THE MEMOIRS
OF
COUNT CARLO GOZZI
VOLUME THE FIRST

PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
Five hundred and twenty copies of this book printed for England,
and two hundred and sixty for America. Type distributed. Each
copy numbered.
No. 606

THE MEMOIRS OF
COUNT CARLO GOZZI

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
With Essays on Italian Impromptu Comedy, Gozzi's Life,
The Dramatic Fables, and Pietro Longhi
BY THE TRANSLATOR
WITH PORTRAIT AND SIX ORIGINAL ETCHINGS
By ADOLPHE LALAUZE
ALSO ELEVEN SUBJECTS ILLUSTRATING ITALIAN COMEDY BY MAURICE SAND
ENGRAVED ON COPPER BY A. MANCEAU, AND COLOURED BY HAND
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME THE FIRST
NEW YORK
SCRIBNER & WELFORD
743 & 745 BROADWAY
MDCCCXC

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOLUME THE FIRST.

The Etchings designed and etched by Ad. Lalauze. The Masks, illustrating the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, by Maurice Sand, engraved by A. Manceau, and coloured by hand.

PREFACE.

AFTER the appearance of my work on Benvenuto Cellini, Mr. J. C. Nimmo proposed that I should undertake a translation of Count Carlo Gozzi's Memorie Inutili.

The suggestion that such a book might be of interest to the English public emanated originally, I believe, from Mr. E. Hutchings of Manchester, in a letter addressed to the Academy.[1]

To this gentleman my warmest thanks are due, not only for starting the idea, which I have carried out, but also for the interest he has shown in my work during its progress, and for the assistance he has liberally rendered by the loan of rare books.

I entertained the proposal with some doubt. What I already knew about Carlo Gozzi amounted to little; and it seemed to me improbable that the world would willingly have left his Memoirs in oblivion if they possessed solid qualities.

At the same time, the little that I did know of Gozzi roused my curiosity. The picturesque aspects of Venetian decadence allured my fancy. I foresaw that I should have to handle the attractive subject of Italian impromptu comedy. Finally, it so happens that autobiographies have always exerted a peculiar fascination for my mind. I rate them highly as historical and psychological documents. The smallest fragment of a genuine autobiography seems to me valuable for the student of past epochs.

I had strong inducements, therefore, to undertake the proposed task.

The first thing to do was to procure a copy of the Memoirs, which exist only in one edition of three volumes. Mr. Hutchings placed the first two volumes of the book at my disposal; but the third was missing. It had been purloined while its owner was stationed in one of the South American cities. Mr. Nimmo and I waited through four months, making continued applications to the best European dealers in old books, before a complete copy was at last disinterred from a Venetian library.

The extraordinary rarity of the Memorie stimulated my growing interest. After making a preliminary study of the text, I perceived that this was no common specimen of self-portraiture. In some respects it seemed to me to be a masterpiece. I felt no doubt that it possessed both psychological and historical value. A man of a very marked type stood forth from those pages. He was, moreover, the Venetian representative of a well-defined social and literary period. This period corresponded pretty closely with that of our own Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Goldsmith, Reynolds, David Hume. It was the period which ended with the earthquake of the French Revolution, the signs of which catastrophe were felt more ominously in Italy than in our own land. At the same time I recognised salient qualities of healthy moral sense, of analytical acumen, of vigorous intelligence, and of caustic humour in the author, mingled with literary merit of no ordinary kind, vivid transcripts from contemporary life, dramatic narration, incisive sketches of character, original reflections on society.

According to my own standard in such matters, Gozzi's Memoirs ranked as an important document for the study of Italy in the last century.

But was the book worth translating? Would it not suffice to leave the few existing copies in their obscurity, and to indicate their value for historians by composing a critical treatise on the author and his times?

My own predilection for autobiographies, and my sense of their utility, caused me to reject this alternative. I decided to translate, and to illustrate my translation by tolerably copious original essays.

While engaged upon the work, I have not, however, felt always quite at ease. It has recurred to my mind that many readers of these volumes will exclaim: "An English version of Gozzi's self-styled 'useless memoirs' cannot fail to be twice as useless as the original!" Not all people share that partiality for autobiographies which in me amounts almost to a passion.

Besides, I had to face other difficulties. The three chapters which contain the narratives of Gozzi's love-adventures could not be omitted. They are too valuable for the light they throw upon his age, and too important in the man's estimate of his own character. Their suppression would have been unfair to Gozzi, and would have shorn his Memoirs of some brilliant bits of local colour. Nevertheless, I knew that the frankness and the cynical humour of these episodes are out of tune with modern taste. Much is pardoned by the virtue of our age to classics—to Plato or Cellini—which would not be excused in a writer of inferior eminence. But Gozzi is no classic. The fact of his neglect by his own nation proves that overwhelmingly. Why drag him from deserved oblivion if these love-stories are indispensable to the rehabilitating process?

My answer to this perplexing query was that the debated passages are good in literature, true to nature, sound in moral feeling. Their candour is the candour of a cleanly heart, resolved to bare its secret by an effort of self-portraiture. Gozzi describes passions common to that age, and ours, and every age; but he also shows how a determined character, upright and honourable, can free itself from the entanglements of natural frailty. The lesson may be somewhat harsh, but it is salutary. Gozzi has written no single word unworthy of a man of principle—nothing which is calculated to make vice alluring. Only one—

only such an one can take exception to the narratives of Gozzi's love-adventures.

Reasoning thus, I determined to include the love-tales in my translation, having already decided that no translation could be given to the world without them, and that the book was worthy of resuscitation. But I felt myself justified in removing those passages and phrases which might have caused offence to some of my readers.

To translate Gozzi with the minute attention to his style which I bestowed upon Cellini would have been unpractical. I should even have inflicted an injury upon my author. It is in many respects an annoying style; redundant, unequal, diffuse; bearing the stamp of garrulous senility and imperfect (though copious) command of language.

To condense and manipulate the Memoirs at my own free will, following the plan of Paul de Musset's abridgement, seemed to me unscrupulous, even if I abstained from that amusing writer's deliberate mystifications.

I resolved to convert the larger portion of the book into equivalent English, allowing myself the license of curtailing certain passages, and rearranging the order of some chapters. All cases of important condensation or omission have been indicated in my notes. My account of the Memoirs and the causes which led to their publication (Introduction, Part i.) sufficiently explains my right to transpose material from one place to another. Readers of the Introduction will perceive how carelessly and accidentally, to serve occasion, the original and unique edition was put together. It is due in part, I think, to Gozzi's indifference and haste of compilation that so curious a specimen of autobiography fell into almost absolute oblivion.

We have only one edition of the Memorie, that of Palese, under the date Venezia, 1797. Therefore nothing need be said upon the topic of bibliography. I may, however, mention that the few copies of this rare book which have fallen under my inspection present some features of difference, indicating the random way in which the sheets were made up for publication.

Among English critics of distinction, one only, so far as I am aware, has mentioned Gozzi's Memoirs. That is Vernon Lee, in her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. But Vernon Lee knew the book only through Paul de Musset's "perversion." Accordingly, what she has to say about the man is less valuable than the vivid, if not always accurate, account she gives of his Fiabe.

The volumes I am now presenting to the public claim at least one merit—that of dealing with a hitherto almost untouched document of historical and literary importance.

I flatter myself that readers will be found to appreciate the brilliant, though prolix and desultory, portraiture of life in Venice during the last century which these "useless memoirs" offer to their imagination.

Finally, I wish here to record my mature opinion about Carlo Gozzi's character for veracity and general uprightness. I think that I have been hardly just, and certainly not generous, to Gozzi in the Introduction and the notes appended to my version. Wishing to avoid the lues biographica, I assumed a somewhat too purely critical attitude while writing. Careful perusal of the proofs makes me feel that the truth would not have suffered had I entirely suppressed some suspicions and concealed some personal want of sympathy with the man. Allowing for his peculiar and occasionally repellent character—the character of an "original" and a confirmed old bachelor—Gozzi seems to me now to have been as honest and open-hearted as a gentleman should be.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

Am Hof, Davos Platz,
March 25, 1889.

BOOKS USED AND REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK.

1. Carlo Gozzi. "Memorie Inutili." 3 vols. Venice. 1797.

2. Carlo Gozzi. "Opere." 10 vols. Venice. Colombani and other publishers. 1772-1791.

3. Ernesto Masi. "Le Fiabe di Carlo Gozzi." 2 vols. Bologna. Zanichelli. 1885.

4. Pier Antonio Gratarol. "Narrazione Apologetica." 2 vols. Venezia. Gatti. 1797.

5. Paul de Musset. "Mémoires de Charles Gozzi." Paris. Charpentier. 1848.

6. Giov. Batt. Magrini. "Carlo Gozzi e le Fiabe." Cremona. Feraboli. 1876. The same work, second edition: "I Tempi la Vita e gli Scritti di Carlo Gozzi." Benevento. De Gennaro. 1883.

7. Michele Scherillo. "La Commedia dell' Arte in Italia." Torino. Loescher. 1884.

8. Adolfo Bartoli. "Scenari Inediti della Commedia dell' Arte." Firenze. Sansone. 1880.

9. Alfonse Royer. "Carlo Gozzi, Théâtre Fiabesque." Paris. Michel Lévy. 1865.

10. Carlo Goldoni. "Mémoires." 3 vols. Paris. Veuve Duchesne. 1787.

11. Ferdinando Galanti. "Carlo Goldoni e Venezia nel Secolo xviii." Padova. Samin. 1882.

12. P. G. Molmenti. "Carlo Goldoni." Venezia. Ongania. 1880.

13. Vernon Lee. "Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy." London. Satchell. 1880.

14. Maurice Sand. "Masques et Bouffons." 2 vols. Paris. A. Lévy 1862.

15. S. Romanin. "Storia Documentata di Venezia." Vols. vii.-ix. Venezia. Naratovitch. 1860.

16. Giuseppe Boerio. "Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano." Venezia. Cocchini. 1856.

17. Philarète Chasles. "Études sur l'Espagne, etc." ("D'un Théâtre Espagnol-Vénitien au xviii^me. Siècle et de Charles Gozzi"). Paris. Amyot. 1847.

18. N. Tommasèo. "Storia Civile nella Letteraria." Roma, Torino, Firenze. E Loescher. 1872.

19. Eugenio Camerini. "I Precursori del Goldoni." Milano. Sonzogno. 1872.

20. "Mémoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, écrites par lui-même. Bruxelles. Rozet. 1876.

THE MEMOIRS
OF
COUNT CARLO GOZZI

INTRODUCTION.
Part I.
CARLO GOZZI AND PIERO ANTONIO GRATAROL.

1. The ancestry and social standing of Count Carlo Gozzi—His collision with Piero Antonio Gratarol, Secretary to the Venetian Collegio—How this quarrel led to the composition of Gozzi's Memoirs—Their importance as a document for the social history of Venice in the eighteenth century.—2. The interweaving of this episode in Gozzi's Life with his literary warfare against Goldoni, which culminated in the production of his ten dramatic fables.—3. Sketch of Gratarol's life, and his relation to Andrea and Caterina Tron—Gozzi's liaison with the actress Teodora Ricci—Gozzi's comedy, Le Droghe d'Amore—Turned by Mme. Tron into a satire upon Gratarol—Gratarol flies from Venice to Stockholm, is proscribed by the Republic, and loses all his fortune—His Narrazione Apologetica—Gozzi takes up the pen in self-defence—The Inquisitors of State forbid the publication of his autobiographical polemic—Gratarol's death in Madagascar—Circumstances which induced Gozzi in 1797, after the fall of the Republic of St. Mark, to complete and publish his Memoirs.—4. Gozzi's literary style and personal character—The false conception of the man and his work which has been diffused by Paul de Musset.

I.

In the year 1797 there appeared at Venice a book entitled Memorie inutili della vita di Carlo Gozzi, scritte da lui medesimo e pubblicate per umiltà, "Useless Memoirs of the Life of Carlo Gozzi, written by himself and published from motives of humility." Its author, though he bore the title of Count, and belonged to an honourable family in Venice, was not of patrician descent. That is to say, none of his lineal ancestors had acquired the right of voting in the Grand Council or of holding the highest offices of state. They ranked with the citizens of the Republic, who took no direct part in the government, but who were permitted to discharge important functions as secretaries of several departments and as ambassadors of the second class. By his mother he drew half of his blood from one of the oldest and proudest of Venetian noble families, the Tiepolos. Thus, socially, if not politically, birth placed him almost on a level with the best Venetian aristocracy.

In the year 1797 he was seventy-seven; and although he had been a man of some mark in his early days, the public had lost sight of him for the last seventeen years. His reputation depended upon a large number of dramatic pieces, satirical poems, and prose compositions, mostly of a controversial kind. Two main episodes in his literary life conferred a slightly dubious notoriety upon his name. The first of these was the long and bitter war he waged against the two playwrights, Chiari and Goldoni, between the years 1756 and 1762. The other was an unfortunate series of events which brought him into collision with a certain Pier Antonio Gratarol in 1777. Gratarol, like his adversary, was a Venetian citizen, allied by descent to the great patrician family of Contarini. Unlike Gozzi, he early embarked on a political career, was one of the secretaries of the Collegio, and looked forward to the highest appointments which were open to a man of his rank. The collision with Count Gozzi, which I shall have to describe with some minuteness, ended in Gratarol's voluntary exile from Venice, the confiscation of his property by the State, and a public scandal of sufficient importance to attract the attention of serious historians.[2] Had it not been for this tragi-comic episode in his past life, Gozzi would never have written his Memoirs; and had the memory of the scandal not been revived some years after Gratarol's death, when the old Republic of S. Mark had fallen in the crash of the French Revolution, he would never have published them.

This autobiography is distinctly an apologetical work, a portrait drawn by Gozzi in self-defence, and intended to vindicate himself from the aspersions cast by Gratarol upon his character. Its main object is to set forth in the fairest light his own conduct during the unlucky collision to which I have alluded. Yet though so limited in aim, the interest which it possesses for us at the present time, is far wider than belongs to that unhappy squabble, long since buried in oblivion. Gozzi's conception of an Apologia pro vita sua was a comprehensive one. He resolved to reveal his character under all its aspects, from his childhood until the date 1777, dealing now with matters of general importance, now with the private affairs of his home, touching upon the literature of his age, discussing fashions, criticising philosophy, entering into minute particulars regarding theatres and actors, describing his love-affairs with a frankness worthy of Rousseau, and painting a series of lively portraits in which a large variety of individuals from all classes are presented to our notice. The result is that his autobiography, although in the strictest sense of that term an occasional production, forms one of the most valuable documents we possess for a study of Venetian society during the decadence of the Republic. Gozzi was gifted with a penetrative and observant mind, strong sense of humour, and a power of brilliant description. On the faults of his style and the defects of his character, I shall speak hereafter. At present it is enough to indicate the importance of the Memoirs as furnishing a vivid picture of Venetian life in the eighteenth century. Venice, at that period, was fortunate in autobiographers. She possessed Goldoni and Casanova as well as Gozzi, not to mention smaller folk like Da Ponte, the poet of Mozart's Don Giovanni. But when we compare the three life-records of Goldoni, Casanova, and Gozzi, by far the deepest historical interest, in my opinion, belongs to the last. Casanova's Memoirs are almost excluded from general use by the nature of their predominant pre-occupation. Moreover, they deal but partially with Venice, and only with limited aspects of its social life. Goldoni's, though more humane, and in all that concerns tone impeccable, turn too exclusively upon the history of his dramatic works to be of great importance as an historical document. Moreover, the scene is laid in several provinces of Italy and transferred before its close to France. Gozzi, on the contrary, never quits the soil of Venice. Except when he served as a soldier for three years in the Venetian province of Dalmatia, he does not appear to have travelled further than to Pordenone on one side and to Padua on the other. Of strong aristocratic instincts, but condemned to comparative poverty by the reckless expenditure of his parents and grandparents, Gozzi enjoyed opportunities of studying the society of Venice from several points of view. His enthusiasm for literature and partiality for professional actors brought him acquainted with the scholars and the Bohemians of that epoch. His management of the encumbered estates of his family introduced him to advocates, solicitors, brokers, Jews, tenants, and all manner of strange people. His birth made him the companion of patricians. His military service involved him in the wild pleasures and perils of scapegrace lads upon a foreign soil. Consequently, the records of a life so varied in experience, while strictly confined within the narrow circuit of Venetian society, could not fail to be rich in details for the student. It may be regretted that Gozzi chose to write in a didactic spirit. We could willingly have exchanged his long-winded excursions into the sphere of moral philosophy for a few more graphic sketches in the style of his Dalmatian adventures.

II.

This biographical and historical interest, far more than Gozzi's quarrel with Goldoni or his collision with Gratarol, is the reason why I thought it worth while to translate a book which has become excessively rare in the original. Nothing can be duller or more contemptible, to my mind, than the chronicle of literary quarrels. The Goldoni-Gozzi episode would be devoid of permanent attraction were it not for the curious light thrown by it upon the obscure subject of impromptu comedy, and for the ten extraordinary Fiabe Teatrali from Gozzi's pen to which it gave rise. Again, the Gratarol-Gozzi episode, as we shall presently see, is almost humiliating in the pettiness of its details, and painful through its tragic termination.

The Memoirs contain a full and tolerably accurate account of the Gratarol incident. Yet I cannot dispense with a summary of this affair, based upon a comparison of Gozzi's story with that of Gratarol in his Narrazione Apologetica. The extreme importance of the event in the lives of both men, and the fact that it constitutes the subject of Gozzi's autobiography in quite as serious a sense as that in which the Persian war forms the subject of Herodotus' history, render this unavoidable.

III.

Pier Antonio Gratarol was a young man between thirty and forty in the year 1776. He had grown up with an ample fortune and without a father's control; had imbibed French ways of thinking and French customs; had married, and after marriage had separated from his wife.[3] He represented that class of intellectual and political Liberals whom Gozzi, with his Conservative prejudices, regarded as dangerous to the well-being of the State. He was an open libertine in his relations with women, and did not strive to conceal those principles of personal liberty which the philosophes were spreading throughout Europe. At the same time he represented a family which had served the Republic in distinguished offices for many generations; he possessed excellent abilities, and had every reason to expect a brilliant future. There was nothing in his conduct or in his domestic circumstances to distinguish him unfavourably from a multitude of gay livers and free-thinkers in the corrupt Venice of that epoch. He had recently become eligible for the post of ambassador at a foreign Court; and was already nominated as Resident in Naples. This nomination required, however, to be confirmed by the Grand Council; and circumstances, which need not be enlarged upon, rendered the grant of money for his embassy a matter of debate.[4] Unfortunately, Gratarol was a person of vain, imperious temper, puffed up with the sense of his own merits, and incapable of correcting his antipathies. His French tendencies—political, moral, social, literary—fashionable for the most part—prejudiced the minds of influential people in the highest departments of the government against him. Finally, he had made an implacable enemy of a great lady, who at that time exercised almost dictatorial control over the councils of the State. This was Caterina Dolfin Tron, the wife of Andrea Tron, Procuratore di San Marco, whose immense influence in the Council of Ten, the Consulta, and the Senate enabled him to do what he liked with the Grand Council.[5] Caterina's husband was popularly known as Il Padrone, or the Master of Venice, and he doted on her with a blind affection. She was a woman of brilliant parts, imbued, like Gratarol, with advanced French notions, meddlesome in public matters, aspiring to manage the politics of Venice and to dictate laws to society from her own reception-rooms. Gratarol began by paying her wise attentions; but for some reason unknown to us, he had lately dropped his courtship and indulged in satirical comments upon Caterina's private conduct. She vowed to effect his ruin, and circumstances enabled her to do so.

