A VENETIAN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
A strange figure, a man almost wholly forgotten, but one to whom Goethe, Schiller, Tieck and Schlegel owed not a little, is yet to be known by whoever cares to rub the dust from old memoirs and turn the pages of some rare and racy volumes. And in knowing this Venetian much may be learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her walls with sweet and splendid works expressive of the endurance and piety of great souls, but such men as Casanova the gambler, Goldoni the play-writer, Longhi and Canaletto the painters; and then, as the best among them all, the honest Venetian whom we now meet, sometimes called the Shakespeare of Venice, but in fact only a play-writer, a Venetian nobleman, who depicted in a dispassionate temper the trivialities of his age, and lacked both the milieu and the material to produce a great work.
Venice had long reached and passed the culmination of her brilliant power, and had become the very palpitating centre of unchecked dissipation and of an extravagant luxury of living. All Europe came to it to be amused. It is impossible to frame with sober English words the bas-reliefs of those licentious times as they are found to-day in the popular songs of the Lagoons. At this epoch there was a young Venetian, Count Carlo Gozzi, who wrote for the Venetian theatre, and may be considered as having first invested with the dignity of literary expression the typical figures of Italian comedy—Pantaleone, Harlequin, Tartaglia, etc. He came from a literary family, and his brother, Count Gaspard Gozzi, was an honored man of letters who gave several volumes to Venetian literature, and whose vivacious face in marble may be seen in the gallery of the ducal palace with the busts of doges, prelates and painters of the great state of Venice. But he whom we think the more interesting man, as well as the most representative, has not been honored with bust or portrait, and we must look to his memoirs to find out what manner of man he was.
Carlo Gozzi was the seventh son of one of those opulent noble Venetian families which a century of indolent leisure and mad enjoyment of gayety had reduced to a state bordering upon beggary. The family was disorganized, and for the completion of its bad fortune the eldest son fell in love with and married a foolish literary young woman, who to an unchecked ambition of distinguishing herself either as a poetess, a writer of plays, or as the fashionable directress of some accademia, added an uncontrollable spirit of domination. She mismanaged the household, rendering it intolerable to every one but herself. Gozzi's good sense very soon convinced him that there was nothing to hope from such a condition of affairs, and he sought guidance and protection from his uncle, Almore Cesare Tiepolo, the venerated senator, who recommended him to Girolamo Quirini, governor-general of Dalmatia. It was to go there and to meet a new fate that Gozzi, then a lad of sixteen, left Venice on board of a ship of war, having for his whole fortune his youth, his guitar and a few books.
It was only after he had become an old man that he wrote the story of his life, and that he so piquantly portrayed the physiognomy of the Venetian people in his famous Memorie inutile, which, as he quaintly says, he published "from humility." The Memorie inutile in which Gozzi has depicted himself with such lifelike realism are sincere and vivacious, and rival Diderot and Rousseau for directness, luminousness and interest. Gozzi's nature is as free from conceit as it is from that reserve which is sometimes mistaken for the enviable result of hereditary culture, when it often is but the makeshift of vanity to cover mental penury. The serenity of his soul never fails him even under the most disheartening circumstances. His unalterable gayety, his playfulness and his genial humor, just a little bit satirical, made him the best of fellows and the most capital companion. None of the changes or chances of an adventurous life seem to have either abated or checked the flow of his animal spirits. He took hold of things and of the people he met by their laughable side. Hence the remarkable elasticity and the buoyancy of his writings. How far he stands from the reactionary romantic movement of a later literature we may know if we notice that there is no morbid self-retrospection and no shadow of melancholy in any one page he ever wrote. When domestic difficulties and the complications attending the dismemberment of the family after the death of his paralytic father—whom he worshipped—absorbed his whole mind, and he had to call upon his reserved strength of character to endure sorrow, Gozzi kept up a brave heart. He believed in his vocation as a writer of plays, and he fed his talent by an indulgent and sympathetic comprehension of human nature.
He says: "It is an endless amusement for me to see the world, such as it is in my century, and to contemplate the big caldron in which all our follies are kept boiling. Is it not an immense farce? and am I not right to make it the plaything of my reflections, and to laugh as I keep counting the somersaults of humanity?" These "somersaults" are precisely what Gozzi has so successfully reproduced upon the scene.
It was while he lived in wild Dalmatia that Gozzi had first revealed to him his own dramatic genius. His protector there was a man of letters, who lent him books and encouraged him to exercise his literary taste and talent in scribbling sketches of character, poetical essays and such things as usually serve as the magnetic conductor between a youth and the people around him, whom he hardly knows. The dramatic troupe in Zara was composed of young Venetian officers only. To amuse the governor and his suite they distributed among themselves the different rôles of men and women, and upon some given theme they improvised those comedies which are so much to the taste of Italians. What a chance there was for individual talent to reveal itself! Gozzi created spontaneously his own rôle—it was that of an Illyrian chambermaid—and in it he used the Dalmatian patois with such dexterity, he railed at feminine foibles with so much finesse, and, using recent social scandals, he touched the whole with such apt satire, that he had an immense success. The rôle of the fictitious chambermaid won universal admiration. Ladies of rank inquired who was that inimitable young man, and expressed the wish to have presented to them the amateur actor. Their disappointment was unconcealed upon finding him reserved in manner, simple, and almost timid and taciturn. We appreciate his surprise when he tells us, "I wondered that my love of study, my chaste tastes, some literary aptitude, and some serious views of life above those of my age did not produce as favorable an impression upon the sex as did my fancy dress of a Dalmatian chambermaid and my skill in gymnastic performances. But, then, had I yet gone down into the inextricable depths of the feminine mind? and was I already acquainted with the laws that rule the magnetic attractions of the most bizarre of brains?"
The stories Gozzi tells us of life in Dalmatia have a fresh, primitive flavor. No one ever told them before him. Their bloom is untouched, and much of the pleasure one has in reading them comes from that. Some of his pictures of manners are as crisp and as vivid as a fine etching.
At the time of his residence there that little, out-of-the-way corner of Europe had not yet been awakened from the stupor of its feudal sleep, nor had the faintest breath of modern ideas so much as rippled over the sullen surface of hereditary slavery to traditional customs. From time immemorial the habits of the people were the same, and singularly uninfluenced by the presence of the gay gallants of Venice who were stationed there. It is not difficult to imagine the distaste with which they left all the enervating delights of their resplendent island of marble, with its mantling of sunlight and the tranquil beauty of its dreamy days, for tedious exile among an inhospitable and untamed population, the severe silence and sombre forests or the monotony of barren rocks. "If you have read your Virgil or Homer," Gozzi tells us, "you have seen Illyrians. These people are quite as pagan in their rites of marriage and the burying of their dead as any people of pagan antiquity. One of their favorite national games consists in lifting a tremendous disk cut out of marble and hurling it to a great distance. Is not this Diomedes and Turnus?
"Contempt weighs down upon every family who has not had several of its men killed, or has not executed cruel vengeance on the right and on the left, or has not been itself the object of outrageous retaliation. It was not long before I had the opportunity to ascertain the truth of what the old priest had told me as we walked together under the walls of the city.