V
"/ give ihtfe Books
fcr the- founding of a College in. this Colony"
STUDIES
OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTUliY IN ITALY,
BY
VERNON LEE.
LONDON:
W. SATCHEL L AND CO.,
12, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.
1880.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY NICHOLS AND SONS,
25, PARLIAMENT STREET.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. Introduction ...... 1
II. The Arcadian Academy ..... 7
III. The Musical Life . . . . . .65
IV. Metastasio and the Opera ..... 141
Y. The Comedy of Masks . . . . .231
VI. Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy . . . 245
VII. Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy . . 273
VIII. Conclusion . . . . . .291
Appendix (List of Names and Authorities) . . . 297
STUDIES OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ITALY.
INTRODUCTION.
This book is at first sight heterogeneous and anomalous : hetero¬
geneous, because it treats two subjects which are rarely treated by one
individual, and never treated under one binding, literature and music;
anomalous, because it is far from dealing with all that goes to make up
the Italian Eighteenth Century, while it deals with not a few men and
things belonging to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "Why not
deal exclusively and completely with either music or literature ? Why
not study the satirist Parini by the side of the playwright Goldoni,
rather than study the composer Jommelli, who seems to have no con¬
nection with him ? Why examine the comedies of the time of Salvator
Rosa and pass over the tragedies of Alfieri ? Why linger over forgotten
composers and singers while scientific and philosophic writers, whose
works are still read and discussed, remain unmentioned ?
The book is seemingly most incoherent in subject, and most incomplete
and digressive in treatment. But the apparent incoherence of subject is
in reality unity of treatment; and the apparent incompleteness and
irrelevance of treatment is in reality completeness and restriction of the
subject. The book deals both with literature and with music, because the
point of view of the writer is neither exclusively literary nor exclusively
musical, but generally aesthetic; because the object of the writer has been
to study not the special nature and history of any art in its isolation, but
to study the constitution and evolution of the various arts compared with
one another; and the arts whose constitution and evolution can be
studied in a work on the Italian Eighteenth Century happen to be the
drama and music, just as the arts which might be studied in a work on
the Athenian fifth century r>.c. would be the drama and sculpture. The
writer of this book is neither a literary historian nor a musical critic, but
an assthetician; and both literature and music belong to the rcsthetician's
domain. Thus far concerning the incoherence of subject: now with
respect to the incompleteness and irrelevance of the treatment The book
B
2
Introduction.
does not treat of all that is contained in the Italian Eighteenth Century
because much of this docs not belong inherently to Italy, but is merely a
portion of the universal character of the century itself, a character far
more spontaneous and strongly marked in other countries; and it treats
of many things belonging to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
because all that was really national in the Italy of a hundred years ago,
the great musical and dramatic efflorescence, has its roots deep hidden in
Italian character and civilization, and germinates slowly throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The notion of there having been a spontaneous efflorescence of national
art in Italy during the eighteenth century may amuse some persons and
will doubtless astonish many; but efflorescence of national art there was,
nevertheless—an efflorescence of national art which has remained hitherto
iTnperceived because the Italian Eighteenth Century has, as a rule, been
not only not studied, but not even seriously considered as a reality, except
by a few specialists who could see nothing but antiquarian details; for,
with regard to the Italian Eighteenth Century, we are at present much
in the same condition as our ancestors of the days of Montesquieu and of
Robertson were with regard to the Middle Ages in general. They knew
that the middle ages had existed, they knew that certain wars had been
carried on and certain laws enacted during that period, but that the
middle ages had had any civilization of their own, much less any art,
never entered their minds: the word suggested a blank, and no one cares
to investigate into a blank. So also is it with the Italian Eighteenth
Century. There is a general notion in other countries that the eighteenth
century did exist in Italy, though the fact has never been brought home
to any one. There is also a vague knowledge of the fact that a certain
number of writers—some, like Goldoni and Alfieri, still read—others, like
Metastasio, remembered as names, belonged to the Italy at that period ;
but what was their connection with that time, or what was the civilization
which surrounded them, is a question which seems to occur to no English¬
man, Frenchman, or German, as indeed it occurs to very few Italians.
The very few Italians who do trouble themselves on the subject are either
laborious bookworms, who find broken and minute fragments of the
eighteenth century as they do of every other century, but are unable to
unite them so as to constitute any definite shape; or else they are philo¬
sophical historians, who are interested in the eighteenth century only
inasmuch as it contains germs of the nineteenth; who study Parini,
Beccaria, Yerri, and Filangieri because they view them as precursors of
the social, political, and literary movement of our own day, but who turn
aside with contempt from Metastasio and Carlo Gozzi because they see in
Introduction.
3
them no political forerunners of the present, and are incapable of recog¬
nising in them the artistic product of the past. To foreigners, therefore,
the Italian Eighteenth Century is covered wth an historical mist, to be
rent and dispelled only by shock of the cannon of Montenotte and Lodi.
Any amount of artistic life may be safely hidden beneath that mist from
the English, French, and Germans who think it their duty to be well
versed in the art and literature of the Italian Middle Ages and Renais¬
sance; who are intimately acquainted with the exact pictorial character of
Liberale da Verona and Ugolino di Prete Ilario, and with the literary
value of Bicordano Malaspini and Giannozzo Manetti, but who do not
know that Metastasio wrote opera texts or that Marcello composed psalm
music; who know very exactly whether Agnolo and Taddeo Gaddi were
or were not father and son, but who are not sure whether Pergolesi and
Paisiello may not have been the same person. The philosophical Italian
historians, on the other hand, take notice only of philanthropic poets and 4
of economic writers ; all that is art entirely escapes their notice.
Now it so happens that, inasmuch as it was a forerunner of our own
civilization, the Italian Eighteenth Century was poor, weak, and uninte¬
resting, because in all this it was a mere insignificant copy of the English
and French Eighteenth Century. The political and philosophic ten¬
dencies of the days of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hume, and of Smith,
did indeed exist in Italy, both because they were naturally produced there
as elsewhere by the preceding civilization, and also because they were
largely imported from other countries; but they were so comparatively
feeble that Italian civilization would never have spontaneously made the
stride which it did, would never have got to its modern point, had it not
been borne along by the whirlwind of the French revolutionary invasion. /
Parini, Alfieri, Beccaria, Filangieri, interesting and valuable though they
are in themselves, are wholly uninteresting and valueless considered as
the products of a spontaneous Italian civilization. They are essentially
cosmopolitan and eclectic. To understand them we must not seek in the
remoter layers of Italian life; we must look round at the general cha¬
racter of the eighteenth century. Without Pope, without Eousseau,
without Montesquieu and Diderot, they are unintelligible; by their side
they gain in intelligibility but they lose in importance. Italy in the last
century got her philosophy and philosophic poetry, like her dress and her
furniture, from Paris and London; but Italy in the last century got her
drama and her comedy neither from Paris nor from London, but from her
own intellectual soil, where they had been germinating for centuries; and
Italy, in the eighteenth century, gave her own spontaneous national
music to the whole of Europe.
b 2
4
Introduction.
In this national drama and national music lies for us the interest of
the Italy of a hundred years ago. Not only is this artistic efflorescence
the only really national and spontaneous thing which Italy then pos¬
sessed, she being in all else inferior to other nations, but that Italian
artistic efflorescence was the only thoroughly national and spontaneous
artistic movement which took place anywhere in the eighteenth century.
The other nations had spontaneous philosophical life, but Italy alone had*"s
artistic life. The plastic arts were dead everywhere, and had not yet
been galvanised by criticism into a spectral semblance of life. Poetry,
in France and in England, under Pope and Voltaire, was mere phi¬
losophy decked out in Dresden china pastoral furbelows ; in Germany
it was, when it re-appeared late in the eighteenth century, only partly
spontaneous, and, in the main, philosophy again of a different sort,
and either draped in classic garments, manufactured on Winckelmann's
patterns, or trapped out with pseudo-mediaeval jingles. The sole vital
thing throughout the eighteenth century appeared to be philosophy:
France, England, and Germany were sterile of all else; Italy alone pos¬
sessed living and growing artistic organisms; Italy alone had art which
was neither decrepit nor eclectic, art which had been germinating un¬
noticed for centuries; comedy whose seeds had been sown in the old
Latin and Oscan days, before Plautus and Terence were born; music
which had been slowly developing throughout the middle ages, and which
now blossomed out in mature perfection, spontaneous, Italian, absolutely
national, and which, even transplanted into the favourable soil of
""Germany and cultivated by the greatest Germans, ceased not to be
Italian. During this eighteenth century, while all eyes were fixed upon
other countries, Italy, insignificant and backward, developed to maturity
the art germs which had remained dormant during her brilliant Middle
Ages and brilliant Renaissance; she possessed then what she had not
possessed in the time of Dante, nor of Lorenzo di Medici, nor of Ariosto,
a drama as national as the English drama of the days of Shakespeare
and the Spanish drama of the days of Lope de Vega. For her, in this
obscure period, was reserved the last great art, of which antiquity had not
dreamed, which the Middle Ages had not divined, which the Renaissance
had but faintly perceived—Music.
Does it matter if the eighteenth century, strutting complacently in its
philosophic dignity and eclectic grandeur, did not perceive the artistic
movement which was going on in Italy ? if, in its satisfaction with the
plays of Voltaire and of Schiller, it mistook the national Italian stage for
the planks of a fair-booth ? Does not all pseudo-classic and eclectic art, like
its archetype Voltaire, mistake all real art, be it the art of iEscliylus, of
Introduction.
5
Shakespeare, or of Calderon, for mountebanks' ranting? The Italian
national stage did exist none the less. Does it matter if the nineteenth
century, critical and misled by critical theory, fixing its eyes on the
people who are the critical and theorising people above all others, fails to
perceive the Italian national efflorescence of music in the eighteenth
century, and considers as spontaneous German products the works of
Handel, and Gluck, and Mozart, although every inch of Germany was
colonised by Italian musicians, and although there is not a form of melody
in the works of the great Germans of the eighteenth century which has
not its necessary predecessor and its absolute equivalent in the works of
their Italian masters and fellow pupils ? Are not critical theorists always
blinded and misled by critical theorisings ? The greatness and supremacy
of the Italian music of the eighteenth century did exist nevertheless.
And it is this national Italian drama, unnoticed by the puristic
eighteenth century; it is this national Italian music, still overlooked by
the critical nineteenth century; it is this spontaneous art, which consti¬
tutes the real importance of Italy in the time of Pope, of Voltaire, and
of Lessing. The Italy of a century ago is interesting because, in a time
of mere philosophic speculation, it alone created artistic form, not eclectic,
but national and spontaneous; because to it belongs perhaps the last
jjreat artistic efflorescence, which was not, like that which produced (
Shelley and Keats, a reaction; nor like that which produced Goethe and
Schiller, a revival; but was like the efflorescence of art to which we owe
Phidias, Raphael, Dante, or Shakespeare, the culmination of a long and
unbroken series of artistic phenomena.
It is therefore from the aesthetical point of view that the Italian
Eighteenth Century appears to us interesting and worthy of study; it is
the art of the day, musical and dramatic, which absorbs our attention. .
But, in studying the art, we have incidentally been led to study the times.
Following the sound of the music of Pergolesi and Cimarosa, trying to
catch closer glimpses of the Bettinas and Lindoros of Goldoni, of the
TrufFaldinos and Brighellas of Carlo Gozzi, we have strayed into the
evcry-day world of Italy in the eighteenth century, the world of fine
ladies in stomachers and hoops, of dapper cavalieri serventi, of crabbed
pedants, of hungry Arcadian rhymesters, of Gallo-maniacs and Anglo-
maniacs—a world of some good, some evil, some folly, and much inanity;
rambling through which, in search of some composer or singer, of some
playwright or mask actor, we have occasionally seen at a distance noble
intellectual figures like Parini and Alfieri, and have stopped to look at
them, although they were not the objects of our pursuit; or we have
glanced at one or two faint forgotten celebrities like Rolli and Frugoni;
6
Introduction.
or wc have wandered into some assembly of drolly solemn pedants,
dreaming of pastoral life and dinner-giving patrons; or again into the
drawing-room of some beautiful Sappho, some Faustina Maratti or Silvia
Verza, seated, sentimental and coquettish, in a circle of enamoured
poetasters. Often also wc have idly followed the crowd of periwigged
and stomachered citizens through the squares and streets of old Italian
cities, or have watched them, chatting and card-playing, in their country
houses. Strolling about and prying in odd nooks and corners in hopes
of meeting a buffoon of Goldoni, or of hearing a snatch of song of
Jommelli, we have come across quaint little old-fashioned figures, droll
little old-world groups fit for Hogarth or for Watteau, and have stopped
and tried to sketch their grotesque outline. Thus has originated the first
essay of our volume, that on the Academy of the Arcadi, which may servo
to give a general notion of the times that witnessed the artistic efflo¬
rescence which is our principal subject. Our true work lies with the
composers, and singers, and playwrights, and actors; with Metastasio, and
Goldoni, and Gozzi; but these cannot be well understood unless we pre¬
viously reconstruct the society in which they lived, and unless wc re¬
assemble around them those men who, though seemingly indifferent or
insignificant, yet indirectly influenced their lives, their art, and their fame.
We deal with that part of the Italian Eighteenth Century which is
sterling and imperishable; with art which, though now forgotten, still
remains and will once more be remembered; and our book is in so far
serenely cheerful; but ever and anon, by the side of the imperishable,
arises the thought of that which has perished; and we may once or twice
forget for a moment the plays of Metastasio and Goldoni, and the music
of Marcello and Pergolesi, forget our persuasion that they remain and
will remain, as the impression comes home to us how deep an abyss
separates us from the men and women for whom the plays were written
and the music composed, and how many faint and nameless ghosts
crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by the past.
THE AKCADIAN ACADEMY.
i.
From the year 1680 to the year 1790, Italian literature is mainly
represented by Filicaia, Yico, Metastasio, Goldoni, Parini, Gasparo
Gozzi, Vincenzo Monti, and Vittorio Alfieri. But these men merely
represent, they do not constitute, the intellectual life of the nation; for
that we must look in the innumerable academies, networks of molecular
life spreading all over Italy, and connecting all the classes of society
which possessed, or were supposed to possess, any knowledge of literature.
These academies were countless and multiform; they sprang up and died
out on all sides, growing out of pompous receptions in the palaces of
cardinals or of princesses, and out of disorderly carouses at literary
coffee-houses; they fairly exhausted the stock of intelligible appellations;
their names were allusions, riddles, jokes, or gibberish, such as the Trans¬
formed (Trasformati) of Milan, among whom were Parini, the three
Verris, and Beccaria; the Frozen Ones (Gelidi) of Bologna; the Crazed
Ones (Intronati) of Siena; the Erithrean Shepherds of Naples; the
Phlegmatics, Frigids, Fervids, and Drunkards. They were all local—
very limited in numbers and fame—all except one, whose name resounded
with equal glory from Trent to Messina, from Savona to Treviso, which
comprised among its members all the great writers, philosophers, or
artists, all the noble lords, all the rich bankers, all the astute lawyers, all
the well-known doctors, all the sainted priests, all the beautiful ladies,
that lived or travelled in Italy; and this academy was the Academy of
the Arcadians. By means of colonics established in all the Italian towns,
it caught, like a huge spider-web, everyone distinguished in any way
whatever. The establishment could profit by every sort of advantage of
which its members might be possessed: the use of literary talents was
obvious in a literary institution; artists could paint pictures and make
plans for the Academy; musicians could afford agreeable interludes in its
meetings; princes, senators, and ministers could grant diplomas and
honours; bankers might give or lend money; and last, but far from least,
ladies would form a pleasing leaven, a charming cement to all the
remainder. With views so liberal, and principles so grasping, what
8
The Arcaclian Academy.
wonder was there if the institution flourished, if it spread in all quarters,
and if there appeared on the title-pages of half the books published in
Italy during the last century the pastoral pipe, and laurel and pine crown,
emblematic of the Arcadian Academy?
In the course of our studies of the eighteenth century we were so con¬
tinually coming upon the Academy of the Arcadians, every person and
every thing seemed so connected with it, it so pervaded the whole of the
Italy of those days, that we began to feel curiosity concerning this once
renowned institution, and to wonder what had become of it in our own
day. Had it been swallowed up in the convulsions which changed the
face of Italy, or were its broken fragments still crumbling away in silence ?
Although we were in Rome, the head-quarters of the Academy, it was
long before we could obtain any answer to this question. Most persons
had never heard the name of the Arcadians, while those who had, asso¬
ciated it with vague impressions of absurdity and imbecility. However,
little by little we obtained a few scraps of information on the subject,
mostly erroneous and contradictory, and invariably accompanied by not a
few expressions of contempt; and just as we were giving up all further
inquiry in despair we received an authorisation to visit the hallowed spot,
once the meeting-place of the Arcadians, and now the only remnant of
their possessions.
The Bosco Parrasio is situate on the road winding up the Janiculum
towards the Villa Pamphili, but so utterly forgotten are all things Arcadian
that for a long time we wandered close to its gate, through the dirty
street leading to Ponte Sisto, up the battered Via Crucis of S. Pietro
Montorio, and down the slippery mule-path of the mills, asking vainly
after the villa of the Arcadians. No one had ever heard of such a place
as the Bosco Parrasio, nor of such beings as the Arcadians; the beggars
who hung about the gate of the monastery hard by, the sacristan of the
Sette Dolori, the dyers hanging out their skeins of scarlet and blue wool,
the peasants loading their mules with sacks of flour, all answered in the
same astonished negative. At the top of two slippery mounds, between
the Vigna Corsini and the mills, was a little garden, at whose gate stood
a portly priest: we determined on accosting him. True, there was no
reason why he should have heard of a place unknown in the whole neigh¬
bourhood, but he was our last hope. So we repeated to him the old,
hopeless question: "Did he happen to know where was the Bosco Par¬
rasio, the villa belonging to the Arcadian Academy?" The priest, as
jolly, slovenly, and demonstrative a one as could be found, turned with
alacrity .towards us—" The Bosco Parrasio ? This is it." So, when we
least expected it, we were actually standing at the gate of the Italian
Parnassus, and, what surprised us still more, in the company of one of
the dignitaries of Arcadia.
The Arcadian Academy.
9
We returned from this first visit with the most dismal impressions of
the Bosco Parrasio—of muddy paths, dripping bushes, flower-beds filled
with decaying ilex-leaves, lichen-covered benches, crumbling plaster, and
mouldering portraits—grim spectres looking down on the final ruin of
Arcadia. Nor had the live inhabitants of the place conduced to raise our
spirits. The villa was inhabited by some peasants, whose furniture and
provisions filled the state-rooms. The Arcadian who did the honours of
the place did not know one portrait from the other; could not recollect
his own, or anyone else's, pastoral name; and took an interest in nothing,
save some beans spread out to dry, which he examined, criticised, and
calculated the market value of, in company with the gardener's wife.
Such was the first effect Arcadia produced on our imagination; but gra¬
dually, as the remembrance of meanness and decay became fainter, the
disagreeable impression wore away, and left instead a whimsical interest
in the forgotten Academy; the Bosco Parrasio impressed us no longer as
a damp, decaying casino in the suburbs, but as a weird habitation of
literary goblins. The result of this new phase of humour was that
we revisited the villa of the Arcadians, and found it strangely different
from what it had at first seemed. It was now June, the time when
Rome receives her crowning beauty before being made hideous by dust
and decay, when the Campagna is one living, waving, chirping, humming
mass of green; when grass and flowers spring up in every interstice of
the old pavement, in every crevice of the crumbling walls. The little
triangular strip of ground on the Janiculum was a tangle of flowers:
belated jonquils and daffodils drooped in the shade of the velvet-leaved
medlar-trees; jessamines, lupins, and wild geraniums were entwined
among the box and yew hedges; garlands of tiny pink and yellow roses
were slung from ilex to ilex, drooping over the marble slab carved with
the Arcadian pipe:
Fistula cui semper clecrescit arundinis ordo,
Nam calamus cera jungitur usque minor.
Behind a clump of tapering laurels and pines was hidden a grotto, covered
with long ferns and maiden-hair, trickling with the icy water of the Acqua
Paola. In front of the little yellow villa splashed a fountain, and the
miniature amphitheatre was overrun with ivy, morning glories, and
tomatoes. The house, once the summer resort of Arcadian sonnetteers,
was now abandoned to a family of market gardeners, who hung their hats
and jackets on the marble heads of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses;
and threw their beans, maize, and garden tools into corners of the desolate
reception rooms, from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of cele¬
brities—brocaded doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals,
simpering drearily in their desolation. Sad, haggard poetesses, in sea-
green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks, and meagre
10
The Arcadian Academy.
arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-sliaven priests in white bands and mop wigs;
sonnetteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-coloured stomachers and
embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting in many-coloured
waistcoats and gorgeous shawls; and among this crowd of rococo figures,
looking down on the homely furniture, holy water vessels, hallowed box
sprigs, and smutty prints of saints and soldiers, here and there stood out
some strongly-marked individuality:—Alfieri in semi-military dress, with
the collar of his own Order of Homer, glaring fiercely round him, his red
hair waving as if in the draught of a furnace; the dapper Algarotti, phi¬
losopher for ladies, versifier for kings, and hanger-on of celebrities, his
long beaked face peeping out from a huge wig and pelisse; John Y. of
Portugal, dark, apelike, his head covered with a mass of black horsehair,
his body encased in shining armour; the Abate Metastasio, reclining on
his sofa, fat, easy, elegant, languid with selfish, self-complacent senti¬
mentality. It was strange to turn from this assembly of literary ghosts,
their gala dresses and gala looks fading away in oblivion, to the bright,
noble nature surrounding the mouldering casino. Close beneath stretched
the Yigna Corsini, overrun with tall grass, poppies, and vines; further
off, the pines of Villa Lante, St. Peter's with its background of the bald
round Monte Mario, and far in the distance, Soracte, rising out of the
hazy blue plain. In front, stretched at the foot of the Janiculum, lay
Rome, bounded on one side by the ilexes of the Pincian and the Quirinal,
and on the other by the Tiber winding past the green Testaccio Mound.
Perhaps it was just in this contrast between the grand view and the blooming
garden, and the time-stained portraits of long-forgotten men and women,
whose frail talents had withered and fallen to dust with time, that lay the
charm of the Bosco Parrasio. We returned often and often to spend the
burning afternoons in the shady garden, or in the cool, dismantled rooms,
going home at sunset, carrying away bunches of flowers, tiny roses,
polyanthuses gorgeous as an Oriental brocade, sapphire-coloured irises,
exquisitely delicate in texture and perfume, tied up with long sprays of
maidenhair fresh from the trickling grotto; sketches, too, of some bro¬
caded Lycidas or powdered Chloe, and above all, vague impressions, quaint
and sentimental, of the long-deceased and long-forgotten world of the last
century.
During the intervals of our visits we procured, not without great diffi¬
culty, old books relating to the Arcadian Academy. We sought for them
in dingy dens near the Piazza Navona, and on stone benches behind the
Pantheon; among rows of musty, faded, worm-eaten, volumes, and among
heaps of soiled prints, engravings, and etchings. Thus, one by one, we
discovered many of the heavily-bound, childishly-printed books with the
invariable Imprimatur, and "Approbation of the Superiors," and the no
less invariable pages of dedicatory nonsense, in huge characters, with
The Arcadian Academy.
11
windmills and cupids as initial letters; the books winch contained all that
remains of Arcadian glory, and whence we extracted the materials for the
folloAving history of the once famous Academy of the Arcadians, round
which centred the general intellectual life of the Italian eighteenth century,
of which we would fain give some notion before proceeding to study its
special artistic products.
II.
The grand literature and art which burst into full efflorescence at the
beginning of the sixteenth century had their origin in the strong, active,
cheerful life of the previous age; the sixteenth century, the time of foreign
invasion, of Spanish and papal preponderance, of despair, brutality, and
fanaticism, in its turn produced and bequeathed to the succeeding century
its artistic and literary fruit—the crazy, meretricious architecture and
sculpture of the Jesuit churches; the theatrical and ecstatic Bolognese
painting; and the wild conceits and languid affectation of the literary
school of Marini. These were the products of a time of unhealthy excite¬
ment; they grew to maturity in one of national lethargy, and the poor
exhausted seventeenth century was reviled not only for its own indolence
and incapacity, but for the extravagance which it had inherited from its
predecessor. The mystic sibyls and tragic martyrdoms of Guido and
Domenichino became simpering sentimental ladies and romping opera
murders in the hands of Donato Creti, of Ciro Ferri, and of Luca Giordano;
the brilliant paradoxes of Marini and the elegant effeminacy of Guarini
turned into systematic nonsense and studied vapidness among their
successors: the sun cooled itself in the waters of rivers which were on fire;
the celestial sieve, resplendent with shining holes, was swept by the bristly
back of the Apennines; love was an infernal heaven and a celestial hell,
it was burning ice and freezing fire, and was inspired by ladies made up
entirely of coral, gold thread, lilies, roses, and ivory, on whose lips sat
Cupids shooting arrows Avhicli were snakes. In short, if in England the
rage for conceits injured not a few excellent poets, in Italy it made the
fortune of scores of poetasters; for the indolent, ostentatious nobles, who
presided over the innumerable academies, required mad paradoxes and
vapid hyperboles in their birthday odes and dedicatory sonnets as much
as they required fluttering smirking goddesses for their gardens, and
curling masonry and waving stucco work for their chapels. Yet it
was during this despicable period of exhausted repose that took place
the partial renovation which produced the modern Italian world; it was
among these languid, pompous, artificial people of the seventeenth century
that modern society began to be formed, and it is in dealing with them
that we first find that we have to do, 110 longer with our remote ancestors,
12
The Arcadian Academy.
living in castellated houses, travelling on horseback, fighting in the streets,
and carousing at banquets; but with the grandfathers of our grandfathers,
steady, formal, .hypocritical people, paying visits in coaches, going to
operas, giving dinner parties, and litigating and slandering rather than
assassinating and poisoning. As the century advanced and the stormy
times of invasion and reformation were left further and further behind,
Italy, indolent, pedantic, and ostentatious, saw the slow consolidation of
regular, formal governments; despotic, but not illegal, letting people do
what they chose except think and act for themselves; while the spiritual
authorities, with their well-organised Jesuit schools and officially-managed
Inquisition, relaxed their sway, or rather let their zeal die out into self-
complacent meddlesomeness. Heresy had long been crushed, indifference
was rapidly spreading, and free thought was almost becoming a possibility;
in short, the ponderous inert mass of Italian society was imperceptibly
slipping onwards.
At this time Rome was, with the exception of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca,
the only truly independent Italian State, and the only true republic remaining.
The Papal Sec had become a most perfect oligarchy; the sacred college
was mainly recruited among the nobility, and the pope was the doge or
gonfaloniere for life of an ecclesiastical senate. Religious zeal there was
no longer: the race of Caraffas and Perettis had died out; poor monks
remained poor monks, and inquisitors remained inquisitors; the Pro¬
testant and Catholic States were treated with the same bland civility; all
ideas of giving laws to Europe had been laid aside as folly. The popes
were elected sovereigns, whose only thought was to secure to their relatives
wealth and a chance of succession; the cardinals were rich senators aspir¬
ing to sovereign power, and consoling their disappointment with pomp
and ostentation. Still, this languid system of nepotism was not without its
advantages: each pope brought with him his family and friends from
Bologna, Lombardy, or Venetia; Roman life was kept up by a continual
influx of foreigners, and Roman society obtained a more liberal and
active character than it could otherwise have had. The papal families
vied with each other in tasteless magnificence: the Borghese enlarged the
great villa outside Porta del Popolo; the Odescalchi of Como built the
vast yellow palace opposite the SS. Apostoli; the Altieri erected the huge
clumsy structure near the Gesu; the Pistojese Rospigliosi established
themselves on the Quirinal, the Florentine Corsini on the Janiculum;
everywhere, in short, the strangers colonised Rome. To them are due
those enormous palaces with spacious courts and low-stepped stairs,
bedizened with plaster dragons and flowerets and curls of masonry
without, and with gilt Cupids, and brick and chalk-coloured frescoes,
within; and the many villas with straight walls of clipped ilex and box,
and innumerable ill-restored, worthless statues in fantastic temples.
The Arcadian Academy.
13
They employed the frigid Maratta and the stiff Sacchi to cover their
ceilings with earthy-tinted Gods and Nymphs, and the clumsy Duquesnoy
and the theatrical Legros to ornament their chapels with gigantic saints in
flying marble robes. Thanks to them and their hangers-on, Rome was in
the middle of the seventeenth century a handsome modern-looking town,
for most of the houses with shell, pinebranch, and other stucco ornaments
which abound in what are now the dirtiest quarters, were then resplendent
with whitewash. The prince nephews were likewise patrons of music,
which was then struggling to free itself from the inexorable composers
of madrigals and canons ; theatres were built, and cardinals had won¬
derful private concerts, at which sang all the charming sirens of the
day, Milton's Baroni and Evelyn's Laurettos and Pasqualinos. But
above all the Roman aristocracy favoured literature and men of letters:
not a wedding could take place, not a cardinal could be promoted, without
volumes of poems being published on the occasion, and the innumerable
lay ecclesiastics who hung on to the princes of the church were all poets,
members and perhaps founders of academies. In short, thanks to foreign
colonisation and nepotism, there was in Rome a vast literary bustle
without aim or result.
But, as the century of incapacity and indolence drew towards its close,
Italian intellect began once more to stir; music, destined to attain to
perfection in the succeeding age, rapidly superseded the plastic arts; and
a new style of poetry, free from conceit and extravagance, soon showed
itself. It would certainly be difficult to find in any Italian verses of the
end of the seventeenth century the feeling and grace of the songs con¬
tained in Salvator Rosa's music-book, but nevertheless a great literary
revival did take place. While _Redi let his droll humour riot in his
burlesque Triumph of Bacchus, and Menzini wrote his sharp, harsh
Satires, Filicaia and Guidi struck a note which had been mute for more
than two centuries; instead of addressing the descendants of the " un-
conquered Hippolytus " and the "magnanimous Alfonso " of Ariosto and
Tasso, they addressed Italy, France, and Germany; they spoke to a
nation in the name of a nation, and their poetry has the nobility as well
as the bombast of newly-obtained and as yet misunderstood independence.
At the same time the conceits and fustian of the poets of the preceding
generation began to lose favour, and the simplicity and elegance of the
early Italian classics began once more to be admired. In Rome especially
a society of literary purists formed itself, which included some of the
most gifted poets and some of the most eminent pedants of the day;
for literature had sunk so low that mediocrity could easily associate with
talent, nay, that talent and mediocrity might be found strangely united
in a single individual. They found a staunch patroness in Queen Christina
of Sweden, who, in return for the amount of bombastic flattery usual in
14
The Arcadian Academy.
that day, received them as friends and presided over their meetings in
her gardens. They even introduced her majesty's bad verses into their
own poems, a better proof than the most servile flattery that these writers
of the seventeenth century were without station, fortune, or a literary
public. They turned their attention especially to extirpating what
remained of the metaphysical poetry of the previous age, and to rehabili¬
tating Petrarch and his followers, Bembo, Molza, and Costanzo; and
their influence became daily greater and more acknowledged. However,
they did not succeed in bettering their own fortunes, for, on the death of
the munificent Christina, they lost their fixed meeting-place, and had to
send their servile muse to Don Livio Odescalchi to ask for an invitation
to Frascati, and to Cardinal Corsini to beg admission into his gardens—
a favour readily granted, for the Boman nobles were idle, conceited, and
loved to play the Maecenas. However, one fortunate spring morning of
the yearJL-G92, Fate decreed that they should find no better place of
meeting than the large pasture tracts behind the castle of Sant' Angelo,
usually known as the Prati di Castello. The party numbered fourteen,
and included some of the most illustrious men of letters then flourishing:
Alessandro Guidi, the humpbacked favourite of Queen Christina,
regarded by himself and his contemporaries as a second Pindar, and who
boasted that his poetical stables contained a hundred winged coursers,
ready to carry up his misshapen little person in the track of the horses
of the sun; Giambattista Felice.Zappi, a young Imolese lawyer, of noble
birth and elegant person, of whose graceful though rather insipid poems
we shall speak more than once; Silvio Stampiglia, historiographer and
writer of tragi-comical opera texts to the Emperor Leopold; the Calabrian
jurist and critic Giovanni VincenzodGmvina; the Abate Crescimbeni,
one of the stupidest and most self-important of Boman pedants; and
nine others, mostly satellites of the two last-mentioned writers. The
Prati di Castello form a quiet, rural peninsula, separated by a bend of the
sluggish yellow river from the vast grey town, with its innumerable
cupolas and belfries shining in the sunlight; the ground is covered with
grass and mint, crushed and browsed by the shaggy Boman horses and
long-horned, white oxen; here and there a hedge of flowering thorn or a
clump of slender elms, and to the back, the round mass of the castle of
S. Angelo and the long extent of the Vatican terrace gardens. The
quiet pastoral scene impressed even our fourteen literati, for after they
had read and improvised verses, and applauded each other as indiscrimi¬
nately as was their wont, one of them exclaimed: "It seems to-day as if
Arcadia were reviving for us! " His speech was hailed as an inspiration,
and it was immediately determined that, since Arcadia had been thus
happily resuscitated, it should be kept alive by their care. The first and
most obvious necessity was to exchange their real names for such as
The Arcadian Academy.
15
would suit their new capacity of Arcadian shepherds, and fourteen
pastoral names and surnames were forthwith written on as many slips of
paper, which were extracted, in the order that fate ordained, out of the
hat of one of the company. This being done, the fourteen shepherds in
black coats, white bands, and horsehair wigs, pastoral physicians, lawyers,
priests, and professors, set about framing the constitution of the newly-
created state. It was republican, but paternal; the elected head of the
state was called custode (custos), and to him were given two subordinate,
or viee-custodi: such was the rudimentary form of government.
Scarcely was the existence of Arcadia known than everyone in Rome ^
longed to be admitted into it, the learned literati and the stupid nobles
being equally charmed with the notion. Meanwhile the Academy elected
its president, or, more properly speaking, the sheep looked out for a head
shepherd. The choice unanimously fell upon one of the least brilliant of
the members; yet the choice was a happy one, as events proved in after
years. Guidi was old, conceited, and too little interested in the institu¬
tion; Zappi, on the other hand, was too young and simple-minded; Silvio
Stampiglia was a writer of plays, and had no connections in the ecclesi¬
astical city; Leonio was insignificant, and the other unnamed ones still
more so; the choice therefore remained between Gravina and Crescimbeni.
Gravina was a man of about thirty: tall, thin, with a fine worn, thoughtful
face, thin lips, a long weak chin, dreamy eyes and a massive forehead,
whence his scant hair fell in light ringlets; he had a considerable fortune
for a Roman writer in those days, and held the chair of Jurisprudence at
the Sapienza. As a jurist his talent was undoubted, his great works on
Romau law being read to this day, and having served, with those of Vico, to
produce a new school of Judicial Philosophy, headed by Montesquieu; he
was besides a great classical scholar, his critical writings were ingenious,
his style elegant and noble; and his society was eagerly sought by all
the most intelligent men in Rome. Gian Mario dei Crescimbeni was a
priest of about forty, born at Macerata in the March; he was small and
ungainly in figure, dark complexioned, with a nose of such huge propor¬
tions as to gain him the familiar appellation of Nasica; his crabbed
aspect was that of the pedant which he was. He had written on literature,
in a stiff', hard, low style, mere awkward compilations, and the only
original idea he was ever known to have struck out was that the Divina
Commedia was a comic poem and the Aforg ante Maggiore a serious one.
Yet, in spite of all the recommendations of person, talents, learning and
position on the one hand; and of all the disadvantages of ugliness,
stupidity, pedantry, and poverty on the other, the general choice fell not
upon the dignified and ingenious Gravina but upon the awkward and
pedantic Crescimbeni; nor was the choice a wrong one. For Crescimbeni had
a high conception of the honour and responsibility attached to the position
16
The Arcadian Academy.
of Custode Generate d Arcadia; he was a good-natured man, who could
flatter the great and soothe the humble, and whose only thought would
be to further the interests of the Academy which had honoured him with
its choice. Martello, writing some years later, describes him as discreet,
fair and modest, able to distinguish a good writer from a bad one, yet
condescending even towards a raven decked out in swan's feathers.*
Gravina, on the contrary, was neither entirely liked nor entirely respected
in Rome; his being a Neapolitan, though certainly no recommendation to
the Romans, is not sufficient to account for the rather hostile feeling
which he inspired. " He is proud and eccentric according to the general
belief" [che strano e altero e nel concetto altrui], writes Martello; he
was cold, conceited, and had an insatiable appetite for praise; to be
tolerated by him it was necessary to concur in all his notions, which were
often extravagant and pedantic, as, for instance, he affected to consider
Trissino's Italia Liberata equal to the Iliad and immeasurably superior
to Tasso's Jerusalem. "You must concur in all his notions," continues
Martello, " for the weakness of this great man is to imagine himself
possessed of all human wisdom. Praise him, and he will love you as a
son." Unfortunately the Roman literati of established position found
such conditions intolerable, although profuse enough of praise towards
wealthy patrons; so Gravina remained as Opico JErimanteo, a mere
member of the Academy, distinguished only by his own talents; while
Crescimbeni, under the name of Alfesibeo Cario, took possession of the
supreme rank of Custode Generale d'Arcadia.
However, as the Academy grew in numbers, Gravina came into greater
notice, for the institution needed a code of laws, and this work naturally
fell to the great jurist and scholar; the result was considered worthy of
Cicero, both for wisdom and latinity. Meanwhile Crescimbeni, who could
not shine by his pen, set to work quietly and patiently at gaining members
and patrons for the Academy, with which his heart was bound up. Among
the Roman nobles who aspired to the position of Maecenas, the most
conspicuous was Don Livio Odescalchi, of Como, nephew of the proud
pope who had dared to thwart Louis XIY. He was the successor to
Queen Christina's position in Roman society; in his elegant palace
between the SS. Apostoli and the Corso he gave concerts at which (as
the irate Bourdelot complains) all the ecclesiastical musicians of Rome
sang profane music, and literary receptions at which verses were read
and improvised by conspicuous writers; nay, he even invited whole
* Yi notai Crescimbeni c il suo Leonio,
Ch'ambo discroti, equanimi e modesti,
San chi sieda e chi no nel coro Aonio.
Ma gia non sono al van desio molesti
D'un corvo che di cigno abbia le piume.
Pier Jacopo Martello, Sat. 3.
The Arcadian Academy.
17
academics to his splendid villa in tlie hills. Don Livio, who was always
willing to buy literary fame at the price of such invitations, immediately
understood how important it was to connect his name with that of the
rising academy, and Crescimbeni took care to foster this belief. Don
Livio appears to have been the only noble who invited the whole Academy
to his country seat, Prince Corsini and Cardinal Farnese deigning to
receive the hungry shabby literati in their vineyards and gardens, but not
in their palaces.
There seems at the end of the seventeenth century to have lingered among
the Italian upper-classes a remnant of Spanish gravity and pomposity, which
disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the true Italian character came
once more into notice, mingled perhaps with a little French levity. It is
impossible to conceive how an institution like the Arcadian Academy could
have assumed the importance which it did, except in the midst of that
stately and solemn civilisation, marked by straight-walked gardens, heavy,
gilt coaches, black clothes, and huge curly periwigs; or in any other place
than Ilome, among its upstart princes and idle prelates, whose only
thought was ostentation of some sort. Sixty years later, in the days of
Goldoni and Gaspare Grozzi, such an academy would have been regarded
as a mere whimsical congregation of crotchety pedants and blue-stockings,
whose only use was to make people acquainted with each other, and whose
sittings were an avowed amusement, enlivened by music, small-talk, and
cards; but between the years 1090 and 1710 things were viewed in a
very different light: the Arcadian Academy, besides reviving the
simplicity and innocence of the golden age, was to reform literature
throughout Italy ; it was to make or unmake the reputation of writers ;
it was to eradicate vice and ignorance ; it was to restore to Rome the
glorious days of Augustus and of Leo X. ; it was to erect monuments to
kings and emperors, and to supply Homers for any chance Achilles who
might turn up. All this was sincerely believed by Crescimbeni, Don
Livio Odescalchi, and probably nearly all the Roman Arcadians, nor do
they ever seem to have suspected any ludicrous discrepancy between what
they were and what they were intended to be; these poetasters, priests, and
lawyers, living for the most part off dedications, and their munificent
patrons, the illiterate nobles, met in the prim box alleys and ilex groves
of the Roman villas, and fretted to read their own compositions, and
yawned over those of their companions, in the full persuasion that they
were engaged in most important work, and that the whole world watched
them with anxious interest. Everything had to be literary and solemn,
and even Arcadian amusements took a ponderous and pompous shape, as
is proved by Crescimbeni's account of that celebrated and delightful game
called the Giuoco del Sibil/one, invented by the illustrious shepherd
Domenico Trosi. " In this game of the Sibillone { i.e. great male sybil),
c
18
The Arcadian Academy.
otherwise called game of the oracle" (writes the Custode Generale
d'Arcadia), " one of the company is chosen to personate the oracle, and
answers in a single word whatever question may be put to him by
the spectators, which word is afterwards explained and shown to be suitable
to the question by two others, who play the part of interpreters. For
the sake of enjoying this most noble and curious game, after some time
there came not only friends, but other persons, and we ourselves have
seen more than once gentlemen and ladies of the highest rank, and even
Cardinals ; and in truth this was an amusement worthy of any great
personage, because, as the interpreters were mostly men learned in every
science, their interpretations were usually full of rare information,
especially philosophical . . . nay, sometimes the interpreter would fulfil
his duty with wondrous perfection, speaking extempore in elegant Italian
verses, sometimes even in rhyme."
As the Academy increased in numbers and importance, Crescimbeni
took to publishing octavo volumes with large margins, endless dedications,
and the syrinx surrounded by pine and laurel branches, the chosen emblem
of Arcadia, in which he chronicled the meetings of the Arcadians and
the Olympic Games, performances in which the clumsiness and sloth of
literary racers and wrestlers were displayed in honour of some illustrious
stranger. The cost of printing these works must have greatly surpassed
any small profits made from their dedications, and, as many of them were
published anonymously, we can ascribe their production only to the sincere
faith which Crescimbeni placed in his vocation, and his awe-stricken belief
in the institution which had placed him at its head. Later appeared
volumes containing lives of distinguished members, and others filled with
biographies of the deceased ones. In these productions Crescimbeni was
assisted by various other Academicians, whose style is rather less
insufferable than his own, but who write about Arcadian matters with as
much solemnity as their chief, From these works it appears that Arcadian
colonies were beginning to be founded all over Italy, and that scarcely a
single distinguished man of letters of any part of the country had been
missed by Crescimbeni's pastoral fishing apparatus. These books also
give an insight into the literary circles of Rome, inasmuch as they wore
connected with the academy. The principal one had for its centre the
beautiful and accomplished Faustina, daughter of the famous painter
Carlo Maratta, and wife of the then scarcely less celebrated poet Felice
Zappi. Zappi Avas considerably older than his wife, but handsome,
elegant, and highly talented, and there appears to have existed between
them an affection which never diminished, and of which Faustina's
beautiful sonnet to an old love of her husband's is a proof such as one
rarely meets among the vapid Arcadian love poems. She was likewise
skilled as a painter, and the Arcadian Academy still possesses a little
The Arcadian Academy.
19
portrait in which she has represented herself in the full maturity of her
beauty, dressed in flowered yellow brocade, her black hair raised in a high
structure, and one long curl falling on her finely-modelled neck. The face,
with its straight, delicate features, and opaque, ivory complexion, has a
sort of sedate, intellectual coquetry, like that of Pope's lady—" an equal
mixture of good humour and sensible soft melancholy"—which makes
one understand the courteous and admiring affection which Faustina
Maratti Zappi inspired in the most eminent men of Italy, a feeling quite
unlike the flat gallantry of those times, and which J^lanfredi has well
expressed in a pretty sonnet :
Fur con questi occhi al fin visto lio l'altero
Miracol di bellezza e d'oncstate,
Cui sol per adombrar, mille fiate
Oltr' Arno ed Apennin spinto ho il pensiero.
E pur con queste orecchie udito ho il vero
Pregio e il vivo stupor di nostra etate :
Or gli uni e l'altre omai paghi e beate
Chiudansi pur, ch'altro da lor non chero.
Ne tu i gran templi e i simulacri tuoi
Vantarmi intatti an cor dal tempo edace,
Nell' ampie spoglie della terra doma;
Che gloria antica o nuova altra non puoi
Mostrar pari a costei, sia con tua pace,
Bella, invitta, superba, augusta Iloma.
Rolli and Frugoni and all the principal Italian poets addressed Faustina
Maratti under her Arcadian name of Aglauro Cidonia; but their verses
were mostly inferior to their subject, and Felice Zappi himself, although
his vein was generally rather insipid and finikin, was, on the whole, the
sweetest and most elegant of the poets who sang the charms of the
beautiful painter and poetess. Faustina is the heroine of a romantic
incident, strange enough in the jog-trot literary Italy of those days. A
young noblemen, violently enamoured of her and enraged at her
contemptuous treatment, determined to destroy her beauty in default of
her reputation, and threw in her face some dreadful liquid, probably vitriol,
of which, however, only a single drop touched her, leaving on her temple
a black patch, the size of a sticking-plaster mouche, an indelible record of
this semi-miracle, which she, of course, recorded in a sonnet. It is curious
with what simplicity Count Corniani, writing sixty years later, asks with
indignant surprise how such an atrocious attempt could go unpunished ;
but its author was perhaps the nephew of a Pope, and in the eighteenth
century it is a great proof of the liberty enjoyed by Italians that the crime
should not have been punished on the victim rather than on the criminal.
An old friend and constant visitor at the Zappi's was Pier Jacopo Martello,
who resided for some time in Rome as Secretary to the Ambassador of the
Bolognesc Senate to the Holy See. Martello was, like most of his
<- 2
20
The Arcadian Academy.
contemporaries, a learned man—lie had written Latin verses and treatise? ;
but lie had been in Paris and acquired a taste for French literature, which,
joined to his secular Bolognese education, gave him a light and genteel
air compared with the solemn Roman clod-hoppers. A volume of his
works contains a finely-wrought little engraving of his portrait, suspended
with a pastoral pipe on an oak tree : with his carefully crimped hair and
fur pelisse he has much the look of a dandy; and his thin lips, heavy
eyelids, and scraggy profile, give the general impression of conceit,
inoffensive, intellectual, and benign.*/Martello was perhaps the first Italian
who made his fellow-countrymen acquainted with French literature, and
who, while the subtle and icy Gravina was constructing plays on what he
conceived to be the Greek model, wrote tragedies in the correct and
polished French style, and in a species of Alexandrin, invented by himself,
and of such uncouthness of sound as to do him little credit. Occasionally
the cheerful little Bolognese society at Faustina Zappi's house was
increased by the benign and elegant mathematician Francesco Zanotti
and his rough, merry brother, the painter and poet Giampietro. Then
there was the intimate of old Carlo Maratta, the famous violinist and
composer Arcangelo Corelli, whose works are still remembered and
admired, while Martello, the Zanottis, Zappi, and even the beautiful
Faustina herself have long been forgotten.
But while colonies were being founded in all directions, and the
illustrious names—not only of princes, and senators, and cardinals, but
of the last Gonzagas and Estensi—were being exchanged for pastoral
appellations, danger threatened the Academy from within, and a spark
was set alight which well-nigh blew Arcadia back again into chaos. The
haughty and eccentric Gravina had not seen without a pang the growth
of an institution which Had declined having him at its head, nor the glory
which had thence accrued to his rival Crescimbeni. This ill-favoured,
awkward pedant had become the acknowledged head of the whole hierarchy
of Italian literature, petted by cardinals and princes and flattered by
poets and ladies; and meanwhile he, Gian Yincenzo Gravina, the greatest
scholar and jurist in Rome, the author of luminous treatises and elegant
poems, the handsome, dignified, eloquent Gravina, was left to muse and
study in his rustily-furnished rooms in Via Giulia, and to hold forth
thrice a week before the students of the Hapienza. Gravina's jealous
irritation was increased beyond all control by the ill success of his tragedies,
which, as Martello informs us, no one would read; and the illwill pent up
for twenty years suddenly vented itself on the unlucky Crescimbeni. The
pretext for the quarrel is confused and obscure. Gravina accused Cres¬
cimbeni of passing off the famous Arcadian Code as his own work;
Crescimbeni declared that Gravina had merely translated what he himself
had suggested; which was in the right and which in the wrong none
The Arcadian Academy.
21
ciin now tell, and no one perhaps understood at the time; but this much
is certain, that a schism ensued, Crescimbeni retaining the main body of
the Arcadians while Gravina marched off at the head of the minority.
And now appeared the influence of Gravina's undoubted talents; one
Arcadian after another abondoned Crescimbeni and rallied round his rival.
Between the two parties poor Don Livio Odescalchi was perfectly lost;
he felt bound to protect from heresy the Academy that was rendering him
immortal; but he could in no way discover which was the orthodox branch,
and which the schismatic, wavering between the authority of Crescimbeni,
long and intimately connected with the institution, and the influence of
Gravina, the most brilliant scholar of Rome. At length, and in despair,
Don Livio let himself be won over by Gravina, but reluctantly, and
casting a half remorseful glance back at Crescimbeni. Although he
installed the Anti-Arcadia in one of his villas outside Porta del Popolo,
and even accepted the nominal title of Custode Generale, he yet tried to
keep on good terms with Crescimbeni, who takes care to inform us of this
fact (Vile degli Arcadi Morti), at the same time hinting darkly and
solemnly that the unhappy Prince was the victim of a conspiracy, of
whose existence he became aware very soon, but too late, alas ! to be saved.
In the midst of these awful events, which the scoffing Baretti ridiculed
with more coarseness than wit fifty years later, one of the original founders
of the disturbed x\cademy, Domenico Petrosellini, had the levity to sing
the war between Gravina and Crescimbeni in a lieroic-comic poem, which
had great success at the time, but is now extremly difficult to procure.
But the schism, begun about 1711, was not of long duration. Gravina's
coldness, intolerant and intolerable conceit, and real want of interest in
Arcadian matters, little by little sent back the penitent schismatics to
the orthodox institution, and after some time the lieresiarch found himself
shunned no less by his own former disciples than by those of his opponent.
So Gian Vincenzo Gravina hid his humiliation in his house near Palazzo
Farnese, and soothed his disappointment by doing his best to make his
young pupil Metastasio an eminent lawyer, instead of letting him waste
his powers on being a poet.
The Arcadian Academy appears already to have possessed some sort
of fixed abode, called Serbatoio, a word that might be translated into
reservoir or conservatory, and about which Baretti made the following
etymological remarks : " Serbatoio, a Greek word derived from the
Chaldean, is in Rome equivalent to poetical Secretary's office, while in
Florence it has the meaning of a closet in which are kept meat, vegetables,
poultry, and other eatables.'''' However, the Serbatoio appears to have
been a very humble apartment, judging by a letter of Giampietro Zanotti,
in which he says : " I have been to the Serbatoio, a very little thing,
ornamented with very little things." Indeed, the only large thing that
22
The Arcadian Academy.
it contained was Crcscimbcni's nose : " I assure you " (writes Zanotti to
his wife) "that it impressed me much more than the obelisk of the Piazza
del Popolo Oh, what a nose! A statue ought to be made
of it and placed in the Capitol. What is the cupola of St. Peter's or
the Colosseum compared to that nose? A wretched trifle. Let us pray
Heaven to preserve that nose yet a while, and let us give thanks for our
living now-a-days and seeing so grand a sight." The Bolognese painter
could not recover from the impression made by Crescimbeni's nose, and
again spoke of it in a letter of the 19th December, 1719: "Saturday
last the lightning fell with tremendous crash on the Capitol, and, strange
to say, broke a bench on which three lawyers were seated, without hurting
them. Think if it were to fall on to the Serbatoio d'Arcadia and hit the
nose of the Custode ! "
When Giampietro Zanotti wrote this rhapsody on Crescimbeni's nose
Gravina had already been removed from the scene of his shortlived glory
and long humiliation. Unable to brook the final victory of his rival he
had apparently accepted the invitation of the King of Sardinia to fill the
place of professor of civil law at Turin, when, in 1718, lie suddenly died,
leaving the bulk of his fortune to his favourite pupil Pietro Bonaventura
-Trapassi, the son of an ex-soldier and small druggist, who was later to
fill the world with his fame under the name of Pietro Metastasio. Soon
after Gravina's death, his friends, Vincenzo Leonio and Pier Jacopo
Martello, informed Crescimbeni that the deceased had charged them to
make known to the Custode Generale d'Arcadia that he deeply regretted
having provoked the schism in that institution, but that he had done so
from no want of respect towards it. This extraordinary posthumous self-
humiliation of one of the vainest of men may possibly have touched even
the rusty heart of his rival ; at all events, the merits of Gravina were
appreciated more universally than before, and by a general decree of the
Arcadian Acedemy the name of Gian Vincenzo Gravina, erased during
his lifetime from its registers as that of a malignant schismatic, was
inscribed once more in them a short time after his death.
Two events, more brilliant than even this one, were reserved for the last
years of Crescimbeni's reign.
In 1725 there arrived in Rome the most illustrious Signor Benedetto
Marcello, patrician of Venice and Provveditore of Pola, celebrated for
his patronage of poetry and music. Crescimbeni and his pedants, who
were utterly incapable of appreciating the musical genius of Marcello, and
who, in their happy state of self-delusion, doubtless considered musicians
as miserable buffoons, not worthy of a look from an empty-headed man
of letters, were yet capable of appreciating the great Venetian composer's
high rank. So Marcello was forthwith admitted to the inestimable honour
of belonging to the Arcadian Academy, and, when his psalms were performed
The Arcadian Academy.
23
in Cardinal Ottoboni's palace, Crcscimbeni and his colleagues embellished
this solemnity by reciting their own verses in the interludes of the music
—a splendid instance of self-sufficient folly patronising genius. Marcello,
however, was of very little importance compared with the heroic prince
who graced these performances with his presence ; and, if sonnets were
made for the patrician who deigned to cultivate music, Olympic Games
were decreed in honour of the king who stooped to pay attention to poetry.
The king in question was Don Jolui V. of Portugal, one of the most
licentious, superstitious, and spendthrift princes of the day, and whose
portrait at the Bosco Parrasio, representing him in full armour and a
black horsc-liair wig, from under which peers his swarthy, apelike
countenance, reveals one of the most brutish natures conceivable. Crcs¬
cimbeni, however, was too much dazzled by the glory which surrounded
John V. to perceive any of his Majesty's uncouth peculiarities, and the
king, in return for the Olympic Games above mentioned, made a present
to the Arcadian Academy of a triangular strip of ground on the Janiculum,
which, being laid out with flowers and shrubs, was designated by the name
of Parrhasian Grove, and became the summer resort of the shepherds in
black broadcloth and full-bottomed wigs.
Meanwhile the Academy was gradually changing, as one after another
of the old members dropped away and new ones started up instead.
Alessandro Guidi had not long survived Queen Christina and the seven¬
teenth century; Silvio Stampiglia had for years been replaced in the im¬
perial service by the Candiot dramatist and reviewer Zeno; Carlo Maratta,
last of great painters, and Corelli, first of great violinists, had followed
each other to the grave; the intelligent and accomplished Martello had
also gone, leaving, however, a growing crop of French imitations and
Alexandrin verses behind; even Prince Livio Odescalchi, would-be Mae¬
cenas, had died, happy, doubtless, in expectation of immortal fame.
This gradual change in the members of the Academy indicated a much
more important one in the whole republic of letters, nay, in the whole of
Italian society. The men educated in the seventeeth century were rapidly
dying out, while those already educated in the eighteenth were beginning to
take their place. The solemn period of stagnation, nepotism, and Spanish
rule was over, and the time of French influence, levity, tolerance, and national
reconstitution, had come. There remained, it is true, not only then, but
throughout the whole eighteenth century, much that was childish, pedantic,
and servile : there were vast numbers of dunces who passed off for learned
men, and vast numbers of fools who got credit as poets; worse still, there
were truly learned men wasting their time on the most futile disputes, and
real poets throwing away their talents on the most insignificant subjects;
there was, still worst of all, the basest adulation of princes, and prelates,
and fine ladies; this was the miserable inheritance of the previous age,
24
The Arcadian Academy.
but by its side was what the previous age had not possessed—learning put
to worthy use, talent developed in the right way, and protection granted
generously and intelligently. But of these new characteristics we shall
speak later, when we come to treat of the time when they were more
highly developed than at the mere beginning of the century. We must,
however, mention some of the new Arcadians, who went to the Bosco
Parrasio before its laurels and ilexes had grown out of the state of bushes.
Paolo Antonio Rolli is one of the most conspicuous of these more or
less forgotten celebrities. He was born near Rome, in the valley of the
Tiber, about 3 086; and, after having vainly attempted to make his fortune
at home by his talents for both written and extemporary poetry, went to
London, wrote libretti for Handel and his rival Porpora, translated
Paradise Lost, was put into the Dunciad for his pains, and pronounced
to be a vermicelli-maker or pastry-cook, the only profession besides that
of musician for which the Britons of those days gave the Italians credit.
In Italy, oil the contrary, Rolli got more consideration than money; his
elegies were translated into Latin, and lie himself, being a native of
Todi in Umbria, was dignified with the title of the modern Propertius.
Although Rolli was far from being a first-rate poet, this epithet was
founded upon more than the mere accident of his Umbrian origin and
elegiac tendencies, for, living when he did, he had a strange, unaccount¬
able antique air about him, such as became common only much later. He
was trifling and superficial, yet, among the colourless, insipid imitators of
Petrarca, he stood out as does a second-rate copy of some mythological
picture by Titian among a lot of hazy, woe-begone Guidos and Sasso-
ferratos. While his contemporaries composed in loose, limp rhymes, he was
the first to make Italian hendecasyllabics; while they were satisfied with
the barest, slightest outlines of conventional scenery, he went into minute
descriptions of the split sides of figs, of the crackling of burning juniper
berries, of the scent of Monte Porzio wine, and the weight of ripe melons;
while they indited canzoni upon the beatification of saints, he wrote a
hymn to Venus, a patchwork of imitations from half the writers of anti¬
quity, but not without a pantheistic, pagan tone, such as was rare before
Goetlie; * indeed, his antique tendencies were carried to such a length that
* 0 bella Venere, figlia del Giorno,
Destami affetti puri nell' ammo,
E un guardo volgimi dal tuo soggiorno.
Te lion accolsero da' flutti infidi,
Nata dall' atro sangue Saturnio,
Di Cipro fertile gl' infami lidi:
A te non fumano l'are in Citera,
Ne ti circonda con le Bassaridi
De' fauni e satiri l'impura schiera.
The Arcadian Academy.
25
he thought it prudent to head his works by a declaration that, " by the
Divine Grace, I was born in the faith and in the bosom of the holy
Catholic Roman Church, which I hare everywhere and at all times pub¬
licly professed." Rolli never departed further from the models of his times
than in the series of little poems addressed to his Egeria: she is certainly
not the Cynthia of Propertius, still less the Delia of Tibullus, yet she is
more closely related to them than to the colourless semi-nymplis, semi-
nuns, of Rolli's contemporaries; he makes no attempt to substitute the
conventional pseudo-classic details for modern ones, and it is perhaps the
very minuteness and distinctness with which he describes Egeria at her
mirror, dressed in brocade trimmed witli gold fringe, flowers and lace on
her powdered hair, waiting for her heavy gilt coach, which brings him
nearer to antiquity than his classical brethren. Rolli, though often
graceful and lively, and sometimes almost pathetic, was after all only a
second-rate poet, but a piece by him has become a sort of relic from being
connected with a great poet,—the canzonet " Solitario Bosco Ombroso"
having been a favourite with Frau Rath, who taught it to the little Goethe
even before he knew a word of Italian.
A more brilliant and universally admired poet than Rolli was the Abate
Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, but his subsequent literary fate was worse than
that of Rolli, for^wliile the latter has been permitted to remain in inglo¬
rious peace, Frugoni's name has been used as a bye-word by thousands of
Italians who have never read a line by him. That frugonena means high-
sounding nonsense, meaningless fustian, is well known by every student of
Le sagge favole sull' onde chiare
Poserti in vaga conca cerulea,
A fior del tremulo tranquillo mare;
Perche il tuo vivido spirto sovrano
Penetra e scorre negli umor fiuidi
Clie padre rendono l'ampio Oceano,
II qual con l'umide ramose braccia
Lo porta e infonde nel grembo all' aride
Cose clie mutano colore c faccia;
Tu quando i tiepidi venti amorosi
II duro ghiaccio sui monti sciolgono,
E i fiumi a Tetide vanno orgogliosi;
Tratta dai rapidi tuoi bianehi augelli
Scendi ncl suolo cbe per te germina
Erbette tenere e fior novelli.
Tu rendi a gli alberi e frutto e fronda;
Per te gli arati campi verdeggiano,
E cresce prodiga la messe bionda;
Per te di pampini veston le viti,
E il caro peso dei folti grappoli
Per te sostengono gli olmi mariti.
2(J The Arcaclian Academy.
Italian literature, but who and what Frugoni was, few have cared to inves¬
tigate. He was, when we really get to see him, a lamentable instance of
line talent, not wasted, but ruined out and out by a disorderly character, a
ramshackle career, and a stupid public. Of noble Genoese family, Fru¬
goni had been forced into a monastery at sixteen; many years were wasted
in getting out of it, with the help of the good-natured Pope; many more
in vainly attempting to recover the fortune which, on his embracing a
monastic life, had been seized by his relatives; and the remainder of
Frugoni's days passed in trying to obtain a fixed mode of life, an attempt
frustrated by political events, by his antecedents and by his own reckless,
disorderly habits, which would have been punished by any but the easy¬
going hierarchy of the eighteenth century. In the midst of all this, Fru-
goni's brilliant, prolific, unsteady talents suffered as much as his worldly
career, for their possessor seems to have been totally destitute of patience,
of desire of improvement, and of judgment: he poured forth sonnet upon
sonnet, ode upon ode, stanza upon stanza, without any thought of
attempting a large work, or perfecting a small one. Perfectly satisfied
with his facile vein and the easily excited applause of his hearers, and
firmly persuaded that he would be immortal, Frugoni's talents were, as Ave
have said, not merely wasted, but irretrievably ruined, for in his works the
good is not embedded in the bad, but sense is inextricably interwoven with
nonsense, and a grand thought or beautiful image is (we can find no other
expresion) so mixed and amalgamated with trashiness as to be absolutely
irrecoverable. Yet his poems were very popular, nor was their popularity
entirely undeserved, for they have a flow of versification, a magnificence of
sound, and a splendour of colouring and imagery which dazzle the mind
before it has time to reflect on the meaning. Frugoni's epithets always
raise up confused visions of beauty and wonder, and the mere sound of his
verse impresses you, but on trying to analyse one of his pieces you find
that he evidently had no idea of what he was writing, and that he did
nothing but heap together brilliant pieces of trash and gorgeous fragments
of real value, which only serve to make the absurdity of the remainder
more lamentable. However, Frugoni's time was not'one of inanity,
although it may have been one of bad taste, and Frugoni himself was not
an inane poet; on the contrary, his grandiloquent and highly-coloured
nonsense Avas probably enjoyed just in proportion as it differed from the
pale, correct, languid truisms of the poets of the preceding generation.
Frugoni was a man of real and brilliant talents, and talents like his, Iioav-
ever much Avasted and ruined they may be, cannot fail to excite Avhat they
do in some measure deserve, momentary admiration and everlasting abuse.
A third poet was beginning tP be spoken of at Arcadian meetings,
although probably much less than either Eolli or Frugoni, and this was
the Abate Pietro Metastasio. He had been early brought into notice by
The Arcaclian Academy.
27
the fact of his being the adopted son of Gravina, of ominous memory;
and after his benefactor's death he often appeared at the Bosco Parrasio,
first with a tiresome frigid elegy to the memory of the deceased, and then
with other trifles of which the great Crescimbeni deigned to approve.
People expected him to be another, though less dangerous, Gravina, and
praised him for his erudition; but unfortunately, having consumed his
protector's legacy, he got into idle ways at Naples, neglected the study
of the law, and abandoned the company of the wise and learned Arcadians
for that of composers and singers and similar riffraff. What would poor
Gravina have done if he could have foreseen such an end for his adopted
son ? said the Arcadians at the Bosco Parrasio, and shook their heads at
the prodigal. One day, however, in the year_J.724, news came from
Naples that a play called Dkloy &ct to music by Sarro and written by
Gravina's pupil, had had the most extraordinary success, and soon after
the worthies at the Bosco Parrasio heard to their amazement that
Metastasio was the greatest dramatist Italy had ever produced, and the
greatest poet she had given the world since Tasso.
But there was another poet who, while infinitely less esteemed than any
of his contemporaries, was yet infinitely more flattered; and who, while
everyone knew that he would, nay must, be forgotten by the very next
generation, yet received what Kolli, Frugoni, or Metastasio would vainly
have sought for—an honour which, while the greatest Italy could give,
she yet ventured to offer only to an inferior sort of beings. The crown of
the Capitol had got to seem such a theatrical honour that it could be
given only to a kind of theatrical performer, and such was the Cavalier
Bernardino Perfetti, the greatest of the Italian improvvisatori. If we
have been speaking in a paradoxical style it lias been from the very
nature of our subject, for never did there exist a stranger paradox than
one of these extemporary poets, possessed of a splendid endowment which
every other sort of poet would have despised, displaying his talent in an
exercise which was an avowed waste of it, and, while producing nothing
but commonplace nonsense, giving a greater impression of genius and
inspiration than the best of his worthier contemporaries. It is therefore
easier to condemn and ridicule such poets and poetry than to judge them
with fairness, or even to get a distinct notion of the case under judgment.
However, before speaking of Perfetti himself, we must make a few remarks
on the class to which he belonged. Italy appears at all times to have
produced extemporary poets; and we meet them, male and female, almost
as often during the Renaissance as during the eighteenth century. Lorenzo
do' Medici is said to have improvised his spirited "Falcon Hunt" at a
convivial meeting, and both he and his son Leo X. had regular
improvvisatori among their satellites; but it seems probable that the gradual
institution of a number of academies, of which the eighteenth century was
28
The Arcadian Academy.
particularly prolific, and the gradual spreading of literary interests among
the more frivolous parts of society—another characteristic feature of the
eighteenth century—favoured the profession of extemporary poets, and
caused it to become a perfectly independent one. For besides the poets
who, like Rolli and Frugoni, extemporised verses at a party or at table,
without thinking any more about them, and whose fame rested entirely
upon their written compositions, there was a class of men and of women
who would improvise, not a couplet here or there, but whole poems of
thirty or forty stanzas on any given subject and before assemblies con¬
vened for the express purpose of hearing them ; people who did not
write and perhaps could not write, for the exercise of their profession
rendered them incapable of anything but the most slovenly work, besides
accustoming them to compose only under a kind of stimulus which they
had not when calmly writing at a table. To be a successful improrrisatore
real poetical faculties were undoubtedly required: great vivacity of mind
and brilliancy of imagination, besides extraordinary powers of expression
and versification, but besides this there were qualities which an ordinary
poet rarely possesses—a nervous excitability and a warmth of, we should
almost say, sensational feeling, which generally developed at the expense
of the body and the mind. Most improrrisatori showed signs of utter
exhaustion, such as was rapidly destroying the young Metastasio when
the Princess Belmonte Fignatelli induced Gravina to forbid his impro¬
vising any longer. How much depended upon the practice of improvising,
the habit of getting into this extraordinary state of physical and intellectual
excitement, is shown by the fact that Lorenzo d'Aponte, the librettist of
Mozart, gradually developed the faculty in himself and in his brother;
while Metastasio, who had possessed it when a mere child, afterwards
declared that he could neither extemporise a single line nor understand
how he had ever been able to do so. That the product of these anomalous
talents must have been a very anomalous one is evident; and that the
improrrisatori talked a vast amount of trash, nay that there was in their
performance no real originality or literary merit, is undeniable; that, as
Metastasio, who in after-life could not endure the thing, tells us, the poems
thus produced were full of " Angelicas with the helmet of Orlando and
Rinaldos wearing the nightcap of Armida; " that, as we learn from
Forsyth, the scraps of improvised poetry written down by persons of the
audience proved the vilest rubbish—all this is very true, and yet it is even
more true that the performance of a good improrrisatore was a wonderful
performance: the rapid out-pouring of sonorous verse, the succession of
image on image, flashing past the mind in vague splendour, the air of
inspiration, and the sensuous eloquence which is more potent than that of the
reasoning faculties—all this made the exhibition of a Perfetti or a Corilla
something fascinating; but a mere exhibition it was, like that of fireworks
The Arcadian Academy.
29
or some strange theatre scene, and it was absurd to seek in it a poem or
any sort of real work of art.* Among the many accounts which remain
of the performance of the greatest improvrisatore of the last century we
choose the following one, written by the lively and intelligent President
de Brosses to his French friends from Rome in the year 1739: "You
have heard of the class of poets who think nothing of composing an
extemporary poem on any subject one may propose to them. The subject
we gave to Perfetti was the Aurora Borealis. He meditated, looking
downwards, for at least half a quarter of an hour, to the sound of a
harpsichord preluding sotto voce. Then he rose, and began to declaim in
rhymed octaves, softly, and stanza by stanza, the harpsichord continuing
to play chords while he was declaiming, and preluding during the
intervals between the stanzas. At first they succeeded each other slowly
enough, but little by little the poet became more animated, and in
proportion to his doing so the harpsichord also played louder and
louder, till at length this extraordinary man declaimed like a poet full of
enthusiasm. The accompanier on the harpsichord and himself went on
together with surprising rapidity. When it was over, Perfetti seemed
fatigued; he told us that he does not like to have to improvise often, as
it exhausts his mind and body. His poem pleased me very much; in
his rapid declamation it seemed to me sonorous, full of ideas and
imagery You may be sure, however, that it consisted in
reality of much more sound than sense: it is impossible that the
general construction should not be most often maimed and tortured,
and that the filling-up be not mere grandiloquent rubbish." Bernardino
Perfetti, thus described by the President de Brosses, was of noble
Sienese family, a knight of the order of St. Stephen and professor of
jurisprudence in his native city, nor does he seem ever to have exer¬
cised his talents for improvising except for pleasure and glory. In
1725 the Grand-Duchess Dowager of Tuscany, Violante Beatrice of
Bavaria, sent for him to Rome, where she was a guest of Benedict XIII.
on occasion of the Jubilee. During this visit Perfetti excited such
admiration by his improvisations at the Clementine College, at the palace
of the Grand-Duchess, and at that of the French ambassador, Cardinal
Polignac, that the Pope, no doubt influenced by Crescimbeni and his
adherents, decided that the improvrisatore should receive the crown of
the Capitol, and gave the necessary instructions to the senators and
chief magistrates. Perfetti had, however, to undergo three consecutive
* The imprnrrixntorl were probably aware of their shortcomings, and aware of
their right to be excused, as I gather from the following answer made by an
extemporary poet of the first years of this century to a Cardinal who cried out, " Too
many syllables : " " Chi ferra, inchioda, e chi cammina, inciampa ; S'improvvisa,
Eminenza, e non si stampa."
30
The Arcadian Academy.
ordeals in the palace of the Grand-Duchess, and in the presence of all
Arcadia, twelve of whose members were chosen as judges. These twelve,
divided into batches of four, proposed a theme to him on each evening; he
improvised on them all with the greatest success; and the last evening,
when everyone thought that he was utterly exhausted, he suddenly rose
and epitomised all the previous arguments in the light verse called
sdrucciolo, and, according to Crescimbeni, " Strung together the themes
with wondrous felicity, and in such a way that, without altering the order
of their succession, he formed out of the most different subjects a perfectly
constructed oration." The delegates of course decided that Perfetti was
well worthy of the crown worn by Petrarch. This was a very serious
opinion, and the character of Benedict XIII., of Crescimbeni, and, above
all, of the solemn, stately time, excludes all thought of the ceremony
being a mystification like that played off by the facetious Leo X. 011
poor Baraballo. The day after these trials Perfetti dressed himself after
dinner, that is to say, after two in the afternoon, in a robe of black
damask, and betook himself to the palace of the Sapienza, where he was
received by a magistrate, who carried liim to the Capitol in one of the
great gold-embossed and painted coaches of the senators. In the hall of the
Horatii and Curiatii, bedizened with Arpino's clumsy frescoes and decked
out for the occasion with draperies and plants, Perfetti was met by the
unique representative of the Roman Senate, in his gold and purple robes,
with his adjuncts, the Conservatori, the chief magistrates, innumerable
pages, mace-bearers, and nobles, by the Grand-Duchess Dowager of
Tuscany, the Princess Ruspoli, sister of the Pope, and her daughter the
Duchess Gravina, and by Arcadia represented by Crescimbeni and the
most illustrious members. In the midst of a crowd of cardinals, prelates,
long-wigged princes, and enamelled-cheeked ladies, Perfetti advanced to
the foot of the senatorial throne, and the Senator Marchese Mario Fran-
gipani, taking the laurel wreath from a page, who held it on a silver
embossed salver, placed it on the poet's head, making the following
Ciceronian speech: " Eximium hoc laudis poeticae decus, quod tuo
capiti impono, sub felicissimis auspiciis 8.S.D.N. Papae Benedicti XIII.
sit publici non minus erga argumentum quam obsequentissimi animi
significatio erga amplissimam illam et plane regiam benevolentiam, qua
decoraris." Perfetti was not less glib in improvising Latin prose than
Italian verse, and answered: "Poetica laurus immeritae imposita fronti,
excelsam S.S. Patris ac Principis Papae Benedicti XIII. munificentiamque,
effusamque senatus populusque Romani erga me voluntatem testatur,
quarum utraque aut honore dignos invenit aut facit." Then the crowned
poet was seated on a chair of state prepared for him, and seven Arcadians,
headed by Crescimbeni, repeated laudatory poems, to the accompaniment
of a tremendous noise of trumpets and drums, and the firing of a hundred
The Arcadian Academy.