Gozzi, meanwhile, had for the last five years or so assumed the position of titular protector to a married actress called Teodora Ricci. He does his best to persuade us that the liaison was one of friendship; but it is clear that, upon whatever footing he stood toward the Ricci, he felt a real affection for this woman. For her he composed the dramatic works of his second or Spanish manner. He attended her in public, introduced her to the houses of his friends, and stood godfather to her second child. We are, in fact, met here by an obscurity not unlike that which involves the more famous connection of Congreve with Mrs. Bracegirdle. Gratarol, pursuing the usual course of his amours, made the Ricci's acquaintance, became her lover, compromised her reputation, and wounded Gozzi so deeply in his sense of honour, that he broke off familiar relations with the actress.

Such was the position of affairs when Gozzi, who wrote assiduously for the theatre, produced a drama modelled on a Spanish piece by Tirso da Molina. It was called Le Droghe d'Amore, and contained a minor part, which might well have passed either for a sketch of manners or for a personal satire on Gratarol. Gozzi vehemently and persistently denied that he had any intention of caricaturing his rival on the stage; and if we trust what he relates about the composition of the play in question, it is hardly possible that he can have had Gratarol in view when he designed it. At the same time, we are bound to concede that the offensive part of Don Adone fitted nicely on to Gratarol. Mme. Ricci, smarting under Gozzi's withdrawal from her intimacy, took for granted that a satire was intended. This woman's hysterical imagination turned a mere jeu d'esprit of her old friend into a formidable weapon of attack against her new lover. Through her dangerous interference it became an instrument, in the hands of other parties, to annoy Gozzi and to overwhelm Gratarol. She began by poisoning the latter's mind with gossiping insinuations. Gratarol's fretful vanity and sense of self-importance made him boil with fury at the thought of being put upon the stage. He moved heaven and earth to get the play suspended; imprudently, as it turned out, because this step brought him face to face with his real enemy, Mme. Tron. The manager of the theatre, to whom Gozzi had given his comedy, took the manuscript at once to that lady. This unscrupulous person now saw her opportunity for inflicting vengeance upon Gratarol. She induced the manager to redistribute the parts so that the rôle of Don Adone should be assigned to an actor who resembled Gratarol. She taught this man how to imitate Gratarol's dress and gestures, and turned what may in fact have been an innocent production of Gozzi's pen into a satire of the most insulting pungency. At that point the Droghe d'Amore passed out of the control of those whom it privately concerned.

After this, Gratarol, driven mad by wounded self-conceit, floundered from one imprudence into another. He applied to the highest tribunal of the State, and laid an information against Gozzi. Whether the Inquisitors did not choose to cancel the license already granted for the Droghe d'Amore, or whether they were influenced by Mme. Tron, does not greatly signify. At any rate, the comedy continued to be acted. Gratarol grew more and more irritated, uttered indignant invectives against the tyrants of the State, and displayed a spirit of insubordination which was perilous in Venice. Mme. Tron followed up her advantage, and caused his appointment to the embassy at Naples to be suspended. Thereupon Gratarol made up his mind to quit Venice. He knew that this act would expose himself to outlawry and his family to ruin. A civil servant of the Republic had no legal right to sever himself from his engagements without permission. The mere fact of doing so caused him to be treated as a contumacious rebel. But instead of assuming an indifferent attitude, instead of biding his time in patience and letting the storm blow over—which it certainly would have done, since a popular reaction had already begun to operate in his favour—he departed for Padua on the 11th of September 1777, proceeded to Ceneda, crossed the frontier on the 25th, travelled to Munich, thence to Brunswick, and finally to Stockholm, where he arrived in March. Meanwhile a proclamation was issued against him at Venice. This curious document is a relic from the savage days of the Middle Ages.[6] It set a price upon his head, offered rewards to any one who should bring him alive to Venice or should prove his assassination, cancelled all contracts made by him during twelve months before the date of December 22, 1777, confiscated his property during his lifetime, and ordered the whole of it to be sold by public auction. The latter portions of the ban were carried into effect. Everything which belonged to Gratarol was sold by the Avogadori;[7] and what seems really scandalous in this transaction is that his furniture and jewels passed into the possession of an Avogadore, Zorzi Angaran, while his landed estates fell to the share of the Avvocato fiscale dell' Avogaderia, Galante, at the ridiculously low sum of 2000 ducats.[8] Even his wife, who possessed a dowry of 25,000 ducats, had to institute long and costly lawsuits for the recovery of what belonged to her and formed no part of the outlaw's estate.

Caterina Dolfin Tron, aided by her victim's rashness and impatience, had succeeded in her plan to ruin him. But a retribution awaited this lady in the form of an eloquent invective hurled by Gratarol against his enemies from Stockholm. The so-called Narrazione Apologetica was printed there in 1779, and soon found its way to Venice. It contained a detailed account of the events which had induced him to take flight, arraigned his powerful enemies in terms of the bitterest sarcasm, exposed their private foibles, and flashed a sharp light upon the political corruption of the decadent Republic. Gozzi, of course, came in for his share of abuse;[9] but Gratarol's most telling shafts were directed against Mme. Tron and the patrician ring which tyrannised over Venice. It is believed that the scandal of this pamphlet was one reason why Andrea Tron failed to be elected Doge in 1779.

On perusing Gratarol's Narrazione Apologetica, Count Carlo Gozzi determined to clear his own character and to lay his version of the story before the public. With this view he composed a lengthy Epistola Confutatoria, taking up each of Gratarol's points in detail, and discussing his arguments with a strange mixture of acuteness, fury, and contemptuous severity. He also conceived the notion of writing his Memoirs, in order that the whole tenor of his life might be clearly understood.[10] The Confutation and the larger part of the Memoirs were finished in 1780. But the Government decided that Gratarol's scandalous pamphlet should be left unanswered. No Venetian pen was allowed to notice it;[11] and Gozzi received information that the Inquisitors of State would take the matter up if he attempted to show further fight. The authorities acted with prudence in this matter. Nobody but Gozzi had anything to gain by his refutation of Gratarol. With regard to the corruption of Venice, the despotism of a few leading patricians, and the back-stairs influence of Mme. Tron, Gratarol had only told the truth. He had told it indeed emphatically, bitterly, and probably with some exaggeration. Yet, unhappily, it was the truth. No amount of apologetical rhetoric could have broken down his arguments. A public discussion would have disturbed the public mind, and many dark secrets and dirty jobs must certainly have come to light.

Gozzi had to choose between the piombi or the sacrifice of his already finished manuscripts. Of course he did not hesitate. Both Confutation and Memoirs were thrown at once aside; and they might even now have been lying in some neglected corner of his ancient mansion had it not been for the events which have to be related.

Gratarol never returned to Venice. From Sweden he passed to England, where he was hospitably received and befriended by members of our aristocracy. Failing, however, to get any appointment in London, he crossed to North America, travelled southwards to Brazil, and again left that country in the train of some political adventurers. The party were betrayed and robbed by the captain of their vessel, and cast ashore upon the coast of Madagascar. Here Gratarol perished miserably in October 1785. His English friends sent information of this event to the Venetian Government; but the evidence was judged insufficient, and the restitution of his estates to two female cousins, who were his only heirs, was refused until the fall of the Republic. When that took place, Gratarol's friends immediately republished the Narrazione Apologetica at Venice, and appealed to General Bonaparte for justice. This was in 1797.

Gozzi, who had now nothing to fear from Inquisitors of State, and whose reputation was again exposed to calumny, took his manuscripts from their drawer, dusted them, and placed them in the hands of a publisher. In the month of July 1797 he issued a manifesto to the Venetian public, proclaiming his intention.[12] "Availing myself of the beneficent freedom now permitted to the press, I have drawn my manuscript from the tomb in which it has lain during the past seventeen years." He refers to the recent republication of Gratarol's Narrazione, and declares that this alone has forced him to resuscitate the memory of bygone quarrels and offences. At the same time he pays a high tribute to Gratarol's work. "This book, which appeared at Stockholm in 1779, and which I had forgotten, without however forgetting the unjust tricks and jobs by which its truly pitiable author was overwhelmed with ruin, contains a great number of indubitable truths, and it is only to be regretted that he dictated it under the influence of blind anger and venomous resentment, instead of philosophic calm."

It appears that at this time Gozzi did not intend to publish his Epistola Confutatoria, written in 1780, and certainly dictated under the influence of anger as hot, hatred as fierce, and resentment as venomous as any which inspired his adversary. Indeed, it may here be observed that Gratarol, though he calls Gozzi a hypocrite, a huckster, an impostor, and so forth, is more measured in his language than the latter. Yet, while Gozzi was passing the sheets of his Memoirs through the press,[13] Gratarol's friends issued another book entitled Last Notices regarding Pietro Antonio Gratarol, with documents relating to his death. In this they expressed a hope that Gozzi would not proceed with the publication announced by his manifesto, and incautiously printed a document alluding to Gozzi in the following by no means flattering terms: "the infernal hypocrisy of a satirical liar."[14] Furthermore, upon the 29th of August, having obtained a decree for the restitution of Gratarol's property to his cousins, they published this edict together with a preface, signed Widiman,[15] in which they had the folly to rake up the whole tedious story of Gratarol's wrongs again. Once more Gozzi was annoyed with well-worn phrases like the following: "The persecuting furies of a haughty woman, the talent and the passion of a very famous author, made him (Gratarol), to the horror of all right-minded people, become the object of scorn and ridicule upon a public theatre prostituted to the uses of a vile and infamous buffoon." This was more than Gozzi could stand. Firmly holding to the opinion that it was only Gratarol's folly and Mme. Tron's vindictiveness which had caused the scandal of Le Droghe d'Amore, he now resolved to publish everything which could establish the truth of his own story. Therefore he incorporated the Epistola Confutatoria in the third volume of the Memoirs, and printed the notorious comedy for the first time at the end of the book. Meantime he invited Gratarol's friends to inspect the MS. of this play, which he declared to be the sole and original autograph, in order that they might convince themselves that his statements regarding its composition were accurate. Having now made up his mind to supplement the two parts of his book with a third, he carried down his Memoirs to the date of March 1798, when they came to a sudden termination. All three volumes bear the date 1797; but their pagination and some other trifling matters lead me to believe that the first two were printed in that year, the third in the following spring.

IV.

The circumstances under which Gozzi's Memorie were produced sufficiently account for their peculiar form, or rather formlessness. He wrote hurriedly, with a polemical object in view, and paid no attention to style. This he confesses in the manifesto.[16] "I have not striven to express myself with the exactitude, the raciness, and the elegances of our language." As a literary performance, this autobiography is remarkably unequal, a thing of rags and patches, some of which are of fine silk or velvet, others of rough sackcloth. Their main defect as regards composition is prolixity. Gozzi does not know when to stop, and he uses three phrases where one would have sufficed. He is also very incoherent, spinning interminable periodic sentences, which sometimes do not hang together grammatically or logically. While insisting so magisterially upon the purity of Italian diction, he indulges in uncouth Lombardisms, and slips at times into Venetian dialect. We must remember that he grew up practically without education. He acquired his knowledge, cultivated his taste, and formed his style by reading without discrimination and by writing without fixed purpose. This accounts for the digressive, irregular, improvisatory manner of his prose. It has its own merits, however, of vehemence, a copious vocabulary, dramatic vigour in narration, and occasionally graphic descriptions.

It may be asked why he called his Memoirs "useless." Partly no doubt out of an ironical self-consciousness, which marked his peculiar species of humour; but partly also as a slap in the face to his readers. He tells them candidly in one of his prefaces that he considers the moral reflections with which the book is filled to be both sound and valuable, but that the false science of the age is certain to render them of no effect.[17] In like manner, when he asserts that the Memoirs were published out of humility, this is partly true and partly false. Gozzi piqued himself on being what I may call a Stoic-Democritean philosopher. It was his pride to bear everything with endurance and to laugh at everything, himself and his own concerns included, with contemptuous indulgence. Yet he deserved the stinging epigram which Goldoni uttered on his character: "A smile upon his lips and venom in his heart." His light-heartedness and risibility were often assumed to hide bitter resentment or boiling indignation. No man had less of genuine humility than Gozzi, or more of the "pride which apes humility." Umiltà upon his title-page has much the same effect as Umiltà in huge Gothic letters beneath the coronets and crests of the Borromeo family above their haughty palace-portals. As a single instance, I might select the supercilious condescension with which he invariably treats his friends the actors. They are canaille, to be consorted with by a gentleman merely for amusement. His repeated boast that he gave his literary work away, and his sneers at his brother Gasparo for making money, do not savour of a really humble spirit. At the bottom of all he says about his foolhardiness in Dalmatia there lurks a proud self-satisfaction.

To what extent was he truthful? That is a difficult question to answer. I believe that in the main he tried to be, and was, veracious throughout the Memoirs; but that he considered a certain economy of statement, a certain evasion of direct facts, and a certain forensic chicanery to be permissible in openly controversial composition. This renders his account of the Gratarol episode somewhat suspicious, particularly when we remember that he was writing with the Narrazione Apologetica before his eyes. It is clear that he wished to conceal his real age, that he falsified the date of his departure for Dalmatia, and that he somewhat misstated the nature of his intimacy with Mme. Tron. In each of these cases it was his object to put himself in as favourable a light as possible face to face with Gratarol, first by making it appear that he was ten years or so younger than his actual age when he began the liaison with Mme. Ricci, and secondly by slurring over the fact of a partial collusion with Gratarol's deadly enemy. It would take up too much space to expand the arguments by which I have arrived at these conclusions; but the notes to my translation will make each point clear in its proper place.

On the whole, Gozzi strikes me as rather inclined to the vices of too open speech and cynicism than to those of dissimulation and hypocrisy. He can hardly have been a lovable man. His language about his mother proves that. She treated him ill, it is true, and gave him but a scanty share of her maternal kindness. Yet this does not justify the freezing sarcasms with which he refers to her. They are no doubt humorous, but their humour is of a savage kind. Toward the rest of his family he behaved with fairness, candour, and uprightness. He devoted himself to the task of repairing their ruined fortunes, and discharged the duties of solicitor and estate-agent for all of them through a long series of years. He bore their bad tempers and frivolities with good-humoured contempt, and did not even resent being satirised by Gasparo in a comedy upon the public stage of Venice. Gasparo, his weak but genial elder brother, he truly loved, although, with characteristic acidity, he always lets us understand what a poor creature he was. Women had not the privilege of being highly appreciated by Gozzi. He treats them in all his writings as inferior creatures, and exposes their frailties with ruthless severity. Either he only knew the worst side of the fair sex, or was incapable of seeing the best. To men he shows himself more just and sympathetic. Though he made but few intimate friends, these remained firmly attached to him till death.

We must divest our minds of the false conception of Gozzi's character with which Paul de Musset hoaxed the French critics and Vernon Lee. He was no dramatic dreamer and abstract visionary, but a keen hard-headed man of business, caustic in speech and stubborn in act, adhering tenaciously to his opinions and his rights, acidly and sardonically humorous, eccentric, but fully aware of his eccentricities, and apt to use them as the material of burlesque humour. Nobody would have laughed more loudly at De Musset's fancy picture of his fairy-haunted palace than Gozzi would have done, or have more keenly relished the joke of turning his practical self into a sprite-tormented idealist.[18]

The Memoirs lie now before English readers, and Carlo Gozzi will be known to them for the first time—certainly for the first time as he really was. It is not necessary, therefore, to spin out this introduction. Otherwise, it would have been interesting to compare the portraits painted of themselves by those four eminent Italian contemporaries—Goldoni, Gozzi, Casanova, and Alfieri. Four characters more diverse in quality, and more admirably placed upon the literary canvas, could hardly, I think, be found in any other nation or in any other century.

Part II.
THE ITALIAN COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE OR IMPROMPTU COMEDY.

1. A brief sketch of the origins of written comedy during the Italian Renaissance—Its dependence upon Latin models.—2. Further description of the so-called Commedia Erudita.—3. Emergence of dialectical literature in Italy during the period of the Catholic reaction—Improvised comedy begins to supersede the written drama of the Renaissance.—4. Farces at Naples and Florence—The Sienese company of I Rozzi—The Paduan Beolco—The four principal masks—Pantalone, Il Dottore, Arlecchino, Brighella.—5. Relation of modern impromptu comedy to the old Latin comedy of mimes and exodia—the Osci Ludi, Fescennini Verses, Satura, &c.—In what sense the modern masks are descended from those antique elements—Infusion of fixed characters adopted from the plays of Plautus and Terence.—6. Lombard, Neapolitan, Florentine ingredients in the Commedia dell' Arte—Lasca's carnival song of the Zanni and Magnifichi about the year 1550.—7. A review of the principal masks and their subordinate species, as these were finally developed—Modifications introduced into the masks, or fixed parts, of the Commedia dell' Arte, by men of genius who supported them.—8. The plots and subjects of improvised comedies—Buffoonery and indecency.—9. Description of the scenari or plays in outline which were acted impromptu by the comic companies—Method of concerting a comedy and distributing its parts—The function of the Capo Comico.—10. Qualifications of a good impromptu comedian—Stock repertories, commonplaces, speeches to be introduced on set occasions, soliloquies, &c.—The Lazzi or sallies of buffoonery and byeplay—Tendency to degeneration in this improvisatory art of comedy.—11. European celebrity of the Italian comedians—In Paris, Spain, Portugal, London—References to Italian companies in England during the sixteenth century.—12. The decadence of the Commedia dell' Arte—Moral and artistic germs of dissolution—Goldoni's severe criticism—Garzoni's description of strolling actors, and their association with quacks, mountebanks, and clowns.

I.

THE history of the Italian theatre is closely connected with the history of the Classical Revival.[19] The literary drama—as distinguished from performances by tumblers, mimes, and masquers, from sacred plays and from plebeian farces—began with the representation of Latin tragedies and comedies. At the close of the fifteenth century it was usual to crown courtly festivals with scenic recitations of favourite pieces by Terence and Plautus. Rome vied with Florence, Venice with Naples, Ferrara with Urbino, in the magnificence of these spectacles. At a time when humanistic erudition formed the main preoccupation of society, and when to be illiterate was unfashionable, princes and great prelates afforded their guests the refined amusement of seeing the Menœchmi or Amphitryon, the Eunuchus or Miles Gloriosus, on their private stages. At the same time, obeying the decorative instinct of the Renaissance, they set these jewels of classical antiquity in arabesques of the richest and most fantastic workmanship. Allegorical masques, dances with musical accompaniment and pantomimic interludes, were interposed between each of the five acts, enhancing the simplicity of the Roman plays and gratifying the vulgar by an appeal to their senses. These hybrid spectacles, eminently characteristic of Italian taste in the age which produced them, contained the germs of several dramatic species, afterwards known as the Commedia Erudita, the pastoral play, the ballet, and the opera. Meanwhile Italian literature, stimulated and powerfully influenced by humanism, acquired independence; and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were translated and performed in the vernacular. During the last years of the fifteenth century these translations began to take the place of the originals upon the temporary stages of princely patrons. As yet there were no public theatres.

Such, briefly sketched, was the origin of Italian comedy; and the specific character of the Commedia Erudita, or written comedy of the sixteenth century, may be ascribed to the peculiar conditions out of which it grew. The genius of men like Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Aretino never wholly freed the form they handled from subservience to Latin models. It remained, in spite of their close imitation of contemporary life and their audacious realism, a sub-species of that dramatic art which the Romans adapted to their uses from the new comedy of the Attic stage.

