The humour of Italy

by Unknown

The writer goes on to describe the play in a very humorous fashion, but as the humour is only apparent from the spectator’s point of view, and does not belong to the work represented, we must not digress so far as to quote it at full length. The conclusion, however, may be given. “... Suffice it to say that there was the ‘Serpent-man,’ ending in a long green tail, and a terrible giant with a negro head and pock-marked face, each of which was a Deus ex machina, descending at opportune moments to assist one or the other side, the uomo serpente on one occasion crushing a warrior who was engaged in an encounter with Ersilia, by flinging a great tower on him. What Belisario had to do with this grandiosa opera, besides giving it his name, I did not plainly see, as he never made his appearance on the stage. However, the audience seemed greatly delighted with the performance. They ate voraciously of bruscolini (pumpkin seeds, salted and cooked in a furnace, of which the Romans are very fond) and cakes, partook largely of lemonade, and when I left the stage was strewn with cornetti, or paper horns, which they had emptied of their seeds.”[^[2]]

The use of dialect in the comic drama has been already adverted to. At the present day “dialect stories” are almost as popular in Italy as they have been, for some time past, in the American magazines. The Neapolitan dialect, so closely connected with Pulcinella, has become as much a stock property of the Italian comic muse, as the brogue of the stage Irishman is of the English. A paper, entirely in this dialect, entitled, “Lo Cuorpo de Napole e lo Sebbeto,” was published for some time at Naples, in the early sixties; but its humour was exclusively political, and of a local and temporary character. The Sicilian dialect has been brought into notice by Verga (whose actual use of it, however, is sparing), Navarro della Miraglia, Capuana, and other writers. Goldoni used the Venetian throughout some of his best comedies (Le Baruffe Chiozzote, for instance), but it seems to have fallen comparatively out of favour of late years. D’Annunzio, in his San Pantaleone, and other stories, has made very effective use of the dialect spoken along the Adriatic coast, about Pescara and Ortona, which is a kind of cross between the Venetian and Neapolitan. In Piedmont there appears to be a mass of popular literature in the (to outsiders) singularly unattractive patois which was so dear to Cavour and Victor Emmanuel.

Among the cities of the Peninsula, Milan and Florence enjoy a pre-eminent reputation for humour. The Florentines of the Middle Ages were famous for their biting wit and satirical speeches, their “motti” and “frizzi.” Franco Sacchetti and Luigi Pulci were Florentines, and Boccaccio was next door to one, being a native of Certaldo. Even Dante, though the last man in the world of whom one would expect anything in the way of humorous utterance, was not without a certain grim facetiousness of his own, as when he turned on the jeering courtiers at Verona with a bitter play on the name of Can Grande, or annihilated the harmless bore in Santa Maria Novella, with his “Or bene, o lionfante, non mi dar noia.” Giusti, whose poems are described as “rather satirical than humorous” (though, as satire is one department of humour, it is rather difficult to see the point of the definition), is in many respects a typical Florentine, though not one by birth, his native place being Monsummano, in the Lucca district. His poems exhibit a singular union of caustic sarcasm and irony, fierce earnestness and merry, rattling disinvoltura—light-hearted Tuscan laughter. He wrote chiefly on political subjects, and never did political poet have worthier themes for his verse. The times in which he lived were sufficient to call forth any amount of saeva indignatio, and if the bitterness sometimes ran so high as to leave no heart for mirth at the pitiful incongruity of human affairs (as in A noi, larve d’Italia), no one who cares for freedom, or to whom the name of Italy is dear, can blame him. Irish hearts can understand the note of deep personal pain that breaks out in “King Log,” or “Weathercock’s Toast,” or the scathing scorn of “Gingillino”;—we have nothing quite like it in English literature. The cause is wanting. We see the same thing in looking over a collection of Italian political caricatures extending over the last thirty or forty years. Some of the cartoons in Lo Spirito Folletto are equal (I am not speaking of minor technical details, of which I am no judge) to the best of Tenniel’s, and the ideal figure of Italy is of rare beauty; but they do not give us what, as a rule, we are accustomed to look for in a cartoon. Now and then, in a serious mood, the artist just named gives us a noble drawing, which is in no sense a caricature; but no work of his causes—nor is it in nature that it should do so—the thrill, the serrement de cœur, we feel before the Aspromonte drawing, with its mournful legend, “Behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow;” or that haunting picture of the “Italia Irredenta” riots of 1882, where Italy looks on the dead body of young Oberdank. We have not fought against hopeless odds for a suffering country.