31
mortars. Afterwards the notary of the Senate drew up an Act by which
the citizenship and nobility of Rome were conferred on the Cavalier
Perfetti and all his descendants. There is or was a picture of Perfetti at
the Bosco Parrasio, not in the black damask robe and laurel wreath, but
in a strange combination of many-coloured garments, green, red, and
yellow, with an open collar and loose blue necktie, and an orange-coloured
scarf rolled round his close-shaven head; a mass of colour harmonising
well with the very swarthy complexion, brilliant eyes, and full, laughing
lips of the poet. This picture, gaudy and yet harmonious, rich and out¬
landish, serves to help out our conception of the strange, theatrical, poetical
medley of talents which made up the successor of Petrarch.
III.
Crescimbeni's glorious reign ended soon after the donation of the Bosco
Parrasio and the coronation of Perfetti ; and the Arcadians of Home and
of the colonies lamented in innumerable sonnets and elegies the veteran
founder and champion of the Academy. The raised seat beneath the
laurels of the Bosco Parrasio, left vacant by the death of Crescimbeni,
was filled by his friend and colleague the Abate Lorenzini. He had been
educated as a servant in the house of the poet Guidi, and had early
acquired a literary position, though less by his works, which cannot now
be found, than by his familiarity with writers, having contrived to keep
on good tenns both with Crescimbeni and with Gravina. He was a large,
rawboned man, with a face at once sarcastic and good-humoured, and
strange, humorous, astonished-looking eyebrows. He had probably more
talent than Crescimbeni; at all events a much juster appreciation of men
and things, and a tendency to regard Arcadian affairs as not so very
much more important than other human concerns. The accession of the
second Custode Generale marks a new phase in the history of the
Academy: during his government Arcadia extended its frontiers to the
utmost, and became supreme throughout the peninsula; but, like Rome
and Venice, it did so at the expense of its original spirit and constitution.
The Academy became lost in its legions of members, and as people of
every sort, and in every part of Italy, became Arcadians, to be an Arcadian
soon meant merely to be a member of the society of one's native town,
and a holder of one's own principles, just as one would have been had
Arcadia never existed. In short, Arcadia ceased to be an academy and
became the whole literary and social life of the country.
And now let us stop and glance round the Italy of the eighteenth
century, a century displaying in all countries so strange a mixture of
32
The Arcadian Academy.
strength and of weakness, of vigorous modes of thought which had not
the force of habit, and of lazy modes of life which Avere enforced by
custom; of philanthropical aspirations and tyrannical institutions; of
goodness masked by frivolity and scepticism, and villany hidden beneath
solemnity and moralising; of corruption and renovation, mingling and
fermenting in unlovely fashion. In Italy this movement was less strongly
felt than in other countries, and especially less than in France, and not
merely because the race was less prone to exaggeration and excess. In
Italy there was, of course, a great deal to sweep away—vicious modes of
thought and life due to long inertion and protracted rule of Spaniards,
Jesuits, and little local tyrants; but, on the other hand, there still
remained much of the influence of the Renaissance. The Italians were
not the great-grandsons of semi-barbarians, like the Germans and our¬
selves, but of free, enlightened, and polished burghers; they had the
remembrance of commercial commonwealths, and not, like the French,
of a hideous feudal system; there was no inequality of classes, no great
misery and great power opposed to each other for centuries; and when
the stream of progress of the eighteenth century reached Italy it joined
insensibly with the remains of civilisation left in the country by antiquity
and the Renaissance, and of which no amount of political and social
disorganisation could ever deprive it. The eighteenth century in Italy
was, therefore, not a violent reaction against feudalism as in France, nor
against Puritanism as in England, nor against foreign domination as in
Germany; it was a mere gradual waking up from lethargy and a shaking
off of its bad effects. There was no war against nobles, or priests, or
foreigners, and thence it is that Italy in that time seems scarcely to
move in comparison with other countries, and its very movement, when
examined, appears rather droll than revolting in the contrasts it brings
to light.
Let us pass by the four great towns most visited by the travellers of
the eighteenth century: Venice, crumbling gaily away, a place where
Beckford could dream Oriental dreams of luxuriousness and hidden
terrors, and compare the motley population, not less than the cupolas
and minarets, to the strange world of Yathek which he carried in his
mind ; Naples, feudal and antique, at once so backward in social
institutions and so happy in natural endowments, which could make
Goethe feel even more of a Greek than he naturally was—Naples,
which from amongst intellectual and physical filth gave Italy in the
eighteenth century her philosophy and her art, her Yico and her Pergo-
lesi, her Filangieri and her Cimarosa ; Florence, with her Frenchified
rulers and intensely Italian people, painted in all her frivolity by the
frivolous Mann ; and Rome, of whose uneducated princes and half-
barbarous lower classes the President de Brosses speaks like an earlier
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33
and less eccentric Stendhal. Let us leave the great centres, each repre¬
senting some extreme, of artificially produced vice, of artificially kept
up barbarism, of artificial credulity, and artificial pedantry; and let us
look at one of the innumerable smaller cities which attest the vigour
of the Italian spirit of earlier days, a vigour which foreign interference
or foreign pressure has succeeded neither in entirely extinguishing nor
in entirely warping. In these quiet mediaeval towns,—where crumbling
monuments overshadow grass-grown streets, and only a few heavy gilt
coaches rumble across the time-worn pavement; where the popular vitality
is concentrated in the market-place, the barbers' shops, and the coffee¬
houses,—intellectual life sputters and crackles cheerily. The noble counts
and marquises, descended from republican merchants, feudal princes, or
mercenary generals, mix freely with the upper middle classes, their equals
in race, in education, in manners, and very nearly in fortune, and who
feel neither jealous nor idolatrous of their superiors in rank. The dull,
serene life of these inglorious grandees and placid burghers is wiled away
in the cultivation of science and erudition, literature and art; nobles
and commoners meet on equal footing; they study together in the same
colleges, where the master may be a patrician general like Marsigli, or a
plebeian professor like Zanotti; they help each other in editing in¬
scriptions, publishing chronicles, and compiling guide-books and histories;
they make each other presents of their materials, or lampoon each other
most frightfully. The women are not left out of the literary bustle; of
course there are some who have been brought up by pious nuns who
could not or would not teach them reading or writing,* as there are
young men after Parini's model who remain in bed till twelve, and
read only wicked French novels, brought up in unconsciousness of clas¬
sical studies by dingy priest tutors, who run errands and carry lapdogs
for their pupils' mothers. All this there is of course, for, unless we
placed the ignorant apathy by the side of the restless inquisitiveness, we
should give a false picture of the eighteenth century, whose charac¬
teristic peculiarity was that it united the evil things that remain with
the good things that are coming. All this there is—ignorance, sloth,
and corruption ; but there are also good qualities. There are the innu¬
merable ladies who, as soon as they have exchanged the convent for their
husband's house, become refined, literary, nay learned: poetesses, com¬
posers, and presiders over intellectual society, the friends, patronesses,
and counsellors of the greatest writers in Italy, yet without aspiring to the
position of the Dottoressa Bassi, who lectured on Newton's Optics before
she was twenty. There are also the innumerable young men, elegant
dancers, and fencers, and sturdy players at racket, who in their youth
* This was the case with the grandmother of a Tuscan friend of ours, from whom
we have the anecdote.
r>
34
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are spoken of by well-known writers as of excellent morals and great
literary acquirements, and wlio, later in life, when dancing and fencing
and racket have been abandoned, collect libraries, write verses and
satires on surrounding frivolity, take interest in agriculture, imitate the
Georgics in poems on the cultivation of rice or silk, and in a few places
keep up some amount of industry and commerce.* The domestic life is
strange enough ; the marriages are mostly made up by the families,
though, according to Baretti, not usually against the desire of the young
people. The husband and wife are not permitted to be on bad terms,
yet there is the inevitable cavaliere servente, chosen by the husband or
the wife's family, obsequious, useful, tiresome, meddlesome, treated with
contemptuous consideration; often much in the way of both husband and
wife, as Goldoni shows him in the play, where Don Roberto and Donna
Eularia run away from town and bury themselves in a village where
society will not force cavalieri serventi on to them ; that he disturbs
family peace or endangers family ties few even of the satirists, no, not
even Parini, will admit; he is a respectable institution. Another insti¬
tution is that of putting all the daughters for whom no eligible husbands
can be found into rich convents, where they can enjoy comparative
freedom; and of making the younger sons enter the Church or some
military order, unless they can turn magistrate or something similar.
The upper middle classes do without cavalieri serventi, convents, and
military orders ; and make their sons lawyers, doctors, professors, or
priests, commerce, except in the sea-ports, being reduced to shopkeeping.
The social life is a queer mixture of gaiety and dullness, unless we go
into the madly spendthrift society of the dissolute Venetians or Frenchi¬
fied Lombards and Florentines; the same people meet day after day;
everyone is intimately acquainted with his neighbours. The literati—
and every educated person belongs more or less to them—sit in the book¬
seller's shop, and discuss new works and enter into a literary conversa¬
tion with any stranger who comes in, as the amiable people at Padua did
with Goethe when he was in search of Palladio's works. They meet
also in the garden or palace of one of the company; and the lofty rooms,
hung with faded tapestry and portraits of worthies in black doublets and
* In the little oligarchy of Lncca the principal families kept up their industrial
and commercial connections until past the middle of the eighteenth century, some
of the nobles possessing silk-manufactories and banking-houses even in Flanders.
These same Lucchese nobles, who managed one of the finest theatres in Italy ofE the
savings in their incredibly small State budget, were great publishers, and re-edited
the whole Encyclopedic when prohibited in France. It has often been remarked
that the Italian nobles of the last century were comparatively better educated than
their descendants, because the progress of Liberalism, while it raised the intellectual
standard ot' the inferior classes, frightened the nobles into stolid opposition to all
improvement, and consequently into an illiterate and bigoted stagnation.
Hie Arcad-icm. Academy.
35
scarlet caps, or shining with new gilt stucco and high-backed white and
gold chairs, are crowded with senators in fall-bottomed wigs, pooi
literary priests in rusty little cloaks, smart young men with their hair tied
in queues and their pockets crammed full of sonnets, and beautiful ladies
with rouged cheeks and long-sleeved brocade dresses ; they read and
recite verses, talk of the new books from Paris, and of the new opera
from Naples; play at cards and siug. Often, in the long winter
evenings, they learn some French tragedy, translated or imitated by
one of the party, and act it with all possible solemnity ; nay the noble
ladies and gentlemen even dance ballets, as was particularly the fashion
at Verona, where Ippolito Pindemonti, Knight of St. John of Jerusalem,
gained such applause in performing the part of Pygmalion that he deter¬
mined to turn ballet-dancer and unite his fortunes to those of the famous
Le Pieq; a plan which, luckily for poetry, he was prevented from
executing. In some towns, Bologna for instance, the young men have
little tournaments; in the winter, if it snow very hard, they drive
sledges, and, incredible though it may sound, the young ladies of the
highest birth go out on riding parties, dressed in almost masculine
fashion, no one taking offence thereat, and the poets telling them that
in this garb they look like Paris and Endymion.* In the autumn the
nobles retire for the vintage to their villas, from whose belvederes they
can see the old, silent, many-towered town, and their friends hurrying to
and fro on the dusty road. The villas are never without literary guests ;
some of them, like the splendid Villa Albergati, near Bologna, contain
large theatres; and even in comparatively poor country houses there are
enthusiasts, like Count Giacomo Gozzi, who make their children act
when scarcely more than babies. A place of villeggiatura, some shady
nook, or breezy hillside near a town, is a collection of five or six large
villas, whose owners live in each other's houses, meet twice and thrice a
day, play at cards, go out shooting together, read to each other, and
saunter about the primly laid-out grounds, or among the upturned fields
strewn with decaying leaves. The lawyers, and priests, and poor literati,
who have been unable to leave the stifling city, are not forgotten, and
presents of grapes, figs, mushrooms, and game are sent to them by beau¬
tiful blue-stockings, and are duly acknowledged in verse and paid for
with sonnets on lapdogs and elegies on canary birds. Then there are
little musical farces performed in the open air, in suburbs or villages,
and to them rush all the listless villa inhabitants, and laugh at the
drollness of the music or the inexhaustible witticisms of the masks.
Once or twice a year the great theatre is put into order, the senators,
prelates, or delegated managers enter into treaty with some great per¬
former, male or female, and the whole town is in a tumult of excitement.
* Sec Fruu'oni's eight enormous volumes.
v 2
36
The Arcadia Academy.
A new opero is composed and brought out in the presence of all the
population and of innumerable visitors from neighbouring places; amidst
a shower of sonnets and flowers, occasionally interspersed with oranges
and medlars thrown at the head of an offending composer, as he sits
directing the performance at his harpsichord. Faction runs high for
rival singers : people at the coffee-houses fight with sedan-chair sticks to
defend the reputation of their favourite, and in the theatre almost die of
rapture : the powdered Achilles or Regulus becomes the tyrant of the
place, bullies the nobles and prelates, and condescends to permit the
ladies to wear five portraits of him at a time. This annual musical
enthusiasm, while showing the life that remains in the people, serves at
the same time to dispel for the moment what is trivial and local in Italian
civilisation.
Such a state of society was admirably suited to produce a vast amount
of worthless poetry. For, while literature had got to be considered as a
sort of social amusement, it had by no means gained the honourable
independence of the other arts and sciences, and a man of letters, although
doubtless considering himself as the perfection of the human type, lived
either in a more limited or in a less stable fashion than a surgeon, a
painter, an architect, or even a singer: Benedetto Marcello's virtuoso
remarking to a great poet that the position of literati was far less honour¬
able than his own, as singers had always plenty of money while men of
letters were usually starving. Nor was this entirely erroneous ; the man
of letters, who was neither a noble nor a well-endowed priest, nor a well-
paid lawyer or professor, and who, according to Baretti, had no chance
of reasonable remuneration for his literary productions, the profits of
which belonged entirely to the publisher ;—the man of letters who was
nothing but a man of letters was necessarily more or less of an adven¬
turer, living off flattery and humiliation. His life was spent in continual
efforts to obtain some fixed employment, which, if he was nothing more
than a poet, was naturally more or less a sinecure, and in the gift of some
great personage ; most often the employment was promised and not
given, or, if given, taken away from caprice, and the poet had to continue
his vagabond life, hunting for dedication fees, translations, odd jobs, and
occasional dinners. The happiest thing for such a poet was to live in the
midst of literary nobles, who would give him lodging and food for a mini¬
mum of flattery, instead of making him loiter about ministerial ante¬
chambers. Literature was a trade, but scarcely an independent or
honourable one, for what was sold were not books but dedications of
books. Romance literature, that rich field for poor mediocrities, did not
exist in Italy, the few novels that were read then being translations from
Marivaux, Le Sage, or Richardson. Theatrical literature could hardly
be said to exist either; there was no tragic stage whatever, for there
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37
were only singers and mask comedians; the few tragedies written for the
closet by men like MaiFei and Martello, and the translations from the
French, amply sufficing for private performance. There was only the old
mask comedy, which consisted mainly of mere adaptations of old Italian
and Spanish plays, all the best scenes of which were left unwritten and
were filled up by the wonderful extemporary performance of the Brig-
hellas, Truffaldinos, and Tartaglias who had taken possession of comedy
ever since the fall of Italian national literature and the reign of dialects
in the seventh century; nor was it till Goldoni that Italian written
comedy reappeared. There remained, it is true, the opera stage, which
was as splendid as its rivals were miserable, but in a time when the same
play could be set to different music twice or thrice by the same composer,
Metastasio's many operas were quite sufficient, being, as they were, a mine
of beautiful dramatic and lyric poetry. There remained, therefore, nothing
but the smaller forms of lyric poetry—the ode, the elegy, and above all
the sonnet; and luckily, as people could not live off such trifles, espe¬
cially when the market was overstocked with them, the number of poets
who were not something else besides was—as indeed is still the case in
Italy—very small.
Here we have, then, a national literature in which the tragic and the
cojoaic stage are respectively monopolised by two men, Metastasio and
Goldoni; from which the epic is excluded by the very nature of the civili¬
sation, which could afford neither natural nor imaginary historical colouring;
in which the minor lyric forms, the ode, the canzone, the elegy, and the
sonnet, are not spontaneous, but maintained by mere scholarly habit, and
in which these latter forms are yet the commonest, because within the
reach of almost everyone. And what are the subjects of this lyric
poetry, whose forms, well-nigh petrified, belong to very different states of
civilisation ? All political subjects are excluded because there is no poli¬
tical interest in a country cut up into little despotic governments, mostly
of foreign extraction; and in this line there remain only general lamenta¬
tion over the decline of Italian arms and influence since the days of
ancient Rome—lamentations which, if sometimes genuinely felt, are yet
too vague and aimless either to alarm the police or to interest the reader.
Then there are religious lyrics; but in the eighteenth century religious
ardour is not sufficiently strong to be poetical, and when a man writes
canzoni to the Virgin and sonnets 011 Judas in the style of those of Betti-
nelli, and Lamberti, and Varano, we cannot help thinking him either
narrow-minded or hypocritical. After political and religious subjects
come personal ones, but the individual was not much more poetical than
the patriot or the believer ; neither married life nor conventional cava-
liere-serventism was prolific of inspiration, and, as to unhappy and ill-
fated affections, never surely were fewer to be found than among the
38
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Italian poets of tlie last century. Not that these good people were with¬
out such sorrows, but the time had passed when men did not shrink from
weeping in public over their dead loves, while consoling themselves with
living ones, like Dante, Petrarch, and Lorenzo de' Medici; and the time
had not yet come when romanticism taught them to alleviate their woes
by retailing them to the public, and to tear open their bleeding wounds
fer the amusement of their readers. There were doubtless Werthers and
Consalvos, but they preferred to keep their misfortunes hidden, and to
write poems on the cultivation of silkworms, or on the absurdities of
pedants, rather than declare themselves ready to commit suicide for their
Charlottes, and to be kissed when corpses by their Elviras. Lyric poetry
—we mean the poetry which is lyric in spirit as well as in metre—
requires the constant appearance of the poet himself, the constant laying
bare of the poet's personal feelings ; and, whether from obtuseness of feel¬
ing, reserve, or any other cause, the Italian poets of the last century could
not and would not make themselves their own subject—so much so that
Rnlli takes care to impress on his reader that his love poems are all
addressed to ladies as purely imaginary as his feelings towards them—
yet lyrics were written in plenty, very correct and elegant in language,
and very cool and vague in sentiment. There are the elegiac patriotic
pieces, in which, after a splendid description of ancient Rome, and the
loudest lamentations over the fallen state of Italy, we are informed that
the man, the hero, the demigod has come from whom the country expects
deliverance from her woes, and this hero and demigod may be a viceroy
of Naples, a Venetian j)r occur at ore, a Tuscan senator, or, as Manfredi
thinks, Don Annibale Albani, " who with universal applause has just
taken his doctor's degree at Urbino." There are the long, intensely subtle,
and metaphysical canzoni to ladies taking the veil, who, either forced into
the convent by their families or entering it from worldly disappointment
and ennui, are supposed to be so many St. Catherines and St. Theresas;
there are the sonnets for the same occasions, full of Cupids, Dianas, and
flourishes, as profane as the fat cherubs and languishing saints overhead
among the stucco and gilding, and printed off by the dozen to be handed
round to the guests with cakes and ices, while the powdered hair of the
novice is being shorn to the accompaniment of church music with fiddles,
flutes, and roulades. There is the still more numerous and nauseous
class of bridal poems, mostly written by priests, in which Venus, the
Graces, Cupid, and every manner of personified feeling are introduced to
bring about the union of two persons who, in all probability, care nothing
for each other, and are merely following the will of their parents or the
suggestions of their worldly wisdom; when the marriage is an aristo¬
cratic one, Italy is brought in as a spectator, and prophesies that a new
Alcides will be born, and that the proud Turk will soon tremble at the
The Arcadian Academy.
39
name of the heroic infant. Sometimes—and this is often the case when
the poet is a superior one, and cares nothing for the marriage—the bride
and bridegroom are left behind after a few lines, and some classic fable
is brought forward in their stead; but even then the best we get are
poetical paraphrases of Albani, with loves climbing into trees, coquettish
nymphs, and languishing heroes. After this we meet poems on all sorts
of trifles—lapdogs, canaries, horses, gifts of fruit and wine, new hats, and
what not; some of which, written under the influence of beautiful poetic
ladies by elegant frivolous poets like Frugoni, are certainly very pretty;
and finally, to exhaust the stock of lyrics, we come to the sonnets destined
to be showered down on to successful performers, and which, although
often written by celebrated poets, are so trivial, vague, and verbose, that
we can only hope that they were used as curling papers by the singers, a
few of whose extemporary flourishes and embellishments contained infi¬
nitely more genius, more art, and more poetry, than all the verses of all
their admirers. But, despite this miserable poverty of subject and
sterility of fancy, the amount of lyrics written in Italy during the last
century passes all belief: for every one who could hold a pen—men,
women, priests, nuns, lawyers, doctors, barbers—every one wrote poetry.
The works of each poet are excessively voluminous—five, six, seven,
eight, ten, fifteen huge volumes being quite usual, and the greater portion
of their contents, as well as that of the innumerable collections printed at
weddings, deaths, veil-takings, christenings, and the still more innumer¬
able academical collections, consist of this uninteresting, vapid, verbose,
intolerable rubbish. In the presence of all these myriads of sonnets,
odes, elegies, and canzoni per nozze, per monacazione, per gentil dama, per
musico, and per elevazione alia sagra porpora, we feel crushed and speech¬
less, and regain the use of our faculties only to cry out at the indefati¬
gable imbecility of the Italian eighteenth century.
There is no exaggeration in this, and yet there is no exaggeration
either in saying that of all the centuries during which Italian literature
has flourished the eighteenth century is one of the most honourable.
We have seen as yet only what the men of that time could not but fail
in, and in which they persisted so obstinately that they left behind them
the appalling mass of rubbish we have described; but there were other
branches of literature in which the Italians of the last century as neces¬
sarily succeeded, and in which they reached a far higher point than any i
of their predecessors. The poetry which required individual activity of
life and feeling, in which all depended upon strength of passion and
abundance of movement, upon the poet's own individuality—this kind of
poetry had ceased to exist; but in its stead appeared that other poetry
which depends upon contemplation and examination of types, whose
excellence is due to the knowledge of the minute shades and transitions
40
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of feeling, upon the power of the poet to divest himself of his own
character and to enter entirely into that of others : the epic, the lyric,
had become impossible, but tragedy, comedy, and satire had taken their
place. The reader must not, however, imagine that, because the literary
forms requiring the development of the poet's own individuality had dis¬
appeared, this was a period when, as in the time of Anne and of George
I. the real poetic artistic element had been replaced by thought, wit, and
elegance of expression; on the contrary, in tragedy, comedy, and satire
there appeared the greatest wealth of the really tragic and humorous
elements, to the utter exclusion both of oratorical pomp and brilliancy of
wit: the tragedy was real tragedy, the comedy real comedy, and more so
than either had been in the hands of the too eloquent Racine or the over
witty Moliere. It may also appear contradictory to our previous remark
on the absence of a regular stage in Italy to affirm that the dramatic
form was the one then brought to perfection, yet this seeming paradox
can easily be explained. There was no tragic stage in Italy in Metas¬
tases time, and it is to that very fact that Metastasio's excellence is
due ; for, had he attempted real tragedy, he would have produced at best
only a feeble repetition of the French oratorical plays. Instead of this
being the case, Metastasio was called upon to write dramas for music, for
music which was then in its heroic youth, simple, grand, pathetic, and,
above all, beautiful; and which, in its vigorous movement towards per¬
fection, could drag along with it the style of poetry arising from its
requirements. The opera was then still in its simplest condition; melody
did not attempt to follow dramatic action in concerted pieces, but was
restricted to short speeches and soliloquies, bursts of feeling or flights of
fancy, in which the poet gave the musician only a general framework,
while all the body of the play—the scenes of narration, dialogue,
altercation, and movement—were left to the musically noted speech
called recitative. The recitative required even more than did the
melody that the verbal expression should be as simple, concise, and
natural as that of the regular tragedy was the reverse; and, above all,
it required that the action of the play should be rapid and strongly
marked. The noted declamation could not be united with a rhetorical
style of poetry, for the modulations of the recitative were suggested by
the inflexions of the speaking voice, and the long carefully-constructed
periods of tragic oratory necessarily reduced these inflexions both in
variety and force. The requirements, therefore, of the music produced a
new style of drama, simpler, stronger, more pathetic, less eloquent, and
less formal than tragedy, while the tendency of the music itself, its
beauty, pathos, grandeur, and yet richness, did much to influence the
poet's conceptions. When we compare Metastasio's poetry with the
music to which it was set we feel, that, if the individual pieces were
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41
suggested by the words of the poet, those words were themselves sug¬
gested by the general style of composition then prevailing. Metastasio's
principal characters, so distinct and yet so noble, so clearly and
delicately drawn, ardent or tender, pathetic or solemn, so full of life and
feeling, and yet never either realistic or sensational—Achilles, Kegulus,
Timanthes, Aristea, Megacles, Dirce —are conceived in the same manner
as the music which Pergolesi, Leo, Jomelli, and Hasse made them sing;
we meet again, what we meet so rarely, emotion used as an artistic means.
A similar paradox has to be explained with respect to Goldoni, who
found no regular comic stage in Italy, and owed his peculiar excellence to
this fact, just as Metastasio did his to the non-existence of a regular
tragic stage. By a singular process of decentralisation, Italian literature,
ever since the breaking-up of the commonwealths and the rule of
foreigners in the sixteenth century, had become less and less national
and more and more provincial; till, in the seventeenth century, all vitality
seemed to have been absorbed by the dialects, and the feebler the writ¬
ings in the universal language of the country the more original and racv
became the poems and plays in Venetian, Milanese, Neapolitan, and
Sicilian.* Now to each of these dialects belonged a figure, a type or
caricature of the particular provincial character formed by the people of
the province. When the Neapolitans gave the reins to their boisterous
humour it was in the character of Pulcinella or of the Fuego; when the
Venetians wished to represent themselves they brought forward the
drolly cautious Pantaloon; when the Milanese wished to criticise the
Spanish airs of their nobles they made the simple, sensible, clownish
Meneghino their spokesman ; when the Bolognese felt inclined to laugh
at the professors of their university they brought forward their blustering
pedantic Dottore; in short, every province—nay, in some cases every
town—had its popular representative, unchanging in dress, manner, and
speech, as every such type must be. As this typical buffoon, or mask,
as he was called, for his unchanging costume easily gave rise to the
appellation, was brought on to the stage, so very soon there began to
appear actors who never played any part except that of the humorous
patron of their native town, and as soon as several of these actors—say a
Venetian Pantaloon, a Bolognese Dottore, a Brighella from Bergamo,
and a Truffaldino from Brescia—met on the same movable stage, the
comedy of masks, or, as it was called, the commedia delV artewas
created. Goldoni found this commedia delV arte in absolute possession of
* The most original Italian poem of the seventeenth century, Redi's dithyramb, is
far less national than Tuscan, even in language.
f Arte here probably has the older meaning of trade, for it literally was a man's
trade to play Arlecchino or Brighella all his life.
42
The Arcadian Academy.
the theatre, and, as many of his admirers and perhaps he himself
believed, he dethroned it. But he did so only in appearance, and when
Voltaire congratulated him upon having " freed Italy from the Goths"
he was much mistaken in thinking that Goldoni had done so in order to
install a semblance of French comedy in their place. In reality Goldoni's
reforms were merely that he put a limit to the improvisation of the
actors, and that he divested the masks of their characteristic costume,
and even sometimes of their characteristic dialect; for Goldoni's action
merely represented that of his time, which tended once more to swallow
up the provincial in the national. Goldoni's comedy was to be for all
Italy, and no longer for a single province ; it was to show the life of the
whole country, and therefore what was unintelligible to the whole nation
and what was illustrative of only local life had to be eliminated to a
certain extent; but Pantaloon remained Pantaloon, although stripped of
his red hose and black long-tailed hood, and put into the dress of a
Leghorn merchant or a country proprietor; and Harlequin remained
Harlequin despite the loss of his parti-coloured clothes and the adoption
of modern dress; the Italian comedy remained the same in spirit and
system, although it ceased to be called commedia delV arte. Goldoni did
not attempt to meddle with the arrangements by which the same types
were constantly reproduced by the same actor; he did not introduce new
characters, but merely new combinations of characters ; he did not make
the stage a vehicle for satire ; in short, consciously or unconsciously, he
merely developed the Italian comedy without imitating the French one.
There were radical differences of origin and conception. between the
French and Italian comedies, and to these are due the absolute difference
that exists between Moliere and Goldoni, a want of perception of which
has so often led to the grossest misjudgment of the latter by persons who
expected to find him like the former. French comedy was mainly a court
and drawing-room production, like all the other literary forms of the age
of Louis XIV.; it had no roots among the people, and was constructed
to suit the wittiest, most caustic, and most elegant class of the wittiest
and most caustic of nations—to suit the contemporaries of Boileau and
La Rochefoucauld, of Mme. de Sevigne and La Bruyere, people all the
power of whose mind consisted in delicate appreciation of character and
neat expression of paradoxes, brought to the highest point of perfection.
The Italian comedy, on the other hand, had arisen among the people,
and, what is more, among the provincial middle and lower classes, who
disdained the national speech, utterly ignored smartness of expression,
and asked only to be amused with humorous pictures of themselves;
simple, jovial, honest folk, with charity at the bottom of all their humour.
Moliere, in compliance with the wants of his audience, accepted a few
trumpery, mostly unnatural and uninteresting plots and situations, and
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43
gave all his attention to the creation of original powerful types : Har-
pagon, the Malade Imaginaire, Tartuffe, the Femmes Savantes, and, above
all, the Misanthrope and his companions, Celimene and Philinte and
Oronte and Arsinoe, the heartless coquet, the easy-going, benevolent
man of the world, the dandified fool and the court prude ; each a bitter
satire, couched in the tersest and most brilliant language, which in itself
forms almost a series of epigrams. Goldoni, who had no courtly wits
among his audience, accepted the old popular types given by each pro¬
vince; types neither very sharply marked nor very satirical, for the Italian
people is neither personal nor unkind in its buffoonery; and lavished all
the richness of his fancy in contriving new plots, new scenes, new situa¬
tions, new combinations of the old characters, in which a trifle—a fan
dropped, a dress expected, a promise not to be jealous, a promise to be
silent—produces in the simplest and most spontaneous way an infinite
concatenation of droll situations, of droll exclamations, of droll move¬
ments. Moliere's characters, when not absolute and almost repulsive
caricatures, make us smile the subdued smile of perception of wit rather
than of drollery ; Goldoni's characters, even when so faintly marked as
to be no types at all, make us laugh the free happy laugh of unconcerned
amusement. Moliere's men and women, even the stupidest, are con¬
tinually saying clever things which do not move us; Goldoni's people,
even the cleverest, never say anything either epigrammatic or unamusing.
Moliere may be as much engaged in the closet as at the theatre, and
even there requires only subtle intonations and clever looks ; Goldoni,
however delightful when read, even out loud, cannot be fully appreciated
except on the stage, where alone we understand that inexhaustible energy
and movement, that amazing overflow of life and animal spirits, which
made the performance of the Barruffe Chiozzotte a kind of revelation to
Goethe.
The third branch of literature in which the Italians of the last century
were destined to succeed was satire, but satire also altered and made
into a separate category by national influence. The satire of Parini is
not much more like the satire of Boxleau or of Pope than the tragedy of
Metastasio is like that of Racine, or the comedy of Goldoni like that
of Moliere. Parini's great poem, the epic, as one might call it, of
satire, seems at first sight to be conceived in greater bitterness than any
other work of the same kind, since it is the satire of a whole class by a
man belonging to a totally different one; yet in reality there is no
animosity of any sort in the Giorno, because its writer is not actuated by
any personal dislike. Parini was doubtless a utilitarian, a philan¬
thropist, more or less of a moral lawgiver, but ho was not a moraliser
nor a stoic ; he had no abstract ideal of virtue, but he had a strong
aversion to what is bad or merely mean, and throughout his poem we
44
The Arcadian Academy.
feel that what he wishes to brand is not so much the corrupt as the idle,
the vapid, the useless ; what he constantly brings before us is not the
wickedness of his hero's life, for it is not wicked, nor its absurdity, for it
is not ridiculous, but its want of everything manly and ennobling. What
Parini hates is the incompleteness, the emptiness of this dandy's exist¬
ence ; the trifles turned into important concerns, the possession of use¬
less objects, the feeble attempts at pleasure ; we understand how different
a life, how full of strong healthy action and enjoyment, of State service,
of literary employment, of domestic affection, of rural pleasures, the poet
conceived ; a life, alas, not granted to the poor sickly priest, obliged to
gain his livelihood like any other schoolmaster in the close hot town.*
At the same time Parini has great artistic feeling ; while satirising, he
does not distort; on the contrary, it is extraordinary what grace he
lends to everything he touches. The luxurious life of his giovin signore
becomes one of almost oriental splendour ; the hundred trifles strewn
about on his toilet table become so many little masterpieces ; the smart
stiff dress of the last century becomes under Parini's fingers the daintiest,
most graceful of garbs, nay, the very movements and gestures become
beautiful and noble, and the young fop seems to forget his dancing-
master under the poet's orders. Add to this beautiful tendency a
wonderful swiftness of movement, and simple elegance of verse and
diction, a delicacy of colouring, and, above all, a subtle subdued ridicule,
never taking the sharp crude shape of an epigram, and we shall yet
have but an incomplete picture of the great Milanese satirist.
An inferior style of satire, and an inferior poet when compared to
Parini, nevertheless deserve to be mentioned among those which did
most honour to the eighteenth century. Count Gasparo Gozzi, better
known by his agreeable and amusing letters, wrote a few of those blunted
* Perhaps Parini might have been ail Italian Cowper, with all the grandeur of form
of which Italian rural scenery could give, had he lived in the country. The famous
odes on the purity of the air, and on rustic life, contain nothing equal to the follow¬
ing lines in the Givvno, so superior was Parini when using blank verse :
Poi sul dorso portando i sacri arnesi,
Che prima ritrovar Cerere e Pale,
Va, col hue lento innanzi, al campo, e scuote
Per lo an gusto sentier da' curvi rami
II rugiadoso umor, che quasi gemma
I nascenti del sol raggi rifrange.
Then with his load of sacred implements,
Ceres' and Pales' earliest gifts to men,
He seeks his field, his tardy ox ahead ;
And in the narrow pathway brushes off
Prom the curved boughs the dewdrops, which like gems
Refract the rays of the just rising sun.
The Arcadian Academy.
45
generalising satires called by the Italians sermoni, which in their line are
excellent. Gozzi has none of Parini's tendency to beautify, none of his
high intellectual aspirations ; he is a simple, honest, sensible man, averse
to all the corruption and affectation of his times ; and his poems, very
plain and elegant in metre and diction, contain clever descriptions of
Venetian life: of the crowd pouring into the square of St. Mark's on
summer evenings ; of the young dandies buying hair-pins for their
ladies; of the barges going up the Brenta to the places of villeggiatura;
little pictures with no attempt at caricature and of a pleasing sobriety of
colour; to which may be added the sketches, full of life and grace, con¬
tained in some of his single lines, as those of the racket-player, the mask
actor, and similar then familiar figures of Italian life.
"We ought perhaps to have mentioned the brother of Gasparo Gozzi by
the side of his rival Goldoni, but, although he had the audacity to enter
into competition with Italy's greatest comic writer, Carlo Gozzi can be
appreciated only when seen alone and when the vast superiority of
Goldoni is kept out of sight. Carlo Gozzi thought that Goldoni wanted
to destroy the national theatre for the sake of imitating the French one ;
and, indignant at this supposed insult, he determined to show the public
that the most absurd nonsense, with the help of the old masks, was more
amusing than the best French comedy. His first attempt succeeded so
well that he continued to write in the style he had taken up for a mere
momentary purpose. His plays have long since been forgotten, as a
sort of posthumous retribution for his injustice towards a greater man
than himself; yet these strange wild things, stories from the Arabian
Nights and from Basile's Neapolitan collection, such as are still told in
the Venetian States, made into tragi-comedies, with transformations,
deeds of heroism, and buffooneries, are not without their peculiar charm :
the wizards and enchanted princesses, the blue monsters, the serpent ladies,
the kings transformed into stags, the Venetian Pantaloons and Lombard
Brighellas talking dialect in their Chinese and Persian dresses, the
mixture of heroism and jargon, of childishness and tragedy, all conduces
to make Carlo Gozzi's plays the quaintest, queerest, and in some respects
almost the most amusing products of his time ; it was chaos, but a chaos
contrived and arranged by a very fertile and original mind.
We have, while glancing at the literature of Italy in the last century,
hurried through a space of upwards of thirty years since the death
of the great Crescimbeni, and we have also got a long way from
the Serbatoio <V Arcadia and its poetical inmates, for which misdemean¬
ours we hope, by pleading our good intentions, to be forgiven by the
shades of the Arcadians, and also perhaps by the reader. Meanwhile the
best and speediest mode of showing our contrition, and of making amends,
is to return to the history of the Academy, and with that view to get
46
The Arcadian Academy.
back to the city which was the head-quarters of Arcadia after having
been the capital of the world.
The eighteenth century had got its pope. Prospero Lambertini,
Archbishop of Bologna, mounted the throne of Julius II. and Sixtus V.
in the year 1740, under the name of Benedict XIV. to the great surprise
of everyone concerned, and of himself most of all. The first thing that
the new Pope did was, in no very decorous language, to reprove the
master of the ceremonies for instructing him to keep his cap on in the
presence of the cardinals ; the second, to inform his nephews at Bologna
that they were on no account to come to Home unless he sent for them,
which he took care never to do ; in short, Benedict astonished everyone
by showing that he was going to be a very different pope from his weak,
bigoted, ostentatious, formal predecessors. He had been a lawyer, and
continued a writer and a wit, a lover of science and literature, without
any pretensions to eminence ; he lived simply and spoke bluntly; he
made friends with the heretics without making enemies of the Jesuits ;
he had the Roman streets cleaned, and left the travertine of the Roman
churches to get spongelike from neglect ; he reformed many abuses, and
hoped to reform many more; he even designed to suppress a number of
the holidays which fostered the idleness of the lower classes, and to dimi¬
nish the religious orders which burdened the country. He accepted with
alacrity the dedication of Voltaire's Mahomet at the very time Cardinal
de Tencin dared not open his doors to its author. In short, Benedict
XIV., a priest without bigotry, a sovereign without ostentation, revered
by Catholics, respected by Protestants, as Walpole's famous epigram runs,
was the typical pope of the middle of the eighteenth century, before free
thought had grown into over-bold action, and attempt at radical reform
had produced violent reaction ; while the Austrians in Lombardy and
Tuscany were tolerant and reforming, and the Bourbons in Naples and
Parma were anti-feudal and anti-Jesuitical: in short, while the people
were still so loyal and obedient that the governments could amuse them¬
selves with being a little radical and revolutionary.
A curious feature of Rome throughout the century was that everyone
who was not a noble or a soldier was a priest in dress and title; married
men, lawyers, doctors, writers, even strangers, wearing the short black
dress and little cloak, and being addressed by the title of Abate. The
priests had an amount of liberty bordering on licence, from the cardinals,
who had their boxes at the theatre, and gave gay parties to the low abati,
who crowded the pit and loitered in the coffee-houses. If we may believe
Winckelmann, who was rather inclined to exaggeration, people might
express themselves very freely on religious subjects, and cardinals laughed
at the Inquisition.* There was much licence, but perhaps less hypocritical
* It was not so in Tuscany. Tommaso Crudeli, a physician and talented poet, was
The Arcadian Academy.
47
vice, than among the priesthood of earlier and of later days ; and alto¬
gether the Pope himself was by far the most devont and rigid, though
perhaps the most freespoken and least priggish, of the hierarchy. While
Benedict was most parsimonious in everything save works of public utility,
his cardinals vied with each other in profane splendour. Foremost among
them were the two brothers Albani, Annibale and Alessandro, rivals in
their attempts to obtain the tiara, in their collections of antiques, and in
their many quasi-bankruptcies; next to them was Cardinal Pietro Otto-
boni, who was in a permanent state of bankruptcy ; an old, shabby, jolly
disgrace to the Church, who, despite his beggary, had a splendid collection
of antiques, and gave magnificent private concerts or sacred operas, at
which all the great performers sang, out of liking for the disreputable
old fellow. Of the family of the last Pope but one there was the beautiful *
young princess d' Arce Orsini, composer, poetess, and general patroness of
literati, a great improvement on the other Eoman ladies if we may believe
the President de Brosses. Another great Roman figure was the King
of England, James III. who had taken to devotion in his old days, and
lived dismally in his palace near the SS. Apostoli. And there remains
yet another figure in the Rome of those days, which, although then
scarcely noticed, was a more important one than all the cardinals and
pretenders. A German priest, a hanger-on first of Cardinal Archinto,
then of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, a sort of pedant after the German
fashion, a kind of humble companion eating what the charity of his
employer gave him, and wedging his way into the company of his pro¬
tector's grand friends ; a cynical, pleasure-loving, information-seeking
man, hanging on to the rich and intelligent painter Raphael Mengs, and
who yet gave himself strange airs towards Roman artists and antiquaries.
There he was, continually poring over books, though no lover of litera¬
ture; continually examining works of art, though no artist, clambering on
to the pedestals of statues and into the holes of excavations. What was
he about ? What was he trying to do ? The Romans got the answer,
although they probably did not fully understand it, when there appeared the
first volumes of A History of Art among the Ancients, and when it became
known that, in the midst of the cockle-shell and mirror art of the eighteenth
century, Winckelmann had discovered the long-lost art of antiquity.
We returned to Rome with the full intention of resuming our task of
chronicling Arcadian affairs, but on examination we find that during the
accused, apparently merely because he liad been seen with " suspicious foreigners,"
of the terrible crime of having derided the Church ; and, although in very bad
health, was shut up first in the Inquisition prisons, then for some years in the citadel
of Florence, despite the sympathy of the Minister Kichecourt, and the constant protec¬
tion of the famous singer Broschi Farinello, then the omnipotent favourite of the
King of Spain.
48
The Arcadian Academy.
peaceful and prosperous reign of Lorenzini there is nothing to chronicle,
except it be the Olympic games and the admission of new members,
which would, we fear, be found rather tedious by our readers. But
at the beginning of the reign of Lorenzini's successor, Morei, Arcadia
began to be threatened, if not in her existence, at least in her glory.
We have already remarked that little by little the limits of the
institution had been overstepped, so that in the middle of the eighteenth
century it had become boundless and shapeless, a mass of incoherent
social and literary life. Now practical philosophers, of whom there
were great numbers to be found when the practical point was one
of 110 consequence—practical philosophers began to ask themselves
and each other what this huge shapeless institution could signify, and of
what earthly use Arcadia could be. Of course, as is usual in such cases,
they never took into consideration that Arcadia, inasmuch as it was the
largest of the many literary associations of the country, united by a
common bond people of all parts of Italy, and broke down those local
distinctions, kept up by prejudice and jealousy, which were so great an
obstacle to national feeling ; that, moreover, it levelled ranks and for¬
tunes, and gave not only introductions into Milanese houses to Neapo¬
litans, but, what was much more important, secured an entrance into
good society to low-born talent; that, for instance, Goldoni, a Venetian,
could, as an Arcadian, gain admittance into Pisan circles merely by
going to the Serbatoio d' Arcadia of Pisa; and that a poor peasant edu¬
cated by charity, like Parini, could become acquainted in the Milanese
colony with the Counts Yerri, with Beccaria, and with women like the
Countess Castiglione; that by this means all the old stupid exclusive-
ness of the aristocracy was got rid of ; that men of letters became refined
by mixing in good society, and good society became ennobled by con¬
taining men of letters ; that it gave a higher tone to social existence,
and a greater sociability to literary life, and that a great step in national
progress was thus made. All this the practical philosophers of course
entirely overlooked ; they did not care for the effects of the real nature
of the institution, but set about investigating those of its imaginary
one. They asked, 1st, Whether pastoral life was consistent with civilisa¬
tion ? 2ndly, Whether, if it were, the members of the Arcadian
Academy were more simple, peaceable, and virtuous than other people ?
3rdly, Whether literature had been reformed by the Arcadian Academy ?
The answers to these questions were obvious: pastoral life was incom¬
patible with civilisation (Baretti proved it by pointing to the nomad
Tartars); the Arcadians were not in the least shepherds, indeed most of
them had never possessed a sheep or any animal save a lapdog; and,
finally, literature was by no means reformed. If, then, Arcadia had not
cured the evil, it was evident that it must have fostered it, and that all
The Arcadian Academy.
49
the artificiality of modern society, all the French idioms which were
creeping into the language, all the bad sonnets that were being written,
all was due to the enervating, stultifying influence of Arcadia.* A few
of these critics admitted that at the beginning things had been different,
and that the institution had entirely degenerated since the days of the
wise and far-sighted Crescimbeni, who would doubtless have been shocked
at the sight of the prevailing folly. To this charming practical unprac-
ticalness, this folly in the garb of wisdom, of which the last century
shows so many glorious examples, must be added the fact that the turning-
point in the eighteenth century, the moment when romanticism began to
exist, quite tiny, by the side of utilitarianism, had come, and that
Rousseau had already suggested that there were real rustic life and
real shepherds, by no means resembling the Arcadian ones. A minority
began to cry out that truth and action were needed, and that Arcadia
was a humbug. Already Bettinelli had suggested that for the benefit of
literature Arcadia should be shut up for a hundred years, at the end of
which it was scarcely likely to be re-opened; but Bettinelli had done so
in a work, the Virgilian Letters, in which existing literary opinions were
smartly lashed, and Dante was ridiculed, so that the whole of Italy rose
in indignation against it. Bettinelli had, however, begun the work;
a more formidable attack was coming from a strange, whimsical, origi¬
nal being, whom we must stop to look at, for, although but little noticed
by his contemporaries, he did much to prepare the way for future genera¬
tions. This enemy of Arcadia was Giuseppe Baretti, a wonderful, wild,
coarse, tender, angry creature, a kind of maniac in the eyes of his con¬
temporaries, who could understand the originality neither of his talent
nor of his character ; and who, not satisfied with attacking Goldoni,
Frugoni, Algarotti, the Verris, and nearly all the most eminent Italians,
did not shrink from making an onslaught on Voltaire in French and on
Smollett in English. He had travelled much, read much, known many
distinguished men, done everything, in short, that might be expected
to tame down a man and a critic, but which had, 011 the contrary,
merely increased his eccentric ferocity. He was decidedly clever; " he
has but few hooks," said Johnson, " but, Sir, he grapples very forcibly
with them;" and his very superiority, inasmuch as it consisted in
extraordinary independence, in utter contempt for the world's opinion,
and intense loathing of everything weak and false, led him into num¬
berless acts of injustice and ill breeding. He could not endure Frugoni
on account of his obscurity and emptiness ; he could not endure Goldoni
* We arc sorry to say that modern Italian writers still talk in this strain, quite as
childish, though in the opposite sense, as Crescimbeni and Don Livio Odescalchi,
when they imagined Arcadia to lie an infallible remedy for all evils. See liana! li's
Star 1 a (Idle Belle Arti.
K
50
The Arcadian Academy.
on account of his designs against the old national comedy ; he could not
endure Algarotti on account of his scientific frivolity and his truckling
to Voltaire ; he could not endure Voltaire because he protected Goldoni
and Algarotti; he could not endure the Verris and Beccaria because they
admired the French and set up a rival journal to his own. Of living
Italian literati he admired only _Metastasio, because Metastasio had no
apparent connection with either Frugoni, or Algarotti, or Voltaire,
or Goldoni, or the Verris ; and he personally esteemed only the two
Gozzis, Gasparo and Carlo, because they were eternally at war with
Frugoni, Algarotti, Goldoni, Voltaire, and the Verris. Above all,
Baretti abominated Arcadia, all its founders, members, and abettors,
because Arcadia had fostered all his enemies, and because it seemed to
him—wild, strong-minded, practical, ill-mannered philosopher that he
was—the most imbecile, effeminate, pedantic, frivolous, and utterly use¬
less institution on earth. Now when Baretti once despised or disliked
anyone or anything that person or that thing was doomed in his eyes ;
it had no merit, no excuse, it was to be abused, calumniated, scoffed at,
annihilated.
In 17G3 Baretti started a species of literary review, more or less on
the model of The Spectator, to which he gave the ominous name of La
Frusta Lettcraria, the " Literary Whip." Like Steele and Addison he
contrived an awkward frame for this work, pretending to be an old
soldier, Aristarco Scannabue (Aristarchus Massacre-the-dunces), who
had lost an arm in Persia, was served by an idiotic slave named
Macouf (who afforded comparisons Avith Goldoni, Chiari, Frugoni, and
the two Verris), and whose intimate, his Sir Roger de Coverley, was a
pipe-smoking, quiet, sensible, Bolognese priest, Don Petronio Zamber-
lucco. This seems dull enough, but it must be admitted that the Frusta
Lettcraria was not only infinitely less pedantic than most other reviews
of that day, but that, in the midst of coarse ill-humoured injustice and
wild buffooneries, it contains much sound sense, good feeling, and
independent thought, and some really humorous notions. Unluckily
for Arcadia, the new Custode Generale Morei, who appears to have in¬
herited much of Crescimbeni's reverence for the institution and want of
intelligence—unluckily Morei thought fit to publish just at that time a
General History of Arcadia. Here was Baretti's opportunity. He had
already, in his English work on Italy, showered abuse on Arcadia; but
now was the moment to let loose all his long pent-up contempt, disgust,
and hatred. Down he pounced on to Morei's book. He concentrated all
his modes of attack upon it: he reasoned, he laughed, he shouted, he
ranted ; he went through the usual argument as to the nature and effects
of pastoral life ; he decried Crescimbeni, Gravina, and the other founders
as pedantic idiots ; he battered Zappi about as an effeminate coxcomb;
The Arcadian Academy.
51
ho trampled upon the early Arcadians; he hooted at the story of the
foundation ; he went into convulsions of angry caricature over the narra¬
tion of the schism ; he cried and shrieked at the present institution, and
sank down exhausted, but triumphant, with the assertion that every in¬
telligent creature knew that Arcadia was the stupidest, most pedantic,
most mercenary, vilest institution in Italy. Baretti's onslaught had hut
little effect on his countrymen. They did not believe in Arcadia any
more than himself ; but they were all Arcadians, and thought it rather
pleasant than otherwise to be called Mirtillo, Labindo, Polianzo, instead
of Francesco, Giacomo, or Antonio, and once a fortnight to read their
literary productions to so many Chloes, Lesbias, and Aglauros.
Arcadia was no longer of sufficient interest to be quarrelled about;
that had been possible only in those far-off solemn days of Crescimbeni
and Gravina, before people read the Encyclopedic and Voltaire's novels.
Yet Baretti's example was not entirely lost, for Baretti was a forerunner
of a new generation, which was soon to become the reigning one. What
distinguished Baretti from men of the class of Frugoni, Gozzi, and all
the other representatives of the then established literature, was that he
had travelled, and had brought home broader ideas on literary and social
points than those of his countrymen. The generality of Italians of the
middle of last century had never been out of their country, and knew of
no foreign ideas save those of the French, which, together with their
fashions, their language, and their dancing-masters, had become as
supreme as they could in a country which differed from France in spirit,
in tradition, and in tendency. But for this reason French ideas could
not thoroughly permeate the Italians; they listened, admired, but
accepted only a very small proportion of what was offered them; they
did not abuse Voltaire, Kousseau, and the Encyclopedic with the fanatical
rage of the English and of the Germans; they found in them much
sense, much elegance, much usefulness, but also much profanity, much
indecency, and much violence. They regarded the French as Parini did
Voltaire, as "too much praised and too much blamed jogging quietly
along on the road of progress, they could not keep pace with the French
in their wild rush onwards towards chaotic change. Add to this the
difference in national character, the impossibility of an Italian being-
satisfied with wit, paradox, and elegance ; the difference in traditions, and
consequent impossibility of an Italian, with Dante, Ariosto, Tasso in the
past, and Metastasio, Goldoni, and Gozzi in the present, being satisfied
with the philosophical, colourless, emotionless, pseudo-classic literature of
France; sum all this together, and it will be evident that as long as
there was only French influence in Italy there was comparatively very
little foreign influence at all. But, little by little, as the middle of the
eighteenth century was left behind, another influence—that of England—
k 2
52
began to be felt in Italy, first indirectly through the French, and. then
directly from the English themselves. The Italians had, early in the
century, got acquainted with a few English writers—Milton, Pope, and
especially Addison—whom not only Baretti but Gasparo Gozzi largely
imitated. Richardson's novels had also reached Italy, and even sug¬
gested plots to Goldoni; but on the whole there was but little intellec¬
tual communication between the two countries until after the year 1750.
Till then the English had been too insular, too coarse, too overbearing, to
see in the Italians anything more than opera singers and vermicelli
makers, and for the Italians to consider the English otherwise than as
stupid pedantic milordi, a fit prey for innkeepers and ciceroni. Besides
this, England could influence Italy and Germany, and strongly influence
even France, only when she had shaken off that French element which
permeated her literature from the time of Charles II. to that of
George III. The force of England lay in her intellectual originality,
in her being at the head of what was afterwards called the romantic
school, as opposed to the pseudo-classic French one. Dryden, Pope,
Addison, pleased the Italians and the Germans, as they pleased the
French ; but they could not strongly move any of them, for they
were not sufficiently unlike the long-established Racine, Boileau, and
La Bruyere. But when Shakespeare reappeared in the hands of Gar-
rick, when Sterne and Gray threw aside all the traditions of the age of
Anne, then England made a sudden and deep impression on foreign litera¬
ture. This return to nature, to passion, to imagination, on the part of
English literature, shook the French literature world, loosening the foun¬
dations of the merely elegant and clever school, which was to be finally
destroyed by Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand ; it threw the new¬
born German literature into full romanticism, and it made the Italians
feel that at last there were people who could sympathise with them, who
could see in Dante something beyond a monster, and in the comic masks
something more than barbarians; making them acquainted at the same
time with a people who could be free without licence or profanity, and
pliilanthropical and utilitarian without rhetorical grandiloquence; whom
they could follow on the path of progress more safely and easily than they
could their over-excited French neighbours. Then it was that Italians
began to go to England for their education and amusement, as even
Parini's giovin sif/nore is supposed to have done, though without be¬
coming acquainted with anything else than the racecourse. The Italians
could get acquainted with English life and thought only by going to
England, for the English travellers, although, according to Goethe, they
carried their tea-kettle up /Etna, came to Italy for the sake of art and
antiquity, but not at all to propagandise their political and literary
notions. In this point Baretti was the forerunner of the men of the
The Arcadian Academy.
53
generation of Pindemonti and Alfieri. He knew England and English
institutions twenty years before the rest of his countrymen, and his
independent utilitarian spirit, his hostility towards the French, towards
grandiloquence and persiflage, did much to form the school which cul¬
minated in the Misogallo, the first assertion of Italian political feeling
since the time of Machiavelli.
So, gradually, as the nation moved onwards in the wake of its neigh¬
bours, as foreign, and especially English, or at least Anglo-French, influ¬
ence became stronger, people grew either more indifferent or more hostile
towards Arcadia. At Milan its members themselves began to despise it.
The Verris and Beccaria had set up a journal called the Caffe, in which,
together with literary topics, they discussed whether the aristocracy would
not do well to resume commerce. The journal succeeded. Young men
of the nobility studied agriculture and legislation, Pietro Verri and
Beccaria nobly carrying out their own recommendations, the former in
his works on political economy, the latter in his famous treatise against
the then existing criminal laws. Joseph II., then master of the Milanese,
did all he could to further this philosophical movement, being himself,
after a fashion, philosophical. In Naples the minister Tanucci, while
letting the young king grow up in the most woeful ignorance, set about
reforming the State in the arbitrary manner then in vogue, while Filangieri
spread liberal and philanthropical doctrines in the court of Ferdinand and
Caroline—doctrines which were to be paid for terribly in the year '99.
In Parma the French minister Du Tillot set up as a wiser and more
philosophical sort of Sully, building factories, suppressing convents, and
sending for Condillac to be tutor to the heir apparent, who, however, did
not profit much by his teachers, since he spent his life serving at mass
and ringing church bells. In Tuscany Peter Leopold changed the rather
barbarous laws dating from the early grand dukes, and expelled a few
dozen monks; finally, in Bome itself, after the death of Lambertini's
bigoted successor Rezzonico, Clement XIV., better known as Ganganelli,
signed the bull suppressing the Jesuits, although probably aware that he
was, in so doing, signing his own death warrant.*
While in the rest of the world philosophy reigned in more or less
boisterous fashion, Italy accepted quietly, prudently, rather timorously.
Even poetry was influenced by this philosophical tendency. Not only were
* See Mutinelli's violent diatribe," Gli ultimi 50 anni della repubblica di Vcnezia,"
written in 1854, in an Austrian and Papal spirit. About tlie year 1780 there were
masonic lodges at Venice, Padua, and Vicenza, unforbidden by the government, and
among whose members were many nobles. In 1768 the Venetians secularized several
monasteries, forbade ecclesiastical purchase and the begging of the mendicant
orders, and ordered that all monks should be tried by civil courts for temporal offences,
forbade novices under twenty-one years, and professions under twenty-five.
54
The Arcadian Academy.
utilitarian odes written in imitation of tlie one by Parini on the salubrity
of the air, or, more strictly speaking, 011 the bad Milanese drainage, but
poets, although probably not grown careless of dinners and pensions, began
to hold up their heads and talk of human dignity—a quality of which
they had never before suspected the existence. Here, again, Parini, as
the poet of civilisation, to use the modern phrase, was the general model.
He had said, what he doubtless sincerely believed, that " he was not born
to knock at the hard doors of the great; that the kingdom of the dead
should receive him a poor, but a free man—
me non nato a percuotere
Le dure illustri porte,
Nudo acorra, ma libero,
II regno della morte—"
and men, quite destitute of his proud, honest spirit, repeated the senti¬
ment in other words, while continuing their modest little raps at illus¬
trious doors. Virtue began to be talked of no longer as a necessary
accompaniment of high birth, but as something infinitely to be preferred
to it; poverty was declared to be a sort of advantage ; war was decried
as an abomination ; ladies were conjured not to give out their babies to
nurse ; late hours, fashionable dresses, and rouge were execrated; in short,
there was a general enthusiasm for nature and virtue, an enthusiasm which
seems to have had but little effect on things artificial and vicious. These
doctrines, of course, brought the fact that the Arcadian Academy was
not a very rustic or natural institution into great relief. It began to be
thought that all this verse-scribbling was not really poetical; and the
excessive enthusiasm for Ossian, who had just been translated by Cesa-
rotti, induced very unlucky comparisons between the Celtic bards and the
Roman abati, between the rocks of Morven and the Serbatoio d'Arcadia.
People began to suspect that Poetry positively refused to inhabit the halls
of an academy, and that she asked for crumbling ruins, virgin forests,
and misty mountain-tops. In default of these places, where people
of fashion might find it inconvenient to visit her, the Muse was invited
to little quiet circles in palaces or villas, where, under the patronage of
some beautiful lady, and out of reach of hungry little priests, poetical
enthusiasts might meet without fear of artificial or prosaic interests being
thrust upon them. The colonies of Arcadia began to be neglected for the
drawing-rooms of women like the Countess Castiglione at Milan, the
Countess Grismondi at Brescia, the Marchesa Silvia Verza at Verona, the
Countess Roberti at Bassano, and, above all, of the lovely Isabella Teotochi
Albrizzi at Venice, where the most eminent poets, Parini, Pindemonti,
Pompei, Cesarotti, were constantly to be met, together with an occasional
classical sculptor or emotional singer like Canova or Pacchierotti.
Very delightful those little literary circles must have been, where the
The Arcadian Academy.
55
most talented men lavished their intellectual gifts to please beautiful
and refined women; little circles meeting in some cosy drawing-room
in the quiet dark town, or 011 the terraces and in the cypress and syca¬
more alleys of the villas along the Brenta and between the Monti Berici;
so delightful that their remembrance made those who long survived them,
and even ourselves, who have merely heard of them, feel quite elegiac
at the sight of the now desolate country-houses where they met, and of
the faded pictures of the ladies who presided over them. The poetry
which was produced in such societies was, of course, far less conventional,
verbose, and worthless than that of the large academical assemblies; less
was written, and that better, than in the days of Frugoni, but great excel¬
lence was scarcely attained to. The poems of Pompei, Mazza, Masche-
roni, and even of Ippolito Pindemonti, who far surpassed his contem¬
poraries,* give us the impression that, agreeable and elegant though they
are, their authors were more interesting than they. There was a general
mild, elegiac tone prevalent, which, though not without a certain charm,
was rather languid and insipid; nor was there produced, towards the end
of the last century, any work to be compared with those of Metastasio,
Goldoni, Parini, or even of the Gozzis. The spread of philosophical and
humanitarian ideas had no perceptibly good influence 011 literature, for,
although a tendency to take interest in individual sentiment had arisen,
it was neither sufficiently strong nor sufficiently spontaneous to produce
true lyric poetry; and the gradual adoption of foreign and the revival
of antique modes of thinking and feeling merely weakened the national
literature. Metastasio could not have written his operas, nor Goldoni
his comedies, had either been fresh from reading Ossian, and Homer, and
Gray, and Rousseau, and Gessner; so true is it that intellectual cultiva¬
tion by no means implies intellectual productiveness. Imitation was in
vogue, as it must always be when anything striking first becomes known to
a whole people; and by the side of the newly-acquired knowledge of foreign
literature came the newly-revived interest in antique art, the enthusiasm
for both mingling strangely towards the end of the last century, but without
a better effect than that of making people tolerate tiresome classicism
by the side of tiresome romanticism. In Italy the classical tendency was
on the whole the stronger of the two, although largely tinged with northern
romanticism ; Italians began to go to Rome with the express purpose of
seeing ruins and statues, which had hitherto interested only professed
archaeologists, and more especially for the purpose of musing over them.
Winckelmann's Italian works, and those of his followers Fea and Visconti,
excited interest in antique art, while the gradually-spreading liberal
* His poem Antonio Fosrarini would be a masterpiece were its subject a more
moral one. Fet even in nobility of feeling how superior is it not to a poem 011 a
somewhat similar subject by a living author, Prati's famous Edmcnegarda ?
56
The Arcadian Academy.
doctrines revived interest in Roman history, which for two centuries had
been a kind of dead letter; in short, romanticism, which, being in reality
only the revival of literary and artistic appreciation due to critical study,
included even classicism—romanticism made Rome once more a capital,
of which we personally are very glad, since it enables us to return once
more to Arcadia, and to show it in a more flourishing state than it had
been since the middle of the century.
This revival of Arcadia was marked in the year 1775 by an event
which brought back for a moment the glory of the Academy, and at the
same time cast great ridicule on it. The reputation, if not the talents,
of Perfetti had fallen to the share of a woman who became famous under
the Arcadian name of Corilla Olimpica. Maria Maddalena Morelli was
born at Pistoja about the middle of the last century, and her early years
are involved in such obscurity that, betwixt the enthusiastic lyrism of her
admirers and the vile scurrility of her lampooners, it is impossible to tell
whether she was a pattern of virtue or the very reverse. She married a
Spanish gentleman named Fernandez, whom, together with her children,
her enemies accused her, among other wickednesses, of having shamefully
abandoned. However, her iniquities could either not be proved or were
hushed up in consideration of her amazing talents, for we meet her every¬
where received, honoured, and courted in the most signal way, despite an
ominous hum of contempt on the part of the less polite or more scrupu¬
lous literati. She received several invitations from Joseph II., from the
Republic of Venice, and from the Bolognese Senate. Clement XIV., an
austere man for his time, gave her, in the most flattering manner, a per¬
mission to read books prohibited by the Inquisition; and all the most
distinguished of the foreign visitors—Orloff, the Corsican chief Paoli,
and the Duke of Dorset—lavished honours on her. Her receptions were
much frequented by the most brilliant company, for, besides her poetic
talents, she was pretty despite a squint, amiable, and accomplished. She
was also a musician, for when Dr. Burney went to her house at Florence*
he heard her play the violin; and she was particularly gracious to Mozart
as a boy, for whom she even condescended to write a sonnet. In 1775
she was invited to Rome by her fellow Arcadians, and excited such enthu¬
siasm that the Senator spontaneously sent her the diploma of citizenship;
and the Abate Gioacchino Pizzi, Custode Generale d'Arcadia, crowned
her at a private meeting of the Academy. To this first ebullition of
admiration is also due a beautiful bust of Corilla, presented by an English
* This house, with General Miollis's monumental, but not very intelligible, inscrip¬
tion, " Qui visse Corilla in secolo XVIII°." is at the corner of Via tlella Forca, a
street running towards S. Lorenzo, and Via Cerretani. It has an additional interest
for us on account of Mozart, who was so often her guest.
The Arcadian Academy.
57
sculptor, Christopher Hewetson, to the Arcadians, in whose possession it
still remains. Judging from it and from a smutty portrait of her dressed
in brown brocade decorated with flowers, Corilla Olimpica must have been
at that time a stout woman of thirty-five, handsome, lively, intellectual,
withal rather heavy and coarse in feature; she had besides a squinting
eye, which was supposed to make the immediate conquest of anyone
upon whom she chose to fix it while in the enthusiasm of improvising;
and, if contemporary scandal may be credited, Corilla had made frequent
use of this faculty. At any rate she turned the heads of many people in
Home, filling them with madness of some sort or other—love, ambition,
or avarice—to serve her purposes. The young Prince Gonzaga Casti-
glione (the Prince Castelforte of this rather realistic original of Corinne),
a certain Monsignor Mazzei, and, above all, the Custode Generale
d'Arcadia, Pizzi, moved heaven and earth, begged, and promised, and
threatened, until the Pope consented to give Corilla the crown which
had been worn by Perfetti. But times were changed since the solemn
reign of Crescimbeni. A Custode Generale d'Arcadia was no longer
omnipotent over men's minds, a pope was no longer infallible in all his
decisions, an improovisatore was no longer an inspired poet; things could
no longer be looked at in the grave and dispassioned style of the year
1725 ; the coronation was regarded as a farce or a profanation, the
Arcadians as conceited pedants, Corilla herself as an impudent adven¬
turess, and, above all, the feelings of the Romans were conceived to be
outraged by this arbitrary and undeserved bestowal of what was thought
once to have been a national reward. Corilla's dubious antecedents, her
theatrical profession, the exaggeration and intrigue of her partisans, did
much to awaken public contempt and indignation : the ready buffoonery
of the Roman people burst out in more or less scurrilous fashion ; it was
solemnly announced by Pasquino—that undaunted stone advocate of an
oppressed but not disheartened people—that
Ordina e vuole Monsignor Mazzei
Che sia la Corilla cinta dell' alloro,
E clie non le si tirin buceie ne pomidoro
Sotto multa di bajocchi sei.
Other epigrams averred that this coronation, like that of Baraballo, was
meant as a jest and ought to be taken as such:
Venez-y, riez-en ; ct puis vous pourrez dire
Que tout cela n'a etc fait que pour rire.
Pizza and Corilla's other partisans seem to have taken fright at these
pasquinades, and, fearing perhaps that, despite the alleged fine of six
baiocclii on whomsoever should throw orange rinds and tomatoes at
the poetess, they might run the risk of some unpleasant scene if they
58
The Arcadian Academy.
performed the coronation in the daytime, they determined that the cere¬
mony should take place at midnight. This precaution did not, however,
entirely suffice, for, as Corilla was advancing to receive the crown of the
Capitol, a young priest pushed his way through the crowd of bystanders
and handed her a paper; the poetess, finding the missive to be in Latin,
handed it to Prince Gonzaga, who, under the impression that it contained
complimentary verses, read them out aloud, discovering, only too late,
that they were most infamously insulting to her. The ceremony of
coronation was hurried over, amid the acclamations of Corilla's enthu¬
siasts ; but the very next day a storm of invective burst out. Lampoons
against Corilla, her partisans, and even against the conniving Pope,
were pasted on all street corners and handed round in every house; the
Abate Pizzi was accused of having plotted to introduce Corilla at an
Arcadian meeting with a crown on, which was to be passed off for that of
the Capitol; of having been induced to do so by the bribes of Prince
Gonzaga, and by his own desire to play in regard to Corilla the part
played by Crescimbeni in regard to Perfetti; the whole coronation was
decried as illegal, and punishment required for its perpetrators. Poor
Pizzi, in despair, wrote a solemn letter of explanation to the Pope, who
would appear to have ratified the whole proceeding. But rumour could
not so easily be put down, or satire so quickly silenced: a long, and
rather clever, but extremely irreverent, poem was published, in which, in
the strain of the Dies Jrce, Corilla lamented her unfortunate fate, cursed
all who had invented Capitoline crowns, and especially devoted to celestial
vengeance the unlucky Abate Pizzi:
Pizzi iniquo, maledetto,
Tun, mcrcc gia m'affretto
A1 ferale cataletto.
Ah crudele ! ah scellerato !
M'ha ridotta in questo stato
D'avarizia il tuo peccato.
Tu sol fosti clie inventasti
Nobilta. corona e fasti,
Tu che mi sacrificasti.
I miei vizii, i mici difetti,
l)i canzoni e di sonctti
Oggi sono i soli soggetti.
Corilla had excited much admiration, and met much adulation ;
Madame de Stael, who saw everything through the beautifying and en¬
nobling medium of her own character, heard of her in after years, totally
misconceived her talent, her position, her triumph, saw in her a radiant
sibyl, a sort of personified genius of Italy, and wrote Corinne. Thus poor,
misused, pasquinaded Corilla Olimpica unconsciously gave rise to a
masterpiece; but those ilomans who still remembered the scene at the
The Arcaclian Academy.
59
Capitol in the year 1775 must liave suppressed a smile in reading the
magnificent description of Corinne's coronation.
The reigns of Clement XIII. and of Clement XIY. had been dull
enough for Rome and Arcadia; both popes were austere men, one en¬
grossed in bigotry, the other in reforms, caring respectively only for beati¬
fications and consistories, and for politics and Church government. The
reign of Pius YI. was a very different one. Giovan Angelo Braschi, the
handsomest, vainest, and most artistic pope who had reigned since more
than a century, seemed inclined to abandon the principles of his imme¬
diate predecessors, and to return to the notions and habits of a Paul Y.
or an Urban VIII. Nepotism, a thing long out of use, reappeared in full
force, together with the most lavish expenditure and the most childish
ostentation. The Pope's nephew, Braschi Onesti, was made a duke, a
grandee of Spain, a prince of the Holy Empire, and was given a large
fortune, large estates, including the famous villa of Hadrian, and a large
amount of political influence : a striking contrast to the Lambertinis,
whom their uncle Benedict XIV. had invited to stay at home and leave
him alone. Pius VI. had something of the feeling of Louis XIV., and a
vague idea of playing the part of Pericles ; he did a few things handsomely
and a great many in the most shabby style of ostentation ; he bought a
number of very valuable ancient statues, which would otherwise have been
scattered about in foreign collections, and built to receive them the
noble rotonda and staircase of the Museo Pio-Clementino, the most
beautiful of all galleries; he caused considerable excavations to be made,
and employed Canova and other first-rate artists to restore antiques; at
the same time he built that monster of heavy pastry-cook architecture, the
chapter-house of St. Peter's, and a number of trumpery buildings of a
similar style; and to whatever he did, good or bad, he appended his name,
hoping to gain immortality by means of the tablets with the heraldic
wind blowing down lilies, and the inscription, "Munificentia Pii Sexti,"
which he sprinkled all over the streets, museums, and monuments of
Rome. In his reign, and partly owing to his personal influence, Rome
became for the first time a great cosmopolitan centre; not merely a place
like Venice, Bologna, and Milan, in which young men on their grand
tour remained for a short time, but the permanent residence of numbers
of foreigners who came to study art or to wile away a lazy existence.