II.

The first attempts at national Italian comedy were the Calandra of Bibbiena and Ariosto's Cassaria. The former appeared at Urbino between 1503 and 1508; the latter, in its earlier prose form, at Ferrara in 1508. During the next fifty years a large number of comedies were produced by a great variety of authors. Men of letters like Machiavelli, Cecchi, Dolce, and Il Lasca, men of fashion like Lorenzino de'Medici, philosophers like Bruno, free lances of the pen like Aretino and Doni, artisans like Gelli, devoted themselves to this species of composition. The type remained fixed, although some notable exceptions, especially in the case of Aretino's plays, arrest attention. Taking the intrigue of Latin comedy for their ground material, these playwrights adapted it to conditions of Italian society. The avaricious father, the cunning courtesan, the parasite, the slave merchant, the swaggering soldier, the young spendthrift in love with a virgin of unknown parentage, the astute serving-man, the faithless wife, the pedant, the cynical priest or friar, the vicious old man in his dotage, the reckless adventurer, the pirate, the country-girl exposed to the corruptions of the town; such are the stock characters of this dramatic hybrid. Everywhere we find the plots of Terence or of Plautus interwoven with a Novella in the style of Boccaccio. As in Latin comedy, the knot is frequently loosed by unexpected discoveries of lost relatives; and the magnificent realism with which contemporary manners are depicted, clashes too often with the stiff and antiquated ossatura, or dramatic mechanism, to which the authors felt themselves obliged by fashion to adhere. From hints in prologues and prefaces we are able to discern that playwrights chafed against these traditional limitations of the Commedia Erudita.

Aretino, as I have just observed, broke the fetters of convention, and presented scenes of pure Italian life; but his plays were too hastily composed or ill-constructed to start a new style. The originality of Machiavelli in his Mandragora was not of the sort to encourage a departure from the beaten track. Like many other masterpieces of Italian art, the Mandragora stands forth by itself, a sole inimitable monument of genius; peculiar and personal; accomplished by one single act of vigorous expression. Before a really national species of written comedy emerged into distinctness from the Commedia Erudita, the literary impulse of the Renaissance began to decline, and the Italians in the middle of the sixteenth century entered upon that new phase of intellectual evolution which is marked by the Tridentine Council and the subsequent metamorphosis of Catholicism.

III.

One prominent feature of this transitional epoch was the reappearance of popular forms of art and literature in Italy. The Italian provinces had retained their local characteristics with undiminished vitality through centuries of civic conflict and the dominance of humanistic culture. Now that this culture was decaying, each district and each city contributed some novelty of its own local vintage. Things which had been overgrown and screened by scholarship put forth their native vigour. A rich jungle of dialectical poetry sprouted from long-hidden roots. Men of birth and breeding began to pique themselves upon the use of their provincial language. A polite public, tired perhaps of too much polish, yielded to the charm of realism. The habits of the peasantry and artisans were transmitted to writing by educated pens. Scenic representations of a simple character, which had formed the delight of villagers from time immemorial, claimed the attention of learned coteries. Farces and morris-dances became fashionable. The buffoons and mimes and masquers, against whom the Church had fulminated in the Middle Ages, and whom the scholars of the Revival looked down upon with condescending indulgence, now lifted up their heads. Suddenly, by an imperceptible process of development, which it is impossible to trace in all its stages, Italy found herself in possession of what looked like a novel type of comedy. This improvised comedy, or Commedia dell' Arte, as we must henceforth call it, was not really new.[20] On the contrary, the elements out of which it sprang were among the oldest, most vital, most national possessions of the race. Yet it was due to the peculiar conditions of the last years of the Renaissance, to the reaction against exhausted forms of artificial literature, and to the fresh interest in dialects, that this hitherto neglected plaything of the proletariate assumed a rare and bizarre shape of beauty. The Italians, still capable of exquisite artistic creation, had just now lost their liking for the Commedia Erudita. Public theatres were beginning to be built. These naturally introduced a more popular tone into the drama. Spectacles were adapted to the taste of a mixed audience. Improvised comedy succeeded to the heritage of written comedy. This younger daughter of Thalia invested the motley characters and masks of her invention with the cast-off mantle of her elder sister. She entered the sphere of the fine arts by continuing the tradition of Italian comedy upon an altered system, and with novel elements of humour.

To talk of younger and elder with reference to these two types of comedy involves some confusion of ideas. Nothing is more significant of Italy than the antiquity and complexity of all the forms of art which flourished there. The Commedia Erudita, as we have seen, was derived from Latin, and through Latin from Athenian sources. The Commedia dell' Arte had an even longer pedigree than this. In a powerfully mimetic race like the Italians, the rudiments out of which it was constructed were, as we shall see, indigenous. Before Rome rose upon the Tiber, the comedy of masks and improvisation had, in some shape or other, amused the people. The fall of the Empire, the formation of the Christian polity, the centuries of the Middle Ages, the culture of the Renaissance, did not extirpate it. Though we know but little of its history during that long period, there is every reason to believe that the elements which gave it individuality survived all changes. To this topic I shall have to return. For the present, it is enough to point out that the blending of the vulgar improvised comedy of vintage festivals and market-places with what remained of polite written comedy after the middle of the sixteenth century, determined the Commedia dell' Arte, considered as a specific and strongly marked type of dramatic art. In this sense, and in this sense only, it may be denominated the younger sister of the Commedia Erudita.

IV.

Farces formed a popular species of entertainment all through the years of the Renaissance. At Naples they had the name of Coviole, at Florence of Farse. The playwright Cecchi has left us several specimens of the written Farsa, together with a general description of the type, which proves it to have been not unlike the earliest of our own romantic plays.[21] A company formed itself at Siena, called I Rozzi, for the representation of rustic farces. Composed of artisans and mechanics, this company acquired such celebrity that Leo X. invited them in 1517 to the Vatican; and their influence must be reckoned in the evolution of the new Italian drama. A Paduan actor and playwright also deserves mention here. Angelo Beolco, born in 1502, made himself known upon the stage as Il Ruzzante, or the Frolic. He wrote rustic comedies with simple plots, distinguished by their realistic humour and their strong incisive pathos; and created the ideal character of the peasant or Il Villano. Beolco formed a school in the Venetian provinces, and died in 1542.[22]

Such are some of the traces we possess of a dramatic type in growth, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, obtained predominance in Italy. It is not possible, however, for the critical historian to explain the several steps whereby the Commedia dell' Arte arrived at maturity. Like Harlequin, bounding from the sides and capering before the footlights, this new species makes a sudden apparition. We find it in full energy, possessing the public theatres and claiming the attention of all classes, at the close of the cinque cento. Described briefly, this comedy trusted to the improvisatory talent of trained actors and made use of masks. Companies were formed under the direction of a Capocomico, who took his name from one of the masks. Their stock in trade was a collection of plays in outline, scenari or plats (to use an old English phrase),[23] which the troupe studied under the direction of their leader. The development of the intrigue by dialogue and action was left to the native wit of the several players, and the performance varied according to the personal qualities of the members who composed the company. The masks or fixed characters were derived from all provinces of Italy, and represented types peculiar to each district.[24] Venice contributed Pantalone; Bologna lent the Dottore; Bergamo supplied the two Zanni—Arlecchino and Brighella; Naples gave Pulcinella, Tartaglia, and the Captain. Tuscany made up the characters of the comedy with the soubrette and lovers. These Tuscan personages were unmasked and spoke Florentine Italian.[25] The masks reproduced their native dialects.[26] Like Harlequin in his coat of many colours, the Commedia dell' Arte wore motley. Displacing the literary drama, which reduced contemporary life in Italy to the conventional standard of classical Rome or Athens, this new drama brought into salience local oddities and notes of provincial eccentricity. The masks were permanent; yet they admitted of genial handling, since these parts in the comedy were rarely written, and every fresh sustainer of a mask had the opportunity of impressing his own individuality upon the type he represented.[27] In this way, as will soon appear, each mask multiplied and made a hundred. Plasticity and adaptability were the essential qualities of a dramatic species which relied on improvisation, and had only the unwritten code of immemorial tradition.

V.

At this point it is necessary to inquire into the relation between the modern Italian Commedia dell' Arte and the old Italian comedy of mimes and exodia. Much has been written, with meagre and dubious results, about the origins of the Latin drama. One thing, however, appears certain, after shaking the dust from ponderous tomes of erudition. The Romans, like the modern Italians, had their Commedia Erudita and Commedia dell' Arte. Of the two species, in classical times as afterwards, the Commedia dell' Arte was indigenous and popular, the Commedia Erudita derived and literary. The latter, whether it affected Greek manners, as in the so-called Fabula palliata, or Roman manners, as in the so-called Fabula togata, remained in the hands of scholarly authors and serious actors (histriones). The former had its natural origin in popular habits, and only at a comparatively late period submitted to regular artistic treatment. It was represented by masked buffoons, Sanniones, Planipedes, Stupidi, and so forth. We hear of Osci ludi and Fescennini versus, the former pointing to Campania and the vintage, the latter to Etruria and village sports.[28] The Satura, which seems to have been an offshoot from the Fescennina, corresponded pretty closely to what we now call farce, and eventually developed into the exodia or hors d'œuvre of the later Roman theatre.[29] Out of these indigenous elements, but with special relation to the Osci ludi, grew a literary form of comedy which obtained the name of Atellana. It is supposed to have originated in the Oscan city of Atella, close to Acerra, Pulcinella's birthplace. In all these native forms of drama, dialects were spoken and masks were used; and this is a main point of connection between them and the modern Italian Commedia dell' Arte. Another feature in common is the rank realism and open obscenity which marked the humours of both species.

Among the ancient Roman masks four types are known to us by name—Maccus, a Protean fool or Harlequin; Bucco, a garrulous clown or blockhead; Pappus, a miserly, amorous, befooled old man; Dossenus, a moralising charlatan. We also hear of the Stupidus and Morio, Manducus, a notable glutton, and the Sanniones, so called possibly from their grin.

Further familiarity with the modern Commedia dell' Arte will make it clear how tempting it is to conjecture a direct transmission of these Roman masks from ancient to modern times. Maccus and Bucco bear a strong resemblance to the two Zanni. The very word Zanni seems to suggest Sanniones; although it is probably derived from the Bergamasque name for a varlet—Jack; Zanni being a contraction of Giovanni. Pappus looks uncommonly like Pantalone, and Dossenus like the Dottore. The Stupidus has an air of our clown or Mezzettino or Il Villano. Manducus might be any glutton with a huge pair of champing jaws. Yet nothing could be more uncritical than to assume that the Italian masks of the sixteenth century A.D. boasted an uninterrupted descent from the Roman masks of the fifth century B.C. That assumption closes our eyes to a far more interesting aspect of the phenomenon. The fact seems to be that ancient and modern Italy possessed the same mimetic faculty and used it in the same fashion. The peasants of modern Tuscany indulged in their Fescennine jibes, stained themselves with wine-lees, and jumped through bonfires, like their most remote ancestors.[30] The grape-gatherers of modern Nola and Capua ridiculed their neighbours with obscene jests, and pranked themselves in travesty, like the earliest Oscans or the first colonists from Hellas.[31] Out of the same persistent habits emerged the same kind of native drama; and just as the Atellanæ of ancient Rome eventually brought the comedy of the proletariate upon the public stage in cities, so at the close of the sixteenth century the Commedia dell' Arte worked up the rudiments of popular farce and satire into a new form which delighted Europe for two hundred years.

Many details derived from the Commedia Erudita rendered the resemblance between the modern improvised drama and the vernacular comedy of ancient Rome superficially striking. The conventional characters of Plautus and Terence, the senex, the servus, the meretrix, the mango, the ancilla, the miles gloriosus, and the parasitus reappeared. In truth, this peculiar and highly complex hybrid combined strains of manifold varieties. Upon the wild and native briar, which in former times produced the Osci ludi, Fescennini versus, and Satura, and which went on living its own natural life beneath the drums and tramplings of so many conquests, was now grafted the cultivated rose of the Commedia Erudita. This, in its turn, contained elements of the Fabula palliata and togata. The result was a species eminently characteristic of sixteenth-century Italy, and similar to the Atellan farces of the Romans.

VI.

The Commedia dell' Arte yields, upon analysis, three chief component factors. The four leading masks, Arlecchino and Brighella, Pantalone and Il Dottore, came respectively from Bergamo, Venice, and Bologna. These were the contribution of Northern Italy. Pulcinella, Tartaglia, Coviello, and the Captain came from Naples. They were subsidiary characters of great importance, contributed by the South. The lovers, primo amoroso and prima amorosa, upon whose adventures the intrigue turned, and the Servetta, came from Tuscany, or rather from the tradition of written comedy, which adhered to the literary Italian tongue. If priority in time is to be sought for any of these factors, we must look to Lombardy. The four masks which were indispensable to this dramatic species, and which survived all its vicissitudes, had an undoubted Lombardo-Venetian origin. The Neapolitan masks were superadded, and the Tuscan intrigue formed little more than a conventional framework for the humours of the fixed characters. Scarcity of documents makes it impossible to speak with absolute authority on any of these points; yet we have good reason to credit the tradition which connects the origin of the Commedia dell' Arte with Northern Italy.

A carnival song, composed by Anton-Francesco Grazzini, called Il Lasca, at Florence some time before the year 1559, throws light upon the subject.[32] It is entitled "Canto di Zanni e Magnifichi." The Magnifico corresponded to Pantalone; and I need not repeat that the Zanni were best known as Arlecchino and Brighella. Lasca makes it clear in this poem that the Lombard masks were strangers to Tuscany, and that they performed comedies upon a public stage:[33]

He also shows how the buffoon parts in these plays were interwoven with the intrigue of the regular drama:

Furthermore, he lets us know that acting was combined with dancing and mountebank performances, and drops the information that women in Florence were not allowed to attend the theatres where Zanni played:

It is therefore obvious that, at the middle of the sixteenth century, the Commedia dell' Arte had already taken shape and earned popularity. The companies who introduced it into Tuscany were recognised as hailing from Bergamo and Venice. Before another fifty years had passed away, this species absorbed the attention of Italy, adopted elements from every district, and settled down into a definite form of comedy, which lasted until the period of Goldoni's reform of the stage. It culminated about the middle of the seventeenth century, and maintained a high degree of excellence during the first half of the eighteenth. But when Goldoni attacked it, and Gozzi rose in its defence, the type was already on the wane. Depending, as any kind of improvised drama must necessarily do, upon the personal talents of successive actors, the Commedia dell' Arte died of inanition when theatrical genius was diverted into other channels.[34] Originality of humour then yielded to conventional buffoonery. The masks became more and more stereotyped, more and more insipid. Were it not for Gozzi's Fiabe, we should hardly be able to form a conception of the part they actually played for two centuries in Europe.

VII.

Let us watch the carnival procession of the masks defile before us. We may imagine that they are crossing the stage of a theatre, while we sit idle in our stalls. First comes Pantalone, the worthy Venetian merchant, good-hearted, shrewd, and canny, yet preserving a certain child-like simplicity, which long acquaintance with the world has not contaminated. His full title is Pantalone de'Bisognosi. Sometimes he is called Il Magnifico, sometimes Babilonio; and old tradition gives a singular derivation for his name of Pantalone. Instead of having anything to do with the Saint called Pantaleone, he ought really to be known as Piantaleone, or Plant-the-lion. In fact, he is one of those patriotic cittadini who, partly out of zeal for S. Mark and partly with a view to commerce, were reputed to hoist flags with the Venetian lion waving to the breeze on every rock and barren headland of Levantine waters.[35] Pantalone wears a black mantle, woollen cap, short trousers, socks and slippers of bright red. A black domino conceals half of his face. He is sometimes a bachelor, but more frequently a widower with one daughter, who engrosses all his time and care. Easy-going indulgence for the foibles of his neighbours, combined with homely mother-wit, is the fundamental note of his character. But as time goes on, he degenerates, dotes, yields to senile vices. At last he becomes the shuffling slippered Pantaloon of our Christmas pantomimes.[36]

After Pantaloon walks the Doctor in his Bologna gown; a hideous black mask covers his whole face, smudged with red patches, like skin-disease or wine-stains, on the cheeks. He is Graziano, Baloardo Graziano, or Prudentio, and has a kind of bastard brother called the Dottor Balanzon Lombardo. Boasting his D.C.L. or M.D. or LL.D. degree from the august University, Graziano makes a vast parade of learning. Bononia docet is always on his lips or in his thoughts; yet he cannot open his mouth without letting fall some palpable absurdity. Law jargon, quibbles, quiddities, preposterous syllogisms, fragments of distorted Latin, misapplied quotations from the Pandects, mingle with metaphysics, astrology, and physical chimæras about the spheres and elements and humours, in his talk. He is a walking caricature of learning, and the low stupid cunning of his nature contrasts with the vain pomp he makes of erudition. To sustain this mask with spirit taxed the genius of a comedian. He had to keep a voluminous repertory of pedantic lumber always ready, to blunder with wit and pun in paradoxes, seasoning the whole with broad Bolognese dialect and plebeian phrases.

Pantalone and the Doctor were only half-masks; that is to say, they held something in common with the stationary characters of written comedy, and took a decided part in the action of the play. As the Commedia dell' Arte coalesced with the Commedia Erudita, they approached more and more nearly to the type of the senes in Latin comedy. The present generation has seen them both in Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia.

Next come the two Zanni. These are thorough-going masks; twin-brothers from the country-side of Bergamo, strongly contrasted in their characters, yet holding certain points in common.[37] First comes Arlecchino, the eldest and most typical of Italian masks, and the one who has preserved its outlines to the present day. His party-coloured, tight-fitting suit reproduces the rags and patches of a rustic servant. On his head is a little round cap, with a tuft made out of a hare's or rabbit's scut. He is always on the move, light-headed, gluttonous, gay, pliable, credulous, ingenuously naïve and silly. The glittering ubiquitous Harlequin of our pantomimes transforms him into a mute ballet-dancer; but when the type was created, Arlecchino spoke and amused the audience as much by his absurdities and uncouth jokes as by his perpetual mobility.

Time would fail to tell of the infinite modifications which this type assumed under the hands of successive able actors. Truffaldino, the delight of Venice, Zaccagnino, Trivellino, Mestolino, Bagattino, Guazzetto, Stoppino, Burattino, and the idiotic Mezzettino, were all descended from this parent stock.

Side by side with Arlecchino goes his more astute and knavish brother Brighella. He is also Bergamasque of the purest breed. But he holds something from the Davus and Geta of Latin comedy. He is the roguish, clever, cowardly, pimping servant of the young spendthrift, who helps his master to deceive his father and seduce his neighbour's wife or daughter. Brighella wears a loose white shirt trimmed with green, and wide white trousers. On his head is a conical hat, plumed with red feathers, which yields place in course of time to the white cap of our clowns. His mask is brown, cut off above the upper lip, over which a pair of short moustachios bristle. Like Arlecchino, Brighella gave birth to a great variety of assimilated types. Unscrupulous Pedrolino, Beltramo, Bagolino, Frontino, Sganarello, Mascarillo, Figaro, Finocchio, Fantino, Gradellino, Traccagnino are his more or less legitimate offspring. He enters French comedy under the names of Scapin, Sganarelle, and Frontin. He creates a character of opera with Figaro. Unlike Arlecchino, who becomes at last a silent ballet-dancer, Brighella grows more vocal and distinct as time advances, until, in the plays of Molière and Beaumarchais, he is hardly distinguishable from a servus of Latin comedy modernised. Indeed, just as Pantalone and Il Dottore approximate to the senes, so Arlecchino and Brighella shade off into the servi; and all their countless progeny are variations on the theme of stupid or roguish varlets.

