The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi; Volume the Second

LXIV

We cannot always go on laughing. – Deaths of friends. – Dissolution of the old Republic of S. Mark. – I lay my pen down on the 18th of March 1798.

As years advanced, it came to me, as it comes to all, to be reminded that we cannot go on always laughing. One Sunday I was hearing mass in the Church of S. Moisè, when a friend came up and asked me in a whisper whether I had heard of the fatal accident to the patrician Paolo Balbi. "What accident?" I said with consternation. "Last night he died," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed I, still more terrified: "why, I was with him three hours yesterday evening; he was in perfect health and spirits." "Nevertheless," said my informant, "the poor gentleman is dead. Excuse me if I have been the bearer of disastrous news." When the mass, to which I listened without listening, was over, I ran to the patrician's house. I cherished warm affection for this friend of many years, and hoped against hope that the news might be false. Alas! the house resounded with funeral lamentations; the widow and children had already left it for the palace of their relatives, the Malipieri.

Not many days afterwards I received the sad announcement that my brother Francesco was seriously ill of a kind of cachexy on his estate in Friuli. A few days later I learned that he had breathed his last. The poor fellow left his wife and three sons well provided for; but when the salutary restraint of his authority was removed by death, they showed every inclination to dissipate what he had brought together for their comfort.

One morning my friend Raffaelle Todeschini was announced. His countenance wore an expression of alarm, while he began: "I come to bring you painful news. Last evening, in the coffee-house at the Ponte dell'Angelo, that honourable gentleman, Carlo Maffei, died suddenly." The blow fell heavy on my heart; for I have enjoyed few friendships equal to that of this most excellent gentleman. In his will he mentioned me in terms of the highest and most unmerited praise, bequeathing me his gold snuff-box by way of remembrance. That was the one and only legacy which fell to my share in the course of my whole life.

In a short period of time I lost successively several other relatives and friends. My brother Gasparo expired at Padua, recommending his second wife, the Mme. Cenet who had nursed him through his long illness, to my care. A sudden stroke of apoplexy robbed me of the first and faithfullest friend I ever had, Innocenzio Massimo. My sister Laura, who was married and lived at Adria, passed away while yet in the prime of womanhood. I could add other names to this funereal catalogue, if I were not unwilling to detain my readers longer in the graveyard.

Meanwhile, a terrible attack of fever laid me low in my turn. The physician, Giorgio Cornaro, a man of the highest probity and candour, who showed a vigilant affection for his patients, came at once to visit me. The intense pains I suffered during the following night, and the excessive fierceness with which the fever renewed its assaults, made me feel that I was about to follow my relatives and friends to the tomb. I waited through those sombre hours; but when I heard my servant stirring, I sent him for a confessor. The man refused at first, and had to be dispatched upon his errand by a voice more worthy of a cut-throat than a penitent. While I was confessing, Dr. Cornaro entered. He inquired what I had been about, and I replied that I did not think it amiss to be prepared beforehand. "I felt sufficiently ill to fulfil the duties of a Catholic upon his death-bed, and have saved you the trouble of breaking the news to me in case of necessity." "Very well," said he, feeling my pulse and frowning. "We must cut short this fever with quinine, before it reaches the third assault. It is a violent attack of the sort we call pernicious." How many pounds of the drug I swallowed is unknown to me. I only remember that they brought me a large glassful every two hours. The fever abated; but I had to drag through three months of a slow and painful convalescence.

But now it is time to close these Memoirs. The publisher, Palese, informs me that the third volume will be more than large enough. I lay my pen aside just at the moment when I should have had to describe that vast undulation called the French Revolution, which swept over Europe, upsetting kingdoms and drowning the landmarks of immemorial history. This awful typhoon caught Venice in its gyration, affording a splendidly hideous field for philosophical reflection. "Splendidly hideous" is a contradiction in terms; but at the period in which we are living paradoxes have become classical.

The sweet delusive dream of a democracy, organised and based on irremovable foundations – the expectation of a moral impossibility – made men howl and laugh and dance and weep together. The ululations of the dreamers, yelling out Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, deafened our ears; and those of us who still remained awake were forced to feign themselves dreamers, in order to protect their honour, their property, their lives. People who are not accustomed to trace the inevitable effects of doctrines propagated through the centuries see only mysteries and prodigies in convulsions of this kind. The whole tenor of my writings, on the other hand, and particularly my poem Marfisa bizzarra, which conceals philosophy beneath the mantle of burlesque humour, prove that I was keenly alive to the disastrous results which had to be expected from revolutionary science sown broadcast during the past age. I always dreaded and predicted a cataclysm as the natural consequence of those pernicious doctrines. Yet my Cassandra warnings were doomed to remain as useless as these Memoirs will certainly be – as ineffectual as a doctor's prescriptions for a man whose lungs are rotten. The sweet delusive dream of our physically impossible democracy will end in the evolution of…

But Palese calls on me to staunch this flow of ink upon the paper. Let us leave to serious and candid historians the task of relating what we are sure, if we live, to see.