Soon there was a regular set of French artists, another of Germans, and
a small colony of English of rank and fortune; nay, Rome became so cos¬
mopolitan towards the end of the eighteenth century that when Beckford
was there in 1780, the Senator—that is to say, the supreme magistrate—
was a Swede. These foreigners did not necessarily mix with Roman
society, except with the artistic and literary part of it; and whereas, in
the year 1740, Charles de Brosses found himself in the midst of a strange
60
The Arcadian Academy.
people, Dr. Burney informs us that as early as 1770 he met more English
than Italians in Rome, and eighteen years later Goethe seems scarcely
to have known a single Italian; for, in proportion as the foreigners
colonised, the natives became more national and exclusive. This new
condition of things naturally affected literary life; there was no longer in
Rome either a Don Livio Odescalchi in search of literary retainers nor a
Crescimbeni in search of rich noble protectors; the nobles had ceased to
play the Maecenas, the literati had ceased to be their humble attendants;
literature was gradually being turned out of noble Roman circles and
seeking refuge in the cosmopolitan society which collected in Rome for
the sake of art, of music, of archaeology, and of that general intellectual
improvement which Goethe was the first to analyse and define; the in¬
tellectual part of different nations was beginning to consider Rome as its
home. There were, of course, lots of Roman fine ladies and gentlemen
on the lists of the Bosco Parrasio; but the really intelligent public, the
one which could still take pleasure in meeting for literary purposes, was
a mongrel one: there was the Duke of Dorset, a great giver of private
concerts; there was Councillor Reiffenstein, a great collector of antiques;
there was Zoega, the Danish archaeologist; Piranesi, the engraver; Fea,
the translator of Winckelmann, and his more famous rival Visconti;
there were Canova and Angelica Kauffmann, and Tischbein and Gavin
Hamilton; there was a crowd of artists, and literati, and musicians,
Italians and foreigners, with whom they associated; there were aspiring
young men trying to create a national stage: the Abate Monti, a poor
secretary of the pope's nephew Braschi Onesti, whose Aristodemus was
vehemently applauded, and Count Alfieri, a rich, half-mad Piedmontese,
always driving a lot of horses and getting into dreadful quarrels, whose
Orestes created a still more violent sensation, and gave the younger gene¬
ration a certain impatient contempt for Pope Pius and his rule, and a
desire to return to antiquity, and freedom, and paganism. While Roman
society was thus losing its national character, Rome itself was unchanged:
with its old-fashioned, half-classic practices, its riotous Carnival, its races
of riderless horses, its people living and sleeping in the streets, its pro¬
cessions and popular festivals, and old Christian and heathenish customs;
so that, in this wonderful mixture of newly discovered antiquity, of modern
artistic life, of picturesque old-fashioned custom, of polished modern
society, Goethe could feel all his wishes fulfilled, save that of never
quitting so delightful a mode of existence. The imbecile and uncultivated
natives had retired, the imbecile and uncultivated foreigners had not yet
come; there was art and music, and antiquity and nature, apparently for
the sole enjoyment of the intelligent and cultivated minority, to whom
new and vast horizons of philosophy, of liberty, of art, of literature, were
gradually disclosing; and altogether things seemed to be going 011 in a
The Arcadian Academy.
61
strangely agreeable way, as indeed tliey did immediately before tlie great
storm which was to shake, and blast, and uproot all. This was the state
of Home when, in 1788, Councillor Wolfgang von Goethe, minister of
the Duke of Wiemar, author of Wei-1her, the most popular book that had
ever appeared, was admitted into Arcadia as Megalio Melpomeneo, and
had allotted to him by the Abate Pizzi the " fields of the Tragic Muse "
—rather an unnecessary piece of property for a man who was finishing
Tatsso and Iphigenia, and had the first scenes of Faust in his portfolio.
This delightful state of Roman life was not destined to last long.
Scarcely had Goethe recrossed the Alps when there came news from
France which diverted the thoughts of intelligent men from literature, art,
and archaeology. Liberal doctrines had long been working their way in
Italy, though in a subdued and inoffensive way, but it was not till the
year 1789 that the Italians became aware that those doctrines might be
practically applied; as it is possible that even in France people did not
know what changes might be effected until the first great effort had shown
them their own force. But, when once the movement had begun, it was
irresistible; men found themselves suddenly hurled from out of the sphere
of mere wild speculation into that of violent action. The Italians seem
to have received a shock of surprise; what the French had so long hinted
at and then ranted about was absolutely taking place. The reforms, which
had seemed mere dreams, were being enforced, philanthropy was being put
into practice, freedom was being established; those far-gone times of
Brutus and the Gracchi, which had seemed mere poetical ideals, were
really returning; humanity was being changed, renovated, transfigured.
Such was the feeling of many ardent young men in Italy, and many more
moderate and wiser men sympathised to a certain degree with them, but
felt less sanguine than they did; nor does there appear to have been any
attempt at imitating the French in their revolution. Very soon, however,
the horrible excesses of the republicans, their theatrical bombast, their
want of patriotism, their insolent defiance of all law, human and divine,
disgusted even the most ardent philanthropists of Italy. The Govern¬
ments looked on in stupid fright or stupid apathy; some thought to stay
the revolutionary wave by imprisoning a few Frenchmen and uproarious
youths; others trusted in their concessions to the people. Tuscany
remained placid and happy. Venice, despite the warning voice of Fran¬
cesco Pesaro, determined to jog on comfortably, and let the banner of
St. Mark and the twenty-five old cripples of Peschiera scare away all
invaders.* Pius VI. immediately ordered a creature of his, named Spe-
dalieri, to write a book to prove that man had a right to equality and
* The following gives an amusing picture of the times, which we transcribe from
Professor Ernesto M;tsi's very learned and at the same time amusing book on the
62
The Arcadian Academy.
liberty, and that the Sovereign Pontiff was the likeliest person to obtain it
for him. The King of Sardinia called out his people to defend their
independence and their rulers, and opposed his elaborately-trained army
to the French. Austria moved, England moved, France moved; the
independent Italian States found themselves between the belligerents,
caressed and bullied now by the one, now by the other, vainly attempting
to maintain neutrality, and to suppress the seeds of insubordination. In
Rome the French minister and his secretary drove through the Corso
wearing tricolour cockades.—the mob fell upon them and cut them to
pieces; Monti wrote a poem in honour of the murdered Basseville, but
that did not atone. The French soldiers, without bread, without clothes,
without shoes, were told at the foot of the Alps to avenge their country¬
men massacred at Rome; they poured into Italy, a hideous barbarous
mass, burning, sacking, and pillaging, while they declared that they were
bringing liberty to the Italians. Napoleon reorganised them, disciplined
them, soothed the population, and prevented all but official plunder. The
Austrians then came and sacked and ravaged in their turn. The French
planted trees of liberty, stole pictures, statues, manuscripts, money, all
they could lay their hands upon. The Italians rejoiced because they had
been made free, and wept because they had been made beggars. Some
false enthusiasts cringed to the conquerors and obtained posts under them;
some timorous conservatives went over to the Austrians; some generous-
minded visionaries plotted to exterminate the foreigners of all sorts and
set up an Italian kingdom; some wanted a democracy, others an oligarchy;
some approved of the French system of levelling and wholesale changing;
others wished to preserve some of the old traditions; a few truly noble
men put aside their prejudices and united, priests and freethinkers, repub¬
licans and aristocrats, determined to serve their country under whatever
rule it fell, trying to save it from the ruin which seemed impending;
among these we meet, for the last time, a man of Avhom we have already
spoken at considerable length, the Abate Giuseppe Parini.
Meanwhile the frivolous part of society chatted and danced, and went to
operas and masquerades, and adored now the Emperor of Germany, now
the French general, but especially that greatest, most heroic of men, the
amateur playwright Albergati, a book which unfortunately fell into our hands only
after the publication of this essay in Fraser's Magazine:—
" In the year 1792 the Bolognese Senate discussed various plans, and finally assigned
to the most excellent Signor Gonfaloniere (head of the Senate) 120 Bolognese livres,
wherewith to provide for the safety of the State. This worthy gentleman resolved
in his mind how best to employ the money, and finally distributed it, in sums of 80
livrcs, to the various Capuchin monasteries and to the convent of the Barefoot Nuns,
that they might implore Heavenly assistance on account of the French invasion of
Savoy " (p. 442).
The Arcadian Academy.
63
singer Marchesi, wliom Alfieri called upon to buckle on his helmet, and
march, out against the French, as the only remaining Italian who had
dared to resist the " Corsican Gallic" invader, although only in the matter
of a song. And in this confusion of contrary opinions, and of absence of
opinions, in this chaos of strife and of utter helplessness, of vain-glorious
rascality and unnoticed heroism, there remained one man who, taking no
part, looked on in contempt, and left the world the most extraordinary
monument of his feeling. Alfieri had only two feelings, strangely fused
into one—hatred and contempt. He hated and despised the savage repub¬
licans, the formal Austrians, the grandiloquent French spoilers, the bar¬
barous German invaders, the inane republics and grand dukes, the retro¬
grades and the radicals, those who acted and those who were passive, the
servility and the tyranny; and this hatred and contempt he expressed in
the collection of epigrams which he entitled Misogallo, with the harsh
bitter terseness which was his literary weakness and his political strength.
The whole order of things in Italy was subverted; all was plundered,
regulated, arranged for the better by the French; the Austrians and Pied-
montese made terrible reprisals. Venice was handed over to the Austrians;
Naples was abandoned to Caroline and Cardinal RufFo; colleges were
instituted, statues carried off, trees of liberty planted, fireworks let off,
while prisons and fortresses were crowded, while whole families, once
wealthy and powerful, crossed the Alps on foot as beggars, and the best
blood in the southern provinces was shed in torrents.* Carlo Botta, a
patriot and a thinker, who had suffered in his youth for the French cause,
has left a heartrending account of the feelings of men like himself at the
close of the eighteenth century, looking upon their country ravaged, pil¬
laged, enslaved; dishonoured by those who had pretended to bring liberty,
and crushed by those who had pretended to defend independence; all
illusions were dispelled, all hopes gone, and there is something like a
stifled sob in the words in which the historian tells how the populace
rejoiced when the Republic of St. Mark was dissolved, and predicts that
soon the time will come when Venice will be a mere heap of ruins, washed
over and half hidden by the compassionate lagoons. So, indeed, it seemed
when Botta wrote; nor could he foresee that what appeared final destruction
was, in reality, but the beginning of renovation; and that the freedom and
independence of Italy, lost amidst devastation and oppression when the
feudal monarchies of the North reached their highest power at the begin¬
ning of the sixteenth century, would be recovered, thanks to that second
* Perhaps no better picture could be given of Italy in the last years of the
eighteenth century than that contained in the Confesstoni (li v?i Ottuagenario, by
the late Ippolito Nievo. This very remarkable, though occasionally tedious, novel
reads like a real autobiography; and it is wonderful how a young writer of our own
day could so realize the condition of Italy ninety years ago.
64
The Arcadian Academy.
foreign invasion due to the fall of feudalism at the end of the eighteenth
century.
What became of Arcadia in that great storm? Did her members con¬
tinue writing and reading sonnets, while Pius VI. was being dragged 1o
Avignon, while Pavia was being sacked, while Venice was being sold,
while Cirillo, and Eleonora Pimentel, and Filomarino were being butchered,
and Caracciolo hanged to the mast of his own ship? This much is certain,
that men thought no more about the institution, and that its existence
and very name were forgotten in the great confusion whence modern Italy
arose.
And as we stand once more in the little desolate battered villa on the
Janiculum, and look again at the portraits of Crescimbeni, of Perfetti, of
Corilla, and of the beautiful Faustina Maratti, of their many nameless
companions, mouldering unnoticed on the bare, stained walls, we feel even
more powerfully than before how deep a gulf separates us from those times,
so near to our own, yet so long forgotten, when the Academy of the Arcadi
represented the whole literary life of Italy.
THE MUSICAL LIFE.
THE MUSICAL LIFE.
We go down the Strada San Donato, the noblest street 111 noble old
Bologna; we issue out of its lofty arcades in front of the tall red brick
church of San Giacomo, pass by the side of its time-worn marble lions,
and ring, hard by, at a little blistered door, all scribbled over with music
notes. The door creaks, swings back on its hinges, and lets us pass into
a little black lobby, illumined by a flickering, sputtering shrine lamp; we
clamber up a dark rugged well-staircase, past an open kitchen, and come
to a landing. A confused sound of instruments and voices meets us, for
the pupils of the music school arc at their lessons; we push back a heavy
leathern door, and enter a vast, lofty, desolate hall, on whose brick floor
our steps resound as in a church. The practising pupils are not here, nor
is any other living person besides ourselves; but all around is a crowd of
dead musicians, members of the once famous Philharmonic Academy, in
purple and lilac, and brocade and powder, who look down upon us from the
walls. Only here and there do we recognise some well-known figure—
Handel, majestic in blue plush and a many-storied peruke; Gluck, coarse,
bright, and flushed, in a furred cloak; Haydn, pale, grey, willow-like,
bending over a meagre spinnet; Mozart, sweet and dreamy, with the
shadow of premature death already upon him—; around them are a host
of others, forgotten and unknown, their contemporaries, their masters,
their friends, their rivals* and perhaps their successful rivals. Very solemn
and quaint they mostly are, those ladies with prodigious beribboned hay¬
cocks on their heads, those fiddlers in dressing-gowns and periwigs, those
prim chapel-masters seated by their harpsichords, and those dapper singers
with one hand on their music roll and the other on their sword-hilt; very
solemn and quaint, and almost droll, but not without something that
awakens sadness. There is sadness in the dignified thoughtful composers,
looking as if the world still rang with the sound of their music—music
not heard for a century; there is sadness in the dandified singers, whose
names have long been forgotten, but whose eyes are upturned and whose
lips are parted, as if tliey still thrilled and delighted those that have been
dead a hundred years: it is a world of feeling extinct and genius forgotten
f 2
68
The Musical Life.
a world separated from ours by a strange indefinable gulf. Yet amongst
these forgotten nameless figures there is one who can procure us a glimpse
into that world: opposite us hangs the portrait of a man in the brocade
gown of a doctor of music; thin, sharp, with a shrewd, kindly, humorous
face. Our fellow-countryman, Dr. Burney, can yet introduce us to some
at least of the forgotten musicians around us; of all his contemporaries
he is the only one who does not look down on us in silence.
Let us quit for a while the old desolate hall, hung with the portraits of
the Philharmonic Academicians; and descend into the cosy brown library,
with its shelves of books and manuscripts, its glass cases of quaint lutes
and viols, and its Venetian chandelier shining opal-tinted in the sunshine,
which slants across the little cloister court, and gilds the red brick of the
adjacent belfry. Here, among heaps of time-soiled scores and bundles of
faded letters, and with a subdued hum of music entering by the open
windows, we can sit and turn over the leaves of the battered volume which
chronicles the musical tour through France and Italy made in the year
1770 by Charles Burney, Doctor of Music.
I.
Charles Burney is scarcely remembered now-a-days except as the father
of one of the earliest and most brilliant of female English novelists; but
long before Evelina and Cecilia were written, at a time when the future
Mdme. d'Arblay was looked upon as a mere ordinary little piece of living
furniture in the house in Poland Street, her father was well known as one
of the first of English musicians, as a man of great literary attainments
and of great social charms, and as belonging to the most brilliant coteries
of the day. Although by profession nothing beyond a mere music-master,
and without pretensions to an elegant or even very comfortable style of
living, Burney had a very large circle of acquaintances, not only among
literary and scientific notabilities, but among people of much higher rank
and station than his own, who were pleased to know him and pleased that
their acquaintance with him should be known, for Burney was a man who
was acquainted with everyone worth knowing, thanks to his character, his
talents, and a certain sincerity and sunniness of nature which attached
everyone to him. Born at Shrewsbury in 1726, and entrusted during
childhood to mere country-folk, he had been early apprenticed to the
celebrated composer Arne, whose teachings were restricted to making him
drudge as a copyist, so that the young man owed nearly all he learned to
his own indefatigable activity while in this bondage. From it he was
released by Fulke Greville, a high-born fop and wit, who took him into his
private service, but less as a teacher than a companion. This position,
The Musical Life.
69
while throwing the youth into the dissipated circles to which his patron
belonged, at the same time afforded him opportunities of becoming
acquainted with persons of social and literary standing; and such was
Burney's happy character that he obtained all the advantages without
any of the disadvantages which Mr. Greville put within his reach. A
charming and highly intellectual young wife confirmed his tendencies
towards domestic life, and towards literary and social culture; and every
succeeding year saw him extend his reputation and enlarge his circle of
friends. Nothing perhaps impresses us more with his winning character
than the perfect confidence and affection of all his children, and the
constant tender admiration of his daughter Fanny—an admiring enthu¬
siastic affection, not unlike that of Madame de Stael for Necker. But
Burney was as great a favourite abroad as at home. Among the earliest
of his innumerable friends was Gar rick, who would show off all his powers
of mimicry for the delight of the little Burneys; the accomplished and
unfortunate Crisp, to whoso conversation Burney probably owed much of
the superior aesthetical education he displayed; and Mason, the friend of
Gray, and author of Caractacus, whom, together with Thomson of the
Seasons, Burney had come across in the earliest part of his career.
Reynolds, who loved money, painted Burney's portrait out of mere friend¬
ship; and Mrs. Thrale hung it up at Streatham. Goldsmith sought eagerly
for the acquaintance of the doctor of music; while Gibbon, Bruce, Burke,
Sheridan, Captain Cook, Murphy, Boswell, and a host of other celebrities,
flocked to the parties in the house which had once belonged to Newton.
But of all Burney's friends none perhaps was as hearty and truly appre¬
ciative as Johnson:
" Mrs. Thrale," writes Madame d'Arblay, "was lamenting the sudden
disappearance of Dr. Burney, who had just gone to town, sans adieux;
declaring that he was the most complete male coquette she knew, for he
only gave just enough of his company to make more desired. ' Dr. Burney,'
said Mr. Murphy, 1 is indeed a most extraordinary man. I think I do not
know such another. He is at home on all subjects; and upon all highly
agreeable. I look upon him as a wonderful man!' 11 love Burney!'
cried Dr. Johnson, emphatically; 'my heart goes out to meet Burney. . .
Dr. Burney is a man for everybody to love. It is but natural to love him.
... I question if there be in the world such another man, altogether,
for mind, intelligence, and manners, as Dr. Burney.' "
In this prosperous condition of his affairs, Dr. Burney, who, it must be
remembered, although a wit and a friend of wits, was by profession merely
a music-master, conceived the idea of a great work on his art—a general
history of music, such as had never been written before, and could never
be written except by himself, by the man who had heard more music than
any other, who appreciated it better, and had the friendship of all the most
70
The Musical Life.
distinguished composers and performers. To this plan he devoted all his
leisure time and all his spare money. He made extract after extract,
bought volume after volume and manuscript after manuscript, and every
hour missed by a pupil was, according to Madame d'Arblay, given to his
History. Indeed, what would not be done for an all-engrossing work by
a man like Burney, who as a boy had tied a string to his toe that he
might be waked by a companion in the street and begin his studies at day¬
break, and who as a young man had learned Latin and Greek while
plodding through the mud of Lynn Regis on his mare Peggy? Very soon
Burney became dissatisfied with the materials for his History which he
could obtain in England from books and conversation; he wished to give
his work the benefit of every kind of information, and he at length con¬
ceived the plan of visiting France and Italy. " In hopes," he wrote, " of
stamping on my History some marks of originality .... I determined
to hear with my own ears, and see with mine own eyes; and, if possible, to
see and hear nothing but music." " There was something so spirited and
uncommon," writes Madame d'Arblay, " and yet of so antique a cast, in
these travels or pilgrimage that he had undertaken in search of materials
for the history of his art, that curiosity was awakened to the subject, and
expectation was earnest for its executionand, consequently, well supplied
with letters of introduction, and encouraged by general approbation, Dr.
Burney set off for Italy with a light heart at the beginning of June 1770.
On Tuesday, June 13, Dr. Burney arrived in Paris. He had been there
twice before, was well acquainted with its sights, people, and music, and
therefore stayed only as long as was required to seek for materials for his
work in the public libraries. Dr. Burney appears to have had that high
admiration for French writers, and that smiling slight contempt for the
French people, which distinguished well-educated Englishmen of his day.
Like them he had read the Encyclopedie, and Voltaire, and Rousseau, and
all the other philosophers, without that religious and national hostility and
dread which the succeeding generation felt for them. Like most of his
travelling countrymen he had noticed the French lower classes, horribly
oppressed, miserably poor, and invincibly lighthearted and civil, dancing,
bowing, and making witticisms in torn, tarnished clothes, as gaily as if
there had been neither taxes nor covvees, nor rack, nor gibbet. He had
looked at this strange people without any of the fears and hatred which
they were later destined to inspire. The coming revolution had not yet
cast its shadow before it. In the eyes of foreigners the Encyclopedists
were not yet atheists and corrupters; the lower classes were not yet dema¬
gogues and murderers. All in France was quite safe and pleasant: there
were philosophical marquises disbelieving in moral law, while waiting for
old age and neglect to take to devotion; ministers, who gave delightfully
courteous audiences to insignificant travellers and sent troublesome pam-
The Musical Life.
71
phleteers to tin' Bastille ; there were gay tattered vagabonds like La Fleure,
and chivalric outcasts like the Knight of St.Louis who sold pasties; there
was the whole fantastic world of Yorick—amusing, charming, despicable,
and perfectly harmless. Dr. Burney went to the public libraries, walked
in the streets crowded with the FeteDieu processions, and on the Boulevart,
"which is a place of public diversion without the gates of Paris. It is
laid out and planted ; at the sides are coffee-houses, conjurors, and shows
of all kinds. Here, every evening during the summer, the walks are
crowded with well-dressed people and the road with splendid equipages."
Here also people danced minuets, allemandes, and contre-danses when the
weather was warm. He went to the theatre and saw comedies exquisitely
acted, and operas most vilely sung. He went to the Abbe Arnaud, who
had written much in favour of Italian music, and to M. Gretry, who was
trying to bring it into fashion by his own example, and with them Burney
lamented to his heart's content over the vileness of French music; for
Arnaud's books and Gretry's compositions, though read and heard through¬
out the country, seemed equally inefficacious to make the French abandon
their own atrocious music.
Burney also went to several concerts and operas, thinking that some
improvement might have taken place since his previous visits to Paris, and
also from a conscientious determination to hear everything, good or bad,
and to try once for all to find something enjoyable or commendable in
French music. " Those who visit Italy for the sake of painting, sculpture,
and architecture," writes Burney, "do well to see what those arts afford
in France first, as they become so dainty afterwards that they can bear to
look at but few things which that kingdom affords; and, as I expected to
have the same prejudices or feelings at my return about their music, I
determined to give it a fair hearing first." How strong a prejudice already
existed in the Doctor's mind is shown by the very precautions he took to
remain unprejudiced; indeed it was preposterous to think of giving a fair
hearing to French music; for, besides the musical taste of every English¬
man of that day being exclusively Italian, it was a fact universally admitted
and proved by experiments on the unsophisticated minds of Greeks,
Ilurons, and Polynesians, that to enjoy French music it was not sufficient
to bo a savage but it was necessary also to be a Frenchman. Why the
French opera from the time of Lully to that of Gluck should have been a
musical abomination incomprehensible to all other nations, it is indeed
difficult to explain, except by the fact that all stagnant things corrupt.
The French, like the English and the Germans, had originally got their
music and their opera from the Italians, but, unlike their neighbours, they
had refused to submit to the constantly progressing Italian taste, while
they themselves remained incapable of improving what they had been
incapable of producing. Music out of Italy was a delicate exotic, and the
72
The Musical Life.
French planted and cultivated it among coarse and tawdry plants by
•which it was soon crushed.
When Cardinal Mazarin introduced the Italian opera into France it
was in the monstrous condition inseparable from times of growth and
transition; the dramas were badly constructed, the poetry languid and
quibbling, the music harsh and pedantic; no great school of singing had
as yet arisen, and the chief attraction of the performance consisted in
scenic displays and pantomime wonders, which were pushed to an incre¬
dible point. The French never dreamed of altering the opera in any of
these essential points. While the Italians gave a new shape to the
drama, eliminated all the extraneous elements of machinery and dancing,
and cultivated singing and vocal composition to the utmost, the French,
relying entirely upon their own powers, never attending to what was being
done in Italy, merely petrified the uncouth and meaningless forms of the
opera of the seventeenth century. Musical progress there was none; on
the contrary, the greater the distance from the original importation of the
opera, the worse it became; the more insipid were the plays, the more
extravagant the scenic shows, the more uncouth the music, the more
insufferable the singers, and the more satisfied was the public. La
Bruyere and Vauvenargues spoke with admiring complacency of what was
styled la machine, of the transformations, the flights through the air, the
apparitions from underground, the enchanted castles and palaces in the
clouds; St. Evremont and Bourdelot proudly contrasted the ranting,
screaming, barking, drawling performance o their countrymen with the
smooth and brilliant execution of the Italians, which they found utterly
devoid of pathos and fit only to make people gape or to send them to
sleep. The most polished Paris audience would turn with satisfaction
from a tragedy by Racine or Voltaire to an opera by Campra or Rameau;
from the exquisitely dignified declamation of a Baron or a Lecouvreur to
tli e screeching and howling of a Gros or a Delcambre; in short, French
music seemed invincible. Gray, who accompanied Walpole to Paris in
1739, has left a long description of a French opera, in which, after
detailing the ludicrously vapid subject and the eternal ballets, he con¬
cludes as follows: " Imagine all this transacted by cracked voices trilling
divisions upon two notes and a half, accompanied by an orchestra of hum-
strums, .... des miaulements et des hurlements effroyables, melees
(sic) avec un tintamarre du diable: voila la musique fran<?aise en
abregee" (sic).*
However, as even Frenchmen must travel and find something to admire
in foreign countries, a suspicion began at length to spread that French
* Compare Goldoni's account, which we translate from his Autobiography:
" I kept waiting for the airs, the music of which would, I thought, have at least
amused me; when, behold! out comes the ballet again, and concludes the act. I,
The Musical Life.
73
music was not quite so perfect, and Italian music not quite so atrocious,
as bad been hitherto thought; men of talent and fortune began to seek
for Italian scores and to write pasquinades on French operas. An Italian
comic company was encouraged to perform in Paris Pergolesi's charming
musical farce La Serva Padrona, which immediately awakened tbe
enthusiasm of all who were inclined towards Italian music and the frantic
indignation of the partisans of the French opera, and inaugurated a war
of pamphlets and epigrams which lasted full a quarter of a century. But
French music was not so easily routed. Frenchmen like the President do
Brosses went to Italy, heard the Faustina, Senesino, Carestini, all tbe
greatest singers of the day; brought back volumes and portfolios full of
songs by Hasse, by Pergolesi, and by Leo, which were handed round in
Paris, copied, and performed by self-sufficient amateurs ; but, after having
recovered from the first shock of hearing once more their national music,
tbe travellers would gradually become half reconciled to the French
opera. Or else a great Italian singer, like Caffariello, would be sum¬
moned to Paris by the Dauphine, and Grimm, Diderot, and hundreds of
others would go into raptures and burst into tears at his performances in
the Iioyal Chapel; but scarcely had he left France when his frantic
admirers would turn half complacently to the howlers and screechers of
the Concert Spirituel. A vast amount was said and written to prove that
Italian music was tbe only sort fit for civilised beings, and a constant
lamentation was set up as to the difficulty of introducing it into France ;
yet never did it enter the head of any one that it was as simple to esta¬
blish a regular Italian opera-house in Paris as it had been to do so long
before in London, at Vienna, nay, even at Lisbon and at Warsaw. The
French talked and wrote in favour of Italian composers and singers, but
neither'the President de Brosses, nor Grimm, nor D'Alembert, nor Arnaud,
nor Diderot, nor any of the warmest partisans of Italian music, ever
dreamed of introducing into France the Italian style of musical drama, nor
tbe exclusive and passionate worship of the human voice which formed
the mainspring of Italian music. They wanted to retain their own
national style and just varnish it over with Italian gloss; they wanted
the singer to remain subservient to the composer, the composer to the
poet, and the poet to the stage mechanician; and at the same time they
thinking that the whole act had been without a single air, turn to my neighbour for
explanation 011 the point. lie begins to laugh, and assures me that the act I have
heard contained no less than six airs. 'How? I am not deaf.' It turns out that
I had taken all the airs for an endless recitative. A minute later out come three
actors, all singing together: this was meant for a trio, but I again mistook it for a
recitative. In short, all was beautiful, grand, magnificent, excepting the music.
When the curtain had fallen, all my acquaintances asked me how I had liked the
opera. The answer bursts out of my lips: ' Tis a paradise for tbe eyes, but a hell
for the ears !' "
74
The Musical Life.
wanted what they called Italian music; a proof that, as Barney affirms,
they never understood what it really meant, and that they were in reality
fighting about mere names. The only French writer of the day who really
understood Italian music was Rousseau, and, because he did, he under¬
stood also that his fellow countrymen would never understand it. Of this
Burney had ample proof at the Concert Spirituel or concert of sacred
music in the Louvre, the only kind of musical diversion which the godly
Louis XV. would tolerate on festivals : the performance began with a
chorus by Lalande, of which the greater part seemed detestable to Burney,
but was "much applauded by the audience, who admired it as much as
they did themselves for being natives of a country able to produce such
masterpieces of composition and such exquisite performers." Two able
Italian instrumentalists were less agreeable to the public; " nay, I could
even discover by the countenances of the audience and their reception how
little they felt such a performance." Poor Madame Philidor, who only
attempted to sing in the Italian way, and who could not be accused of suc¬
ceeding in the attempt, was scarely better treated; but Mdlle. Delcambre,
" who screamed out Exaudi Deus with all the power of lungs she could
muster," was much admired, and when the concert concluded with a grand
chorus, which surpassed all the clamour, all the noises Burney had ever heard
in his life, he saw, "by the smiles of ineffable satisfaction which were
visible in the countenances of ninety-nine out of a hundred of the company,
and heard, by the most violent applause that a ravished audience could
bestow, that it was quite what their hearts felt and their souls loved."
Yet these were no longer the days when Lully and Rameau had ruled
supreme. Rousseau had written his Lettre sur la Musique Franchise;
Grimm and Arnaud had pasquinaded French composers; Diderot's
daughter, when Burney visited her, played only Italian music, and all
the fashionable people declared themselves the warm admirers of Pergo-
lesi and Galuppi. " It is not easy," writes Burney, " to account for the
latitude the French take in their approbation, or to suppose it possible
for people to like things as opposite as light and darkness. If French
music is good and its expression natural and pleasing, that of Italy must
be bad; or change the supposition, and allow that of Italy to be all
which an unprejudiced but cultivated ear could wish, then the French
music cannot give such an ear equal delight. The truth is, the French
do not lilce Italian music: they 'pretend to adopt and admire it, but it is all
mere affectation."
Burney was perfectly correct in saying that the French never really
liked Italian music. They never obtained or tried to obtain it genuine;
and, so far from its ever being thoroughly adopted in France, the French
lost their exclusive worship for Lully and Rameau, made a step forward
from the point at which they had been at the beginning of the eighteenth
The Mimical Life.
75
century, and began to enjoy Italian music only when it was offered them
by Gluck cunningly tinged with French declamation; and they entirely
abandoned their national composers only when Italian music was begin¬
ning to decay, when it had ceased to be purely Italian, and had mingled
with what remained of the original French style, in the days of Chcrubini,
Salieri, and Spontini.
The violent feuds between Gluekists and Piccinnists, which broke out
in Paris a few years after Burney's visit, have indeed led some persons to
believe that there must have been intense musical life among the French,
and that they really possessed an Italian school of composition ; but such
a notion is totally erroneous. The French cared nothing for music itself,
but they seized hold of it as a subject for dissertation and dispute. Gluck
and Piccinni were equally unappreciated by them, and were valued only
as affording occasion for a war of pamphlets, epigrams, and vaudevilles,
such as was waged upon every other subject and upon no subject at all.
The French were in that strange state of mental over-excitement in
which scientific discoveries and drawing-room jests, social laws and
charlatans' nostrums, became objects of the same engrossing and feverish
attention; and music, to which they never listened, but about which they
were always talking, was merely another intellectual bauble which amused
and excited them for a-while, until Mesmer and Cagliostro took its place,
and until all artificial subjects of interest were swept away by the Revolu¬
tion. With respect to the Italian school of music, it never took root in
France, and indeed the first superficial varnish of Italian elegance was
imparted to French music by Gluck, whose wild theories of dramatic
expression, joined with his aversion to the supremacy of the voice, made him
sympathise to a certain extent with the declamatory and unmelodious
school of Lully and Rameau; whereas Piccinni, bent, like every true
Italian composer of his day, solely on perfecting purely musical excellence,
was utterly unable to amalgamate his style with that of the French, or to
produce any effect on the latter. That this is true, and that the utter
musical stagnation of which Burney complains continued in the midst of
the most violent theoretical discussions, is proved by Mozart's letters,
written from Paris in 1779, when the Gluckist and Piccinnist squabbles
were at the highest: " What irritates me most," he writes, "is that these
Ilerren Franzosen have improved their taste only to the extent of endur¬
ing to hear good music as well as bad. But to expect them to perceive
that their own music is bad—ey lei Leibe! And such singing ! Oime!
If at least French women would let alone Italian airs, I might forgive
them their squalling; but to hear good music spoilt is intolerable."
Again: " If at least there were a place here where people had ears and
hearts to appreciate music, where they understood a little about music,
76
The Musical Life.
and had a little good taste ; but with respect to music, I am among cattle
and beasts ( Vielier unci Bestien)." Lord Mount Edgcumbe also, who
visited France in 1780, found French music insufferable, and French taste
so little improved that Pacchierotti, the most refined and pathetic of all
the many exquisite singers of his day, was wholly unappreciated there.
The French, however, continued quite proud of themselves, and pro¬
tested (and still perhaps protest) that if French music was not perfect,
which they could not readily admit, it yet possessed great excellences,
without which the Italian school must necessarily have remained incom¬
plete. This was already the style of talk in the time of Rousseau, the
first Frenchman who flatly denied that French music had any qualities
which the Italians need desire; and these pretensions became such an
article of national belief that it is right they should be examined care¬
fully, as well as the answers of their contradictors.
There are no Italian accounts of French music,* for the Italians who
travelled avoided hearing it, and those who stayed at home did not even
know, as Rousseau remarks, that there was any French music which
differed from theirs. Our authorities, therefore, are mainly English and
Germans, and Frenchmen themselves, who often confessed individual
faults of their music, while refusing to admit its general inferiority. The
first and most important fault found by foreigners is that French music
is old-fasliionod; that, while Italian music has rapidly improved, French
music has remained utterly stagnant since the end of the seventeenth
century; that the same operas, forty, fifty, or sixty years old, are con¬
stantly being repeated, while in Italy ten or fifteen years suffice to render
an opera obsolete; and that, even if new operas are composed, it is always
in the same traditional style and with the same servile imitation of Lully,
Lalande, and Rameau, whose Italian contemporaries have long since
been laid aside. " It is wonderful," writes Burney, speaking of the Za'icle
of Royer, which he had just heard, " that nothing better, or of more
modern taste, has been composed since; the style of composition is totally
changed throughout the rest of Europe; yet the French .... have
stood still in music for thirty or forty years: nay, one may sssert boldly
that it has undergone few changes at the great opera since Lully's time—
that is to say, in one hundred years. In short, notwithstanding they can
both talk and write so well and so much about it, music in France, with
respect to the two great essentials of melody and expression, may still be
said to be in its infancy." What we next hear is that the music was not
* Except that of Goldoni, who resided in France for more than twenty years. He
refers to about the year 17G5, and, although unmusical by nature, his opinion is
interesting as being that of a man accustomed to the best Italian music.
The Musical Life.
77
only old-fashioned, but bad, and most shamefully performed. French
singing was proverbially abominable : the French, as we learn from
Rousseau, knew only one sort of upper voice, the soprano, raised to the
most unearthly pitch; and they replaced the contralto, so lovingly culti¬
vated by the Italians of the eighteenth century, by a sort of falsetto tenor,
of a most nasal and disgusting artificial tone. These misplaced voices
were further ruined by being produced either purely in the head or in the
throat, no such thing as a real chest-voice being known in France. They
were totally undisciplined in the simplest and most essential qualities:
they had no swell, 110 proper shake, no real agility and neatness of
movement—above all, 110 portamento, that is to say, no art of moving
from one note to another without either hopping or dragging, no art of
beginning and finishing a phrase; in short, no art of singing. All this
was replaced by the most violent vocal contortions, shrieks, howls,
gabbles, and squalls; by the most lamentable drawling, and especially by
certain movements, called indiscriminately ports de voix, which, according
to contemporaries, were the sourest and most lugubrious graces con¬
ceivable. So much for the singers. The orchestra, though very numerous,
was, as Gray expressed it, one of humstrums; and Rousseau informs us
that, despite its numbers, it produced 110 effect, as no one knew how to
direct it. Add to this, that the choruses were bawled in so stentorian a
fashion that Burney declares that compared to them the loudest English
oratorio chorus was a lullaby. As to the compositions, they belonged, as
we have seen, with the exception perhaps of dance music, for which the
French had natural talent, to a raw, primitive, and—what was much worse
—utterly stagnant style; and the French notoriously possessed neither
real, distinctly marked melody, nor real, spoken, well-modulated recitative;
both categories, so carefully kept asunder by the Italians, being merged
into a kind of awkward, insipid, boorish, continued declamation.
All this the French had to admit wholesale or piecemeal, and they had
to admit also that in every one of these points the Italians were as perfect
as they themselves were faulty. Yet the French had a loophole of escape:
"The Italians," they admit, "sing exquisitely, have first-rate orchestras,
compose divinely, but they have 110 expression. And that is what we,
with all our failings, possess to the utmost." But this was the weakest
subterfuge, sufficient perhaps for their blind vanity, but which all other
nations utterly despised. For by expression the French meant the mere
coarsest ranting. They could find none in Italian compositions, in the
most heroic and pathetic which have perhaps ever been written ; a clear
proof that they did not feel and recognise true pathos. One of their own
light, dissolute rhymesters, Dorat, declared that
II ochappe souvent lies sons a la douleur
Qui sont faux pour 1'oreille, mais vrais pour le ca>ur.
78
The Musical Life.
But certain it is that French music, to all but Frenchmen, was false to
the ear, without being therefore just to the heart. Indeed, the constant
burden both of Rousseau and of Burney is that the French did not know
what musical pathos meant. Rousseau especially informs us that the
chief advantage of French music was that, according as it was sung
quickly or slowly (and either suited it equally), it could be made cheerful
or melancholy, thus saving much additional trouble; and that the chief
advantage of French singing was that the performer could slacken or
quicken a passage to suit the length of his arms, and the time which it
consequently took to stretch them out and draw them in again. What,
then, was this wonderful expressiveness of French music ? It was simply,
to all appearance, an extraordinary amount of national musical obliquity,
and a great deal of theatrical claptrap. A French opera, despite the
utter absence of pathos, the horrible monotony of both the poetry and the
music—for the first was a mere tissue of the most vapid gallantry and
conceits, while the second was a mere succession of trivial, vulgar, and
awkward tunes—a French opera was a far more dramatic performance
than an Italian one; it was full of ranting and shuffling and screaming
and roaring, full in short of all the refuse of tragic representation, of all
that is sensational, melodramatic, and unartistic. If therefore French
music did eventually give anything to Italian music, it certainly was not
musical expression nor musical pathos, which Italian, and not French,
music already possessed; it was a quality which could not improve, but only
destroy, a work of art—it was the coarsely, falsely emotional. However,
a union of the two schools, French and Italian, did eventually take place,
to the great advantage of the former, but certainly not of the latter, as
some critics would have us believe. But this amalgamation could take
place only when both schools were growing feeble, and when the excellence
of the Italian was diminishing no less than the execrableness of the
French. In France the public was growing tired of shrieking and
bellowing, and the romantic movement which began towards the end of
the last century was bringing foreign art, as well as foreign literature,
into vogue; in Italy, on the other hand, people were growing sick of
good singing, and the French revolutionary wars were bringing the two
nations into close contact. A third school, the German instrumental
School, had meanwhile separated itself from the Italian, to which it was
originally due, and served further to cement the Italian with the French
music. Italian composers, Cherubini, Spontini, and Paer, settled in
France, and their works, returning to Italy, diffused the remains of the
French style in their country. It is from this moment of union that
dates our modern music, born of the disconnected, convulsive, highly
theatrical French school, as well as of the perfectly coherent, polished,
and eminently musical Italian one. The two elements may easily be
The Musical Life.
79
traced; they are sometimes equally balanced, but oftcner one of them
overweighs the other; and, although we have still got some pure melody
and some good singing, it is, we fear, easier to recognise in our operas
the frantic cries, shrieks, and whimperings; the noisy concerted pieces,
and the vulgar scenic displays, which disgusted Gray in the works of
Rameau and Campra, than the touching situations, exquisite melodies,
and highly polished and pathetic performances, which delighted Rousseau
in the operas of Pergolesi and Jommelli.*
But this period of union was still far off in 1770, and Dr. Burney left
Paris in unmingled disgust at what he had heard, and journeyed towards
Italy in delightful expectation of what he was going to hear. In the
provinces music was of course still more abominable than in the capital,
for there being no spontaneous musical life in the country, where not
imported, it did not exist. At Lyons, however, he met at a coffee-house
with a family of which the father and sons played a violin quartet, while
the daughters sang. None of the guests at the coffee-house ceased
chattering and laughing during their performance, but Dr. Burney was
delighted: he heard good music almost for the first time since entering
France, and heard it from this family of poor Italian street musicians.
It was like a sort of welcome to the country which was at that time the
home of music; he accepted it gratefully, and hurried 011 towards Italy.
How Dr. Burney got across the Alps he does not tell us. In those
days, when Alpine roads were unknown and Alpine scenery unnoticed, a
journey of this sort was probably looked back upon as equally horrid and
uninteresting, and unworthy, therefore, of being recorded. We next find
him safely arrived at Turin, and settled at the Hotel La Bonne Femme,
round whose rooms some twenty-five years later Xavier de Maistre made
many a fantastic journey. And now let us try and place ourselves in
the position of Burney, of this intelligent, cultivated, and enlightened
traveller of the eighteenth century, on finding himself at length in Italy,
the country of countries, towards which he had looked for years, and to
visit which had been his dream, as it had been that of so many of his con¬
temporaries. To the mind of an intelligent and cultivated man, Italy
was not then what it is now. Its name did not suggest what it suggests
to us; it was not the field for the exercise of those faculties which are
exercised there in our day. There had been no Byron, no Sismondi, no
Lady Morgan, no Ruskin; the generation of Goethe, of Madame de
Stael, of Beckford, nay, even that of Ann Radcliffe, had not as yet
* The Printer suggests tliat we arc mistaken in spelling this composer's name with
two 111's, and this certainly is not the usual spelling, The authority for the two ■«.'s
in Jommelli and also for the two m's in Piecinni (usually written ' Piccini') is
Savcrio Mattei, an eminent Neapolitan critic, who was intimate with both composers,
and who puts the two w's oven on Jommelli's epitaph.
80
The Musical Life.
appeared. There was 110 such tiling as aesthetic criticism, as scientific
history, as romantic poetry; not even a trace of classical enthusiasm or
of romantic awe. Antiquity was only just beginning to become a real
existence; the Middle Ages were only vaguely supposed to have existed;
and as to the Renaissance, it was not known that there had ever been
one. Italy was already the great museum of Europe, but its contents
had not yet been catalogued and labelled; no one knew what to look at
or what to look for, and people ran about in it at random, either seeing the
wrong things or nothing at all, or at best only what they themselves could
discover in the vast confusion. In a few years, it is true, Goethe would
come to revive antiquity in his mind by the help of scenery and buildings,
customs, and manners, art and poetry; and Beckford would come and fill
his strange fantastic brain with visions of splendour and weirdness, with
gorgeous displays of nature and of art, and with fanciful suggestions of
terror and mystery. But neither Goethe nor Beckford had yet arrived
with romanticism in his company; and the traveller in Italy still belonged
to the generation educated in the midst of philosophy and affectation, fed
upon Pope and Voltaire, Boucher and Kneller ; poor in historical informa¬
tion, as in poetic fancy, and possessing only a very large fund of good
sense and practical wisdom, with plenty of this attendant folly. He came to
Italy without prejudices as without enthusiasm, to finish his education
or to improve his mind. He was interested in antiques, as historical
remains, without much rcsthetical appreciation; associating Greek vases
with coins of Roman Emperors and with mummy cases; not clearly
understanding the difference between Athens and Rome; seeing Hadrians
and Faustinas in gods and goddesses of Scopas and Praxiteles, and
recognising Brutus and Virginia in bas-reliefs of athletes and amazons.
He turned away from Giotto's Tower and Milan Cathedral as barbarous
Gothic structures, but went into careful details of Palladio's and Sanso-
vino's palaces. He venerated the names of Raphael, Titian, and Michel
Angelo, of whose predecessors and minor contemporaries he was perfectly
ignorant; but what delighted and entranced him were the fat, languishing
sibyls, the dainty dapper angels, the muscular sprawling martyrs of the
Bolognese school. The old Florentines and Venetians were certainly
very correct draughtsmen and fine colourists, but the traveller of the
eighteenth century was above such material merits; he wanted soul,, and
soul he found to his heart's content in the Caracci, Guido, and Guercino.
But he did not go to Italy for mere art; he was too large-minded and
universal for that. He examined the cultivation of the fields; he chipped
off little bits of rock; he made inquiries respecting the construction of
drains and the passing of laws. He investigated into family arrange¬
ments and historical legends; he tried to understand the nature of those
two strange, mysterious animals the tarantula and the caraliere serrente;
The Musical Life.
81
in short, lie took an interest in everything, peeped into everything, and
judged most emphatically of all things. He did not consider Italy as a
thing of the past, a remnant of antiquity, of the Middle Ages or of the
.Renaissance, but as a country like any other modern one; and its in¬
habitants neither as degenerate descendants of the Romans nor as weird
children of the Renaissance. He expected neither heroism nor enthusiasm,
nor poisonings, nor bravo-liaunted castles, but merely human beings very
much like himself, only, of course, somewhat inferior to so splendid a
type of humanity.
In all these characteristics Dr. Burney was a perfect representative of
the educated traveller of the eighteenth century: he was never surprised,
entranced, or horrified by anything he saw; he never imagined that he
saw what there was not; he looked about him coolly and complacently.
He had, however, two distinguishing peculiarities. He was neither an
ordinary stranger nor an ordinary traveller; he had known many Italians
in England, mostly, it is true, of the musical sort, whom their countrymen
not a little disparaged, although they seem to have given him a very
favourable idea of the nation; and he seems to have felt perfectly at
home and at his ease in Italy, more so by far than he had done in
France. In the second place, Burney had a distinct object in his journey:
he had come on a sort of artistic mission, to collect materials for the work
which was the darling object of his life. And this artistic mission was
in itself quite different from most others, for Burney had come to Italy
not to unite by dint of science and imagination broken limbs of marble
into complete and perfect statues, to follow the outlines of frescoes fading
away from mouldering walls and to seek for patches of colour under layers
of decaying plaster; he had not come to reconstruct a past state of things
nor to cherish its vestiges like relics ; he had come to hear music finer,
as he believed, than that of any previous time ; to enjoy the fruits of an
artistic civilisation while it was yet in its prime, to see a nation to whom
music Avas at that time what sculpture had been to the Greeks and
painting to the men of the Renaissance; he had come to deal not with
a dead art but with one which, as he says, " still lived."
And he came neither as an ignoramus nor as a student: he had heard
Handel's oratorios when Handel himself was at the organ, and Gluck's
operas when Gluck himself directed them at the harpsichord; he had
heard all the best works of Pergolesi, of Jommelli, of Galuppi, sung by
the singers whom the masters themselves had taught, and from whom the
masters themselves might have learnt the living musical art; he had
enjoyed all the best of what Italy could give and his object now was to
inquire how Italy had been able to give it: he had known Italian music
abroad; he wished to know it in its home.
But when Dr. Burney descended into Italy it was the middle of July,
G
82 The Musical Life.
the time when the old cities doze the whole long day, when the nobility
have gone to their villas, and the rich burghers run to and fro between
their shops and their farms; when the small townsfolk stay sleepily at
home, or loiter yawning about barbers' shops and lemonade booths ; when
everything is lazy and desultory. At this time no great music was to be
heard: the great theatres were shut, the great singers were abroad, the
ecclesiastical and secular great folk were far too drowsy to encourage art;
the only music to be heard was in the churches during their more ordinary
services, in the small popular theatres, in the streets, and in some private
family here and there; music which the Italians despised, as their ordinary,
every-day, cheap artistic food, but of which Dr. Burney never failed to
hear every note, finding it, indeed, delightful and exquisite after what he
had heard in France. Music therefore he heard every morning and every
evening ; in the morning in church, in the evening at the theatre, as lie
journeyed leisurely through the great drowsy plain of Lombardy. In
some one of the churches, thanks to the multitudes of obliging small saints,
something could always be heard, and Dr. Burney was so indefatigable and
insatiable that even when only passing through a town he would run off,
while his horses were being changed and his dinner being cooked, and
hear all the monks, nuns, or choristers that could possibly be heard; and
when staying in any larger place he would miss no church performance,
although dusty scores and illuminated missals awaited him in the public
archives; for Dr. Burney, unknown perhaps to himself, always cared
much more for the music of the present than for that of the past.
In these churches he tells us he never met " much good company," the
good company hearing mass in their private chapels (when indeed they
had not sent their chaplain to run errands) or in the smart Jesuit churches,
where the service was conveniently short, and all the cavalieri serventi
stood holding their ladies' mass-book, smelling-bottle, fan, or lap-dog,
according to the devotional habits of the day. At the churches to which
Dr. Burney went there were only small shop-folk, peasants and artisans,
hanging about, staring at their neighbours, saying their prayers, listening
to the music for a few minutes, and then walking out; a rather dis¬
respectful manner of receiving the Church's cheap musical gifts; yet even
such listening, repeated constantly, could do more to form people's musical
taste than the most strained attention at an opera. The shop-keepers,
artisans and peasants, while dawdling carelessly about, imbibed music
unconsciously; they became critics, and occasionally one of their sons or
nephews, instead of turning shopman or farmer, would turn composer or
performer; and indeed nearly all the great Italian musicians belonged to
the humbler, often to the humblest, classes of society. This daily church
music was usually mediocre in performance; good singers and instru¬
mentalists could gain far too high remuneration elsewhere to become
83
attached to a church, yet every now and then Barney would meet a little
chorister destined to become famous or a nun singing like the most
refined prima donna. The nuns sang', and sang well; the monks played
the organ, often grandly and scientifically, and even in the smaller
churches the director was a learned musician. On the other hand, in the
great churches and chapels splendid musical establishments were kept
with first-rate performers; every ducal or grand-ducal chapel possessed at
least one great opera-singer; while the famous violinist Pugnani, the great
hautboy and bassoon players the brothers Besoxzi, and innumerable
others, played in the churches at Turin, Milan, and Padua. The Maestro
(li Capella of a large church was always high in the profession: Jommellij
the greatest tragic composer of Italy, Avas chapel-master at St. Peter's'
Leo and Caffaro at Naples, Galuppi at Venice, and the famous instru¬
mental composer Sanmartini at Milan. Nor were their functions limited
to merely directing the performances; they were required to produce
several new works every year, and the great church archives of Italy
contain numbers of unpublished masses, hymns, and psalms by the greatest
composers of the eighteenth century. Besides the usual musical services
in cathedrals, and parish and convent churches, there were occasional grand
performances even at minor ones, to celebrate the feast of some patron
saint or the consecration of some rich nun. Then all the greatest opera
singers, the Caffariellos, Manzolis, and Guarduccis, mounted into the
organ loft, and a tremendous concourse of people met to hear them;
sometimes also, as we learn from Sir Horace Mann, a great musician
would have a splendid service performed at his own expense, on recovering
from a bad illness or accident.
The music performed in the churches was, as a rule, not very different
from that performed in the theatres; for the fact is, that there never has
existed such a thing as church music independent of the other branches
of the art. There have been various styles of music, one belonging to
each epoch, and which have been adapted, one after the other, to all the
musical requirements of the time, the church, the theatre, or the room;
but there has never been music used solely for the church or for the
theatre or for the room. The style of the Roman school of the sixteenth
century may possibly be more suitable for ecclesiastical purposes than any
other, we do not deny it; but it is undeniable that this style was the only
one then extant, and that Palestrina himself set profane madrigals to
that very sort of music which is held up as the only sort fit for the
church. The eighteenth century also had its style of music, which it
used indiscriminately for all purposes, and which has been described as
unsuitable to religious ceremonies. Possibly it was not so suitable to
them as that of the Palestrina school, but this was no fault of the great
masters of a hundred years ago. The art had progressed for two hundred
<i 2
84
The Mv.sical Life.
years since the days of Palestrina; to ask the composers of the eighteenth
century for music such as those of the sixteenth could have given would
be like complaining that Raphael did not paint like Giotto. They could
not have spontaneously produced anything of the sort, and, as to cold
imitation, they were incapable of it; for as long as there be a living art
there can be no exhumation and galvanising into life of a dead one; so
the eighteenth century knew of no Palestrinists, as the Renaissance knew
of no pre-Raphaelites. Modern critics—not unlike those who never
perceive that Giotto, their idol, was progressing, while they, his disciples,
are merely retrograding—modern critics have found fault with the church
music of the eighteenth century for not being as suitable to ecclesiastical
purposes as that of the sixteenth century; but this fault of the church
music of the last century, like the similar one attributed by kindred critics
to the church painting of the Renaissance, merely signifies that it
belongs to a fully developed and not to an immature art. The form has
attained to perfection, the spirit to maturity; it has all the richness and
strength of human nature; it is no longer timid and lowly, it is grand and
divine; men, according to Goethe's expression, form the picture of the
Divinity after their own highest model, as He had formed them in His
own resemblance; art is no longer a symbol, it is a form, a thought, a
feeling which acts independently and directly. The church music of the
eighteenth century is profane, if you will; saints and angels are made to
sing like opera heroes and heroines; but what the opera heroes and
heroines sing is so pure, so lovely, so noble, that there remains nothing
purer, lovelier, or nobler for the saints and angels. These great composers
do not, like some later ones, own several styles, one for the gods and
goddesses and the other for the Satyrs and Maenads: wherever their art
is employed, for whatever purpose it is destined, it is equally noble, not
because it is used to express the feelings of Scipio or of St. Eustace or of
Harlequin, but because it is their art, which to them is a thing sacred.
This being the case, the Italians of the eighteenth century, who set apart
110 special style for devotional purposes, gave church music all that they
gave to all other music, all the richness of device which their art afforded.
They preserved the massive choruses on which men like Lotti, Leo, and
Durante lavished all their skill of counterpoint; they kept the solemn
organ for which Scarlatti had written his grand fugues and on which
every composer had learned to play; they kept all the best part of the
old, unindividual, unemotional church music; but they added all their own
creations, all the individual, emotional wealth of completely matured art;
the choral performances were broken by psalms and verses in three or
four single parts, performed by the most highly-trained singers, who
displayed all their powers of execution and expression; by duets either
fugued like the divinely-lovely ones of Pergolesi, or in the freer, more
The Musical Life.
85
emotional shape of the opera; by splendidly-modulated recitatives, crowned
by an air, solemn, pathetic, or florid, sung by one of those great singers
whose feeling gave a new soul and whose fancy added a new splendour
to even the most perfect piece. The eighteenth century added also its
orchestra, its wind instruments lightly and soberly distributed among the
graver stringed ones; and during the hushed moment, when any human
voice, be it even that of a Guadagni or a Pacchierotti, would have sounded
profane, Tartini or Giardini or Pugnani would take up his violin and
break upon the silence of the church.
According to a bad but invincible tendency of which the reader may
often have to complain, we have taken the opportunity of discussing the
church music of the eighteenth century in general, when there was no
occasion to speak of any save the trifling performances which Dr. Barney
attended; keeping our traveller waiting, standing in some dull little
church listening to mediocre music; but, alas, we have not the power of
introducing our reader into the smallest church, of letting him hear even
the meanest performance of the eighteenth century. So, in default of
this, we can give him the only thing criticism can give—not art itself,
but only a disquisition 011 it.
As soon as the sun had fairly set and the cool breeze risen, the towns¬
folk would awake, and having opened shutters, pulled up blinds, and
breathed the fresher evening air, they would begin to think of hearing a
little music. A little music, nothing grand or tragic, oh, 110 ! 110 great
singers who required tremendous applause; something simple, easy, and
refreshing. 80 the men have exchanged dressing-gown for snuff- or
puce-coloured light coat, and coloured handkerchief for well-combed little
wig, and their wives and daughters having slipped on a tidy gown and a
coquettish black veil, the population would slowly wend their way towards
the comic theatres, pausing just a little to talk to acquaintances, and
breathe the fresh air in the white, pearly twilight. In this state of
quiet, languid enjoyment, the people would scarcely have given a thank-
you for the autumn and winter music—music in her grand, splendid,
delicately-worked Court dress, led about in state by prince-singers, who
wore military orders and bought dukedoms; they wanted music, like
themselves, in summer array, music in her most negligent, slovenly attire,
wandering carelessly from town to town in company with third-rate
singers, vagrant fiddlers, and motley columbines and pantaloons, and yet
as graceful and charming, if not as stately and magnificent, as in the
serious winter months.
All summer performances were therefore comic, and at small theatres,
to which the admission cost a few pence, where people went in and out,
made a terrific noise, and listened, and let others listen, only to as much
or as little as they felt inclined, it was an amusement for the lower or at
86
The Musical Life.
most middle classes, and one which they held very cheap indeed. For,
until quite late in the eighteenth century, the Italian comic opera was
not only totally distinct from the serious one, hut of much lower artistic
standing, and its performers were a class wholly apart and decidedly
inferior. A long comic opera like the Matrimonio Segreto or a semi-
serious one like Don Giovanni was equally unknown; there were only
short musical interludes of two or three characters, like Metastasio's
Impresario of the Canary Islands or Pergolesi's Serva Padrona, intended
to be sung between the acts of a spoken comedy; and short musical farces,
with plenty of buffoonery and nonsense, like Galuppi's Arcifanfano King
of Fools and Leonardo Leo's Cioe. The comic opera, or burletta, as it
was called, was a very humble sister of the serious opera, and a near
relative of the Italian comedy of masks; it got a share of the musical
excellence of the first, and inherited a large portion of the ramshackle,
popular buffoonery of the second. Where a singable dialect existed, the
comic opera was most often written in it, and the President de Brosses
took the trouble to learn Neapolitan in order to fully enjoy Pergolesi's
burlettas ; and where the dialect was wholly unmusical the modes of speech
of the lower classes were strictly adhered to ; for one reason of the success
of the Comic opera was its total opposition to the serious one: the more
dignified and heroic became the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Persians of
the opera seria, the more trivial and farcical became the shopkeepers,
sailors, and peasants of the burletta. Baretti, in his book on the Italians,
says that comic operas were most often coarse and even gross; and Dr.
Burney adds that they were utterly childish and ridiculous ; but Baretti
hated all things musical, and never lost an opportunity of throwing undue
odium on them, while Burney was accustomed to regard the polished
French comedy as the only proper one, and was wholly blind to the
merits of the Italian national stage, so that the opinion of neither is very
reliable ; and it is probable that the burlettas, although occasionally coarse,
had no harm in them, and although fantastic and absurd were decidedly
clever. However they were strictly popular and lowly, for, although
Goldoni wrote a few texts for them in his moments of pecuniary distress,
no well-known poet worked regularly for them until the time of Casti,
Da Ponte, and Sografi, when the comic opera, in the hands of Mozart,
Cimarosa, and Paisiello, had already become the successful rival of the
serious one. The performers were on a level with the text-writers; no
first-rate singer, male or female, ever deigned to sing in a burletta until
cpiite late in the century; the performers Avho had been carefully trained
ever since their childhood were reserved for the serious opera, more
lucrative, more fashionable, more purely musical, where they might stand
as rigid as statues and as stupid as babies, providing they could swell
and diminish, shake and run rapid divisions, and make long, intricate
The Musical Life.
87
extemporary embellishments; they would have nothing to do with the
comic opera, and the comic opera would have nothing to do with them.
Occasionally indeed the second man or second woman of the serious opera
(in which no one listened to them) would play the serious parts, the two
insignificant lovers, in the burletta; or a young raw performer would
begin his career 011 the comic stage before attempting the serious one;
but such irregular singers were not those on whom the success of the
burletta depended. The real burletta performers were men and women
of talent, but whom want of voice, want of training, want of ambition, or
want of respectability, had wholly excluded from the higher walks of the
profession. There were fine voices with insufficient cultivation, and good
singers with insufficient voice; but there were likewise brilliant actors,
delightfully cheery scapegraces, exquisitely coquettish waiting-maids,
magnificently blustering tutors; there was an overflow of life and good
humour. The public did not go into raptures and ecstasies about their
comic singers as they did about their serious ones, but they liked them
and applauded them as jovial friends, and the singers were grateful; they
did not sulk when there were no kings or princes or senators to applaud
them, they did their best to amuse shopkeepers and vagabonds; they did
not show off wonderful rifiorituras and feats of execution, but they impro¬
vised a witty answer here, or a comical situation there; parodying, pas-
quinading, always entering into the fun of the tiling, like that buffo whom
Dr. Burney saw at Milan, falling on the prompter and thrashing him
in default of the actor who played his prodigal son, to the great joy of
the whole audience. Many, however, of these inferior singers would have
seemed excellent, but for the comparison with the great performers of the
serious opera, and Burney met many who would have pleased on a higher
stage, even the worst being better than the best that could be heard in
France. The music, on the other hand, was never mediocre, for the great
composers of Italy were never so overburdened with money or so sated
with applause as to disdain obtaining it by humbler means: the Pergolesis,
Leos, Galuppis, and Piccinnis, who were either positively starving or
living in the most modest style, and who had 110 absurd artistic dignity
like their overpaid, swaggering singers, wrote willingly for the comic
opera and wrote their best. Nor did they adopt a different style from
that they otherwise employed; for the Italian composers of the eighteenth
century, like the Italian painters of the Renaissance, had only one stylo,
spontaneous and perfect, which, according to the time and the individual,
was only more or less grand, or tender, or gay. The comic opera did not
exist in the earliest part of the century,* because the music of that time
* Goldoni, Memorie, chap. 35, says, " The comic opera originated in Naples and
in Rome, but it was still unknown in Lombarily and the Venetian States about
1735.
88
The Musical Life.
was too uniformly grand and solemn; it began to develop only when
musical forms became softer and more flexible, and it reached its highest
point when they had become so light, graceful, and unheroic as to be
positively unsuitable to solemn subjects. But the style of the masters of
the last century, which was too spontaneous, too free, too perfect, to be
distorted either into the thoroughly tragic or the absolutely trivial, could
yet be adapted with more or less success to tragedy or comedy, though
always, of course, suiting the one better than the other. The introduction
or omission of certain passages, the arrangement of the accompaniment,
the choice of the rhythm, of pace and of voice, would alter the style suffi¬
ciently, yet without changing its radical nature: Pergolesi was accused of
having used the same tune in a piece of his Stab at Mater and in an air
of his Serva Padrona, but the melody had been so adapted to each situa¬
tion that no one would have complained of unsuitableness had it been
heard in only one of the two. So much indeed was done by the choice of
melodies, of accompaniments and voices, and by the different structure of
the whole play, that not only did the comic opera differ totally from the
serious one, despite the similarity of the general style, but a complete
revolution in musical arrangements gradually developed in the former,
which finally upset the latter. For, in the first place, popular melodies,
taken from the peasantry, were constantly being introduced into the bur-
letta, and thence influenced even serious music, which little by little grew
lighter, brighter, brisker, less grand, massive, and studied; the accom¬
paniments at the same time growing more dependent on rhythm and less
on counterpoint, and the more popular and less cultivated wind instru¬
ments being introduced one by one into an orchestra which had mainly
consisted of strings. Add to this that in the burletta the contralto voice,
so dear to the serious composers, especially in men's parts, was completely
eschewed, that the principal male part was reserved solely for the tenor,
while the bass voice, which in the serious opera was given over to mes¬
sengers, confidants, and other small folk, appeared, and perhaps to its
greatest advantage, in the very effective parts of blustering old tutors
and blundering valets. Nor was this all; the comic situations could ill
be expressed in the grandly-modulated solemn recitative of the serious
opera; they required constant movement and hubbub, and thence the
introduction of finales and other concerted pieces where five, six, or seven
persons scream and shout and storm at each other; pieces which the
delicate, pathetic situations of the heroic opera excluded, and which,
moreover, the despotic serious singers, who had not spent years in con¬
stant practice to let themselves be drowned by screaming women and
bellowing basses, would never have permitted. Thus there came to exist,
not a different style of composition, but a different system of arrange¬
ments, in the comic opera; and when the comic opera had risen to the
The Musical Life.
89
level of its rival in the hands of Paisiello, Guglielmi, and Cimarosa; when
it possessed first-rate singers, like the charming Coltellini, the magnifi¬
cently-comic Casacciello, and the delightful tenor Mandini; when Joseph II.
kept comic poets and a comic company instead of serious ones ; then the
old arrangements of the opera seria had to give way; contraltos had to
be abandoned for brisker voices, tenors were shoved up into important
parts, and basses removed out of subordinate ones; recitatives were slashed
into, and Curiatius and Pyrrhus, Iloratia and Penelope, had to join in
thundering concerted pieces, just as the undignified harlequins and
columbines of the burletta had done before. The old opera seria was
fused with the old burletta, and, this being done, both expired, leaving a
joint product—the modern melodramatic opera.
In 1770 the poor humble little burletta was still far from such triumph:
but it was, perhaps, all the purer in its nature, all the more popular,
simple, and amusing. Its singers had not yet learned to make rifiorituras
like the serious ones; its poets had not yet felt the necessity of intro¬
ducing deserted ladies, punished libertines, heart-breakings, murders, and
pathos. All was as yet simple, natural, buffoonish, cheap, and jolly.
The Abate Metastasio, Imperial opera poet, might smile with contempt
at the plays; the virtuosi in peagreen satin and lilac and gold lace might
turn up their languishing eyes in horror at the singers; the small shop¬
keepers and street folk might still shake with laughter on their wooden
benches, while the President de Brosses, Rousseau, and Burney, could
still join in their hearty delight at the bright, elegant music, the droll
situations, the easy, off-hand singing, and the inexhaustible humour of the
old burletta.
Stepping out of the little cheap theatre, Dr. Burney found music again
in the streets—the streets, which, after all, are the pleasantest place in
the heavy drowsy summer evenings, when the people loiter about in little
knots of threes and fours under the clear blue sky, as clear and as blue,
though in so strangely different a way, as at midday. There were bands
of artisans, apprentices, shop-boys, marching down the street arm-in-arm,
singing, led by a fellow playing the guitar or the mandolin; and sere-
naders coming with flutes and fiddles under windows, which would occa¬
sionally open to reward them with a dash of water ; and all sorts of similar
non-professional music, received by the population sometimes as a favour
sometimes as a nuisance. Besides this, in the spacious squares where
people sat drinking lemonade and coffee, where perambulating booths
displayed their wares under the flickering torchlight, where the puppet-
show stood surrounded by a ring of eager spectators, there, of course, in
the great outdoor saloon of the town, there was music again in plenty
music which the public paid for, feeling that even the humblest profes¬
sional music is, cceteris paribus, better than that of amateurs. There
90
The Musical Life.
were whole families, like the one Burney met at Lyons, who wandered
about, singing and playing in concert, and these perambulating musicians
were most often Venetians. They played and sang well, and occasionally
a voice might be heard amongst the tables of the coffee-houses which was
destined to the utmost vocal glory, like that of the poor untaught girl who
was later to be called Banti, the most pathetic female singer of the latter
part of the eighteenth century. Bologna possessed in Burney's day a
quartet of vagrant blind musicians, called the " Bravi Orbi," whom many
Italian composers warmly admired, the great and masterly Jommelli
always sending for them to play for him. What these people played we
are not told; probably favourite opera airs, with just a dash of more
popular music. At all events, it was not to them that belonged the
really popular songs, for these were the property of the wholly untrained
loAver classes, workmen, boatmen, fishermen, and peasants, and it was
from these that composers like Paisiello learned the rustic, truly pastoral
style of some of his pieces; while the vagrant musicians, on the contrary,
served to diffuse among the people the more refined and polished styles
of composition.
After loitering about a little in the coffee-houses, Dr. Burney would go
and end his evening at an accademia, or dilettante concert, in some private
house, with whose owners he was of course totally unacquainted, but to
which he was taken by some musical busybody, whose acquaintance he
had made the previous day, and who now treated him as a brother; perhaps
some long, meagre ecclesiastic, with immense spectacles on a nose which
looked like a pick-axe, wherewith to hew into the depths of musical
science; or by some jovial lawyer, who always found time to devote to
the Muses, especially when pretty, and who would talk himself purple in
favour of this or that composer; or again by a music-master—some still
obscure young composer, or some ancient singer who had not provided for
his old days—a music-master bound to accompany his pupils on grand
occasions, and thankful for the scanty refreshment offered him. By some
such individual Dr. Burney would be introduced into the trim little
parlour as a distinguished foreigner, a man of, universal knowledge, as a
glory to England, and an honour to Italy, &c. The company would rise
and look with awe at the stranger (perhaps a Milordo—who knows?—
are not the English the most eccentric of beings?), the hostess would
meet him, curtsey, and express how much her house was honoured, and
then the dilettanti would sit down to their instruments, their silken coat-
tails neatly disposed on either side of their chair, their well-starched
ruffles carefully drawn out; the ladies would rise, smooth out their
dresses and aprons, unroll their scores, and the performance would begin,
interrupted only by a few solemn pauses, during which candles were
snuffed, violins tuned, bows resined, and snuff-boxes passed round.
The Musical lAfe.
91
They took things solemnly, these good people, because a hundred years
ago musical amateurs were rarer than now, and to be one involved much
more responsibility. For among the Italians of the eighteenth century
music was at once both more common and more prized than among lis;
it was a necessity to the greater part of the nation, but it was an art, a
profession, rather than an amusement or an accomplishment. All young
ladies were not taught music; not, as Baretti most falsely and pre¬
posterously pretended, because the morals of professional musicians were
too slack, but because people had not yet conceived the modern notion of
culture, which most often consists merely in giving slovenly cultivation
to endowments which deserve no cultivation at all. But where real
musical talent existed it was usually made the most of; and it must be
remembered that the study of music was at that time far more arduous
than in these happy days of classes, piano arrangements, manuals of
harmony, and other royal roads to mediocrity. The musical education of
professionals, the seven or eight years spent in learning to sing by men
who were to be mere composers; the two or three years spent in learning
composition by those who were to be mere performers; the inexorably
complete system according to which one branch of the art could not bo
mastered without a knowledge of the others; all this reacted on the
education of the non-professional musicians: the music which people
heard was too good to permit them to endure music that Avas bad ; the
masters were too thoroughly trained to submit to slovenly pupils. More¬
over, all was more difficult in itself. Amateurs had not the benefit of
pianoforte arrangements; they had to read the full orchestral scores
of theatrical music and the figured or absolutely dry basses of church
and chamber music; they, like all others, had to learn the difficult
science and art of accompaniment which required not only knowledge
but natural facility. There were no easy drawing-room fantasies, ballads,
or duets ; there were only sonatas, harpsichord lessons, string quartets,
cantatas composed of recitative and air, canzonets as difficult in their
simplicity as the cantatas were in their complication, canons and
madrigals for several voices. There were violins, viols, hautboys, bassoons,
violoncellos, harpsichords, but 110 pianofortes, and that fact alone means
a great deal. A11 instrument very much resembling the modern piano¬
forte, as distinguished from the harpsichord, clavichord, virginal, and
others of the same genus, having been invented by Cristofori, of Florence,
at the beginning of the last century, the non-existence of the pianoforte
as a class (for individual instruments could be found here and there,
Farinelli and Count Torre Taxis appearing to have had them according
to Burney) means not only that the musical education of that day was
free from the influence which the pianoforte necessarily exerts, but that
there were circumstances which prevented the instrument from becoming
92
The Musical Life.
as common as it lias since. The harpsichord, although externally like
the piano, was in reality a very different thing, for its quill mechanism,
the absence of pedals, and its sharp metallic sound, placed it rather in the
category of stringed instruments. Now, viewed as a stringed instrument,
the harpsichord had little to recommend it ; its tone was not strong, not
peculiarly fine, and extremely monotonous, and the consequence was that
people often preferred to it the violin tribe, which was more capable of
effect ; and that the harpsichord sank rather towards the level of a mere
accompaniment. And even when cultivated for itself it had to be culti¬
vated in a totally different manner from the pianoforte; it was too uniform
and feeble in tone, and too sharp and unsustained, to permit either of
emotional performance or of that hurricane and lullaby alternation so dear
to modern pianists. You could not play a study of light and shade, nor a
moonlight fantasia, nor a rhajisody on it, even had such pretentious pieces
of inanity existed in those days ; you could play a fugue, a gigue, a brilliant
scherzo, or an intricate lesson, like those of Handel and Scarlatti, and play
them neatly, clearly, firmly, roundly, with a spring and an expression of
intelligence and cheerfulness, but that was all you could do on a harpsi¬
chord ; and Handel and Scarlatti understood this fact, and turned it to
account, as genius turns everything to account. But the violin, the
violoncello, the organ, could do much more and better: they could be
brilliant or pathetic or grand, and the voice could be all three together ;
so the harpsichord was comparatively little esteemed. People regarded
it as a respectable instrument, and most great masters, like Porpora,
Jommelli, and Pergolesi, wrote a few good pieces for it, but rarely did a
composer, like Domenico Scarlatti and Alberti of Venice, devote himself
almost exclusively to it, until it turned into the pianoforte and gained a
new character, or rather borrowed that of other stringed instruments in
the days of Haydn, dementi, and Mozart. The Italians cared little for
harpsichords, and made them badly, so badly that we have been told that
when, at the beginning of this century, Clementi returned to Rome, he
could barely find an adequate instrument. They made them feeble and
metallic, such as singers and violinists and opera conductors wished them
to be ; small, thin, ungainly things, 011 slender little legs with black keys
instead of white, and vice versa, such as you still occasionally meet, faded,
yellow, with only a few jangling, melancholy notes left, in old houses
where they have not been touched for a century. As to people who went
in for execution, they might get their harpsichords from England,
Germany, or Holland, from Pucker or Broadwood. An instrument like
our pianoforte, with a loud, thick, muffly tone, on which you could
execute with considerable disadvantage the music written for other
instruments, besides the sentimental and thundering imbecility written
expressly for it; with sufficient power of expression to supersede other
The Musical Life.
