"A woman about fifty years old came one day and threw herself at the feet of the governor. From her shoulder hung down a cumbrous gamebag, and out of it she pulled a mass of hair clinging to a dried-up skull: then, placing the hideous object before the governor, she struck her head against the ground, crying, 'Justice! justice!' I inquired what could possibly be the motive of so extraordinary an exhibition, and I learnt that the skull was that of the woman's mother, who was assassinated thirty years before—that the murderers had been executed, but that the greed for vengeance not being yet appeased in that wild daughter of Dalmatia, she had never failed to repeat the same ceremony at the installation of each successive governor, always exhibiting the same thirst for avenging herself upon the family of her enemies, the same gamebag and the same skull!"
"It was impossible to have introduced into Dalmatia any such agricultural reform or innovation as would have ameliorated the cultivation of its fertile plains. The Dalmatian peasants were wedded to the unintelligent routine of their forefathers, and in their ideas or apprehension of things no landmark was ever removed. But, then, is the mere industry which clears the soil of any good if courage and intelligence do not second and direct material labor? Why do we so little care for the improvement of men? Machines and inventions are not a sufficient development: it is the heart and the mind which should be worked upon, changed, electrified into new activity. Will men never comprehend that civilization can never begin except at the soul, and that whatever is purely material must ever be overruled by what is intellectual?" This was written nearly a century and a half ago.
The series of little pictures which Gozzi has left us of those days, when upon his return from Dalmatia he realized the abasement into which the family had finally fallen, are most vivid, and remind us of the honest realism of the Dutch painters. And the charm of Gozzi's writings lies precisely in that sense of genuineness which more than anything else inspires us with trust in a writer. You feel sure that whatever he relates is the thing he has himself observed or felt, just as it happened. All the puerile inconsistency of an age not fecundated by any belief, in which a strong religious sense is replaced by childish superstition and bold materialism, is admirably rendered in the episode of the death of the old senator Almore Cesare Tiepolo. He was a man of great benevolence, and he distinguished himself from his peers by a rare courtesy of manner toward his servants and the people of that class. It happened one day that as he was stepping out of his gondola his foot caught in the folds of his senatorial robe, and he fell down. In trying to hold him up his gondolier let go the oar, which struck Tiepolo's arm and broke it. He, however, showed no sign of pain and no irritation toward his man, but quietly walked home and sent for the surgeon. Forty days he was kept motionless in bed, and during all that time the same unalterable regard for the feelings of others made him gentle and uncomplaining and grateful for the care he received. But the old Venetian loved a good table; so every morning he had his gondolier come to his bedside and tell him what fish was in the market, how it looked, how much it cost; and, giving himself up to his culinary enthusiasm with the appreciative appetite of a connoisseur, he established the relative merit of the different fish and discussed their flavor, till one day, while he was engaged in his favorite morning occupation, the end of things came for him, and Almore Cesare Tiepolo turned his face toward the wall, like the prophet of old, and, surrendering himself to acts of fervid contrition with the aid of his confessor, he obtained a last parting benediction and died.
Two writers, two rival would-be poets, and critics one of the other, held then the literary sway over Venice. One was the licentious and unscrupulous Abbé Chiari, who imitated with a certain success the artificial manner of the brilliant French writers of the day: the other was Goldoni, then at the height of his fame. It is difficult for us, placed as we are so far from that tinselly age, to form an idea of the fever and furore of admiration which raged in Venice for these two men. A deluge of adulatory literary expression poured on every side in the shape of comedies, tragedies, plays, sonnets, poems, songs and apologies, all of them inflating with a fervid enthusiasm the inflammable youth of the most mobile of populations. The comedies of Goldoni were the fashion. They were found in everybody's hands, in ladies' rooms, on shop counters and on the benches of workmen. The plain literal copy of Nature, the unblushing sans-gêne of a sportive cynicism, pleased the indolent imagination of the blasé and immoral Venetians. And the infatuation was carried so far that a certain abbé, the fashionable preacher of the day, boasted that he preached his Lent sermons only after he had read a comedy of Goldoni!