To-day is the 18th of March in the year 1798; and here I lay my pen down, lest I injure my good publisher. Farewell, patient and benign readers of my useless Memoirs!

LXV

SEQUEL TO GOZZI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Supplied by the Translator

Gozzi broke off his Memoirs on the 18th of March 1798. He lived another eight years, and died upon the 4th of April 1806, aged eighty-six. On reviewing his life, we find four clearly marked periods. The first ends with the death of his father in 1745, and includes his three years' service in Dalmatia. The second closes with the year 1756, and is marked by the break-up of the Gozzi family and his engagement in those litigations and affairs of business which formed his real occupation for a long series of years. Short as was this second period, it gave a decisive tone to his character by confirming the man's natural obstinacy and litigiousness. Undoubtedly it was not for nothing that he frequented the Venetian law-courts and studied the arts of chicanery. In all his polemical writings we detect the habit of forensic warfare, the wariness of an experienced pleader, and the licensed plausibility of one who is accustomed to conceal the weak points in his own case while magnifying the shortcomings of his adversary. His unremitting attention to practical matters made him an experienced man of business. This was the true Carlo Gozzi; not that fantastic dreamy plaything of the sprites and fairies which his romantic French and German critics have discerned in the author of the Fiabe. At the same time, during this second period, he never neglected literature, but went on writing in the intervals of serious affairs. Self-taught, well-nigh devoid of systematic culture in history, philosophy, and language, but gifted with a sincere admiration for the best Italian authors, with an active fancy and a natural bias for burlesque humour, he formed that peculiar manner, at once prolix and forcible, effective and slovenly, which distinguishes his published works. Unequal in style, incorrect in diction, incapable of giving perfect form or polish to his compositions, he nevertheless posed as a purist and threw himself with passion as a conservative into the literary polemics of his day. The Accademia Granellesca, founded at the close of this period, recognised in him its stoutest champion and most quarrelsome fore-fighter. I have mentioned the year 1756 as the date which opens the third period in Gozzi's life. It marks the publication of his Tartana degli Influssi and the return of Sacchi's company to Venice. This period terminates in 1781, and includes all that was most memorable in his career – the quarrel with Goldoni and Chiari, the alliance with Sacchi, the composition of the Fiabe and twenty-three plays on Spanish subjects, the liaison with Teodora Ricci, and the episode of Gratarol. Gozzi was past sixty when Sacchi's company broke up, and Gratarol's misfortunes threw a gloomy light upon his past theatrical career. The fourth period of seventeen years is distinguished by little literary activity. Yet we owe to it the Memorie Inutili, which were professedly written as an answer to Gratarol's Narrazione Apologetica. Partly composed in 1780, but suppressed by order of the Government, they did not see the light until the year 1797-98, when Gozzi completed the work and sent it in a hurry to the press. Meanwhile the Republic of S. Mark had fallen, never to rise again. In the midst of this political earthquake, Gozzi retained his old aristocratic principles intact, though he bowed to custom and used the shibboleths of the French Revolution, as he confesses, with conscious cynicism.^[85] The period of old age was passed in comparative solitude, cheered, however, by the friendly relations which he maintained with the surviving members of his family. The cycle of his dramatic works was closed; and after 1782 he had the mortification of seeing his Fiabe neglected, while Goldoni's star reascended the firmament of popularity and fame. Indeed, the Fiabe had no chance of surviving the improvised style of comedy, to support which Gozzi composed them, and which he fondly imagined immortal. Goethe, in 1788, was present at a performance given by the last débris of Sacchi's company; but when the old Commedia dell'Arte and the old actors died out, the Fiabe were relegated to marionettes and puppet-shows. The poet and the man of letters dwindled in Gozzi, but the man of business survived. His correspondence during this fourth period shows him engaged in various commercial affairs upon a small scale, minute in his accounts, involved in litigation, attentive to the produce of his farms, busied about the interests of friends, trafficking in lace and stuffs, groceries, wine, fowls, and carriages.^[86] This forms a curious contrast to the romantic portrait of the old man vamped up for us by Paul de Musset. The ordinary troubles of advanced age – rheums, aches, and infirmities – fell upon him. In one of his letters to Innocenzio Massimo he describes their correspondence as "a hypochondriacal gazette." On the 13th of February 1804 he signed a holographic will, which shows him still loyal to his conservative creed in religion, politics, philosophy, and morals. At this time he appears to have been living in the Campo S. Angelo, one of the broadest, busiest, and sunniest squares of Venice. Indeed, he had quitted the ancestral palace of the Gozzi at S. Cassiano many years before, finding it too distant from the theatres and the piazza. For a long while he occupied a casino alone in the Calle Lunga S. Moisè. The little dwelling belonged to him; and in a passage of his Memoirs, which did not lend itself to the scheme of my translation, he relates the circumstances of his removal to this habitation.^[87] I shall insert it here, because it throws light upon the last stage of Gozzi's journey in this world. "Many years," he says, "had passed away since my brothers Francesco and Almorò with their families were established in Friuli, while I remained at Venice, the sole occupant of our paternal mansion. For me alone, the vast place was like a wilderness. In the winter I shivered with cold there. Snow, rain, and the Rialto caused me innumerable annoyances when I left the theatres at night to gain my distant home. I was growing old, and this made the journey seem each year more irksome. A casino which I owned in the quarter of S. Maria Zobenigo, Calle Lunga S. Moisè, not far from S. Marco, had been let for sixty ducats a year to the majordomo of a Venetian nobleman. This man left Venice with his master on an embassy, giving me no notice that he had sold his furniture and handed over my casino to the mistress of some man about the town. By a series of similar changes, the tenement passed successively through the hands of several women of the same sort. I always got the rent and asked no questions. The best of it was that the money was punctually paid me by priests, who uttered panegyrics on the heroism of my female tenants. The last of these heroines sent to tell me that my house needed certain repairs. Accordingly I went there, and was received by a well-restored relic of womanhood, who pointed out the alterations she judged necessary in her dwelling-place. Casting my eyes over the lodgings, I thought that they would serve my purpose admirably, and told the lady so. In a moment she changed her honeyed tone and language of affected flattery to oaths and threats and declarations that nothing in the world would make her turn out. I phlegmatically remarked that she had no lease, that my lessee had no power to sublet, and that I would grant her sufficient time to seek another nest. In such matters, as is well known to readers of these Memoirs, I have always had some trouble. But at last, by taking over certain pieces of damaged furniture, I came to terms with the Nymph of Cocytus, and installed myself in my casino. I did it up, and stayed there fourteen years, letting on lease my former abode at S. Cassiano. I should have been there still, had not my brother Almorò written to say that he was tired of Friuli. A widower, with a son and daughter, he should like to send the former to the university at Padua, and to make a home with me in Venice. I was always ready to oblige my brother, and this casino could not hold us all. Accordingly, we took a larger house at S. Benedetto; and here my brother, much aged in my eyes, as I must probably have seemed in his, came to live with me. His children, whom I had only known as little creatures, had grown into giants. Before a year was over, the daughter made a good match in Friuli, and the son went to Padua, whence the troubles of the Revolution drove him away before he had obtained the laurels of a doctor's degree. In that commotion the laurel, destined for the brows of students, was consecrated to the kitchen and the garnishing of dishes on the table."^[88]

