Volume I Part 8 (1/2)

The occasional origin of the _Fiabe_, on which I have already insisted, accounts for their want of plastic unity, their juredients They were not the spontaneous outgrowth of artistic genius seeking to fuse the real and the fantastic in an ideal world of the iotten by an accident, which the creative originality of a highly-gifted intellect turned to excellent account Gozzi's predilection for burlesque, his satirical propensity and fondness for e, found easy vent in the peculiar form he had discovered by a lucky chance But these inative poetry His fancy, command of dramatic situations, intuition into character, rhetorical eloquence, and inexhaustible inventiveness expatiated in the region of caprice and wonder Yet we do not feel that he has succeeded in har these divers elements with the spiritual instinct of an Aristophanes or a Shakespeare Probably he did not seek to do so The numerous reflections on the _Fiabe_, which are scattered up and down his works, prove that art for art's sake was far fro consideration in their production They remained with him pastimes, which had partly a practical, partly a didactic purpose--convenient vehicles for indulging his literary bias and airing his ethical opinions--serviceable aarded as i es, the actors, and of keeping himself in favour with his friends, the actresses To the last they retained so of the _punctilio_, which, as he says, inspired him at the outset

VII

In all his _Fiabe Gozzi_ employed the four Masks and the Servetta, Smeraldina[81] He not unfrequently wrote the whole part of a ” and _lazzi_

Truffaldino's role, however, was invariably left to improvisation; perhaps in compliment to Sacchi's talents and his prominent position

The other ue acquired dramatic or satirical importance, he wrote it out for them On ordinary occasions he intrusted the whole or a considerable portion of each scene to their exte the movement of the plot in a _scenario_ The parts of the masks were treated in dialect and prose The serious actors, who had to sustain the scheood and evil spirits, spoke in Tuscan blank verse, occasionally heightened by the use of Martellian rhy moments of the action Thus it will be seen that the text of Gozzi's plays offers every condition of drah carefully dictated prose, up to rhetorical soliloquies and dialogues in verse of several descriptions His dexterity as a playwright is shown in the tact hich he e of the five fixed characters is hout

Whether Gozzi writes their lines or only indicates a theme for their impromptu declaent and practised group of actors The hue in this departe is most idiomatic and spontaneous here Here too we find his raciest characters

Powerfully conceived and boldly projected, each coe breathes and moves with vivid realism Study of the Masks, as Gozzi treated the of plastic beauty the _Commedia dell' Arte_ must have been Here, in a work of carefully considered literary art, we have its long tradition and itsa _Fiaba_ is like opening a bottle of rare old wine The bouquet of the fragrant vintage exhales into the chaone summers But the very conditions under which Gozzi exhibited this side of his dramatic mastery render translation impossible In a translation the colours of the dialects are lost The gradations of style, passing froue into elaborated scenes, are bound to disappear Tuned to a foreign language, our inward eye and ear fail to reconstruct the _lazzi_, which rendered this part of the drama humorous

That is why Schiller's _Turandot_ is inferior to Gozzi's; and yet, when Schiller selected this piece for the Gerht artistic instinct It is the one in which the fable predominates, and can best be separated froe here upon the variety of shades and coiven to the five fixed types of character, according as the plot demanded es This inquiry would be interesting, since it reveals their singular elasticity beneath a master's touch It must, however, be left to amateurs of curiosities in art The development of the subject in detail implies previous acquaintance with the ten _Fiabe_, and would involve a lengthy dissertation Soeneral points may, nevertheless, be indicated

Pantalone retains ical outlines under all his transforood-humoured, honourable, simple-hearted Venetian of the middle class, advanced in years, Polonius-like, with stores of worldly wisdo natural affections, and healthy moral iht, purging away those baser associations which gathered round it during two centuries of the _Commedia dell' Arte_ His Pantalone recalls the Cortesani, described in a chapter of the Memoirs; but a touch of senility has been added, which lends colia sta of the knave in his composition, burnished with Neapolitan abandonard for eneral conception of the character explains the transforlia of the _Augellino Belverde_

Brighella is an intriguing, self-interested individuality, trying to turn the world round his fingers, and not succeeding, or succeeding only by some lucky accident He frequently assuhted cunning

Truffaldino blossoms before us as an ubiquitous and chameleon-like creature of caprice and huenial rogue and witty fool; bred in the kitchen; uttering words of wisdom from his belly rather than his brains; pliable, fit for all occasions; a prodigious coward; trusty in his own degree; taking thehiher senti up at its conclusion with a rogue's own luck in the place he started from, and on which his heart is set, the larder He runs like an inexpressibly coh the warp and woof of Gozzi's many-coloured looellino Belverde_, for purposes of pungent parody, Gozzi invests hiotist At the close of that supreuise, and willingly assumes the role of a domestic buffoon Our author's trenchant irony, that ”smile on the lips with venom in the heart,” of which Goldoni wrote so lucidly, that touch of bitterness which renders hienius here Truffaldino, the whelp whose antics dispelled melancholy, becomes for once in Gozzi's hands a stick ith to beat the dog of modern science