The four main masks, with their attendant groups of subordinates, have passed before us; but a multitude whom no man can number and no words can describe press on from behind. Perhaps the first place should be given to the Servetta. Her names are legion. Colombina, the sweetheart of Arlecchino and Pulcinella, Rosetta, Florentine Pasquella, Argentina, Diamantina, Venetian Smeraldina, Saporita, Carmosina; under all her titles, and with every shade of character ascribed to her by the free handling of successive actresses, she remains the sprightly, witty, shifty pendant to the Zanni.[38] Not a true mask, however; for the Servetta wears her own face and form, only assuming the costume and dialect of the region she prefers to hail from. Like her lover Arlecchino, Colombina underwent a long series of transformations before she became the fairy-like being who flits behind the footlights of our theatres on winter evenings. And, like Brighella, written comedy blended her with the fixed characters of drama under the name of the soubrette. Susanna in the Nozze di Figaro is a familiar example of Colombina in her latest dramatic development.

The Servette in their many-coloured Contadina dresses have passed by. Close upon their heels press forward a chattering grimacing group from Naples. Pulcinella leads the way, for he must still keep Colombina in sight. In him, far more than in Arlecchino, the genius of a nation lives incarnate; and this he partly owes to a poor artisan of Naples, Francesco Cerlone, who fixed the type with inimitable humour in the last century.[39] Pulcinella has had whole volumes written on his pedigree. Some authors find him depicted on the walls of Pompeii; others trace him in statuettes and masks of antiquity. The one point which seems to be certain is, that he made his appearance on the public stage toward the end of the sixteenth century, wearing the white shirt and breeches of a rustic from Acerra. His black mask, long nose, humpback, protruding stomach, dagger and truncheon, were later additions. Whatever connection there may be between Pulcinella and the masks of classical antiquity—and I have already attempted to show how I think that connection ought to be conceived[40]—he was, at his début, regarded as the type of a Campanian villager, established at Naples in the quality of servant. Pulcinella is thus the Southern analogue of Bergamasque Brighella and Arlecchino. Gradually he absorbed the humours of the Neapolitan proletariate, and became the burlesque mirror of their manners and ways of thinking. Time's whirligig has made him the hero of our puppet-shows, and he enjoys cosmopolitan celebrity under the name of Punch.

Coviello goes along with him, a Calabrian mask, which was sustained with applause by Salvator Rosa at Rome. He belongs to the buffoon class, and is distinguished by his mandoline and ballad-singing. After him walks Tartaglia, afflicted with an incurable stammer, which renders his magisterial airs and graces ludicrous. Tartaglia has something in him of the Doctor; but this part lent itself to great varieties of treatment. We shall see what play Gozzi made with it.

But now our ears are deafened with a clash of arms, rumbling of drums, pistol-shots, and shouted execrations. A fantastic extravagant troop of soldiers march upon the stage. At their head goes the swaggering Capitano. He is a Spaniard, armed to the teeth, loaded with outlandish weapons, twirling huge moustachios, frowning, swearing, boasting, quarrelling, thieving, wenching, and shrinking into corners when he meets a man of courage. Sometimes he affects the melancholy grandeur of Don Quixote. Sometimes he leans to the garrulity of Bobadil. Sometimes he assumes the serious ferocity of a brigand chief or the haughty punctiliousness of a hidalgo. Still he remains at bottom the caricature of professional soldiers, as they plagued and infested Italy under the Spanish domination. His language soars into the wildest hyperboles and euphuisms. He cannot speak without new-coined oaths and frothy metaphors and vaunts that shake heaven, earth, and sea. But the slightest trial of his valour breaks the bubble, and he cringes like a whipped hound.

The Capitano talked a mixture of Neapolitan and Spanish. His part, which required to be sustained at a high pitch of burlesque upon a single note of bragging insolence, was not unfrequently written, and none of these fixed characters assumed more stereotyped outlines. The Miles Gloriosus of Latin comedy reappeared in him, and helped to mould the modern type. The ramifications of this character were innumerable. A celebrated actor, Francesco Andreini (born at Pistoja in 1548), helped to create its form. He called himself "Capitan Spavento da Valle Inferna." Then followed Ariararche, Diacatolicon, Leucopigo and Melampigo (white and black buttocks), Coccodrillo, Matamoros, Scaramuccia (created by Tiberio Fiorelli of Naples), Fracassa, Rinoceronte, Giangiurgolo, Bombardon, Meo Squaquara, Spezzaferro, Terremoto. The list might be prolonged until the page was filled. Every variety of the burlesque son of Mars, from a delicate Adonis to a fire-eater, obtained impersonation from one or other able sustainer of the part. And a host of minor bastard braggarts, like the Trasteverine Meo Patacco, perpetuated the fun long after the great Capitano had quitted the public stage. Some of these types survive in literature. Scaramouche is known to us, and Gautier has immortalised Fracasse.

In the rabble which follows this noisy band of warriors we discern several buffoons of the long-robed tribe—Neapolitan Pancrazio, Biscegliese, and Cucuzzietto, Sienese Cassandro and Roman Cassandrino—who have more or less affinity with the Dottore. Il Pedante walks apart, and attracts attention by his Maccaronic Latin and eccentric morals. He has the poems of Fidenzio Glottogrysio in his hands, which he presses on the attention of a smooth-chinned pupil.[41] Don Fastidio distinguishes himself from the vulgar herd by his enormous nose, and lantern jaws, and long lean figure, and preposterous citations from the law reports of Naples. Cavicchio tells silly tales and sings his Norcian songs. Il Desávedo burlesques the "dude" of Parma, and Narcisino plays the "masher" of Bologna to the life. Burattino comes upon the stage in a score of disguises, now gardener, now shopkeeper, now valet, always the fool and knave combined, impostor and imposed on.[42] The Notajo, with huge spectacles upon his nose and swan's quill stuck behind his spreading ears, murmuring a nasal drawl, and tripping himself up at every step in his long skirts, leads up the rear. Rope-dancers, ballerini, Pasquarielli, Pierrots, conclude the show, dancing and pirouetting after their more vocal comrades.

It is impossible, in a sketch like this, to do justice to the manifold and motley crowd of the Italian masks. Even Callot, whose burin has bequeathed to us so many salient portraits of the types he saw in action, leaves the imagination cold. As I have remarked above, the Commedia dell' Arte combined fixity of outline in the masks with illimitable plasticity in the details communicated by the genius and personality of their sustainers. The mask, the traditional character, was something which a comedian assumed; but he dealt with it as he found it suited to his physical and mental qualities. Each distinguished actor re-created the part he represented. The improvised extempore rule of the game allowed him boundless license. Therefore, while the masks persisted, they varied with the men who wore them. Arlecchino became Truffaldino in the hands of Antonio Sacchi. The Capitano appeared as Scaramuccia in the person of Tiberio Fiorelli. Parts crossed and intercrossed. Pulcinella borrowed something from Arlecchino; Brighella patched himself with rags from Coviello's wardrobe. The dialect and local humours of South Italy were engrafted on types conventionalised in Lombard provinces. Tuscany took them up, and added her own biting wit. As in a kaleidoscope, the constituent fragments of the changeful whole assumed shapes and forms of infinite variety by clever shifting of each particle. Each company established for the performance of this comedy gave a fresh nuance to the combinations which the show permitted. In each district it adopted a new local colour. The mask was recognised; the man who wore it was expected to remodel it upon himself. Folk came to the theatres, less to see the masks, than to see how an Andreini or a D'Arbes or a Costantini or a Riccoboni would sustain them. We who have lost the men, and lost well-nigh the memory of their performance, cannot hope to reconstruct the comedy in its entirety. Histrionic art always and everywhere suffers from the ephemeral conditions under which it has to be externalised. But this disadvantage is crushing in the case of an art which was left to the spontaneous creativeness of its great representatives.

VIII.

Intrigue of a simple kind formed the staple of these improvised comedies. Anything like refined studies of character or the development of calculated motives was rendered impossible by the conditions under which they were presented to the public. An artist pleased or displeased by the exhibition of his personality in masquerade, and his creation of a shade of difference for some known type. The plot, whether borrowed from the written drama, from Latin plays, or from the gossip of the market-place, was always of an amorous complexion. Fathers, lovers, guardians, varlets, priests, and panders played their parts in it. The action proceeded by means of disguises, sleeping-potions, changelings, pirates, sudden recognitions of lost relatives, phantoms, demoniacal possessions, burlesque exorcisms, shipwrecks, sacks of cities, bandits, kidnapped children. It is singular in what a narrow circle the machinery revolves. Unlike our own Romantic drama, the Commedia dell' Arte made but few excursions into the regions of history, fable, mythology, and fancy. Its scene was an Italian piazza; and though we hear of thrilling adventures by land and sea, in forest and on fell, these are only used to loose a knot or to elucidate the transformation of some personage. We ought not to marvel at the limitations of this drama. They are explained by that close connection, on which I have already insisted, between the Commedia dell' Arte and the Commedia Erudita. The new comedy supplied little but its masks; and these masks, as we have seen, were types of bourgeois and rustic characters, capable of infinite modification within prescribed boundaries. The end in view was not the delectation of the audience by a scenic drama, but the caricature and travesty of life as it appeared to every one. That caricature, executed with inexhaustible finesse and piquant sallies of fresh personality, accommodated itself to the antiquated framework of plots as old as Plautus.

If the Commedia dell' Arte lacked fancy and invention in its ground-themes, this defect was compensated by audacious realism and Gargantuan humour. The indecency of these plays cannot be described. Men and women appeared naked on the stage. Unmentionable vices were boldly paraded. Buffoonery of the vilest description enhanced the finest strokes of burlesque sarcasm. Actors who created types which made the spirit of a nation live in effigy, condescended to tricks unworthy of a Yahoo. We have to accept the species, not as a branch of the legitimate drama, but as a carnival masquerade, in which humanity ran riot, jeering at its own indignities and foibles.

IX.

The stock in trade of an acting company consisted of some scores of plots in outline. Gozzi, writing in the eighteenth century, calculates that there may have been from three hundred to four hundred dramatic situations.[43] We possess a certain number of these scenari, as they were technically called Flaminio Scala published a collection of fifty in his Teatro delle Favole Rappresentative (Venetia, 1611). The titles of about one hundred others survive from the archives of Basilio Locatelli and Domenico Biancolelli, incorporated in eighteenth-century histories of the Italian stage. The records of the theatres where Italians played at Paris supply titles of another set, and a few have been disinterred from miscellaneous sources. Quite recently a complete collection of well-formed scenari was given to the press by Signor Adolfo Bartoli from a Magliabecchian MS. of the last century.[44] It contains twenty-two pieces.

Comparative study of these scenari shows that the whole comedy was planned out, divided into acts and scenes, the parts of the several personages described in prose, their entrances and exits indicated, and what they had to do laid down in detail. The execution was left to the actors; and it is difficult to form a correct conception of the acted play from the dry bones of its ossatura. "Only one thing afflicts me," said our Marston in the preface to his Malcontent: "to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken, should be inforcively published to be read." And again, in his preface to the Fawne, "Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read; remember the life of these things consists in action." If that was true of pieces composed in dialogue by an English playwright of the Elizabethan age, how far more true is it of the skeletons of comedies, which avowedly owed their force and spirit to extemporaneous talent! Reading them, we feel that we are viewing the machine of stakes and irons which a sculptor sets up before he begins to mould the figure of an athlete or a goddess in plastic clay.[45]

The scenario, like the plat described for us by Malone and Collier, was hung up behind the stage. Every actor referred to it while the play went forward, refreshing his memory with what he had to represent, and attending to his entrances. But before the curtain lifted a previous process had been gone through. This was called Concertare il soggetto. The company met in their green-room. What followed may be told in the words of a seventeenth-century writer on the technique of the Commedia dell' Arte.[46] "The Choregus, who rules and guides the troupe by his ability and experience, has to plan the subject, to show how the action shall be conducted, the dialogues concluded, and new sallies of wit or humour introduced. It is not merely his business to read the plot aloud, but also to set forth the personages with their names and qualities, to explain the drama, describe localities, and suggest extemporaneous additions. For instance, he shall begin by saying: 'The comedy we have to represent is so-and-so; the personages such-and-such; the houses are on this side and on that.' Then he will unfold the argument. He will impress upon his comrades the necessity of bearing well in mind the place where they are supposed to be, the names of people and the business they are engaged in, so that they shall not confound Rome with Naples, or say that they have come from Spain when they are bound from Germany. A father must not forget his son's name, nor a lover his lady's. It is also most important that the houses in which the action has to take place should be accurately known. To knock at the wrong door, or to take refuge in the home of your enemy, would spoil all. Afterwards, the planner of the subject must indicate occasions suited to the sallies of the several characters. 'Here a piece of buffoonery is right. A metaphor, or sarcasm, or hyperbole, or innuendo, would make a good effect there.' In fact, he has to show each actor how to play his part to best advantage in the circumstances of the piece. Then he must look to preventing inconvenient entrances and exits, providing that the stage be not left empty, and indicating proper ways of bringing scenes to their conclusion. After the Choregus has read this lecture to the troupe, they will meet and sketch the comedy in outline. Then they have the opportunity of bringing their own talents forward, and combining new effects. Yet, at such rehearsals, they must all be mindful to maintain the outlines of the subject, not to exceed their rôles, nor yet to trust their recollection of similar plays performed under different conditions. The piece has each time to be produced afresh by the concerted action of the players who will bring it on the boards."

The Choregus was usually the Capocomico or the first actor and manager of the company. He impressed his comrades with a certain unity of tone, brought out the talents of promising comedians, enlarged one part, curtailed another, and squared the piece to be performed with the capacities he could control. "When a new play has to be given," says another writer on this subject,[47] "the first actor calls the troupe together in the morning. He reads them out the plot, and explains every detail of the intrigue. In short, he acts the whole piece before them, points out to each player what his special business requires, indicates the customary sallies of wit and traits of humour, and shows how the several parts and talents of the actors can be best combined into a striking work of scenic art."

X.

More than natural cleverness and native humour went to the making of a good comedian. To begin with, he had to be a man of sense, tact, and obliging disposition. "When we speak of a good comedian in the Italian style," says Gherardi,[48] "we mean a man of solid parts, who depends on imagination more than memory in his performance, and composes everything he says upon the spot; he is one who knows how to play up to his companions on the stage, combining his words and gestures so well with theirs that he responds at a touch to their hints, and who is so ready with a repartee or movement that the audience believes the scene to have been concerted beforehand." In truth, fertility of fancy, quickness of intelligence, a brain well stocked with varied learning, facility of utterance, command of language, and imperturbable presence of mind, were required in a first-rate improvisatory actor. When he undertook to sustain one of the masks, he had first of all to live himself into the character. If, for instance, he chose the Dottore, nothing might escape his lips upon the stage out of harmony with that character, nothing which could remind the audience that anybody but a pedant from Bologna was speaking. His every gesture had to contribute to the same effect. The second nature of his part had so to supersede his own instincts, that no sudden accidents, the maladroitness of a comrade, an unexpected turn in the dialogue, or any of the inconveniences to which unpremeditated acting was liable, should throw him off his guard.

It was further necessary that he should stock his mind with what the actors called the doti of a play, and with a repertory of what they called generici.[49] The doti or dowry of a comedy consisted of soliloquies, narratives, dissertations, and studied passages of rhetoric, which were not left to improvisation. These existed in manuscript, or were composed for the occasion. They had to be used at decisive points of the action, and formed fixed pegs on which to hang the dialogue. The generici or common-places were sententious maxims, descriptions, outpourings of emotion, humorous and fanciful diatribes, declarations of passion, love-laments, ravings, reproaches, declamatory outbursts, which could be employed ad libitum whenever the situation rendered them appropriate. Each mask had its own stock of common topics, suited to the personage who used them. A consummate artist displayed his ability by improving on these, introducing fresh points and features, and adapting them to his own conception of the part. They had to become incorporated with the ideal self he represented, and not to betray their origin in study. The tradition of the drama and the daily practice of rehearsing together made each member of a company know when such premeditated pieces were to be expected. They did not therefore break the general style of the performance. Habit enabled the actors to lead up to them and pass away from them upon the stream of impromptu dialogue.

Another highly important branch of the art was what were called the lazzi. "We give the name of lazzi," says Riccoboni in his history of the theatre, "to those sallies and bits of by-play with which Harlequin and the other masks interrupt a scene in progress—it may be by demonstrations of astonishment or fright, or by humorous extravagances alien to the matter in hand—after which, however, the action has to be renewed upon its previous lines." It was precisely in these lazzi that a comic actor displayed his personal originality to best advantage; but it required great tact and sense of the dramatic situation to render them natural, appropriate, and to keep them within bound and measure.

We have now seen what was expected of a first-rate artist, and understand to what extent the Commedia dell' Arte depended upon study and premeditation. Long familiarity with their own repertory undoubtedly reduced the improvisatory element to a minimum in the case of troupes who were accustomed to play together for years. Yet they strove to gain novelty by inventing fresh situations, giving unexpected turns to dialogue, and varying their action on successive nights. The best companies were those in whose hands a hackneyed comedy was always plastic, and who kept their improvisatory powers in exercise.

The defect of the art was that it tended to become stereotyped. The Zanni repeated their jokes. The Dottore used the same malapropisms over and over again. The primo amoroso served up the crambe decies repetita of his monologues. The lazzi degenerated into unmeaning horse-play and buffooneries, which had nothing to do with the action of the piece. Nature was forgotten. Every actor over-played his part, ranted, raged, turned caricature into burlesque, spoke in and out of season, exaggerated his gestures, diction, gait, and declamation, until a pack of madmen seemed to have run wild upon the stage. To control these tendencies towards a false and artificial style of presentation, which formed the inherent vice of improvisatory acting, was the duty of an able Capocomico. It could only be done by forcing the members of the troupe to study and reflect on what they had to represent, by compelling them to subordinate their several parts to the general effect, and by raising the tone of their intelligence. Thus there was the greatest difference between a well-conducted company, intent on the perfection of their art, and a wandering rabble, satisfied with appealing to the lowest instincts of the proletariate. The value of these remarks will be apparent after reading what Gozzi has to say about Antonio Sacchi's company and the causes of its dissolution.

XI.