93
instruments, and with power of mechanical dexterity unlimited enough
to ruin itself—such an instrument, such a compromise, could not have
existed in the eighteenth century; and could not therefore usurp all
musical privileges, make people lose all notion of adaptation of sound
and style, accustom them to unlimited noise and to dubious tune, and
foster that wholesale ignorance of music in general which is inevitable
where a performer need aim only at mechanical dexterity; arranged
pieces, pedals, and tuners, having relieved him from the necessity of
learning harmony, of studying expression by means of the voice, and of
obtaining a correct ear by tuning his own instrument; where, above all,
everything having been done for him by others, he has been educated to
total want of individual endeavour.
The dilettanti, therefore, of the last century, were more thorough
musicians than are most of ours, besides having had the advantage of
learning, not from teachers who are mere performers who have failed,
but very often from first rate composers, Leo, Porpora, Jommelli, Galuppi,
who did not disdain by any means to give private lessons. The pupils
were usually worthy of their masters, and Dr. Burney heard excellent
performers, vocal and instrumental, at the private concerts he attended at
Milan, Venice, and Rome, in the dull, bare parlours of the upper middle
classes, and in the gorgeously stuccoed and gilded saloons of the aristo¬
cracy; for in that day music belonged equally to all classes, being a fruit
not of special culture but of general civilisation. Round these dilettanti
performers, whether dressed in broad cloth or in embroidered satin, was
congregated the far larger class of merely appreciative amateurs, who
neither sang nor played, nor composed, but for whose benefit singers,
violinists, and composers were produced. Some of these were of the
oracular sort, others of the disputative, others of the ecstatic. The oracu¬
lar ones were old gentlemen, senators, monsignori, lawyers, and doctors,
who gave advice to young musicians; and, as the singer Mancini tells us,
taught well-endowed but slightly-rigid sopranos and tenors how to move
their arms and legs gracefully and expressively, and how (as the malicious
Marcello adds) to take snuff and blow their nose without impeding the
dramatic action: the disputative were younger men, men of fashion and
wit, who discussed musical merit under the hands of their hairdresser,
like Parini's young gentlemen, wrote indecorous sonnets against admirers
of rival musicians, and occasionally waylaid and thrashed them with
sedan-chair sticks; the ecstatics, on the other hand, were mainly ladies,
or effeminate cavalieri serventi, descendants, and worthy ones, of those
noble dilettanti who sallied out a whole mile outside the town of
Bologna to meet the singer Baldassare Ferri, and heaped his carriage
with roses, somewhere about the year 1650. In the soberer eighteenth
century, when great singers became more plentiful, the ecstatics remained
94
The Musical Life.
at home, but were none the less ecstatic, the ladies wearing portraits
of great performers, fainting, like Beckford's Paduan lady, from musical
rapture; in short, showing their love of music in a hundred absurd
fashions, at which satirists either shook their heads like Parini or Gozzi,
or laughed like Passeroni and Marcello ; and foreigners looked amazed,
and remarked that the Italians had become a nation of children.
It was through such disputative and ecstatic dilettanti that music so
thoroughly permeated the life of the upper classes ; that, even where it
was not genuinely enjoyed, it was required as part of fashionable life,
and good taste in art became a sort of accompaniment to good taste in
dress and deportment. 13 ut, as the circles on the water grow fainter as
they grow wider, so this general dilettanteism, by which musical culture
was extended to the utmost, to even the unmusical, was necessarily
comparatively sterile and uninfluential; the really influential dilettanti
were of course the active ones, those who approximated nearest to the
professional musicians. Among these many appear to have possessed
much talent and learning, both for the theoretical and the practical parts
of the art; and the Italians of the eighteenth century owed two of the
best, and one of the very best, of their composers, Domenico Alberti and
Emanuele d'Astorga, and the great Benedetto Marcello, to the class of
aristocratic amateurs.
II.
Thus Dr. Burney proceeded leisurely through the great plain of Lom-
bardy, from Turin to Milan, from Milan to Bergamo, thence to Brescia,
Verona, and Vicenza, seeing and hearing everyone and everything ; active,
wideawake, observing and criticising; making extracts from dusty books
and MSS. on the music of other days; taking down notes on music and
musicians of the present. Ah ! if only we could obtain a sight of those
notebooks in which Dr. Burney kept his journal, of those letters in which
he told his friends at home of all his doings: those original sketches,
taken from true life, and of which the printed work is but the curtailed,
polished, enfeebled copy ! As we turn over this cold, civil, pseudo-diary,
trimmed and clipped so as to give offence to no one, we feel instinctively
how much we have lost—what droll anecdotes, what racy adjectives, what
humorous descriptions, have fallen victims to the doctor's prudent scissors.
In looking up at Burney's portrait, by Reynolds, we can fancy the ineffable
suppressed smile with which this sharp, shrewd, caustic little man, with
almost as much rapid perception of the ludicrous as his daughter and
perhaps more kindliness of nature, must have sauntered through the
Italian musical world of the eighteenth century—a world which, while it
Hie Musical Life.
produced masterpieces of art equal to those of a Phidias, a Raphael, or
a Milton, also produced living figures and combinations of figures worthy
of Sterne, or Hogarth, or Hoffmann—of that Hoffmann who even from far
away caught strange glimpses of it, which he handed down to us in those
fantastic stories of beautiful singers, crabbed Kapellmeisters, and melo-
maniacs dressed in coats the colour of A sharp minor. What a series of
whimsical silhouettes, of delicately touched caricatures, Dr. Burney might
have given us; how he might have shown us all the droll and touching
realities of those musicians whom we see only with composed mien and
holiday dresses in the portrait gallery of the Bolognese Academicians—
composers, singers, fiddlers, and dilettanti, in dapper silk and plush and
well-powdered wigs, solemn and dignified as if, while they belonged as
artists to the unchangeable, eternal world of the grand and lovely ideal,
they had not also belonged as men to the ephemeral world of quaint and
ludicrous reality, the world of academic pedants, of dandy nobles, of
cavalieri serventi, and of harlequin actors; the world of Goldoni and
Gozzi, and of Marcello's Tecitro di Musica cdla Mpda.
Throughout Lombardy Dr. Burney had heard only the music which
formed the ordinary every-day artistic food of the people; not what they
prized and took trouble to produce, but what they got easily and scarcely
noticed, and which was thereby almost more important to the critic. But,
if the art which is in common use be good, that reserved for special
occasions must needs be excellent; and such art, carefully obtained and
kept up, not by the lower and middle but by the rich and cultivated
classes, nay, by the governing oligarchy, Dr. Burney first met at Padua,
the terra firma suburb of Venice. In this quiet, straggling town of reedy
canals, silent gardens, and faded villas, the Venetians held their great
annual fair of St. Anthony, or the Santo as he was styled; when the vast
oval space of the Prato della Valle was turned into a little town of booths;
where merchants from the East, from Germany, and from Poland, brought
their costliest wares, in almost mediaeval fashion, and all the wealth and
luxury that still remained in Venice came riotously across to the melan¬
choly old town. Then, as at the other great fairs of Reggio and Lodi, there
were new operas performed by the finest singers—as Gray explained to
his friend West, who associated only giantesses and gingerbread with the
word fair, and could not comprehend this great annual market, where the
Republic sold what yet remained of its commercial and artistic products.
For these performances of the fair of St. Anthony all who came had of
course to pay; but the Republic had its own permanent music at Padua,
it spent large sums on the musical establishment of its great, half Gothic,
half Byzantine basilica of St. Anthony; it kept up a large band,
composed of first-rate performers, and for only four annual performances
it gave 400 ducats and the cross of St. Mark, the only decoration the
The Musical Life.
State possessed, and with which it was wont to reward Ambassadors and
Proccuratori, to Signor Gaetano Guadagni, one of the finest singers, and
the handsomest and most brilliant actor, in Italy, the favourite pupil of
Garrick, the famous original Orpheus of Gluck. Guadagni was in no
wise tied down by this liberality, and belonged, in the intervals of tlie
four performances, to the rest of the world quite as much as to St.
Anthony's; but Padua was the sole possessor, and almost the shrine, of
a greater and more famous musician than lie. Tartini lived there during
well-nigh half-a-century, playing regularly at the Santo, and when
Barney arrived there, a few months after his death, the silent city was
full of the fame of the great violinist, whose dark, puzzled genius and
fantastic story fitted well into the framework of the strange. mediaeval
town. Tartini, who was born in Istria at the end of the seventeenth
century, and had spent an adventurous youth, had passed the remainder
of his long life in quiet artistic routine; composing, playing, teaching,
meditating over his art, and writing, surrounded by devoted pupils, and
tormented by an insufferably ill-tempered wife ; but in this uneventful
existence there was one little speck of romance which shed weird lights
over all the rest. Early in the century Tartini had received a visit from
the Devil, and had heard the Fiend play the violin more beautifully than
even he himself had ever played. Whether Tartini was dreaming or
awake during this visit is a matter of small importance, and certain it is
that the demon's performance left a deep impression on this whimsical-
minded, Petrarch-reading violinist—an impression of weirdness which
can be seen not only in his fantastically-beautiful works but in his
haggard face, with intense, wildly-staring eyes, as it is portrayed in the
gallery of the Philharmonic Academicians of Bologna.
The reputation of Tartini and his career were equally different in nature
from that of the great vocal performers of his day, and would have been
so even had he not been a very eminent composer and writer on musical
science as well as a mere violinist, for the Italians of the eighteenth
century placed vocal and instrumental performers on a totally separate,
though not necessarily unequal, footing. Tartini may have had greater
talents than, say, Farinelli, and a fame not very much inferior to his; but
he could never have had his career, for the greatest, nay, merely the
great, singers of the last century exercised a sort of magic which even the
greatest performer on the most perfect of human-made instruments never
possessed. The singer, besides the immense individual influence due to
his being at once the performer and the instrument, had a much larger
and more universal audience than the violinist; the first was heard on
every great theatre, and by every class of society, while the second was
rarely heard out of the room, and that room not a concert-room. For the
concert, in our sense of the word, was not an institution of the eighteenth
The Musical Life.
97
century, at least not in Italy; music was too spontaneous, too universal,
to be confined in any stated place more limited than the theatre or the
church; it was not an exotic enjoyment for cultivated gentlefolk, it
was a national necessity, a necessity as much to the petty artisan, the
gondolier, the lazzarone, as to the great lady, the senator, and the prelate;
and when music was inclosed within the limits of a room it was not
because it was too rare and fine for ordinary use but because it was so
common, so all-pervading, as to become indispensable in private life. The
instrumental performer, therefore, who, after a certain eminence had been
attained, would probably not condescend to play in a theatre orchestra,
could be heard by all the world only in the organ-loft of a church, and, if
he rejected that, he must be satisfied with playing in private houses and
gaining his bread by teaching. Thus most of the great instrumental per¬
formers became fixtures, tied down to some church or cliapel, like Tartini
to the Santo of Padua; Pugnani and the two Besozzis to the royal chapel
at Turin ; only now and then venturing abroad, where chamber music was
an exotic, like Giardini in England, or taking service with some royal
personage, as Domenico Scarlatti and Boccherini did in Spain. The great
violinist, or hautboy or bassoon player, could thus gain only a limited
income—Tartini securing 400 ducats for yearly attendance while Guadagni
got as much for only four performances—and only an inferior reputation;
for, although dilettanti might flock to Padua to hear Tartini, he was never
heard or heard of by the thousands of people who might applaud a singer.
The life of a musician of this sort was therefore modest, quiet, without the
tumultuous opulence of the singer; where he went he was received with
respect and listened to with the deepest admiration; but he was not petted
by people of fashion, idolised by great ladies, and permitted to swagger,
bully, and pout like his vocal rival; his life was less brilliant, but perhaps
more worthy of respect, and occupied in the patient, humble study of his
art.
In a period when music was a natural product, a thing for the whole
people and only secondarily for the individual, that branch of it which
essentially belonged to the house naturally followed the progress and
adopted the style of the more universal one belonging to the theatre and
the church. As, in the great days of Greek art, the carvings on cameos and
seal-rings were executed in the same grand style as the colossal statues
on the fronts of temples, so instrumental music was dependent on vocal
music, developing as it developed, and following its changes of style; but,
just as the Greek artists understood that a small shell or onyx requires
a different treatment of details from that required by a huge block of
marble, so the Italians of the eighteenth century also understood that a
violin, a violoncello, or a wind-instrument, must be treated differently from
the human voice, and in accordance with its peculiar tone and volume, and
H
98
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with tlie nature of the building in which it is to he heard. The instru¬
mental style was therefore an adaptation of the vocal, within the strict
limits of each particular instrument: no one wrote for the harpsichord what
might equally well have been written for the violin, the violoncello, or the
voice, yet the general style had been learned from vocal composition, just
as the education of every instrumental performer had begun with learning
to sing; nay, if we examine the sonatas even of Haydn, we cannot fail to
see how much the most purely instrumental of German composers had
learned from Porpora, the greatest singing-master of the eighteenth
century.
Burney had come too late to hear Tartini, but, with an artistic piety by
110 means common in those uncultured days, he went to see his house, and
the organ-loft at the Santo in which he was wont to play, and collected
every possible relic of his compositions. Having done so, he embarked
in one of the barges, crowded with people returning from the villeggiatura,
and loaded with vegetables and fruit, which, having slowly carried him
along between the reed- and willow-grown banks of the Brenta, drifted
him across the lagoon, and landed him at Venice on the 4th of August,
1770.
And now Dr. Burney found himself for the first time in a musical
centre, where the art was not only a cheap amusement of the people, but
a splendidly managed State concern and an enthusiastically cultivated
occupation of the upper classes. The street music soon taught him the
superiority of Venice over the cities of the mainland : there were guitars,
mandolins, fiddles, and voices in the two squares of St. Mark, among the
coffee-house tables and the story-tellers, and their music was better than
any street music elsewhere; there were the gondoliers chanting Tasso, and
by night barges full of musicians, like the one on which Goldoni and his
merry companions had mounted, fiddling and singing, up the Po towards
Pavia; there were serenades on the canals, which to Burney sounded
exquisite, and music issuing from the windows of the palaces; the now silent
city of winding canals and fantastic lace-like architecture was still full of
music, music destined to cease with the destruction of the fast crumbling
State. Then there was music in numberless churches, from the archaic
chants of the Greeks and Armenians to the florid rondos and sonatas of
the Redentore and the Gesuciti. Dr. Burney went to SS. Giovanni e Paolo
one morning that the Doge and Council were attending mass, and heard
the music of the Venetian State, as carefully guarded from corruption and
as singular in character as that of the Sovereign Pontiff. The Common¬
wealth kept its own chapel of St. Mark's, where the music had been directed
by a series of the most eminent national composers. The compositions
performed at St. Mark's on State occasions, and those sung on the
Bucentaur when the Doge wedded the sea, all belonged to the Venetian
The Musical Life.
99
school of the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth
centuries, at the head of which was the famous Antonio Lotti: madrigals
and fugued pieces, elaborate and stately, either wholly without instru¬
ments, or accompanied merely by the organ, unimpassioned and solemn,
suitable to the dignity of a great oligarchic State—of Venice, not perhaps
as she really was, with her corrupt nobles, spying police, and effete com¬
merce, but as she continued to exist in the imagination even of her own
degenerate sons, strong, placid, and venerable beyond all others. And
Dr. Burney, who had heard music enough to make him rather insensible
to any save its purely artistic qualities, seems to have received an unac¬
customed impression from these performances, and confesses that, he knew
not well how or why, they affected him even to tears.
Dr. Burney next proceeded to visit the music schools for girls for which
Venice was famous: the Pieta, the Mendicanti, the l'ncurabili, and the
Ospedaletto. As their names imply, these institutions were originally
and really nothing but hospitals and workhouses ; but as the girls educated
in them were taught music, and the best teachers were given them, the
four conservatori (literally asylums) had gradually become engrossed by
musical interests, until at length girls neither orphans nor beggars were
admitted, merely because they showed disposition for the art. Although
the public heard of them only as musicians, these girls were being
thoroughly educated without any view to making music their profession;
as long as they remained in the conservatorio, they were permitted to sing
nowhere else ; comparatively few took to the stage, and the greater part
were dowered by the State and married; those who did not, remaining
and growing old and amazonian, as Beckford tell us, at their double-basses,
French horns, and kettle-drums. Nor did this singular system cost much,
for the older girls taught the younger ones, the choruses being studied
under the guidance of the foremost pupils, so that the State had to pro¬
vide only the masters to compose, direct grand performances, and finish
the best pupils. But in the matter of masters the Serene Republic was
incomparably generous, accepting only the most eminent composers, so that
in the course of the eighteenth century the four schools were respectively
directed by Porpora,* Domenico Scarlatti, Hasse,f and Jommelli, who
taught, directed, and composed for the girls, from the simplest exercises
up to the grandest oratorios and the most elaborate masses. And the
performers were worthy of their teachers: all the writers 011 music of the
* The Venetian music-schools of the last century are now remembered chiefly by
the readers of George Sand's great novel, as Oonsuelo is made a pupil oL' Porpora at
the Mendicant}.
f Niecold Porpora, horn at Naples in 1087, died in 1707. Domenico Scarlatti,
horu in 1083, died in 1757. Adoli'o llasse, born in Saxony about 1700, died in 178:).
Niecold Jommelli, born in 1714, (lied in 1778.
II 2
100
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eighteenth century speak with enthusiasm of the performances of these
girls, of their voices, of their excellent performance, choral and instru¬
mental perfection, and of the singular effect produced by the sight of an
orchestra entirely composed of women, who played in a masterly manner
the most difficult solos and the most complicated symphonies. Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, no particular friend to music, speaks with
astonishment of the concerts given in these hospitals, where she says she
heard finer voices and better singers than the Faustina and the Cuzzoni,
who then surpassed all other singers. The President de Brosses and
Rousseau soon after mention them with equal enthusiasm ; Beckford, who
was a great musician himself, was entranced by what he heard in 1780 ;
while Goethe, in 1787, seems to have received a grander impression from
these girls' performance than from any music he had previously heard;
in short, the four charity schools of Venice were one of the musical
wonders of the eighteenth century. Of all writers on the subject, Dr.
Burney is, however, the most detailed, and at the same time the most
enthusiastic. At the period of Burney's visit to Venice, the two best of
the schools, whose respective merit oscillated according to the eminence
of the teachers, were the Incurabili and the Ospeclaletto, while the Pieta
had previously been more famous for singers and the Mendicanti for
instrumentalists. At all of them, bxit especially at the two first named,
Burney heard admirable performances : splendid voices of every category,
whether for agility, expression, or grandeur; excellent orchestras and
choruses, which were perfect, although consisting only of female voices,
the compositions being skilfully scored for soprano, mezzo soprano, and
contralto, the latter singing at a pitch which the unmusical Mrs. Tlirale
called " odd unnatural enough." Dr. Burney went to several rehearsals,
and to the small concerts, Avhere, a few friends only being present, the
girls played all sorts of vocal tricks, in order to show off their powers of
voice and lungs. Of all these various performances Burney has but one
judgment to give: that they are admirable, equal, and perhaps superior,
to anything that can be heard on a first-rate stage—in short, some of the
very finest things which he, the great musical critic, who had known
every opera and every singer since 1740, had ever heard.
A great deal, of course, depended on the masters. At the two best
schools Burney found respectively two of the greatest of Italian com¬
posers, one in vigorous old age, the other in brilliantly promising youth :
at the Incurabili, the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi, surnamed Buranello ;
at the Ospedalello, the Neapolitan Antonio Sacchini. Galuppi was one
of the Italian composers whom Burney most admired, placing him second
only to Jommelli; Sacchini was one of those whom Burney was most to
esteem in later years ; each belonged to a separate period of musical
transition: Galuppi, born 1703, to the transition from the solemn, heroic
101
style of Lotti, Durante, and Leo, to the deeply and almost femininely
pathetic one of Gluck, Jommelli, and Trajetta; Saccliini, born about
1738, to the period of transition from this latter style to the untragic,
lovely, sunny style of Cimarosa, Paisiello, and Mozart. Each was to
cause others to be forgotten, and to be forgotten in his turn, in the rapid
changes which Italian music was undergoing ; but Saccliini, being the
nearer to us, is probably less entirely forgotten than Galuppi, from whom
he was separated by a Avhole artistic generation.* Galuppi, who was an
immensely prolific composer, abounded in melody, tender, pathetic, and
brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally
rose to the highest beauty. He was not a very learned composer, used
instruments very sparingly, but when, for instance, he introduced wind
instruments, it was with a delicate and delightful effect. The purely
musical qualities satisfied him, and he defined the requisites of his art to
Burney in very moderate terms, " Chiarezza, vaghezza, e buona modu-
lazione," clearness, beauty, and good modulation, qualities which he himself
possessed to a high degree, without troubling himself much about any
others. Saccliini, on the contrary, thought much of orchestral fullness
and dramatic expression, or, rather, he followed the taste of his time,
which was constantly tending to the first and momentarily interested in
the second ; yet, with more effort at pathos, he obtained it less success¬
fully perhaps than Galuppi. in whose time it came more spontaneously
than in that of Saccliini, when musical forms were tending to the idyllic
rather than the tragic. Galuppi, although he lived many years in Russia,
always remained faithful to the purely musical school of Italy, while
Saccliini, seeking his fortunes in France about 1785, adopted to some
extent Gluck's dramatic system. The lives of the two composers were as
widely opposed as their genius: Galuppi was a model of the respectable
modest artist, living quietly on a moderate fortune, busy with his art and
the education of his numerous children ; beloved and revered by his
fellow artists ; and, when some fifteen years later he died, honoured by
them with a splendid funeral, at which all Venetian musicians performed;
the great Pacchierotti writing to Burney that he had " sung with much
devotion to obtain a rest for Buranello's (Galuppi's) soul." Saccliini, on
the other hand, was most irregular in his habits and luxurious in his
mode of life; his dissolute conduct surrounded him with enemies ; his
singers were constantly rebelling ; he was more than once reduced to
almost beggary, and died poor, broken-spirited, and neglected, before he
was fifty.|
* Mr. Browning's fine poem, "A Toccata of Galuppi's,'' has made at least his name
familiar to many English readers.
f Saccliini had gained the friendship of the great satirist I'arini, who, on his
death, mourned him with an ode. I'arini, a very moral man, was totally mistaken
102
Venice, being- the city where music was cultivated at greatest expense,
was naturally the one where most was done in the way of music-pub¬
lishing, nearly all the printed music in Italy coming from Venice. This
was, however, very little; nothing compared to what was done in this
line in England and Germany; for in the last century music-printing
was quite exceptional in Italy. Musical types had indeed been invented *
by an Italian, Ottaviano Petrucci of Fossombrone, and much music had
been engraved and printed in the country during the sixteenth and the
first half of the seventeenth centuries; but gradually, as the musical life
developed, as the number of musical productions increased, printing and
engraving were thrown aside as too laborious and expensive processes ;
it was not worth while, as Rousseau explains, to strike off a number of
copies of an opera or oratorio which might be forgotten in a year; for in
the rapid rush forward of Italian music, in the tremendous vortex of new
compositions, the work even of an eminent composer was rarely performed
more than one season at the same place, especially as it was usually
written so exactly to the measure of this or that great singer that where
he or she was not the opera could not be performed with any hope of
success. The system of copyists, who could produce exactly the number
of copies that were demanded, was therefore developed to the utmost;
all the Italian operas of the last century existing only in manuscript,
while only collections of sonatas or cantatas published by subscription
were printed. These copyists, who knew of no such thing as copyright,
had a very profitable business of it, although they gave their work very
cheap ; for they not only supplied the theatres, and churches, and native
amateurs, but were often employed to prepare whole musical libraries for
strangers, whom their countrymen expected to bring home loads of the
newest Italian compositions. In these cases it was a joke of long
standing, already mentioned by Marcello in 1720, and still spoken of by
old Italian musicians, that the copyists would sell, as rare works by
eminent composers, hotch-potches made up of odd pages of old operas
and exercises which the rich Milordi bought up as treasures. However,
it must be said in favour of this rather uncivilised practice of copying
that much of the music of the last century was written in a way to
gladden the heart, compared with our crabbed, stiff type, on the thickest
and creamiest paper, in large, bold, elegant characters, which prepossess
you in favour of a piece even before you have read it. The paper has
now, alas! become yellow and stained, the ink brown and shiny, the loose,
in Sacchini's character, and praised him for virtues which Sacchini entirely ignored,
while taking the opportunity of throwing a little of his usual abuse upon singers,
among whom Parini would, however, scarcely have found so dissolute a spendthrift
as Sacchini himself.
* About 1500.
The Musical Life.
103
mottle cardboard bindings give out a cloud of dust when you touch
them, but the compositions are full of that divine youth which never
fades.
The private concerts to which Burney went at Venice were as superior
to those he had heard elsewhere as was the church music; he was
present at several in the houses of patricians, amongst others in that of
the Grimani, and heard excellent performances by persons of the highest
rank. One of these concerts was devoted entirely to the works of
Benedetto Marcello, some of which a party of ladies and gentlemen per¬
formed once a week; and this might be considered as a kind of national
and social institution, for the Venetian dilettanti naturally regarded their
great patrician composer as a sort of patron saint; and this might well bo
the case, for Benedetto Marcello was the personification, the incarnation,
of all that was most original and noble in the music of the Venetian
oligarchy, uniting as he did the genius of a great composer with the
spirit of a noble of the great commonwealth. The younger son of the
Senator Marcello and of a lady of the famous Cappello family, Benedetto
was born in ]G86, one year after Handel, during the efflorescence of
Venetian music, and in a highly intellectual and musical house. An old
story tells that the young man was recalled from a dissolute mode of life
by a fall into an empty tomb, whose slab had given way beneath him.
This may or may not be true, but we prefer to think of Marcello, not as
the converted libertine, but as the delicate, precocious, ardent boy, from
whom his parents had to hide every book, and who, disdaining the
servile, mechanical study of music, attempted to learn the art in his
own rapid way, until a slighting remark from his elder brother, who told
the Princess of Brunswick that lie was a clever little fellow, and very
useful in finding the place in books, goaded him into serious study of
the art. How serious that study was, how deep a knowledge of harmony
he obtained, is evident from his works—so masterly, so simple, and yet
so elaborately finished. And that study was carried on by the side of
many others, for Marcello became well known as a writer, nay, even as a
writer of verse, and having taken his degree in law he entered the
service of the Republic as a judge of the criminal Quaranzia. About
1720 lie began his setting of the first fifty psalms, translated into Italian
by another patrician, Ascanio Giustiniani. This work was enthusiastically
received all over Italy; it became a model for composers, a study for
singers, and was commented on by the many musical archaeologists of the
day, who compared it with the works of Arion, Terpander, and other
Greek musicians, of which they knew nothing and about which they
were therefore extremely enthusiastic. A few years after the publication
of this grand work, the famous composer and wit, whose palace was the
meeting-place of all the Venetian musicians and literati, went and buried
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himself in the little marshy, semi-ruined Dalmatian town of Pola, at the
order of the government, which had appointed him Provveditore there.
Marcello set bravely to work at his official duties, employing his dull
leisure in composing and writing; but after five years of this kind of
exile his health gave way and he was obliged to beg for other employ¬
ment. The Republic recalled him, and appointed him to a fiscal office
at Brescia, but his health, weakened by over study, had been ruined by
the malaria of Pola, and after languishing for a few years he died in
178'.), at the age of fifty-three. In the last years of his life he had met
a girl of very low birth, called Rosina Scalfi, had been struck by her
splendid contralto voice, had taught her to sing, and had, as tradition
has it, ended by marrying her, although by so doing he incurred the dis¬
pleasure of the Senate and Council, who by no means approved of such
marriages. We are told but little concerning Benedetto Marcello's pri¬
vate life, yet enough to picture to ourselves a grand character, following
quietly an ideal of the conduct of a Venetian noble, earnest in his belief,
serious in his official work, full of suppressed and unostentatious enthu¬
siasm for his art, going through life with a deep perception of what he
owed to the State which had given him social nobility, and to Him who
had given him artistic genius; yet not without a certain softness and
playfulness of humour. Marcello hated and despised every sort of medi¬
ocrity, and this he proved in two very different yet very characteristic
writings: the one a solemn letter, written shortly before his death, in
which he admonished his nephew to live and serve the State as befitted
liis family; the other a satire, published when he was about forty, in
which, while professing to teach how managers, singers, and composers
should act in order to please a modern audience, he held up to contempt
all that was mediocre in his art.
This little prose work, entitled II Teatro di Musicci alia Moda, is not
only a great musical curiosity, but, in its style, a literary masterpiece ;
not an ordinary satire such as the Italians possess by the dozen, not a
pasquinade, nor a humorous display of provincial characteristics, like
those of Marcello's countryman Gritti, but a curious mixture of all these,
with a dash of the fantastic extravagance of Carlo Gozzi, and a droll
simplicity worthy of Addison and Steele, whom, however, it is far from
probable that the Venetian had ever read. In a grave, simple, business¬
like style, it purports to teach how best to suit the theatrical and musical
taste of the day, recommending a series of petty absurdities, interspersed
with more glaring follies, and crowned every now and then by a burst of
the quaintest, drollest, wildest nonsense; and in so doing it gives a more
complete and more completely developed picture of the motley theatrical
life of the time, certainly not as it was, for absurdity never was so amus¬
ing, but as the artist, the idealiser of nonsense and extravagance, would
The Musical Life.
105
conceive it;—not of the higher artistic classes, which in all times must
needs be serious and manly, but of the lower ones, in which all the folly
of the profession and of the time bursts out unmitigated—classes which
afforded (loldoni and his imitator (inimitable himself) Sografi the most
delightfully comic characters and episodes, as in the Impresario delle
Sin hue of the former and the Convenienze Teatrali of the latter; but
which Marcello alone viewed as a whole, as a cycle of humorous ab¬
surdities, as the heroic world of grotesque folly, and which he alone
treated in an epic spirit, showing us all its heroes and heroines, laying
bare all their feelings and displaying all their various actions, making us
witness all the complications and collisions of their several whims and
requirements. For there is a perpetual struggle in this grand world of
the Teatro alia Moda, a battle of conceit, avarice, imbecility, and ser¬
vility, between the singers and the composer, the composer and the poet,
the whole company and the manager; and Marcello, its Homer, brings
us into the midst of the strife—among the swaggering, bragging singers;
the threadbare, cringing, and shuffling poets ; the fantastic prime donne,
with their dialect-jabbering mothers, and their retinue of parrots, lapdogs,
monkeys, and admirers; the stolid, ill-educated composers, complacently
plagiarising, curtailing, lengthening their operas; the self-important bear
performers, the pushing figuranti decked in their companions' clothes;
the whole jostling, screeching, bellowing, tossing warfare of behind the
scenes. And to each and all Marcello lays down the law, quietly teaches
his part in the general scuffle, regulates and systematises the universal
folly. The poet gets his lesson of cringing impudence ; the composer, of
exacting slovenliness; the singers, male and female, of wild conceit and
artistic inanity—precepts of which we can give but the following short
specimens.
The starving poet, the patcher together of operatic imbecilities, must
declare : " That for his part he has never deemed it necessary to read
the ancient writers, since the ancient writers never deemed it necessary
to read the moderns. He must secure the assistance of some influential
person, cook or valet, agreeing to share all dedication fees with him, who
will teach him all the names and titles to be put on the dedication. He
must exalt the family and ancestors of his Maecenas and be profuse in
such expressions as munificence, generous soul, &c., and finding nothing
to praise in the great personage himself (as is frequently the case)
lie must explain that he refrains from eulogies for fear of offending his
modesty. Fame, with her hundred sonorous trumpets, will re-echo his
immortal name from one pole to another. He will conclude his epistle
with the declaration that, by way of showing his profound respect, ho
kisses the jumps of the fleas of the dogs of his Excellency." He will,
moreover, write a dissertation on tragedy and poetry in general, quoting
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Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Horace, &c., and adding that all good
rules must " bo set aside to meet the requirements of the corrupt time,
the absurdity of the theatre, the extravagance of the composer, the indis¬
cretion of the singers, the susceptibility of the bear, of the firjuranti, &c.
He must not fail to give the usual explanation of the three unities of the
drama, place, time, and action; the place being such and such a theatre,
the time from two hours after sunset to six, and the action the ruin of
the manager." The composer must be very humble towards everyone,
standing with his hat off before the singers, and showing every possible
degree of politeness towards the bear, the figuranti, and the candle-snuffers;
but he is to maintain his station with the poet, " ordering him to put in
such and such metres and syllables, insisting on the poem being legibly
copied, with lots of commas, semi-colons, notes of interrogation, &c.
although in his composition he is to pay no attention whatever either to
commas, semi-colons, or interrogations."
The singers, male and female, are to keep up their dignity above all
things, " never listening to any other actor; saluting the people in the
boxes, joking with the orchestra, &c., that people may clearly understand
that he or she is not the Prince Zoroaster but Signor Alipio Forconi;
not the Empress Filastrocca but Signora Giandussa Pelatutti ... If
the singer plays the part of a prisoner, or slave, he must take care always
to appear well powdered, with many jewels on his dress, a very high plume,
nice shining sword and chains, which latter he is to clatter frequently, in
order to awaken compassion in the audience ; the prima donna must
always raise one arm, then the other, constantly changing her fan from
one hand to the other; and if she perform the part of a man she must
always be buttoning one of her gloves, must have plenty of patches on
her face, must very frequently on entering the stage forget her sword,
helmet, wig," &c. The seconda donna "must always insist on the poet
making her come out before the prima donna, and when she has received
her part she must count the words and notes in it, and if there be less
than in that of the prima donna she must insist 011 the poet and composer
giving her the due number of words and notes, as she must never be
inferior toiler in the length of her skirts, the amount of paint and patches,
in her shakes, embellishments, and cadenzas, protectors, parrots, owls," &c.
These lamely translated quotations can give but a very poor notion of
the wonderful talent of the Teatro di Musica cdla Moda; it lies in the
details, in the subordinate figures, actresses' mothers, protectors, teachers,
scene-painters, bear-performers, pages, &c., and in the ludicrously grave
incidents which arise between them; in the completeness and drollness
of the whole picture; and, such as it is, Marcello's humorous talent might
be envied by his fellow-countryman Groldoni. And in all this Benedetto
Marcello is always perfectly gentlemanly, never gross, never buffoonish,
The Musical Life.
107
never bitter; looking down upon the absurdities of the profession with
the delicate and amused contempt of a patrician who is above the squabbles
of professionals, and of a genius who is above the disputes of mediocrities.
For Benedetto Marcello was much more than a mere wit, than a mere
high-bred critic ; to the spirit of a noble amateur, who could permit him¬
self all sorts of artistic vagaries, he united the genius of a great composer
who could deal with every sort of material. His dilettante's fancies,
learned and fantastic, which no professional could permit himself, raised
suspicion in the minds of professional critics, among whom we grieve to
find the usually candid and appreciative Burney, who was inconceivably
blind to Marcello's merits ; but these fancies and oddities were controlled
by unerring instinct. Marcello might score his pieces for strange com¬
binations of voices, leaving only a solitary contralto to cope with three or
four tenors and basses, but he would make that contralto soar grandly
above them; he might continually change measure, key, and pace, change
recitative for air and air for recitative, but with these abrupt alternations
lie would produce a splendid and harmonious effect; he might go into the
port, into the synagogues, and into the Armenian churches, and imitate
the strange, nasal, barbaric chants he heard there, but he would use them
as the groundwork of choruses of extraordinary beauty and grandeur; he
might be as odd as he chose, he could never be otherwise than great. For
Marcello not only lived at the precise time when Italian music was in its
full youthful strength and grandeur, but he had the peculiar endowment
for the musically sublime. His works afford examples of many sorts of
composition for single voices and for many voices; of the simplest
slightest melody, and of the most complicated fugued style ; of the tender
and the florid; yet they resemble each other by a peculiarity which it is
difficult to define—a certain, if we may say so, impersonal character: they
seem to express not so much human emotions due to human circumstances
as the impressions which a poetical mind might receive from nature—im¬
pressions which, though vague, are embodied in the most distinct and
artistic shape, somewhat in the same way as the vague divinities of nature
took plastic forms in the conception of the Greek people, yet without
losing something characteristic which betrayed their origin. What we
meet in Marcello's works seem impressions of the sea, of the sky, and of
the moonlight, with all their solemnity and stillness and vastness, sweet
or austere. A sort of pantheistic nature-worship is suggested by his
great psalms, which raises them far above the more emotional and dra¬
matic church music of other composers. While his contemporaries gave
the loveliest musical form to the human emotions, Marcello seems to have
musically embodied man's mysterious sympathies with inanimate nature.
This could only be done by a man placed, like Marcello, high above pro¬
fessional requirements, unaffected by fashion, and able therefore entirely
108
The Musical Life.
to follow liis own natural dispositions. Marcello wrote much church and
chamber music, the remains of which now lie mouldering away in archives
and lumber-rooms, even as Griorgione's frescoes mouldered away patch by
patch from off the Venetian palaces ; his psalms only have been pub¬
lished and republished, and are still known to the more studious among
Italian musicians; but they alone suffice to show how great and original
a composer is due to the Venetian aristocracy, which, despite corruption
and sloth, was yet the only remaining institution of the Italy of nobler
days. Of the distinguished men which it produced Benedetto Marcello
was the last great and characteristic one.
Dr. Burney left Venice about the 18th of August, and proceeded direct
to Bologna, which was one of the principal stations of his musical pilgrim¬
age. It could not indeed afford what Venice did; it had not the great
musical establishments of the latter, nor anything of its musical life, but it
was eminently the studious town of Italy, and was therefore the home of
the more purely erudite and abstract part of music. The rich Bolognese
nobles, more intelligent and less frivolous than the Venetians, cultivated
music even to a high point; the great Teatro Comunale, which the
famous Bibbiena had just built, was admirably managed by the Senate;
the deputation of patricians who had the care of the great Gothic church
of S. Petronio stinted neither trouble nor money to obtain first-rate per¬
formers on each recurrence of the feast of the patron saint; all this, and
a good deal more, would have sufficed to place Bologna in the first rank
of musical cities, but it had, moreover, a peculiar walk of musical activity
in which it was supreme. The town of universities and academies
naturally possessed the society which dispensed the highest musical
honours, and the man who had penetrated deeper than all others into the
mysterious depths of musical science and history—the famous Philhar¬
monic Academy, and the not less famous Padre Martini. The Philhar¬
monic Academy was the highest standard in Italy, because it was purely
and rigidly musical; it accepted, indeed, the patronage of royal per¬
sonages, but it would not open its doors to the fashionable and profes¬
sional mediocrities who crowded all similar institutions. It was as
democratic and suspicious as any mediaeval commonwealth; its president,
or principe, reigned only a year, and was elected only after many disputes;
it accepted as members only those who had undergone the severest
examination in musical science; and we know with what exultation the
young Mozart passed through the ordeal of being locked up alone in a
room and developing the theme given him, and how fond his father was
in after-years of telling people that Wolfgang was a Bolognese Acade¬
mician. There were consequently no inferior men in the Academy, and
all the most eminent composers and singers belonged to it : the com¬
posers and singers whose quaint faded portraits now hang, forgotten and
The Musical Life.
109
unnoticed, in the former refectory of the convent of S. Giacomo Maggiore,
converted by Napoleon into the present musical school. If a stray
traveller go there now, it is not for their sake, but for the sake of
Rossini and Donizetti, who, while passing to their lessons, may some¬
times have stopped, looked wonderingly at their predecessors in powder,
brocade, and satin, have thought for a moment how frail and unenduring
a thing is musical fame, and then gone on themselves to join the number
of those who in their turn will be neglected and forgotten.
Of course Burney did not fail to go to the Philharmonic Academy, which
later honoured him with membership, but his first thought at Bologna
was to run to the Franciscan monastery of S. Francesco, and deliver the
introductory letter to Padre Martini given him by Gretry, for the
famous monk was not only the most learned theoretical musician in
Italy, but was himself busied with a vast history of music, of which the
first volume had appeared some twelve years before. Giambattista
Martini was the most eminent type of a peculiar class of musicians which
had swarmed in Italy ever since the end of the sixteenth century ; the
class of musical humanists, or, if we prefer, of scholarly investigators
into the science and history of the art, as distinguished from its practical
and sesthetical sides. The humanists of the Renaissance had been exclu¬
sively busied with the literary remains of antiquity, and it was not till
music began to replace the plastic arts in the general interest that the
new category of musical humanists could arise ; men who had inherited
all the blind enthusiasm for antiquity of their literary predecessors, but
who, caring really little for literature, and having a smattering of counter¬
point and mathematics, devoted their thorough knowledge of Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew, and their unwearied inglorious patience, to the
subject of ancient music ; ransacking every classic author for allusions,
copying bas-reliefs of musical instruments, trying to decipher ancient
systems of notation ; attempting in short to understand the unintel¬
ligible. Many of them, of course, firmly believed that they understood
how to produce music like that of Pythagoras and Anaximenes, as was
the case with the unfortunate little humpback Gabriel Naude, who per-
formed a genuine Pyrrhic dance before the jeering court of Queen
Christina; and with those noble Florentine gentlemen of the end of the
sixteenth century who thought they had reconstructed ancient tragedy on
their theatre in the Palazzo dci Bardi, when they had in reality invented
the modern opera. Those who could not aspire to performing ancient
music made up for it by most furiously abusing modern music, like Doni,
Kircher, and a host of others ; so, while modern music was rapidly
developing in the hands of empirical students, of composers and singers,
who gradually refined and enriched the musical elements they had re¬
ceived from the people, a number of scholars, men without voice,
110
The Musical Life.
fingers, or talent for the art, gravely condemned everything that did not
suit their notions of ancient music. Of course they could neither prevent
nor direct the growth of modern music, but so blind was the worship of
antiquity—antiquity, we need scarcely say, neither understood nor ap¬
preciated—that the critical and scientific world bowed down before their
verdicts. While Scarlatti,* Pergolesi, Leo, and Jommelli, were bringing
the art to the highest point of excellence, while the whole Italian nation
went into raptures for its great composers and performers, treatise on
treatise was published to prove that modern music was low, immoral,
and totally without the miraculous powers of ancient music; and these
treatises were read, commented on, and rarely, very rarely, refuted.
D'Alembert scarcely dared to suggest that, after all, ancient music was a
mere name ; Metastasio thought it prudent to write an immense com¬
mentary on Aristotle's Poetics, to prove that ancient tragedy was
exactly the same thing as modern opera; men of original thought, like
Arteaga and Eximeno, always maintained the superiority of ancient
music; and Sacchi, a very judicious critic, whose musical ideal was the
rather un-antique Signor Farinello, declared that ancient music must
have been better than modern music since ancient sculpture was better
than modern sculpture—the very reason, to our minds, for its being
inferior; while only now and then a sturdy dilettante, a lawyer or doctor
like Saverio Mattei, would boldly enter the lists in favour of modern art,
driven to this extremity by the perverse and insolent pedantry of the
musical humanists.
To this class Padre Martini undoubtedly belonged, but he joined to
the bigotry of other scholars so much learning, musical and mathematical,
so much candour and gentleness, and so much self-abnegation towards
his art, as to neutralise it in great part. People might think him pre¬
judiced and infatuated, but they were compelled to view him with respect.
Padre Martini had an intense aversion to the then existing Italian music:
to him, who possessed far less musical talent than musical science, it
seemed frivolous and superficial; he attacked Pergolesi for not having
written his exquisite Stabat Mater in the more scientific fugued style of
the sixteenth century; and when one day a young man desiring his advice
had very skilfully developed a theme given him to test his knowledge,
and had subsequently informed him that he was Niccolo Jommelli,
engaged to compose for the Bolognese opera, Padre Martini burst out
into lamentations that so fine a genius should be wasted in composing
operas. Jommelli, whose peculiar excellence happened just to lie in
dramatic expression, used to speak very highly of his obligations to
* Alessandro Scarlatti, born about 1650, died in 1725. Giambattista Pergolesi,
born according to recent accounts in 1710, died in 1737. Leonardo Leo, born in
1694, died about 1745.
The Musical TAfe.
Ill
Padre Martini as to the first scientific musician in Italy ; but added that
he had but little real musical genius, although lie wished to direct that
of others. To Burney Padre Martini was a most interesting person, as
he had written more on the art than any other Italian, and possessed
the largest musical library in the country ; a library of which the most
considerable part had been made him a present by the famous singer
Farinelli, who, after having had the most wonderful career which a
musician ever enjoyed, may have looked with a sort of mixed compassion
and envy on the perfect contentment which the poor old monk enjoyed
among his books and MSS.
This Cavalier Don Carlo Broschi, surnamed Farinello, was in fact a
much more interesting person to Burney than poor good Padre Martini,
despite ail the learning stored up in his head and in his MSS.; nor was
Burney at all singular in the vague curiosity with which this great singer
inspired him. Even unmusical travellers arriving at Bologna between
1760 and 1780 would, if they had credit among the aristocracy, try and get
presented to him like the Abbe Coyer; or, if they were less fortunate, like
La Lande and Dupaty, would question their fellow-lodgers and the towns¬
folk about him, so as to be able to put down a sentence or two in their diaries
about the Cavalier Broschi's history or present circumstances; for Fari¬
nello, or, as the English, including Dr. Burney, called him, Farinelli, had
had a most extraordinary social career, which, magnified by time and
ignorance, and fused with his immense musical fame, surrounded him
with that species of mysterious effulgence which curious persons are
always trying to see through, even at the risk of seeing something far
smaller than they imagined. He was eminently one of those figures
which leave a deep impression on the popular imagination, an impression
which for a long while grows stronger in proportion as the reality is removed
further away. His voice, it was universally acknowledged throughout
Europe, had been infinitely more voluminous, extensive, and beautiful
than any other that had ever been heard before or since; his musical
talent far more versatile and astonishing than any other; in short, the
whole eighteenth century was unanimous in placing him alone and far
above all its other great singers, his predecessors, contemporaries, and
successors; and musicians, as the eminent singer Mancini emphatically
writes, regarded Farinelli not so much as the most brilliant member but
rather as the tutelary divinity of their profession.* Carlo Broschi,f one
of a family of shabby-genteel musicians, had been launched into the
theatrical career about 1721, when a mere boy and still the pupil of the
famous Porpora, and had immediately become famous under the schoolboy
* " Questo luminoso deeoro,anzi piuttosto tutelar nume della nostra arte." Mancini,
who wrote this, was a shrewd critic and very catholic in his admirations.
f Born in 170"), left the sta,ue in 1738, died in 1782.
112
The Musical Life.
nickname of Farinello, due to the protection of some dilettanti called Farina,
and which, after the easy-going Neapolitan fashion and the habit of con¬
temporary musicians, he continued to be called by for the rest of his days.
The Italians and the Germans lavished every species of honour and
adulation on him, for in those days singers were paid much less in money
than in the wildest enthusiasm. There are prints representing Farinelli
seated among clouds in the midst of allegorical figures with preposterous
draperies and preposterous inscriptions: a long, slim, sober youth,looking
on with the most absolute indifference at the puffy-cheeked Fame blowing
her trumpet, and the creasy little Cupids pelting him with roses: no bad
allegory of the perfect self-command and modesty which the great singer
preserved amidst the most exaggerated prosperity. All the Italian poets,
good, bad, and indifferent, wrote vapid, turgid sonnets for him: amongst
others the very talented Tommaso Crudeli, destined to end his days
imprisoned for atheism, wrote a couple of odes for this musical divinity.
In one of them the poet, in despair at the thought of his going off to
England, calls upon Cupid to detain him in Italy; to which Cupid answers
that the plan is impracticable, since he cannot help following him wliere-
ever he may think fit to go, across the sea, or across the Alps. In this
glorious way Farinelli departed from Italy, young, and at the height of
popularity. When lie returned twenty-five years had elapsed ; he was
elderly, broken in health and spirits; he had been sent home ignominiously
by the new King of Spain, Charles III., and ordered to fix his abode at
Bologna, the place he bated most in the world. During those twenty-
five years his fellow-countrymen had been constantly receiving vague and
wonderful reports concerning him. He had gone to Spain, cured Philip
V. of melancholy madness by the magic of his voice, kept Ferdinand VI.
alive by the same supernatural means, become omnipotent at Court, been
made prime minister, and, people added, had governed the country like
another Solomon; all of which extraordinary pieces of information were
duly registered by historians and writers on music, who have handed down
to posterity the fame of this miracle. It was indeed a miracle, and, like
all other miracles, could be explained satisfactorily only by one fact, that
it had never taken place. Not that it was groundless ; on the contrary,
it was merely the popular exaggeration of what few people at the time
could thoroughly understand, namely, that a great singer had gone to
Spain, had pleased poor old, dull, duped Philip by his voice, his intelli¬
gence, his good French, and his good nature, and had gained much
iniluence over him ; that Philip's successor, Ferdinand, had liked and
esteemed him still more, and that thus he had insensibly got to possess
very considerable political power. Such a position as this was difficult
to define, and consequently easy to exaggerate; the story was in itself a
strange one; people made it much stranger, the glamour of Farinelli's
The Musical Life.
113
musical fame heightening the effect and inducing them to add 011 all
sorts of fanciful colouring; for, whenever humanity has a chance of
tasting the uncommon and inexplicable, it takes good care to season and
spice it to the utmost. Thus there came to exist a sort of popular myth
of Farinelli, in which the singer appeared much as lie does in the pageant¬
like portrait by the crotchety barrocco painter Amigoni: colossal, dark,
uncanny, mysterious, standing out sharply and strangely in his white
mantle of Calatrava from a vapoury, lurid background, filled with vague
forms of elves and genii. But only eliminate the additions made by
popular fancy, the strange, weird lights and shades, and see him through
an ordinary medium, and you find yourself in the presence uo longer of
Amigoni's sphinx-like demi-god but in that of an ordinary man, very
amiable, very intelligent, very incapable of being a prime minister, such as
you may see Farinelli in the smaller portrait belonging to the Bolognese
Philharmonic Academicians, in which a book, a walking-stick, and two
dogs, replace the theatrical paraphernalia of the large picture. Yet, after
all, the reality is almost more curious than the fiction; Farinelli never
cured Philip's madness, he neve]' became prime minister, he never governed
Spain, as even well-informed people like the Margravine of Anspach and
President Dupaty affirm, but his residence at Court is none the less
singular from the sole fact that never was there a person less made to be
a royal favourite than this favourite of two kings, and never was there a
man less capable of profiting by Court influence than this man, whose
influence nobles, ministers, kings, and emperors were continually trying to
beg, steal, or buy. For Farinelli cared neither for money nor for titles, cared
nothing for political power, which he felt incapable of wielding and which
he was incapable of selling ; he was proud of being a singer and afraid
of being a political agent; yet, while childishly mistrustful of all who
flattered and courted him, fearing and despising their aims, he was as
childishly confiding in those who treated him with coolness and ingratitude,
remaining unshaken in his devotion to the Queen—a vain, avaricious
woman, who used his influence for her own selfish purposes while making
him believe she was a saint—and maintaining with all his might the
minister Ensenada, a clever rascal, whom he imagined to be the noblest
of philanthropists, and to save whom from well-deserved ruin he risked
everything, even after being convinced of his gross treachery towards
himself. This is how we see Farinelli: not in the high-flown panegyrics
of Lombard! and Grossi, but in Sir Benjamin Iveane's despatches from
Madrid. All the romance is gone, but there, is something nobler than
romance in this man, who was neither a genius nor a wizard : modest and
self-respecting in the most corrupting position, unselfish and forgiving
amidst baseness; something which makes him appear like almost an
idyllic hero among the artificial, worthless people around him. Farinelli
1
114
The Musical Life.
had lost his credit at Court, and paid for it by exile from Spain on the
accession of Ferdinand's half-brother Charles—a wanton act of injustice,
due,'in all probability, to old Elizabeth Farnese, the new King's mother,
whose influence over her husband, Philip V., Farinelli had considerably
usurped, and whose tool he had declined to become. He had been living-
near Bologna about ten years when Dr. Burney arrived there, spending
the dull last years of his life in a desultory, intellectual fashion, seeing a
vast number of celebrities, teaching his nephews, writing innumerable
letters, singing, composing, and talcing part in the easy cheerful life of
Bolognese senators and professors, always serviceable and generous, except
in undeserved praise, which was exactly wherein his contemporaries were
most lavish. He came to meet Dr. Burney at Padre Martini's monastery,
and the Englishman visited him several times at his country-house, which
Bolognese tradition still points out in the fields near the Reno. Dr.
Burney, although a trifle awe-stricken by the dim halo of royalty which
surrounded the old singer, experienced strongly that singular attraction,
due to manner, voice, and unmistakable goodness, which Farinelli seems
to have exerted over everyone, making men's hearts open instinctively to
him, they knew not why or wherefore, and in which lay the real explana¬
tion of his otherwise inexplicable career. When, therefore, Dr. Burney
took leave of Farinelli, whom he had met only twice or thrice, he felt, lie
tells us, quite sorry and melancholy, as if in parting with an old friend;
and nearly thirty years later, when the great singer had long been dead,
and Burney was himself grown old, and forlorn, and sceptical, he looked
back to this visit, and declared that, of all the celebrities he had ever
known, none had inspired him with more liking and respect than the
Cavaliere Broschi Farinello.
Dr. Burney left Bologna after a week, and proceeded towards Florence,
crossing the Apennines wholly unconscious of the delightful Radcliffian
thrills of horror which Mrs. Jameson and Washington Irving were destined
to render so popular; indeed the writers of the eighteenth century are so
perversely cool and comfortable about the Apennine passes that you might
almost imagine brigands and ghastly inn-keepers to have formed part of
the travelling paraphernalia of the romanticists of our century, by whom
they were introduced into Italy, together with circulating libraries and
English groceries. Florence was not a particularly musical town in the
musical Italy of those days: it had neither the inexhaustible musical life
which in Naples bubbled up spontaneously from the lowest depths of
society; nor the carefully cultivated, splendidly dowered art belonging to
the Venetian nobles. Although it had done much for music in the sixteenth
century, when the opera took rise in its court pageants and learned
academies, Florence had been passive ever since, submitting to imported
taste, listening to Neapolitan, Venetian, and Umbrian composers and
The Musical Life.
115
singers; for the one great master whom Florence produced, Cherubini,
was still a mere child, and attained to maturity in France, at a time when
the musical civilization (if Italy was dissolving and spreading over other
countries. But Florence, with its thriving agriculture, its comfortable
laws, its easy fortunes, its mild little intellectual stir, with all that it still
retained from greater days, and with the addition of the levity introduced
by the Austro- Lorenese Court—Florence in the eighteenth century was the
place of places for fashionable dilettanteism. It could no more have produced
a Marcello or an Alberti, than a Pergolesi or a Durante, but it produced a
great number of small dilettanti, half nobles, half burghers, who sang and
played and quarrelled and went into ecstasies: a public of rapid, intelli¬
gent, if rather superficial appreciation. There was first-rate music in the
fashionable churches, where all the best singers and fiddlers performed; *
there were innumerable parties in private houses, where, alternated by
chit-chat and improvising verses and erudite discussions, Dr. Burney
heard great performers, like the stentorian soprano Manzoli and the
famous violinist Nardini. The Austro-Lorenese princes were themselves,
of course, very musical—musical in a humdrum, paternal way, as they
were in all things: as, for instance, the Archduke Ferdinand, the son of
the then reigning Peter Leopold, who would summon his chapel musicians
any day or hour to perform with him one of those many operas and
symphonies which he kept neatly bound in gaudy German paper with the
titles written in the middle of droll pictures, " Vorstellung einer vornehmen
Assemblee in einem schonen Saale," and so forth, intended to be cut out
for children's pasteboard theatres; childish-looking volumes, half vulgar,
half pathetic, which have rarely been opened these eighty years.
The Florentine aristocracy had the fashionable melomania to almost as
great an extent as the Milanese. The Italian nobles of the last century
built their theatres by subscription, forming themselves into a sort of
academy, each retaining a certain number of boxes, and all retaining the
right to discuss the choice of the performers or of the delegated manager.
At Lucca, where the aristocracy was accustomed to mercantile and political
business, the theatre was under the direct management of the Senate, and
there is a droll account in Beckford's correspondence of the solemn visit
of expostulation paid by the Gonfaloniere and the Anziani to his friend
the great singer Pacchierotti, 011 account of certain cold-taking excursions
with the author of Vathck, about which they vociferated and gesticulated
* There is scarcely a number of the Moniturc <li Timutna of a hundred years
hack which does not contain a notice of some such performance, registered in
company with the noble weddings, royal presents, monster births, miraculous cures,
and occasional falls into wells and apoplectic strokes, which consoled the Florentines
of those days for receiving but little political news, and that little about six weeks
or two months old.
1 2
116
The Musical Life.
" as if the safety of their mighty State depended on them." This system
of course infinitely increased the already existing musical bustle and
squabble; preference for this or that composer or singer implying not mere
abstract enthusiasm, but palpable advantages for him, and the amateurs
were constantly coming to blows about their favourites. A curious
instance of the passionate interest taken in musical matters by the
frivolous Florentines of the eighteenth century may be seen in Sir
Horace Mann's Correspondence. The British minister was so infected by
this very un-British mania that he kept informing Horace Walpole,
who cared nothing for music, how this and that theatre at Florence was
managed; how such and such a singer had performed, how such a virtuoso
had treated his rival; how such a prima donna had been dressed as
Penelope; and giving him regular bulletins of the condition of his
favourite Gizziello: what medicine he had been given, how many times
he had been bled, what the doctors said, and so forth.
Dr. Burney found the attention of the Florentines engrossed by a
musical phenomenon which had excited universal wonder throughout
Italy, but which, we believe, he shrewdly suspected was a mere fair-booth
wonder, destined to come to nothing : it was a boy of thirteen or fourteen,
a weazen, childish little creature, ayIio played the harpsichord astoundingly,
had composed an opera, and was being courted by everyone. Of course
Dr. Burney held his peace on the subject: since Signor Farinelli had
thought fit to encourage the boy, and the Pope to give him the Golden
Spur, and the Improvvisatrice Gorilla to write him sonnets ; since the
people would make a fuss about the creature, and send him bouquets,
fruits, and ribbons, and cry " Evviva il Maestrino ! " why let them, there
was 110 harm in it; but as to him, Dr. Charles Burney, he maintained
certain doubts as to the possibility of infant prodigies coming to any
good, and especially in the case of this little Signor Volfango Amedeo,
son of M. Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of His Serene Eminence the
Prince Archbishop of Salzburg.
On his way from Florence to Rome, a dismal six days' journey, Dr.
Burney stopped at Montefiascone, near Viterbo, in order to visit an old
acquaintance, the singer Guarducci, who, according to the vocal fashion
of the time, had in his old days taken to him his peasant family, left far
behind during his brilliant career. Guarducci was a very eminent per¬
former, extremely refined and expressive, and certainly also exceedingly
ludicrous in aspect, if we may believe the Bolognese print, in which his
fat and flabby countenance peers out from beneath an immense antique
helmet. He is forgotten like all his rivals ; nor should we have men¬
tioned him had he not suggested a few remarks on the singers of the
eighteenth century, which we can make at our leisure while Dr. Burney's
The Musical Life.
117
chaise is slowly rumbling through the Umbrian fields and oak-woods,
southwards towards the valley of the Tiber.
The singer was a much more important personage in the musical
system of the eighteenth century than he is now-a-days. He was not
merely one of the wheels of the mechanism, he was its main pivot. For
in a nation so practically, spontaneously musical as the Italian, the desire
to sing preceded the existence of what could be sung: performers were
not called into existence because men wished to hear such or such a
composition, but the composition was produced because men wished to
sing. The singers were therefore not trained with a view to executing
any peculiar sort of music, but the music was composed to suit the powers
of the singers. Thus, ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century,
when music first left the church and the palace for the theatre, com¬
position and vocal performance had developed simultaneously, narrowly
linked together ; composers always learning first of all to sing, and
singers always finishing their studies with that of composition ; Scarlatti
and Porpora teaching great singers, Stradella and Pistocehi forming
great composers ; the two branches therefore acting and reacting on each
other so as to become perfectly homogeneous and equal—homogeneous
and equal because, in this national, spontaneous development of music,
unwarped by critical speculation, the art tended to perfect balance; tended
to satisfy, not an abstract ideal, but an irresistible mental craving, the
craving to hear music, and the best music that could be heard. Now
music is a twofold entity, consisting of composition and performance. To
unite the two halves in one individual would have been to prevent either
from duly developing; to subordinate the one to the other would have
been to produce an ill-balanced whole, and therefore to frustrate the
attempt to reach what was wanted. The two branches were therefore
given over to separate individuals, equal in talent, in education, but
different in function, and the collision between whose equal powers
constituted the full, strong artistic life of the day.
The singer, therefore, was neither a fiddle for other men to play upon,
nor a musical box wound up by mechanism. He was an individual voice,
an individual mind, developed to the utmost; a perfectly-balanced organi¬
sation ; and to him was confided the work of embodying the composer's
ideas, of moulding matter to suit the thought, of adapting the thought to
suit the matter, of giving real existence to the form which existed only
as an abstraction in the composer's mind. The full responsibility of this
work rested 011 him ; the fullest liberty of action was therefore given him
to execute it. Music, according to the notions of the eighteenth century,
was no more the mere written score than a plan 011 white paper would
have seemed architecture to the Greeks. Music was to be the result of
the combination of the abstract written note with the concrete voice, of
118
The Musical Life.
the ideal thought of the composer with the individual personality of the
performer. The composer was to give only the general, the abstract;
while all that depended upon individual differences, and material peculi¬
arities, was given up to the singer. The composer gave the unchangeable,
the big notes, constituting the essential, immutable form, expressing tiie
stable, unvarying character; the singer added the small notes, which filled
up and perfected that part of the form which depended 011 the physical
material, which expressed the minutely subtle, ever-changing mood. In
short, while the composer represented the typical, the singer represented
the individual.
To perform such a work, to bear such a responsibility, the singer had
to be produced almost like a work of art; the physical powers had to be
developed to the highest point, the mental powers had to control them
to the utmost, the whole had to become so balanced that 110 physical
movement could be made without the direction of the mind,* and that
110 mental movement should be without its physical expression. This
was the aim towards which singers and singing-masters constantly strove,
the ideal which, when attained by an individual, gave him the undisputed
supremacy of a Farinelli or a Paccliierotti. To attain it, merely to ap¬
proach it, was the labour of years—patient, self-sacrificing, intelligent
labour on the part of both master and pupil. It could not begin too
early, it could not continue too long. The singers of the last century
began to learn how to produce and steady the voice before they were ten;
they continued studying how to render it supple and docile not only up to
their beginning their career at seventeen or eighteen, but long:-afterwards;
they went on refining their style, selecting their ideas, all their lives; and
then, after ending their career, they might say, as the old Pacchierotti
said to the young yet unknown tenor Rubini, " Our art is too long for a
lifetime : when we are young we have the voice, but do not know how to
sing; when we are old we begin to know how to sing, but we no longer
have the voice."
Few, very few, of course, ever attained to this ideal, but it was so high
a one that the whole level of the art was raised, and mediocrity itself
became excellent; for in this attempt to reach perfection of development
and balance every good quality was encouraged and every bad one eradi¬
cated to the furthest power of the individual; hence those many incom¬
pletely gifted, yet extremely excellent, singers, who had partially filled up
* Stendhal, with his keen artistic sense and sentimental jargon, has expressed
this in the style of his day: " Co grand artiste (Pacchierotti), qui ne s'etait jamais
permis un son, un mouvement, qui lie fat calcule sur le besoin actuel de Fame des
auditenrs;" a great artistic triumph turned into a preposterous hysterical calcula¬
tion; yet Stendhal knew what lie meant, although few of his readers can say as
much.
The Musical Life.
119
natural deficiency by unwearied study, like the Bolognese Bernacclii, who,
with a bad and weak voice, still became one of the most perfect singers of
his day ; and the more modern Marchesi, who, with a prodigious A'oice and
but little taste, was yet tempered down into a highly refined performer;
hence also those innumerable others who, with neither much voice nor
much talent, were forced by the weight of tradition and of universal
requirement into very considerable excellence.
The composer remained a comparatively abstract creature in the eyes
of the Italians of the eighteenth century ; they applauded him, indeed,
vehemently, but, once the opera over, he was rarely to be met except in
specially musical houses and among others of his profession. It was the
singer who awakened personal enthusiasm, and who became the musical
idol of society at large; and, as the male singer was at once more respect¬
able and more thoroughly artistic than the singing actress, it was he who
had all the social advantages of the art for himself. He was received
with open arms in every house; all his impertinence and caprice were
tolerated; when he sang people remained silent and breathless, and occa¬
sionally fainted and went into hysterics ; when he ceased the applause
was perfectly frantic ; everyone possessed his printed portrait with Latin
distichs, Cupids, laurel-wreaths, &c. ; the ladies wore miniatures of him,
sometimes four at a time ; all the wits of coffee-houses and lecture-rooms
wrote sonnets in his honour ; nay, the very writers who had held him
up to derision were forced to join in the general enthusiasm. All the
travellers in Italy tell the same story, and foremost of them the President
de Brasses, whose love of scandal was highly and not unreasonably grati¬
fied by these demonstrations. The singer, meanwhile—usually a mere
lad at the commencement of his career, of the lowest extraction, and who
had hitherto led the hardest, dullest life of musical routine—was placed
in the most trying situation, and if the sudden change from the rusty
cassock, the scanty food, and abundant blows of the conservatorio, to fine
clothes, lacqueys, fashionable dinner-tables, and great ladies' flatteries,
did turn his head and make him an intolerable, capricious, swaggering
coxcomb, it was less his own fault than that of society at large. But the
satirists of the eighteenth century, embittered by this musical infatuation,
by the insolence of individual singers towards themselves, above all by
the comparison between their pecuniary and social circumstances and those
of the singers, fell upon the virtuosi with implacable rage. Parini de¬
nounced the singer as a base and ungrateful upstart, as a corrupter of
morals; Passeroni abused him as a conceited imbecile; Baretti roared
that of all living creatures the singer was the most abject; Marcello,
(Joldoni, and Sografi, were more successful in their attempts at depicting
him as an absurd, jolly, cowardly, bragging puppy—more successful
because they produced genuinely humorous, and therefore really valuable,
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pasquinades. But delightfully droll as are the Signor Alipio Forconi of
Marcello, the Carluccio of Goldoni, and the Giuseppino of Sografi, it is
clear that they represent only the most inferior class of performers—the
small fry, which in every profession is almost equally worthless; the
really great artists entirely escaped the satirists' hold; neither Marcello,
nor Goldoni, nor Sografi can show us one of them ; we see them occa¬
sionally in memoirs and letters—modest, honourable, and intellectual,
spending their time among books and friends, often the intimates of men
like Metastasio, Zanotti, Winckelmann, and Canova; we see their por¬
traits, gentlemanly and intelligent, among those of the Bolognese Acade¬
micians ; and we feel convinced that the dignity in which the vocal art
was then held necessitated in some measure the dignity of the artist;
for it must be remembered how much intelligence, feeling, and refinement,
how much honest, patient striving after excellence, was required of the
singer, and how much the possession of such requisites argues in favour
of those who possessed them.
The eighteenth century required such a development of singing; it
deemed it absolutely indispensable ; and in that day of artistic strength
and riches, the genius spent in an extemporised vocal ornament which
was never transmitted to paper, in the delivery of a few notes which
lasted but a second ; the genius squandered in the most evanescent per¬
formance, the memory of which died with those who had heard it—all
this seemed no waste, and indeed it could well be afforded; but when we
read of it—we, who can only read of it—we feel an undefinable sense
of dissatisfaction, a wistful dreary sense of envy for what did not fall to
our lot, and of pain at the thought that all that feeling, all that imagi¬
nation, all that careful culture, has left no trace behind it. In turning
over the leaves of memoirs and music-books we try, we strain as it were,
to obtain an echo of that superbly wasted vocal genius ; nay, sometimes
the vague figures of those we have never heard, and never can hear, will
almost haunt us. And of all these dim figures of long-forgotten singers
which arise, tremulous and hazy, from out of the faded pages of bio¬
graphies and scores, evoked by some intense word of admiration or some
pathetic snatch of melody, there is one more poetical than the rest —
for all such ghosts of forgotten genius are poetical — that of Gas-
paro Pacchierotti, who flourished just a century ago.* For in those
that heard him lie left so deep an impression of supreme genius, of
moral and intellectual beauty, that even now we cannot read of him
without falling under a sort of charm. In the pages in which the writers
of the day speak of Pacchierotti there lies, as it were, a faded, crumbling
iiower of feeling, whose discoloured fragments still retain a perfume that
* 1750—1824.
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121
goes strangely to the imagination; so tliat we almost fancy that we our¬
selves must once, vaguely and distantly, have heard that weirdly sweet
voice, those subtle, pathetic intonations. Home such occult charm, acting
after a century, there must be, for no story, no romance, is connected with
this singer that could explain the interest he awakens. We catch a
glimpse of him once or twice in Beckford and Stendhal's books, we see
him oftenest in Madame d'Arblay's Diary—a gaunt youth, with plain
features, but which would light up with a look of genius; proud and shy
and silent, but bursting out sometimes into a strange impassioned sort of
prose-poetry, beautiful and grotesque, such as children and poets appre¬
ciate ; ardent and patient, learning English and Latin and Greek with
passionate eagerness, loving his own art with intense, never-satisfied
enthusiasm ; a curious whimsical character, always in pursuit of some
indefinable excellence ; equally at home in Dr. Burney's parlour in Poland
Street, in Mrs. Thrale's garden at Streatham, and in Daddy Crispe's
hermitage at Chesington, an unexpected figure by the side of Johnson, of
Burke, and of Reynolds; comprehended by very few, liked by all, and
especially, with a singular romantic, sisterly sort of affection, by that
most sharp-witted and sharp-tongued little Fanny Barney, who, years
later, when he was dead, and she an old woman, declared, that had Pac-
chierotti not been a singer, he must certainly have been a poet, without
perceiving that the secret of his influence lay in his being both together.
Strangely enough, by a curious accident, we got yet another glimpse of
this singer—the glimpse, as it were, of a ghost. For rambling one day
through a quiet corner of Padua—where the rows of gloomy porticoed
streets have gradually thinned, and the town seems insensibly to grow
into the open country, green with budding vines and corn ; where you are
met by bends of the sluggish, verdure-garlanded canal, which reflect faded
Palladian villas, and by tracts of desolate gardens, with only mutilated
statues and rows of undipped trees, to mark their former avenues,—in
this remote corner of Padua we stumbled one day into a beautiful tangle
of trees and grass and flowers, separated from the grand cedars and mag¬
nolias of the Orto Botanico by a bend of the Brenta, and were informed
by a gardener's boy that this garden had once belonged to a famous
singer, by name Gasparo Paccliierotti (of whom your Excellency has
perhaps heard ? Why should we, why should anyone?). The gardener
led us into the house, a battered house, covered with creepers and amphora',
and sentimental inscriptions from the works of the poets and philosophers
in vogue a hundred years ago—beautiful quotations, which, in their can¬
dour, grandiloquence, and sweetness, now strike us as so strangely hollow
and melancholy. He showed us into a long narrow room, in which was a
large slender harpsichord, the harpsichord, he informed us, which had be¬
longed to Paccliierotti, the singer. It was open, and looked as if it might
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just have been touched, but no sound could be drawn from it. The
gardener then led us into a darkened lumber-room, where hung the portrait
of the singer, thickly covered with dust: a mass of dark blurs, from out of
which appeared scarcely more than the pale thin face—a face with deep
dreamy eyes and tremulously tender lips, full of a vague, wistful, con¬
templative poetry, as if of aspirations after something higher, sweeter, fairer
—aspirations never fulfilled but never disappointed, and forming in them¬
selves a sort of perfection. This man must have been an intense instance
of that highly-wrought sentimental idealism which arose, delicate and
diaphanous, in opposition to the hard, materialistic rationalism of the
eighteenth century ; and the fascination which he exerted over the best
of his contemporaries must have been due to his embodying all their
vague ephemeral cravings in an art which was still young and vigorous
—to his having been at once the beautiful soul of early romanticism and
the genuine artist of yet classic music.
Some faded scores, a few passages in memoirs, a grimy portrait, are
all that remains of Gasparo Pacchierotti; yet, slight as are these remains,
they have sufficed to do that in which many far more important might
have proved inadequate : to bring us vaguely and drowsily into the pre¬
sence of a man forgotten since the days of our great-grandfathers;
perhaps because Schiller may after all be right and
Wer den Bcsten seiner Zeit genu"' gethan,
Der bat gelcbt fur alle Zciten.