It is possible that the marriage of this niece and the subsequent marriage of his nephew broke up the joint-household at S. Benedetto, and that Gozzi then removed to the neighbouring quarter of S. Angelo.^[89] Almorò and his son Gasparo were appointed executors to Carlo Gozzi's will, which winds up with the following characteristic admonition to the young man: "Preserve your affection for your well-bred, well-behaved, and excellent wife. Look to the careful education of your children, and protect them from the false maxims of that sophistic science which is the bane of our age, involving all humanity in disastrous mists of error and confusion, in labyrinths of infelicity and misery." Gozzi died on the 4th of April 1806, and was buried in the church of S. Cassiano.

PIETRO LONGHI,

The Painter of Venetian Society during the Period ofGozzi and Goldoni.^[90]

I

The eighteenth century was marked in Venice by a partial revival of the art of painting. Four contemporary masters – Tiepolo, Canaletti, Longhi, and Guardi – have left abundance of meritorious work, which illustrates the taste and manners of society, shows how men and women dressed and moved and took their pastime in the City of the Waters, and preserves for us the external features of Venice during the last hundred years of the Republic.^[91]

As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia, representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. Indeed, the sense for colour, the robust breadth of design, and the firm, unerring execution, which distinguish that great master, seem to have passed into Tiepolo, who revives the splendours of the sixteenth century in these superbly painted pageants. It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the Labia reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for masculine sobriety of workmanship.