There is no doubt that during their flourishing period the companies of the Commedia dell' Arte afforded the rarest amusement, not only to the vulgar, but also to refined and cultivated audiences throughout Europe. They were especially appreciated at Paris. From the year 1572, when the Confidenti and Gelosi made their first appearance, to the close of the eighteenth century, Italian troupes at the Hôtel de Bourbon, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the Palais Royal, and the Opera Comique, formed the delight of the French court and the Parisian public. Under various names, Uniti, Fedeli, Barbieri's, Bianchi's, and Cardinal Mazarin's men, actors who had learned their trade in Italy continued to seek larger profits and a wider audience in that capital. "The way in which Italian comedians compose, study, and represent their plays," says a French critic in the year 1716,[50] "is quite beyond the powers of language to describe. I might venture to call it inconceivable; with such a wealth of new and agreeable sallies and of unpremeditated dialogue do they adorn their scenes." Many anecdotes regarding these Italian players in their French homes have been transmitted to us, with detailed descriptions of their qualities. I will confine myself to two extracts.[51] One is taken from Constantini's Life of Tiberio Fiorelli (1608-1694), the famous Scaramouche. "He was one of the most perfect mimes who have appeared in these last centuries. I call him mime advisedly, because he played his part by action more than speaking. Scaramouche was not satisfied with making what he represented intelligible by speech; he translated everything into movements of his face and body, adapting his gestures to his words and his words to his gestures with incomparable art. Everything became vocal in this man, his feet, his hands, his head; the slightest attitude he took had meaning and significance." Gherardi adds that "he could keep an audience in fits of laughter for a long quarter of an hour without uttering a word. A great prince, who saw him act at Rome, uttered these words, 'Scaramuccia does not talk, and yet he says everything,' and at the end of the performance presented him with his coach and six horses." Of Tommaso Vicentini, called Il Tommasino, who made his début at Paris as Harlequin in 1716, we read: "His suppleness, his natural gaiety, his graceful airs of rustic simplicity, made him a first-rate Harlequin. But nature had also made him an excellent actor in the more extended sense of that phrase. True, naïve, original, pathetic, amid the laughter he excited by his buffooneries, a single trait, a single reflection which became a sentiment by his manner of expressing it, drew tears from the audience, and surprised the author of the piece no less than the public, and that too in spite of the mask, which seemed intended to inspire as much fear as merriment. Often, when one had begun to laugh at his way of simulating grief or pain, one finished by being melted with the tenderness of the emotion which came from the bottom of his heart."

Italian companies delighted the court of Spain during the reign of Philip II., and were welcomed in Portugal. We find them in Bavaria, at Dresden, and in other parts of Germany. Nor were they entirely unknown in England. Collier, in his "History of the English Drama," speaks of a certain Drousiano, who played with his troupe in London during the winter of 1577-78.[52] This was probably Drusiano Martelli. The extempore plays of the Italians are mentioned by Whetstone, Kyd, Jonson, and Brome; and it seems probable that the plat-comedies, ascribed to the famous fools Tarleton and Wilson, were modelled on Italian Commedie a Soggetto. Kyd, in the Spanish Tragedy, shows that the method of studying an improvised play was well understood. Hieronymo, who wishes to have a certain subject mounted in a hurry, says to his confidant—

Lorenzo replies—

The full history of Italian companies in foreign lands still remains to be written; but I have said enough in this place to prove their wide popularity.

In its native country, the Commedia dell' Arte was long regarded as the special glory and the unique product of Italian dramatic genius. Gozzi, though he wrote as its apologist, only expressed common opinion when he said:[53] "I reckon improvised comedy among the particular distinctions of our nation. I look upon it as quite a different species from the written and premeditated drama; nor have I the shameless audacity to stigmatise with the title of an ignorant rabble those noble and cultivated persons whom I see with my own eyes following and enjoying a play of this description. I esteem the able comedians who sustain the masks, far higher than those improvisatory poets, who, without uttering anything to the purpose, excite astonishment in crowds of gaping listeners."

XII.

This essay would be incomplete if I failed to describe the decadence of the Commedia dell' Arte, and the various inconveniences which attended its performance by incompetent or wilfully scurrilous actors. Without such a sequel to the history of its development, Goldoni's reform of the theatre, and Gozzi's energetic attempts to sustain the old style by works of a peculiar and hybrid character, will not be intelligible.

In its higher manifestations, this comedy, as we have seen, allied itself to fine art by singularly delicate links of connection. More than in other kinds of drama, where actors make themselves the mouthpieces of poets whose creations they incarnate, the performers of improvised comedy had to be complete and finished works of living art in their own persons. So long as they were conscious of their mission, and earnestly aspired to the highest points within the range and scope of their achievement, they supplied a scenic travesty of actual life unequalled for its freshness and its truth to nature—sparkling with salient traits of character, seasoned with mirthful sarcasm, and pungent by its satire of contemporary manners. But the roots of this unique and singular species of the drama were grounded in a deep sub-soil of vulgar instincts and dishonest proclivities. It clung to the tradition of mountebanks and mimes, acrobats and jongleurs, circus-clowns and rope-dancers. The rare flower of racy humour and refined parody, which fascinated Paris in the age of Louis XIV., sprang from a stock discredited and outcast through fifteen centuries of Christian teaching. The Church in council and in synod had anathematised the ancestors of Andreini and Fiorelli, Sacchi and Darbes. Burial with the sanctities of religion was forbidden them, as it is forbidden to suicides. They were reckoned among the enemies of social order and civil discipline. The State, in its sumptuary laws, forbade their entrance into decent houses, relegating them to dark corners of the city, where they lurked with thieves and prostitutes. Saintly pastors of the flock, like Carlo Borrommeo, carried on a crusade against these corruptors of public morals.[54] Even in Venice, the city of their adoption—the sea-Sodom, as Byron called it, of carnival licentiousness, the mart of pleasure for all Europe, the modern Corinth—an Inquisitor of State scourged them with these words of stinging reprobation:[55] "Bear in mind, you actors, that you are folk beneath the ban of blessed God's almighty hatred, and that the prince allows you only as pasture for the common people, who take pleasure in your ribaldries." With such a record of contempt and disesteem and outlawry, the Commedia dell' Arte was always sinking back into the slime from which it rose. Unhappily, the same eyes which delighted in its glory during the years when genius shed brilliant lustre on its noblest representatives, had only to look on this side or on that, and a crowd of shameless merry-andrews, the scum and dregs of the histrionic profession, made the evidences of its inherent immorality only too apparent.

I have already touched upon the scurrilities and obscenities which were common in improvised comedy. To enlarge upon the topic is not necessary. Everybody can perceive that a drama relying in great part upon buffoonery, restrained by no obligation to literary precedents, dependent on the favour of mixed audiences, among whom women scarcely showed their faces, and varying at each performance with the whims and humours of masked actors, who were ex hypothesi beyond the pale of social decency, may have allowed itself licenses which were well-nigh intolerable.

I have already described the tendencies toward exaggerative emphasis, stilted declamation, ill-concerted action, impertinent extravaganza, and wearisome repetition of exhausted motives, to which the species was peculiarly liable. There is no need to expand those observations. They justify the severe remarks of Goldoni in the preface to his theatrical works, which, as these have a direct bearing upon the subject of my next essay, I will summarise here:[56]—"The comic theatre of Italy for more than a century past had so degenerated that it became a disgusting object for general abhorrence. You saw nothing on public stages but indecent harlequinades, dirty and scandalous intrigue, foul jests, immodest loves. Plots were badly constructed, and worse carried out in action, without order, without propriety of manners. If translations of French or Spanish pieces were given, the improvisatory comedians mutilated and deformed them beyond recognition. The same fate befell the plays of Plautus and Terence, and of our elder Italian dramatists. People of culture, nay, the common folk, cried out against these miserable travesties. Every one was wearied with the insipidities and conventionalities of an art upon the wane. You knew what Harlequin or Pantaloon was going to say before he opened his lips."

Readers of Gozzi's Memoirs, to which these pages serve as a prolusion, have means of judging, on the testimony of a very partial critic and avowedly Quixotical defender of the old Commedia dell' Arte, to what extent the system of the theatre in Italy was faulty. Students of Casanova's Memoirs will remember the dark picture of the actress whom he met at Ancona, with her epicene brood of children and of changelings exposed to indiscriminate contamination.[57] The lighter pages of Goldoni's Memoirs reveal a spectacle less revolting, but far from edifying, of a comic troupe in its passage from one Italian capital to another.[58] Leaving these accessible sources of information regarding the social status of the dramatic profession in Italy untouched, I will close this chapter with some extracts from a well-nigh forgotten book—Garzoni's Piazza Universale. One of the most frequent charges brought against the acting companies was that they dressed their women up in men's clothes, and sent them about the public squares of cities to attract the rabble. "No sooner have they made their entrance," says Garzoni, "than the drum beats to let all the world know that the players are arrived. The first lady of the troupe, decked out like a man, with a sword in her right hand, goes round, inviting the folk to a comedy or tragedy or pastoral in the precincts of the Pellegrino.[59] The populace, inquisitive by nature and eager for any new thing, hurries to take places. Paying their pennies down, they crowd into a hall, where a temporary stage has been erected, the scenes scrawled with charcoal as chance and want of sense will have it. An orchestra of tongs and bones, like the braying of asses or the caterwauling of cats in February, performs the overture. Then comes a prologue in the manner of a quack-doctor's oration to his gulls. The piece opens; you behold a Magnifico, who is not worth the quarter of a farthing; a Zanni, who straddles like a goose; a Gratiano, who squirts his words out from a clyster-pipe; a lover, who acts like a narcotic on the senses of his neighbours; a Spanish captain, with nothing but a couple of musty oaths in his whole repertory; a stupid and foul-mouthed bawd; a pedant, who trips up in Tuscan phrases at each turn; a Burattino, whose whole humour consists in taking off and putting on his greasy cap; a prima donna, who goes yawning, drawling, twaddling through her mumbled part, with eyes well open to the chance of selling her overblown charms in quite another market than the theatre. The show is seasoned with loathsome buffooneries and interludes which ought to send their performers to the galleys." Enlarging on this theme, Garzoni proceeds as follows: "These profane comedians pervert the noble use of their ancient art by presenting nothing which is not openly disreputable and scandalous. The filth which falls continually from their lips infects themselves and their profession with the foulest infamy. They are less civil than donkeys in their action, no better than pimps and ruffians in their gestures, equal to public prostitutes in their immodesty of speech. Knavery and lewdness inspire all their motions. In everything they stink of impudicity and villainy. When occasions offer for veiling grossness under a cloak of decorum, they do not take these, but pique themselves on bringing beastliness to sight by barefaced bawdry and undisguised indecency."

One of the degradations to which these comedians willingly submitted was that of playing jackals to quack-doctors on the squares of the Italian cities. Goldoni in his Memoirs[60] speaks of a certain Buonafede Vitali who "maintained at his own cost a troupe of actors. It was their business to collect the money thrown to them in pocket-handkerchiefs, and to return the handkerchiefs filled with pots of ointment and boxes of pills to the purchasers, after which they performed plays in three acts with a certain kind of pomp under the light of wax candles." In order to form a conception of the scenes which were enacted on an Italian piazza crowded with charlatans, mountebanks and players, we must have recourse again to Garzoni. It is almost impossible to understand or to reproduce his language at the present day. Sarcastic sallies, which were doubtless piquant in their time, but to which the key has now been lost, abundance of ephemeral slang and racy innuendo, allusions to forgotten people and obsolete customs, topical jests, the coarsest Lombard patois seasoned with the salt of euphuistic rhetoric, all combine to render his motley descriptions untranslatable. Garzoni and writers of his class still lack the pains which Casaubon bestowed on Athenæus, and perhaps their matter is not worthy of such vast expenditure of industry. Yet the pith may be seized; and following our garrulous cicerone, we stroll out on the piazza. "In one corner of it you will see our swaggering Fortunato and his boon companion Fritata spinning yarns, and keeping the whole populace agape into the night with stories, songs, improvisations, dialogues; quarrelling, making-up, dying of laughter, coming to blows again, bustling about their stage, settling the dispute by fisticuffs and violent language, and lastly handing round the cap to reap the harvest of the pennies they have earned. In another corner, Burattino sets up his bray of brass. You would think that the hangman had got hold of you, to hear him yell into your ears. He carries a scavenger's bag and a common sailor's cap, and screams until the whole world gathers around him. The people crowd, the groundlings jostle, men of quality press forward to the platform. When the burlesque prologue comes to a conclusion, Burattino's master puts in his appearance. It is our old friend the Doctor, with his Bolognese jargon, long-winded citations, insipid tomfooleries, and absurd pretensions to omniscience. The droning of this arrant humbug drives as many of the audience away as the zany's merry pranks and roguish whiskers and apish tricks have drawn together. Meanwhile the curtains of the booth open, and the Tuscan comes forth with his tumbling girl. He begins some silly story in the Florentine tongue, during which the girl draws her circle and puts herself in position, straddling with arms and legs abroad, flinging her body backwards to pick up a piece of money with her mouth from two crossed swords, and tickling the greasy varlets of the market-place by the exhibition of her lascivious graces. Not far away, you may see the Milanese quack, dressed like a noble gentleman, velvet cap on head and white Guelf feathers waving to the wind. He is telling his man Gradello some story of his hapless love. The groom cuts indecent jokes and gibes in the background; then swaggers forward, twirls his moustachios, vows to uphold his master's cause against all rivals, and bristles like an enraged bloodhound; but, on a sudden, feigning to see foemen near, he drops his arms, knocks his knees together, befouls his breeches on the stage, and lets himself be soundly drubbed. When that interlude is over, Gradello acts another part. He is a blind man squalling out a ditty, and thrumming on a puppy in his lap instead of a theorbo. The climax of all this buffoonery is a panegyric of some famous pills, which lasts an hour or two, and leaves the charlatan wrangling over cents and farthings with his swiftly dwindling audience. Toward evening the crowd of quacks and blind musicians and acrobats thicken. Here is Zan della Vigna with his performing monkey; there Catullo and his guitar; in another corner the Mantuan merry-andrew, dressed up like a zany, Zottino singing an ode to the pox, and the pretty Sicilian rope-dancer. Tamburino spins eggs on a stick; the Neapolitan capers about with brimming bowls of water on his pate; and Maestro Paolo da Arezzo makes his solemn entry with a waving banner, on which you see St. Paul, holding a huge falchion in one hand, while the rest of the field is painted over with twining hissing serpents. The mountebank clears his throat and relates his fabulous pedigree. St. Paul was his great ancestor, and ever since that accident upon the island of Malta, all the family have possessed miraculous powers over the snaky tribe. Hereupon boxes are opened, and horrid vipers, water-snakes, and adders are drawn forth to the terror of the bystanders. 'Do not be afraid,' continues Maestro Paolo; 'I have delivered your fields and woods from these plagues and their poison.' The trembling country-lads creep up and buy a box of powders from the condescending hands of the impostor. After the sight of all those asps and crocodiles, stuffed basilisks, tarantulas, and Indian armadilloes, there is not one of them would venture out into the country lanes without a prophylactic. Meanwhile, Settecervelli has laid his mantle on the pavement, and is making his little bitch go through her tricks, bark at the worst-dressed fellow in the circle, howl at the name of the Grand Turk, dance for joy in honour of her master's sweetheart, and carry round the cap for pennies in her mouth. The Parmesan is not to be outdone by these performances; he has his nanny-goat, whose antics are at least as sight-worthy as the puppy's. The Turkish athlete climbs the campanile, lets his brawny chest be hammered like an anvil, dislodges a stout pillar by the strength of his huge arms and shoulders, and wins a bag of coppers heavy enough to pay his expenses to the holy town of Mecca. The baptized Jew wails in a lamentable tone of voice, goi, goi, badanai, badanai, till he has attracted a crowd round him; then he tells the romance of his conversion to the true faith, which leaves a strong impression on our mind that if he has become a sincere Christian, which is more than doubtful, he has certainly not lost the arts of an accomplished cheat. Soon the whole piazza is swarming with folk of this sort; pills and powders, for all the ills that flesh is heir to, are being hawked about; men are eating fire, and swallowing tow, and pulling yards of twine from their throats, and washing their faces in molten lead, and finding cards in the pockets of their unsuspecting neighbours; every conceivable article, which ingenuity can force on the attention of simpletons, is flirted in one's face, and vaunted with a deafening din by hoarse and squeaking salesmen."

Garzoni has carried us somewhat astray from the main subject of this essay. Yet it is not amiss to have gained a full conception of the medium out of which the Commedia dell' Arte emerged, and into which it always tended to relapse, as well as of the various low and ignoble branches of industry with which the players were associated.

Part III.

GOZZI'S DRAMATIC FABLES, OR FIABE TEATRALI; TOGETHER WITH A BRIEF HISTORY OF HIS QUARREL WITH GOLDONI AND CHIARI.

1. Venice in the last century—The Liberals and Conservatives—Invasion of French theories in politics, philosophy, and social manners—Prevalence of French taste in literature—Conservative resistance to this revolutionary state of things.—2. Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi—Popularity of French sentimental dramas—The Academy of the Granelleschi founded in 1747 by literary Conservatives, to restore a taste for pure Italian style, and to promote the study of the Tuscan classics—Carlo Gozzi belongs to this Academy, and becomes one of its chief supporters—Goldoni, and the qualities of his genius—His perception that nature has to be closely followed in the drama.—3. A sketch of Goldoni's career, and of the steps whereby he became a professional playwright—Settles at Venice in 1747 as poet to Medebac's company—Goldoni's Venetian comedies, comedies in the French manner, melodramas—Goldoni's rivalry with the Abbé Chiari—Chiari's bombastic pseudo-Pindaric style—Martellian verses.—4. Indignation of the Granelleschi with both Goldoni and Chiari—Carlo Gozzi confounds them in one common hatred as corruptors of the language—His particular dislike for Goldoni, who had declared war against the Commedia dell' Arte, of which Gozzi professed himself the champion—Publication of Gozzi's satirical poem La Tartana degli Influssi in 1756—Return of Sacchi's company of impromptu comedians to Venice in that year—Vigorous warfare carried on by the Granelleschi against both Goldoni and Chiari during the next four years—Gozzi first shows his dramatic faculty in a severe Aristophanic satire upon Goldoni, entitled Il Teatro Comico—Chiari makes up his differences with Goldoni, and both playwrights now join forces against their conservative antagonists—Chiari defies the Granelleschi to produce a comedy—Goldoni appeals from their criticisms to the public, who idolise him—Gozzi determines to write a satirical play upon a nursery-tale, which shall prove no less popular than Goldoni's comedies—The Amore delle Tre Melarancie appears in January 1761—The true character of Carlo Gozzi's dramatic fables—It is a mistake to suppose that he was actuated by spontaneous Romantic genius—His affinity with the elder Tuscan burlesque poets—His wish to rehabilitate the Comedy of Masks—His conservative and didactic spirit.—5. A translation of Gozzi's own account of The Love of the Three Oranges, important in the history of the Commedia dell' Arte, and illustrative of the way in which Gozzi handled his fabulous material.—6. Success of L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie—Production and dates of the remaining nine dramatic Fiabe.—7. Gozzi's method of writing, and employment of the Four Masks and the Servetta—Interweaving of the comic element with the fairy-tale—Gozzi does not rise to the height of imaginative poetry.—8. His satire, humour, feeling for poetic situations—His conservative philosophy of life.—9. Sources of the Fiabe—The artistic superiority of L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie.—10. Analysis of L'Augellino Belverde.—11. Gozzi's temporary success—Goldoni retires to Paris, and Chiari to Brescia—Posterity has reversed the verdict of contemporary Venice—Fate of the Fiabe—Vicissitudes of Gozzi's fame in Italy, Germany, France—Paul de Musset's condensed abstract of the Memoirs, and their distorted picture of Carlo Gozzi.

I.

