually wrote their plays out, or at least left comparatively little to the invention of the actors; but Cerlone composed entirely in the spirit of the commedia dell’ arte. His Pulcinello is commonly a butt, designed to keep the audience throughout in a roar of laughter by his ridiculous adventures, an object most fully attained. Gozzi’s pieces are of higher literary quality, and demand a more particular notice.

CARLO GOZZI (1720-1808), brother of Gaspare Gozzi, already mentioned, would merit an honourable place among Italian writers merely on the strength of his entertaining memoirs, translated by Symonds. His real significance in literary history, however, is confined to the four brilliant years in which he carried all before him on the Venetian stage by his fiabe or dramatised fairy tales, composed in the spirit of the commedia dell’ arte, in so far that many of the characters belonged to the old conventional types, and that a portion of the action was highly farcical. These characteristics were nevertheless combined with a regular plot capable of exciting deep interest. The fiabe originated in a literary quarrel. Goldoni, the restorer of true comedy to Italy, had denounced the buffooneries of the old commedia dell’ arte, and Gozzi, who had himself cultivated that form, and whose partiality for it was enhanced by a misunderstanding with Goldoni, determined to show its capabilities, and at the same time to ridicule his dramatic rivals, Goldoni and the Abate Chiari. To this end he hit upon the extremely happy idea of dramatising the fairy tales in Basile’s Pentamerone, thus creating a form represented in English literature by the admirable burlesques of Planché, but with even more resemblance to an ancient form of which no complete example remains, the mythological parodies of the Attic Middle Comedy, which combined ridicule of the tragic poets with a regular plot derived from ancient tradition.