Smeraldina, under her nuar woood -wo ain, she never soars into the regions of ideality, andburned for blundering atrocities upon the road to commonplace felicity

With these fixed characters, which forredients of the _Fiabe_, Gozzi interweaves a fairy-tale, abounding in hts of capricious fancy, marvels, transformations, perilous adventures There is always a conflict of beneficent and ood over evil, the reward of innocence, and the punishment of crime There is a fate to which the heroes and heroines are subject, and which can only be overcoh dark years, by sustained endurance, terrible struggles, and faith in supernatural protectors

Thus the texture of the _Fiabe_ is similar to that of our pantomimes, except that in the former the fairy-tale and the harlequinade are interwoven instead of being disconnected

The fairy-tale is always treated in a serious spirit The didactic allegory, on which the author set such store, and which he regarded as the main purpose of his art, finds expression here The fairy-tale is roic Gozzi interests himself in the creatures of fantastic fiction, and forces them to utter tones which vibrate in our entrails Soh pressure of dranancy, by the accents of grief and anguish on the lips of _fantoccini_ It is a singular species of art, soaring by spas flashes of electric light on hu away by abrupt transitions into mechanical improbabilities and burlesque absurdities--an art foractors, yet withal so vivid that able representation on the stage ory of the masquerade world in which man lives:--

”We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep”

The Masks take part in the action, generally as subordinate personages, sometimes as persons of the first rank, never as hter, nor as a stationary chorus In this way the coic and didactic This sounds like a contradiction of what I have said above, about the want of plastic unity in Gozzi's work Yet the two apparently contradictory stateether Gozzi interweaves the wires of humour and romance with remarkable skill But he does not fuse them into one poetic substance He fails to create an ideal world in which both tragedy and comedy are necessary to the spiritual order, as are the systole and diastole of the heart to an organised being Though interlaced, they stand apart, each upon its own clearly defined basis You pass from the one sphere to the other, and have sudden shocks communicated to your sensibility There is a lack of at picture, an absence of spontaneous transition froht's sympathies have been touched to diverse issues by divers portions of his task Very probably, the at in the _Fiabe_, may have been communicated by the interaction of the e at Venice But this is only tanta that Gozzi understood the theatre It does not prove that he was a drahest sense of that teric hile reading him That is precisely ish to do, and cannot always actually do His _Fiabe_ reestive originality They are not the inevitable products of creative genius, fusing and infors with inbreathed sense able to pierce”

Had Gozzi been a great spontaneous poet, or a consuht have become one of the rarest triumphs of artistic fancy It is difficult to state precisely what his work misses for the achievement of complete success Perhaps we shall arrive at a conclusion best by inquiry into points of style and details of execution

VIII

By singular irony of accident, the author of the _Fiabe_, though he dealt so much in the fantastic, the marvellous, and the pathetic, was far more a humorist and satirist than a poet in the truer sense Of subliery, lyrical sweetness or intensity, verbalin his plays The style, except in the parts written for the Masks, is coarse and slovenly, the versification hasty, the language diffuse, commonplace, and often incorrect Yet we everywhere discern a lively sense of poetical situations and the power of rendering them dramatically The resources of Gozzi's inventive faculty seey hich he forces the creations of his capricious fancy on our intelligence The passionate volcanic talent of the man alenius

What he wants is not the power of poetical conception, but the power of poetical projection; and the defects of his work seem due to the partly contemptuous, partly didactic, mood in which he undertook them It would be difficult to surpass the pathos of Jennaro's devotion to his brother in _Il Corvo_, or the dramatic intensity of Armilla's self-sacrifice at the conclusion of that play _Turandot_ is conceived throughout poetically Thepassion of Prince Calaf passes through it like a thread of silver In the _Re Cervo_, Angela has equal beauty Her love of the , and her discernment of her real husband under his transforar, are hu Cherestani, the Persian fairy, who loves aher devotion, is ad of _La Donna Serpente_ The subterranean labyrinth of lost woraded to monstrous shapes by their tyrannical seducer, in _Zobeide_, e_ in Dante's hell Its horror is al The love of Barbarina for her brother in _L'Augellino Belverde_, which es her froer, is no less romantic than Jennaro's love in _Il Corvo_ The picture of Pantalone and his daughter Sarche, in _Zei their quiet life aloof from cities on the borders of an enchanted forest, touches our i of the charm we find in _Cymbeline_ _Il Mostro Turchino_ is roht It seems to call for music, such music as Mozart invented for the _Zauberflote_

Or, since Gozzi had little in coht wish that this wild fable had fallen into the hands of Verdi

The cos of immortality

Gulindi, by the way, in this last fable, is a terrible portrait of the Messalina-Potiphar's-wife