ABOUT the middle of the eighteenth century, Venetian society was divided into two main parties, representing what we should now call Liberal and Conservative principles in politics and thought. The Liberals were imbued with French philosophical ideas, French fashions, and French phrases. The boldest of them, men like Angelo Querini, Carlo Contarini, Giorgio Pisani, openly aimed at remodelling the constitution. They aired new-fangled theories of government, based upon the Social Contract and the Rights of Man, within ear-shot of the terrible Inquisition of State. Some of them went in consequence to end their days in the dungeons of Cattaro or Verona. These patricians created a body of restless opposition in the Grand Council, agitated the bourgeoisie and proletariate with the expectation of impending changes, and succeeded in effecting some salutary but superficial reforms. Outside the sphere of politics, that spirit of innovation which in France was silently but surely working toward the Revolution, made itself felt among the educated classes. The University of Padua, while preserving external forms of mediævalism in its discipline and teaching, fermented with the physical hypotheses of modern science. The deism of the Encyclopædists and Voltaire came into vogue. Sentimentalism, thinly cloaking a desire for liberty and license, ruled in morals. Rousseau's speculations and the humanitarian utopias of the philosophes disturbed the old foundations on which social institutions rested. The word prejudice was upon the lips of everybody, to indicate the restraining influences of public order in the state and of ethics in the family. These new ideas permeated society and saturated literature. In the drawing-rooms of great ladies, the clubs and coffee-houses of the gentry, the theatres, concert-rooms, and little houses, where men and women congregated, French books were discussed, French fashions were affected, the French language was engrafted on the old Venetian dialect. Frivolous butterflies of pleasure in that great mart of the world's amusement assumed fine airs of philosophy and science. Wide-sweeping and far-reaching theories, which called in question the whole groundwork of man's previous beliefs, were freely ventilated by chatterers, who caught their jargon from flippant manuals of science and popular essays, poured forth by thousands from the press of Paris. Unhealthy novels spread subversive moral doctrines flavoured with a spice of philanthropic sentiment. It was considered rococo to admire the old Italian classics. Staunch Liberals paraded their independence of precedent and prejudice by adopting a masquerade style which set the traditions of the language at defiance.

All this indicated a deep and irresistible fermentation in society. The great catastrophe of the eighteenth century was preparing. The stage of Europe was being made ready for that transformation-scene which opened a new era. But few could foresee the inevitable future; few could distinguish what was wholesome progress from the delirious or somnambulistic ravings of the moment. Therefore the Conservatives clung fast to their prejudices and precedents; to established forms of government, the national religion, the traditional customs of civil and domestic life. To superficial observers it appeared that these men held the strongest cards. Yet even rigid Conservatives were bound to admit that there was something ominously rotten in the state of Venice. Her commerce dwindled year by year. Her provinces were ill-administered, and yielded less and less to the exchequer. Social demarcations disappeared in the luxury and corruption which invaded all classes. Pauperism assumed appalling dimensions. In the decay of industries and manufactures thousands of workpeople were thrown famished upon public charity. The ranks of the Barnabotti, or impoverished nobles, who claimed state support, swelled, grew clamorous in the Grand Council, gave signs of insubordination, and contaminated the fountain-head of government by their venality. Meanwhile, the old machinery of the constitution had fallen into the hands of a close oligarchy or commission of a few powerful patricians. These corruptors of the State pulled wires, bought votes, and manipulated the College and the Senate to secure their own ends in the Consiglio Grande. The more far-sighted among the Conservatives felt the necessity of temporising. Influenced by the all-pervasive spirit of the age, but not prepared to join the Liberal forces, they compromised, tampered with institutions, and tried by stopping leaks to keep the deep sea out. This was the attitude of men like Marco Foscarini, Alvise Emo, and Paolo Renier.

Apart from politics, the Conservatives stood on firmer ground. There is no doubt that the so-called philosophy of the eighteenth century, both in its principles and in its consequences, offered points of patent weakness to hostile criticism. It was subversive without being reconstructive. Its foundations were sentimental and fanciful rather than logical and reasoned. Hazy in the minds of its projectors, it was almost universally misunderstood by the multitude which it illuded. Immorality was encouraged; not that any speculative system is inherently immoral, but that the confused postulates regarding personal liberty, the right of private judgment in matters of conduct, the light of Nature, and the tyranny of custom and prejudice, from which this philosophy started, enabled foolish or ill-minded people to hide their vices and caprices beneath the specious mask of systematic thinking. Again, the literature which sprang into existence under the predominance of such theories, was in some respects pernicious, and in many points of view ridiculous. The Conservatives had a definite course before them when they determined to vindicate the purity of Italian diction, to maintain the traditions of a glorious past in art, and to expose the foibles of the Liberal school of thinkers and of writers.

II.

This brings me to the proper subject of the present chapter, which is the conflict of Liberalism with Conservatism in the theatre at Venice. The two protagonists are Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, both Venetians, and both of nearly the same age. Goldoni was born in 1707, Gozzi in 1720. Gozzi entered the lists against Goldoni in 1756, when the latter had been working for the Venetian stage since 1748, and when he had already turned the heads of the public by his brilliant dramatic novelties.

The old Commedia dell' Arte, as we have seen, had sunk into decrepitude. It was not merely that the type itself was exhausted, though subsequent circumstances proved this to be the case. What was more important is, that the popular taste veered round against it. Under the prevailing dominance of French fashions, a style of drama, hitherto unknown to the Italians, came into vogue. The so-called Comédie Larmoyante, or pathetic comedy (of which Nivelle de la Chaussée, a now-forgotten archimage of middle-class sentimentalities and sensibilities, is the reputed inventor), caught the ear of Europe. The Père la Chaussée, to adopt an epigram of Piron's, preached every evening from his pulpit in a score of theatres through Europe. The titles of his most famous plays, Mélanide, La Gouvernante, Préjugé à la Mode, L'École des Mères, remind us of the revolution in the drama which converted the public stage from a place of amusement into a platform for the dissemination of political or social sentiments. Saurin's Beverley, Mercier's Déserteur and L'Indigent, De Falbaire's Honnête Criminel, Voltaire's Écossaise, Diderot's Père de Famille, carried on La Chaussée's tradition. Regarding their popularity at Venice, enough is related in the verbose and bilious diatribes prefixed by Gozzi to his dramatic works. Among plays of this description, an adaptation of our George Barnwell—much in the style of Thackeray's parody upon Lord Lytton's novels—attracted great attention by the pathos with which a nephew murdering his uncle from the highest motives was exalted to the rank of hero. The Conservatives not unjustly protested against the contamination of public morals by the false sentiment of these tearful dramas. The perversion of taste by low domestic arguments and clumsy realism, which had nothing real but its vulgarity, seemed to them no less a sin.

They were particularly sensitive, moreover, upon the point of language, diction, style. Translations and adaptations of French plays confirmed the growing carelessness of authors. Gallicisms were so fashionable that a stage-hack allowed himself all license in that direction. The jargon of science introduced unheard-of phrases, which would have made the fathers of the Della-Cruscan Academy shudder in their tombs. Moreover, the prevalent affectation of independence and the fashionable revolt against prejudice led ignorant scribblers to plume themselves upon their solecisms and plebeian lapses into dialect.

With the main object, therefore, of maintaining a standard of propriety in style, and with the secondary object of opposing theatrical innovations, the Venetian Conservatives (in literature) founded their Academy de'Granelleschi. It came into existence about 1747; and I need not enlarge upon its constitution, except to say that it was an academy of the good old Tory type, like the Gelati, Sonnacchiosi, Storditi, and so many scores of literary clubs with absurd names and trivial customs, whose members wasted their time over pedantic studies, and occasionally issued a piece of solid work among their otherwise ephemeral transactions. A sufficient account of this Academy is given in Gozzi's Memoirs. Its importance at the present moment is that out of this little camp Carlo Gozzi marched like David to attack the Goliath of Philistinism, Carlo Goldoni.

It is difficult to speak adequately and fairly of Goldoni. In making this man, Nature cast her glove down in the face of criticism, and defied analysis. He possessed indubitable genius; what is more, his genius obeyed generous enthusiasms, unselfish aims, pure-hearted sentiments. He perceived instinctively and correctly that a new age was dawning for the literature of Europe. He devoted his life to creating a comic drama adequate to the intellectual dignity of his nation. Goldoni was a good man, a modest man, a man complete in all the social virtues. But he was not a great man. And his genius, that innovatory force of his, that infinite adaptability, that inexhaustible scenic faculty which he possessed, that intuition into the necessity of change, was, after all, a genius of thin and threadbare quality. Can we point to a single masterpiece produced by Goldoni? After allowing the sediment to settle down of his prolific works and various experiments, can we select any one play which bears the stamp of the supreme master? I think not. I shrink from placing Goldoni, as a peer, in the company of Shakespeare, Molière, Calderon, and Schiller. But, while saying this, it is impossible to deny his actual achievement. It is impossible not to recognise the honest motives which prompted him to copy Nature's book. That was his great discovery; and that keeps the memory of Goldoni ever green among us. He saw that Nature had to be loved and studied and followed by the artist. He discerned this luminous point in a period befogged by prejudice, tradition, pedantry, conventionality, subservience to antiquated humours and insurgent eccentricities. It was not Goldoni's fault that birth and fortune denied him those higher capacities and favourable openings which might have made his art-work monumental. His genial, shifty, pliable, and yet persistent personality was forced to humour obstacles and to fawn on circumstance. As an inevitable consequence, his productions are mediocre and unsatisfactory. Mediocrity of talent and of character is stamped upon his plays, and self-revealed in his good-humoured Memoirs. But what confounds criticism is that this mediocrity in the man and his equipment was combined with undeniable originality. His genius, though not of the purest water, was genuine. He had a correct perception of the requirements of his age, a clear intuition into the practical possibilities of the dramatic art he handled, and a vivid consciousness of the ground-principle that no artist can afford to lose sight of reality in practice. What would Goldoni not have been, we say, after summing up the survey of his qualities, had he been gifted with a finer fibre, a wider range of knowledge, a deeper philosophy, a more robust temper, a poetic talent equal to the task of externalising his just perceptions in forms of meditated art? As it is, he presents the curious spectacle of a man born to inaugurate a new epoch, but without the faculty to impose his own ideal successfully upon his contemporaries. The general public acclaimed him, and understood his aims. But the aristocrats of literature were able to inflict telling blows in their fight against him. We, who stand aloof, when all the dust of that conflict has subsided, see that Goldoni really won the day. It is only to be regretted that a champion of such small dimensions, soft heart, and feeble sinews, was commissioned to effect the revolution.

III.

Goldoni's instinct led him by an irresistible bias to the stage. He vainly attempted to form himself for the more lucrative profession of the law. During his youth he studied at a college in Pavia, but was expelled for giving free vent to his literary propensities in satire. He practised as an advocate at the Venetian bar, practised at Pisa in the same capacity, acted as Genoese Consul at Venice. Still though he courted Themis, his real predilections drew him toward Thalia. The first piece which revealed his leading talent was a comedy in outline; Il Gondoliere Veneziano, represented at Milan in 1733. In the next year he produced a painfully bad tragedy at Verona entitled Belisario. Several pieces of a mixed character, between comedy and tragedy, followed. Yet he had not taken to the theatre as a profession; and it was not until the year 1746, when he joined the comic company of Medebac, at Leghorn, in the capacity of their paid playwright, that he entered definitely upon the career of author for the stage.

During the years when Goldoni was thus wavering between law and literature, he attempted many kinds of dramatic composition—operettas for music, tragedies, tragi-comedies, farces, scenari for improvised comedies, and comedies of which the dialogue was partly written. His facile talent adapted itself to every style in turn. All this while he recognised that his strength lay neither in the direction of poetry nor in that of serious drama. Nature had bestowed on him a genius for comedy; and he felt born to educate Italian taste in that species. We have already seen how deeply he deplored the degeneration of the Commedia dell' Arte; and yet some of his pieces had been performed by the best improvisatory actors then alive, Sacchi the famous Truffaldino, and Darbes the no less celebrated Pantalone.

While scribbling Harlequinades, Goldoni never lost sight of the reform he had long meditated; and this was to substitute written comedies of character, in the style of Molière and the ancients, for the old comedies all' improvviso. But he saw the necessity of proceeding cautiously. On the one hand, he had to consider the adherents of the elder style. On the other hand, he was forced to humour the comedians, who were jealous of changes which increased their dependence upon professional playwrights.[61] Accordingly, he advanced with circumspection. In the Momolo Cortesan, which he composed for the Pantalone of Sacchi's company (a certain Golinetti), only the leading part was written. The rest was left to improvisation. Nevertheless, this piece was constructed on different principles from those which governed the Commedia dell' Arte. It aimed at being a comedy of character; and thus Goldoni hoped by gradual steps to wean his actors from their bad old ways. Copying his mistress Nature, he saw that nothing could be done per saltum. It was necessary to prepare transitions, and to pass through the development of imperfect species to the exhibition of the type he had in view. This seems to have been the principle on which he acted. But Goldoni was so pliable and easy-going, so apt to take the cue from casual suggestions offered to his versatile ability, that he frequently lost sight of this leading principle. His Muse wore Harlequin's robe of many colours, and assumed the mask while waiting to effect the meditated revolution. This indecision at the commencement of his career exposed him to Gozzi's piratical attacks, and exercised, I think, a prejudicial influence over his subsequent career as playwright. But it was not in the character of the man to act otherwise. He could not divest himself of ready sympathy, fluency, and genial adaptability to the circumstances in which he was placed from time to time. Some natures are destined to achieve their ends by condescension. Goldoni's was essentially a nature of this kind. And the fact remains that, amid all his excursions into regions alien from his purpose, he kept one aim in view and finally achieved it. What survives of solid in his work, is the select series of plays produced upon the lines of the reform he calculated.

It was at Pisa in 1746 that the Capocomico Medebac induced Goldoni to join his troupe. The proposal was that a theatre at Venice should be hired for five or six years, and that Goldoni should dedicate his whole talents to the composition of plays. Sufficiently good pecuniary offers were made; for it seems that each comedy was paid at the rate of thirty sequins, or about £12 sterling. Goldoni accepted. Then travelling with his new partners by the road through Modena, he reached Venice in July 1747. His first venture, with a play called Tognetto or Tonino bela grazia, was a failure. A couple of pathetic pieces which followed, won more favour with the public. Darbes, whom Goldoni learned to appreciate and use with excellent effect, seconded his efforts admirably; and in 1748 circumstances seemed propitious for attempting the long-cherished scheme of a revolution in the theatre. Accordingly he wrote the Vedova Scaltra, which is distinctly a comedy of character. It was performed during the carnival season of 1749, and was received with intelligent sympathy by the Venetians. This induced Goldoni to pursue the course he had begun. La Putta Onorata obtained a similar success, and met with emphatic approval from the gondolier class, whose sentiments and manners had been studied in its composition. Goldoni's novelties had by this time roused the jealousy of rivals and the opposition of Conservatives. A parody of the Vedova Scaltra appeared at the theatre of S. Samuele. This was clever enough, and scurrilous enough, to attract attention. Goldoni received a check in mid-career, which became serious when the Carnival of 1749 closed with the total failure of a new piece from his pen, L'Erede Fortunata. Upon this occasion, stung to the quick, and piqued in his self-esteem, with the sense of his own inexhaustible and facile forces rendering the hazard light, Goldoni publicly declared his intention of producing sixteen new comedies within the next twelve calendar months.

He kept his promise, but at a considerable cost both to his position as playwright and his health. With the general public, the man's indomitable pluck, his good-humour, and the variety of subjects treated in his famous sixteen plays, created an indescribable enthusiasm. The end of the Carnival, 1750, brought well-earned laurels to Goldoni, together with the good-will of the fickle multitude. But unforgiving enemies, the supporters of the old drama, the literary purists, and the Conservatives who could not stomach sentimental comedies, were watching him with Argus eyes. In the heat of volcanic combustion, he had thrown up cinders and rubbish along with several felicitous and brilliant works of art. The worst of his performances were remembered and scored up against him by critics like Carlo Gozzi. The best were confounded in one plausible condemnation.

From this point forward for the next six years Goldoni met with no formidable opposition, except from a rival playwright. The man in question was the Abbé Chiari, a relic of the seventeenth century, pompous and bombastic in style, a blatant member of the Arcadian Academy, a bastard brother of Pindar in the matter of mixed metaphors and wild Icarian flights, a prolific scribbler of melodramatic pieces in rhymed Martellian verses,[62] and, after all his qualifications are summed up, a mere pretentious windbag. Chiari caught the public ear. Venice divided itself into factions for Chiari and Goldoni. On a smaller scale, the Bononcini and Handel conflicts of London, the Gluck and Piccini riots of Paris, were repeated. The most damaging feature of this contest for Goldoni, was that Chiari, less gifted with originality, aped each of his new inventions. Against Goldoni's Pamela Nubile Chiari brought out a Pamela Maritata, against his Avventuriere Onorato an Avventuriere alla Moda, against his Padre per Amore an Inganno Amoroso, against his Molière a Molière marito geloso, against his Terenzio a Plauto, against his Sposa Persiana a Schiava Chinese, against his Filosofo Inglese a Filosofo Veneziano, against his Scozzese a Bella Pellegrina. In spite of their mutual hostility, this game of battledore and shuttlecock between Chiari and Goldoni enabled the literary Conservatives to regard both playwrights as flying under one flag. But before the Granelleschi opened fire in earnest, Venetian society continued for five years to be pretty equally divided in its sympathies. The best judges sided with Goldoni, while Chiari's glaring faults, which passed for brilliant qualities with the vulgar, won him numerous admirers. Carlo Gozzi has described this state of contention:[63]

IV.

The Granelleschi, in their zeal for sound literature, were justly enraged against the ranting, arrogant, bombastic Chiari. Although the more discreet Academicians, men like Gasparo Gozzi, recognised Goldoni's merits, they resented his slovenly and slipshod style. Carlo Gozzi, less tolerant and far more satirical than his elder brother, confounded both poets in a common loathing. This was obviously unfair to Goldoni, who, whatever his faults of diction may have been, ranked immeasurably higher than the Abbé. But Goldoni was guilty of an unpardonable sin in Gozzi's eyes. He had declared war against the Commedia dell' Arte, for which Gozzi entertained the partiality of one who was himself an excellent impromptu actor. The other reasons of this bitter hatred are sufficiently explained in those chapters of the Memoirs which describe the beginning of his career as playwright.

At last Gozzi thought the time had come for striking a decisive blow.[64] The Granelleschi professed sincere admiration for an obscure burlesque Florentine poet of the fifteenth century called Burchiello. Taking some of this man's enigmatical sentences for prophecies, Gozzi compiled a sort of comic almanac, in which the various woes impending over Venice in the year 1756 were described. It was entitled La Tartana degl' Influssi per l'anno bisestile 1756,[65] and was modelled upon an almanac for country-folk, published at Treviso under the name of a certain Schieson.[66] For each quarter of the year a capitolo in terza rima was written, and a prophecy in octave stanzas was dedicated to each month. Although the Tartana contained satires upon society in general, a considerable part was directed specially against Chiari and Goldoni. The introductory address to the readers strikes the keynote. The month of February deals with comedies, the month of November with Martellian verses, and the month of December invokes the speedy return of Sacchi and his company of masks from Portugal. Finally, in the sonnet addressed to the bookseller at the end of the book, the two poets are mentioned by name. Gozzi declared himself an implacable enemy of the plays in vogue, an opponent of rhymed verses imitating the French Alexandrine measure, and a zealous adherent of the old Commedia dell' Arte. The prophecy with regard to Sacchi's company was speedily fulfilled; for the earthquake of Lisbon happening in 1755, they were obliged to quit the scene of that lugubrious disaster. Soon after their return to Venice, Gozzi appears to have courted their friendship. This we gather from the Canto Ditirambico de'Partigiani del Sacchi Truffaldino which he published in 1761.[67]

Irritated by the Tartana degli Influssi, Goldoni, who usually kept silence under literary attacks, took up the pen and wrote as follows:[68]—

I have transcribed these verses for several reasons; first, that my readers may judge for themselves of Goldoni's poetical style; secondly, because the last six lines profoundly irritated Gozzi; and thirdly, because they engaged him in the production of his first semi-dramatic pasquinade upon their author.