Of Canaletti it is not necessary to say much. The fame which he erewhile enjoyed in England has been obscured of late years – to some extent, perhaps by the fussy eloquence of Mr. Ruskin, but really by the finer sense for landscape and the truer way of rendering nature which have sprung up in Europe. Canaletti's pictures of Venetian buildings and canals strike us as cold, tame, and mechanical, accustomed as we are to the magic of Turner's palette and the penetrative force of his imagination.

Guardi, the pupil and in some respects the imitator of Canaletti, has met with a different fate. Less prized during the heyday of his master's fame, he has been steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain qualities peculiar to himself. His draughtsmanship displays an agreeable sketchiness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and a glow of sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for Guardi popularity is the attention he paid to contemporary costume and manners. Canaletti filled large canvasses with mathematical perspectives of city and water. At the same time he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind us that the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes and bag-wigs, of masks and hoops and Carnival disguises. Guardi had an eye for local colour and for fashionable humours. The result is that some of his small pictures – one, for instance, which represents a brilliant reception in the Sala del Collegio of the Ducal Palace – have a real value for us by recalling the life of a vanished and irrecoverable past. Thus Guardi illustrates the truth that artists may acquire posthumous importance by felicitous accident in their choice of subjects or the bias of their sympathies. We would willingly exchange a dozen so-called "historical pictures" for one fresh and vivid scene which brings a bygone phase of civilisation before our eyes.^[92]

In this particular respect Longhi surpasses Guardi, and deserves to be styled the pictorial chronicler of Venetian society in the eighteenth century. He has even been called the Venetian Hogarth and the Venetian Boucher. Neither of these titles, however, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, rightly characterise his specific quality. Could his numerous works be collected in one place, or be adequately reproduced, we should possess a complete epitome of Venetian life and manners in the age which developed Goldoni and Casanova, Carlo Gozzi and Caterina Dolfin-Tron.

II

Very little is known of Longhi's career, and that little has no great importance. He was the son of a goldsmith, born at Venice in 1702, and brought up to his father's trade. While yet a lad, Pietro showed unusual powers of invention and elegance of drawing in the designs he made for ornamental silver-work. This induced his parents to let him study painting. His early training in the goldsmith's trade, however, seems to have left an indelible mark on Longhi's genius. A love of delicate line remained with him, and he displayed an affectionate partiality for the minutest details of decorative furniture, dress, and articles of luxury. Some of his drawings of plate – coffee-pots, chocolate-mills, ewers, salvers, water-vessels – are exquisite for their instinctive sense of graceful curve and unerring precision of contour. It was a period, as we know, during which such things acquired an almost flawless purity of outline; and Longhi felt them with the enthusiasm of a practised artisan.

He studied painting under Antonio Balestra at Venice, and also under Giuseppe Maria Crespi at Bologna. The baneful influences of the latter city may be traced in Longhi's earliest known undertaking. This is an elaborate work in fresco at the Sagredo Palace on the Grand Canal. The patrician family of that name inhabited an old Venetian-Gothic house at San Felice. Early in the last century they rebuilt the hall and staircase in Palladian style, leaving the front with its beautiful arcades untouched. The decoration of this addition to their mansion was intrusted to Pietro Longhi in 1734. The subject, chosen by himself or indicated by his patron, was the Fall of the Giants —La Caduta dei Giganti. Longhi treated this unmanageable theme as follows. He placed the deities of Olympus upon the ceiling. Jupiter in the centre advances, brandishing his arms, and hurling forked lightnings on the Titans, who are precipitated headlong among solid purple clouds and masses of broken mountains, covering the three sides of the staircase. The scene is represented without dignity, dramatic force, or harmony of composition. The drawing throughout is feeble, the colouring heavy and tame, the execution unskilful. Longhi had no notion how to work in fresco, differing herein notably from his illustrious contemporary Tiepolo. A vulgar Jove, particularly vulgar in the declamatory sweep of his left hand, a vulgar Juno, with a sneering, tittering leer upon her common face, reveal the painter's want of feeling for mythological grandeur. The Titans are a confused heap of brawny, sprawling nudities – studied, perhaps, from gondoliers or stevedores, but showing a want of even academical adroitness in their ill-drawn extremities and inadequate foreshortenings. It was essential in such a subject that movement should be suggested. Yet Longhi has contrived to make the falling rocks and lurid clouds look as though they were irremovably wedged into their places on the walls, while his ruining giants are clearly transcripts from naked models in repose. Here and there upon the ceiling we catch a note of graceful fancy, especially in a group of lightly-painted goddesses, – elegant and natural female figures, draped in pale blues and greens and pinks, with a silvery illumination from the upper sky. But the somewhat effeminate sweetness of this episode is ill-combined with the dull and impotent striving after violent effect in the main subject; and the whole composition leaves upon our mind the impression of "sound and fury, signifying nothing."