Gozzi fell in the very midst of that literary ebullition, and watched curiously its ephemeral duration; for, like a brilliant soap-bubble blown by merry children, it soon vanished into nothing. Even Goldoni could not retain his hold on minds which, if they knew it not, needed a more satisfying nourishment than the uninspiring, material rendering of characters overcharged with vices or virtues inharmoniously collocated.
Gozzi, persecuted by extreme poverty, stepped on the scene with the determination and the power to substitute for works full of defects and cynical in their influence his own conceptions of life. It was throwing the glove in the face of popular favor, and it opened literary skirmishes which lasted from 1757 to 1761, and determined his vocation as a a writer of plays and a theatrical manager. If we remember how minds had lost all nice critical perception, and had become too confused to distinguish between a good and a bad literary style, having accustomed themselves to admire at large whatever served for amusement, we shall better understand what was the task that Gozzi took upon himself, and appreciate the way he fulfilled it. His work was the creation of a national theatre. He used his vivid imagination and the ingenious turn of his fancy to personify the pet vices and the fatal frivolity of the Venetians. He created fantastic beings, brilliant caricatures and grotesque characters. They made a hit and became popular favorites.
His plays, written especially for the dramatic troupe which he had taken under his paternal protection, and which he loved, cared for, watched over during twenty-five years of his life, are a strong and spicy satire upon the follies of the eighteenth century—a subtle and sagacious criticism of its universal immorality. Our humorist was greatly aided in the prosecution of his work by the sustained rectitude of his own life. With the naïve confidence of a child he relates to us some of his strange experiences of men and of women—mostly of women—and we feel sorry when he is so cruelly and so unnecessarily deceived, and he must lose his implicit trust in that young prima donna in whose purity of soul he so unreservedly believed. How many years he had seen her, day after day, first as a mere girl, then as a young wife and a young mother, and always surrounding her with the homage of his admiration and of his respect! She appears like one of those enshrined figures one is surprised to find in out-of-the-way places, and which, after all, have to be left to other eyes. Gozzi came very near losing the dignity of his mental quietude—and that in spite of his mature age, for he was then nearly fifty—in a Don Quixotism well worthy of a man who had so deeply immersed his fancy in the fount of the Spanish drama, and whose head was filled with romantic adventures. A strange, an almost unaccountable, devotion bound him during five years to the erratic destiny of Ricci. Yet his affection for her did not go beyond a sustained solicitude for her welfare and an active interest in the development of her talent. For a long time he blindly believed in her moral capacities, and he went to work with the hope of winning her permanently to a pure and an elevated life. It is touching to watch him centring his whole interest and placing his paternal pride in that delusive will-o'-the-wisp glimmer of goodness which must inevitably lead hope astray. Gozzi broke off his friendship for her the day he found out she was less than he expected her to be. But this time he did not laugh, though he tells his readers that they may well laugh at him for his credulity, his childish, untaught experience, his romantic effort to believe in and to create an impossible ideal.