We need not describe the battle of sonnets, squibs, and pamphlets which raged after the appearance of Gozzi's Tartana. The Granelleschi were now committed to crush their antagonists; and they spared no pains to do so. Men of birth and parts condescended to the filthiest ribaldry and the most savage personalities. On the whole, it must be allowed that the Granelleschi displayed superior wit and style. Gozzi, in particular, showed real powers for burlesque satire in his Marfisa Bizzarra; and some of his occasional pieces are composed with a terseness and directness worthy of the classical age of Florentine literature. Goldoni replied from time to time, but feebly. In a poem entitled La Tavola Rotonda, he described his formidable antagonist as:[69]

This seems to me a fair, if somewhat pungent, description of Carlo Gozzi, who, in spite of his theoretical purism, rarely succeeded in writing with correctness or distinction, and who veiled a really caustic temper under the mask of Democritean philosophy. Touching upon the charges brought against himself of being neither a scholar nor a poet, Goldoni admits their truth with frankness:[70]

Strong in the unwavering appreciation of the public, and confident in his own powers, Goldoni could afford to make this concession to his antagonist. But it argued a generous and modest mind, different in quality from Gozzi's.

Meanwhile Gozzi took up the glove of defiance thrown down by Goldoni in his Tavola Rotonda. A sonnet referring to that poem contains these lines:[71]

This Comento led Gozzi eventually to the production of his Fiabe. But a step or two remained to be taken before Gozzi resolved to meet Goldoni on his own ground, the theatre.

He began by circulating a satirical piece entitled Il Teatro Comico all' Osteria del Pellegrino tra le mani degli Accademici Granelleschi, or "The Comic Theatre at the Inn of the Pilgrim, rough-handled by the Granelleschi." Gozzi's Memoirs contain a sufficient description of this satire, which still exists in MS. at the Marcian Library. They also explain why he withdrew it from publication at the request of his friend Farsetti and Goldoni's patron Count Widman. Therefore it is not necessary to discuss it here in detail: yet the meaning of the title may be pointed out. Goldoni had already produced a comedy, called Il Teatro Comico, setting forth his views regarding the reform of the drama.[72] Gozzi, alluding to this play, undertakes to expose the faults of Goldoni's own theatrical writings. The satire is conceived in the broad spirit of Aristophanic or Rabelaisian humour, and is really a masterpiece in its kind. We feel for the first time that Gozzi has found his proper sphere by the breadth of handling, the free play of humour, and the precision of touch, which reveal an inborn dramatic faculty. The unmasking of the vociferous four-faced monster which caricatured Goldoni, is eminently fit for scenical effect. While reading, we seem to be present at a new act in Jonson's Poetaster. The four mouths of the four-faced mask represent the four kinds of dramas written by Goldoni—his early harlequinades and scenari, his domestic comedy of the pathetic species, his heroic and Oriental melodramas, and his transcripts from Venetian life. A fifth mouth, the mouth in the belly, la veridica bocca dell' epa, as Gozzi terms it, utters Goldoni's personal aims and views, as Gozzi chose brutally to interpret them. This truthful witness confesses that all the four mouths of the masked head were subservient to its carnal needs. Quis expedivit psittaco suum χαἱρε?... Magister artis ingenîque largitor, Venter negatas artifex sequi voces. "Who taught the parrot his word of welcome? That master of art and liberal dispenser of genius, the belly." That motto from the prologue to Persius' book of satires might be inscribed on the title-page of Gozzi's pasquinade. The blow inflicted, in a literal and metaphorical sense, below the belt, was unworthy of a gentleman. It betrayed Gozzi's critical insensibility to Goldoni's actual merits. It exhibited his aristocratic contempt for professional literature, combined with his comedian's readiness to take advantage of a powerful opponent. But it also revealed a literary athlete capable of striking home, and whose method of attack was certain to be formidable.

Goldoni bowed beneath the storm, and used his influence to withhold the sanguinary satire from further publicity. At this point Gozzi showed the courtesy which might have been expected from a man of his quality. He dropped the point of his weapon at his antagonist's request, and prepared himself to meet the playwright on his own ground. In fairness to Gozzi, it is necessary to observe that this resolution indicated no small amount of chivalry and courage. Goldoni was the idol of the public. He kept continually pointing to the concourse which crowded the Venetian theatres when a new piece from his pen was advertised. Gozzi was unpractised in play-writing, a man in his fortieth year, and the dramatic card on which he staked his luck might well be considered hazardous. What that card was we shall presently discover.

Chiari, involved in the same warfare with the Granelleschi, had hitherto preserved a discreet silence. Now he defied them to produce a play. Gasparo Gozzi answered with a sonnet, which betrays his personal leaning toward Goldoni. Then Chiari resolved to make common cause with his old rival on the stage. This shows how the dropping fire of the Academicians had told upon their opponents. The Abbé addressed Goldoni as degnissimo comico vate, poeta amico, most worthy master of comedy, my good poet friend. Goldoni reciprocated the compliment with vate sublime, vate immortale, sublime, immortal bard. Not without a touch of concealed irony, he compared himself to Chiari in this lyric flight:[73]

We trace in these verses Goldoni's perfect clarity of vision regarding his own powers, and his good-humoured indulgence of other people's foibles. He recognised the practical advantage of an alliance with Chiari. At the same time he disclaimed all honours for himself, and gently ridiculed his new ally's pretensions.

Chiari had defied the Granelleschi to produce a comedy. Goldoni had taken up his stand upon the popularity of his own plays. Carlo Gozzi conceived the bold idea of writing a fantastic drama upon the old lines of the Commedia dell' Arte, which should fill the theatre of his adoption and restore Sacchi's company to favour. If he succeeded, both Chiari and Goldoni would be hit with the same stone. This was the real origin of the celebrated Fiabe Teatrali. But before engaging in the attempt, Gozzi looked about for a suitable subject. Nothing, he calculated, would floor his antagonists more thoroughly than the exhibition of a dramatised nursery tale by impromptu actors. Therefore, in the spirit of a burlesque duellist, in the true spirit of Don Quixote, he composed his Amore delle Tre Melarancie.

These facts about the genesis of Gozzi's Fiabe need to be insisted on, since French and German critics have distorted the truth. They regard Gozzi as a romantic playwright, gifted with innate genius for a peculiar species of dramatic art. According to this theory, the Fiabe were produced in order to manifest an ideal existing in their author's brain. Minute attention to Gozzi's Memoirs, his explanatory Essays (Opere, vols. i. and iv.), and the preface appended to each Fiaba, shows, on the contrary, that he began to write the Fiabe with the simple object of answering a certain challenge in the most humorous way he could devise. He continued them with a didactic purpose. His keen sagacity and profound knowledge of the Venetian public led him possibly to anticipate success. Yet he knew that the attempt was perilous; and he made it, without obeying preconceived principles, without yielding to any imperative instinct, but solely with the view of giving Chiari and Goldoni a sound thrashing.

If it is worth while studying Gozzi and the Fiabe at all, this point has so much importance that I may be permitted to resume the history of his literary conflict with the two poets. Gozzi opened fire with the Tartana in 1756. Goldoni retorted that he had only made himself ridiculous; unless he proved both his assumption and his argument, he was nothing better than a dog barking at the moon. Gozzi then declared that he was already engaged in the production of a commentary. This circulated in MS. under the form of a satire called the Teatro Comico. Meanwhile Goldoni parried all attacks by pointing to his popularity, and Chiari openly defied the Granelleschi to write a comedy, instead of condemning the plays in vogue. Finally Gozzi, who had become intimately acquainted with the actors in Sacchi's company, resolved to write a scenario, which should rehabilitate the Commedia dell' Arte, parody both Chiari and Goldoni, attract the public in crowds, and prove that a mere fairy tale, treated with romantic gusto, was capable of arousing no less interest than the works of professional playwrights following new-fangled models. The Amore delle Tre Melarancie, produced at the end of January in 1761, rather more than four years after the appearance of the Tartana, was the result.

It is mistaken to suppose that Gozzi was animated by the enthusiasm of a literary innovator. The Fiabe, in spite of their fantastic form, were the work of an aristocratical Conservative, bent on striking a shrewd blow for the Commedia dell' Arte, which he considered to be the special glory of the Italian race. In this respect, we might call Gozzi the Venetian Aristophanes.[74] The Fiabe were his "Clouds," and "Birds," and "Wasps." Goldoni and Chiari were his Euripides and Agathon; perverters of the good old comedy by vulgar realism, false pathos, and meretricious rhetoric. Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvetius, the French philosophes, were his Socrates and Sophists. His art was the expression, not of creative instinct evoking a new type of drama merely for its beauty and romance, but of a militant, sarcastic mind, imbued with the ironical literature of the sixteenth century. Gozzi had little in common with Shakespeare. Truffaldino is no twin-brother of King Lear's fool, nor is Brighella cousin to the grave-digger in Hamlet. These personages belong to the family of masks, whose pedigree dates from immemorial antiquity in Italy. The element of fable, as Gozzi repeatedly informs us, was first adopted by him out of sheer bravado to maintain a certain thesis, viz., that whole nations could be made to laugh and cry over puerilities, when handled with the judgment of a master. Gozzi's true ancestors in art were the Florentine burlesque poets, notably Luigi Pulci. The blending of magic, phantasy, broad comedy and serious tragic interest in the Fiabe allies them to the Morgante Maggiore far more closely than to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. In them, therefore, we observe the curious literary phenomenon of what at first sight appears to be spontaneous romantic art, but what is really the result of satirical and didactic intention. The preface to L'Augellino Belverde, in which Gozzi takes leave of the Fiabe, clearly explains the case.[75] "I addressed myself to the task of arousing great popular enthusiasm by a tour de force of fancy; and at the same time I wished to cut short the series of my dramatic pieces, from which I derived no profit, and the burden of producing which was beginning to weigh heavily upon me. Besides, it seemed to me that I had fully achieved the end I had proposed to myself from the outset, in the indulgence of the purest capricious and poetical punctilio." Punctilio was the parent of the Fiabe.

At this point I shall introduce a translation of L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie. There are several reasons for doing so. First, although it only exists For us in the compte rendu of the author, and is therefore a description rather than a literal scenario, a very good idea can be gained from it of the directions given by a poet to extempore actors. Secondly, it shows the four Venetian masks, Pantalone, Tartaglia, Truffaldino, and Brighella, in action, together with the servetta Smeraldina. Thirdly, it is interesting for the light thrown upon Gozzi's controversy with the two poets in the critical observations he has interspersed. These I shall enclose in brackets, so that the scenario of the play may be distinguished from extraneous matter.

V.

A REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS
OF THE FABLE ENTITLED
THE LOVE OF THE THREE ORANGES.
A Dramatic Representation divided into Three Acts.[76]

[The touch of satire in this prologue, directed against poets who were trying to trample down Sacchi's company of improvisatory players, is too obvious, and my intention of supporting the latter by introducing the series of my dramatised nursery-tales upon the theatre is too evident, to call for detailed commentary. In the choice of my first fable, which I took from the commonest among the stories told to children, and in the base alloy of the dialogues, the action, and the characters, which are obviously degraded of set purpose, I wanted to ridicule Il Campiello, Le Massère, Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, and many other plebeian and very trivial pieces by Signor Goldoni.]

FIRST ACT.

Silvio, King of Diamonds,[77] the monarch of an imaginary realm, whose habit exactly imitated that of his majesty upon the playing cards, confided to Pantalone the deep distress caused to his royal mind by the misfortune of his sole son and heir, Tartaglia. The Crown-Prince had been subject, for the last ten years, to an incurable malady. The first physicians diagnosed the case as hopeless hypochondria, and gave their patient up. The King wept bitterly. Pantalone, sending doctors to the devil with his sarcasms, suggested that the admirable secrets of certain charlatans, at that time famous, might be tried. The King protested that all such means had been employed with no result. Pantalone, letting his fancy play upon the hidden causes of the malady, asked his liege in secret, so as not to be overheard by the royal bodyguard, whether his Majesty had perhaps contracted something in his younger days, which, being communicated to the constitution of the Prince, might still be extirpated by the exhibition of mercury. The King, assuming an air of stately seriousness, replied that he had been invariably faithful to his consort's bed. Pantalone then submitted that the Prince might be concealing, out of a befitting sense of shame, the consequence of boyish peccadilloes. His Majesty assured him seriously that his own paternal inspection of the patient excluded that hypothesis; the young man's illness was solely due to hypochondria of a grave and malignant nature; the physicians declared that, unless he could be made to laugh, he must sink slowly into his grave; a smile upon his face would be the favourable sign of convalescence. That was too good to be expected. To this he added that the prospect of his own decrepitude, the sight of his son and heir upon a death-bed, the inevitable succession to the crown of his niece Clarice, a young woman of strange temper, bizarre fancies, and cruel passions, caused him the deepest affliction. Thereupon he began to bewail the future misery of his subjects, broke down into a flood of tears, and quite forgot the dignity of his high station. Pantalone consoled him, urged on his attention the propriety of restoring the court to merriment and gladness, if all depended on Prince Tartaglia's recovering the power of laughter. Let festivities, games, masquerades, and spectacles be set on foot. Let Truffaldino, well approved for making people laugh and chasing the blue-devils from their brains, be summoned to the Prince's service. The Prince had shown some inclination for Truffaldino's society. He might succeed in bringing smiles again upon the royal features. The remedy could but be tried, and possibly a cure might ensue. The King allowed himself to be convinced, and began to plan arrangements.

To these persons entered Leandro, Knave of Diamonds,[78] and first Minister of the realm. He too was dressed like his figure on a pack of cards. Pantalone, aside, expressed his suspicion of some treachery on the part of Leandro. The King commanded festivities, games, and Bacchic entertainments, adding that whoever made the Prince laugh should receive a noble prize. Leandro tried to dissuade his Majesty, and urged that such remedies were likely to prejudice the sick man's health. The King repeated his orders and retired. Pantalone rejoiced. Aside, to the audience, he explained that Leandro was certainly planning the Prince's death. Then he followed the King. Leandro remained stubborn, muttered that he detected some opposition to his wishes, but from what quarter he could not guess.

To him appeared the Princess Clarice, niece of the King. There was never seen upon the stage a princess of so wild, irascible, and determined a character as this Clarice. [I have to thank Signer Chiari for furnishing me with abundant models for such caricatures in his dramatic works.] She had settled with Leandro to marry him, and raise him to the throne, upon the death of her cousin. Accordingly she burst into reproaches against her lover for his coldness. Were they to wait until Tartaglia died of a disease so slow as hypochondria? Leandro excused himself with circumspection. Fata Morgana, he said, his powerful protectress, had given him certain charms in Martellian verses, which were to be administered to Tartaglia in wafers. These would certainly work his destruction by sure if tardy means. [This was introduced to criticise the plays of Chiari and Goldoni, whose Martellian verses bored every one to death by their monotony of rhyme.] Now Fata Morgana was hostile to the King of Diamonds, having lost much of her treasure on his card. She loved the Knave of Diamonds, because he had brought her luck in play. She dwelt in a lake, not far from the city. Smeraldina, a Moorish woman, who performed the servetta in this scenic parody, acted as intermediary between Leandro and Morgana. Clarice fumed with fury at hearing the slow means appointed for Tartaglia's death. Leandro confessed that he entertained some doubts about the efficacy of Martellian verses to secure a happy dispatch. He was uneasy, too, at the unexplained appearance of Truffaldino at court, a very facetious fellow; and if Tartaglia laughed, his cure was certain. Clarice's rage boiled over; she had seen Truffaldino, and the mere sight of him was certain to make anybody laugh. [In this dialogue my readers will detect a defence of the mirth-making comedy of the masks as against the melancholy drama in verse of the poets in vogue.] Meanwhile, Leandro had seat Brighella, his servant, to Smeraldina, to learn the explanation of Truffaldino's appearance, and to demand assistance from Morgana.

Brighella entered; and with much show of secrecy related that Truffaldino had been sent to court by a certain wizard Celio, Morgana's enemy, and the King of Diamonds' friend, for reasons exactly opposite to those which had incensed Morgana against him. Truffaldino, he continued, was an antidote to the morbific influences of Martellian verses; he had come to protect the King, the Prince, and all the people from the infection of those melancholic charms.

[It may be pointed out that the hostility between Fata Morgana and Celio the wizard symbolised the warfare carried on between Goldoni and Chiari. Fata Morgana was a caricature of Chiari, and Celio of Goldoni.]

Brighella's news threw Clarice and Leandro into consternation. They laid their heads together how to kill Truffaldino by some secret device. Clarice suggested arsenic or a blunderbuss. Leandro was for trying Martellian verses in wafers, or opium. Clarice objected that there was not much to choose between Martellian verses and opium, and that Truffaldino had the stomach to digest such trifles. Brighella added that Morgana, informed of the festivities designed for the Prince's recovery, meant to appear and neutralise the action of his salutiferous laughter by a curse which should quickly send him to the tomb. Clarice retired. Leandro and Brighella went to superintend the preparation of the shows.

The next scene disclosed the chamber of the sick Prince. He was attired in the most laughable caricature of an invalid's costume. Reclining in an ample lounging-chair, Tartaglia leaned against a table, piled with medicine-bottles, ointments, spittoons, and other furniture appropriate to his melancholy condition. With a weak and quavering voice he lamented his misfortunes, the various treatments he had tried with no success, and the extraordinary symptoms of his incurable malady. The eminent actor, who sustained this scene alone, kept the audience in one roar of laughter by his exquisite burlesque and natural drollery. Then Truffaldino entered, and tried to make the patient laugh. The extempore performance of this duet by two of the best comic players of our day afforded excellent mirth. The Prince looked on approvingly while Truffaldino exhibited his pranks. But nothing could bring a smile upon his lips. He insisted upon returning to his illness, and asking Truffaldino's advice. Truffaldino entered into a labyrinth of physiological and medical arguments, highly humorous and spiced with satire. He smelt the Prince's breath, and swore that it stank of a surfeit of undigested Martellian verses. The Prince coughed, and asked to spit. Truffaldino brought him the vessel, examined the expectoration, and found in it a mass of rancid rotten rhymes. This scene lasted above a quarter of an hour, to the continual amusement of the audience. Instruments of music were then heard, announcing the festivities in the great court of the palace. Truffaldino wanted to conduct the Prince to a balcony from which he could survey them. Tartaglia protested that this was impossible. Truffaldino, in a rage, threw all the medicines, cups, and ointments out of window, while the Prince squealed and wept like a baby. At last Truffaldino carried him off by main force, howling as though he was being massacred, and bore him on his shoulders to enjoy the show.

The third scene was laid in the courtyard of the palace. Leandro entered, and declared that he had carried out the King's commands; the people, plunged in grief, but eager to refresh their spirits, were all masked; he had taken precautions to make many persons assume lugubrious disguises, in order to augment the Prince's melancholy; the hour had sounded for unbarring the court-gates to the populace.

Morgana then entered, in the travesty of a ridiculous old woman. Leandro expressed his astonishment that such an object should have obtained entrance before the gates were opened. Morgana discovered herself, and said she had come in that disguise to work the Prince's swift destruction. Leandro thanked her, and styled her the Queen of Hypochondria. Morgana drew to one side, and the gates were thrown wide.