Whither have our fancies carried us?—The garden at Padua, the
harpsichord, the portrait—are none of them present. Pacchierotti, so far
from being a mere faint recollection, is as yet a scarcely noticed reality,
an obscure youth with undivined talents. Dr. Burney has never yet
heard his name, and, little dreaming that eight years hence a new world
of music is destined to be revealed to him by this singer, whom he is so
passionately to admire, the Doctor of Music is now jolting along the
high road to Rome, in the month of November 1770.
III.
In the eighteenth century, as in the sixteenth, Rome was sterile of art
and artists, but it was once more the market to which were brought the
productions of other provinces. As the town of Italy where men of all
nationalities had most met, where every period of history had left the
greatest trace, where everyone found most to suit his taste—as the huge
centre of eclecticism—Pome was at once unable to produce anything herself
and able to absorb all that was produced elsewhere ; for great works of
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123
art are born of a single locality and a single period, but arc destined for the
whole world and all time. A hundred years ago Rome was a musical
centre; it alone had preserved the music of the sixteenth century as a
sort of relic, and the living music of the eighteenth was poured into it on
all sides. The nobles, ignorant and pedantic, were as infatuated for
musicians as they had been forty years before for writers, with the addition
that the former were tidier, better mannered folk than the latter. The
princes of the Church, immensely ostentatious, thought fit to collect and
keep singers (when obtained cheap) as well as antiques. Perhaps they
could no longer afford to keep private chapels as a hundred years before,
when Milton and Evelyn were at Rome; but they had numbers of musical
proteges, whom they flattered with dinners, for whom they intrigued with
foreign theatre directors, as the great Alessandro Albani disdained not
to do, and by whose means they could get up sacred, though tolerably
profane, operas in their palaces, as Metastasio's godfather Ottoboni did
at the Cancelleria. The smaller priesthood hunted about everywhere for
poor and modest young men of talent, who composed oratorios and masses
for their shabby little churches and schools. The middle classes, an easy¬
going, independent, rather indolent set, with the intelligence, cynicism,
and good humour of Pasquino, were so many born critics; the opinion of
shopkeepers and shopkeepers' wives, who heard music from morning till
night, was important; that of doctors, lawyers, and secular priests, para¬
mount. The enormous class of indescribable half-lay, half-ecclesiastical
creatures, poor, witty, disreputable, called abati; adventurers, scholars,
poetasters, filled the pits of the theatres, where they reigned supreme;
they, in their rusty black cloaks and horse-hair wigs, bearding the scarlet-
robed cardinals and be-ribboned grandees in the boxes. For they were a
most intelligent and pugnacious lot; quick at epigram and pasquinade,
always ready with smart sayings, sonnets, and unripe apples, wherewith to
express their several states of mind. Behind these youngsters were the
graver wearers of black: physicians, jurists, chaplains, and secretaries,
respectable old gentlemen who had published unread treatises on the
music of the ancients, on the opera, &c.; slow and reserved in judgment,
inquisitorial and paternal. These two classes supplied the total absence
of musical journalism; their disputes at coffee-houses, their disquisitions
in drawing-rooms, constituted the eesthetical life of the people; their
combined impertinence and dignity, rapidity of perception and solidity of
judgment, kept all in check; cardinals and nobles could not gainsay
them; when they had cried erviva to a singer the proudest princess
could not shut her door to him, although he be a lout and a coxcomb.
When they had thrown tomatoes at a composer, the Fope himself could
not engage him. This critical tendency, due to constitution and social
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arrangements, was considerably increased by an absnrd regulation for¬
bidding women to perform on any stage in the Eternal City. When the
opera originated, as when the drama took its rise in Greece and in
England, it never occurred to anyone that women might rationally per¬
form women's parts ; their introduction was an innovation which gained
ground slowly, despite prudery and jealousy: the Italian Church could
not object to dramas, nor damn actors, as did tl^Gallican Church,
because the Italian drama had originated in monasteries and prelates'
palaces; but the Italian Church did set its face against female performers,
and this original disapprobation remained expressed in the regulation
above mentioned, a regulation made early in the seventeenth century, and
which the priests of the eighteenth were too unoriginal, rather than too
moral, to revoke. Consequently, all the female parts were performed by
men or boys, to the great delight of Goethe, to whom the performances of
a black-bearded young man, as Goldoni's Mirandolina, seemed a return
to the days of Roscius. At the opera the women's parts were performed
by boys, who looked the parts amazingly well, as Burney, Brosses, Goethe,
and Miss Berry inform us, and as all can believe who have seen the
Tuscan peasant lads playing Armida and Bradamante on their rustic
stage. Now not only did the exclusion of women, who were often hand¬
some and invariably coquettish, render public appreciation purely artistic
and coolly critical, but the youth and comparative immaturity of these
boys rendered their critics singularly sharpwitted and practical; these lads
were brought rather to finish their musical education than to be applauded;
their masters came less to gain money by them than to sound public
opinion; and the audience reproved, and approved, and corrected timid
schoolboys in a manner which would never have been tolerated by men
and women of confirmed style and settled reputation. The Roman public,
therefore, was not only critical to an intense degree, but highly paternal,
and with paternal freedom and vigour did it administer the intellectual
rod to singers, composers, and teachers. It was a well-established fact,
recorded by Gretry, that when an opera or performer had once been
approved by the Romans it must succeed everywhere else, and, when a
man was applauded elsewhere, shrewd people would say " Wait till he
has been to Rome;" for Rome was the inexorable judge—inexorable, yet
discriminating, for, when it approved of a composer but not of a singer,
it would intersperse its hissings with " Bravo Maestro ! " or vice versa;
and when it discovered any touch of plagiarism it would cry " Bravo
Galuppi!" " Evviva Piccinni!" in the middle of an opera by Signor Bimolli
or Maestro Bequadro. Therefore the greatest composers deemed it an
honour.to live among the Romans, even with the small stipend of chapel-
master of St. Peter's or St. John Lateran, and it is touching to see with
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125
what candour tlie great Jommelli sent Padre Martini a copy of a medal,
showing his effigy adorned with donkey's ears, with which the Romans
had honoured him.
Yet even the Romans were not always infallible. At the foot of the
Pincian, where its laurel and rose hedges first begin, there stand, or rather
did stand a short time since, the four walls of a burnt theatre—an empty
dismal shell which still gave its name to the adjoining Yicolo d'Alibert,
close to the Via Margutta, the street full of the incessant hammering and
chipping of sculptors. This burnt-out shell is that of a theatre far older
and more illustrious than S. Carlo or the Seal a, the so-called Teatro delle
Dame, built by an equerry of Queen Christina, a certain M. d'Alibert,
whence its other name of Teatro Aliberti. This Teatro Aliberti, and not
the Tordinone or the Argentina, which have replaced it, was the principal
Roman theatre of the eighteenth century ; Metastasio wrote his plays for
it; Porpora, Leo, Durante, Galuppi, Jommelli. all the great composers of
the day, composed for it; and it was there, if we may believe tradition,
that when one evening the great Pacchierotti was playing Arbaces, and
when, not hearing the usual instrumental bars which filled up his recitative,
he turned impatiently to the orchestra, exclaiming " What the devil are
you about?" that the composer, from his harpsichord, answered simply,
" We are crying."
Well, to return to the one instance of Roman injustice. One day, in
the year 1735, the performers of the Aliberti brought on to the stage an
opera called the Olimpiade, the work of a young pupil of a Neapolitan
music school. He was only twenty-five, with a delicate, feminine, almost
Raphael-like face, and a fragile, sickly person. He had composed an
opera or two and some church and chamber music with great success; his
name was Giambattista Pergolesi, of Jesi in the March. This opera, the
Olimpiade, was his last and dearest work; in it he had done things that
no other composer had done : it was a masterpiece, marking a new era
in music. Now it so happened that, from some reason or other, the good
Roman critics were out of temper that night: they hissed the opera off
the stage, and one of them threw an orange at the head of the composer,
who sat directing at the harpsichord. The opera was suspended, and next
day news came from the rival theatre of Torre Argentina, that another
new opera, the Nerone of Duni, had been enthusiastically received the
very evening of the fall of the Olimpiade at the Teatro Aliberti. Duni,
who was a good man or a very bad one, came to his rival and condoled with
him on the ill-success of his work. The Olimpiade, he said, was far superior
to his own Nerone; the Romans were the stupidest people on earth : he
was furious with them for their bad taste. " Son frenetico con questi
Romani." Poor Pergolesi made 110 answer; he returned to Naples and
to his work there, but he would never again write for the stage. He wrote
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his splendid cantata Orpheus, and some church music, but then he fell ill;
his reverse had utterly broken his spirit, and with it his frail constitu¬
tion. His friends took him to Torre del Greco, the place where con¬
sumptives are sent to revive or to die; he got worse and worse, but con¬
tinued to work at the Stabat Mater, for which, in consideration of his bad
circumstances, he had already been paid. The price was eight scudi, about
thirty-five shillings, and Pergolesi was too honest to give an incomplete
work in return for it. He died in 1736, one year after the fall of his
Olimpiade, leaving the Stabat finished and a divinely perfect work.
People heard of his sad end, were sorry, made amends; two years later
his house was already shown to strangers; the Olimpiade was performed
for years and yeai's all over Italy, in England, in Germany, nay at the
very Teatro Aliberti; it was considered a masterpiece, one of the few that
withstood changes of fashion, and Pergolesi was acknowledged all over
Europe to have been perhaps the greatest Italian composer of his day.
The Olimpiade is truly a beautiful work, but the Stabat, written on the
young man's death-bed, is a still finer one, and is recollected even now.
Naples, the last of the stages of I)r. Burney's musical pilgrimage, was also
one of the, if not the, most important of them; for, if Italy was regarded
as the musical country of the eighteenth century, Naples was universally
considered as the most musical town in it. And this was but natural; it
Avas at Naples, that, so to speak, modern music, as distinguished from the
old choral music of Rome, Bologna, and Venice, had originated; it was
there that, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, music had
ceased to be symbolical, liturgical, and scientific, and had become human
and humanly excellent; there that composers had listened for the first
time to the rude, sweet inspirations of the people; that the art had been
brought back to revive, a,? it were, in the fresh air, to drink in the strong-
life-giving wine of popular feeling, after its long imprisonment in churches
and schools, where it had dragged on a weak existence, starving on mere
science. This new movement, doubtless very slow and imperceptible,
became strongly marked by, and inseparably united with, the figure of the
great elder Scarlatti. Born in the middle of the seventeenth century,
when the purely contrapuntic style of Palestrina's successors was still
predominant; when the opera was a mere puppet-show, sometimes
literally performed by puppets; when melody was feeble and unsteady,
and recitative stiff and ill-modulated, Alessandro Scarlatti had died about
1725, when Porpora had brought the art of singing to perfection; when
Marcello and Durante had developed the free church style to the utmost,
when Vinci and Leo were rapidly carrying tragic melody and tragic
recitative to the highest point; and if we seek for the link between these
two generations, for the men to whom the immense progress is due, the
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127
magnificent figure of Scarlatti is alone visible, throwing all humbler ones
into shade. For Scarlatti was essentially one of those men destined to
achieve a great movement; bold and original, but never, as Gluck was,
beyond the limits of possibility; upsetting readily, but only as much as he
could rebuild; innovating rapidly, but because carried on by the tide
of universal feeling; always following instinct, never following theory.
He was the strangest of strange modulators, the most pertinacious ex-
presser of the words, the most wholesale adapter of popular themes;
trying all, and making his works a wonderful, splendid, grotesque medley,
full of untold wealth of harmony, of melody, and of expression, riches which
required only to be singled out, purified, and recast by others.
All the musicians of Italy flocked round him: Porpora, Durante, Leo,
Vinci, were his personal pupils ; Kaiser and Stefani carried the Italian
style, inaugurated by him, to Germany, where it helped to produce Handel,
Hasse, Bach, Graun, in their turn constantly receiving new grafts of it
from the works of the Italians themselves, brought to the north by singers
like the Faustina, Senesino, Farinelli, and Carestini, pupils of Scarlatti's
pupils. The influence of Scarlatti's school, and the consequent musical
supremacy of Naples, persisted for two generations ; Pergolesi, Jommelli,
Ficcinni, Sacchini, and an immense number of. great singers, diffused the
fame of the Neapolitans all over Europe. Rousseau, the only really great
and fascinating writer on music of the day, told the young musician to go
to Naples as to the head-quarters of his art, in that famous article on
Genius, in which he poured forth lava-like eloquence to singe and wither
up French music. All subsequent travellers mentioned Naples in the
same fashion, some, like La Lande, deferring all accounts of music till
they arrived there ; and Dr. Burney, who knew better than any other man
what Naples had done for music, arrived there with intense expectations.
He had taken care to be provided with the means of fully enjoying the
musical wealth he expected to find; he brought letters for Jommelli, for
Ficcinni, for the Ambassador Lord Fortrose, and for the later too famous
Sir William Hamilton. The latter received him most cordially ; his wife,
not the terrible Lady Hamilton of the year '99, but an amiable and
accomplished woman praised by all travellers, was herself a great musician,
and at her house, and at that of Lord Fortrose, Dr. Burney met several
eminent musicians, amongst others the singer Caffarelli, or more properly
Caffariello, who had been extremely famous for his voice, talent, beauty,
wit, and immeasurable insolence, which latter he had vented on all the
greatest personages in Europe.
Dr. Burney then went to see Ficcinni, who was at that time about
forty, very well known all over Italy, reckoned among the most eminent
of living composers, but by no means yet raised to that pitch of importance
which he was soon to obtain in Paris as the rival of Gluck. Ficcinni had
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special talent for comic music; his Buona Figliuola, written to a text of
Goldoni's, had been applauded everywhere, and lie did more than any
composer of his day to bring about the gradual transition to the softer,
brighter, less tragic, more richly accompanied style, which, twenty years
later, was to attain to perfection in the hands of Paisiello, Cimarosa, and,
most resplendently unheroic of all, Mozart—a transition which consisted
in a gradual change of the musical forms, which became lighter, smaller,
more tripping, more twirling, less massive and simple; in a gradual
development of the rhythmical accompaniment, hitherto almost unknown,
which was to culminate in Cimarosa and Mozart's delightfully buoyant,
rondos, and to degenerate into Rossini's machine-like crescendos; in a
gradual breaking-up of the melody and sharing it with the orchestra,
which was permanently endowed with those wind-instruments which had
till then been reserved for very special occasions. Piccinni was at the
head of a change in the art, a change which captivated the public at largo,
but which a few individuals regarded with suspicion and aversion, growl¬
ing out, like Mattei, that music was losing its dignity and worth; that it
was growing effeminate and frivolous. Nor were they entirely wrong; but
in losing one set of good qualities it was gaining another, and classic
music could not enter into its last and most brilliant phase without leaving
its earlier, more sober, and solid ones. The idol of this austere minority
was Niccolo Jommelli ; not that he was theoretically of their opinion, for
in this lies the main difference between Jommelli and the other great
composer whom he resembled almost like a brother, Gluck: Jommelli
was essentially a practical artist, paying no heed to theory, indolent,
placid, following only his instinct; nor did he, who was the most amiably
candid of men, underrate Piccinni, or abuse the movement which Piccinni
represented, as did his partisans ; but he held aloof from it, because he
had no sympathy with it, because he was incapable of going along with it,
because he was essentially a survivor of a previous generation of com¬
posers. Jommelli, who was born in 1714, the same year as Gluck, lived
for about fifteen years, between 1755 and 1770, at Ludwigsburg, as
Chapel-master to the Duke of Wiirtemberg; and this long stay in
Germany, though not longer than that of many another Italian com¬
poser, gave rise to the legend that his style underwent a process of
Teutonisation. When he returned to Italy, the Italians seem to have
looked on him with a degree of suspicion, and his works seem to have
struck them as strange; a circumstance which, to the minds of German
critics, evidently proves that Jommelli had ceased in some measure to
be Italian. But this theory is founded on a misconception, and has
grown, thanks to national vanity. Jommelli underwent no change during
his absence, but his countrymen did; he brought back from Germany only
what he had carried thither, but when he brought it back it was already
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129
so out of date as to seem almost a novelty. The public had changed,
not he : the admirers of Leo, Hasse, and Pergolesi were dead or dying
out, and in their stead were men who were gradually getting accustomed
to the fast-developing style of Piccinni, Saccliini, and Sarti, composers
much younger than Jommelli, and who had scarcely been boys in the
time of his immediate predecessors. To Jommelli this new style, with
its broken-up melody, its easy modulation, its light, brilliant ornaments,
its strong rhythm, its wind-instruments constantly used and used in the
same fashion as the others; all this easy, lightly pathetic music seemed
trivial, effeminate, undramatic, and meretricious. He resisted the new
style to the utmost, intensifying in so doing all the peculiarities of the
old one. The lighter and less serious became his contemporaries, the
more solemn and tragic became Jommelli; and the more they dealt in
wind instruments and slightly tripping rhythms, the more vigorously did
he adhere to his violins and the more varied and complicated became his
accompaniments. The public listened with as much awe as a Neapolitan
public could muster; Jommelli's undisputed fame and undeniable genius
enforced it, but all the same the public was not satisfied; it instinctively
disliked Jommelli's efforts to stem the onward movement; it was vexed
by his composing solemnly where another would have composed lightly,
by his putting few instruments where another would have put many, by
his writing solid passages where the singers wished to improvise ilimsy
ones; add to this, that the performers, vocal and instrumental, were
unaccustomed to his music and incapable of performing it, not because
they were inferior, but because they were capable of performing something
else. Jommelli's works were less and less liked: some people said they
were hard of performance and comprehension; others, as Burney tells us,
that they were written for the learned many and not for the feeling few;
others still, as Mozart heard, that tliey were old-fashioned. At length
things came to such a pitch that when, in 1773, Jommelli offered the
public his opera of Iphigenici, which contained many extremely beautiful
things ; many, like the great duet between brother and sister, which might
have been composed by Hasse or Pergolesi, and nothing that indicated
that forty years had elapsed since their day—when Jommelli thus pushed
his resistance to extremes, the opera broke down in the performance, the
audience grumbled, the Government ordered another to be performed,
and Jommelli, having returned the price of his opera to the manager,
entirely abandoned the profession. Some years later he wrote his last
work, his great Miserere, and died, honoured but not appreciated, in
1778. The old style died with him. In i780 Sarti wrote his Giulio
Sabino, Mozart his Idomeneo; Cimarosa and Paisiello reigned supreme;
the comic opera gave laws to the serious one, and classic tragic music was
buried for ever.
K
130
The Musical Life.
Dr. Burney paid a visit to Jommelli, whose peculiar genius, at once so
elevated and so sweet, so full of that solemn, intense tenderness which he
shared with Gluck, the Englishman admired immensely. Jommelli had
made a very considerable fortune, as the fortunes of composers then went,
and lived comfortably enough, married, but childless, a well-educated,
quiet, highly benevolent, very indolent man; immensely stout ever since
his youth, not unlike Handel in face, and, according to Metastasio's
account, " liking to saunter at his ease and indulge the laziness of his
well-fed body "—a placidity and self-indulgence which probably prevented
him from becoming, like Gluck, a would-be reformer, and kept him
satisfied with following his own ideas and letting others follow theirs.
He received Burney very well, and invited him to attend the rehearsal of
his new opera Demofoonte, which he was then putting on to the stage of
S. Carlo. Burney went, not only to the rehearsal but to the performance
of this opera, the last by Jommelli which was either well performed or
at all successful, and at the same time the first serious opera which the
Doctor had heard since his arrival in Italy, where the burletta alone
sufficed during the summer and autumn.
An Italian serious opera was in those days a very different thing from
what it is now—different in its object, different in its production, different
in its nature, answering to requirements unlike those of our own time, and
regarded in quite another manner. In the second half of the eighteenth
century music had run through an untroubled course; it was still young,
still vigorous ; it grew and altered spontaneously and insensibly by the
same vital force as a child grows into a youth; it had not required any
artificial treatment, any doctoring at the hands of theorists, for it had
never given signs of decrepitude ; and if it had occasional maladies it got
over them quickly and unconsciously. It had not yet grown old, and the
public had not yet grown tired of it; men did not yet require dramatic
effects or psychological interest, for they could still obtain pure beauty;
they did not ask for distinctly marked characters, for historical pictures,
for mythological allegories; they asked only for music. Greeks, Romans,
Persians, Chinese, and Indians, the heroes of Homer and those of Ariosto,
were all made to sing in the same way, because there was only one way,
and that the proper one—just as the ancient heroes and saints of Kenais-
sance painters are all dressed in the same nondescript delightfully in¬
accurate fashion, because that fashion was the most becoming one; the
historically valuable and artistically worthless being left to later and
more critical times. The object, then, being to have music, and only
music, people began by discarding every irrelevant, and subordinating
every additional motive. Now in a time of artistic life the best art must
always seem to be the newest ; the art is in motion, the public with it ;
The Musical Life.
131
there are no received classics because there is no perceivable decay ; per¬
formers suit their style to that of composers, or rather it grows with
theirs, and if they were thoroughly suited to the old they would be
more or less unsuitable to the new. The consequence was that in the
eighteenth century no opera lived more than a few years ; others followed
it, as good, but in a different style; and in the immense bustle of new
productions and new styles there was very rarely time to revive an old
one. An opera was therefore almost invariably new—either newly com¬
posed or newly imported—and there was no such thing as a repertoire.
Every great town had yearly one or two operas composed expressly for it,
and one or two imported from elsewhere. When the opera was newly
composed it was composed for a given set of singers already engaged;
the composer bad, as it were, to take their measure, and there was no
such thing as writing for an abstract soprano, tenor, or bass, and then
trying to fit the part so written (and such a fit must often be bad) on a
concrete one; an opera was written for such or such a performer, in order
best to display his or her peculiar excellences. Of course, in proportion
as it fitted them it was also unsuited to others, for, as we have already
remarked, the individuality of the singer was highly developed ; it was
therefore usual that an opera should be performed only by its original
performers, who, so to speak, kept its copyright, and very often kept
its composer bodily; thus all the most popular serious operas of the
eighteenth century were indissolubly connected with some great singer—
the Artaserse * of Hasse with Farinelli, the Iiegolo of Jommelli with the
Mingotti, the Orplieus of Gluck with Guadagni, the Quinto Fabio of
Bertoni with Pacchierotti, who sang it at Venice, at Florence, at Lucca,
at Vienna, in London, everywhere. To attempt a part written for an¬
other was to throw down the glove and pretend to equality with him or
her ; such audacity was generally severely punished by the audience ;
and when, for instance, the Italians permitted Pacchierotti, Marchesi,
and Rubinelli successively to sing Sarti's Giulio Sab/no, it was for the
pleasure of comparing their three greatest singers, of pitting them
against each other, and for the attendant pleasure of street riots and
coffee-house fights.
Two points, then, are established : the opera must be new, or at least
new for the place ; and, secondly, it must have been composed expressly
for the principal performers. The consequence was that each theatre
could scarcely prepare more than one opera each season, as the performers
and audience both required to be perfectly familiarised with it ; the same
opera was therefore performed twenty or thirty successive times, and then
* ] hisse's Artaserse, 1730; Jommelli's Recjolo, 1750; Gluck's Orplwux, 17(54;
Bertoni's Quinto Fabio, 1780.
K 2
132
The Musical Life.
packed off to another place. Moreover, as the music was all and every¬
thing, the music alone was required to be new, while the words were as
old as possible ; every composer of the eighteenth century had set nearly
all Metastasio's plays, and most of them twice, thrice, or even four times.
The plays were beautiful, the public knew them by heart; so much the
better, it enjoyed them here and there, and gave its main attention to
the music; that was novel, and full of unexpected turns and twists,
whereas everybody knew since his childhood that Zenobia was not to be
killed by her husband, that there was poison in Artaxerxes' cup, that
Megacles was to be married to Aristea after all, that Timanthes was not
Dirce's brother; and was consequently highly indifferent to the sudden
explosions of wrath, the attempts at assassination, the alarming oracles,
and similar stage business which would otherwise have absorbed its at¬
tention. Thus the play was of but little account, the music was every¬
thing; but gradually, as the audience became acquainted with it, parts
of it also began to pall on the hearers : the pieces belonging to the
secondary parts began to be but little heeded, and when the thirty or
forty performances were drawing to their close; when the public—which
had started with a thorough knowledge of the play—had become heartily
sick of the connecting scenes and the subordinate parts ; only five or six
pieces were attended to, the audience paying visits, playing at cards, talk¬
ing, making an intolerable din during the remainder. But let only the
prima donna or the primo uomo come forward, especially if she or he be a
Gabrielli, or a Marchesi, or a Davidde, and the whole theatre becomes as
silent as a church : woe betide those afflicted with colds or coughs ! As
the Venetian Majer informs us, they become an object of universal hatred.
The crowd listens breathless to the great recitative, to the duet, the trio,
the air, to the rondo, that crowning glory ; they have heard them thirty-
five nights consecutively, and each night twice or thrice, but they never
tire of them: how could they, since each new performance means a new
intonation, a new ornament, a new variation—nay, sometimes a perfectly
new reading of the piece ? the great singers having become positively in¬
capable of singing a thing twice alike, and sometimes entering the stage
with three or four totally different renderings in their head from which to
select on the spur of the moment, as Farinelli had done, as Paccliierotti
did, and as old, old people can still recollect Velluti, the last of vocal
autocrats, to have done before Kossini came and said, "Lascia fare a
me." * Then the audience became breathless, ecstatic; then amateurs,
* An intelligent German traveller, Rehfues, who was in Italy about the year 1800,
gives the following information concerning the rifiorituro of the famous Luigi
Marchesi, who left the stage just about that time. It is all the more curious as Mar¬
chesi was famous rather for voice, agility, and dramatic power, than for imagination,
The Musical Life.
133
like Stendhal's friend, would gently slip off their shoes, and throw first
one, then the other, across their shoulder, in silent agony of delight.
Foreigners were amazed at this strange mixture of utter indifference
and utmost rapture, of loud-voiced inattention and breathless attention;
the Germans especially, who took all their pleasures as duties, ancJ all
their amusements as tasks, cried out that assuredly the Italians must be
the most unmusical, the most unassthetical, the most unconscientious of
nations; but, many years later, a German and an aesthetician, Hegel,
vindicated the Italians, pointing out to his countrymen that only the un¬
musical will give intense attention to every detail of a play—to every note,
will be equally interested in the important and the unimportant, and be
so merely because thoy are really interested in neither; while the genu¬
inely musical will heed only what is worth heeding; an important lesson,
unfortunately unnoticed in our days, when people rarely reflect that art
demands not volitional attention but instinctive appreciation; that when
an art is of spontaneous growth it is enjoyed as men enjoy outdoor
nature, freely, independently, carelessly; and that the Greeks of the days
of Pericles, and the Italians of the time of Leo X., could enjoy Athens
and Florence in a less pedantic manner than we do, for whom works of
art are rarities and the beautiful a mere study.
The opera was the product of requirements different from those of
our times; it was therefore a different thing in itself. In the days of
Jommelli it was, it is true, undergoing a gradual change, or rather it was
beginning to be affected by that organic change in the art itself which was
to complete the evolution of classic music; but the change was as yet
slight, and, above all, the change was solely in the music. The pecu¬
liarity of the opera of the last century was, as we have said, that it was
essentially classic, as Hegel uses the word: that is to say, that the princi¬
pal aim was a purely artistic, as distinguished from a dramatic or psycho¬
logic one, and that the principal interest lay in the musical form. The
play was there to suggest the music, not the music to illustrate the
play; the play corresponded to the capabilities and requirements of the
music, and gradually changed to suit its changes. Now the music of the
first seventy years of the last century, although thoroughly developed
in point of modulation and of melody, had not yet attained to full
rhythmical and orchestral maturity; the fact is, that the great vigour of
modulation and melody excluded much rhythm and sonority, and that the
uniform, more or less meclianically-marked, rhythm, and the volume and
like his rival racchierotti: "Man hat ihm manchmal in Opcrn naehgeschrieben,
aber, trotz der oftmaligen "Wiedcrholung dor nehmlichen Stiicken, waren seine Ver-
anderungen unaufhorlieh verschieden. Mein Freund S in L besitzt cine solche
Saminlung" (of rijiorituro and cadenze taken down during the performance).
134
variety of sound, were employed in proportion as the modulation became
weaker and the melody less massive. Now as long as rhythm and
sonority were in this undeveloped state there was no possibility of any¬
thing' beyond the air, or the double air called a duet, besides the recita¬
tive and the chorus; for the concerted piece, where a lot of small snatches
of melody are caught up and carried along by the general rhythm, could
not exist as long as the rhythm was undeveloped; and as to fugued
pieces, where the parts follow each other and cross and combine in a
regular and intricate fashion, they were kept solely for the church and
the room, as being unsuitable, from their methodical and artificial con¬
struction, to the expression of dramatic situations. The consequence
was that all the action of the play was transacted in recitative, mostly
unaccompanied, and that melody and orchestration were reserved as the
expression of mere emotion; of the result, so to speak, of the previous
action, not as the expression of that action itself. Nor was this peculiarity
at all considered as a disadvantage, for people instinctively recognised,
that, while in comedy the interest lies in the joint action, the hubbub and
tussle of several characters, the interest of tragedy lies in the emotion of
the single characters, emotion more or less solitary although subject
to be influenced by the emotion or action of others. While, therefore,
rhythmical concerted pieces were gradually being employed in the burletta,
the personages of the serious opera stood, musically speaking, alone, or
at most in groups of two or three, as the figures stand, sharply defined
and separated, in Greek frescoes, from the mere want of that general
rhythm of the accompaniment which would press them together, tie them
up in balanced groups, as the figures in modern painting are united by
means of perspective and effects of light and shade. The personages of a
serious opera anterior to 1775, not excepting even those of Gluck, who,
despite his efforts at dramatic expression, never hit upon that rhythmical
arrangement which, in the humblest burlettas, was already making the
music follow the action—the personages of the old serious opera stood
united together by a mere recitative, like so many statues on a Greek
temple: as isolated, but also as individually perfect; for their very isola¬
tion caused them to be seen closer, to be appreciated more minutely than
are the combined figures of a painting, Avhere one hides the other, and
many are lost in the deep shade, where you cannot immediately tell whose
is that head or whose that drapery; this close scrutiny forced both com¬
poser and performer to aim at the greatest perfection, at the greatest har¬
mony between the feeling and the expression, at the greatest grandeur of
outlines, at the greatest finish of details.
The art was aesthetically mature, though, perhaps, like Greek sculpture,
dramatically as yet undeveloped; the songs of the Italian and German
masters up to the time of Paisiello and Cimarosa are so many single artistic
The Musical Life.
135
gems, each in its own style ; like the Giustiniani Minerva, the Amazon of
Polyclete, the Discobolus of Myron, the Faun of Praxiteles, they lose
nothing by being removed from their niche, from that connecting frame¬
work of recitative, itself grandly simple. We, who have enjoyed the
wondrous musical pictures of Mozart, where form melts into form and
group succeeds group, united by the light and shade of the accompaniment,
we moderns should truly not be satisfied with those series of perfect soli¬
tary gods and goddesses and demigods of the operas of Handel, of Per-
golesi, of Jommelli, of Gluck; but the men of the eighteenth century were,
and if we consider what splendid and lovely forms those were we need not
compassionate their ignorance.
Dr. Burney heard another new opera at Naples, a little burletta called
Le I rame per Amove, by a young man named Giovanni Paisiello. Bur¬
ney had never before heard of him, but he was delighted with this little
farce, so full of life, of easy melody, of coquetry, of passages so simple and
easily remembered; and perhaps the Doctor was not without an instinct
telling him, that, while an old artificially maintained style was dying out
in the full pomp of Jommelli's opera at S. Carlo, a new power in music
was rising up with Paisiello's burletta at the shabby little Teatro Nuovo,
a power which was destined to triumph before ten years were out, and
which, while it for ever precluded the production of a Judas Mac cab cans,
an Olimpiade, or an Orpheus, would give the world a Matrimonio Segreto,
a Marriage of Figaro, and a Bon Giovanni*
After Jommelli's new opera—for only lazzaroni and low folk as yet
deigned to notice Paisiello's—what most attracted Burney's curiosity in
Naples were the famous music schools : Sanf Onofrio, the Pieta dei
Turcliini, and S. Maria di Loreto, which, like the four conservatori at
Venice, had been founded towards the close of the sixteenth century, and
had afforded gratuitous musical education to boys and young men as
the Venetian ones did to girls. The difference in the sex of the pupils
constituted the only main difference; but it was a very important one,
for, whereas the girls mostly married and disappeared into private life,
only a very few becoming professionals, the boys developed into the most
* The comic operas of this school are tolerably in keeping with the requirements
of our day; the Matrimonio Srgreto of Cimarosa (born 174!), died 1801), and the
Jlarbierc di Siviglia of Paisiello (1741-181G), have both been performed in Italy
(the hitter shamefully and without any success) during the last two years; but the
serious operas of the same day, the Ovazi of Cimarosa, the Pirro of Paisiello, the
Clcmrnza di Tito of Mozart, are entirely incompatible with our present (good or
bad) opera habits, on account of the absence of action, the incoherent effect produced
by light and idyllic music (suited to comedy), adapted to very tragic words, and
partly also the chief male part being written, as in all serious operas of the 18th
century, for a soprano or contralto voice, a habit extending to Rossini's day.
136
The Musical Life.
famous composers and performers in Italy. In the Venetian schools,
therefore, music was regarded as an accomplishment forming part of
a liberal education, while in the Neapolitan conserratori it, was taught
essentially and almost exclusively as a profession. Now as Naples had,
during the first half of the eighteenth century, been the focus of Italian
musical life, its music schools had necessarly become most important in
the history of the art. The elder and greater Scarlatti had taught in
them; Porpora, Leo, Durante had been educated and taught there, them¬
selves forming such pupils as Pergolesi, Vinci, Jomn\elli, Piccinni, and
Sacchini; while at the same time a great proportion of the finest singers
of the day were trained under their care, as the immense heap of vocal
exercises, from the most rudimentary to the most complicated ones, by
all the great Neapolitan masters, abundantly proves. The music schools
of Naples were consequently far more important, if less curious, than the
Venetian ones. Who could tell how many embryo geniuses there might not
be among those sallow little urchins, promenaded about by twos, like semi¬
narists, in their coloured cassocks and sashes and symbolical leading-strings ?
What wonderful voices might not be resounding in those dreary, white¬
washed convent-like rooms? What new musical glory might be developing
'in those schools, so venerable for their memories of past splendour? So
Dr. Burney naturally thought, and impatiently asked leave to visit these
Wonderful establishments. But the Neapolitans somewhat damped his
ardour; they looked modest, and hummed and hah'd about their conser-
vatori, while Jommelli and Piccinni, who had themselves been educated in
them, shrugged their shoulders and warned the Englishman not to let
himself be run away with by his expectations. All this Dr. Burney
interpreted as mere modesty, true or false; as the indifference of men
long accustomed to musical supremacy, or as the peevishness of the
praisers of past days. He visited the conservatori S. Onofrio, S. Maria
di Loreto, the Pieta dei Turchini, each and all; went over every part of
the establishment, listened to every class, vocal and instrumental, and
followed the pupils to their public performances at churches and con¬
vents; did all, in short, which can be done by a man who cannot well
believe his own senses, and tries to wake out of a sort of nightmare.
No, it was all of 110 avail; there could be no delusion, 110 mistake; it
was as clear as day, visible, audible, undeniable, irrefutable, that in not
one of the conservatori of Naples could there be discovered a talented
composer, a fine-throated singer, a well-taught instrumentalist, a single
piece of good music. The schools where Scarlatti, Porpora, Durante,
and Leo had taught,—where Pergolesi, Jommelli, Piccinni, Caffariollo,
Gizziello, all the greatest of Neapolitan composers and singers had learned,
—those famous unrivalled schools were now filled with ill-taught, untrained
mediocrities; composers without originality, singers without voice; mu-
The Musical Life.
137
sicians as raw and inferior as a musical country and a musical time could
well produce.
What could it mean ? asked Burney. Did the State give less money
to the maintenance of the establishments? No. Had Neapolitan masters
migrated elsewhere ? No. Was there any rational explanation of this
extraordinary decay ? No one could afford any. The more philosophical
doubtless remarked that such phenomena are inexplicable, being, in the
good language of the eighteenth century, so many freaks of Nature. But
the additional experience of a century has taught us moderns that Nature
is the least freakish, prankish, or whimsical of creatures ; but, on the
contrary, the most matter-of-fact, economical, and practical of beings ;
and it has also shown us why the Neapolitan schools had become sterile.
The reason was simple: they had produced enough ; tliey had done their
work ; they might cease to exist. A very ungracious mode of proceeding;
but Nature, in her wise niggardliness, by no means shrinks from unkind-
ness. She had used Italy, and more especially Naples, and in Naples
most particularly those three schools, as the mechanism by which music
was to be made to traverse the second great phase of artistic life, the
classic one, the one during which the art is no longer subordinate to some
exterior aim, like the religious aim, as in the phase rightly designated
by Hegel the symbolical; and when the art has not yet gradually been
diverted to some other likewise unartistic aim, such as those of dramatic
effect or scientific suggestion, as in the third or romantic stage; the
second phase when art exists literally for art's own sake; when men ask
it only for the beautiful ; when it stands in full independence. Now this
classic phase—being in fact merely the time when art has become capable
of interesting by its own sole force, of riveting attention without borrowed
aids, and before it has become unable thus fully to satisfy the mind
beginning to require artificial and foreign stimulant—this classic phase
requires a peculiar combination of circumstances. Like some splendid
plant, it needs for its efflorescence a peculiar atmosphere, a peculiar
temperature; like the plant, also, it requires that its roots should be in
one spot and should strike into the lowest layers of soil: 11 Et quantum
vertice ad auras a?therias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit;" it must be
spontaneous, national, and popular; it must be born of period, of a nation
and of every class of that nation ; it must grow naturally, freely, un¬
consciously, because it must grow in the most favourable of circum¬
stances. Such a phase is of short duration—short, at least, when we think
that an art lives not years but centuries. In ancient Greece it lasted
some three hundred years; in the Renaissance barely fifty; in its last
instance, the one we have been treating of, scarcely five generations of
artists, from Carissimi to Cimarosa.* In 1770, the classic period of
* Carissimi died in 1 (>72; Cimarosa in 1801.
138
The Musical Life.
music, the period of music for music's own sake, and of perfectly spon¬
taneous national growth, was fast coming to a close; music in this sense
classic had only one more stage to pass through before gradually declining
into romanticism; the stage represented by Mozart, Cimarosa, and Pai-
siello. Now Paisiello was already nearly thirty, Mozart was fifteen,
Cimarosa eighteen; the minor masters, Guglielmi, Sarti, Sacchini, were
still older; the men and women who were to perform for these masters
were also well nigh mature. The younger musicians, therefore, yet children
in the conserratori, were destined to activity about the year 1800, exactly
the moment when classic music melted into nothing, when Italy ceased
to be spontaneously creative; they were to be those weak and barren
composers, those slaves of first sopranos, as Hoffman called them, of
whom Zingarelli, Paer, Pavesi, and Portogallo were the gloriously in¬
glorious leaders; they were to be those abnormally wretched singers,
mere apes of former styles, who were destined to bring Italian song into
disrepute and to call forth Rossini's sudden abolition of all vocal licences;
in short, they were to be the men employed by fate to publish to the
whole world that truly classic music was dead, that the real artistic energy
of Italy was well nigh exhausted, and that it was time for romanticism
to arise, to render art cosmopolitan, eclectic, and to restore its influence
by making it appeal to men's love of excitement, of the new and of the
scientific. Some persons, nay many, nay perhaps most, from that moment
date the real existence of music, at least of the music which will last;
and Hegel, we know, distinctly said that music was essentially a romantic
art, which only means that it thrives best when not cultivated solely for
its own sake, and that it is most valuable in the days when composers
aim at scenic effects and philological distinctions; when they build up
their works out of the fragments left by various preceding generations,
to the accompaniment of a chorus of critics; when art is born spon¬
taneously nowhere, but exists equally artificially everywhere; when, there¬
fore, composers who are putting together forms originally created by
Italians talk loudly of German music, and Italians, who have learned all
their newest tricks from Germans, cry out that foreign music should be
banished; when, in short, criticism and eclecticism are playing at the
game of original creation. Perhaps this may be the case, perhaps cul¬
tured people are right to like only the music of their cultured century; we
do not dispute it ; all we can say is that with these cultured days and
this eclectic music we have at present nothing to do, for with them ends
what we have been trying to reconstruct—the musical life of Italy in the
eighteenth century, as Dr. Burney saw it one hundred and ten years ago.
Of all this strange movement in the future Dr. Burney of course never
dreamed; and he left Naples for England, highly delighted with Italian
The Musical Life.
139
music, unable to explain that odd little decay in the conservator/, and little
guessing that in forty years all that musical life would have vanished, all
that musical supremacy would have ceased, and that the works of Mar-
cello, of Jommelli, of Piccinni, of Galuppi, nay, even of Paisiello and
Cimarosa, would have been thrown aside by generations asking for a new
spirit in art, for more vehement emotions and more violent sensations.
We shut the old, brown, calf-bound volume of Dr. Burney's musical
tour, and lay it down on the oaken table. The evening sunlight, rosy and
golden, is gilding the red brick belfry of S. Giacomo Maggiore, the grass
of the quiet little cloister court, the brown fittings of the cosy library of
the Bolognese music school. We tie up the bursting portfolios of old
prints, Ave replace the ill-sewn, musty-smelling music books on their accus¬
tomed shelves ; we close the cardboard box of yellow, shrunken letters,
and Ave take our leave. In going away we pause a moment in the vast,
vaulted, desolate refectory, Avhere our steps re-echo as in a church; the
grey tAvilight is sloAvly filling the place, and from out of it faintly appear
the i'oavs and rows of portraits: Marcello, stately and sad in his patrician
robes; Jommelli, heavy and bowed ; Farinelli, strange and Aveird in his
knightly mantle of Calatrava; Pergolesi, sweet and mournful; and the
many others, more forgotten than they, dignified composers at their harp¬
sichords, dapper and sentimental singers holding their scores, men and
Avomen in plush, and satin, and poAvder, and buckle Avigs, once famous,
uoav forgotten. Dimmer and dimmer do they groAv in the twilight, till
they melt into the colourless uniformity of the Avails.
We turn aAvay, descend the dark tortuous staircase, cross through the
black lobby Avith its sputtering shrine-lamp, and pull the iron bar of the
creaking door.
Outside there is the pearly light of evening; the old bricks of the
Gothic palaces glimmer Avith rosy hues, and at the end of the long row of
dark arcades is the purple and golden glory of the sun setting over the
green plain of Lombardy. There is rumbling of carts, and clicking of
tinkers' hammers from beneath the old leaning towers, and clanking of
officers' SAvords, and clatter of glasses, and strum of guitars, and laughter
from the open coffee-houses; but Ave pass heedlessly through the bustle of
the summer evening, threading our Avay almost mechanically through the
croAvdcd streets, silent and absent, our thoughts still bent upon that dead,
forgotten Avorld of art, Avhich has faded aAvay, even as the last streaks of
crimson are uoav fading in the grey evening sky.
METASTASIO AND THE OPEEA
METASTASIO AND THE OPERA.
On the 28th of January, 1750, the Abate Pietro Metastasio, Imperial
Court Poet of Austria, scribbled off in a letter to the Cavalier Broschi,
court singer and royal favourite of Spain, a page of mock biography,
beginning thus: "In the eighteenth century there lived a certain Abate
Metastasio, a tolerable poet among bad ones."
The Abate Metastasio was in high spirits that day ; he had just
received a present of snuff, chocolate, and quinine; he had been given
hopes of obtaining some hundred doubloons of pension, and lie had heard
that the Queen of Spain declared him to be the greatest poet of the age;
a conjunction of agreeable things which made him burst out into a
dithyramb of frolicsome nonsense crowned by mock humility, by the
supreme drollery of calling himself a tolerable poet among bad ones.
The notion was certainly a very funny one, and certainly must have
made everyone laugh very much; yet, by a strange irony of fate, this
judgment, scribbled in a moment of buffoonery, is the very one which the
future was destined to pronounce over Pietro Metastasio, expressed with
the would-be leniency of candid criticism. For the fame of Metastasio
has undergone singular vicissitudes; the Italians of to-day mention his
name with a contemptuous smile and a contemptuous shrug, often with a
rhetorical mixture of pity and taunt, of stinted praise and restrained
abuse; yet scarce a hundred years ago that name was famous throughout
Europe, adored in Italy; those much-reviled works were in every man's
memory, in many men's hearts, and on all men's shelves. Metastasio was
petted by kings and empresses and popes, and looked up to like a sort of
prophet by his countrymen; while Voltaire, the sneerer at all things
un-Frcnch. said that he was greater than the Greeks, equal to Corneille
when Corneille was not declamatory, and to Racine when Racine was not
insipid ; and Rousseau, the denouncer of false sentiment and pastoral
lyrism, declared that lie was the only living poet who was a poet of the
heart.
Was Metastasio unworthy of the admiration of the past?—is he
deserving of the contempt of the present? At once both and neither; for,
144
Metaslasio and the Opera.
while Iris century admired hi in for what were sometimes faults, our own
times yet oftener despise him for what are in truth his merits ; the
eighteenth century praised him because he belonged to the eighteenth
century, which was often his misfortune; the nineteenth century derides
him because he does not belong to the nineteenth century, which is most
often his advantage. Metastasio was great because he wrote not tragedies
but operas, at a time and in a country in which the opera was the dramatic
form spontaneously created and appreciated by the whole nation, while
the tragedy was the dramatic form artificially elaborated and eclectically
enjoyed by a few men of letters; because he never shrank from the faults
which were inherent in the style which belonged to Iris day, and strove
only after the beauty which it could afford, instead of pruning away
inevitable defects and seeking for unattainable merits like his great rival,
the fastidious, faultless, pleasureless Alfieri; Metastasio was great because
his position as court poet placed at his disposal the best tragic actors of
his day, its singers, while Alfieri, the disdainful amateur, was forced to
seek his Brutus and his Antigone among the harlequins and columbines
of the comic stage; Metastasio was great because, being himself weak
and characterless, his unerring instinct, his psychological imagination,
was free to create the most varied and well-defined types, while Alfieri
made his men and women only a curtailed and lifeless copy of his own
strong self. But music, as it became more boldly multiform, mangled
Metastases plays, and finally wholly rejected them, so that at length
they disappeared from every stage in Italy. The position of Court
librettist at Vienna became a source of contempt and hatred when national
liberty and independence were once more sighed for. The feebleness of
Metastasio's own nature, when once known to the public, raised against
his works a suspicion of effeminate hypocrisy; in short, the causes of his
true greatness, of his deserved fame, became in time the causes of neglect
and scorn, both totally undeserved and perfectly unintelligible neglect
and scorn, which will last till criticism shall have taught us that a mean
man may be a greater poet than a noble one, and that a faulty product of
a whole time and nation is more valuable than a faultless fabric of eclectic
refinement.
I.
One evening in the summer or winter, no one remembers which, of the
year 1709, two wearers of the grave black cloak of priests and scholars,
the Abate Gian Vincenzo Gravina, of Hellenistic and legal fame, and
famous also for his revolution in the Arcadian Academy, and his friend
the satirist and critic Lorenzini, were strolling about in the heart of
Metastasio and the Opera.
145
Rome, when they perceived a crowd collected in the Piazza dei Cesarini,
between the bridge of S. Angelo and the Farnese Palace. On approach¬
ing, they found that the people were collected round a little boy, who,
perched upon a curbstone, was singing extemporary verses. The child
was pretty, his voice was beautiful, the verses followed each other with
singular facility. Gravina and Lorenzini remained standing and listened,
and were more and more astonished at the ease and grace of the impro¬
visation. The boy, 011 his part, perceiving the scholarly gentlemen who
had joined his audience of artisans, beggars, and street children, turned
towards them and extemporised some lines of thanks and of excuse; thus
he continued to sing his verses and they to listen. When he had ceased
and the crowd had dispersed, the two literati called the boy to them, and
asked him who he was and what he did. His name was Pietro Bona-
ventura Trapassi, son of Felice Trapassi, druggist and macaroni-seller in
the neighbouring Via dei Cappellari; he was eleven years old, having
been born 011 January 6,1698, and had two sisters and one brother. His
father had sent him to a day-school, where he had been taught reading
and writing. Gravina was struck with the child, and bade him come
next morning to his house in Via Giulia, over the Chapel of the Soffragio.
Then the two scholars went their way, while the boy ran home to tell the
good news.
Felice Trapassi, descended from an honourable family of Assisi in
Umbria, had served as a private in the Pope's Guard, ostensibly com¬
posed of Corsicans, but recruited in reality among the riff-raff of all parts
of Italy; he had been a thrifty man, and, on marrying a Bolognese called
Francesca Galasti, he had set up a little shop of flour, maccaroni, oil, drugs,
tallow-candles, soap, and that curious variety of things designated by
the Romans as White Art. He had, by some means or other, probably
the patronage of some great cook or valet, obtained the inestimable
honour of having his younger son nominally carried to the font by the
very handsome, dissolute, and art-loving Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni,
nephew of a preceding Pope; but, beyond permitting his name to be
entered in the parish register of SS. Lorenzo e Damaso, his Eminence
appears to have done but little either for father or son. Felice Trapassi
was therefore much pleased at the expectation of some small present
which the rich and learned Gravina would doubtless make his boy. So
the next morning Pietro Trapassi was dressed in holiday clothes, and
sent to the house of the great jurist and scholar. The Abate Gravina
was still better pleased with the little poet, so pleased that either then
or soon after he asked Felice Trapassi to give him the boy that he might
educate him as his son. Gravina was rich, learned, and famous; his
offer opened the way to a far higher career of fortune than could be
dreamed of for his child by the ex-soldier and druggist; he accepted.
L
146
Metastasio and the Opera.
This is tlie authorised narration of the strange chance which turned
Pietro Trapassi into Pietro Metastasio, a druggist into a poet; it is
probably not absolutely correct, but. yet relatively true, compressing into
one or two striking scenes what was" certainly a matter of days and weeks,
possibly even of months. The Abate Gravina, though only nominally a
priest, was unmarried, his sole near relative being his old mother; he
had a number of pupils, young men and boys, whom he was preparing
for a legal or classical career; it is probable that be had at first merely
admitted Pietro Trapassi to some of his lessons, and that gradually and
slowly, as the boy developed in undoubted talents, he took him into bis
house and adopted him as a son; for he likewise took charge of the
education of Felice Trapassi's elder son Leopoldo, less gifted and less
insinuating than his brother. Be it as it may, Pietro Trapassi had not
yet completed his twelfth year when be was entirely settled in Gravina's
house, lodged, fed, clothed, and taught by the famous man. Giovanni
Vincenzo Gravina was between forty and fifty, a tall, spare, handsome
man, prematurely bent and pale from study and from discontent; among
the dull, benevolent, cringing pedants of his day he stands out almost like
the ghost of some old humanist of the times of Poggio or Valla. He had
the intense, blind, sterilising love of antiquity of the men of the fifteenth
century, their boldness restrained by servile imitation, their scepticism,
their bitterness, and their inordinate and morbid vanity; the people of
his time, even his most intimate friends and warmest admirers, thought
him disagreeable and eccentric; tlie rest of tlie literary world looked upon
him with suspicion and aversion, and pasquinade and calumny were
showered on him. He hated all things modern, and, like the Hellenists
of the Renaissance, was discontented even with his own name, which lie
changed from John into Janus.* Tlie name of his two pupils, the
druggist's sons of the Via dei Cappellari, offended him beyond measure,
and he lost 110 time in seeking a Greek equivalent or approximation to
the plebeian and modern Trapasso. The substitute lie hit upon was
elegant, scholarly, sonorous, well fitted to become famous;—it was Metas¬
tasio.
The name represented the fact; Pietro Trapassi, the son of the Arte
Bianea dealer, had entirely ceased to exist; there remained only Pietro
Metastasio, the adopted son of tlie greatest of Roman jurists. To the
Via dei Cappellari the boy never returned except on a visit; his brother
was permitted to be present at his lessons, and thus remained somewhat
of a companion; but from his father, liis mother, and his sisters, he became
* (Han is a common Italian contraction for Giovanni, especially when followed by
such a name as Vincenzo, but that Gravina took it deliberately is evident from liis
styling himself, in his own Latin, not Johannes but Janus.
Afetastasia and the Opera.
147
daily more alienated. He lived in a pleasant house, ate off Gravina's
handsome plate, studied out of costly books, dressed elegantly as a little
priest, and associated with the well-born, or at least well-educated, lads
whom Gravina was bringing up. He was taken to literary assemblies
in the houses of nobles and prelates; lie had the honour of improvising
before cardinals and princesses; he was handsome, bright, winning; every¬
one approved Gravina's choice in adopting the little poet. His career
lay ready mapped out: he would become a great scholar and legal authority
like his master, exercising poetry only as an elegant pastime. Gravina
would push him on in the law, he would take orders, become auditor of
the Rota, pontifical advocate, prelate, cardinal, who knows what ? It
was a splendid present and a splendid future, but it had its drawbacks.
The child, taken out of the society of his old comrades tin1 street-boys,
restrained by the trammels of unaccustomed gentility, decorum, and study,
crammed with book pedantry by a protector impatient to enjoy the fruits
of his munificence, stiffened in the society of literary celebrities and
academic dignitaries, shown off as a poetical wonder before every high¬
born or learned idiot who asked to hear him, was living in an intellectual
hothouse, and undergoing the most intense intellectual cultivation, in
order that he might sooner burst into flower and gratify his patron's
vanity. He was growing into a pale, stunted, priggish piece of precocity,
vain and conceited from the general applause, timid and depressed from
the sense that such applause was the price required by Gravina, who
had adopted him mainly as a means of satisfying his greed for praise.
Metastasio was declining in bodily and mental health when Gravina
was suddenly called by business to his native Calabria, whither he con¬
ducted his dear, precious, stunted, applause-obtaining pupil. Passing
through Naples he < could not resist the desire of showing off Metastasio
before the many legal and scholastic celebrities of the place, among whom,
perhaps unnoticed, and contrasting strangely with the complacent and
prosaic commentators on the Pandects and St. Thomas, was the great
Vico, seeing dimly, chaotically, with the half-mad enthusiasm of a prophet,
that great field of philosophic history which Montesquieu and Herder
were first to open to us. Before these great men, great men mostly
long forgotten and not worth remembering, Gravina made Metastasio
improvise eighty stanzas at a sitting, and then left Naples triumphant.
But Metastasio was exhausted, and when they got to Calabria it was
necessary to leave him there, less to study than to recruit his strength,
under the care of Gravina's cousin Gregorio Caroprese. at a place called
Hcalea. After the dark Via Giulia, the narrow Roman streets, the
dismal academic rooms, Caroprese's house struck Metastasio as a sort
of paradise; sixty years later he spoke with vivid pleasure of the little
room in which the breaking of the sea against the rocks had lulled him
l 2
148
Metastasio and the Opera.
to sleep, of the boats in which he had rowed about, of the boys with whom
he had studied, of his teacher's little dog, of the good old Caroprese, the
gentle and amiable pedant, who would jestingly teach him logic and amuse
him with optical and chemical experiments ; a world of study, serene and
happy, so different from the dead classic world of Gravina, in which
nothing lived save bitter vanity. And even Gravina had to relent; he
had to cede to the remonstrances of the charming blue-stocking sister of
Prince Pinelli di Sangro, of that strong, warm-hearted, intelligent woman,
to whom, when she had become the Princess Belmonte Pignatelli, Metas¬
tasio was to owe so much ; he forbade Metastasio ever again improvising
a line,—a great sacrifice from a man who had seen him improvising with
Rolli and Perfetti, the most famous of extemporary poets, and had heard
him complimented by the pompous old humpbacked Pindar Guidi. Gra¬
vina also moderated the study of Greek and Latin; he forbade all scribbling
of verses; he was beginning to see that his desire for immediate success
might lose him the pleasure of his pupil's final triumph. Still the life in
Via Giulia was much the same; the same studies, the same academic
amusements, the same solemn philosophic banquets, the same lectures, the
same squabbles, inuendoes, satires, and other literary violences; while
Gravina grew more bent, more pale, more sickly, more consumed by
unsatisfied vanity and bitterness as his great Arcadian schism came to
nothing, as his adherents abandoned him for his rivals, as his tragedies
remained unsold at the booksellers, as his satirist Lodovico Sergardi
became fiercer and fiercer, and even his friend Martello jested blandly over
poor, learned, intelligent, eloquent, conceited, ill-tempered Gravina's
eccentricities. Gravina was also intellectually difficult to deal with:
broad as were some of his views, and intelligent as were some of his
criticisms, he was often narrow-minded, not in accordance with the ideas
of his times, but in obedience to a captious character. Antiquity was his
idol, but antiquity cramped and warped by his appreciation, antiquity
rather negative than positive, stiff, cold, subtle, as suited the scholar who
hated everything the world enjoyed, who despised love, and scorned women,
in his bitter revolt from the pomp and gallantry, the effeminate pastoralisms,
of the dying seventeenth century. The Italian language he found weak,
the Italian poets childish—Ariosto alone found grace in his eyes; Tasso
he abhorred and tried to annihilate by praising his stiff rival Trissino.
Gravina was constitutionally in contradiction with his times, and liis
conceit and obstinacy rendered him doubly contradictory. " You must
concur in every one of his opinions ; praise him, and he will love you like
a son," wrote Martello about him. During Metastasio's boyhood, while
Gravina looked down upon him in undiminished majesty, before he had
had opportunities of comparing his judgments with those of others, and
testing his likings by his own; while he was but a poor little feelingless,
Metastasis and the Opera.
149
idealless scholar, Metastasio probably regarded Gravina as a god: lie
concurred in his judgments spontaneously, unhesitatingly, and blindly.
It was in this stage of his intellectual existence that Metastasio wrote
his first work, the play of Giustino. The story is that he worked at it at
night, fearing his master's displeasure, and that Gravina discovered the
manuscript only when completed. This may be, but the play is written
distinctly in Gravina's shadow: the story is taken from the Italia Liberata
of his favourite Trissino; the action is so to speak none; the speeches
are immeasurably long, pompous, and dull ; the choruses, the best part
»>f the performance, are painfully copied from the moralising lyrics of
antiquity : it is a tidy patchwork, made up by a boy who sees only the
shell of the antique, to whom Seneca is as strong as Sophocles, and Lucan
as grand as Homer ; awe-stricken before the Elzevir and Aldine classics,
pleased with the polish and sentiment of the courtly French, utterly
without experience of character and passion ; thinking he understands
and admires, merely because he has never felt the true nor seen the
beautiful. Such is Giustino. Gravina was pleased with it, got it approved
by his friends, and finally had it printed, probably after it had benefitted
by his revision.
This was Metastasio's attitude towards Gravina when still a boy; did
it not undergo a change as the boy grew into a young man ? Did not
the Armida of Tasso, with whom he became acquainted in some clandestine
way, seduce him from allegiance to dull old Trissino ? Did not Lope
and Calderon, devoured in stealth, open a world of movement and passion
unknown to Seneca and Gravina? Did not some opera or mask comedy,
which he saw muffled up and hidden in the pit of the Aliberti or Palla-
conla, give him a glimpse of splendour and humour, of living art as
opposed to dead erudition ? Did not some face he may have seen, some
word he may have heard, suggest that the world contained other things
besides Aldines and Elzevirs, that there was more than was known of by
the omniscient Gravina ? Surely all this must have happened; surely as
Metastasio grew up, and questioned others and questioned himself, some
doubt, some sneer, must have crossed his mind respecting his master's
dogmas; surely he must have begun to feel that reaction against the
antique, that distrust and aversion of its pedant-expounded masterpieces,
which to the last prevented his seeing more than a barbarian in iEsehylus
and an obscene jester in Aristophanes. And then, did he cease to praise
Gravina ? Did he fail to concur in all he said ? No, for Gravina loved him
like a son to the last. When we think of Gravina's character, of Gravina's
ideas, and of Metastasio's position of total dependence upon him, we are
inclined to think that the accident which made Metastasio's literary great¬
ness possible rendered almost inevitable the pusillanimity of his life. Gra¬
vina's education taught Metastasio not only a hypocritical love for an unlov-
150
Metastasio and the Opera.
able man,but a cowardly acceptance of opinions not his own. A great benefit
may ennoble a strong nature, which can be both grateful and independent;
it can but degrade a weak character, leading it to servility or ingratitude.
Gravina's worries and bitternesses, his total humiliation in his contest
with his stupid rival Crescimbeni, the ill-success of his literary under¬
takings, the inuendoes of enemies accusing him of irreligion and what
not, finally determined him to leave Rome and to seek for success at
Turin, whither lie was invited by the King of Sardinia. But it was too
late: his constitution was broken down, and he died unexpectedly, pre¬
maturely, humbling himself before his adversaries in his last moments,
and regaining while dying the sympathies he had disdained during his
life. To his old mother he left all his Neapolitan property ; to his
beloved pupil Metastasio all the remainder of his considerable fortune.
Metastasio wrote off several letters, telling, in a half stilted, half
trepidating style, the death of his master and his good fortune ; he paid
Gravina's little accounts, arranged the legal affairs, gave the materials
for an obituary notice to one of Crescimbeni's Arcadians, wrote a solemn,
constrained, obscure, but not unpoetical elegy on the death of his master,
and read it among general applause at the meeting of the Arcadian
Academy; and then, having performed his duties, looked round him.
Here he was, the penniless son of the druggist, suddenly in possession
of a house, furniture, much valuable plate, a fine library, three lucrative
hereditary offices, several bonds of Neapolitan investments, the whole
amounting to upwards of 15,000 scudi, about 4,000/. It was a good
fortune for a man of letters, and more than enough to secure a successful
legal career. But Metastasio was only twenty; the idea of further
drudgery displeased him; he had, four years previous, taken the minor
orders requisite to hold ecclesiastical benefices, and he determined to
obtain some employment about the Pontifical Court, and while waiting
for it to amuse himself. So Metastasio, very young, very handsome,
very clever, entered the world of the frivolous, gallant, though ecclesias¬
tical, city. He was successful: he pleased everyone; he was witty, tender,
elegant, a poet, and moreover a rich one; he led the life of a smart secular
priest, going to balls, theatres, villas, throwing his money about lavishly
in every sort of dissipation save gaming, from which his placid, timid
nature shrank. He was a favourite with ladies of all ranks, for whom he
wrote such pretty affected pieces of gallantry as his canzonet, " Gia riede
Primavera," * and the two graceful cantatas in which he offered snuff and
chocolate to candid nymphs in hoops, ribbons, and long stomachers. His
godfather, the handsome Cardinal Ottobini, whom he so strangely re-
* Exquisitely set, sixty years later, by Paisiello as the lesson-piece in the Bariiere
di Siviglia.
Metastasio and the Opera.
151
sembled in effeminate good looks, introduced him to the great ecclesi¬
astical world,—ostentatious, worldly, immoral, and insincere,—in which
he hoped to make his way by dint of smiles, flatteries, and bribes.
Thus things went brilliantly in the midst of amusements, gallantries,
and applause; but the ecclesiastical situation was not forthcoming, and
after a couple of years, on examining into his finances, Metastasio found
them in a deplorable condition. The hope of a sinecure was gone with
the money that could buy it; the certainty of steady advancement in the
law had been trifled away in idleness; friends and protectors vanished,
creditors began to rise up, flirtations became subjects of jealousy; Rome
grew hateful to Metastasio; he was sick of dissipation, fearful of want,
longing for change. He sold the house, plate, and most of the books, and
set off for Naples, Gravina's home and the home of legal pursuits; poor,
but determined to work, somewhere in the year 1720.
As he had received only the beginning of a legal education from
Gravina, Metastasio apprenticed himself to a distinguished Neapolitan
lawyer, called Castagnola, as whose clerk he began to work. This
Castagnola was a hard, sensible man of business; he had heard of
Metastasio's idle life in Rome, of his reputation as a drawing-room poet;
he probably expected but little real work from the young man, and, by
way of keeping him to his studies, he extorted a promise that he should
completely abstain from any reading or writing of verses. Metastasio,
afraid of poverty, tried to follow his employer's advice; but a little poetry
he did write, probably behind his back, a canzonet to the pretty young
daughter of the famous philosopher Yico, of which Castagnola could not
be expected to hear; and a long grandiloquent poem, stately and
sweetish, full of gods, goddesses, and little chubby Cupids, after the
style of the Bolognese painters, for the marriage of his noble patroness
the Princess Pinelli di Sangro with Prince Belmonte Pignatelli, a neces¬
sary piece of civility of which the gruff lawyer could not possibly com¬
plain. Metastasio did not like hard work, he did not like the law, he
did not like his employer; his temperament required light and elegant
work, and pleasant easy-mannered people ; still, he continued, for,
although lazy and self-indulgent, he was the most prudent, the most ex¬
cessively prudent, of men.
One day in the year 1722 a servant of the Viceroy of Naples, Prince
Borghese of Sulmona, brings word that his Most Illustrious Excellency
desires to speak with the Abate Metastasio, clerk of the Advocate
Castagnola. Metastasio, in an agony of surprise and curiosity, hurries
to the Viceroy's palace and waits for the mysterious communication.
The Viceroy appears, receives the young man in the most flattering
manner, tells him that he has had the highest reports of his poetical
powers, probably from the good Princess Belmonte and her family, and
152
Metastasio and the Opera.
asks Metastasio whether he will undertake to write a short play, to be
sung on the birthday of the wife of the Emperor Charles VI., then still
King of Naples and Sicily. Metastasio is taken aback, hesitates; he
has, it is true, written several such pieces in his days of prosperity in
Eome, the Galatea, the Endymion, and others; he feels that he can
succeed; but he has had experience of the vanity of a poetical career.
He fears to displease his employer, Castagnola, by so flagrantly breaking
his promise; he dreads being dragged from his dull but solid profession
into the unlucrative, demoralising habit of writing verses. He would like
to accept, but dares not. The Viceroy inquires into the reasons of his
hesitation; the young man, emboldened by his condescension, explains his
dilemma. Is that all? In that case all is well; his Excellency gives him
his solemn word that not a living soul, not even the composer, the per¬
formers, 110, not even the printer, shall know the authorship of the proposed
piece; Metastasio may go and obey his request with perfect tranquillity of
mind. So Metastasio takes his leave and goes home. During the daytime
he copies in Castagnola's office, and only at night, when the sulky un-
poetical lawyer is asleep, does he venture to work at the play. At length
it is finished. Metastasio carries it to the Viceroy, and receives from him
fresh protestations of secrecy and two hundred ducats; and then awaits,
hidden and safe in his legal den, the reception of his work by the public.
II.
Metastasio's new work, The Gardens of the Hesperides, was what people
in those days called a serenata: a sort of dramatic cantata destined to
celebrate a marriage or a birth, a sort of poetical decoration for a grand
entertainment. When, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the
opera was first transported on to a public stage, the serenata remained
in the palace, as the oratorio did in the cloister, the two minor develop¬
ments of the musical pageant of which the opera was the highest, most
altered form. While the opera, represented on a large theatre before
every class of society, required a distinct dramatic action, well-defined
characters and situations, and above all rapidity of movement,—the
serenata, only half acted and sometimes not acted at all, in a hall or on
a terrace, before an assembly of great folk coming from a wedding, and
waiting for a ball or a supper, remained what the earliest melodrama had
been,—a tissue of long speeches, of refined conceits, of florid descriptions,
like the pastorals of Tasso and Guarini, and the masks of our own Eliza¬
bethan and Jacobian poets. While the opera turned to account all the
heroic deeds, great love, great murders of antiquity, the serenata required
only the slightest mythological theme. In the opera Orestes was torn
Aletastasio and the Opera.
15 3
by remorse, Cleopatra stormed and imprecated, Caesar strutted and bullied,
Greek queens calumniated their step-sons, and Persian satraps poisoned
their kings on the bare boards before the roughly-daubed scenes; in the
serenata Galatea and Proserpine, Endymion and Paris, sauntered about
placid like shades in Elysium, sweet and dapper like china shepherds and
shepherdesses, grandiloquent like dedicatory letters, among the real
shrubs and flowers in a palace, among the trimmed hedges and triton
fountains of a garden, a sort of well-bred, languishing, love-sick Olympus
come to entertain the greatest folk in the country with their conceits and
their roulades, their cooings and their cadenzas. Metastasio's serenata
is a serenata like every other, only much better. Venus and Adonis glide
about in the gardens of the Hcsperides something between the flabby
chalky divinities of Guido and Albani and the peruked and furbelowed
heroes and heroines of an heroic ballet; they sigh and weep, and smile
and glow in phrases borrowed from Aminta and the Pastor Ficlo; they
move in a pastoral world made up of recollections of Theocritus and
Virgil, and impressions of formal, artificially sweet French gardens:
they are at once unnatural and lumbering like a decorative stucco, and
finiekingly finished like a fan-painting ; they are among the latest pro¬
ducts of the dying seventeenth century, the century of nepotism, of
conceits, and of Bernini, when art has fallen to the level of upholstery
and poetry has sunk to the level of dedication writing. Still the Orti
Esperidi has great merit: beneath the upholsterer there is an artist—
beneath the dedication writer a poet; the play is good in as far as a bad
style will permit it.
And good it was found by the audience, who heard this graceful nonsense
accompanied by the solemn, manly music of the early eighteenth century,
so drolly unconscious of the discrepancy ; better still did it seem to those
who read the book, prettily ornamented with barrocco vignettes ; the
verse was so good, so clear, so elegant in that time of slovenly inflation,
there was so unmistakable a poetry in the midst of the conventional
flourishes, that people began to talk about it and to ask who was the
author. The composer asked, the actors and actresses asked, the noble
ladies and gentlemen asked; but the Viceroy kept his promise, and it
was of no avail. The mystery increased the general curiosity ; every
one tried to discover the author; some wrote to the Custode Generale
dArcadia, but he knew no more than they; it was all in vain. The
most curious of all these curious people was Signora Marianna Benti, wife
of Signor Domenico Bulgarelli, commonly called La Romanina, who had
sung the part of Venus in the mysterious play. She had been particularly
struck with the piece, and had piqued herself on discovering the author.
She made inquiries in all quarters; she threw money about freely; at
length she found a clue to the secret: a servant of the Viceroy informed
154
Metastasio and the Opera.
her that a certain young man, a clerk of the lawyer Castagnola, had had
several private interviews with the Viceroy just at the time that the per¬
formance was proposed, that he had moreover sent to the palace various
rolls of manuscript at the very moment that the play began to be learnt.
The Romanina immediately commissioned a friend, who knew Castagnola,
to obtain her a piece of his clerk's handwriting, while she, on her side,
borrowed from the printer the manuscript of the play. Comparing the
two manuscripts, and putting facts together, the ingenious and pertina¬
cious lady ascertained to her complete satisfaction that the author of the
Gardens of the Hesperides was in short no other than the Abatino
Metastasio. But she was not satisfied; her final triumph required that
the fact should be confirmed by the author himself. So she induced
some friends to take an opportunity of bringing Metastasio to her house
without letting him suspect her discovery.
Signora Marianna Bulgarelli, commonly called La Romanina, was not
only one of the most famous Italian actresses and singers, but was well
known as a singularly respectable, well-educated, and intelligent woman,
whose house was an intellectual centre. Metastasio, therefore, could not
resist the invitation. He was taken to one of the Romanina's receptions,
which was crowded with poets, composers, singers, lawyers, travellers,
and the more intelligent nobles. She was no longer young, and had
never been beautiful, but she was dignified yet lively, insinuating and
clever, one of those women who, without inspiring love, can gain a great
ascendency over an intellectual man by the strength of their will and the
warmth of their sympathies. She received Metastasio with every degree
of courtesy, made him feel very happy, and then suddenly asked him
whether he was or was not the author of the Orti Esperidi; the question
was so unexpected and so direct that Metastasio was forced to confess
that he was. The Romanina had gained her point; now that her
curiosity was satisfied she might have ceased to care about the poet.
But Metastasio had pleased her; he was young, handsome, soft-mannered,
and clever; and perhaps the very effeminacy, the absence of strength
of character, which was written in his fair smiling face, rendered him
attractive to her. She bade him return to her house, and he did so,
finding himself for the first time in his right element. But the Roma¬
nina, much as she got to like Metastasio, had, by her thoughtless curiosity,
put him into a dangerous position. In a few hours all Naples knew who
was the author of the serenata, and the Advocate Castagnola heard it
but too early. He was a hard and imperious man, and took Metastasio's
breach of faith and subsequent dissimulation all the more ill that he had
not before doubted of his implicit obedience. Of the serenata he did not
condescend to speak, but began to treat his clerk with the most insulting
gruffness. Metastasio cowered before his unspoken anger, and waited
Metastasio and the Opera.
155
that it should consume itself, while he resumed his work with greater
assiduity, and treated his employer with greater deference than ever.