But in spite of this earnestness (which is usually said to be fatal to a sense of humour), the Tuscan love of fun was always bubbling up in Giusti. His letters, in which he was continually falling into the racy idioms of his native hill-country, are full of it; and some of his poems are purely playful, without political or satiric intention—or, if satiric, only in a kindly spirit. Such is the poem of “Love and a Quiet Life,” from which we have given an extract. There seems to be no English version of the best of Giusti’s works, and these offer peculiar difficulties to the translator. I have not ventured to lay hands on the “Brindisi di Girella”—a process which could only result in spoiling that inimitable poem—and have contented myself with the excellent renderings of “L’Amor Pacifico,” and some stanzas from “Gingillino,” contributed some thirty years ago to the Cornhill Magazine by an anonymous writer.

Tuscan rural life has been admirably painted of late years by, among others, Mario Pratesi and Renato Fucini, both writers of considerable graphic power and a certain “pawky” humour, though they seem to prefer tragedy to comedy. The latter’s sketch of a day in a Tuscan country-house has been included in the present collection.

So much for Florence and Tuscany. Milan is famous in Italy for various things—for its Duomo and the singing at La Scala—for the gallant fight for liberty during the Five Days in ’48—and for the mysterious delicacies known as polpette and panettone. But besides all these things, the Milanese are noted for a love of jokes and laughter, which they endeavoured heroically to suppress in the days of the Austrian dominion. They possess a dialect which seems as though it were intended for the comic stage, and lends itself excellently well to Aristophanic wit; and they have had a dialect-poet of some note—Giacomo Porta, the friend of Grossi and Giusti. Giusti had a great sense of the humorous capabilities of the Milanese dialect, and quoted verses in it (or, more probably, improvised quotations) in letters to his Milanese friends. Unfortunately Porta’s poems are so strictly local, and lose so much by translation, that none of them have been found available for this book.

As a rule, the prose specimens of Italian humour have been more satisfactory (as far as the present work is concerned) than the poetical, for two reasons—first, the latter are more difficult to translate with any degree of point and spirit; and secondly, whether from the choice of metre or other causes, they are apt to become long-winded, if not heavy. The favourite measure for humorous poems, which cannot exactly be described as satires, is a six-line stanza, like that of Horace Smith’s “Address to the Mummy”; in fact, the ottava rima stanza, docked of two lines. Now, a division into stanzas is not, as a rule, favourable to rapid or spirited narration, and the longer the stanza the greater the difficulty. Unless the thought exactly fits the limit, it must be either abruptly contracted to bring it within the compass of the stanza, or expanded by feeble paraphrase and repetition; otherwise the enjambements resulting from the carrying on of a sentence from one stanza into another are apt to be awkward and obscure, unless very skilfully managed. Pananti, in his “Poeta di Teatro” (from which I have given a quotation), is very happy in this stanza; the measure flows easily, and the poem is not, in the original, too diffuse, the accumulation of trivial details having a naïvely ludicrous effect, which is lost to some extent in English. Pananti, by-the-bye, was a Tuscan, as was also the genial physician, Redi, whose dithyramb in praise of the wine of Montepulciano (he also wrote a great number of pleasant letters, and some papers on natural history, which show him to have been an accurate observer as well as an enthusiastic lover of nature) has been spiritedly translated by Leigh Hunt. So, too, was another doctor, Guadagnoli, whose collection of Poesie giocose contains some good things, but none in a sufficiently concentrated form for quotation.