On a terraced balcony, in front of the spectators, sat the King, and Prince Tartaglia, muffled in furred pelisse, Clarice, Pantalone, the guards, and afterwards Leandro. The spectacles and games were precisely such as are related in the fairy story. The people flocked in. There was a tournament, directed by Truffaldino, who arranged burlesque encounters for the knights. At every turn, he addressed himself to the balcony, inquiring of his majesty if the Prince had laughed. The Prince only shed tears, complaining that the air hurt him, and the noise made his head ache. He entreated his royal sire to send him back to his warm bed.

There were two fountains, one of which ran with oil, the other with wine. Round these the rabble hustled, disputing with vulgar and plebeian violence. But nothing moved the Prince to laughter. Then Morgana hobbled out to fill her cruse with oil. Truffaldino assailed the hag with a variety of insults, and finally sent her sprawling with her legs in air. [These trivialities, taken from the trivial story-book, amused the audience by their novelty quite as much as the Massère, Campielli, Baruffe Chiozzotte, and all the other trivial pieces of Goldoni.] On seeing the old woman's fall, Tartaglia burst into a long sonorous peal of laughter. Truffaldino gained the prize. The people, relieved of their anxiety about the Prince's health, laughed uncontrollably. All the court was glad. Only Leandro and Clarice showed wry faces.

Morgana, raising herself from the ground in a spasm of fury, abused the Prince, and hurled the following awful malediction in the true style of Chiari at his devoted head:[79]

Morgana disappeared. The Prince suddenly conceived a firm and resolute enthusiasm for the love of the Three Oranges. He was led away amid the confusion and consternation of the court.

What nonsense! What a mortification for the two poets! The first act of the fable ended at this point with a loud and universal clapping of hands.

ACT THE SECOND.

In one of the Prince's apartments, Pantalone, beside himself with despair, describes the terrible effect of the hag's malediction on Tartaglia. Nothing could be done to calm him down. He had asked his father for a pair of iron shoes, to walk the world over, and discover the fatal Oranges. The King had commanded Pantalone, under pain of the Prince's displeasure, to find him such a pair. The matter was one of the most pressing urgency. [This motive suited the theatre, and conveyed a sprightly satire on the dramatic motives then in vogue.]

Pantalone retired, and the Prince entered with Truffaldino. Tartaglia expressed impatience at this long delay in bringing him the iron shoes. Truffaldino asked a number of absurd questions. Tartaglia declared his intention of going to find the Three Oranges, which, as he heard from his grandmother, were two thousand miles away, in the power of Creonta, a gigantic witch. Then he called for his armour, and bade Truffaldino array himself in mail, for he meant him to be his squire. A scene of excellent buffoonery followed between these highly comical personages, both of them fitting on corslets, helmets, and huge long swords, with burlesque military ardour.

Enter the King, Pantalone, and guards. One of the latter carries a pair of iron shoes upon a salver. This scene was executed by the four principal performers with a gravity which made it doubly ridiculous. In a tone of high tragedy and theatrical majesty the father dissuaded his son from this perilous adventure. He entreated, threatened, relapsed into pathos. The Prince, like a man possessed, insisted. His hypochondria was sure to return, unless he was allowed to set forth. At last he burst into coarse threats against his father. The King stood rooted to the ground with amazement and grief. Then he reflected that this want of filial respect in Tartaglia arose from the bad example of the new comedies. [In one of Chiari's comedies a son had drawn his sword to kill his father. Instances of the same description abounded in the dramas of that day, which I wished to censure.] Nothing would silence the Prince, till Truffaldino shod him with the iron shoes. The scene ended with a quartet in dramatic verse, of blubberings, farewells, sighs and sobs. Tartaglia and Truffaldino took their leave. The King fell fainting on a sofa, and Pantalone called aloud for aromatic vinegar.

Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella came hurrying upon the stage, rebuking Pantalone for the clamour he was raising. Pantalone replied that, with a King in a fainting fit, a Prince gone off on the dangerous adventure of the Oranges, it was only natural to kick up a row. Brighella answered that such matters were mere twaddle, like the new comedies, which turned everything topsy-turvy without reason. The King meanwhile recovered his senses, and fell to raving in true tragic style. He bewept his son for dead; ordered the whole court to wear mourning; and shut himself up in a little cabinet, to end his days under the weight of this crushing affliction. Pantalone, vowing that he would share the King's lamentations, collect their mingled tears in one pocket-handkerchief, and bequeath to coming bards the argument for interminable episodes in Martellian verse, withdrew in the train of his liege.

Clarice, Leandro, Brighella gave way to their gladness, and extolled Morgana to the skies. Whimsical Clarice then insisted on coming to conditions before she raised Leandro to the throne. In time of war she was to command the armies. Even if she suffered a defeat, she was sure to subdue the victor by her charms; when he was drowned in love, and lulled by her blandishments, she meant to stick a knife into his paunch. [This was a side hit at Chiari's Attila.] Clarice further reserved to herself the right of distributing court-offices. Brighella, as the reward of his services, begged to be appointed Master of the King's Revels. The three personages now disputed upon the choice of different theatrical diversions. Clarice voted for tragic dramas, with personages who should throw themselves out of windows and off towers, without breaking their necks, and such-like miraculous accidents (id est, the plays of Chiari). Leandro preferred comedies of character (id est, Goldoni's plays). Brighella recommended the Commedia dell' Arte, as very fit to yield the public innocent amusement. Clarice and Leandro flew into a rage. What did they want with stupid buffooneries, rancid relics of antiquity, unseemly in this enlightened age? Brighella then began a pathetic speech, commiserating Sacchi's company, without mentioning it by name, but making his meaning plain enough. He deplored the misfortunes of an honourable troupe, who had done good service in their day, but were now downtrodden, and forced to behold the affections of the public they adored, and whom they had for many years amused, withdrawn from them. He retired with the applause of that public, who thoroughly understood the real drift of his discourse.

The next scene opened in a wilderness. Celio the wizard was discovered drawing circles. As the protector of Prince Tartaglia, he summoned Farfarello, a devil, to his aid. Farfarello appeared, and with a formidable voice uttered these Martellian lines:

[Allusion was here made to the two poets, who wanted to abolish the masks, magicians, and fiends in writings for the stage.] Celio answered in prose that he was a real wizard. Farfarello continued:

Celio swore at the devil, and told him that he meant to go on talking prose. Then he inquired whether Truffaldino, whom he had sent to the court of the King of Diamonds, had done any good, and whether Tartaglia had been obliged to laugh, and had lost his hypochondria. The devil answered:

The devil disappeared. Celio monologised against his mortal foe Morgana, explaining the great perils of Tartaglia and Truffaldino when they should arrive at the castle of Creonta on the quest of the fatal Oranges. Then he retired to make the necessary preparations for saving two persons of high merit and great social utility.

[Celio, who stood for Goldoni in this piece of nonsense, ought not to have protected Tartaglia and Truffaldino. I admit the error, which deserves to be condemned, if a mere dramatic sketch of such a trivial kind comes within the scope of criticism. At that time Chiari and Goldoni were enemies and rivals. I wanted Morgana and Celio to caricature their opposite dramatic styles; and I did not care to protect myself against censure by multiplying personages more than needful.]

Tartaglia and Truffaldino entered armed, and proceeding at a tremendous pace. They had a devil with a pair of bellows following behind, and blowing their backsides to make them skim along the ground. The devil ceased to blow and disappeared. They sprawled on the grass at the sudden cessation of the favouring gale.

[I am under infinite obligations to Signor Chiari for this burlesque conception, which produced a very excellent effect upon the stage. In his dramas, drawn from the Æneid, Chiari made the Trojans perform long journeys within the space of a single action, and without the assistance of my devil and his bellows. This writer, though he pedantically insulted everybody else who broke the rules, allowed himself singular privileges. In his tragedy of Ezelino, after the tyrant's downfall, a captain is sent to beleaguer Treviso, and reduce Ezelino's garrison. This takes place in one scene. In the next scene the same captain returns victorious, having ridden more than thirty miles, captured the town, and butchered the tyrant's troops. He delivers a rhetorical oration, ascribing this miracle to the matchless spirit of his horse! Tartaglia and Truffaldino had to perform a journey of two thousand miles, and my device of the devil with the bellows explained their exploit better than Chiari's charger.]

The two comedians rose from the ground, half-stunned and astonished at the mighty wind which wafted them. Their geographical description of the countries, mountains, rivers, and oceans they had passed, was crammed with burlesque absurdities. Tartaglia concluded that the Three Oranges must be nigh at hand. Truffaldino, feeling tired and hungry, asked the Prince whether he had brought a good stock of cash or bills. Tartaglia spurned such low considerations and idle questions. Spying a castle on a hill, and judging it to be Creonta's, he set manfully forward, while Truffaldino trudged behind in the hope of finding food.

Meanwhile Celio entered, and sought in vain to dissuade the Prince from his perilous adventure. He described insuperable obstacles fraught with danger on the way. They were exactly the same as are told to children in the story-book; but Celio enlarged upon them with wide rolling eyes, and magnified the molehills into mountains. There was an iron gate rusted with time, a famished dog, a well-rope rotten with damp, a baker's wife, who, having no broom, was forced to sweep the oven out with her own dugs. The Prince, unterrified by these appalling objects, determined to assail the castle. Celio, seeing his mind made up, gave him a magic ointment to smear the bolt of the gate, a loaf to throw the dog, and a bundle of brooms to give the baker's wife. The rope he bade them hang out in the sun to dry. Then he added that, if by lucky chance they should acquire the Oranges, they were to leave the castle at once, and be mindful to open none of the Oranges except in the immediate neighbourhood of some fountain. Finally, he promised, if they escaped the perils of their theft, to send the same devil with the bellows, to blow them home again. Then he recommended them to Heaven and left them. Tartaglia and Truffaldino, carrying the articles provided by Celio, went forward on their journey.

Here a tent was lowered, which represented the pavilion of the King of Diamonds.—What an irregularity!—Nay, what misapplied criticism!—Two short scenes followed, one between Smeraldina and Brighella, rejoicing over the loss of Tartaglia; the other with Morgana, who bade Brighella inform Clarice and Leandro that Celio was assisting the Prince. This she had learned from the devil Draghinazzo. Then she bade Smeraldina follow her to the lake, where Tartaglia and Truffaldino would certainly arrive if they escaped Creonta's clutches. Some new snare might then be devised to entrap them. The parley broke up in confusion.

The next scene disclosed a courtyard in Creonta's castle. [I was able to observe, upon the opening of this scene, with the grossly absurd objects it contained, what an immense power the marvellous exerts over the human mind. A gate constructed with an iron grating, a famished dog which howled and roamed around, a well with a coil of rope beside it, a baker's wife who swept her oven with two enormously long breasts, kept the whole theatre in silent wonder and attention quite as effectually as the most thrilling scenes in the works of our two poets.] Outside the grating appeared Tartaglia and Truffaldino, engaged in smearing the bolt; and lo! the portal swung upon its hinges. Great miracle! They passed in. The dog barked and leapt upon them. They threw him the bread and he was still. Great portent! Truffaldino, trembling with fright, then hung the cord up to dry, and gave the baker's wife her brooms, while the Prince entered the castle and came out again, capering for joy and holding the three enormous Oranges he had seized.

The moving accidents of this scene did not end so suddenly. The sky darkened, the earth quaked, and loud claps of thunder were heard. Tartaglia handed the Oranges to Truffaldino, who kept trembling like an aspen leaf. Then there issued from the castle an awful voice, which was Creonta's own. She spoke as the story-book dictates:

The baker's wife, following the fable with equal fidelity, replied thus:

Creonta cried:

And the rope, still observing the text, answered:

Creonta howled aloud:

The dog retorted:

Creonta, again:

And the gate:

It was very funny to see Tartaglia's and Truffaldino's mock astonishment at the fine flow of the poet's eloquence. They stood dumbfounded to hear bakers' wives, and ropes, and dogs, and gates talking in Martellian verse. Then they thanked those courteous objects for the kindness shown them.

The audience were hugely delighted with these puerilities, and I confess that I joined heartily in their laughter, half-ashamed the while at being forced to relish a pack of infantile absurdities, which took me back to the days of my babyhood.

The giantess Creonta now appeared upon the stage. She was of towering stature, and attired in a vast sweeping andrienne. Tartaglia and Truffaldino fled before her horrible aspect. Then she gave vent to her despair in Martellian verses, not forgetting to invoke Pindar, whom Signor Chiari treated complacently as his own twin-brother:

[These last verses were no bad parody of both Chiari's sentiments and style of writing.] A thunderbolt fell and reduced the giantess to ashes. Here ended the second act, which had been followed with more marked applause than the first. My bold experiment began to seem less culpable than it had done at the commencement.

ACT THE THIRD.

The first scene opened near Fata Morgana's lake. There was a great tree visible and underneath it a large stone seat. Several rocks and boulders were strewn about the meadow. Smeraldina, who talked the jargon of an Italianised Turk, was standing at the brink of the lake impatiently awaiting the fairy's orders, and calling out. Morgana rose from the surface, and began to relate a journey she had made to hell, where she learned that Tartaglia and Truffaldino, victorious in their achievement of the Three Oranges, were coming by the help of Celio and the devil with the bellows. Smeraldina soundly abused the fairy for her want of skill in magic. Morgana bade her spare her breath. Owing to precautions she had taken, Truffaldino would reach the spot where they were standing, separately from the Prince. Thirst and hunger, sent by wizard's arts, should annoy him; and since the Oranges were in his custody, great catastrophes would take place. Then she consigned two bedevilled pins to Smeraldina, adding that she would see a fair girl sitting on the stone beneath the tree. She was to contrive to fix one of these needles in the girl's hair, whereupon the latter would become a dove, and Smeraldina was to take her place upon the stone. Tartaglia should marry her and make her Queen. During the night, while sleeping with her husband, she was to fix the other needle in his hair, whereupon he would become a beast, and the throne would be left vacant for Clarice and Leandro. The Moorish woman raised some difficulties, which Morgana easily disposed of. Then, observing Truffaldino approaching with the infernal blast behind him, they withdrew to mature their plans.

Truffaldino entered, carrying the Three Oranges in a wallet. The devil with the bellows disappeared, and Truffaldino related how the Prince had tripped up a little while back, and that he must wait for him. He seated himself. Intolerable thirst and hunger tormented him. At last he resolved to eat one of the Oranges. But conscience stung him; he declaimed in tragic style; then, driven mad by thirst, made up his mind to risk the sacrifice. After all, he reflected, the damage could be made good with two farthings. So he proceeded to cut open an Orange. Oh, what a surprise! There issued from its rind a girl clothed in white, who, following the text of the story-book, spoke immediately:

She fell upon the earth oppressed with mortal languor. Truffaldino, who had forgotten Celio's directions about opening the Oranges within reach of water, being besides a fool by nature, and not noticing the lake in his distraction, thought he could not do better than to slice another of the Oranges and quench the dying girl's thirst with the juice of that. Accordingly, he went, like a donkey, and sliced another Orange, out of which there appeared a second lovely female, exclaiming:

She sank down exhausted like the other. Truffaldino flung himself about in fits of desperation. He roared, screamed, leapt like a maniac, while one of the girls spoke as follows, in an expiring voice:

"Hard destiny! Of thirst to die! I'm dying! I am dead!"

Then she breathed her last, and the other continued:

"I'm dying! Barbarous stars! Ah me! Who'll soothe my burning head?"

Then she too breathed her last. Truffaldino wept abundantly, and murmured over them words of impassioned tenderness. He decided to cut the third Orange in the hope of saving both girls alive. While he was upon the point of doing this, Tartaglia entered in a rage and stopped him. Truffaldino took to his heels and left the Orange lying on the grass.

The stupor of this grotesque Prince, the inimitable reflections he poured forth over the rinds of the two Oranges and the dead bodies of the girls, soar beyond the powers of language. The masked actors of our Commedia dell' Arte, in situations like this, invent scenes so droll and yet of such exquisite grace, with gestures, movements, and lazzi so delightful, that no pen can reproduce their effect, and no poet could surpass them.

After a long and ridiculous soliloquy, Tartaglia caught sight of two country bumpkins passing by, ordered the corpses to be decently buried, and bade the fellows carry them away. Then the Prince turned to gaze upon the third Orange. To his utter amazement it had swelled to a portentous size, and was as large now as the biggest pumpkin. Seeing the lake at hand, and bearing Celio's injunctions in mind, he thought the place convenient for cutting the fruit open. This he did with his long sword; and there stepped forth a tall and lovely damsel, attired in robes of white, who fulfilled the conditions of her part in the story-book by speaking as follows:

The Prince understood upon the spot the meaning of Celio's precepts. But he was embarrassed to find any vessel capable of holding water. The case did not admit of ceremony. So he unbuckled one of his iron shoes, ran to the lake, filled it with water, and making a thousand excuses for the improvised cup, presented it to the fair damsel, who slaked her thirst, and stood up in full vigour, thanking him for his timely assistance.

She said that she was the daughter of Concul, king of the Antipodes; Creonta, by enchantment, had enclosed her, together with her two sisters, in the rinds of three Oranges, for reasons which were as probable as the circumstance itself. A scene of comical love-making followed, at the close of which Tartaglia promised to make her his wife. The capital was close at hand. The Princess had no decent clothes to wear. The Prince bade her take a seat upon the stone beneath the tree, while he went off to fetch costly raiment and summon the whole Court to attend her. That settled, they parted with sighs.

Smeraldina, astounded by what she had been witness to, now entered. She saw the form of the fair maid reflected in the lake. Of course she proceeded to do everything dictated for the Moorish woman in the story-tale. She dropped her Italianate Turkish. Morgana had put a Tuscan devil into her tongue. Thus armed, she defied all the poets to speak with more complete correctness. Advancing to the young Princess, whose name was Ninetta, she began to coax and flatter, offered to arrange her hair, came to close quarters and betrayed her. One of the magic pins was promptly stuck in the girl's head. Ninetta took the form of a dove and flew away. Smeraldina seated herself upon the stone and waited for the Court.

These miraculous occurrences, together with the childish simplicity of the successive scenes, and the burlesque humour of the action, kept the audience, instructed as they had been by their grandmothers and nurses in the days of babyhood, upon the tenter-hooks of curiosity. They followed the plot with serious attention, and took the profoundest interest in watching each step in the development upon the stage of such a trifle.

Then, to the music of a march, the King of Diamonds entered, with the Prince, Leandro, Clarice, Pantalone, Brighella, and the Court. On beholding Smeraldina in the place of the bride whom he had come to fetch away, Tartaglia flew into the wildest astonishment and fury. Smeraldina, so altered by Morgana's artifice that no one recognised her, swore she was the Princess Ninetta. Tartaglia continued to make a burlesque exhibition of his misery. Leandro, Clarice, and Brighella, suspecting the real source of the mystery, rejoiced among themselves. The King of Diamonds gravely and majestically enjoined upon his son the duty of keeping his princely word and marrying the Moor. The Prince submitted with a wry face and new demonstrations of comical grief. Then the band struck up, and the procession filed away to celebrate the marriage in the palace.

Truffaldino meanwhile remained behind in the royal kitchen, to the charge of which Tartaglia had appointed him, after condoning his mistakes about the Oranges. He was preparing the nuptial banquet, when a new scene opened, which is perhaps the boldest in this jocose parody.