What makes Gozzi's memoirs so interesting is, above all, their vitality. A fresh, bounding current of life runs through them, and while watching it you take no notice of those débris of character which an austere moralist would surely count up and remember. In the midst of extreme licentiousness, Gozzi endeavored to awaken in the Venetians a sense of the dignity of existence by placing before their eyes tangible ideas of virtue. The public is a materialist by right of usage, and therefore prefers the reality of the theatre to all other forms of teaching or of amusement. Rouge and tinsel have the gift of persuasion. Gozzi felt that instinctively, and few play-writers have been more successful as an influence than he was. At the avenue of every new sensation, and gifted with a quick-catching sense of gayety, he lost nothing of the play which men and women enacted before him. He observed, he listened carefully: nothing escaped the grasp of his constructive and fanciful mind. His daily walks through the most populous streets; his habitual lingering around the fashionable shops where pretty modistes attracted the idle admiration of idlers; his morning visit to the Rialto, and his never-failing appearance on the Piazza when everybody was assembled there in the afternoon,—these were the varied sources of his study of his contemporaries and also of his dramatic inspiration. Though at that time there were several playhouses in Venice, and going to the theatre was then, as it is now, the favorite way of spending the evening, no theatre was so well patronized and so crowded as that of San Samuele, where Venetian nobles and high-born women dazzled the eye of the people with their splendor, while an unbounded admiration welcomed some new play from the well-known, the genial and much-loved Count Carlo Gozzi. And yet, reading these same plays, may we not somewhat wonder at the extravagant praise that was showered upon them in those far-off days? They are sketchy, sparkling, interesting by their movement and color. Like a piece of faceted glass they catch and radiate light. But they are not distinguished by any originality of thought nor by a profound and far-reaching philosophy. They are society-studies, an exact portraying of what was considered le beau monde. Gozzi had too much common sense and too much honesty of nature not to be very much shocked by the avowed cynicism which it was the fashion then to parade. He takes pains to aim against it the full and spicy expression of his disfavor, considering it as a fatal outgrowth of French infidelity. Therefore he deserves to be considered a moral writer. The freedom of his language is only the seal of realism affixed to his writings, such as we find it in Shakespeare. Nothing could be more unlike and dissimilar in the after-taste which they leave on the mental palate than these very plays which we are considering and any French play of our own time. In Gozzi the moralist lines the writer, and that, perhaps more than anything else, establishes the different character of his literary influence from that of Goldoni. He says that he wrote his plays for his own pleasure first, and with a wish to illustrate for his fellow-citizens a joyous and wholesome moral.
One hundred years ago one of the most famous comedies of Gozzi was given to the Venetian public. Le Droghe d'Amore ("Love's Potion") caused so much perturbation in its author, and so much excitement and importance in the Venetian people, so much manœuvring and intriguing was set to work for and against it, and so much more was said and felt and suffered about it, that for its adventurous entrée into the world, if for nothing else, it deserves a special notice. What was, then, the cause of all this stirring-up of passions and of prejudices? And how could it happen that an inoffensive dramatic representation of character should have proved the spark which suddenly set on fire a perfect powder-house of human interests? It occurred in this manner: On the night of the first representation the Venetian public recognized in the character of Don Adone the well-known and fashionable figure of Pietro Gratarol, secretary of the august Senate of Venice, and, in spite of such a charge, one of the most unscrupulous profligates and successful roués of the time. Young as he was, and handsome, he had acquired the marked reputation of an exquisite in the salons of Venice, where he was a leader and used the prestige of his influence to introduce foreign customs. No man was more universally known in every grade of society than he was, and his bonnes fortunes as a gambler and as a man of pleasure formed an important subject of the daily conversation of the men and women who dispensed public favor. He was therefore a conspicuous person, and whatever happened to him became an object of general interest to people as frivolous as he. It was of course impossible for him to remain indifferent to the spectacle of his own ridicule placed before the laughter of the public. His indignation was immense, and with the help of such of his admirers as he could rally around him he formed a clique bent upon destroying Gozzi as a writer. They employed every means of calumny to effect it, but failed. The piece, which for a time had been withdrawn by superior order, was again given, and was received with triumphant applause. It was something gained to have in a manner brought the censorship to terms and forced it to change its verdict. The star of Gratarol set for ever. He was no longer admired, but he was pitilessly laughed at or patronized with crushing compassion wherever he appeared; and wounded self-love, wounded vanity, everything, combined to excite a desire for revenge. But honest Gozzi had not intended any personal allusion in the writing of his play, and was hardly responsible for the characterization of a quick-witted public. Parties, however, became so envenomed about the whole affair that Gratarol was finally banished from Venice, on the ground of having slanderously attacked the reputation of Gozzi in a pamphlet which was suppressed; and he withdrew to Stockholm, where he died.
But for that episode of his picturesque life Gozzi would never have given us his memoirs. He wrote them not from a motive of vanity, but only to let the world have a fair chance of judging his character correctly. Surely, a man as conspicuous as he was in his day had the right to get a hearing before his contemporaries, and to leave unblurred by prejudices or false impressions the mirror of public memory in which his figure was to reflect itself.