In speaking of the humorous literature of Italy, we must not forget to notice the English influence which made itself so strongly felt during the eighteenth century. Swift, Addison, and Sterne found not only eager readers, but imitators. Giuseppe Baretti, the friend of Johnson, who, after a prolonged residence in London, returned to Italy for a few years, probably did something towards popularising the language and literature of his adopted country. Count Gasparo Gozzi (elder brother to Carlo Gozzi, of the Memorie and the Fiabe) founded and carried on for some time, at Venice, a journal called L’Osservatore, avowedly on the model of the Spectator; and though he was no servile imitator, his writings have an unmistakable Addisonian flavour. Sterne’s influence was, perhaps, more widely felt than any other. Ugo Foscolo probably came under it when writing Didimo Chierico; and the frequent allusions to the Sentimental Journey in Italian writers prove it to have been widely read. Leopardi’s intensely original individuality owed little to any writer; yet I cannot help thinking that he may have found Swift, to whom he was in some respects akin, both suggestive and stimulating. Certainly, the masterly dialogues exhibit a bitter saturnine humour very like Swift’s misanthropic irony, though more subtle and refined, and rendered still more striking by that innocent-seeming naïveté of expression which is so peculiarly Italian. The dialogue between the “First Hour and the Sun,” now translated, is one of the best; but “The Wager of Prometheus” is exceedingly fine, though too long to quote entire, and difficult to select from. I have examined the translation of some of these dialogues by Mr. Charles Edwards in Trübner’s Philosophical Library, but, after consideration, found myself unable to make use of them. Apart from a few minor inaccuracies, which could easily have been corrected, it was evident that the translator had his mind fixed on Leopardi’s philosophy, and the peculiar humorous quality of the dialogues had almost disappeared in his version. The bull, which the Edgeworths laboured so hard to prove not indigenous to Ireland, or at least not peculiar to the Green Isle, flourishes vigorously in Italy. It naturally would be of frequent occurrence among a quick-witted people, ready of speech, who, in their haste to reach the salient points which have struck their imagination, omit to express the connecting links, and so make that absurd which is perfectly clear to their own minds. Into the wilderness of definition we will not enter; but there appear to be two principal kinds of bulls,—one in which the man’s idea is sensible enough, though it appears nonsense to others, because of his excessive brevity, as in “He sent me to the devil and I came straight to your honour;” and another in which it is in itself nonsense, because he has overlooked one essential condition. Thus, when the blind man in Pratesi’s Dottor Febo is eagerly asseverating something, he exclaims, “May I become blind if...!” Castiglione records another bull of this kind (it will be found on page [28]), which will at once be recognised as an old and familiar friend; and others will be met with in the course of the volume.

It must be confessed that Italian humour is often of the Aristophanic order, not merely in that (as has been already hinted) a great deal of it is concerned with topics usually (among us) omitted from polite conversation, but also in the more than free-and-easy way in which the Unseen is frequently dealt with. The worship of the saints—whatever may be said to the contrary—stands much upon the same footing among the ignorant and superstitious peasantry of Southern Italy (it is not so true of the Tuscans) as the polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome. And if familiarity bred contempt in the case of Aristophanes (it may not have been so—and we dare not say, in the face of learned commentators, that it was—but it certainly looks like it), like causes have produced like effects in Naples and Sicily. The Neapolitan lazzaroni has scant respect for San Gennaro, when the latter shows no signs of acceding to his wishes, but calls him animale and canaglia, and worse names than that. Capuana has an exceedingly characteristic sketch, entitled “Rottura col Patriarca,” in which a gentleman, who considers himself badly treated by St. Joseph, the patron of married couples (being disappointed in his hopes of an heir, besides numerous other misfortunes), declares that he has formally broken with that saint, and throws his picture out of window. His confessor remonstrates with him for his language on the subject, which is, to say the least, unparliamentary; but the gentleman replies, “As a patriarch, and the husband of the Virgin, I am willing to accord him all due respect, but ... in short, he has behaved very shabbily, and I will have no more to do with him.”

This suggests the subject of ejaculations, oaths, and imprecations, of which the Italians have an infinite variety, and as some of the most characteristic occur untranslated in the following selections, a few words of explanation may not be out of place. The subject has been treated so well by Story, that I cannot forbear quoting him once more, especially as the passage throws curious side-lights on some aspects of the national character.