But the lawyer became daily more unpleasant, and his house intolerable
to Metastasio; in the evening he would go to the Romanina's receptions,
and seek consolation in the literary and musical company around her, but
after some time Castagnola's ill-will and desire to get rid of him grew
too strong to be borne. Metastasio appeared at the Romanina's depressed
and disconsolate ; she and her husband, whom we see only as her shadow,
pressed him to say what ailed him, and the poor fellow, utterly broken-
spirited, told the story of his promise, of its violation, and of Castagnola's
wrath. Perhaps the Romanina was sorry, perhaps she was glad ; at all
events it was evident that her indiscretion had been the proximate cause of
Metastasio's losing his employer's good will, and finally his employment
also. Her advice was decided: " Leave that detestable Castagnola; there
are lots of other lawyers in Naples; another employer will soon be found;
meanwhile, get out of his house as soon as possible, and come to mine
till you be settled." The obedient husband re-echoed her energetic invi¬
tation. Metastasio hated Castagnola's office, he liked the Romanina's
drawing-room: the offer was in itself too tempting; the determined
temper of his friend entirely broke through any resistance on the part of
his prudence. Metastasio was weak, ceding to people with strong likings
and dislikings whenever fear, stronger than any human will, did not
command him to resist by means of flight. The Romanina did not give
him time to hesitate, but dispatched her husband to Castagnola's to see
that Metastasio took his leave, and to have his luggage instantly trans¬
ported to her own house. So, shielded by Signor Domenico Bulgarelli,
Metastasio faced the furious Castagnola and meekly departed from the
lawyer's hated habitation.
Once fairly established at the Bulgarellis', Metastasio seems to have
forgotten all about the necessity of finding another legal employer, or, at
least, to have postponed the matter indefinitely. For the moment he was
comfortable and happy; the Romanina could afford to support him for
awhile, and neither she nor her husband was in any hurry to get rid of
him; he could on his side earn a little by writing more serenatas and
more bridal compositions, now that the Orti Esperidi had given him a
name. All was well. The Romanina, no longer young, childless, fast
coming to the close of her professional career, centred upon him all the
energetic interest, all the passionate affection, of her intense nature; that
she did so was her pride, and she disdained to hide it. Some people
smiled and whispered at this adoption of a young and handsome man by
a woman herself not old nor ugly; but to their inuendoes neither she,
nor her husband, nor Metastasio, would give any attention; that ho was
156
Metastasio and the Opera.
her lover she scorned to disprove, she to whom he was more than a lover,
more than a son, a suddenly found object of an intense and headstrong
devotion such as other women of her character have given to some political
or social object. Her strength and breadth of character strengthened
and widened, at least for the time, the timid and narrow character of
Metastasio; her generosity ennobled as that of Gravina had debased him,
because the one was noble and the other mean. She was a large-minded
woman, strongly educated, with clear ideas—best of all, with strong sym¬
pathies; she matured Metastasio's mind, and raised it above the pastoral
insipidities which had been his admiration. She was a great, simple,
masterly singer, above all a grand actress: in her Metastasio first saw
the incarnation of the artistic work which was allotted to him; in her
society he was first led into the world of art in which he was to create.
Round the Romanina centred that great musical life which existed at
Naples and Venice in the early eighteenth century. It was a very
different world from those hitherto seen by Metastasio; from the crabbed
wooden decrepitude of the world of erudition, from the hopeless formal
ossification of the world of plastic art, from the artificial and sterile
exuberance of the world of poetry. Many things, blighted by the great
catastrophe of the sixteenth century, had faded away during the seven¬
teenth, and died grotesquely at the beginning of the eighteenth,—erudition,
painting, sculpture, lyric and epic poetry: but some things, dormant in
the Renaissance, had quickened and grown unnoticed during the great
lethargy of the seventeenth century,—Italian tragedy, Italian comedy, and,
above all, Italian music. And now music arose, in its first fresh life, as
painting had done in the days of Ghirlandaio, Mantegna, and Signorelli,
grand in its very adolescent roughness, charming in its very immaturity,
magnificent in its concentrated not yet unfolded strength. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century music had no past, only a rich present
and a richer future ; it had none of the academic classicalities of the
effete plastic arts, no models, no rules, no pedants, no originals, no
threadbare inheritance of importance, nothing false or borrowed. Its
artists were simple, earnest, cheerful ; not dreaming of artistic dignity,
conscientious, self-unconscious workmen, as have been the artists of every
living art. Despised by the academic painters with their months full of
classic forms and their brains empty of thought, despised by the erudite
poets who revived Pindar and Anacreon by means of scissors and gum-
pot, perhaps they were a little awe-stricken before the dignified dotage of
other arts, and half ashamed of their infatuation for their own adolescent
unrecognised art, but satisfied with themselves, happy in the obscure
consciousness that they were alive, the art and themselves, and that the
same life filled those who listened when they played or sang. Such were
157
these musicians upon whom we now look back as upon primaeval giants.
And Metastasio met them, sympathised with them, was infected with the
life of their art, and put it into his.
We may picture to ourselves those musical gatherings in the Bulgarellis'
house : the two or three bleak rooms furnished in the heavy Italian
imitation of the heavy Louis XIV., red and black and gold, the flourishy
Flemish prints on the walls, the dim mirrors set in dim glass, Metastasio's
solemn little collection of parchment-bound classics in a corner, the tables
covered with the nicknacks of the great actress's admirers and with her
new friend's books and papers; the whole pale with the light of the wax
candles and drowsy with the scent of the fading nosegays brought back
from the theatre; the rooms filled with a motley noisy crowd of old com¬
posers, in solemn perukes and beribboned shoes, of dapper literary
priestlets redolent of bergamot and sonnets, of shy young composers
conscious of threadbare coats and unappreciated genius, of youths foreign
and queer, come from the Marches, from Bologna, nay from Germany
and Spain, to study music; of beautiful actresses in long embroidered
stomachers and cushioned hair, of comic actors, Scaramuccias and Coviellos,
only just stripped of their parti-coloured garb and black masks ; a loud-
spoken, jovial world, jabbering Neapolitan and gesticulating terribly, half
serious and fierce, half light and buffoonish, always moving, acting, per¬
forming, overflowing with rough artistic life. And in the midst of them,
moving rapidly from group to group, made room for respectfully by all,
the energetic yet almost regal Eomanina, intensely interested about every¬
thing and everyone, constantly active about something, encouraging,
reprimanding, ordering about, assigning to each his business, as befits the
queen of that world. Yes, we can see her moving about in her rustling
brocade and trailing velvet, going from the great singer lolling about the
harpsichord, his fat, sentimental face half hid in his curly wig and lace
frill, one fat bejewelled hand thrust into his satin doublet, the other
playing with his music roll, accustomed to be adored, and waiting dawdlingly
for adoration, an affected puppy when speaking, a grand and inspired
artist when singing ; from him to some obscure fair-liaired young man,
stammering broken Italian with German absurdity, sent to Naples by the
King of Poland, called perchance Adolf Hasse, and ten years later, by
these Italians who are now grimacing at him, "the dear, the adorable
Saxon"; and from him the Eomanina will go up to the great Alessandro
Scarlatti, father of the Neapolitan school, old, gouty, and occasionally
peevish; she will bend over his arm-chair, asking after his beautiful sweet-
voiced daughter Flamniinia, after his son Domenico, great on the harpsi¬
chord, now at Koine or at Venice; she will make him feel happy and
almost young again. She will lead up to him a grave handsome man, in
158 Metastasio and the Opera.
patrician black, introduce him to the old master as his Excellency Signor
Benedetto Marcello, a great dilettante and composer from Venice, and the
noble will bend humbly before the plebeian, as a pupil before a master.
Then she will dive into the crowd of young students of the Conservatorio,
exchange a word, hurried but earnest, with the impetuous but gentle Leo¬
nardo Leo, with the sedate scholarly Durante, with the smart and fiery
Vinci, till she finds the burly, sarcastic Porpora, greatest of cantata com¬
posers and singing-masters, and will ask him jestingly whether he is
satisfied with his new pupil, the Abate Metastasio. The Abate Metastasio,
handsomer and brighter beneath her glance, laughs and vows he will sell
all his benefices and turn primo tenore and make a fortune. The Romanina
leaves them, and turns towards a boy of sixteen or seventeen, too tall to
be hidden behind the stumpy Porpora, struggles with his shyness, drags
him along on her arm in affected gravity to the harpsichord, pins him
down, all blushing and protesting, and cries out that since he cannot be
got to sing alone he must sing with her. She strikes a few notes and
sings, while all become breathless, the boy hesitatingly beginning, till,
seeing him absorbed in the performance, her own dexterous voice com¬
pletely drowned by the immense splendour of his, the Romanina stops and
lets him run on alone in endless intricate passages, unconscious of the
crowd, till at length he is interrupted by the universal shout of admiration,
" Bravo, Farinello! " Metastasio jumps up, runs to the harpsichord,
seizes hold of the boy, and cries, " I am honoured by this applause ; we
belong to each other, we are fellow pupils, twins, born together for the
world, you in song, I in verse. Remember it in later years, adorable twin
brother ! "
From the men who met at the Romanina's house, from Scarlatti, Por¬
pora, Leo, Durante, from the many great singers whose names are now
forgotten, from the very mediocrities of that musical world, Metastasio
learned his place in art, learned to co-operate in what, to the enlightened
and cultured of the day, probably seemed a mere huge incongruous
monster, at best but a sort of sublime puppet-show, but what was in reality
the real artistic form, musical and dramatic, slowly elaborated by the whole
Italian people, the assemblage of the finest gifts of a whole civilization, the
masterpiece of the eighteenth century as the chryselephantine colossus
was of antiquity; in which there were indeed unsightly frames of wood
and grotesque clamps of iron and trumpery additions in stucco, but which
was yet in the main of dun gold and creamy ivory, and was formed in
dignity and loveliness—the Opera.
Metastasio and the Opera.
159
III.
The opera was a necessary product of Italy ; it existed in germ in the
very essence of the Italian language; it developed by the very pressure of
Italian culture. True tragedy, as it existed in England and in Spain,
was perhaps impossible in Italy, with a language which naturally took
musical inflexions, and with a people who naturally sought for artistic
pleasure. The language fell into regular cadences hostile to the fluctuating
accent of emotion; the people desired definite and artificial forms incom¬
patible with the upheavings and wrenchings of tragic action. The Italians
wrote and acted many a tragedy, from the mediaeval Ezzelino of Mussato
down to the Merope of Maffei; but these tragedies were works of imita¬
tion, due to the feeling that what had been done by the ancients must
needs be repeated by the moderns; they were not the product of a national
craving which insisted on being satisfied. They were written, performed,
applauded, and published, one after the other, in rapid succession, but they
never called into existence a permanent stage ; they were the works and
entertainment of academies and erudite courts—the people outside neither
desired nor noticed them. Construct them with the utmost care, write them
with the greatest eloquence, declaim them with the greatest intelligence, it
was all useless; neither the verse of Poliziano and Tasso, nor the skilful
recitations of academic actors, nor the ingenious stage mechanisms of
Peruzzi and Palladio, could make tragedy a real necessity, a real pleasure,
to the Italians. Humanists and erudite courtiers might be faintly inter¬
ested in such performances, but the townsfolk cared only for their carnival
mummers, gods, goddesses, virtues, shoemakers, and pastrycooks, singing
dialogued couplets on their cars; and the peasantry cared only for their
viaggio actors, for their raw lads chanting on stages of planks and bedsheets
the stories of saints and paladins;—nay, even the very courts themselves,
when not hampered by learned advisers, cared only for their pompous
anomalous festivals, in which knights fought for enchanted ladies, sirens
and tritons swam across villa ponds, and Flemish or Flemish-taught
musicians sang madrigals inside the flanks of cardboard monsters. Thus,
on the part of the burghers, the peasants, and the nobles, we see the
desire for an artistic form far more artificial than the mere recited
tragedy. This form, this fusion of drama, music, and scenic effect, will be
crudely elaborated by the upper classes, saturated with humanism and
false chivalry, a weak and uncouth anomaly, with not much vitality in it;
but once born, once seen, it will be eagerly grasped by the people at
large, it will be vivified by popular feeling, and it will develope in fair
growth as a product of the whole nation. The opera is not the court
pageant, not the street mummery, not the village play; it is the court
pageant developed and transformed by the influence of those classes whose
160
Metastasio and the Opera.
vague hankerings find their imperfect expression in the street mummery
as seen in the carnival song, and the village-play as exemplified in the
maggio.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, while the plastic art of the
Renaissance is dying away in decorative imbecility, music becomes an
ever more important accessory in the festivities of courts,—music which,
during the century dividing Josquin from Palestrina, has attained to a
partial but in itself wondrous perfection; a perfection of symmetrical
design and interwoven colour like that of the limited but subtly-finished
art of the East. At the magnificent wedding of the Grand Duke Fran¬
cesco dei Medici with Bianca Cappello there were, together with tourna¬
ments, pageants, verse reciting, and scenic shows, long musical per¬
formances, complicated pieces set in learned contrapuntic mazes by Strozzi
and Peri, sung by men and boys trained as carefully as those for whom
Palestrina was composing in Rome. A few years later, at other court
feasts, we meet music even more developed; choruses sung to pastorals
like those of Tasso and Guarini, players and singers on the stage sitting
round the harpsichord, viol, lute, and fife in hand, as we see them in the
concert pictures of Niccolb Abati and Leonello Spada. And in one of
these pictures a musician has left the harpsichord and is pacing the boards,
plumed hat in hand, with solemn gesture. Is he reciting, or is he singing?
Is this a rudimentary opera or merely a play interlarded with concerts?
This is the ever recurring question concerning the mixed performances,
dramatic and musical, which took place in the late sixteenth century. We
are told that there was music, Ave see that there was declamation; but were
the two separated and merely juxtaposed, or had they already amalgam¬
ated? Were those verses merely spoken and those choruses only sung,
or had the first timid modulations been noted under the single declaimed
parts? The plays with harlequin and pantaloon with which Orazio
Vecclii amused the Lombard cities, the pastorals written by Rinnuccini
for the marriage of Henri IV., are still of this anomalous sort. And the
indecision is inevitable ; the music must have been limited to the choruses
until slowly, imperceptibly, the single parts had disentangled and separated
themselves from the great woof of harmony, which, until the beginning of
the seventeenth century, existed alone in its balanced complication. For
during the Middle Ages music had been but a unison, a faintly rhythmical,
almost formless chant; and during the Renaissance, while in the hands of
the great Flemish and Hispano-Flemish composers, of whom Palestrina
and Gabrielli were the last, though Italian, representatives, music existed
only as a harmonic structure, as a sheaf of wondrously-combined sounds,
learned, sublime, wonderful, but unindividual, unemotional, unmelodic, and
unrhythmic. When this sheaf of harmony had been perfected and handed
over from the erudite North to the artistic South it was gradually, timidly
Metastasio and the Opera.
161
loosened; tlie Italians severed and extracted one part from the other;
made the separate parts—unheard-of wonder!—stand alone in trepidating
awkwardness, but stand alone, individual, independent, freed from the
association which stiffened and weighed them down, free to develope
individually, to become one of the two great divisions of modern music:
noted declamation or melody, recitative or air.
Men had wished to enjoy that music which they had heard in palace
and church in their own house; they had sung one of the parts of those
splendid combinations of sound, and had sought for the other ones on
their viol, their lute, their virginal, trying to reconstruct the great vocal
fabric. But they had destroyed it; this single human voice would not
let itself be bound together with the voice of the wood and of the string as
it had let itself be fettered with the other human voices. It leaped up,
broke loose, and giddily followed its own course; a strange, wild course,
from which it returned, trembling and terrified,'seeking the shelter of the
instruments. But independence once tasted was never forgotten; the
single voice had learned the existence of a world of music whose doors
had been closed to the compact harmonic groups ; it had learned that it
had the strength to move and work by itself. Henceforward the single
voice is the main musical interest: to train it for long sustained quies¬
cence, for rapid movement, becomes the work of the age, of the seven¬
teenth century, which is to music as the fifteenth century had been to
painting: the century of innovation, of awkwardness, of timid grace, of
over-bold attempt, the predecessor of perfection. The instruments have
become the servants of this new master of the art, of this individual voice:
they must prepare its advent, wait for it, sustain it, give it time for repose,
receive it back after its triumphant journeyings. But what shall this
liberated voice do? Shall it travel in regular and cunning mazes, in
definite and perfect circles and arabesques, or shall it follow boldly in the
free, varying steps of the spoken word ? Shall it sing or shall it declaim ?
At first and for a long time the answer is difficult: it does both and
neither. Accustomed but little to its liberty, uncertain of its powers,
uncertain of what is in store, it feebly attempts both to sing and to
declaim; nay, sometimes, in its foolishness, it tries to imitate its servants,
the violins and fifes; worst of all, it still seeks safety in the shadow of its
servitude, and would when free do what it did when imprisoned in its
harmonic shackles.
The song or air, the melody, in short, necessarily originated in the
attempt to reproduce with one voice what had hitherto been done by
several; the recitative necessarily suggested itself simultaneously, for as
one singer left the chorus and sang alone, it naturally occurred that he
might sing the verses intended for one part; and, as tiie blank verse of
this narrative or dramatic part neither suggested rhythm nor definite
si
1G2
Metastasio and the Opera.
shape, it was noted in a sort of approximation to the speaking tone. The
story goes that recitative, as this noted declamation came to be called,
was invented by certain Florentine gentlemen, the poet Rinnuccini, the
composers Peri and Caccini, who met in the house of a Bardi, Count of
Vernio, to discuss the music to which the ancients had sung their choruses:
instead of reproducing ancient tragedy they invented modern opera. It
may be so, but as music had long been on the stage, although only as
chorus, the attempt to reduce the inflexions of the speaking voice within
musical limits must have been made all over Italy at the end of the
sixteenth century, independently and simultaneously, because the same
causes prevailed everywhere. But for a long while there is, strictly speak¬
ing, neither recitative nor air: the poetry is written without sufficient
distinction of metre, the instrumental part is still too rudimentary, the
voice still too untrained. There is neither enough melody nor enough
declamation; musical form and prosody are alike confused, and even in
the works of Monteverde, the greatest Italian composer of the early
seventeenth century, we can scarcely distinguish the music which can be
sung from the music which must be recited. His setting of Rinnuccini's
lament of Ariadne on Naxos contains, in its rich and pathetic modula¬
tions, the germ of the great art of the Pergolesis and Jommellis ; but we
cannot define it as either air or recitative: it is not an air, because it is
too unsteady in rhythm, too unadmitting of a real, formal accompaniment;
it is not a recitative, because it reproduces too little of the inflexions and
punctuations of speech to be freely declaimed.
But this double product of the enfranchisement of the single voice,
recitative and air, confused and rude though it was, was at once recognised
and fostered by the Italian people. The musical drama almost banishes
the recited pastoral off the court stages; it penetrates into church and
cloister in the form of oratorio, it is dragged about from town to town on
the cart of Pietro della Yalle, Thespis fashion; instead of chapels we
now begin to hear of singers. Milton and Evelyn, travelling in Italy
about 1G30, meet everywhere great virtuosi, Leonora Baroni (the heroine
of Milton's Latin verses), Lauro Vettori, Baldassare Ferri, artists trained
from their earliest childhood, and whom the whole nation honours with
poems, flowers, presents, and triumphal processions. Meanwhile, on all
sides, theatres have sprung up at Fano, at Parma, at Venice, at Rome,
very different from the little theatres hitherto erected in palace halls;
immense stages, fit for the most magnificent scenic displays; immense
houses, in which the voice resounds as it never did in a church; galleries
on galleries, capable of holding thousands of spectators; for now the
whole nation,—nobles, merchants, artisans, gondoliers and lazzaroni,—
have discovered what they want and insist upon being admitted.
But this rapid development is necessarily very unequal, anomalous.
Metastasio and the Opera.
163
This musical drama, which the Italians have instinctively called uthe work,"
gives scope to too many and various arts: the already matured arts,—
architecture, mechanic and pantomimic art.—obtain more than their due
share from the yet imperfect arts, poetry and music. The plays are ill
constructed, uncertain mixtures of the historical and the mythological,
patchworks of lyric verbosities and cold conceits, interlarded with stupid
mask-buffooneries; the music is still awkward and unfinished: timidly
modulated, ill punctuated, frigid recitative; imperfectly rhythmical, ponder¬
ous, indefinite melody; accompaniment added at random, without percep¬
tion of its real place and power ; the singers are rather coarse and over-
exuberant, fond of rough vocal gymnastics, with but little care of general
effect or of finish. On the other hand, the remains of the pageant art of
the Renaissance crowd the stage; there are continual changes of scenery,
immense displays of horses, camels, elephants, armies; transformations
into wild beasts, into birds, into plants ; enchanted palaces rising out of
the ground or dissolving into chin air; chariots drawn by winged serpents,
heroes carried off on the backs of dragons; Tartarus, Elysium, Chaos,
nay, as in Beverini's opera at Venice, nothing short of the Creation of the
Universe. This was the condition of the opera about the middle of the
seventeenth century, when (a suggestive fact) the Cavalier Bernini, the
Michelangelo of Barrocco art, built a theatre, painted the scenes, hewed
the statues, wrote the play, composed the music, and sang and acted the
principal part himself; when flourished Carissimi, the striver after elaborate
simplicity—Cesti and Cavalli, sweet and pathetic in their very con-
strainedness; when Italy, which had long been ceasing to impose artistic
fashions on the world, gave Europe her last artistic creation, made it
recognise her latest supremacy—the supremacy in music. Mazarin had
introduced the opera into France, with Italian words, Italian music, and
Italian singers; but the French soon rebelled from foreign domination,
had plays constructed on the then existing Italian model by the cox¬
combical, pastoral, sugary Quinault; music composed in the Italian style
by Lully and Lalande, and singers trained according to Italian rules;
an attempt to be at once imitating and original, pupils and masters, which
speedily ended in turning the French opera,—words, music, and perform¬
ance,—into a European laughing-stock. The opera had early been carried
to Germany: Scliiitz and Staden had tried to Teutonise it even in the
days of Monteverde, but the attempt failed in monotonous, allegorical,
contrapuntic frigidness, little suited to the coarse German middle classes;
but the Italian opera, with Italian poets, Italian or Italian-taught com¬
posers, and Italian singers, took root in every one of the Frenchified
German courts. At Vienna, an Italian court poet was kept expressly to
furnish libretti; at Dresden, Munich, and Ilanover, the bes Italian music
could be heard; even at Teutonic Berlin a great singer and composer,
m 2
164
Metastasio and the Opera.
Pistocclii, was kept, although his music accompanied the movements, not
of real actors, but of waxworks; even the Archbishop Moritz von Thun,
prince of the little medieval Salzburg, had an opera called Arminio per¬
formed at the end of the seventeenth century, as we learned from the soiled
MS. lying on his Eminence's beautifully inlaid ebony and ivory harpsi¬
chord, silent for nearly two hundred years. Italian singers and com¬
positions began to be imported into England in the days of Charles II.,
Davenant and Purcell attempting to do in English what Quinault and
Lully were doing in French; and the opera, first of mixed language
(Niccolini singing Italian and Mrs. Toffts English), but finally entirely
Italian, was definitely established in the reign of Queen Anne. The
opera was recognised as a production of Italy, and a production for which
all the other nations were clamorous.
Meanwhile, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, music, in the
hands of Alessandro Scarlatti, of Bononcini, and of Pistocclii, was rapidly
maturing: melody was solidifying into strong, clear forms; recitative was
expanding and growing bolder and more elastic; accompaniment was
becoming fuller, more meaning, taking a certain reciprocal importance;
singing was developing in wonderful perfection, perfection of superb
delicacy and vigour. And as music moved so the poetry to which it
was to be linked had to move also, and before their growing importance
scenic shows and mimic performance were to give way. Silvio Stam-
piglia, Court poet of Leopold I., and Domenico David, Venetian play¬
wright, began to disband the transformations, the enchantments, and
other shows of the old opera; to turn out harlequin and pantaloon; to
eschew flimsy mythology for serious historic subjects; to give to their
opera texts the proportions and dignity of tragedies; while at the same
time the composers began to require less rhetoric and more passion for
their recitatives, more simplicity and metrical clearness for the airs; and
the singers began to insist upon being given the place and the work due
to their respective voice and importance. Thus, little by little, thanks to
the pressure of the public, to the conflicting claim of authors, composers,
and singers, the opera was moulded into a definite shape, as we first see
it in the hands of the first true opera poet, of the predecessor of Metas¬
tasio, the Venetian Candiot Apostolo Zeno.
The literary activity of Apostolo Zeno, who was born in 1668 and
died in 1750, was mainly during the last years of the seventeenth and the
first of the eighteenth centuries, while occupying the post of Poeta Cesareo
or Imperial Opera Poet to Joseph I. and Charles VI. He was a very
learned man, a philologist and antiquary, according to the ideas of
those days; poetical gifts, in the sense of fancy and metrical talent, he
had next to none, and no power of conceiving character; but he had great
instinct for the dramatic, for well-tightened action, for simple plot, for
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165
effective scenes. What he conceived lie executed firmly, strongly, without
losing time in rhetoric and pathos, sketching rapidly, clearly, harshly,
with much ease and evident satisfaction in his rough, curt work. Pathetic
speeches or even avowedly pathetic scenes he ignored, interesting and
moving the audience rather by the tragic earnestness, the very hard
decisiveness of the situations. A forgotten writer, left even in the
eighteenth century merely to patchers-up of libretti, never read by the
public, and now found only on the shelves of public libraries, yet when
read giving an impression of power, of solid art, reminding you some¬
what, at once for worse and for better, of Corneille; a man with little to
please and amuse, but occasionally, as in his Lucio Papirio, with some¬
thing that rivets and impresses. Though no poet, and not pretending to
be one; though dry, cold, hard, inharmonious, and freely plagiarising,
Apostolo Zeno is what the Trissinos and Cintliios, the Contis and Maffeis,
the whole herd of Italian tragic writers, were not, a true artist, because,
unlike them, he is working at a living and national art. Zeno did not
give the melodrama its shape, he merely compressed it firmly into the
form required by the development of music; he merely defined the
necessary tendencies which had begun to exist with the very birth of the
opera.
The opera, as elaborated by Apostolo Zeno and perfected by Metas¬
tasio, is not a classical production like the French and Italian tragedy,
constructed according to supposed Aristotelian precepts and in avowed
imitation of the antique: it is, in the same sense as the plays of Shake¬
speare and Calderon, a romantic product, born unnoticed by the learned
and suffered to grow up unmolested by them, and only given an outer
semblance of classic correctness when already fully and individually de¬
veloped. It is the double product of the musical revolution of the early
seventeenth century, melody and noted declamation, woven into dramatic
shape with the addition of scenic display. These three items,—melody,
recitative, and mimetic and mechanical show,—are its three originally most
important parts; poetry is thought of only later, and must bend to suit them.
The opera is first for the ears and eyes, and only subsequently for the
reasoning faculties. It is the exposition, or the supposed exposition, of a
story by means of music, and action, and scenery; words and their recitation
(the staple of the pseudo-Greek drama) are added only from the necessity
of defining the story and giving words to the music. The words, therefore,
are such as the scenic display, above all as the music, requires them. Now
how do they require them ? What dramatic forms do they elaborate ?
In the very first place the scenic part entirely rejects the famous unity
of place: the object of the mechanician is to change the scene as often as
he possibly can, so that the poet has to satisfy Aristotle's commentators
(if he care to satisfy them at all) by the shallow excuse that "the
166
Metastasis and the Opera.
various places are all sufficiently near each other to be gone to and from
in the course of twenty-four hours." This violation of the unity of place
carries with it a real, although not avowed, violation of the unity of time;
and this unavowed violation of the unity of time induces an unblushing
violation of the unity of action. For as the scene keeps shifting, and the
actors appear now in a wood, now in a palace, now in a temple, there is
absolutely nothing to tell the audience whether the scene in the wood
takes place the same day, week, month, or even year, as the scene in the
palace; and as there is thus no perception of limits of time; as no one
clearly knows when the various actions take place, there ceases to be any
objection to introducing half a dozen various actions interwoven with
each other,—plots, counterplots, murders, remorse, vengeance, mistakes,
recognitions, complications enough for years and years of human life.
Thus, instead of a correct tragedy according to Aristotelian precepts, we
obtain an exceedingly loose and complicated play virtually setting all
three unities at defiance. And since so many plots and events are com¬
pressed into one piece, since the action is not one, but none in particular,
why not give up the Aristotelian canon of going from good to bad and
bad to worse,—why not satisfy the noble lords and ladies assembled to
celebrate a wedding or birthday, and the citizens and artisans come to
enjoy their Carnival or Ascension amusement, and neither at all wishing
to be moralised,—why not satisfy their craving for pleasant impressions
by making the play progress from bad to better, or at all events wind up
cheerfully? Why not? Here, then, is another piece of corrupt heresy:
happy endings are substituted for dismal ones, even as in the harrowing
Measure for Measure and the ferocious Fuenteorejuna of Lope de Vega.
Thus far the necessity of the scenic display has forced the opera out
of the old pseudo-classic groove; the requirements of the music will push
it into full romantic eccentricity, and the claims of the performers will
give it the finishing touches needed to make it what the good critics of
the eighteenth century called it—a monster, seductive or ridiculous. The
music which developed on the stage was reducible to two forms, recitative
and air. Besides the noted declamation, the one-voiced melody, there
existed, until the full development of rhythm and instrumentation in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century, only one really distinct musical
form, the fugue or madrigal, inherited from the sixteenth century. For
in default of that general rhythmical movement which could swing along
the various parts, and of that instrumental mixture which could solder
them together, as in the concerted pieces of the time of Paisiello, Cima-
rosa, and Mozart, there was no choice except between letting one part
(or one chord as in the choruses, where all the voices move together at
regular intervals) move alone, or making two or more parts move
together by that system of reciprocal balancing and pushing invented
Metastasio and the Opera.
167
by the cunning harmony of the Renaissance, and brought to perfection
in the fugued choruses of Handel and Bach, in the fugued duets and
trios of Marcello and Pergolesi. But the opera had from the earliest
rejected the fugued concerted piece as too formal, too scientific, too
difficult of execution, and too deadening of action on the stage; so, until
the appearance of the rhythmical or symphony-like concerted piece of
the late eighteenth century, it entirely dispensed with concerted music,
which was left to the church or the room. There was as yet no way of
making several voices sing together in a manner not unfit for the drama,
so the voices were left to sing each in turn, and to meet only in recitative,
except in the case of the simple chord-like chorus and in that of the
duet, which was merely two airs juxtaposed and crossing each other at
one or two points, two voices singing mainly alone, and only for a short
time at the third or fifth. So the musical elements were virtually recita¬
tive and air.
Obviously the recitative was used in all scenes of action, altercation,
and fluctuating feeling, for it was free, changing, impetuous as conflicting
emotion; obviously, also, the air was used when a person was left to speak
alone, or when a feeling had become perfectly homogeneous, for it was
single-voiced, consistent, and defined as the ruling emotion of an individual.
The bulk of the play, therefore,—the whole action, the whole friction of
characters and collision of interests, all that makes the piece move on,—
is given up to recitative; the superadded pieces, the lyrical similes, the
solitary outpourings of feeling, all that is stationary in the play, all this
is the domain of melody. Their functions are defined and separate; their
requirements are distinct and their influence opposed. The recitative,
the approximative noting of the speaking tones, the musical expanding
and ennobling of speech, requires, first of all, that speech be speech, and
chooses, therefore, that poetical form which is most like prose, freest,
least hampered by metre and rhyme, richest in various combinations of
phrase, in long, short, broken, sustained periods—blank verse. And of
this blank verse recitative requires that it be clear, to the point, chary
of involutions which perplex the musician, hostile to set phrases, to
figures of rhetoric, to oratorical lengthiness, to far-fetched graces, which
condemn him to monotony of modulation because they are monotonous
in spoken expression. Various, brief, clear, simple, abrupt, passionate,—
such is the blank verse which is required for recitative ; no oratorical
splendour, no stilted majesty: Seneca and Seneca's Italian imitators, the
French poets who made Augustus and Athaliah speak like Bossuet and
Bourdaloue, are here no longer models; the librettist must strike out a
new path, pushed onwards by the musician.
These are the requirements of recitative; those of melody are still greater.
In the first place melody absolutely requires lyric metres, metres totally
168
Metastasio and the Opera.
unlike that of the recitative—short, regular lines, rich in rhythm and
rhyme, strongly marked, compressed into the most definite shape;
strophes which both as wholes and as parts shall suggest well-marked
musical phrases. And these short lyrics must be as lyrical as possible.
They must be as absolutely homogeneous in feeling as is the music in
plan; they must be worked up into arabesques to correspond with those
of the voice; they must move towards a climax like the melodies to which
they are set; they must, in their briefness, contain lines, half-lines,
epithets, ejaculations, which the composer can detach, displace, and
repeat and re-repeat as often as the melody may require ; they must con¬
sist of metaphors, of similes which may be dwelt on and brought round
again in new forms, which may suggest some imitative accompaniment,
some particular vocal grace; above all, they must be manifold, offering
the composer as many different rhythms, as many different moods and
shades of mood, as possible; they must be by turns solemn and long-
stepped, sighing and pathetic, tripping and cheerful, abrupt and passion¬
ate, brief or lengthy, in order that every sort of melodic form may be
displayed. The lyrists of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century,
the Petrarchists and followers of Bembo and Tasso, with their monoto¬
nous tinkle of sonnets, their vague, languid, turgid drawl of canzoni, can
teach the librettist nothing; the ancients, with their curt metres, but
their convoluted, inextricable sentences, can teach but little. The librettist
must again follow his own devices, under the directions of the exacting
composer.
The scenic mechanician has forced the opera into being a play without
real unity of time, place, action, or plot,—an eccentric performance,
crowding together all manner of events, and ready to move from bad to
good as easily as from good to bad. The recitative has forced it to put all
the action into blank verse, simple, uninvolved, curt, varying, impetuous,
passionate, unoratorical, and unlyrical. Melody has forced it to interlard
this blank verse with lyric strophes of intensely lyrical feeling and form,
strongly marked, singable, metaphorical, various as various can be in
metre and style. The opera is already a monster, setting Aristotle, Tris-
sino, and Castelvetro at defiance ; romantic, mixing blank verse and
rhyme, dramatic and lyric, plain-spoken and metaphorical. Thus far we
have seen the influence of the decorator and the composer on the poet,
an influence which drives him to distraction, makes him'violate all rules,
and, instead of a worthless piece of imitation, makes him create a new
style, homogeneous and natural. There is yet another influence, that of
the performers.
These performers are singers; they are, first of all, so many voices of
various pitch, which have been trained from infancy to every sort of vocal
gymnastics ; whose respective importance is a purely musical one. A
Metastasio and the Opera.
169
natural law of music makes the highest pitched voice invariably the
most important; the singer with the highest voice, therefore, is inevit¬
ably the principal performer. Now, the highest voice necessarily suggests
relative youth ; the principal part is, consequently, almost always that of
a youth. And the emotions proper to youth, and best suited to high-
pitched voices, are the tender ones; the hero and heroine are, therefore,
invariably in love, love passionate, melancholy, or solemn, but love of some
sort; the harsher passions being left to the lower voices, so that ambition,
patriotism, vengeance, and such like, fall to the inferior performers
and become subordinate to that main love interest as the lower voices are
subordinate to the upper. The poet has thus to develope to the utmost
youthful characters and feelings, and to make love and the misfortunes
of lovers the chief interest of his play. In this the ancient Greeks
and Romans, who understood dramatic love only as a family virtue or
a family crime, the love of Alcestis or the love of Phaedra (both too
monotonous, the one in resignation, the other in fury, to give full scope
to music), can be of little help; nor can their Italian imitators; still
less the French dramatists, to whom young people are most often
puppets, like Severe in Polyeucte, Curiace in Les Horaces* Xipbares in
Mithridate, and Aricie in Phedre, and for whom love is a mere insipid
stuffing and bolstering for more violent and tremendous passion. The
Spaniards, with their jealous husbands, seduced maidens, duennas, and
poignards, as in Lope's play about the Infanta Dionysia and Calderon's
Alcalde of Zalamea, are almost equally useless. The poet who has created
Romeo and Jessica, Imogen and Helena, is unknown to the Italian
librettist of the eighteenth century: the development of youthful cha¬
racter, the development of love interest and story, must be done by
himself unassisted. Further, the singers are voices; they are easily
fatigued, and when fatigued are worthless; they insist upon having their
parts distributed in a way to equalise the work. Again, being voices
trained to various cunning artifices, they insist 011 displaying them all.
Each principal part requires at least four airs of four distinct characters :
a graceful, easy air, but not easy to sing (aria di mezzo carattere), a
pathetic air (cantabile), a speaking or dramatically active air (aria par-
lante), and a passionate, florid air {aria di bravura). The inferior parts
are not on any account to get anything as interesting as the superior
parts, and they are to get less, the ultima parte getting only one air, and
* In 1796 Cimarosa wrote liis beautiful Orazi c Cuviazi to a text of the comedian
Sografi. The play is absolutely modelled on Corneille's tragedy, without any addi¬
tions or omissions. But who is the principal performer? Horatius, the murderer
of his sister, as in Corneille ? No; Curiatius, who in Corneille is a mere doll; and
why? because Curiatius, having to sing love duets with Orazia, must be, according
to the habit of the day, the soprano, while Horatius must be the tenor, and conse¬
quently less important.
170
Metastasio and the Opera.
that in significant. Two airs of the same metre and character must not
succeed each other, and two performers having the same sort of voice
must not be made to sing in succession; claims in reality extremely
moderate and rational, but which the writers of the eighteenth century
declared monstrous, and which, while taking the opera more out of the
mould of the tragedy, completed it by balancing and co-ordinating its
parts.
Such was the musical drama of the early eighteenth century; a thing
born of scenic displays and concerts, cherished for a century by the whole
nation, moulded into a romantic, wholly original shape, by the require¬
ments of scenery, music, and singing. Such it was, defined and regular
in form, in the last days of the reign of the too-much forgotten Apostolo
Zeno; an original, elegant, well-balanced, dignified, and wholly national
form of art. The music to which it was linked was in high perfection,
a perfection of solemnity, of heroic strength and grandeur; of ample and
impetuous recitative, of majestic and solemn melody : the music of Lotti,
of Handel, of Caldara, of Marcello, of the great composers of the first
quarter of the last century. The singers who performed it were deeply
scientific, trained in the schools of Pistocchi and Scarlatti, supreme in
graduated and sustained solemnity, in powerful and well-marked rapidity;
magnificent in broad and dignified recitative; those heroically strong con¬
traltos and solemn sweet sopranos for whom Handel composed his
Rinaldo, his Giulio Cesare, his Admeto, his Flavio ; among them superb
actors and actresses, statuesquely fine in gesture, like Vittoria Tesi, the
Romanina, Senesino, Carestini, and that Cav. Niccolino of whom Steele
said that his gestures were as noble as those of an antique, and Addison,
in the days of Betterton, that he wished all English actors would take
him as a model.*
* Steele's account of Niccolini is very quaint:—" Signor Niccolini sets off the
character he bears in an opera by his action as much as he does the words of it by
his voice. Every limb, and every finger, contributes to the part he acts, insomuch
that a deaf man might go along with him in the sense of it. There is scarce a
beautiful posture in an old statue which he does not plant himself in. . . . He
performs the most ordinary action in a manner suitable to the greatness of his
character, and shows the prince even in the giving of a letter or the dispatching
of a message. ... I have seen him enter alone at the remotest part of the stage,
and advance from it, with such greatness of air and mien as seemed to fill the
stage, and at the same time commanded the attention of the audience with the
majesty of his appearance."—Tatler, No. 115, Tuesday, January 3, 1709. Steele,
be it remarked, had no musical sense, and abominated operas. Addison, in the
Spectator (in which there is another eulogium on Niccolini's acting), has a very
droll story of this singer's encounter with a lion, in the opera of Hydaspes, who
roared in high Dutch to a figured bass, and, being when off the stage a tailor, clawed
open the hero's doublet in order to make work for himself in his other capacity.
Niccolini's voice was a low contralto; Handel wrote for him his fine part of
llinaldo.
Metcistasio and the Opera.
171
Well-balanced, strong, solemn, heroic, is tliis opera of Zeno, of Cal-
dara, of Handel; in these qualities it can go no further. Let it be perfect.
Metastasio, Pergolesi, Leo, Jommelli, may arise.
IV.
In the year 1723 the Romanina got Metastasio engaged to write the
text of the opera in which she was to perform the following Carnival.
The subject chosen was Dido. The treatment was talked over between
the friends, perhaps also with the composer Sarro, and with the Cavalier
Niccolino, the greatest actor in Italy, so warmly admired by Addison and
Steele, and who was to play iEneas. The Romanina conceived, we are
told, one of the most original scenes. That the dramatic conduct of the
play, the masterly rapidity of the action, were due to the influence of the
great actress, is more than probable. Dido has faults, and in plenty;
there are many tedious scenes, tiresome disquisitions, action springing
from nothing; and ending in nothing; but it has a something, a simplicity
of language, a swiftness of movement, an energy of passion, which show
a new style and a master. The manly, generous, but lukewarm iEneas
has the ease and dignity which Steele has described in Niccolini; a
simplicity and modesty of gesture which yet fills the mind, because it is
broad and elegant. Dido has a proud drawing herself up, a sweeping
impetuosity of passion, a grand draping as it were of the part, whether
calm or excited, in which we can recognise what the Romanina must
have been,—in her scornful humbling of Jarbas, in her pretended in¬
difference to iEneas, in her pitiful clinging to him, above all, in the
splendid scene where, abandoned by all—dauntless, despairing, and be¬
wildered—she hurls her death as an evil omen on the path of iEneas, and
precipitates herself into the crashing ruins of the burning palace. In all
this there is something almost superior to Yirgil, superior as are the
ample modulations, the concentrated accent of a recitative to the natural,
but confused and feeble, intonation of mere spoken words.
Metastasio wrote not only the tragic play itself but wrote also two
little comic interludes, according to that illogical jumbling fashion which
prevails whenever an art is adolescent. After the curtain had fallen
upon the intensely tragic Romanina Dido upbraiding the stately and
statuesque Niccolini iEneas, it rose upon Signora Santa Marchesini, as a
prima donna, quarreling with the stage tailors about the length of her
train, and interrupted by the arrival of a famous buffo as Nibbio, a
ridiculous manager from the Canary Islands. Metastasio had no true
comic talent, yet these interludes arc droll enough—caricatures of the
very tragedy that they relieve, caricatures of the wrath and faintings of
just such a queen as Dido, caricatures of just such airs, with tremendous
172
Metastasio and the Opera.
nautical, botanical, meteorological similes: roses, rainbows, gilliflowers,
copper kettles, lions, tigers, lobsters, cold fowl, &c., as Benedetto Marcello
recommended to opera poets of the year 1720, and as Metastasio himself
made by the dozen—caricatures of the impresario, of the prima donna, of
the audience; turning of everything into ridicule fearlessly, from the
certainty that as soon as the tragedy was resumed people would weep as
much at the originals of the caricature as they had laughed at the carica¬
ture itself.
The success of Didone Abbandonata was prodigious; it was immediately
set by all the principal Italian composers, and performed on all the
principal Italian stages. It was printed and reprinted. To the com¬
posers it offered a musical perfection, an elegance and variety of blank
verse and rhyme such as had hitherto been wholly unknown. To the
actors it gave an intensity of movement to which they were unaccustomed,
to the public in the theatre, and to readers in the closet, it revealed a com¬
pleteness of character and action, a height of pathos and passion, such as
Apostolo Zeno could never have conceived. And from that moment
dates the end of Zeno's reign, the commencement of that of Metastasio.
Dido is in some respects a mature, a perfect work, showing a complete
mastery over the subject, an unerring instinct of the treatment. It is a
simple, strong, correct blow, correct perhaps because it is the first that is
struck. It is satisfactory because it is limited, because it does not aim
at much, because in it Metastasio does not attempt to do more than a
third of what can be done by him; because the plot is simple, the action
evident, the characters and passions concentrated, and given ready made
by Virgil. The plays which succeeded Didone are woefully inferior as
wholes; they are as unsatisfactory as Dido is the reverse; they are confused,
insipid, exaggerated, disagreeable, from the sense that the poet is at a
loss how to proceed. They are often ridiculous in inanity and artificiality:
in C'ato in Utica, Caesar at one moment threatens Cato with Roman
hardness and terseness, at another talks Petrarchescpie sonnets at Cato's
daughter ; in Semiramide Riconoscinta, Semiramis, pretending to be her
own son, is made the judge in a dispute for the hand of a Bactrian
princess, is recognised by a lover who had tried to drown her on a pre¬
tence of infidelity, and who consequently gives up the Bactrian princess,
and refuses the cup which she offers her three suitors. The Hyrcanian
prince, who, thinking his favoured rival would accept the cup, had put
poison in it, has it offered in turn to him, and is sorely puzzled what
to do. . . . And thus for three acts of interminable complications. In
Alessandro nelle Indie, Porus pretends to be one of his own generals,
carries messages to and from himself, and offers to betray himself into the
hands of Alexander, in order to catch the latter. In Siroe, a princess,
wishing to avenge her father on the tyrant Chosrocs, dresses as a man,
Metastasio and the Opera.
173
becomes his favourite councillor, urges him to every degree of injustice
towards his son, in order to make that son, who loves her, the instrument
of her vengeance. The son refuses; is accused of conspiracy, cannot clear
himself without accusing her, and so on. In Artaserse, the hero, accused
of regicide by his father, and nnable to disculpate himself, is let out of
prison by the king, his bosom friend, and thus comes up just in time to
crush a revolt, by means of which his father intended to depose the king
and liberate him. There is so much action, so much plot, so much
heroism, so much lyrism and love-making, so much blundering and
recognising, that yon get wholly indifferent to everything, to these
eternally agitated men and women, and to these everlasting theatrical
strokes—the very good qualities of the plays, the real passion, real pathos,
real poetry, increase the impatience with the confused whole. Yet the
Italian public did not grow impatient, and was not dissatisfied with these
plays. Nay, it was better pleased with tliem, in their imperfection,
than with Dido in its perfection. And the Italians? were right. They
instinctively recognised that the very inequality, the very languor and
exaggeration of these later works, was the result of a development
of Metastasio's genius ; that his uncertainty arose from striving after
new effects; that the faults arose from the attempt to seize new beauties;
that the want of proportion was the effect of growth. He was expanding
the style, seeking its limits, fumbling for its characteristics; every fault
corresponded to a new merit. If he was over-lyric, he was striking out
lyric beauties; if he was over-complicated, it was because he was more
varied and inventive; if his action was precipitate, his passion accumu¬
lated, and his movement jerky, it was because his action had become more
rapid, his passion more concentrated, his movement freer; if he was sway¬
ing between the example of the French and of the Spaniards it was
because lie was absorbing some of the qualities of both. There cannot
be another Dido : it must for ever remain his best unless it be followed
by very different works. And if Dido be Metastasio's best, Metastasio
will never be Metastasio, the Metastasio of Acliille, of Demofoonte, of the
Olimpiade, of Jtegolo. He will be but a better Zeno, forgotten like Zeno.
Thus, despite the bungling work of these plays, they were far more suc¬
cessful than Dido. They were newer, more original, contained more
elements of greatness ; irregular, but great beauties, like the roughly but
grandly sketched Cato, far more Roman and more dramatic than Addi¬
son's mild platonician ; like the two slightly executed, but powerfully
conceived characters of Siroes and iEtius—noble, arrogant, boastful,
passionate—like the beautifully pathetic situation of Arsaces in Artaserse,
judged and condemned by the father whose crime he expiates, but dares
not reveal: beauties also of lyric expression, of metrical originality and
power, of brilliantly conceived plot and action. In Dido, Metastasio is
174
Metastasio and the Opera.
drawing correctly, with mastery, after the antique; but lie can do more
than copy the antique, he can compose whole pictures, balance large groups,
manage cunning lights, combine splendid colours. He has now left the
antique; he is sketching confused groups, blurring strange colours—no
matter, he is learning his true work.
Almost immediately after the successful appearance of Dido, the Ro-
manina, her husband and Metastasio, left Naples for Rome. Metastasio's
brother, Leopold, was employed to look for a house, and bought or hired
one in the Corso, between Piazza del Popolo and S. Giacomo, not far
from where, some fifty years later, Goethe was to finish his Ipliigenia in
the palace opposite Rondanini's. To settle in Rome was equivalent, on
the part of the Romanina, to retiring into private life, as ecclesiastical
prudery would suffer no woman on the stage. Marianna Bulgarelli's
career was over; her future interest in life lay solely in Metastasio. She
was more devoted to him than before. She took into her house not only
himself,—young, famous, and agreeable, and whom she idolised,—but what
was very different, his whole family: an old man, who, however worthy of
respect, was but an ex-soldier and a small ex-shopkeeper; an old and broken
woman, ignorant, illiterate, accustomed to hobble about with a kerchief
on her head, and an earthenware brazier under her apron, much honoured
by the company of the neighbouring housekeepers ; a couple of girls,
perhaps a little less homely, but probably not much more cultured, very
like those whom the Romanina may have seen, gaudily tricked out, eat¬
ing pumpkin seeds and oranges in the highest part of the theatre; and
finally Metastasio's elder brother, Leopoldo, well' educated and well-bred,
but lazy, peevish, and perpetually dissatisfied. But they were Pietro
Metastasio's family, and for Pietro's sake, for the sake of his fair and
winning present, his dimly splendid future, for the sake of her passionate
devotion, the Romanina,—intellectual, cultured, a great artist, accustomed
to the society of men of rank or of talent, a proud, though self-made
woman,—made these people her companions daily, hourly, and for as long
as they chose to stay. These good people must have felt rather odd in
their new position; they must have said and done things which made the
Romanina's grand visitors look at each other and smile. Was the Ro¬
manina vexed ? Probably not. She may have smiled and tried to set
all right and make everyone comfortable, but the elegant little Abate
Metastasio, in his dapper black dress and a little white wig, with his soft,
dignified manners, may sometimes have turned aside—crimson or livid—
to hide his shame and disgust at some droll blunder of his father, or
mother, or sisters. Yet, saving such little mortifications, his life was
pleasant enough. True, here in Rome everyone knew about Gravina,
some about the arte bianca shop, and there were all the Trapassis to tell
their own talc. But living in this rather strange fashion in the house of
Metastasio ancl the Opera.
175
an actress, surrounded by the harum-scarum theatrical world, risen from
the mud and living strange lives, Metastasio got a sort of devil-may-care
feeling, and thought less about proprieties and dignity than before, for
Metastasio's preoccupation throughout life was to come up to the notions
of those who immediately surrounded him. And the life in Rome was
pleasant in its way. There was 110 further thought of the law: Metas¬
tasio was to gain his bread writing texts for the opera. What he earned
was spent on bread only metaphorically, since he and his lived off the
Romanina, but it was a pleasant pocket-money for his little vanities and
amusements, of which there were plenty. There was much company in
the house, and always amusing, literary, and theatrical folk, who would
talk, brag, and had many and various adventures ; young idlers, Clevel¬
and agreeable, jovial men of the middle classes, who cared more for
music and jesting than for their shops and offices; light ecclesiastics,
gallant and cynical; occasionally also some traveller or passer-by.
So they lived in Home during the winter, Metastasio writing his plays
and looking on, while the energetic Romanina drilled the boy actresses of
the Aliberti theatre; teaching them how not to trip up in their skirts,
how to hold their fans and fold their arms, all extremely droll, no doubt;
and generally instructing everyone, from the prince of Persia in his fair
wig, immense plumed helmet, and gilt manacles, down to the pages and
senators and other dummies. Then the excitement of the final perform¬
ance: the pasquinades, the applause, the triumph; the Carnival amuse¬
ments, with the windows crammed full of friends; the riderless Barbary
horses rushing down the Corso ; the stream of masks harlequinading
along, throwing up flowers and sweetmeats, amidst a rain of plaster com¬
fits and of witticisms ; the waxlights lit, and snuffed out, between street
and window; the yells, grimaces, quips and cranks, and everything that
is childishly, barbarously amusing.
Then, during the dull Lent, some oratorio or sacred opera to write for
this prelate or that, some wheedling of ostentatious princes of the Church,
as Metastasio never entirely gave up the hope of ecclesiastical preferment,
wishing, as was quite possible in the Rome of those days, to dine off the
altar and sup off the stage"; to live in the house of an actress, surrounded
by theatrical riffraff and adventurers, and still to hold some sanctimoni¬
ous office—clerk of the Inquisition, secretary of the Congregation of the
Index, treasurer of the Propaganda Fide, or something similar.
And perhaps, too, there were walks in the spring, lazy strolls in the
violet-grown dells of the Villa Pamphili and beneath the inky holm-oaks
of the Borghese. Yes, there must surely have been such: the cantatas
which Metastasio wrote about that time prove that lie was not always 011
the pavement of the Corso and the boards of the Teatro Aliberti. In;
these charming little pastorals of a page or so, of which the gruff and
176
Metastasio and the Opera.
sarcastic Porpora set the blank Averse in pithiest, lightest recitative, and
wrote to the rhymes the sweetest, brightest melodies, wreathed with deli¬
cate cadences, starred with crisp turns and sparkling little shakes, in these
cantatas of Metastasio's there is an element of truth which there was not
in the Endymion or the Gardens of the Hesperides—there are no patches
of Virgilian or Theocritan colour, there is no sweetly insipid perfume of
Tasso and Guarini; Thyrsis and Chloe, Pliilenus and Irene, the shep¬
herdess who is invited to go on the sea, fretted by the moonlight; the
shepherd who dreams that he sits on the brink of the well with his
beloved, and starts up awake at the appearance of his rival; the youth
and the nymph who are caught by the shower and take refuge in the cave:
all these bright, graceful, actively feeling and moving little figures, are
neither real rustics like Lorenzo de' Medici's immortal Nencia, nor yet
dainty Dresden ladies and gentlemen, with flowered bodices, long waist¬
coats, powder, and crooks. They are something betwixt and between,
embodiments of impressions received neither from the fields and woods
nor from the clipped avenues and terraces of a garden, but from the sort
of Elysian ruralness of those sweet, solemn Roman villas, where the
horses graze beneath the red-stemmed pines, where you tread on a carpet
of lilac anemones and starry daffodils, where the bays meet overhead, and
the water trickles over the maidenhair of the broken fountains, where
Arcadia seems real, Arcadia neither of dusty pedants like Crescimbeni's
yonder on the Janiculum, nor of porcelain beaux, like that of M. de
Florian, but an Arcadia of your own, according to your own heart.
In the scorching Roman summer there were the little open theatres,
where Pulcinella and Coviello jabbered the Neapolitan dialect, which
Metastasio preferred to his own stately Roman, and where hairdressers'
apprentices and coffeehouse waiters played great ladies and sly waiting-
maids. Later, in the pestilential autumn, there were villeggiaturas at
Albano and Frascati, with long games at cards, noisy midnight walks,
and singing and laughter to heart's content. Every now and then there
was even some longer excursions to Bologna, where the buffoonish, jolly
men of science flocked round the Romanina and Metastasio; to Venice,
where the Dido was received with rapture; where they met old Neapolitan
friends, Porpora and Vinci composing, and Metastasio's adopted twin
brother, Farinello, singing, no longer a boy, but the greatest, most
brilliant, most versatile, most magnificent of singers, living in a sort of
permanent apotheosis. At Venice also they met the Saxon Hasse and his
famous, beautiful wife Faustina, staunch friends in later years, and des¬
tined to set and sing Metastasio's verses into popularity all over the
world. And at Venice a famous rococo painter, by name Amigoni, later
destined to paint the finest scenes for Metastasio's plays, put the poet into
a half realistic, half allegorical picture, with himself, Farinello, and the
Metcistasio and the Opera.
177
Faustina, to whom he might have added her husband Hasse; with these
three Metastasio was to be indissolubly connected, though going through
life in different countries; while increasing their individual fame, con¬
stantly contributing each to the other's triumph; they were young and
hopeful, fit to be painted together. The Romanina Amigoni did not dream
of putting into his picture : she was gradually becoming a thing of the
past.
But meanwhile time was going on. All hopes of ecclesiastical prefer¬
ment had vanished; the price of each of Metastasio's new dramas was
fixed at 300 scudi (about 601.); their success was certain. All was going
well, but all was limited: more new plays, more 300 scudi, more applause,
he knew it all by heart, and it probably began to pall upon him. Such
a smooth, straight road, down which he could see for miles, was depress¬
ing him; he would fain have turned a corner, at the risk of whatever
might appear round it. Perhaps, also, the sense of dependence upon the
generosity of the Romanina began to weigh upon him; perhaps he was
weary of being so constantly thought of and cared for; weary of being
the sole thought of a woman who no longer sufficed for him. He was
what people in those days called imprudent, and she was a prudent
woman—he imprudent, safe in her care; she prudent in her absolute
devotion: the words sound like an irony. Imprudent he was, in the
sense of following his whims, of ceding to his passions, and the Romanina
was prudent in trying to restrain a weak, selfish man. Perhaps she
would have had him more manly, stronger, more capable of restraint,
able to repress all but some huge folly like her own, more like her own
self—blind to the fact that had he been like her she could not have felt
towards him as she did, nor he have been what he had become to her.
There were petty quarrels, the more frequent because Metastasio brooked
interference less, now he was tired of dependence. There were worse than
quarrels, worse than anxieties: Metastasio, from fault or weakness, got
himself into a predicament which placed him at the mercy of enemies.
This is all his biographers dimly hint, speaking vaguely of his " frequent
visits to a person for whom he had a polite partiality," of " regard towards
her family forbidding further explanations;" of calumnies spread; of a
lawsuit threatened, and suppressed by the influence of a friendly cardinal;
of the matter not ending till the mysterious person had " preso stato,"
which can mean only one of two things, marriage or the cloister. What¬
ever the matter was it must have been scandalous, judging by the ex¬
treme anxiety shown by Metastasio to suppress all discussion on the
subject, as in his letter written to Cardinal Gentili, written some years
later—the most abject humiliation, the most painful knee-kissing, the
most pathetic entreaty for help which could be extorted from a man who
N
178
Metastasio and the Opera.
has let himself slip into a disgraceful position, who cannot defy calumny,
and sees safety only in complete silence. Altogether, the pleasant life
had become embittered.
Did the Romanina notice it ? Surely. But she did not become angry.
She let Metastasio suggest to his old protectress, the Princess Belmonte
Pignatelli, that he was anxious for change, for a less precarious position;
that—ah, were it only possible! if only—but he had no thought of it—
if he might obtain employment at Vienna, in case Apostolo Zeno, the
Court poet, should require assistance. The Princess Belmonte repeated
the insinuation to her sister-in-law, the Countess Althann, widow of the
favourite of the Emperor, and herself at one moment his flame; then the
matter was left to itself. The suggestion worked its way. On Septem¬
ber 27, 1729, Metastasio received a grand letter from the Austrian Em¬
bassy, a letter whose aspect and seals must have made him turn white
and red, and the Romanina tremble and sicken. It was from Prince
Pio di Savoja, one of the Emperor's lords-in-waiting, and said that the
universal applause excited by Metastasio's poems, and the approbation
awakened in the august Emperor, were the reason for which his Majesty
desired to offer his service to the Abate Metastasio, on whatever terms
he might mention; that Apostolo Zeno, the present Court poet, wished
for no other companion, and that, as soon as an answer in the affirmative
was received, money would be forwarded to cover the expense of the
journey from Rome to Vienna.
Metastasio was astounded, not at the proposal, for which he had been
sighing, but at the rapid fulfilment of his dearest wishes. His biogra¬
phers tell us that the letter put him into terrible perplexity; that he
could not resolve to leave his dear native city, his dear father, brother,
and sisters, his dear benefactress; that, without uttering a word, he
placed the letter in the Romanina's hand; that she was overjoyed, chid
him for his coolness, laughed, joked, and saluted him Poeta Cesareo.
Alas! the pretty little story must be apocryphal: the post had been long
coveted, the indecision long settled, the Romanina's sacrifice had long
been made; and an answer, joyfully accepting the offer, and suggesting
4,000 florins as annual stipend, was despatched the very next morning.
Presently came Prince Pio's reply: 4,000 florins were deemed too much;
would the Abate Metastasio accept 3,000, and a hundred ungheri for
the travelling expenses? The Abate Metastasio most humbly and grate¬
fully accepted. He begged time to settle his affairs in Rome, to provide
for his family (already provided for by the Romanina); to put an opera
on to the stage, &c.; all would be completed by Lent, and in Lent he
would start. ^
All was completed by Lent. His family was to remain with the Bul-
garellis; Leopoldo was to continue at-*the bar; the Romanina was to
Metcistcisio and the Opera.
179
teach the singers of the Teatro Aliberti how to perform his pieces; he
was to go, become rich, great, who knows what? And in a few years he
would obtain a holiday, and pass it in Rome; or they should all come
over to Vienna—why not? It was not so melancholy after all; only a
little twinge at parting, a little sickness of his too feminine sensibility, a
few tears, and then all would be over; once off, all would be merry as
ever. But would it be merry for the Romanina; for her who was going
nowhere, who had no future, and was to lose the present ? Metastasio
wept, and wept copiously, we may be sure, and then sprang cheerily into
his postchaise. Marianna Bulgarelli parted from him with a smiling
face, and words of hope and encouragement; but when he was gone there
remained in her poor life a void, a darkness, cheered up only by the hope
of seeing him again.
V.
Charles VI. of Austria, King of Hungary, Emperor of Germany,
King of Naples and Sicily, sovereign of the Milanese, Caesar Ever August,
was a very stately and splendid sovereign, surrounded by very solemn
magnificence. True, the Austrian house was beginning to be the foot¬
ball of Europe; his father and brother had been brow-beaten by Louis
XIV.; he himself had been turned out of Spain by the little imbecile
Philip V. True, he was on the point of losing Parma and Naples, and
could with difficulty cope with his rebellious electors ; true, his daughter
was to be ignominiously deprived of the empire by Charles of Bavaria, and
to be buffeted about by Frederick the Great, Augustus of Saxony, George
II., M. de Choiseul, and Madame de Pompadour; true, the Austrian
finances were deplorable, the Austrian people ragged and ignorant, the
Austrian armies ever defeated; true, he was a pompous empty pate:
true, most true, yet Charles VI. was surrounded by a halo of glory, an
aureole of victory, a dim majesty of Roman imperialism. And he knew
it. He felt the necessity of a degree of holiness, of solemnity, of magni¬
ficence, such as only the heir of the Cassars could assume. His court, his
capital, were full of prudish gallantry, of frivolous devotion, of osten¬
tatious bad taste, of majestic brutality, of imbecile bigotry : a mixture of
French elegance and levity with German coarseness and heaviness, Spanish
solemnity and vacuity, Hungarian pride and love of display, Oriental
splendour and misery, and Italian love of art. Feudal courtiers kept
musical chapels and drank fifty sorts of wine at dinner; Jesuits built
plaster beribboned churches; ladies we^e publicly and solemnly asked to
appoint their lovers ; men who had struck priests who had insulted them
were promenaded through the town in sackcloth, holding expiatory
180
Metastasio and the Opera.
candles; lierotics were slaughtered in Silesia; Turks were dreaded on the
Danube; the Empress and her ladies amused themselves with archery
meetings where jewelled Cupids were shot at; the people amused them¬
selves with seeing robbers and murderers racked and broken on the
wheel; there were grand circus games, where bears were baited, bulls
torn to pieces by dogs, and horses ripped open; German comedies, where
Hanswurst and Kasperl said and did all that is filthiest; and Italian
operas, where heroic contraltos and idyllic sopranos sang virtue and
clemency to exquisite music: of that strange medley of refinement,
brutality, pomp, vice, and bigotry which constituted a German Court of
the early eighteenth century, that of Vienna was a perfectly balanced
specimen: less vicious than Saxony, less brutal than Prussia, but as
dignified, splendid, and bigoted as any. And in this Olympus, with his
feet on the heads of Magyar and Bohemian nobles, of German mercenary
generals, of Italian and Spanish princes, of Occidental and Oriental
magnates, was throned Charles VI. Ever August, with his confessor behind
him, his humpbacked, velvet and diamond clad dwarf on the right hand,
his gouty, grave chapelmasters, and plump, wistful singers, on the left.
Like all of his family, a mongrel, without sympathy for any nationality,
Charles VI. was too much of a German lout to be a successful Spaniard,
too much of a Spanish grandee to be a satisfactory German; he had
suffered too much from France to endure anything French in dress,
language, or manners; so, on the whole, he inclined towards being Italian
in all that he could be. And, while as a German, a Spaniard, a Hun¬
garian, Charles VI. was but a huge, pompous puppet, twitched by the
various European stringholders into attitudes the droller for his very
gravity, as an Italian he had his fine side in his sincere passion for music
and his truly intelligent cultivation of it. He was a good performer, a
tolerable composer, an excellent critic, though, as artistic sovereigns
usually are, rather jealous of supreme merit. His two chapelmasters,
Fux and Caldara, were somewhat ancient and pedantic, innovating genius
rather disconcerting Caesar's musical habits; but he also employed more
modern and fashionable composers, like Lotti, Porpora, and later Hasse.
He would have liked to compose his operas and to sing them in person,
but the sense of Cajsarean dignity restrained him. He did the next best:
he made all his dependents learn music; he sent his little Archduchess,
Maria Theresa, on to a miniature stage when she was still an infant, and
made her sing duets with Signor Senesino when she was already Grand
Duchess of Tuscany; he had operas performed by his chamberlains and
ladies of honour ; he accompanied Farinello on the harpsichord, and well-
nigh gave singing lessons to the greatest of living singers; he had long
interviews with his chapelmasters, and presided at every sort of rehearsal.
He squandered the money of his poverty-stricken country on wonderful
Metastasio and the Opera.
181
performances in the open air, where the choruses were sung by a hundred
distinguished singers ; on operas in the Favorita gardens, with astounding
scenic shoAvs and naval battles, like the one seen by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, which cost 30,000/.; he kept companies entirely composed of
celebrities, like the Tesi, the Faustina, Carestini, Senesino, Lotti's wife,
and the like, of whom a single one was enough to sustain the great
theatres of Naples, Venice, or Rome. For the sake of his operas also he
kept Apostolo Zeno, a Cretan Venetian, one of the most distinguished
literati and humanists of the day, who received 4,000 florins for one or
two dramas, and who was assisted by another playwright, Pariati, at a
salary of 2,000 florins. And for the sake of his operas Charles VI.,
on Apostolo Zeno retiring from active service, had called from Italy its
greatest dramatist, the young Abate Pietro Metastasio.
The honour of being the servant of so great and splendid a sovereign
was too much for Metastasio's feelings ; he himself wrote home that,
although he had prepared himself for the event, the presence of Cassar
Augustus entirely overpowered him. It was at the palace of Laxemburg.
The gentleman-in-waiting introduced the poet into the room and left him
on the threshold. Metastasio made three most humble bows, one at the
door, one half-way, and one before the Emperor, and went down on one
knee before the immense and monumental monarch, not, as in his pictures,
in a breastplate and laurel crown, but in walking dress, a three-cornered
beaver on his majestic peruke, leaning against a table, looking very
serious indeed. " Rise, rise," said Caesar, and Metastasio, in faltering
tones, began the speech he had probably composed before his departure
from Rome, which sounded thus: " I know not which is the greater, my
joy or my confusion, at finding myself at the feet of your Cesarean
Majesty. This is a moment for which I have longed ever since my
earliest years, and now I find myself not only in the presence of the
greatest monarch of the world, but even in the glorious capacity of a
servant of his. I know the obligations of this position, and if the loss of
a great part of my blood could make me a Homer I should not hesitate
to become one. I shall, however, do my best to supply my want of talent,
sparing neither attention nor fatigue in your Majesty's service. I know
that, whatever the degree of my incompetence, it will always be less than
the infinite clemency of your Majesty, and I hope that the position of
poet to Caesar may give me that merit which I cannot hope from my
talent." Charles VI. listened patiently, and as he listened his counte¬
nance became more serene (why should it have ever been otherwise?), and
then he answered: " I was already persuaded of your ability, but I am
now further convinced of your good manners, and I do not doubt that you
will satisfy me in all my Ca;sarly service; nay, that you will force me to
be satisfied with you." The Emperor stopped, waiting to see whether
182
Metastasio and the Opera.
Metastasio liad any request to make; he begged permission to kiss
Caesar's hand, but Caesar laughed and shook hands friendlily with him.
"Delighted by this demonstration of affection," writes Metastasio, "I
squeezed Ca3sar's hands in both mine in a transport of pleasure, and gave
it so sonorous a kiss that my most clement master could not but perceive
that it came from my heart."
We may smile at this scene, at this ludicrous crawling speech of the
poet, at the solemn mien of the Emperor, at the transports of joy and the
overwhelming sense of honour with which the greatest of Italian writers
received the stinted, ungracious civility of this pompous Caesarly jackass ;
but we must remember what royalty was in those days, what a halo, what
a glory, what holy splendour surrounded it; we must remember that the
Bold Bavarian had not yet snatched the imperial crown ; that Frederick
the Great, with his shabby clothes and democratic manners, had not yet
brought Austria to the last gasp ; that Maria Theresa had not yet made
herself cheap to everyone, from the King of France's mistress to the
smallest vice-chapelmaster of Salzburg ; that the Holy Roman Empire,
that mysterious inheritance of the Csesars, that link between Augustus,
Charlemagne, and modern times, was still intact; and that this pompous
jackass, this dull, crowned music-master, was its incarnation, and as such
stood on a mental pedestal, in a mystic niche, which could be approached
only with awe and trembling. Metastasio was in no respect superior to
his age, which was servile; nay, his temper made him improve even on
the servility of his day; so Metastasio was extremely happy, and there
was a more interested reason for his satisfaction. If he had offered to
shed his blood in order to write better plays for Czesar, if he had squeezed
Ctesar's hand with such transport, if he had given it such a sonorous kiss,
it was not merely from abstract loyalty and abstract servility: the post of
Court poet was, in his eyes, a golden door to a vaguely-splendid career of
Court favour. And why not ? The Emperor, constantly busy about his
operas, his oratorios, his cantatas and serenatas, had frequent oppor¬
tunities of noticing his theatre poet, of talking with him, of making him
his intimate. Metastasio's predecessor, Zeno, who had left Vienna just
before his arrival, had been most remarkably honoured by Charles VI.;
he had been treated with the most astonishing familiarity, had been made
the Emperor's companion, his friend, his crony, had been given oppor¬
tunities of obtaining a splendid position at Court, if he had not been too
great an old fool to seize his advantages. And if Zeno, an old, simple,
crabbed scholar, caring and knowing only about parchments and books,
without a presence, without manners, without desire to please, could have
gained so much of Cesar's affection, what might not be done by a young,
handsome man, by an acknowledged genius, a man of the finest manners,
the most delicate tact, the most insinuating conversation, who hungered
Metastasio and the Opera.
183
for imperial condescension, and could give such heartfelt and sonorous
kisses ? Ah, yes, Metastasio would captivate Cassar as he had captivated
Gravina and the Bomanina.
Meanwhile he looked around him in this new world of Vienna, this
world of mongrel feudalism, of heraldic hierarchy, in which people were
judged of by their quarterings; so different from his own democratic Italy,
where servility was unprejudiced and practical, the only inequality being
that between those who could confer favours and those who could accept
them. Metastasio did not know a word of German, any more than any
other foreigner of the eighteenth century, to whom the language was a
mere guttural jabber fit for drunken postillions and half-witted alchem¬
ists, but not for polite lips or polite ears. But this ignorance, although
it was of no hindrance in conversing with chamberlains, maids of honour,
and similar civilised people, was a great disadvantage when coping with
Viennese servants and tradesfolk, especially where there was not much
money to facilitate comprehension. Metastasio, therefore, ingratiated
himself with a fellow-countryman, Signor Niccolo Martinez, a Neapolitan
of Spanish origin, and interpreter of the Papal Nuncio. He had long
lived in Vienna ; his wife knew how to deal with Germans ; both he and
she were pleasant, reputable people, just rich enough to have a comfort¬
able home, just poor enough to be glad to share its comforts with a man
who could pay for them. So Metastasio took up his abode in the Mar¬
tinez's apartment, up a great many stairs, In the Kohlmarkt Street, and
arranged his occupation methodically, as was his habit, and as was easy
for a man who had always been taken care of by others.
It being a pious Court, he began his day by going to mass at the
Capuchin church; then he wrote his plays, then he went about paying
his visits, all with the regularity of clockwork. He thought to captivate
all the Viennese magnates with his handsome face, his discreet wit, his
delicate scents, his elegant, subdued dress, his perfect balance of good
qualities. And so he went his round of visits. But the Austrians seem
to have been rather cold towards this plebeian Italian poet, without
quarterings, without ancestors, with nothing but talent, and without a
voice, which was the only thing that could make these blue-blooded
feudal grandees thaw towards an inferior; for a singer, like a spaniel,
a horse, a dwarf, was one of those inferior beings which could be fondled
without indignity. But Metastasio was only a poet, that is to say, some¬
thing very like a valet: being the Emperor's poet, he had indeed a place
in the hierarchy, not as high perhaps as that of the Emperor's chief
butler, or chief groom, or chief dwarf, but he had a place, and one which
must be recognised even by those who, instead of writing verses for
Csesar, had the supreme honour of handing him his wig, and buckling his
garters. Beyond such a frigid recognition of Metastasio, things appear
184
Metastasio and the Opera.
scarcely to have gone; and Metastasio ever after liated the Anstrians,
especially the ladies, seated solemnly over their samplers, from which they
would raise but a supercilious glance at the poet. Metastasio's good
looks and graceful speeches were unremarked by all this blinking, lisping,
half-deaf Viennese pride ; but they made a conquest, and an important
one.
Do you remember the Countess of Althann, to whom, as to her sister-
in-law, the good Princess Belmonte had applied on Metastasio's behalf,
and through whose influence the post of Poeta Cesareo had been obtained
for him? To her, as the source of his good fortune, as the relative of his
former patroness, as the greatest of Italo-Austrian great ladies, Meta¬
stasio immediately turned. She had perhaps seen him once or twice at
Naples, where her husband bad been Viceroy at one time; she knew all
about him through the Princess Belmonte; she received him very well,
and he, rejected by the Austrian grand folk, solitary and discouraged,
threw himself at the feet of this, his only hope. Marianna Pignatelli was
a very great lady indeed, both by birth and by marriage; her late
husband, John Michael III., Count of Althann, had been the chief
favourite of Charles VI. She herself had long been, and perhaps still
was, the Emperor's chief flame—honours in a German Court, where every
infraction of the morality of lower folk was sanctified by its title, badge,
and place in the hierarchy. She was very rich, had beautiful possessions
in Moravia, and moreover wras extremely influential and venerated at
Court. She was an intellectual, liberal-minded woman, not indeed (being
an Austrian by marriage) as jovially familiar with writers, composers, and
singers, as her warm-hearted sister-in-law, the Princess Belmonte, could
be in unceremonious, undignified Naples; but appreciative, encouraging,
gracious to talent, Avhatever its number or paucity of quarterings. Meta¬
stasio's works she admired, his company she enjoyed. For the Countess
Althann was probably weary at heart: weary of her grandeur, weary of
the Court routine, weary of the empty-brained people with stars on their
breasts and keys on their coat-tails, who formed her society; incapable,
from Italian birth and education, of taking an interest in the squabbles
for precedence and for footstools, which occupied the court ; incapable,
from character, of feeling attachment for these pompous male and female
Court dolls. Moreover, she was ceasing to be young; forty was fast
approaching, and, as it approached, her famous beauty, her famous fasci¬
nations, were vanishing. Charles VI. may still have been jealous, but he
probably had long ceased to be in love; she was turning into a neglected
dowager, without much interest in life. At that moment appeared Meta¬
stasio, young, good-looking, witty, broad in opinions, delightful in
manners, an Italian, a genius or vei*y nearly, and ready to see her
young, beautiful, fascinating, all that she had been; ready to adore
Metastasio and the Opera.
185
her discreetly, humbly,—raising his eyes upon her only enough to show her
that he wished to do more but dared not. She was delighted with him,
with bis respectful love : she encouraged him. That she was amiable,
clever, charming, is probable ; that she was rich, powerful, his only
resource and hope, is certain. Little by little he made his way with
her, not foreseeing perhaps what did happen, that the great lady ceded
completely to him, became his slave, his mistress—most wonderful of all,
bis legitimate though secret Avife ; that he should have foreseen this is
scarce possible; but in the Countess Althann he saw an ally, a protec¬
tress, who might push him on in this dull stupid Court, and help him
even more than the sonorous kisses on the Emperor's hand.
And meanwhile it was pleasant ; Caesar was distant and Olympic
indeed, but benign; the Empi-ess was encouraging ; the archduchesses
adorably gracious ; one play succeeded better than the other; with
time and patience he might still obtain as much notice as Zeno had
done, and he would know how to set it to profit. And the Countess
Althann would help him on. . . . All went well. In the winter he
went daily, as was the duty of a respectful cavaliere servente, to amuse
his noble protectress while she was having her beautiful hair curled, poma¬
tumed, and powdered, and again in the evening when she received her
friends. There were long chatty games at cards ; music, with Hasse and
Cnldara to play the harpsichord, and the Faustina, Farinello, or himself,
to sing, and pleasant talks with condescending ministers and diplomats.
In the summer there was the visit to the Countess in Moravia, the long
strolls through the woods, the rambles gun in hand, everything familiar
and charming. But there was not complete peace in Metastasio's mind
while he shuffled his cards, talked gaily, and listened to the music : some¬
thing began to worry him. He had found a delightful protectress here
at Vienna,—a beautiful, accomplished, rich, powerful and loving Mari-
anna ; but there was another Marianna, the one he had left in Rome.
The Romanina had permitted hirn to leave her; she had supported the
parting with fortitude, she had been happy in the thought of his happi¬
ness. But onee away, her mental eyes were never turned from the
direction in which he had gone; she attended to household matters, to
the wants of her husband, of Metastasio's father, brother, and sisters ;
she directed the performance of his plays at Rome : all Avent on as usual,
but her thoughts were far away, straining to see through the space that
separated him from her, straining to see him, to follow his actions, to
live in his presence. Much she doubtless supplied by her own fancy,
working upon the scanty facts contained in his letters. But he did not
tell her enough of himself and of his doings. Why not ? Perhaps because,
wearied of long tutelage, he was vaguely vexed by her attempt still to keep
him in her sight, under her supervision. He wished to enjoy his liberty,
186
Metastasio and the Opera.
to account to no one for his actions, to be independent, and independent
she would not permit him to be. His letters (Heaven knows bow much
pruned and revised by those who published them) are at first affectionate,
dutiful, but with a sort of hurried affection and quickly despatched duti-
fulness. There is no lingering over this sort of talk with the distant one,
no fond entering into such details as could make her see him; it is all
very proper, grateful, civil; he feels bound to write so many times a
month, but he hurries over his letter, and sends it to the post with a
pleasant sense of accomplished duty. The Romanina, intensely sensitive,
—all eyes, ears, imagination in what concerns him,—is dissatisfied : she
wants more details ; she complains of briefness, of reticence; he answers
with greater briefness and reticence, and also with a little impatience,
filling up his letters with moral reflections—moral reflections to her who
is hungering and thirsting for love, for something that may enable her
to be in his company, at least in imagination. She becomes suspicious,
jealous ; imagines he is purposely concealing what he is working at,
complains, accuses. Metastasio, with the impatience of a slightly ruffled
stoic, resigns himself to complaints which, he says, have become as
regular and inevitable as fits of quartan ague; forgives her, becomes
more brief, more general. The Romanina has been very good to him,
dear, generous soul, but she is too ridiculous, too exacting towards a
young man in his position; well, she is an evil, with her eternal sus¬
picious epistles at regular intervals; but it must be borne. Meanwhile
he goes to the Countess Althann, sees her hair dressed, reads her his
poems, basks in the sunshine of so great a lady's affection.
But the Romanina cannot take things so philosophically; she has no
future, no present; she has only a blank, a void, an immense bitterness to
live upon. And were they not to meet ? Was he not to return to Rome
after a few years ? Does he ever allude to that, the ungrateful wretch ?
Was there not a talk of her joining him in Vienna? He has forgotten
that. But she has not. Join him, and how? Under what pretext ?
How leave her house, her husband ? How undertake such a tremendous
journey, not of days but of weeks ? Has not the Emperor a chapel,
does he not engage all the greatest Italian singers ? And is she not a
great singer—a great one among the great ? The poor passionate creature
forgets that she is old, that she has long left the stage, that she has
refused engagement after engagement. She thinks only of seeing him
again. Let him get her engaged.
Metastasio is terrified at the idea. Engage her, an old woman ?
Never. There is no danger of that, indeed. But if she knows there is
no chance by this means, who can tell whether she may not sacrifice
house, husband, all, and come to Vienna, openly, avowedly to see him ?
He trembles at the thought. What, to be claimed by her, as her protege,
Metastasio and the Opera.
187
her adopted son; Heaven knows what! By an actress, a singer, a mad
woman, without sense of decorum or prudence, in the face of the whole
Court, of the Emperor, of all his friends and enemies! To be made the
laughing-stock of this prudishly gallant town ? And the Countess of
Althann! What will happen if she, the proud great lady, whose pro¬
perty he has become, sees him claimed by another woman, a plebeian, a
stage woman ? She Avho thinks him entirely hers, who never dreams of
his having been defiled by less noble patronage ; and the Romanina, who
thinks that he lives solitary and faithful to his gratitude, finding him the
acknowledged pet of another woman! What may not happen? Good
heavens! the earth will open beneath his feet; his hopes, his career, all
be engulfed, and he be left to shame and misery.
No ; the Romanina must not, shall not come. But the only means of
preventing her is to let her continue in the hope that she may; to delude
her into fancying that he is working for her, lest she take the matter into
her own violent hands. Oh, wise young diplomatist! sagacious reader
of the human heart! Expert manager of life's stage ! How admire thee
enough? Alvisi, thy biographer, is too delighted with thy ingenuity,
and expatiates on it: " He loved her sincerely ; he did not let a post-day
pass without giving her the most lively signs of affection, but he took
care not to satisfy her. He managed things so that the hope should not
be extinguished in her, while he abstained from taking any steps to obtain
what she desired. The most exquisite policy did he use in the matter,
so as neither to disgust Marianna nor to risk any untoward concatena¬
tion."
Exquisite policy! And what sensibility, what consideration for Mari-
anna's feelings, as well as for those of the Countess ! A troublesome
game, but beautifully played; nay, almost a pleasure to play it. But the
most dexterous player cannot play against Fate. Fate would have it
that Marianna, wearied, suspicious, became exasperated at the delay; that
some singer or composer, returning from Vienna to Italy, dropped an
incautious word about the Countess Althann .... Metastasio played
well and long, but Fate could not be wearied. What happened ? We
do not know. Suddenly, in the year 1734, a letter comes, a black letter.
Metastasio falls as if stricken. He can no longer conceal his feelings.
He is ill, very ill; cannot go to Court for months; remains at home for
weeks, till at length the Countess Althann, alarmed, throws dignity and
decorum overboard, and rushes to him, up the three pairs of stairs, into
his rooms at the Martinezes. All we are told is that Marianna Bulga-
relli, commonly called the Romanina, was dead. Around this fact there
is a great stillness, a great darkness. But in the stillness circulate faint,
very faint murmurs; in the darkness are visible dim outlines of things
which frighten us The murmurs cannot be completely compre-
188
Metastasio and the Opera.
bended, the outlines cannot be distinguished, yet there remains a terrible
something, a legend made out of these confusedly interpreted vague
sounds and sights ; a legend which now, after 150 years, would scarcely
be understood, but merely suspected, had not a great philologist, a seeker
for curious myths of all sorts, registered it in his common-place book.
There it stands, hard and prosaic, in the common-place book of Gotthold
Epliraim Lessing, Librarian of Wolfenbuttel, in its alphabetical place,
among notes on antique medals, extracts from mediaeval MSS., memoranda
on hydraulics, old German ballads, &c.
"Metastasio.—In his youth he was called Trapassi. Finazzi tells
me that the Didone Abbandonata, performed for the first time in "Venice
in the year 1725, contains to a certain extent the story of Metastasio
himself and the Romanina, the most famous of then flourishing Italian
singers. The Romanina had fallen in love with him, and when M. was
called to Vienna she wished, shortly after, to follow him. But Meta-
statio feared lest she might occasion annoyances to him in Vienna, and
might damage his reputation there, as she was married to a certain
Bulgarelli, a poet and musician. So he obtained an order from the Court,
which was sent to her half-way on her journey, forbidding her entering
the imperial dominions. The Romanina became furious, and in her first
rage tried to kill herself, and wounded herself in the chest with a pen¬
knife. The wound was not mortal, but she died soon afterwards of grief
and despair."
The Romanina was not married to a poet and musician; Metastasio
may never have been in love with her ; she died full four years after his
settling at Vienna; Didone was written ten years before her death; orders
to prevent people entering the imperial dominions were not granted to
Court poets for the mere asking; the asking for such an order was not
the simplest or least compromising step a man could take. The myth is
a myth, full of incongruities and absurdities as all myths are; but myths
do not originate out of nothing: they are distorted phantoms, too hideous
for reality, but which haunt and avenge.
Metastasio staggered under the news of this death, so sudden, so op¬
portune, so unexpected, perhaps also so horrible. So Marianna was dead!
She who had so long stood in his way was removed ; the letters of which
he had been so sick had come to an end ; the suspicions and accusations
would never again be renewed; the journey to Vienna, which had so
terrified him, would never be carried out ; that dreaded encounter would
never take place; he had been fighting for his honour, his safety: they
were no longer in peril. He had almost hated the Romanina, and now
he loved her again. Oh to be chidden once more, to dread her again, to
risk all from her arrival! anything rather than that she should be dead;
gone, gone in wrath at his ingratitude ; gone before he could have made
Metastasio and the Opera.
amends (as he had doubtless intended to do) for the cruelty to "which he
imagined he had been driven by circumstances ; gone before he could have
loved her again and been grateful to her once more! And even in her
anger, in her moment of death she had forgiven him, had loved him, pro¬
vided for him, made him heir to all her fortune after her husband's
demise. This generosity was too much; this money was too loathsome
to him ; he had fine and generous instincts and ideals when selfishness
did not frighten him out of them. He did not hesitate for a second, but
wrote off to his brother, in answer to the news of the Romanina's death
and of the inheritance, a quiet, manly letter, but intensely remorseful and
sad:—" In the agitation caused by the sudden blow of the death of poor,
generous Marianna, I have not the strength to write at length. I can
only say that my honour and my conscience persuade me to renounce the
inheritance in favour of her husband. I owe the world the rectification of
a great mistake, namely, that my friendship for her had its foundation in
interest or avarice." . . . Then he gives instructions concerning the
legal measures necessary for the transfer; he conjures his brother to keep
on good terms with the Romanina's husband, all calmly and briefly, but
at the end his grief bursts out:—" But poor Marianna will not return,
nor can I hope to console myself, and I think the rest of my life will be
insipid and melancholy. May God help me and give me the force to
keep up, for I do not feel it in me."
Metastasio, the least Quixotic of men, had done a Quixotic thing.
Neither honour nor conscience nor any feeling towards Domenico Bul-
garelli required his giving up the inheritance, for Bulgarelli was to have
the interest of the capital all his life, and there was no reason whatever
why the Romanina's fortune should not go to her friend after her hus¬
band's death, rather than to some person, unknown in all probability to
herself, whom Bulgarelli might choose as heir. Metastasio was merely
depriving himself and his of a capital of 1,500 crowns without any real
necessity or reason. But he was sacrificing the money not to Bulgarelli,
not to justice, not to appearance, but to the memory of the Romanina, to
his own ideals, to his own feelings. Let no financial advantage mar the
perfect grief at his benefactress's death; let him not accept a gift from
her to whom he had been ungrateful. ... He had been mean, cruelly
mean; hard fate (no doubt) had forced him to ingratitude; now, freely,
spontaneously, he would be generous, self-sacrificing ; it raised him out
of his humiliation, it did him good to wipe out by the generosity which
was of no use the meanness which had killed.
After this Metastasio's grief became milder and more bearable; he had
the pleasure of looking back at the past with tender regret; he could
freely love the Romanina, freely vent his gratitude towards her, praise
her, talk of her, now she was dead. Of an easily moved disposition, the
190
Metastasio and the Opera.
mention of the Romanina's name ever after brought tlie tears into his
eyes—tears of sincere affection and admiration, which he could shed even
in the presence of the Countess Althann, who was doubtless much moved
by the grief of her dear friend, and who may even have cried a little over
this generous woman who had done so much for him, and who was safely
removed far beyond all jealousy. Thus ended the romance of Metastasio's
life, and with it his youth, and soon after his hope and his genius.
VI.
Metastasio's genius, and with it the musical drama of the earlier
eighteenth century, attained to perfection only after his arrival at Vienna
and after the year 1730. This date represents the maturity of the com¬
posers who were to be his fellow-workmen, in the same way that Bonon-
cini, Caldara, Scarlatti, Lotti, and Keiser had been the fellow-workmen of
Apostolo Zeno. Although the general forms both of the drama and of
the music remained the same, the early works of Metastasio, of Leo, of
Vinci, and of Hasse represented a change: an attempt to obtain greater
flexibility, greater variety, intensity, and delicacy of form and effect. A
younger, subtler genius was entering the forms left by the older masters,
and as it moved, expanded, and altered, it also discomposed their solid
dignity. Metastasio was not the mere equal of Zeno, as Vinci, Leo,
Hasse, and Pergolesi were the equals of their predecessors,—he had from
the first an immeasurable superiority of talent; yet the first works of the
younger poet, like those of the younger musicians, are far less satisfactory
than those of the older: both poet and musicians obtain new and beau¬
tiful effects of movement and pathos at the sacrifice of the former dignity
and completeness, at the expense of alternate insipidity and jerkiness.
Gradually the change is completed, the new genius and new style are
matured, discrepancies and awkwardness disappear, the various qualities
coalesce and harmonise, the excrescences are absorbed. Already in
Artaserse, written in 1729, there is less vacillation of purpose ; in Adriano
the leading character is fuller and more conspicuous; in Demetrio, written
in 1731, the unity of plan and the development of situation are almost
perfect; in Issipile, written in 1732, the unity of plan is disturbed, but
the action greatly strengthened ;—these are all imperfect works, but they
balance and correct each other's imperfections. The period of perfection
begins in 1733 with the Olimpiade, followed at intervals of six months or
a year by Demofoonte, La Clemenza di Tito, Achille in Sciro, and Temis-
tocle, and it is closed in 1740 by Altilio Begolo, after which masterpiece
there is nothing but imitation and inferiority.
As the opera was an artistic form, distinct and different from tragedy,
Metastasio aud the Opera.
191
so also Metastasio was a different sort of poet from Shakespeare and
Lope do Vega, from Corneille and Racine; as the opera was a combina¬
tion of two very distinct musical forms, recitative and air, so also Meta¬
stasio was a poet of two very distinct categories: a dramatist and a lyrist.
But here we must note a difference: the opera, in its duality, belonged
half to the poet, half to the musician; they were sixbservient to each other
by turns: in the recitative, the. musician, composer, and singer helped the
poet, worked to give his verse the strongest, most artistic expression ; in
the air, the poet helped the musician, laboured to give him, composer and
singer, the greatest scope for free melodic invention and execution. The
notes of Pergolesi, the intonations of Farinello, were of first-rate beauty
in the recitative, but its real absorbing interest was the words of Meta¬
stasio ; in the airs the rhymes of Metastasio were often of first-rate
beauty, but the real, absorbing interest was the melodies and harmonies
of Pergolesi, the swells, and runs, and shakes of Farinello. Metastasio's
real greatness does not lie in his lyrics, beautiful as is sometimes the
sentiment, perfect as is always the expression, deft as are invariably the
metre and rhyme; these lyrics are even more incomplete without the
music than would be the notes of the recitative without the words; the
notes of the recitative would be vague, formless, meaningless without the
words; but the lyrics arc wholly different without the music. For the
music entirely changes the character of the lyrics: those little strophs,
which look such ridiculous appendages at the end of scenes, whose brief
metre and recurring rhyme jar so painfully with the sustained blank verse,
which are read off with a rapidity out of all proportion to the time re¬
quired by what precedes; those little strophs are altered, enlarged, trans¬
posed by the composers, expanded into broad musical phrases which
coalesce perfectly with the musical declamation of the blank verse ; their
component parts are arranged and repeated in different fashions, their
metre is widened, their rhymes veiled; they take as long to sing as two
or three scenes of blank verse do to declaim. Those tripping, skipping
rhymes, which seem, when read, such absurd vehicles for pathos or passion,
are made by the composer into sustained and intense lamentation, or im¬
petuous and whirlwind-like invective ; those little comparisons of flowers,
seas, ships, storms, skies, &c., which read so insipid and tiresome, are
turned into exquisitely graceful melodies, into rich and florid songs, during
whose performance poet, words, rhyme, and metre are forgotten in pure
musical enjoyment.
Further, as the opera was performed by voices, of which the highest
pitched and therefore most important ones suggested youth and youthful
feeling, Metastasio diverged from tragic writers by the immense import¬
ance he was forced to give to love. There must be love between the
primo uomo and the prima clonna, else how obtain a satisfactory duet
192
Metastasio and the Opera.
between them ? And even where, as in Tliemistocles and Eegulus, the real
hero is not the high-voiced youth but some graver father or adviser, 011
whose patriotism or revenge the real interest depends, even then an
additional interest, a love story, must be created for the primo uomo and
the prima donna, who by musical right, and despite dramatic suitability,
remain the most important performers. Nor is this all. An action, and
a complicated action like that of Metastasio's plays, cannot possibly be
carried on by merely the three principal characters ; other characters are
required to complicate the threads, another young man or young woman
is required to bring about the jealousy or the sacrifice in which consists
the pathos of the situation, not to speak of the confidants required to give
and receive information. Thence arises a second couple of young people,
the secondo uomo and seconda donna, who have to make love respectively
to the prima donna and the primo uomo in order to produce unfortunate
complications, and who, in the intervals, when they must come forward in
order to let their exhausted superiors take breath, can find no other em¬
ployment than again making love with each other. This inevitable sub¬
ordinate love is inevitably uninteresting: it has been created not for its
own sake but for the sake of the other love ; a second pair of lovers can¬
not be made to go through the selfsame scenes of tenderness and rage as
the first pair, and, as the musical recitation of the play forbids any mere
exchange of witticisms, any fanciful flippancy such as Shakespeare gives
to his second pair of lovers, to Jessica and Lorenzo, Nerissa and Gratiano,
Beatrice and Benedick, this subordinate love-making of the opera is mere
namby-pamby cooing and sighing, weak sonneteering, fearful trespassing
into the ground of pathos and passion reserved to the primo uomo and
prima donna.
Moreover, the difference between recitative and ordinary speech in¬
duces a radically different conception of character from that of the
ordinary tragedian. Recitative, drawing its existence from the inflexions
of the speaking voice, starves on rhetoric and dies miserably for want
of feeling. Long descriptions, disquisitions, logical propositions, in¬
volving no alteration of mood, supply no intonations to recitative ;
what it wants is feeling, fluctuating and rapid. The consequence is that
Metastasio entirely eschews everything like speechifying for its own sake;
if his men and women speak it is because they feel. He accustoms him¬
self to think not so much how people would speak but how they would feel.
He cannot conceive one interlocutor waiting quietly while the other dis¬
courses ; the very internal emotions, which in reality find no vent in
words, but only in looks, are noted and treasured by him, are communicated
to the audience by means of those continual apartes, those exclamations,
oh Dio! Stelle! Dei! &c., which seem absurd and womanish in print as
long as we suppose them to be spoken, but which are most effective in
Metastasio and the Opera.
193
recitative, as the expression, by artistic licence, of what is merely felt, not
said. Metastasio could not have conceived Cinna sitting calmly listening
to Augustus's eloquence; to his mind, Cinna would have bounded up after
the first sentence: he could not have imagined Theseus listening quietly
to the narration of his son's death ; in his Clemenza di Tito, which is in
the main the same situation as Corneille's Cinna, the principal scenes are
totally different. What interested Metastasio was not what Titus said, bnt
what Sextus felt; and into Sextus's feelings he dived, bringing them
out with wondrous perfection of gradation, from the first terror of finding
himself befoi'e his betrayed benefactor, in the line
Oh voce chc piombami sul cuore
through the stages of sickening and dizzy fear, the agonised hesitation,
down to that passionate explosion of feeling, that sweet though anguished
flood of tears, with which the traitor sinks down overwhelmed by the
generosity of the betrayed :
Oil Tito, oh mio clementissimo prence, &c.
To conceive an emotional situation, to develope it, gradually yet swiftly,
marking each step, each movement, even as a musician would develope a
theme, this was Metastasio's aim and his glory. To obtain opportunities
for such development was his constant thought; he was for ever seeking
for pathetic situations, he loved to crowd them together. The subjects
treated by the ancients and by the French did not satisfy him, they were
too meagre for him. He would take the main situation from half a dozen
plays and poems, and work them into one plot, combining together in his
Titus the Cinna of Corneille and the Andromaque of Racine; weaving
together Sophocles and La Motte, Ariosto and Racine, Lope and Herodo¬
tus, and then, in the prose argument prefixed to his play, referring the
reader with grand vagueness to Strabo, Pliny, Sanclioniathon, anyone ; as
romantic as Shakespeare or Calderon, while thinking he was correct and
classic as Maffei.
As a writer of opera texts, Metastasio was much influenced by music
and musicians; he had none of the sense of discomfort of ordinary libretto
writers; he enjoyed writing for music, being a musician himself and a
passionate lover of the art. lie was intensely fond of Hasse, who set
most of his operas, and between whose very delicate, graceful, and pathetic
music and his own verse there was a strong affinity ; of Jommelli, closely
resembling Gluck, he was an immense admirer; himself an excellent
singer and somewhat of a composer, he was at his ease in the musical
element and moved freely in it. Instead of the contempt and hatred of
such writers as Gasparo Gozzi and Parini, he felt a liking for singers:
he recognised their artistic value, sympathised with them, made friends
with them, and was repaid for his friendliness. He did not write for
o
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abstract performers: his actors were before him, and lie wrote to their
measure. They were indeed singers, but the early eighteenth century,
with its immense development of recitative, was rich in singers with
dramatic talent, which required only to be directed. Some of these
singer actors and actresses Avere really great: intelligent, energetic, hand¬
some, and with a natural dignity of gesture which was increased by the
dignity of vocal recitation ; and Metastasio let his conception of a part be
influenced by the individuality of the performer. Thus, in his Dido and
iEneas we can see the Romanina and Niccolino ; in his passionate proud
.ZEtius we can recognise the superbly strong and florid Carestini; in some
of his princesses the charming, soft Faustina Hasse, in others the
Amazon-like, majestic Vittoria Tesi. The charming part of Megacles
in the Olimpiade—of whom Argene says, " Avea bionde le chiome,
oscuro il ciglio . . . gli sguardi lenti e pietosi—" was suggested by
a beautiful young pupil of Porpora, with fair curls and femininely soft
brown eyes, Felice Salimbeni, who afterwards represented Achilles dis¬
guised as a girl on Scyros in a way which astonished Metastasio himself:
" The part is made for him "—he wrote to his brother. " I have trained
him with great care, and he has succeeded so perfectly that the opera will
not have half its effect where he cannot perform it."
Under the influence of composers and singers Metastasio received the
finishing touches requisite to make him a romantic poet: it was impossible
to conceive correct tragic folk, solemn Greeks and Romans like those of
Corneille, Racine, Maffei, and Alfieri, in the midst of this strange and
motley vocal world of the eighteenth century: of these women dressed
as men, and boys dressed as women, in powder, velvet, rose-coloured
doublets, hoops, jewelled helmets, immense feathers, many-buttoned
gloves, and every eccentricity of cut and colour ; of the soprano and
contralto heroes and heroines, quarrelling and making love in richly
modulated recitative, with fiddles to mark the cadence and hautboys
to play the ritornellos, sighing their passion or threatening their anger
in magnificently melodious airs with fugued accompaniments, or in
wondrously subtle and flimsy woofs of swells and runs and curling turns
and luminous shakes. A distinct race of beings, as distinct as the euphu-
istic, fantastically dainty young men and girls of Shakespeare, as distinct
as the grotesquely wonderful masks and Kings of Hearts of Gozzi, was
necessarily created under the influence of the proud beautiful music of the
Hasses, Leos, Pergolesis, and Jommellis.
And they had not time to be ceremonious and stilted, these opera
heroes and heroines : they were called into existence too rapidly for that.
There was 110 thought of the Imperial theatre poet first writing half a
dozen plans of a play, then working out one in prose; then versifying the
prose, then turning the diction into correct Tuscan, as did the fierce and
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195
energetic Alfieri : the plays were ordered and had to be produced at
once, to be ready by a certain day, to be ready for representation,—poetry,
music, scenery, acting, everything; nay, once, in the case of Achilles on
Scyros, the performance had to take place eighteen days after the play
was ordered of the poet. Metastasio had to dash down an argument on
a large sheet of paper, make memoranda of the scenes and stage business,
and begin scrawling off verse after verse, song after song, while the mes¬
senger waited to carry each page to the composer, at whose door another
messenger waited to carry each piece to the singer; and then Metastasio
had to be present at the prima donna's house at the rehearsal of the
second act, and to clamber on ladders and teach the mechanicians where
he wanted the temple, porticoes, and ships of the first act ; while the third
act was only taking shape in his brain. Beset by composers, singers,
scene-painters, mechanicians, there was no time to take down the dic¬
tionary of the Crusca; the people had to speak, not Tuscan, but Roman,
and sometimes familiar Roman, such as Metastasio himself spoke; luckily
the pedants were forgotten in the bustle.
And now, having followed Metastasio in the composition of his play,
having seen all the requirements and restrictions due to music and
scenery, seen the poet surrounded by the odd figures of the eighteenth-
century vocal heroes and heroines, writing under the influence of eighteenth-
century music, hurried by copyists, mechanicians, messengers, chamber¬
lains; having watched him at his work, we would fain see the production
when completed, witness the performance of one of his operas. But we
cannot. The wonderful Favorita Theatre, with its open-air stage extend¬
ing into real avenues and thickets, may indeed still be standing, but long
abandoned and decayed; the scenery may still be lying in some lumber-
room, but blackened and tattered ; the music of Caldara or Ilasse may
still be contained in some mouldering music-book, but long silent; the
voices which declaimed the verse and sang the songs have long died
away and been forgotten; of this combination of arts, of this splendid
and delicate and complex work, fostered by a whole nation for a whole
century, there now remain only ruins, memories, and the volumes con¬
taining Metastasio's plays. We cannot scientifically reconstruct, nor
fancifully evoke a vanished form of art; we can only take up and examine
what yet remains of it; these plays, which are not a whole in themselves,
but only a part of a great whole, of the opera of the eighteenth century.
Of these plays three may be considered as representative : the Olim-
jriude, of the year 1733, for the delicately-sketched youthful characters
and pathetically-developed situations; Achille in SSciro, of 1736, for
buoyancy, swiftness, and impetuosity of action; and Attilio liegolo, of
17-10, for sustained simplicity, solemnity, and grandeur of situation.
o 2
196
Metastasio tells us in his preface that the subject of the Olimpiade is
taken from Herodotus; in reality the story is but slightly modified out of
the Orlando Furioso: the scene is in Elis instead of being in Paris, the
tournament turns into the Olympic games, Charlemagne becomes Clis-
thenes King of Sicyon, Bradamante his daughter Aristea, beloved by a
Greek, Roger called Megacles, and by his bosom friend and benefactor,
Lycidas, who is made Prince of Crete instead of Prince of Constantinople.
The original chivalric colour of the story is never wholly lost: the Olym¬
pic games, despite their choral processions and olive wreaths, retain
something of the mediaeval tournament; Megacles, Greek wrestler and
runner though he be, acts with the punctilious sense of honour of a
paladin; Aristea is more of an Erminia or Isabella than of a Briseis or
Iphigenia; antiquity and chivalry, Ariosto and Herodotus, are fused, and
out of their mixture is produced a something perfectly original, situations
and characters neither classic nor mediaeval. Megacles arrives at Olym-
pia obeying the summons of his friend Lycidas, who has saved his life,
and who claims the fulfilment of his promise of gratitude ; he arrives in
the very nick of time; he must hasten and enroll himself among the
competitors in the games which are about to take place, enroll under the
name of Lycidas ; there is not a moment to lose; all shall be explained
on his return. He goes and returns. Lycidas explains the plot. The
prize of the Olympic games is to be Aristea, the daughter of King Clis-
thenes ; Lycidas is in love with her ; he has no chance of winning her in
the contest; his friend Megacles, a repeated victor in the games, shall win
her for him. Megacles is struck dumb ; to the eager, hopeful words of
the flippantly passionate Lycidas he answers confusedly ; he staggers, he
begs to be left to repose before the games begin. This Aristea, this
prize whom he is to win and to hand over to his friend, is his own long
hopelessly beloved; he can possess her and he must not keep
her ! He ivill keep her ; but what of Lycidas, who loves her, who hopes
only in him, for whom he had sworn to sacrifice his life ? Is he to refuse
him this, the first, the only gift ever asked ? Honour and gratitude
vanquish; yes, he will conquer Aristea; Lycidas shall possess her, and
shall never know at what a price his happiness is bought. If only
Aristea can be prevented from knowing the real victor, if only she can
be led to Lycidas without thinking of Megacles.; if only her presence be
avoided; before her what would become of his resolution? All would
melt away. At this moment he is interrupted in his thoughts; he turns
round ; it is Aristea herself ! Megacles! and is it lie himself, the long-
beloved, and yearned and wept for in vain! Has he at length heard his
poor Aristea? Yes, he has come, and how opportunely! Oh happy love,
happy past griefs! But why is Megacles so silent, why does the colour
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197
come and go in his face, why does he not look up ? Has he not come to
win Aristea? He lias. Then why this confusion and sadness? She
understands it all ; some one has made him doubt of her fidelity ; frankly,
cheerfully, she sweeps aside the idea; he has been and will ever be her
only love ... he has for ever been in her thoughts. But why does he
not answer? Why does he smother exclamations of grief? Listen:
does he believe her to be faithful? As faithful, is the mournful answer,
as beautiful. Is he not going to win her ? He hopes it. Has he still
his former valour ? He thinks so. And will he not conquer ? He hopes
it. If it is so, will she not be his ? From Aristea, clinging lovingly,
but anxiously to him, Megacles tries to sever himself; the recitative be¬
comes melody, the exquisitely simple touching melody of Pergolesi's
duet, " Ne' giorni tuoi felici;" he bids her remember him in the happy
days to come; she asks him the reason of these strange, sad, words ;
he begs her, weeping, not to speak; she entreats him to explain; the
words of the one, the silence of the other, are intolerable; she sees him
in grief without understanding its reason; he struggles with suppressed
jealousy; both join in complaining of their cruel destiny; a solemn,
deeply pathetic passage, of doubt and boding evil, which closes the
scene.
The Olympic games come to a close, and Megacles, under the name of
Lycidas Prince of Crete, is the victor. King Clisthenes crowns him with
the olive wreath, while the chorus sings an ode; and then the prize, the
beautiful Aristea, is led forward. Megacles pretends that he is suddenly
called back to his father in Crete, and begs Clisthenes to intrust his
bride to his friend iEgisthus, who is, of course, no other than the real
Lycidas. Lycidas, light, eager, impulsive, is impatient to discover his
love to Aristea; he urges Megacles to explain all to her. Megacles asks
to be left alone with the princess, much to the surprise and annoyance of
the unsuspecting Lycidas, who retires. Once alone the ordeal begins.
Aristea throws herself into the arms of Megacles, rejoicing at their final
happiness; to her words of love and joy he answers only with enigmatic
sadness, trying how to break the terrible news to her. Is he in earnest
or jesting ? she knows not what to think; sadly, tenderly, solemnly, he
begins to explain, and, as he speaks, vague fear seizes her. Has she not
often said that what she most loves in him is his spotless honour, his
gratitude and generosity; would she still love him if he had become un¬
grateful to his benefactor, perjured to the gods, false to his promise ?
And how can Aristea ever conceive such a change in him ? Let her then
know that by becoming hers Megacles wilL be all this : ungrateful,
deceitful, perjured. And he tells her the story, his promise to his bene¬
factor, of the Cretan prince's love, of the plot by which lie is to win her
for his friend. What! he has fought for another ! he would consent to
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lose her, he would have her sacrificed ! Megacles, half broken in purpose,
revives; he begs her, as she loves him, to enable him to do his duty, to
crown his sacrifice, to love his friend as she has hitherto loved him ;
he calls upon her generosity and heroism . . . but Aristea will hear
nothing of this; she sees only that she is to lose him, that all her
hope, all her future is gone, that her happiness is shattered; generosity,
heroism, what is all that to her ? The resigned, quiet Magacles deter¬
mines to be brief; he cannot face her despair and wrath ; he bids her
farewell, the last farewell. The last! Aristea is struck down by the
sudden blow; he is leaving her already. Go he must, and, if he go,
better at once; she would detain him in vain ; he goes; and overcome
by grief she falls down insensible. Megacles hastens back; this sight
entirely breaks his resolve ; he kneels down by Aristea, tries to revive
and comfort her. This is a piece of accompanied recitative, set magnifi¬
cently even by so late a master as Cimarosa. He calls her in vain ; he
will stop, she shall be his wife, anything rather than see her thus ; but
she does not revive. What shall he do ? can he leave her ? leave her
thus? and, if he remain, what becomes of his honour, his gratitude? What
will Lycidas say, and the deceived Clisthenes? At least he will delay
the going. Delay ? it will be this agony again ; what shall he do ? the
sighing violins and viols are the only answer. Better go. Farewell, his
beloved, his hope, lost for ever. The instruments echo, Lost for ever.
May the gods watch over her and give her the happiness he has lost: a
passionate, lyric burst of almost melodious declamation, borne upwards by
the instruments. Lycidas, where is Lycidas ? Lycidas comes ; has Aristea
heard all ? but what does he see ? what is the meaning of this ? Hastily,
impatiently, Megacles answers ; a sudden grief has overcome her; in¬
voluntarily, he is angered by the unconsciousness of Lycidas, his uncon¬
sciousness of all the tragedy that is going on. " And thou leavest me ?"
says Lycidas. " I go," answers Megacles, " ah, think of Aristea." Alas,
what will she say when, reviving, she finds him gone ? Lycidas, attend;
and these last instructions glide from recitative into slow, gently heaving
melody, the exquisite melody of Pergolesi—" If she asks what has be¬
come of me, tell her I am dead." But a thought strikes him, a deep,
passionate thought, which makes the melody stop, and expand solemnly.
"Ah, no, do not give her such sorrow for me. If she asks after thy
friend, answer her only, ' he went hence in tears,' and the accompani¬
ment breaks in low, tremulous sobs; then, while Lycidas hastens to suc¬
cour the still fainting girl, Megacles bursts out in one last, rapid, wild
outpouring of grief at losing his beloved, and hurries away. Aristea
revives, calls upon Megacles, and recoils in horror on recognising a
stranger instead of her beloved. " Where is Megacles ?" " Gone,"
answers Lycidas quietly; "but I, thy love, thy husband, thy Lycidas,
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am here " Lycidas, is lie Lycidas ? she cries, starting to her feet; and
Megacles lias left her ! Where is the justice of heaven if the gods leave
such villany unpunished ? What ails her ? What has Megacles done ?
asks the perplexed Lycidas. Does she ask for revenge ? She shall have
it, she shall have all and everything from him. From him ! Aristca
bursts into impetuous song, broad, majestic in its very passion, the master¬
piece of the great master Leo. Away, out of her sight! He is the cause
of all her wretchedness, of all her misfortunes ; let him never hope for
love or forgiveness from her; his sight will for ever be hateful and
monstrous to her. But all comes right at last, after many complications,
attempted suicides, and murders; the tender and vehement Aristea is
united to her Megacles, wonderfully sustained in quiet, tender, resigned
affection, for Lycidas is discovered to be her brother, a long-lost son of
Clisthenes, and returns to his former love, Argene.
Achilles on Scyros is far better constructed than the Olimpiade, or
rather it is not constructed at all. It is an organic, spontaneous, perfect
growth, scene developing insensibly out of scene, and action out of action,
unbroken by oracles, recognitions, or murders, unhampered by the second
pair of lovers ; a beautiful and swiftly moving whole.
An oracle having declared that Troy cannot be taken without the help
of the young Achilles, Ulysses, despatched by the Greek chiefs, arrives
in the island of Scyros, where Achilles is said to lie hidden by his mother
Thetis. While waiting for the succour promised by the king Lycomedes,
Ulysses remarks, among the damsels of Deidamia the king's daughter, a
certain Pyrrha, whose strange beauty, martial expression, vehement
manner, and passionate love for the princess, lead him to suspect that
she is the object of his search, disguised in woman's clothes. He takes
every means to make sure, to elicit some unmistakable proof; while, on
the other hand, Deidamia, in love with the disguised Achilles, does all in
her power to prevent the discovery. Achilles, swayed alternately by
martial instinct, by shame at his disguise, and by love and fear of losing
Deidamia, is for ever on the point of discovering himself, and for ever
restrained from so doing. At length Ulysses, fully persuaded that
Pyrrha is Achilles, resorts to an artifice which shall force him to disclose
himself. Lycomedes, King of Scyros, is banqueting with his guests,
and Ulysses describes in eloquent terms the preparations which are every¬
where being made for the Trojan expedition ; and as he speaks he
watches the supposed Pyrrha, standing near the princess Deidamia,
listening eagerly, forgetful and agitated. "All Greece," says Ulysses,
" has risen like one man; the cities are emptied of their inhabitants;
decrepit old men drive on their sons with envy; the very children and
maidens burn to join the fight, and the wretch whom some hard necessity
holds back accuses Heaven and thinks himself hated by the gods."
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Deidamia, terrified at Pyrrha's strange demeanour, calls her, chides her
lover for his want of prudence. The king bids Pyrrha take her lyre and
sing to entertain the guests ; reluctantly, and only at Deidamia's bidding,
Achilles acquiesces. He sings in bitterness of love and his cruel power,
which takes pleasure in degrading the wisest and bravest, in degrading
men and gods ; in making Jove himself assume the shape of beast and
bird; and after all this requires the victim to kiss his chains, to praise
his shame and servitude. In the midst of the ode, Achilles is interrupted
by the arrival of the servants of Ulysses, bearing presents to the king of
Scyros. Lycomedes and his friends admire the purple apparel and costly
vases, the princess the gems and ornaments: the eyes of Pyrrha are fixed
upon the swords and shields and lances. " Ah! " exclaims Achilles,
" what splendid arms !" " Resume thy song, Pyrrha," orders Deidamia
angrily. At that moment there is a great clangour of arms, a noise of
strife; all rise in surprise. Areas, the confident of Ulysses, rushes in,
calling upon the chief to stop a contest which has arisen between his
followers and those of Lycomedes. The noise grows louder; Lycomedes
hastens to the scene of the fray with his friends, Deidamia runs to hide
in her chamber; Achilles remains, trembling with martial rage. Fire
runs in his veins, a mist rises up before his eyes, he can contain himself
no longer. " To arms ! " he shouts, " to arms ! " But he stops, he per¬
ceives the lyre in his hand, the lyre, his only Aveapon. He dashes it on
to the ground, seizes a sword, and rushes forward, heedless of his
woman's weeds, with the magnificent impetuosity of the Pompeian
fresco. At that moment Ulysses, who has been watching him unob¬
served, advances, takes him by the hand, and salutes him as Achilles.
Terrified at the discovery, the son of Thetis recoils; but Ulysses embraces
him, and tells him that it is too late for more dissimulation. Come, he
will lead him to glory; Greece awaits him alone; Troy fears only him.
Achilles, overjoyed, follows him, but stops. "And Deidamia ?"" Dei¬
damia ! he shall return to her more worthy of love." " And meanwhile? "
" And meanwhile, while the whole world was on fire, he would remain
hidden on Scyros ? What would posterity say ? That Diomede, Ido-
meneus, Ajax, had broken the walls of Troy, and divided the spoils of
Hector: and what was Achilles doing ? Achilles, robed in woman's
weeds, lived ingloriously and feebly among the maidens of Scyros, slum¬
bering to the sounds of other men's exploits. Ah, let this never be said!
Let no one see him again in this garb. See, does he recognise himself? "
and as Ulysses raises the shield as a mirror, reflecting the youth in his
disguise, Achilles tears his dress in wrath, and cries out for arms. And
Ulysses leads him off, quivering with shame and rage. As they go they
are met by Nearchus, to whose care Thetis had confided her son, and who
tries to stop the supposed Pyrrha. Achilles shakes him off, bids him never
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201
again pronounce that shameful name; but then, when Nearchus asks
what is to be said to Deidamia, he turns round. Tell her that he
loves her, that he leaves her faithful, that he will return ere long; a
beautiful tender air, quite in keeping with the character. Nearchus,
dreading the anger of Thetis, hastens to Deidamia, and tells her that
Ulysses will carry off her lover unless she prevent it. Meanwhile Ulysses
is leading Achilles to his ships, and admiring the young hero, in his
shining armour, rejuvenated like the serpent which has shed its skin, and
twists and untwirls proudly in the sunshine. At last, says Achilles, he
feels himself ; but like a prisoner whose chains have been struck off he
still doubts of his freedom, the shadows of his prison are before his eyes,
the sound of his fetters still in his ears. Ah, when will he see the shores
of Troy? He will wipe out the stains on his name; the indignities of
Scyros shall be erased by his sword; he will bury the remembrance of his
shame beneath that of his glory. " And Thetis thought to hide him
from the world!" exclaims Ulysses; and the recitative bursts into a
grand and vehement air, rolling and storming with its splendid simile
of the fire bursting out of a volcano and rushing in destruction over
the land. The ships come up to shore, and Achilles is about to cross
on to one of them when Areas runs up, hurrying their departure:
" Deidamia," he whispers to Ulysses, " pursues them." " What has hap¬
pened? Whence this haste ?" asks Achilles. " The King of Scyros,"
answers Areas, " has heard of our departure, and may attempt to prevent
it." "Prevent the departure of Achilles? Is he then the slave of Lyco-
medes? " "Away! let us not be detained," urges Ulysses, well know¬
ing how dangerous a foe pursues them. But Achilles refuses to move;
he will await Lycomedes and show him that he is no prisoner. Instead
of Lycomedes arrives the infuriated Deidamia. She stops before Achilles,
and they remain a moment in silence; then she bursts out in complaints
of his perfidy; he would answer, but Ulysses stops him. " If thou
speak, thou art lost," he whispers. But Achilles cannot listen in silence
to her passionate accusations; he must, he will answer; he explains that
he loves her, but that lie can no longer remain in shame on Scyros ; he
must follow Ulysses; he has dreaded her grief, her tears, he has fled
from her because he loves her ; but go he must. Deidamia feigns
resignation; she confesses that he is in the right, that his disguise was
shameful, that his love was weakness; yes, he must go. But give her
a day, only a single day more, let not the blow be so sudden ; can he
refuse it ? Achilles does not answer, but remains with downcast eyes.
Will he not give her a day ? What thinks Ulysses ? Ulysses answers
with scornful indifference, "Achilles is master of his actions; let him
go, or let him stay. But he, Ulysses, must go at once ; if Achilles
wait, he will leave him behind." Achilles knows not what to answer.
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"Well? "asks Deidamia, "resolve." " I would remain, but what of
Ulysses ? " " Resolve," cries Ulysses. " I would go, but wbat of
Deidamia? " " I understand," cries Deidamia, " thou wouldst go; go,
unfaithful wretch !" To go, or to remain? which shall he do? Deidamia
no longer begs him to stay ; 110, she sees that it costs him too much ; she
asks but one last gift : since she must die, let it be by his hand; let him
begin his deeds of war on her ; he will go, unhampered ; she will die
happy, dying by his sword ! The half-serious comedy touches Achilles;
he bids her not speak thus: " Ulysses, I cannot go, it would be too cruel."
" 80 I see," answers Ulysses, " farewell." " I ask only one day's delay,"
begs Achilles. " Oh ! that is more than I can afford. I must hasten
to the Greek chiefs, and tell them what noble deeds are wiping out
Achilles' shame; what grand amends he makes for the idleness of Scyros,
what trophies he is raising." " Valour .is valour," answers Achilles, "it
is not lost in a day." " Valour!" cries Ulysses, " do not speak of it.
Strip off those arms. They are merely a weight to Pyrrha. Ho! bring
the hero's gown! He has sweated too long beneath the helmet." " I
Pyrrha! oh gods ! " and Achilles becomes ready to go. " Thou leavest
me? " asks Deidamia. " I must." " Already?" " The delay is fatal to
my honour; farewell, Deidamia; " and he mounts resolutely on to the
ship. Deidamia, left alone, bursts out with furious grief; calls upon the
gods to avenge her; her ghost shall haunt him everywhere, and bring
him to his death. But no; alas, whose fault is it? Could Achilles
remain for ever? If some one must pay the penalty, let it be the miser¬
able Deidamia ; she has lived for him; for him she will die. And over¬
come by grief she sinks inanimate. Achilles sees it, pushes aside Ulysses,
who would vainly restrain him, springs from the ship, and runs to her
side; and calls her, and tells her he will stay. "Areas," says Ulysses,
" the battle is lost; let us cede for the moment, and then we will try
other arms ; " and he hastens to Lycomedes, persuades him to give bis
daughter to Achilles, and postpones the departure till Achilles can go to
Troy, leaving behind him his bride. Thus ends Achilles on Scyros; not
a tragedy, but rather an heroic comedy of intrigue and love.
Attilio liegolo, on the other hand, is pure tragedy, with a more than
tragic, almost religious solemnity: in it there is no crime, only a grand
self-sacrifice; there is 110 plot, nothing but the gradual action of the hero's
influence on those around him; the whole interest depends upon the
resistance of Regulus against his own friends, his final triumph over
their love and their veneration. The play opens with the daughter of
Regulus, Attilia, stopping the consul Manlius as he descends the stairs
of the Capitol, and apostrophising him in favour of her father, a prisoner
at Carthage. This scene is magnificent in dignified impetuosity; Attilia
neither begs nor threatens, she demands assistance with a consciousness
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203
of justice, of greatness, which places her, the supplicant, far above the man
who is supplicated ; every word, every burst of passion, means a gesture,
and a gesture of infinite nobility. Manlius, secretly jealous of the heroism
of Regulus, is disconcerted, left without an answer. At that moment
the news comes that Regulus is in Rome, brought thither by the Cartha¬
ginian ambassador, come to negociate peace or an exchange of prisoners.
Regulus has sworn to return to die horribly at Carthage if the treaty be
rejected. All Rome is ready to accept any terms for the sake of libera¬
ting him; his friends await with joy his speech before the Senate, sure
that all will be granted. Regulus is introduced before the Senate in
company with Hamilcar, the Carthaginian envoy; he pauses a moment
on the well-known threshold, " Wherefore does he stop ? " asks Hamilcar,
" Is this place unknown to him? " " I was thinking what I was leaving, and
to what I am returning," answers Regulus, and the instruments, taking
up the phrase of recitative, re-echo his thought. Hamilcar reminds Regu¬
lus of his promise, of what awaits him if the treaty be rejected ; Regulus
will fulfil all he promised. Hamilcar exposes briefly the conditions of
peace, and waits for Regulus to second the proposal. And Regulus speaks :
Carthage desires peace on condition of retaining all her conquests; or, if
that be refused, at least an exchange of prisoners; the advice of Regulus
is to refuse both. Every one is in astonishment; ho holds firm, he
desires to return to Carthage. Manlius, jealous of the sacrifice which
raises his rival, tries to prevent it; Regulus has pointed out that the
deliverance of Roman prisoners, broken to every ignominy, and the giving
up of a number of warlike Carthaginians in return, will be fatal to Rome.
Manlius answers that mere utility is not the only question, that Rome
must think of what is honourable, and honour requires gratitude to
Regulus. For the first time Regulus loses his usual moderation of tone.
Does Rome wish to show gratitude towards him? Let it avenge him
then. The barbarians have thought that he would betray his country
from cowardice, urge acceptance of the treaty from fear of returning to
Carthage. This outrage is worse than any torment they have inflicted;
let Rome avenge him. Arm, hasten to tear from their temples the
Roman trophies; do not sheathe the sword until the enemies be crushed.
Let Regulus read the fear of Roman anger in the faces of his mur¬
derers; give him the joy of seeing in his dying agonies that Carthage
trembles at the name of Rome. The Senate vacillates, but Regulus
has not yet conquered; his children stir up the people to protect him
from himself; the Senate decides that an oath extorted from a prisoner
is not binding; the Carthaginian envoy himself, moved by the sight of
such greatness, offers to let him escape. There is yet a long struggle
against violence of passion, from which Regulus, simple, determined,
finally issues victorious, causing all, by the calm weight of his purpose,
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Metastasio and the Opera.
to cede and make way; his children he silences into obedience ; the Senate
he shames into more rigid honour; the treacherous Hamilcar he chides
with disdain. The Senate and his family permit him to go, the Cartha¬
ginian galleys await him on the Tiber, but the people of Rome refuse to
let him pass to his death, and a struggle begins between the Consul wish¬
ing to open a way for Regulus and the Tribune ordering the crowd to
refuse the passage. The Consul trios to explain, but the crowd drowns
his voice with the cry, " Regulus shall stay." At this moment Regulus
appears, and on his appearance there is a sudden silence. Regulus shall
stay, he cries, and does Rome wish his dishonour? The Tribune answers
that Rome wishes to strike off his chains. " Without them," Regulus
answers, " I am but a perjured and fugitive slave." But the augurs have
decided that the oath of a prisoner need not bind. Regulus rejects such
pretexts for bad faith as worthy of the barbarians. But what Avill Rome
do deprived of her greatest citizen? Regulus answers gravely, firmly,
but with a moment of enthusiasm. He is old, and has served his time,
he can no longer be of use to Rome, fate offers him a glorious end,
let him not be defrauded of it to die in obscure infamy. Let not the
Romans think differently from himself; down with the rebellious arms;
as a friend he begs; as a citizen, exhorts; as a father, he commands.
The arms are lowered and the crowd silently opens to let him pass. At
last he can go. He bids Hamilcar ascend 011 to the ship; he will follow.
He stops once more and turns round to the silent, solemn multitude:
Romans, farewell. Let this the last adieu
Be worthy you and me. Thank Heaven, I leave,
And leave you Romans. Oh preserve unstain'd
The mighty name, and you will thus become
The earth's sole arbiters, and the whole world
Will be for Rome. Ye deities that watch
Over this sacred soil, ye who protect
^Eneas' breed, to you I now entrust
This race of heroes; and on you I call
To guard this soil, these roofs, this city wall.
In them for evermore let glory, faith,
And bravery dwell. If to the Capitol
Malignant stars now threaten evil fate,
Here's Regulus, oh gods; and he alone
Shall be your victim, and upon his head
Let all the wrath of Heaven be discharged,
But Rome uninj ured . . . What ye weep ?
. . . Farewell.
The plays of Metastasio are neither fashionable pieces of pseudoclassic
work, like those of Voltaire, nor eclectic works of classic imitation, like
those of Alfieri; they are a national, spontaneous form, evolved by the
artistic wants of a whole nation. And this being the case, Metastasio's
Metastcisio and the Opera.
205
men and women are neither eighteenth-century gentlemen and ladies, with
togas and chitons slipped over their brocade coats and silk embroidered
stomachers, talking the talk of eighteenth-century drawing-rooms in
majestic theatre language; nor are they conscientiously reconstructed
Greeks and Romans, draped in imitation of the antique and speaking on
the pattern of Thucydides and Tacitus, uncomfortably fearful of taking
up modern attitudes or uttering modern sentiments. They arc something
quite apart, born neither of contemporary manners nor of classical study,
but of the peremptory necessities, the irresistible suggestions, of a great
and living art. If we would knoAv the origin of Megacles, of Aristea, of
Achilles, of Attilia, and of Eegulus, let us turn over the scores of Per-
golesi, of Leo, of Handel, of Jommelli, and we shall answer: They are the
offspring of the music of the eighteenth century.
VII.
There was nothing now to compromise Metastasio, nothing now to im¬
pede his complete success at Vienna. But the success did not come: the
Emperor approved of his dramas and gave him a lucrative fiscal post in
the Neapolitan States; the Archduchesses took lessons of him in Italian
and declamation, and were adorably civil; made him sit in their presence,
and gave him a snuff-box ; the Countess Althann took him publicly into
her favour, and, it was rumoured and believed, gave him her hand; but
beyond these isolated successes things would not go. Neither the appro¬
bation of the Emperor, nor the favour of the Archduchesses, nor the love
of the Countess Althann, obtained for him any higher position than that
of Court poet, any influence beyond that over singers and composers
and theatre mechanicians. He held, in short, the self-same position he
had held in Rome ten or fifteen years before, only gilded with Court titles
and hampered by Court restrictions ; he was, as then, nothing beyond a
mere writer of libretti; instead of three hundred scudi a play he received
three thousand florins a year; his employer was an Emperor instead of a
manager; his public came to the Favorita Theatre by Imperial invitation,
instead of entering the Teatro Aliberti for so many bajocchi; it was all
far smarter, loftier, more splendid, but also far less hearty. The Austrian
magnates, caring nothing for poetry, only superficially conversant with
Italian, took far less interest in his plays than did the shabby priestlets,
the shopkeepers, and the populace of Rome, who understood and were
pleased with everything; the very signs of approval were forbidden in
the august presence of Ctesar, and a successful masterpiece was heard
frigidly, silently, without even the excitement of a little cabal and pas¬
quinade. It was all very distressing and narrowing for a poet: he heard
206
Metastasio and the Opera.
of himself as of a great genius from the letters of his friends in Italy;
here, in Vienna, he was merely a functionary, an Imperial servant, who,
in virtue of imperial perfection, must needs be as good as possible. There
was 110 outlet, no future; all was dull, as dull as at Gravina's, as dull as
just before he was called from Rome, with the difference that he had then
been on the steps of the ladder, and was now on the top without hope of
getting higher. Cassar had approved of his plays, and had kept him per¬
sistently at a distance in his appointed place as playwright. For Caesar,
surrounded by etiquette and suspicious of all attempts at being circum¬
vented, was the last man to encourage such forward loyalty, such enter¬
prising devotion, as Metastasio had from the first displayed. Old Apostolo
Zeno he had indeed taken into his confidence, because he felt that he
could do so without fear of compromising his dignity, because he knew
that this childlike, amiable pedant knew and thought of nothing beyond
his books, was blind to any advantages to be obtained from such intimacy;
because he could find a sort of friend, something far too simple and
pedantic for a courtier, in the good Candiot dramatist ; but this young,
pushing, wheedling, flattering Abate Metastasio was not a person to be
encouraged: his kisses on the Imperial hand were too sonorous, his
humility was too humble, he was seeking for favour. Charles VI. kept
him at arm's length.
To this failure of his Court career were added vexations concerning his
brother in Rome. The transfer of the Romanina's inheritance, so useless,
so foolish, so unconscientious, towards her desires, had borne its natural
result. After a few years Domenico Bulgarelli, her husband, had taken
it into his head to marry again. Leopoldo Metastasio, furious at the
notion of the Romanina's property (over which he had never ceased to
groan) being left to Bulgarelli's second wife or possible children, was
violent to prevent the marriage. But Bulgarelli, now wholly independent,
snapped his fingers at Leopoldo, and brought home his new wife ; Leo¬
poldo, an ill-tempered, unreasonable creature, never ceased complaining;
the new wife objected to such a household; and finally, after a deal of
quarreling, Bulgarelli gave Metastasio's family to understand that he could
110 longer live with them. Thus the comfortable household, once presided
over by the Romanina, was broken up ; Leopoldo and his father and
sisters sought another abode ; Metastasio was called upon to supply
additional money, and was constantly worried by the lamentations and
recriminations of his brother, who hated having to work. Metastasio,
who had never been very fond of his brother, was weary of his ill-temper.
He began to write rarely and sharply, and from that time, perhaps, dated
the common saying at Vienna, that Metastasio particularly begged never
to be informed whether he had any live relatives.
Still, he had the occupation (not the amusement, for he protested that
Metastasio and the Opera.
207
lie hated writing) of supplying plays for the Imperial Theatre.. But this
also ceased. In 1740, just as he had finished his Regulus for the Em¬
peror's birthday, Charles VI. ate that momentous dish of mushrooms
which, according to Voltaire, set Europe on fire—and died.
The pompous melomaniac Cajsar had had the power, the power of tra¬
dition and habit, to keep the Holy Roman Empire together. As soon as
he was dead, Bavaria, Prussia, France, Spain, all suppressed enemies, were
let loose upon his daughter and her husband. The danger was not that
which had disturbed the pomp of Charles VI. Not merely a long-pro¬
tracted war with the Turk in the distant East, not a rapid campaign of
French and Sardinians against the Imperial possessions in Italy: it was
a war at home against the very existence of the house of Austria. Those
were the heroic days of Maria Theresa, when young, handsome, with a
semblance of legality on her side, without troops, without money, with
nothing but her indomitable courage, her unblushing cunning, her aspect
of conjugal and motherly devotion, and the enthusiasm, personal and
traditional, which she aroused, when this strange, picturesque figure had
to fight it out with the whole dull, sceptical, Machiavellian world of
rococo conventionalities, and at last came out victorious.
But patriotism was not a growth of the eighteenth century, nor was
active loyalty; and least of all did it exist in Metastasio. He, who had
made Cato, Themistocles, Regulus, speak, and speak with superb breadth
of intonation, was but little moved by the political cataclysm. What
most affected him was its extreme discomfort to himself; what his
sensitive feelings shuddered at Avas the suspension of salaries, the cessa¬
tion of theatrical amusements, the extreme dulness and disorder of the
Court; he felt mentally and morally chilly in this great storm, and
thought more of the petty ailments it caused in himself than of the im¬
mense dangers and miseries which it brought to others. He felt himself
neglected by everyone, he was mortified at the Empress-Queen being
constantly surrounded by generals, ambassadors, ministers, and such like,
and never glancing at him; he shrank into a corner by the side of the
Countess Altliann, and moped, and began to think that he had some
mysterious nervous disease.
When the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle settled matters, when Maria Theresa
was thoroughly reinstated in her imperial position, when Austrian finances
began to be set right, and the Viennese Court was reorganised, Metastasio
was already an elderly man, a hypochondriac, an idle routinist, without
the desire or the power to work. His ambition was dead, his desire for
power and fame was dead; he was beginning to be purely passive, living
on the past, caring only to secure a future as safe as the present, dread¬
ing change, excitement, incapable of great joys, seeking only for trumpery
pleasures. The peculiar nature of his position had forced him, when a
208
Metastasio and the Opera.
certain level was once attained, to become stationary, and his character
was such that to be stationary meant to be stagnant. He had no interest
in life beyond himself, so that himself once provided for he ceased to
have any at all; egotism so absolute as to refuse thoughts and action to
any exterior aims or objects must needs grow into a passive scepticism,
and finally into hypochondriac cynicism. Metastasio had no enthusiasms,
political, religious, or personal; no love for any idea whose triumph
would be his triumph, no passion for any discovery which would be his
discovery; he had not even a pleasure in the movement of society, and of
things in general. The eighteenth century was sterile of political or
religious enthusiasms; political and religious forms were both too utterly
dried up and crumbling ; but it had intense social and scientific Utopias,
hopes of reform and perfection in which even the most timid, even the
most frivolous, joined; but Metastasio had neither of these. He found it,
as he himself declared, more conducive to peace of mind to accept dogmas
than to examine them; yet he expressed every degree of aversion to over-
zealous belief; he saw the way the century was going, he even foretold
great convulsions, but he neither rejoiced at the movement nor regretted
it: he was never astonished, never moved. In the days of active reform,
of philanthropy tinging even the most frivolous and corrupt, of reactionary
disgust warping even the noblest, in the days of Beccaria and Filangieri,
of Baretti and Gozzi, Metastasio remained wholly indifferent.
Nor did any interest in his own art absorb his energy; he worked un¬
willingly, like a cobbler at his shoes (according to his own words), and for
the works of others he did not care. The ancients he had learned to hate
at Gravina's; about the French and Spaniards he was lukewarm; Mosu
Bacine, as he called him,seemed a prig, and Corneille a ranter; he would
not decide between Ariosto and Tasso, and cared probably but little for
either; Dante he mentioned with deprecating respect. Voltaire's books
he bought, with Voltaire's praise he was pleased, but he did not even
attain to the point of saying, with Parini, that he was too much praised
and too much blamed. About contemporary Italian literature he was
equally indifferent; the verbose magnificence of Frugoni he disliked but
praised, because Frugoni was court poet at Parma; the comic genius of
Goldoni he probably admired, but mentioned coldly, because Goldoni was
a heretic in the eyes of the upholders of the old Italian stage. The only
intellectual concern about which Metastasio displayed any genuine feeling
was music; nor did he perhaps ever show so much abstract interest as
when he entreated the composer Jommelli not to change his style, or
when he groaned with the famous singing-master Bernacchi over the
decay of cantabile singing. It was the same with his social relations.
At forty-two he made it a point never to dine out; he shut himself out
of general society, seeing only the people who went to the Countess
Metastasio and the Opera.
209
Althann; and those who, from curiosity or business, came to him 011
Sundays; lie had four or five friends whom he saw daily, almost hourly,
and with whom he went through a perfect social routine. He met Count
Canale, the Sardinian minister, and a Canon Perlas, regularly three times
a week to read Horace, and when they had finished they began again at
the other end. He kept up correspondences with people like the Princess
Belmonte and a certain Filipponi, whom he had not seen for years, whom
he was never likely to meet again, and with whom he had no news to
interchange, from the simple fact that they had ceased to have any com¬
mon interest and almost any mutual friends. Add to this that he was
getting apprehensive about his digestion, his nerves, his health, and com¬
plaining of mysterious symptoms which 110 one could see. Thus, towards
1750, Metastasio was getting mummified. He had weakened his body by
over-much care; he had hampered his actions by rules of conduct ; he had
stultified his genius by routine and indifference; he had weakened his
affections by constant and stupefying familiarity within a narrow circle;
he had compressed his whole life, and was beginning to suffer by the
compression.
About this time he took a step, almost the last ever taken by him : he
contracted a new friendship which elicited the last works which came from
his genius. The Emperor Charles VI. had, by way of augmenting his
salary, given him the post of Treasurer of Cosenza in Calabria, an office
which could be farmed out for about three hundred scudi a year. Scarcely
had he received his first payment when war broke out between Austria
and Spain. Don Carlos, son of Philip V., seized the Neapolitan States,
and was made King of Naples; all the Austrian officials were replaced
by Spaniards, and Metastasio remained, as lie expresses it, with his com¬
mission as Treasurer of Cosenza ready to be made into a bag for sugar¬
plums or into curling-papers. This loss became the more serious when
Maria Theresa began to suspend the payment of his salary; and he en¬
deavoured to recover his post by means of representations to the Neapoli¬
tan Government, and by every sort of influence, through cardinals, am¬
bassadors, and ministers, all in vain. The King of Naples would not
hear of any sort of indemnity. But the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle having
put an end to the hostile relations between Vienna and Madrid, Meta¬
stasio bethought himself of applying to the most powerful person, after
the King and Queen, in all Spain, to Hon Carlo Broschi, Knight of St.
Iago and of Calatrava, who had been the greatest of Italian singers under
the name of Farinello. Metastasio had known him in his happy Nea¬
politan days, when Farinello had been brought to the Romanina's by his
master Porpora; he had liked the boy, and playfully dubbed him twin-
brother; he had met him later at Pome, Venice, and Vienna, the most
indisputedly great among the great Italian singers, an intelligent, hand-
p
210
Metastasio and the Opera.
some young giant. Metastasio had liked him still better and continued
to call him twin-brother, for he was rich and courted, and there was no
reason for thrusting him away. Then Farinello had left the stage and
gone to Spain, where, during the long time of war and interrupted com¬
munication, Metastasio had lost sight of him. During those years a most
extraordinary phenomenon had taken place, and when the poet again
heard of his singer friend it was as the omnipotent favourite of Philip V.,
of his successor Ferdinand VI., and of his Queen; as a maker and un-
maker of ministries, constantly beset by grandees, governors of provinces,
ambassadors, and ambassadresses, and to whom even the immortal Maria
Theresa wrote curiously civil little notes.
That this unexpected recognition of his old acquaintance, of the most
unlikely person in the whole world in the very position, only infinitely
more defined, more magnificent, more astonishing, which Metastasio had
probably dreamed of for himself when he kissed the Emperor's hand with
such vehemence; that this realisation of his dreams, a realisation so con¬
crete and undoubted, but in the person of another, gave the poet a pang,
left in him an aching void, is most probable. This was the living com¬
mentary on his own failure at court, this success of a man so totally dif¬
ferent from himself. Metastasio, who had looked upon his employment,
upon his art, upon his fame, as merely so many steps to imperial favour;
who had sought for new friendships and rejected old; who had laid him¬
self out to please, to flatter, to wheedle ; who had been frantically loyal
and sublimely groveling for the sake of court influence, had been super¬
ciliously passed over, coolly and majestically pushed aside into his allotted
place ; and meanwhile his old acquaintance, without a thought beyond his
art, his friendships, and amusements, perfectly satisfied with his musical
fame, taciturn and haughty (after the manner of singers) with his
superiors in rank, bluntly ingenuous in his words, stalking through life
without a look or a bow for any save his friends, this unambitious,
uninsinuating, self-satisfied singer, had become the most important per¬
son at the Spanish court, without any sacrifice of dignity or convenience.
But Metastasio was not envious where envy could obtain nothing.
Farinello had been more fortunate than himself (owing to that perversity
of faith of which he was the particular victim); the best thing to do
was to try to turn this unjust good luck to profit. So he wrote to his
old acquaintance, reminded him of old Neapolitan days, exposed the
lamentable story of his treasurership of Cosenza, called him his dearest
twin brother, and waited for an answer; suspecting, however, that the
Cavalier Broschi might no longer care to be reminded of the days when
lie was still Farinello; that he might think Metastasio an intolerable
claimer of friendship and assistance, that he might politely send his twin-
brother to the devil. The answer came. Farinello was overjoyed at the
Metastasio and the Opera.
211
resumption of acquaintance, overwhelmed by tlie honour of still being
the twin-brother of the author of the Olimpiade and of Regulus, im¬
mensely communicative, from friendliness, rather than from vanity, about
his life in Spain, his friends, his relatives, the bad Spanish doctors, the
beautiful Spanish ladies—everything. He had already been to the
Queen ; he had already written to the King of Naples; he had got the
minister Ensenada to make special applications for indemnifying Meta¬
stases loss; he was willing to do anything merely to enjoy the pleasure
of Metastasio's letters. And, if matters went well, would his great
twin-brother write him some poems ? He wanted this, that, and the
other.
Metastasio was delighted ; a little of his friend's grandeur had fallen
upon him. He was the Benjamin of a favourite r/»cm-minister, if not a
favourite himself. Farinello kept writing, one letter more affectionate
than another, offering his services, sending immense presents of chocolate,
of vanilla, of snuff—such exquisite snuff—with which the poet regaled
the haughty Austrians, informing them from whom it came ; losing no
opportunity of boasting of his friendship with so great a personage. The
Austrian grandees opened their eyes; this was a new view of Metastasio.
They all had brothers, cousins, friends, whom they wished should be
recommended at the Spanish court; would Metastasio intercede for them ?
Metastasio graciously granted the request, mentioned the applicants to
Farinello, adding that they were wholly unrecommendable, but that some
civil excuse must be given them. The favour was conferred without
hurting the poet's conscience. Metastasio was beset by noble toadies for
his friend's patronage; he looked modest and joked over it, but he
enjoyed it vastly; enjoyed having generals, ambassadors, and magnates
asking him, " Signor Abate, when are you going to write to your twin-
brother? " His heart dilated when Prince Belmonte asked for a letter of
introduction from him; when Cardinal Migazzi begged him to speak
well of his brother to the great singer; when Esterhazy embraced him in
the street, and thanked him for his recommendation ; when the mighty
Ivaunitz himself desired him to ask whether the Cavalier Farinello was
still as partial to him as in former days.
In the return for all this second-hand influence Metastasio wrote for
Farinello some of his last, but most charming, cantatas: and one day sent
him a packet containing the words and music of the famous, most famous
canzonet: "Ecco quel fiero istante." It was the last work that came
from Metastasio's genius; all after it was the result of practice and dex¬
terity. Perhaps it did more for Metastasio's popularity than all his
dramas put together ; it was set and reset by every composer, translated
and retranslated into every language ; it was not passionate, not very
sincere; it had not the great merits of the best of his works; but it was
r 2
212
happy in conception and execution, complete, spontaneous, perfect as only-
small and inferior things can he. The people of the eighteenth century
made sure, in their blindness to the difference between real emotion and
artistic emotion, that Metastasio himself was the hero of the poem; that the
pangs of separation were his. But Metastasio was far too true an artist,
far too cold a man, not to feel that neither he nor his love-stories could find
a place in poetry; the Countess Althannwas too prosaic for artistic repre¬
sentation ; the Romanina had been too tragic ; he must deal only with
ideal passions. " You will find it very tender," wrote Metastasio to Fari-
nello, as he sent him the canzonet, " but do not do me the injustice of
supposing that I am in love; you know whether I am capable of such
imbecility." And Metastasio, the poet of the heart, whose works were
being sighed over by all the lovesick people in Italy, was speaking with
perfect sincerity. Love was all very fine in novels and on the stage, but
a man of his experience of life was far too wise to make himself happy or
wretched about other people: emotion was far too dangerous to the
digestion, not to speak of its danger to one's social position.
Metastasio had begun his correspondence with Farinello in hopes of
being helped back to his treasurership of Cosenza; he had continued it
for the satisfaction of being the friend of a man in power, for the satis¬
faction of being asked to obtain favours for grand folk; still when he
wrote immense letters in which he deluged the singer with affection, called
him his dearest, most adorable, most incomparable twin-brother, he was
not insincere nor wholly interested. Farinello pleased him beyond measure;
the mixture of a supremely great singer and of a supremely powerful
favourite, of titles and money and reputation, was enhanced in Metastasio's
eyes by the addition of a strangely upright and amiable character. Meta¬
stasio, as a prudent man, had an eye for rank and fortune; but Metastasio
as a poet, as the creator of ideally noble figures, had an eye also for fine
characters; he was a connoisseur in Tituses, and Farinello had something
of the Titus in him. It pleased the poet's ideality to hear of his friend's
spotless honour in the midst of a court (Metastasio had written so many
fine lines against courts and courtiers), of his perfect modesty, of his
self-respecting frankness, of his generosity to his detractors, of liis in¬
difference to money and titles, just as it pleased Metastasio to hear how
Farinello was present at the King of Spain's council, how the Due de
Duras and his wife used to beset and wheedle him every time they could;
how, as Beekford expresses it, he was in the habit of drilling sopranos
and tenors on one day, and ambassadors and ministers on the next. To
Farinello, on the other hand, Metastasio appeared as a sort of little
divinity; the singer, despite his intelligence and prudence, was eminently
gullible, impulsive, magnifying the good, closing his eyes to the bad ;
obstinate, unconvincible of error. A fervent Catholic, profoundly per-
Metastasio and the Opera.
213
suaded of the graciousness of the Madonna and of the saints, though
boldly rushing into danger of damnation by his friendship for Antichrist
in the person of the atheist poet Crudeli, Farinello was ever ready to add
to heavenly more earthly objects of devotion, to make a Madonna out of
the amiable mean little Queen of Spain, and a saint, an apostle, out of the
philanthropic but unscrupulous minister, Ensenada. Metastasio, with
his passionate eloquence, his magnificent tirades about virtue, his infec¬
tious nobility of sentiment, appeared to the singer something super-
naturally beautiful, whose letters were a heavenly gift and a sign of grace.
The whispered story of the Romanina's death Farinello had probably
never heard; if he had he would have indignantly refuted it, have treated
it as an infamous lie, even with the proofs before him. Metastasio was
the greatest of poets, the noblest of men; a divinity before whose shrine
no sufficient amount of chocolate and snuff could ever be deposited.
Metastasio jogged on through life without a mistake, without ever being
a dupe of anyone save himself. Farinello, even while this whimsical,
flattering correspondence continued, was agitated by troubles of which
his friend never dreamed ; the combat between reality and fiction, be¬
tween the dupe and the deceivers ; the long, bitter struggle to keep in
power his friend Ensenada, despite his insolent ingratitude and his un¬
popularity, and at the same time to serve the Queen, Ensenada's mortal
enemy; the struggle to conciliate what to him seemed opposed, but
equally generous, plans, which were in reality equally mean and false.
Ensenada was a saint, and must be kept in office; the Queen was a saint,
and must be helped. Ensenada pretends that he is in reality opposing
the dangerous alliance with France; that he accepts the order of the
Saint Esprit and the French money only to gain time to mature relations
with England. Meanwhile he is plotting with Choiseul; everyone in
Spain suspects it except Farinello; the proofs are put before him, he
refuses to believe in Ensenada's treachery. Ensenada, seeing that his
case is hopeless, merely laughs at his credulity, and insults his good faith.
The minister is taken, condemned ; the Queen is frantic for revenge.
Farinello betrayed, derided, rushes to the King, begs, implores, threatens;
Ensenada is let off with mere banishment from court, despite the Queen,
who would see him a beggar, a prisoner—best of all, see him dead. In
the midst of outward splendour and power, Metastasio's poor twin-brother
was but a pitiful dupe, pulled hither and thither by foolish generosity,
without real power, and without much real happiness.
Metastasio would have acted differently,—Metastasio the prudent, the
self-restrained, who had prevented the Romanina from coming to Vienna,
who had crawled on the ground before Charles VI., who was so far
beyond any imbecility of love. Yet let us not be too hard upon Metastasio.
We have had to show him as he has appeared to us, always selfish, often
214
servile, sometimes ungrateful, meanest in action wlien noblest in words;
but, while showing him thus, we must show also the almost irresistible
influences which degraded him. Between him and his friend Farinello
there lay an immense difference, far greater than that between a man
cold and timid and a man warm-hearted and rash ; the difference be¬
tween a poet and a singer, between an artist who has a market and an
artist who has not. It was easy for Farinello to be independent and
self-respecting; sure from his earliest youth of money and applause, know¬
ing that as long as ho had a voice he had the means of subsisting any¬
where without need of protectors ; it was needful for Metastasio not to be
servile and timid, knowing, from his youth, that his existence depended
upon the favour of Gravina, of the Romanina, of the Emperor; knowing
that without a real literary public his writings could support him only
inasmuch as they gained him protection and offices: if the singer offends
the Emperor, no matter, he will go to England, to Spain, to Venice, and
gain as much money and obtain as much credit; if the poet displeases
the Emperor, or the Emperor's friend the Countess Althann, or the
Emperor's lacquey, where else will he be sure of a pension for life ? In
England? No Italian poet is kept. At Berlin, Dresden, or Munich?
He may get five hundred florins at most. Is he to return and write plays
for the Teatro Aliberti, at three hundred scudi a piece, and be left to
starve when he can write no longer? The singer in the eighteenth cen¬
tury had a paying public, the writer had not; the one lived off his talent,
the other off his servility; that is why the singers of the eighteenth
century, like Caffariello and the Gabbrielli, insulted Kings and Em¬
presses ; that is why Italian poets of the eighteenth century, like
Metastasio and Frugoni, crawled before ministers and chamberlains. In
Goldoni's plays the singer is well fed and insolent, with a fur coat and
jack boots; and the poet is hungry and humble, in a ragged doublet and
broken shoes. A false economical position implies a false social position,
and a false social position implies personal degradation.
In 1755 Metastasio lost the Countess Althann. She was an old
woman; she had even grown-up sons ; she had been his for twenty-five
years; yet there had been to the last something of the flavour of romance,
rather than of the staleness of domestic life (stale at least to a mind like
his), in this connection with a woman who was his wife and was not,
who lived under another roof, who bore another name, who remained
his superior in rank, whom ho treated in public with a sort of deference
and courting devotion. " I have never been in greater need of the
assistance of a real friend like you," wrote Metastasio to Farinello, " and
you, without knowing it, have given it to me in your last most affection¬
ate letter, whose kind words have proved to me that I am not left in a
desert now that we have lost our very dear Countess of Althann." This was
Metastasio and the Opera.
215
not a shock, not a violent grief like that at the death of the Romanina;
it was a dull sense of forlornness, of being, as he says, in a desert, which
made him stretch forth his hand to a man whom lie had not seen for so
long, who was so far distant, and whom he would probably never see again.
There is a portrait of Metastasio painted about this time, of which an
old copy belongs to the Arcadian Academy: he is seated, half reclining
on a sofa, one arm over its elbow, as if about to add a word to the manu¬
script on the table by his side; short, fat, rather languid and bent, not
sickly, but delicate and lazy in body ; the large head is raised, but the
high wide forehead, the imaginatively turned brows, are weighed down
and materialised by the lumpish aquiline nose, and the long square jaw,
imbedded in double and triple chins; the long slit mouth is smiling
sweetly, the eyes are lit up with humour, the heavy cheeks are dimpled,
yet there is a melancholy, an absence of animal spirits, a something
which tells you that this face is but a living mask, the muscles of which
will easily give way, the eye grow dull, the mouth droop, the jaw drop,
the whole collapse into vacancy. There is no strong life in the man,
though there is a flickering semblance of life : he is amiable, bright,
whimsical, humorous, can tell anecdotes well, can make a witty repartee,
can seem the very ideal of cheerful old age, when in company or Avhen
writing his letters, which is but another way of being in company; but he
becomes dreary and apathetic when alone or with his intimates. People
compliment him on his looks, on his activity in mounting the stairs, on
his clear voice in singing, on his bright eyes and pink and white com¬
plexion, which, against his white wig, makes him look like a pretty old
lady; but lie shakes his head, complains of a mysterious nervous disease,
of attacks of trembling, of flushing whenever he gives his attention to
anything; he calls it a hysterical condition, clearer still, hypochondria,
confessing, without perceiving it, that he has the vain weak nervousness
of indolent, over-pampered women ; the ridiculous depression of broken-
down, idle old men; he dreads motion, change, activity, all that can cure
him. In reality, what ails him is mental and moral ennui.
This Vienna of the third quarter of the eighteenth century is an intoler¬
able place: lifeless, or living only a mean little life. Nothing goes on ot'
any importance: wars are carried on on all sides, sometimes against the
English, sometimes against the French, no matter which; they are no sub¬
ject of excitement; the Austrian Empire is perfectly safe, falling always (in
the right side. When beaten, making allies of the victor, always ready to
tack and veer so as to avoid tempest and meet a mild little breeze. The
victories arc those of allies, and inspire no heroic joy, like those of
yonder Frederick sung by Rammler, Gleim, and Kleist; the defeats are
also those of allies, and produce no great convulsions, no terrible ruin like
those in which the splendid Polish court of Dresden crashes down; a
216
Metastasio and the Opera.
Te Deum is ordered, or a Requiem with prayers for better luck, both
sung by the cheapest possible singers. There are lots of processions
in the streets, lots of seizures of books at the custom-houses. This
town, which is neither German, nor Sclav, nor Hungarian, nor Italian,
is sleepy and indifferent. The court is dull and miserable: the Emperor
Francis, mild little busybody, useful conjugal dummy of the Empress,
keeps the accounts of the expenses, pares and scrapes, farms out the
court-balls to those who will pay most (by giving least lights and refresh¬
ments), collects the cheapest singers, after much haggling, for the court
theatre, makes all as stingy and shabby as things can be, till the blood
boils in the breast of Leopold Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of Salzburg,
who turns away in loyal shame at such a capital, in which there is not
money and movement enough to afford any chance for his little pheno¬
menon Wolfgang. The Empress, the heroic Maria Theresa, is shut up
with the dear Minister Kaunitz, scheming to marry off as many as possible
of the many archduchesses who are now, by way of philosophic education,
sweeping their rooms and making their beds, growing up ignorant, un¬
bridled, ready to become Carolines of Naples, and Amelias of Parma,
or at best, if of nobler fibre, Maria Antoinettes; plotting to get duchies
for some of the many archdukes, who are at present learning carpentering,
until, grown into Josephs and Leopolds, they quarrel with their mother,
visit the King of Prussia, sweep out Jesuits, and make up for years of
servility by bilious, headstrong reformation. She is keeping a shrewd
look-out on European affairs, watching for the moment when she must
drop her allies and toady her enemies, when she must make friends with
the cynical, sneering Frederick, with the philanthropic murderous Empress
of Russia, with the poor inflated King of Poland ; when she is to write to
Madame de Pompadour beginning, " Ma princesse et cousine;" and in the
intervals of this powerful political game she appears proud yet modest,
simply dressed, surrounded by an effaced husband and stultified or rebel¬
lious children, a picture of maternal and conjugal perfection, in church,
or reviewing the good pandours of Trenk; she weeps at the sight of a poor
widow, gives her her own breakfast, sighs over her inability to relieve
distress ; she raises herself to a majestic height of virtue, and wrathfully
exiles to Moravia, to Hungary, to Transylvania, any unlucky lady against
whose reputation there has been a whisper. A heroine in the eyes of
those good English far off, a saint in those of the lower classes, Maria
Theresa was but a queer mixture of virtue, of unscrupulousness, of pru¬
dery, of bigotry, and of cynicism, for those who see and had her in sight.
For a poet, a poet dealing especially with tragic and idyllic character,
nothing could be worse than to be thus constantly in the presence of such
a sovereign—a sovereign too who, for the sake of the past, had to be
called glorious. She was, after all? a heroine, a Semiramis, this Maria
Metastasio and the Opera.
217
Theresa; but what an unheroic heroine, what a prudish, bigoted, insult-
swallowing Semiramis ! She was a disheartening sight, making humanity
seem petty and shabby in her very greatness. And, such as she was,
Metastasio was forced to see her, forced by proximity, by his own rapid,
unerring judgment: if he could have seen her as she was not, but should
have been; if he could have been duped, his self-respect, his good faith,
his faith in goodness, would have been saved: but Metastasio was by
nature cool, critical, sceptical; he could not see a saint in every friend,
a Madonna in every patroness, like his twin-brother Farinello; the
very saints and Madonna in heaven did not awaken his enthusiasm,
and as to seeing them on earth ! he was too shrewd and frigid for
that. He could not believe, he could only accept dogmas; he could
not be blind, he could only shut his eyes ; he could not delude, he
could only perjure himself; he was kneeling before altars in whose
miracles he did not believe, and kissing relics which he knew to be no
better than the refuse in the dustbin.
And Metastasio, cut out from all life in admiration and belief, had no
real life in lower things : he could not, like Goldoni, be satisfied with a
little amusement in looking at street squabbles, and a little excitement in
playing faro for a scudo; he could not consume his energies in editing
classics and writing pasquinades, like the two Gozzis ; he could not be
tilled with ineffable pleasure while improvising a stanza over a bottle of
maraschino, with a great lady in a new Paris hat opposite, like the gay
old rhymester Frugoni; he could not dilate with holy rage while scourg¬
ing vice and folly like Parini; he was too selfish to take pleasure in any¬
thing concerning others, too delicate of mental fibre to take pleasure in
mere coarse enjoyment and coarse warfare : he took pleasure, therefore, in
nothing, or, at best, but a feeble pleasure in trifles. In this numbing of
all his faculties from disuse, two, the most developed, still kept a little
sensibility; his vanity and his benevolence could still be tickled. The
little notes with which the Empress occasionally testified her remembrance
he treasured up with delight; the gold (or gilt?) candlestick with the
lampshade which she gave him, bidding him " Take care of his eyes," he
displayed and talked over with rapture. Bo much for his vanity. In
1759 he met his former teacher, the composer Porpora, a man often
vainly assisted, vainly pushed into comfort, hopelessly spendthrift, quarrel¬
some and disreputable ; Porpora was old, forgotten, without employment,
without money, and applied to Metastasio for assistance. Metastasio
wrote off to Farinello a long letter, a masterpiece of pathetic eloquence.
" We are bound by every duty to help poor Porpora," he urged ; " lie is a
man, and we are obliged to assist our fellow-creatures; he is of eminence
and a friend; he is old, and a small pittance will save him. I shall be
personally obliged to you for saving me the pain of seeing the wreck of
218
Metastasio and the Opera.
a man -whom Ave have respected from our early youth," and so on ; but
the letter is too fine a piece of writing: a few dollars, a little endeavour
to obtain Porpora employment, above all, a little perception that a really
kind man like Fariuello required only to know of distress, would have
been better. Metastasio's benevolence is too abstract.
The very same year, 1759, Ferdinand YI. of Spain and his Queen
died, Charles II. succeeded, and Metastasio's twin-brother fell from his
greatness. A year of terrible suspense, of sickening attendance upon a
miserable, loathsome maniac, as the King of Spain became after his wife's
death ; of melancholy watching the defection of one friend after another,
and the daily diminution of importance, had been at length closed by dis¬
grace, by unexpected banishment from the country, by finding himself
suddenly alone, severed from old connections and habits, powerless, with-
out voice or youth, reduced to nothingness ; and all this had smitten down
Fariuello : the strong, cheerful, warm-hearted giant had been broken by
the fall as a man weaker in body and temper would never have been.
Metastasio, so to speak, hastened up, took him by the hand, looked into
his face with the smile of a friend; and the rapid, unhesitating, thorough
act of friendship was felt and never forgotten. His letters on this occa¬
sion are full of that tact, of that right balance between cordiality and
reticence, between the desire to console and the fear of appearing to do
so, which can come only from singularly delicate moral fibre. Farinello
could no longer be useful to Metastasio ; he could serve neither his avarice
nor his vanity; he had lost all influence, but he had not lost his hand¬
some fortune, his social standing nor his good name, and he could in no
way endanger Metastasio. And Metastasio, so far from being a mere
toady to influential people, was singularly disinterested and sincere where
he could be with safety: he would have been the most grateful and gene¬
rous of men had he not sometimes been afraid.
So Metastasio continued his life of idleness and indifference, writing a
play or a copy of verses when absolutely required, but nothing good;
withdrawing more and more from the world, complaining more and more
of his health, never going to the theatre, to court, or to any party. While
the man was thus fading away, his fame was growing daily. His works
had been printed and reprinted in all parts of Italy; they were translated
into French, English, German, Spanish, and even into modern Greek; he
was read in mud villages in Portugal and in wood villages in Russia; to
foreigners he represented the whole sum of Italian poetry since Tasso.
Voltaire, in his preface to Se'miramis, praised him up to the skies, with
the usual addition of a little depreciation of Italy, operas, and everything
that was not French and Voltairian; Rousseau praised him up to the skies
pretty well everywhere, with less critical acumen and backbiting. lie had
been made a member of every possible academy; medals were now being
Metastasio and the Opera.
219
struck in his honour, and sent to him; even the arch-heretic Baretti, who
trundled about the world calling all established celebrities the most shame¬
ful names, wrote a splendid rhapsody on Metastasio, ending that he was
truly a poet for Kings and Emperors (even Baretti, being an Italian of
the first half of the eighteenth century, could find no higher praise than
that). Letters poured in from all parts of Italy, delightfully candid in
their obtrusiveness, letters from authors sending their works (which were
always pronounced to be excellent), from learned men propounding their
theories, from young men asking for a rule of conduct, from young ladies
confiding their aspirations and affections. Everyone in Italy had read
and re-read Metastasio's works to such an extent that they felt quite
intimate with him, persuaded themselves that they knew him most
thoroughly, and that it was quite natural to confide everything to so
omniscient a creature, just as they might lay all their ideas and troubles
before the busy but hopelessly intruded-on Madonna and St. Joseph.
That Metastasio was the best, wisest, happiest of mortals, seemed
evident, even to the people who, like Sir Nathaniel Wraxall and Dr. Burney,
came into his presence on Sunday mornings. He looked so rosy, so
cheerful, so placid, such a picture of rewarded philosophy and virtue ;
surely he must be the happiest of mortals. He was not particularly
happy, and perhaps took a pleasure in being so as little as possible: to be
wretched was at least some little excitement in this monotony. His inti¬
mate, the Canon Perlas, with whom and Count Canale he went on year
after year, jogging dully through the classics, wrote to some one (whom
we are not told) that " Metastasio is universally considered the happiest
of human beings, but in reality no man is more unhappy than he. Since
the death of the Countess Altliann I have been his confidant; I know
his woes, and if I could tell how great they are I could greatly diminish
your present grief," &c. Strong words. Heavy woes, heavy enough to
make those of other men seem light; no man more happy than he ! We
pause before this awful announcement. But no, we cannot be made to
condole, to pamper Metastasio's sickly sentiment.
And Metastasio, in his old age, was not quite alone. The Martinez
family with whom he lived were kind and deferential; nor was this all.
About 1769 appears for the first time (from out of a convent or school ?
we know not whence) a third Marianna, a girl of singular intelligence and
great cultivation. She was called Martinez, the sister of Joseph Martinez,
then the head of the family ; but she was also called Metastasio's pupil,
his niece, his adopted daughter. Was she the daughter of the poet?
Perhaps she was; perhaps she was not. She seems to have come into
existence already grown up, We never see her except as a very mature
young lady, with the self-possession and independence of a spinster.
Metastasio, who had little paternal instinct, but a great, cool liking for
220 Metcistasio and the Opera.
intellectual women, especially not too old (charming nymphs, as he
called his bine-stocking correspondents), took mnch pleasure in Marianna
Martinez, in perfecting her education, in making her into a sort of female
self. She had great musical talents, which were cultivated to the utmost.
A poor young scholar was got at a great bargain to teach her the harp¬
sichord and composition in return for board and lodging : he, in his thread¬
bare coat, had the honour of sitting at table with the Abate Metastasio,
listening solemnly to the great poet's words ; he often spoke of it later
when he had become more famous throughout Europe, and, having re¬
ceived an Oxford degree, was called Doctor Haydn. Metastasio taught
Marianna Martinez to sing; he sang beautifully himself, as befitted a
pupil of Porpora and of the Romanina, and the intimate friend of
Hasse, of the Faustina, of Farinello, of Jommelli; and Marianna turned
out an exquisite singer, in the most noble and delicate style of the early
eighteenth century, which was then being fast forgotten ; so that Dr.
Burney had no words to express his admiration of her. She was a good
linguist, spoke German, French, English and Spanish, admirably, and
was altogether a most admirable young lady. But withal a little cold:
why did she not cure Metastasio's melancholy? Why did she not marry
him and cheer him by the sight of children? Perhaps she cared but little
for this amiable old hypochondriac; perhaps he cared for her only as a
pupil, as a dependant, as a kind of nurse. However it may be, the ap¬
pearance of domestic life is no greater with this daughter or quasi-
daughter than it was in the case of his quasi-wife the Countess Althann :
Metastasio had made himself into a hopeless and typical old bachelor.
Timorous he remained, timorous about his health and about his position.
Farinello, the only remaining old friend, had, after long, wretched de¬
pression, finally consoled himself for his loss of power and for his loss
of youth. The rest of his life should not be dismal: he took to him his
nephews and nieces and got to think only of them. One day, in high
pleasure, in intense friendliness, he asked Metastasio to become the god¬
father to his nephew's child. There were other people enough whom he
might ask; Bolognese senators, and Cardinals, and Neapolitan princes;
but Farinello disdained them for the sake of his old friend. His old
friend answered in most affectionate terms that he regretted, it was an
immense mortification to him to disappoint his twin-brother, but he had
recently refused to be godfather to the son of a very great personage, and
great personages must not be trifled with. Farinello was vexed, but
called the child after Metastasio all the same; and soon after, having for¬
given, astounded the poet by the proposal that he should leave Vienna
and live the rest of his days in his house at Bologna. It seemed quite
simple to the singer that Metastasio, having ceased to be of any use in
Vienna, should be but too glad to abandon a sinecure, to realise a dream
Metastasio and the Opera.
221
of which he was always talking, the dream of ending his days in Italy,
out of that cold, proud, beggarly Austria where no one cared for him.
Metastasio had indeed talked about his dear Italy, about the pleasure of
seeing all his old friends again, of meeting his innumerable admirers ;
perhaps he even thought once over the plan. But to move, to travel (lie
was in the best health), to leave his tiresome old Viennese acquaintance,
to give up drawling through Horace, to cease to be what he had been,
and then to take up his abode in Farinello's house, a house too in the
country (Metastasio considered the country most unhealthy), full of noisy
brats, of visitors, with a constant bustle and hubbub; to be dragged out
of his dear, dull routine into the life of other people—he shrank from
the idea; his nerves, his sensitive nerves, could never endure it. He
thanked his old friend and chose the philosophical course of staying where
he was, of continuing the philosophical life he had hitherto led.
So he did. The century drew towards a close, and Metastasio, who
had been born with it, shrank and withered. Things had gradually
changed: mysterious forces were converging to form the revolution; all
was palpitating with strange life, oven at Vienna. The Viennese were
beginning to remember that they were Germans, and instead of transla¬
tions of Metastasio's plays they crowded to see Emilia Galotti and Goetz
von Berlicliingen. The last years of Maria Theresa were being watched
with impatience. In 1780 she died, and with her seemed to die the old
state of things. The bilious, impetuous Joseph cleared out a new road ;
down with the old ceremony, the old prudery, the old bigotry. He was
a Frenchman at heart, a passionate admirer of Frederick the Great, a
passionate disciple of Voltaire, of Beccaria, and of Filangieri; he would
reform everything, and he began by thrusting out the clergy ; seized by
that vertigo which made even the kings and emperors of the late eighteenth
century hasten on the revolution which was to sweep them away. Meta¬
stasio disliked all this movement, this pulling up of the bad old pave¬
ment over which he had jolted for sixty years. Moreover, new poets were
arising in Italy, and a new mode of thinking. A wild young man, whose
tragedies were fast supplanting Metastasio's plays, came to Vienna with
the intention of paying his respects to the old poet. But one day, as
A1 fieri was walking about the promenade, he saw a modest carriage stop
before a splendid gilt coach, the door open, and a little bent old man of
eighty get out, go up to the coach, and stand obsequiously at its window,
hat in hand. Alfieri saw it, and left Vienna without visiting Metastasio;
a foolish, conceited, unthinking, unsympathising piece of swagger, but
which showed that the attitude even of the Italians was undergoing a
change.
Meanwhile, all Metastasio's friends were dead, those friends with whom
he had kept up a dull vacant correspondence for years; even those whom,
222
Metastasio and the Opera.
like Jommelli, lie liad encouraged as youths, were fast going; the cen¬
tury was dying: he who had belonged to it so completely, so slavishly,
must die also. He shivered and moped in his third floor in the Ivohl-
markt, surrounded by the obsequious, cool Martinezes, to whom that third
floor, with all its contents, must so soon belong. Farinello, the only sur¬
viving old friend, and who was still as active and friendly as at forty,
not being able since his departure from Spain to send the poet snuff or
chocolate, sent him Bolognese grapes, gingerbread, preserved peaches,
and other indigestible good things. Metastasio smiled faint thanks, let
Marianna Martinez eat the grapes, gingerbread, and preserves, and looked
on vacantly. He was beginning to feel a great yearning after affection;
to his singer friend he wrote oftener and oftener, short, tremulous notes ;
he thought of his twin-brother as he had been fifty years ago, the slender,
light-stepped youth with the broad shoulders and triumphant voice; he
let himself, perhaps, be led back by this phantom of a man still living
but long altered to his own young days, to the summer walks across the
park in Moravia, to the chats and games at cards in the Countess
Althann's rooms, perhaps even to the musical parties at Naples, when
sixty years ago he, a brilliant young man of twenty-four, had seen the
Romanina lead the boy Farinello to the harpsichord, while Scarlatti, Por-
pora, Leo, Vinci, Hasse, all the great composers whose settings of his
plays had been forgotten for forty years, looked on and listened. " Ah !
adorable twin-brother, dearest Carlucciello," he wrote, " how much I have
to say to you and how little I can say ! What can we do when we can do
nothing?" What would he have said had he been able? Perhaps
nothing ; memories of old affections, vague desires for love, were sadly
and confusedly inarticulately speaking within him. All that he would
have said remained unspoken. He wrote no more to Farinello, nor to
anyone. In the spring of 1782 he caught cold, fell ill, and in a few days
was beyond recovery. Pius VI., who had come to Vienna to humiliate
himself and Catholicism before Joseph II. (who, having sore eyes, did
not even go to meet him), sent his benediction to the dying poet; the
Nuncio brought him the sacrament, and as he took it he sang, with
strange self-assertion, a verse of his own paraphrase of the psalm
Miserere; then he subsided into lethargy and silence. In those hours of
isolation did he go over the past, remember Gravina, the Romanina, and
the Countess Althann, ask himself how much sweetness he had got out
of that long life of philosophic prudence, of sacrifice to peace and
safety?
A little later Marianna Martinez, most cultivated and best mannered
of spinsters, sent off a long letter to the Cavalier Don Carlo Broschi,
commonly called Farinello, at his villa outside the Porta San Felice at
Bologna, beginning, " The loss of a mortal who did honour to humanity
Metastasio and the Opera.
223
must be felt by all," &c. and winding up with thanks for a box of pre¬
served fruit; the whole to inform him, with all due ceremony, indifference,
and frigidness, that the Abate Pietro Metastasio had died 011 April 14,
1782. Very cold was this letter of the woman to whom, with her
brothers, Metastasio had been as a father, and had left his whole fortune;
cold as had been the letter, written sixty-four years earlier, by which
Metastasio had informed those concerned of the death of Gravina.
Farinello did not take it so coolly; to him Metastasio had never ceased
to be the greatest of poets, the noblest of men, the dearest of friends. A
few months later the great singer died, giving his last thoughts to a
certain harpsichord and music-books ; all the rest his nephews might
dispose of as they chose, but that they must keep, for it had been the
gift of a saint, of the wife of Ferdinand VI. What became of harpsi¬
chord and music-books heaven only knows; the heirs of Metastasio's
" adorable twin-brother " left Bologna, and abandoned his villa to utter
decay. For ninety years did it stand empty and tenantless, dismantled
and crumbling ; a strange weird spot of desolation in the beautiful
fields of corn and vines, forgotten like the fame of its owner. The
next year, 1783, in a little house of the Campo S. Marcuola, at Venice,
died an old couple, a German and his Italian wife, and no one noticed
their end ; the husband was Johann Adolph Hasse, the most famous
Italian composer of the second quarter of the eighteenth century; the
wife, Faustina Bordoni, the greatest singer and most beautiful actress of
the day. Of the great melodrama of the year 1730, the joint work of poet
and musician, these four,—Metastasio, Farinello, and the two Hasses,—
were the last, late survivors. A new school of music had arisen, a new
school of poetry was arising: Cimarosa and Paisiello reigned without
rivals; Allien and Monti were about to accede; the old heroic opera, the
school which had produced the Olimptacle, Demofoonte, and liegolo, was
extinct.
VIII.
The news of Metastasio's death gave a shock to the Italians: to that
generation he seemed ever to have lived, his works seemed always to
have existed; many people had probably not realised the fact of his being
alive until they heard that lie was dead. He had been a name, familiar
beyond all others, a name associated with a hundred plots of operas which
everyone seemed to have known ever since he existed, and with innumer¬
able rhymes, strophs, and quotations which everybody seemed to have
known almost before he was born. But, living at Vienna for fifty years,
224
Metastasio and the Opera.
lie was not a personality to his countrymen, and even the few who had
known him, in person or by letter, knew nothing whatever of his history.
His death was felt as a surprise. A number of new editions of his works
were published, and the printers hunted greedily for every letter of his
that could be discovered; all the hungry literary priestlets set about com¬
piling biographies of him, bare, barren, and most often apocryphal. All
the would-be men of letters penned his eulogiums, gushing, pedantic, full
of quotations from Horace and Rousseau, enriched with foot-notes, in
which they displayed their learning and lampooned their adversaries with
equal want of connection. All the academies convoked all their mem¬
bers to a great Church ceremony round a richly-scrolled catafalque, or to
a meeting in the black-draped academic rooms, and speeches were made,
and sonnets read and distributed. At Turin the literati gave Metastasio
a grand funeral, with the famous Marcliesi to sing ; at Alexandria the
clever ex-Jesuit Cordara extemporised an immensely long and compli¬
cated oration; but the most was of course done at Metastasio's own birth¬
place, Rome. The Arcadians all met at the Bosco Parrasio, hetero¬
geneous, cosmopolitan, and rather frivolous Arcadians, very unlike those
Metastasio had seen there sixty years before: English milordi led about
by tutors; German princes led about by equerries ; artists, antiquaries
of all nations, Angelica Kauffman, Piranesi, Gavin Hamilton, Tischbein,
and Zeoga; a motley crowd, not knowing very ay ell nor caring very much
what this Arcadian business might be. To them, the Abate Taruffi,
former secretary to the Nuncio at Vienna, most Voltairian, Ossianesque,
altogether fashionable of ecclesiastics, friend of Goldoni, of Gluck, of
Beccaria, of all that in those days meant rebellion, held forth in praise
of his dear friend Metastasio, showing how great a man and how very
great a poet he had been. And winding up his discourse the Abate
Taruffi declared, that, though the Italian stage had lost much in Meta¬
stasio, there was present one who could repair the loss ; and he waved
his hand gracefully in the direction of that singular, violent, red-haired
young man who drove the many horses and wrote the tyrannicide trage¬
dies, and made love to the wife of the last of the Stuarts; singing, in the
same breath, the requiem for Metastasio and the Te Deum for Alfieri.
This incident represents a vast fact. Metastasio's fame was indeed
still alive, but it was a fame born of the past and not destined to live in
the future. People continued to write, speak, and even think of him as
great, but the reality of his greatness came less home to them year by year.
The civilisation of which Metastasio had been the spokesman was break¬
ing up ; the work of art of which he had been the chief craftsman was
falling to ruins. Metastasio had represented the awakening of the purely
Italian mind out of the long slumber of the seventeenth century, its spon¬
taneous sliaking-off of Spanish and erudite influences; but this movement
Metcistasio and the Opera.
225
was now over ; Italy had become cosmopolitan and eclectic, borrowing
French, English, German, and antique modes of feeling; and thinking
already of borrowing topboots, guillotine cravats, and Grecian sandals.
Metastasio's strong, delicate, natural, simply speaking and rapidly moving
characters were even more insipid to the enthusiastic admirers of Lovelace,
of Julie, of Fingal, of Werther, and of Brutus, than were his old-world
wisdom, his old-world morality, to the readers of Diderot, Rousseau, and
Chamfort.
To the Italians of the latter eighteenth century, saturated with every
sort of exotic fashion, medleys of every sort of cosmopolitan exaggeration,
Metastasio was necessarily insufficient: he did not satisfy their craving
for morbid sentimentation, for strong action, for bold theory; he did not
help to drag them along towards that mysterious, magnetic future which
hid the revolution.
Moreover, Metastasio, who could no longer command sympathy in the
closet, was rapidly ceasing to awaken admiration on the stage. The
opera, such as he had known and treated it, had put all the action and
dialogue into recitative, and had retained only the solo air or at most the
duet for expressions of lyrism or passion. Very early, as soon as the
public had grown fairly acquainted with his plays, the recitatives had
begun to be curtailed; later, the words of airs were changed to suit com¬
poser or singer; little by little his plays became mutilated patchworks.
Moreover, a gradual change took place in music; rhythm, accompaniment,
and concerted pieces developed, while at the same time musical forms
became softer, slighter, less massive and heroic; boldness of modulation
diminished; and the recitatives, become threadbare and monotonous, were
gabbled over unnoticed, except when relieved by instrumental passages.
As the recitatives became worse and less noticed, concerted pieces became
more complicated, better and more popular: trios, quartets, and quintets
were made out of Metastasio's pages of recitative. The effect was obvious.
Not only did the verses thus inserted by theatre rhymesters disgrace the
original play, but the very play was deformed by the action, whose
rapidity was its great merit, being arrested or rather forced to move in
the treadmill of concerted pieces. Anyone curious to see what a play by
Metastasio had become by the year 1790 may compare the Clemenza di
Tito as printed in his works with the Clemenza di Tito as set by Mozart:
the powerful opening scene between Sextus and Vitellia is fiddle-faddled
into a duet; the rapid scene of the discovered conspiracy is drawn out into
a quintet; the pathetic meeting of Sextus and Titus is fugued and twisted
into a trio, and the exquisite outburst of Sextus's remorse is frittered away
into a long rondo, in which he repeats a dozen times and to all sorts of
t,unes—" Tanto affanno soffre un core—ne si muore—di dolore."
Meanwhile the universal taste for whimpering, semi-serious comedy,
Q
226
Metastasio and the Opera.
wliich had already done so much harm to Goldoni in Italy and to Lessing
in Germany, affected even the opera. A famous singer, Marchesi,
thought he could show off his fine figure to better advantage in modern
dress than in the pseudo-antique works of Metastasian tailors, and could
move more ladies to tears as a deserter, a reformed prodigal, or a game¬
ster, than as a Roman consul ; so he imported from France a number of
plays of the lachrymose, middle-class sort, which were duly transformed
into Italian opera texts. The heroic subjects, with Greeks and Romans,
kings and dictators, were still kept for the stately gala performances, to
which people went in full dress, in the powder, hoops, stockings, and em¬
broidered coats which were replaced in ordinary life by dresses a la Brutus
and a la Pamela, limp, lank, and draggled; but the semi-serious plays,
like the Nina pazza per amove, the Disertore, the Locloisha, the Agnese,
were what people really enjoyed, what the great composers, like the
delicately sentimental Paisiello, worked at with the best will.
The revolution had burst out; the old Italian states had been broken
up, the Venetian republic had been dissolved for ever, the Papacy had
been extinguished for the moment: a new state of things had suddenly
arisen: it was the dawning of the nineteenth century; the last hours of
the eighteenth were striking. Alfieri and Monti were at their zenith.
Ugo Foscolo was arising, the children were already born who were to be
known as Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi; Metastasio was a
thing of the past. Yet even then his name carried with it authority; he
was no longer liked, no longer read, but he was still respected. About
1798 there came to Rome with the victorious French a strange republican
sibyl, once a nun, a mystic, a saint; now a democrat, a philanthropist, a
prophetess of progress, the Citizeness Clothilde Suzanne Courcelle La-
brousse, who held forth before the Roman patriots in the mixed language
of an encyclopaedist and a fishwife, and whose long, rambling discourses,
droll, sickening, pathetic, mixtures of politics, midwifery, and scriptural
quotations, were printed by the republican printer Puccinelli; the original
in wondrous French on one page, the Italian translation on the other. In
this exceedingly rare little pamphlet, which gives a greater insight into
the French revolutionary invasion than all Botta's volumes put together,
there is the following curious passage, which we transcribe with the
Citoyenne Clothilde Suzanne Courcelle Labrousse's own spelling and
punctuation:
" Vous Romaines, qui vous pleignez de toutes ces choses, je va vous faire
voir encore comme quoi tout vient en haut et que c'est dun Romain dont
est venue l'origine de tout ceci au reste je va vous dire ce qui ma etc
raporte, car je n'en sai point positivement l'histoire ; mais cela me paroit
si vraisemblable que cela m'engage a le raporter, le principe de tout ceci
vient dont d'un sertin Metastaze qu'on dit etre de son origine un petit
Metastasio ancl the Opera.
227
pauvre enfant do Rome, et qui se trouvant avoir la voie agrable cliantoit
souvant et vercifioit avec une grali.de facilite, gens d'etude, l'entendant
lui dirent s'il vouloit venir avec eux qu'il lui aprendroit quelque cliose qui
lui faciliteroit a ce tirer d'affaire, lui soudain accepta, et fit tant de pro-
gres que dans peu temps il les surpassa a tous, cola etant il demanda au
Pape de ce temps l'a une pension pour vivre afin de nepenser qu'a 1'etude,
le Pape l'ayant constament refuse il s'en fut a Yiene, soudain ses talens
firent du bruit, et parvinrent a Marie Therese Imperatrice, qui le voulut
voir, et elle en fut si satisfaite qu'elle le fit Regent de ces enfants qui
comme tout le monde sait etoient en grand nombre, comme ce Metastase
etoit vraiment eclaire, il faisoit presenter a cette cour que l'homme quoi
qu'il soit d'une grand naissance, il n'est pas pour cela dans le vrai plus
grand que le reste des hommes, et qu'il n'est pas pour cela plus a l'abri
des evenements de la vie que tout autre; enfin en consequence des prin-
cipes qu'il insinuoit a cette cour l'lmperatrice fit aprendre a tous ses
enfants un art comme l'agriculture etc. tout comme s'ils eussent ete
oblige d'avoir besoin de cela pour vivre, a ses filles, elles leur faisoient
balier leur chambre etc. et lors que les grands de sa court le voyoient, et
qu'il luiobservoient qu'elles n'auroient jamais besoin de ce savoir etc.; elle
leur repondoient liela! qui le sait, de sorte done que se soit par principe
on par pressentiment que ce fesoit cette cour; mais reste qu'etant imbue
de ces sentiments; ils se disposoient deja, et disposoient tout cliose aux
evenements du temps .... de maniere que toute ses lumieres s'etant re-
pendues dans toutes les cours et des cours dans le peuple il en resulte
joint a tant autres circonstances favorables; a 9a que les choses en sont
venues ou elles sont, ainsi Romaines prenez vous en a vous memes, et
non a d'autres."*
Whether the Roman citizens, citizens ex-abati, ex-princes, ex-spies,
and ex-flunlceys, assembled at the republican club in the month of Floreal
of the year six, were deeply impressed by the truth of Citizeness La-
brousse's remarks, whether they ever took Metastasio into consideration
as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and the original cause of the revolution,
we shall never know. All that we do know is, that as a poet Metastasio
was daily losing ground. By the end of the last century his plays had
been transformed into monsters which could scarce be recognised as his;
in the first years of this century they had disappeared altogether from
the stage, routed by the invasion of pseudo-knights, pseudo-chatelaines,
pseudo-pages, pseudo-ghosts, and all the other supposed representatives
of chivalry which came with romanticism from Germany to France, and
from France to Italy.
* Discours prononces par la Citoyenne Covreelle Labrousse au Club de Home
da its le mois Floreal de Van VI. faitsct rents par elle-meme. A Rome ckcz Puc-
cinelli Joachim Imprimcur National, p. 224.
Q 2
228
Metastasio and the Opera.
Driven from the opera stage, Metastasio could find no asylum on the
tragic stage ; his plays were now useless as operas, and had always been
unavailable as tragedies: they could never be declaimed, and they now
ceased to be sung. Off the stage everything was against Metastasio ; he
was not descriptive, not oratorical, not elegiac; he was dramatic, and his
swift, impetuous action, his light, firmly-marked points of pathos, ap¬
peared to the reader dry and bare, thin action and thinner pathos, im¬
bedded in insipid gallantry and entangled in complicated plots. The eye,
running rapidly over his blocks of blank verse, was for ever arrested by
those continual little lyrical strophs, insignificant little appendages which
stood out like flourishes from the white paper. If anything was remem¬
bered it was these strophs, these pretty, insignificant little similes and
conceits, formerly given over by the poet, who had done his work, to the
composer who was to begin his ; trifles of little value save as a theme for
melody and vocal execution, trifles in which the opera of the eighteenth
century paid for having been almost an acted tragedy by becoming almost
a motionless concert. These remained, and on these Metastasio's fame
began to rest; on these rhymes, which had been intended to be enlarged,
changed, given new metre, new movement, new life, breadth, and dignity
by music, but which, when read off, were a mere pretty, ridiculous little
fiddle-faddle.
Thus Metastasio was gradually placed in a position in which he could
never be fairly judged, the position of an unacted dramatist, of an unsung
song-writer; while, at the same time, the general way of thinking and
judging became necessarily hostile to him. The Italians, checked by
the French invasion in their self-elaborated civilisation of the eighteenth
century, had become pedantic and utilitarian; the literature of the days
of former freedom, and the literature of aspiration after future liberty,
were alone valued ; in their reviving national spirit, in their state of
struggle against oppression, the Italians disdained that artistic life which
had made them, as it seemed, the a_'stlietical slaves, the jesters of the rest
of Europe. Metastasio had belonged to the slavish eighteenth century,
had been a court pensioner, a flatterer of the house of Austria ; he was
utterly scorned; his works, which had been opera texts, were reviled as
effeminate pieces of trumpery, which, with their falsified history, their
royal pieces of perfection, their love-sick heroes, their roulades and their
ritornellos, had been good only to amuse tyrants and to enervate slaves ;
artistic Delilahs, sending the nation to sleep with meretricious delights,
that it might awake to find itself shorn of its strength and blind to its
shame. Even now, when criticism is getting the better of enthusiastic
injustice, Metastasio is scorned and, at the best, condoned; his jesting
and unconscious prophecy has been fulfilled, and people write of him
almost in his own mock humble words; " In the eighteenth century there
Metastasio and the Opera.
229
lived a certain Abate Metastasio, a tolerable poet among bad ones." This
is all the recognition he receives from the intellectual classes: if his
works are still re-printed, it is for the benefit of old-fashioned prigs, who
think him a safe moralist; of uncultured gnsliing women, who think him
a consolation in unhappy love; of illiterate peasants, who use his plays
on their own stages of planks and sheets. His true worth, which is his
artistic worth, will be recognised only when the eighteenth century shall
cease to be studied merely as a precursor of the nineteenth; when the
musical efflorescence of the last century shall be recognised as a national
and artistic phenomenon analogous to the plastic efflorescence of the
Renaissance; and when with this musical efflorescence shall be associated
the efflorescence of the Italian tragic drama; when, in short, the Italians
shall recognise that their last great artistic gift to the world was the
opera.
THE COMEDY OF MASKS.
THE COMEDY OF MASKS.
The Comedy of Masks, the farce partially improvised by typical buf¬
foons, is as old as the Italian race. It has existed in rudiment ever
since the earliest days of Latin, Oscan, and Italo-Greek civilisation: it is
the elder comedy, for ever thrust aside by the younger comedy, the un¬
written for ever banished by the written, driven out of sight by Aristo¬
phanes, by Plautus, by Terence, by the erudite comic writers of the
Renaissance ; despised, reviled, ignored ; forced to hide in fair-booths and
village taverns, till at last, after two thousand years of ignominious lurk¬
ing, it issues forth strong, brilliant, and victorious with the great invasion
of the dialect literature of the lower classes, of the peasants and lazzaroni
and vagabonds who saved the Italian nationality in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
One or two allusions of contemptuous ancient satirists and furious
fathers of the Church, one or two terra-cotta statuettes and comic wall-
paintings, have sufficed to prove not only that the Comedy of Masks was
a mere continuation of the Atellan farces of old Italic days, but that
the principal buffoons have undergone little change since the days when
Pulcinella, under the name of Maccus, displayed his double-hump and
prodigious nose to the ancient Neapolitans; when the Oscan Pappus
and Casnar let themselves be duped by valets, daughters, and wards, just
like the Venetian Pantalone and the Roman Cassandrino; when Harle¬
quin, once the satyr-like buffoon of the dionysiac revels of Sicyon, played
his pranks and danced on his head, flatshod (planipes), begrimed with
soot (fuligine faciam obductam), and dressed in motley patches (mimus
centunculus), before Cicero and Apuleius. In the days of Roman civili¬
sation and eclecticism the old Italic farce, the Comedy of Masks of
antiquity, was rejected as coarse and rustic by a society requiring the
more refined and artistic filtliiness of Greece; but when the austerity,
which is always the companion of the highest depravity, began to grumble
with the Stoics and thunder with the Saints against the written and
polished comedy, when the Christian Emperors and Popes began to pro¬
scribe the elegant abominations of the stage, the old Italian farce, safe
from imperial and ecclesiastic censure in its unwritten licence, began once
more to raise its head. And, in proportion as the intellectual culture of
antiquity diminished, and the austerity of Christianity increased, the
234
The Comedy of Masks.
Italian mimes returned to power. We can dimly watch the buffoon
masquers, with their gibbosities and sootiness and patches, playing their
antics and cracking their jokes amidst the crumbling remains of anti¬
quity, in the fast increasing darkness involving the world; until at
length, when Home has been reduced to a heap of ruins and Italy to a
Babel of nationalities, when memory of the past, conscioxisness of the
present, and care for the future, seem simultaneously extinguished, we
lose sight of the old Mask Comedy in the general obscurity, and strain
vainly through the gloom to see the silhouette of the buffoons of antiquity.
What became of them during that long period of darkness ? Did they
lurk, with the last remnants of paganism, in the rural festivals, playing
their pranks in honour of antique gods disguised as mediajval saints ?
Did the Church absorb them, as it absorbed all the life that remained, and
let them loose to dance, gesticulate, and jest among the donkeys and
drunken clerks of the feast of fools or the mummers of shrovetide,
humouring the love of the ridiculous and the gross in the same way as
it did in the dirty and grotesque apishnesses of the cathedral fronts ?
Be it as it may, the old buffoons continued to live, perhaps to hibernate,
throughout the Middle Ages ; they doubtless showed themselves in the
carnival processions of Italy, by the side of the mummers of shoemakers,
of pastrycooks, of grasshoppers, and of antique divinities for whom
Lorenzo de' Medici wrote his clever indecencies. But, as the culture of
Greece had thrust them aside in Rome, so also did the revival of antique
literature thrust them aside in the Renaissance ; the humanists of the fif¬
teenth century would hear only of Plautus and Terence, and drove back
the barbarous mimes, little dreaming of their antiquity, into the arms of
the uneducated classes. Machiavelli, Ariosto, Bibbiena, Speroni, Tris-
sino, devoted their talents to imitating the ancient comic writers; Baldas-
sare Peruzzi constructed ingenious stage scenery ; prelates, like Fedra
Inghirami, learned the parts of antique prostitutes and panders, and Leo
X. and Clement VII. laughed like schoolboys at humanistic adaptations
such as the Calandra and the Suppositi, which would have made even an
ancient blush.
But when the brilliant civilisation of the Renaissance broke up, when
humanities were forgotten in the strife for existence, when Popes and
prelates began to think of Luther rather than of Aristophanes, when the
Italian merchants, turned into thriftless nobles, began to be weighed upon
by Spanish solemnity, when the Inquisition began to prick up its ears at
every profane joke, when the misfortunes of Italy had set in, then the old
buffoons reappeared, Maccus become Pulcinella, Casnar grown into Pan-
talone, the sanniones turned into the two zanni, Arleccliino and Brighella;
then the unwritten comedy came as a consoler. It is a strange and sug¬
gestive fact that the man who first gave to the Com,media dell' Arte a
The Cornedij of Masks.
235
separate and honourable position, who counterbalanced with his frank,
tender, genuine comic genius the clever imitations and adroit obscenities
of the humanists, the Paduan actor and dialect poet, Angelo Beolco, sur-
named Ruzzante, was also the man who first mourned in the simple and
touching dialect of Venetia the misery of Italy in the second quarter of the
sixteenth century, the wretchedness of the peasantry and townsfolk ruined
by the long wars and continuous massacres of the French, the Germans,
and the Spaniards. " The world is 110 longer what it was," said Ruz¬
zante; "there is nothing but slaughter and famine; in the fields there is
no longer any sound of laughter and singing ; the young people no
longer make love and marry; we seem choked by the plague in our
throats; the very nightingales no longer sing as in former days; happy
are the dead quiet under ground. Let us therefore, since we cannot cry
freely, laugh in our misery."
Laughter in misery, such was the origin of the revived Comedy of
Masks : buffooneries to drown the recollection of ignominy, merriment to
hide seditious sorrow, local satire to hide national satii-e, dialect to save
Italian; the typical mask as a mantle wherewith to cover the object of
derision, and the improvised jest, obscene and fleeting, wherewith to strike
without leaving a trace. The police of the Viceroy, or the censors of the
Holy Office, may indeed get scent of some stir in men's thoughts: let
them come and pry; what can they find ? merely Harlequin kicking
Pantaloon with some rabelaisien drollery; there is 110 proof, no paper, no
definite action to lay hold of, the sedition has evaporated. Thus the
Comedy of Masks kept alive the interest of Italy in itself at a time when
Italy had been superseded by so many Spanish fiefs and Spanish king¬
doms ; crushed and mangled as a whole, the country maintained its
vitality in its fragments: fragments too insignificant, too heterogeneous
to create suspicion, living 011 separate and unnoticed until at length per¬
mitted to reunite ; and the Comedy of Masks, the jumble of Bergamascs
and Sicilians, of Neapolitans and Bolognese, the Babel of dialects the
most dissimilar, is the product and the expression of this provincial life
ever tending towards forbidden national unity.
The wonderfully rapid development of the Comedy of Masks proves its
intense vitality : by the middle of the sixteenth century the principal masks
had already become traditional: old men were typified in Pantalone dei
Bisognosi the Venetian merchant, wearing the obsolete costume,—the
scarlet stockings, black robe, and long-tailed hood, of the burgher of a medi¬
aeval commonwealth; the two ideal classes of servants, the hypocritical rogue
and the gluttonous sly simpleton, were represented respectively by Brighella,
dressed in the loose-striped shirt and linen cap of the artisans of the six¬
teenth century; and by Arleccliino, wearing tight-fitting hose and jerkin of
motley stripes and patches, suggestive of the grotesque dress of the youths
236
The Comedy of Masks.
in Signorelli and Carpaccio's paintings. Both Brighella and Arleccliino
came to be associated with the town of Bergamo, the Lombard dialect of
which, wholly distinct from the Venetian of Pantalone, they continued to
the last to employ. These two servants, the arch buffoons of the play, were
called the two Zanni, perhaps in reminiscence of the Sanniones of antiquity;
and Harlequin in especial never lost his antique character of mime,—
dancing, playing tricks, and performing gymnastic feats in the midst of
his parts. To these three was added the Doctor, sometimes called Doctor
Graziano or Doctor Balanzon, the typical man of learning: dressed as a
jurist, with an immense wine-stain on one cheek : always a Bolognese,
always blustering and pedantic, oscillating between a knave and a fool,
holding forth in maccaronian Latin. These four, Pantalone, Brighella,
Harlequin, and the Doctor, were called the four masks; they were the
most popular, the most typical, the most universally known and the
longest of life. But opposite this quartet of North Italians arose another
quartet of Neapolitan buffoons: Pulcinella, the ancient Maccus, the
modern Punch or Policliinelle, with immense nose and double hump,
dressed in white, a terrible violent sort of comic Bluebeard or Nero; the
bully and intriguer Scaramuccia, dressed in black, the archetype of the
military adventurer; the simpleton and stammerer Tartaglia; the long,
dancing, fiddling, singing vagabond Coviello;—these Southern masks
being more violent, more savage, more indecently antique, than the
Northern, and perhaps more restricted to their own provinces. Round
these two quartets of masks swarmed an infinity of other buffoons, varie¬
ties, individual or provincial; rising up and dying away, altering, multi¬
plying to all infinity: the Milanese Beltrame and Meneghino, the im¬
mense class of Scappinos and Trivelinos of various shades, born of the
Brighella tribe; the Truffaldinos, Mezzettinos, Pedrolinos, and Cavicchios,
children or brothers of Harlequin; and a legion of others, Burattinos,
Francatrippas, Giangurgolos, Pasquariellos, Travaglinos, whom, in their
rapid appearance, disappearance, and metamorphose, we cannot even
plainly identify. To these masks—half actors, half acrobats, half jesters,
—were added regular actors and actresses, speaking Tuscan and probably
improvising but little, the pair of lovers borrowed with but slight alteration
from the written comedy and retaining its pseudo-antique names : Lelio,
Leandro, Orazio, and Florindo; Lavinia, Flamminia, Ortensia, Giacinta,
and Rosaura, dapper figures with no comic work to do, but necessary for
the action of the play. And finally, superposed as it were on to the
Italian comedy, was the type of the military adventurer, of the Spanish
hidalgo, violent, tyrannical, overbearing and rapacious : a mixture of Don
Juan, Pizarro, and Don Quixote; at first rather terrible than ridiculous,
and growing into a bona fide comic figure, into a threadbare and hungry
adventurer, a cowardly sonorous fire-eater, a Captain Fracassa or Mata-
The Comecly of Masks.
237
moros, only in proportion as the redoubtable kingdom of Philip II.,
odious but dignified, turned into the tattered Spain of the seventeenth
century, execrable but ludicrous.
Moreover, the stability of the characters was only one peculiarity of
the improvised comedy ; the types were not only fixed, they were abso¬
lutely personal; a man who had once chosen to play Pantaloon, Harlequin,
Pulcinella, or the Captain, never played anything else; the part was a
costume which, once worn, could never be changed ; the various characters
were not abstractions like the characters of other comedies, they were
concrete individuals. Instead of the playwright inventing a figure, a
Falstaff or a Tartuffe, and then instructing an actor how to embody his
conception, the playwright of the Comedy of Masks was given so many
living creatures, so many embodied types, not Jacopo, Andrea, or Gio¬
vanni, whom he must bid strip off his every-day dress in order to assume
some characteristic costume, and paint his face with any new device of
wrinkles, but Arlecchino, with his patches and stripes, his black mask,
his kicks, capers, and jokes; or Pantalone in his red hose and long black
hood; or Lelio in his dainty slashed silk doublet and curled mustachios ;
each as complete, as ready-made in character, gesture, intonation, and
moral being, as in exterior appearance. The Mask actors were in short
scarcely actors at all: they were fantastic realities, they no more needed
a part to be written for them than does any other reality; they neces¬
sarily and from their essential nature felt, acted, and spoke in a consistent
and characteristic way. The consequence was evident: no parts were
written for them, they were placed opposite each other, and the meeting
of Pantaloon and Brigliella, of Harlequin and the Doctor, of Pulcinella
and Scaramuccia, produced, by the automatic movement of the characters,
an action and a dialogue ever new and ever natural. Ideal types of
buffoons, made up of local caricature, of obsolete fashions, of antique
traditions, moulded together by the reckless fancy of the people ; and real
friction of character, real dialogue, real action, real repartee; such was
the strange dual nature of the Mask Comedy, such the secret of its long
fascination for the fancy and its ever renewed dramatic interest.
The Comedy of Masks had started with being but a sort of extravagant
offshoot of the written comedy imitated from the antique, an adaptation
thereof to the wants of less refined classes, and to the peculiarities of
popular actors; the buffoons had at first tried to perform for the lower
classes what the academic actors performed for the upper ; Pantaloon and
Harlequin had wished to act Terence and Ariosto. But, as the Comedy
of Masks developed, it separated from the classic comedy and diverged
further and further, till it stood perfectly alone, a unique phenomenon in
the history of the drama. About 1540 Beolco and his imitator Calmo
had still written their comedies, leaving but little to the improvisation of
238
The Comedy of Masks.
the actors, and their plays can still be read and thoroughly enjoyed in
the reading; but their successors were obliged to leave half of the
dialogue to be extemporised, and in a very few years the written part of
the plays was reduced to a mere skeleton plan of the action divided into
scenes, which was hung up in the green-rooms for the instruction of
the actors, who filled up all the outlines according to the whim of the
moment. Thence it is that nothing has come down to us of the Comedy of
Masks of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries save a volume pub¬
lished about 1610 by the actor Flamminio Scala, containing fifty outlines
of comedies in narrative form, which read like some duller Bandello or
Cintio, threadbare tales of scurrilous intrigue, which are to the Comedy
of Masks like the shapeless scaffoldings which remain after some wonder¬
ful exhibition of fireworks: of those enchanted palaces of light spring¬
ing suddenly from the ground, of those fountains of flames, of those
showers of sparks and sheaves of rays, of all that wondrous world of fire,
there remains nothing but dreary rows of posts and bleak archways of
wire.
The Comedy of Masks was not an invention, not a revelation, it was a
natural product; it did not sieze hold of national taste, it sprang up and
developed everywhere because its seeds had long existed in the Italian mind,
and because the intellectual temperature of the latter sixteenth century
necessitated its germination and development. From the humbler quarters
of the towns it spread to the nobler, until the high-born and learned
Academicians, reciting antique and pseudo-antique plays in their palaces,
were interrupted by the yells of laughter of the spectators of Pantaloon
and Harlequin over the way. The noble amateurs, trying to reconstruct
Attic drama, strutting about in antiquarian splendour of toga and cothur¬
nus, yelling choruses according to Pythagorean recipes and stumping
pyrrhic sarabands after the fashion of Batthylus, looked down with
infinite scorn upon these ignoble modern buffoons who dared to be more
amusing than themselves. They refused to prostitute the noble name of
comedy to the farces which, as the learned Niccolo Secchi contemptuously
writes, " are performed here, there, and everywhere by dirty mercenary
raggamuffins, who introduce the Bergamasc Zanni, Francatrippa, Panta¬
loon, and such like buffoons, who can be compared only with the Atellan
mimes and planipedes of the ancients." The dirty mercenary ragga¬
muffins of Messer Niccolo were by that time, about 1580, neither dirty
nor raggamuffins, and could afford to snap their fingers at the written
comedies and the would-be Kosciuses of the Academies. Mercenary they
were, they lived off the laughter they could command, and lived honourably
and even magnificently; and they accepted for their unwritten comedy
the contemptuous epithet given it by the academic actors: professional
comedy, artisan comedy, trade comedy, in the Italian of the sixteenth
The Comedy of Masks.
239
century, which associated no assthetical ideas with the word art, Coin-
media delV Arte. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century Italy was
full of comic companies,—Venetian, Lombard, Tuscan, and Neapolitan,
but more commonly mixed, who wandered from place to place performing
with incredible success. The upper classes and the prelates and princes
patronised superior companies of highly-trained actors and beautiful
actresses, richly remunerated and highly honoured. The very Academi¬
cians became proud to recite verses in honour of some famous Harlequin
or some lovely Flamminia. The Church, so far from excommunicating
and refusing Christian sepulture to actors, did all to attach them to
religion, and was rewarded by occasionally discovering that some celebrated
buffoon had been in the habit of wearing a hair shirt beneath his motley
garb, and had died almost in odour of sanctity; nay, a real saint, Carlo
Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, was in the habit of examining, correcting,
and annotating the skeleton manuscripts submitted to his censure by
pious managers, and some of these curious, half holy, half profane relics,
were still extant in tlie eighteenth century. At the end of the sixteenth
century Italy was still the teacher of fashions, and the young foreigners
travelling about with their tutors and their fencing-masters brought back
to England, to France, and to Germany, the taste for Mask Comedies,
until at last they encouraged Italian actors, as their great-grandsons of
the days of Queen Anne were to encourage Italian singers, to try their
fortunes abroad. About 1570 the Austrian and Bavarian courts already
kept Italian companies with Arleccliino, Brighella, and the Doctor; in
1577 a company of Mask actors headed by a certain Drusiano migrated
to England, introducing the clowns and fools employed by Shakspeare ;
about the same time Juan Ganassa attempted, with but small success, to
graft the Italian masks on to the Spanish drama of Lope and Moreto; and
in 1577 Henri III., himself the strangest buffoon that ever played a
part in tragedy, called to Blois, to amuse the Huguenots and Ligueurs
there assembled, the comic company of the Gelosi, whom he had perhaps
seen during his Italian journey, and which numbered, besides the director
Flamminio Scala, the two excellent Zanni, Simone Bolognese and Pedro-
lino, Francesco Andreini, famous by his stage name of Captain Spavento
della Yalle Inferna, and his wife the beautiful Isabella, queen of Italian
actresses, celebrated throughout Italy for her beauty, her learning, and
her excellent conduct. The taste for things Italian increased with the
marriage of Henri IV.; the Gelosi were again invited to Paris, subse¬
quently succeeded by a new company called the Fedeli, headed by a
younger Andreini; and finally, in 1G45, the Italian Mask actors were
established in the Hotel du Petit Bourbon, where they performed al¬
ternately with French actors, and where the young upholsterer Jean
Baptiste Poquelin, known on the stage as Moliere, studied acting from
240
The Comedy of Masks.
the admirable Scaramuccia Tiberio Fiorilli. Moliere not only learned
from tlie Italians bow to construct his plays and how to perform them,
but he also borrowed from them largely, taking several of their Mask
types, like Truffaldin, Sganarelle, Pantaloon (Geronte), and Brighella
(Scapin), and deliberately using Mask frameworks for several of his plays,
such as EEtourdi and Le Festin de Pierre; nay, some critics go so far
as to assert with M. Moland that wherever in Moliere there is com¬
plicated action and comic movement we may trace the influence of the
Italian comedy. Thus the Commedia delV Arte, which had perhaps
afforded suggestions to Shakspeare and to Lope de Vega, proximately
produced the comedy of Moliere by offering a definite artistic mould in
which to cast all the heterogeneous comic elements which had existed
chaotically in the old French fabliaux, nouvelles, and farces.
The historians of the Comedy of Masks, from the arcliasologist-actor
Riccoboni, " dit Lelio, comedien ordinaire du Roy," down to M. Maurice
Sand and M. Moland, have universally declared that the establishment
of these colonies in England, Spain, Germany, and France, marks the
highest point, the golden age, of the Commedia delV Arte, and that its
decline dates from the year 1G00. In this decision we cannot possibly
concur. That the Comedy of Masks obtained its most artistic shape and
its highest polish in the days of the Gelosi and the Fedeli; that in the
hands of these admirable actors it was a happy mixture of written and
improvised dialogue, of Tuscan and of dialect, of classic tradition and
popular inspiration, is undeniable ; but the very nature of the Commedia
delV Arte was to be deficient in artistic shape and literary polish, to be
wholly improvised and totally unliterary, to be unhampered by traditions
and fluctuating according to the caprice of the people. The comedy of
the Gelosi and of the Fedeli still partook too much of the written comedy
of Machiavelli and Bibbiena, the actors were still too much influenced by
academic models, and spectators were still too accustomed to humanistic
unities. Italy in the sixteenth century, broken as was its nationality and
crumbling.as were its institutions, was still too much of the well-organised,
polished Italy of the Renaissance to permit of the full development of the
Mask Comedy : for that was required the final stage of national stagna¬
tion and ferment. The golden age of the Commedia delV Arte is precisely
the period which has been assigned to its decline, the time when the re¬
straints of culture and civilization had rotted away, and when comedy fell
into the hands of the rabble; the Commedia dell' Arte flourished most
luxuriantly in the depth of that strange swamp, bog, and quagmire of the
Italy of the seventeenth century.
A swamp, a bog, a quagmire indeed; a confused expanse of stag¬
nating ideas, of rotting forms, of rank and inextricable abuses, of
melancholy dried vegetation of better times ; a slippery, muddy, puddly
The Comedy of Masks.
241
piece of noisomeness, from whose approach we are scared by the monoto¬
nous croak of a legion of literary reptiles; such is the Italy of the seven¬
teenth century. Yet let us be fair even to this evil piece of historical
land ; to this putrescence of the vigorous things, good and evil, left by
the Kenaissance. Hidden in the corruption of death are the germs of
life; among the putrid waters trickle little invisible streamlets, pure and
limpid, acquiring daily more volume and more current ; hidden by the
rotting vegetation of the insolent rank marsh-grass are little plants,
gradually pushing their shoots upwards till they will have overtopped
the evil weeds ; in this atmosphere of death there is a microscopic, in¬
finitesimal but infinite life, a life as of maggots, or of millions of ugly
little vermin, born of the very putrefaction : the swamp, which seems
dead, is alive, and the day will come when it will be redeemed and fruitful
for the world.
Let us not, therefore, turn away in contempt and disgust at this ugly
Italian seventeenth century ; let us remember that in this miserable,
loathsome period took place that process of disintegration and revivification
of national elements which gave us, instead of Machiavelli and Guicciardini,
Yico and Beccaria ; instead of Politian and Ariosto, Metastasio and
Goldoni; instead of Leonardo, Michel Angelo, and Titian, Marcello,
Pergolesi, and Cimarosa. In those dismal days when the solemn osten¬
tatious houses of the rich were full of domestic degradation, when the
husband would fall by his wife's side stabbed by the wife's lover; when
the wife would pine away for months with the sickness of mysterious
poison ; when the father, stained with every vice, would be strangled
by night and cast by his sons into some foul hiding-place; and people
would shrug their shoulders and the police raise their eyebrows as sole
comment; when the dapper young men kept retinues of murderers dang¬
ling at their heels, and the sainted nuns filled the convent wells with
little children's bones ; when the learned academies disputed in Greek,
Latin, and Italian, whether the stone hurled against the Virgin's picture
was to be considered a holy relic or a sacrilegious abomination ; when old
women and young were burned for going to the witches' meetings in the
shape of cats ; when poets were crowned for calling the heavens a shining
sieve; when the upper classes had become poisoned and bewitched
maniacs, and the literati exuberant superstitious pedants; when the
society, literature, and language of Italy, sick with the excesses of the
Renaissance, were weighed upon and oppressed by the huge rotting mass
of dead Spain ; then in that dismal seventeenth century the lower classes,
the beggars, the vagabonds, the illiterate, the whipped serfs of Naples,
the malaria-poisoned peasants of the Maremma, the starved artisans of
the towns, all the tattered, bruised, ulcerated, homeless, worldess, nameless
oppressed, upon whom national degradation and foreign tyranny fell
R
242
The Comedy of Masks.
hardest, arose in tlieir rags and their filth, and proclaimed in their multi¬
fold jargon of dialects that Italy was not dead. While the upper
classes became day by day more grave, more sad, more imbecile with their
Spanish solemnity and vacuity ; while the Italian poets, with Marini at
their head, became day by day more nauseously insipid with their Spanish
unmeaningness and inflation ; the lower classes became daily more way¬
ward, more powerful, more passionate, and their dialect poet more fan¬
tastic and original. While the upper classes sat yawning in their plaster-
bedizened palaces, listening to some vapid, turgid pastoral rubbish, some
bastard Amyntas or mongrel Pastor Fido; the lower classes in the open
squares, in the fairs, among the nostrum vendors, the gibbets, the wine¬
shops, the pillories, the strings of onions and tin ware, among the maimed,
armless, legless beggars, the giants and giantesses, the preaching friars
and the fortune-telling gipsies, the whole squalid, fantastic, grotesque
world which Callot has etched in his " Fair at Impruneta," listened to
the wandering dialect poets, singing of Bertoldo and Bertoldino like
the Bolognese Croce, and to the vagabond actors of the Mask Comedy.
Then it was that, without poets and without actors of any fame, the
Gommedia delV Arte attained to its full size; gigantic, gigantically vigor¬
ous and monstrous : born of laughter among misery in the days of
Ravenna and Marignano, it attained to maturity amid oppression, starva¬
tion, and squalor in that dreary half-century of lethargy during which
Italy paid for the Thirty Years' War in Germany, and was bled of money
and men for the great strife between Catholic Austria and Protestant
Sweden. Plays and playwrights there were none ; subjects were taken
helter-skelter from Spain, from the older comedy, from the written
comedy; the dialects were in their most wondrous vigour ; the burlesque
style, under Tassoni, Maggi, and the great Redi, was triumphant. Every¬
where swarmed new varieties of masks, acrobats, jesters ; grotesque, ter¬
rible ; obscene and ludicrous shapes, only half-human, suggesting the
broken egg-shells, melon-rinds, and bundles of rags of their native
dust-holes and drain-vaults. Spanish Rodomonts, wondrous in deed,
with slashed jackets and cobwebbed swords, of names without end, Cocco-
drillo, Spezzamonti, Bellorofonte, Martellione, Basilisco, Rinoceronte,
Escarabombardon della Papirontonda, swaggered about with bristling
whiskers and mangy plume before the Spanish garrisons, boasting that
they were sons of Earthquake and Thunder, cousins of Death, and bosom
friends of Beelzebub; Trivelinos, Fritellinos, Formicas, Coviellos, dancing,
fiddling, kicking creatures, with long noses and slit mouths, tumbled
about in the face of the monks and Jesuits, singing heathen songs with
jargon burdens; Giangurgolos and Scaramuccias, ceremonious and stately,
with tattered clothes and spectacles, fandangoed about before the terrible
coaches of Neapolitan Viceroys ; Pulcinella, ogre-like, terrific, a volcano
The Comedy of Masks.
243
of jest and gibe, lashed np the lazzaroni like a precursor of Masaniello.
The Inquisition, the Jesuits, the Viceroys were powerless against this
ever-increasing and ever-varying swarm of buffoons ; the vagabonds,
the raggamuffins and their dialects, were saving the Italian nationality :
the masks of the comedy,—bold, insolent, serious, jesting, unseizable Pro-
tenses,—were saving the Italian lower classes from the fate of their
Spanish fellow-sufferers. Yes, this middle of the seventeenth century was
the golden time of the Comedy of Masks ; and the representative man, the
supreme and universal genius of the day, the Michel Angelo of vagabonds,
as Bernini was the Michel Angelo of nobles and pedants,—Salvator Rosa
—was one of the shining lights of the Commedia delV Arte. This strange
jumbled genius,-—wild, pedantic, ferocious, gentle, and playful, whose
cynically imaginative paintings, with their smoking battle-fields, their
brawls of ragged soldiers, their grimacing beggars and bandit-haunted
ravines, contrast so singularly with his coarse verbose satires, sweepings
up of erudite dirt-lieaps, and with his charming, quaint, half-undeveloped
music,—this arch-adventurer and arch-rebel wandered about in his youth
with other tattered artist vagabonds, acting the part of the Neapolitan
buffoon, dancer, singer, and jester, Coviello, in a masterly manner, as
another confused and ragged genius, caricature of poet and composer like
Salvator Rosa himself, Hoffmann, has shown him us in his admirable
story " II Signor Formica," in which Salvator Rosa, with his opponents the
Pyramid Doctor and thelittle deformed soprano Pitichinaccio, form a group
perfectly in the spirit of the Comedy of Masks. Later in life, when Rosa
had settled down in Florence, he continued to play his parts of Coviello
and Pascariello in the comedies improvised at his own house, in which
Torricelli the mathematician, Yiviani the brother of the astronomer, and
Carlo Dati, the Hellenist, performed the other mask characters ; while
Carlo Dolci, Alessandro Stradella, and Redi, the author of the magni¬
ficent rollicking dithyramb in Tuscan dialect, may have been present as
worthy spectators.
With Salvator Rosa the improvised Comedy of Masks, the proteus-like
representative of the vagabond life and dialect buffoonery of the seven¬
teenth century, culminates and begins to decline. As the seventeenth
century drew towards its close, as foreign oppression and national exhaus¬
tion diminished, as brigands and bravos vanished, as society became re¬
organised in its upper strata ; as, in short, the marsh, with its stagnation,
its garish weeds and vermin inhabitants, gradually turned into arable
land, so also the Comedy of Masks began to lose vitality. The opera,
attaining to maturity, gradually usurped its national powers; in the
southern provinces comic musical interludes began to supersede the mask
buffooneries; in the northern, French imitation began to substitute bad
tragic declamation for comic improvisation. The Commedia deJV Arte
r 2
244
Tlie Comedy of Masks.
maintained, it is true, its possession of the smaller theatres for another
half century ; all actors were mask actors, all comedies were mask
comedies; but the life of the style was fast ebbing ; no new types
appeared ; the old became stereotyped ; the jokes and gestures and acro¬
batic feats became traditional; the Comedy of Masks began to be con¬
sidered as legitimately enthroned as perpetual sovereign of the Italian
comic stage; its days of battle and adventure were over. The day of its
dethronement was fast approaching; and the man who was to disinte¬
grate the old national comedy, and to cast its elements into a new mould,
was already born.
GOLDONI
AND THE REALISTIC COMEDY.
GOLDONI AND THE REALISTIC COMEDY.
i.
Carlo Goldoni was born at Venice, in a house at the corner of the
via Ca. Cent' anni, in the parish of St. Thomas, somewhere in the year
1707. Sent into the world with the sole object of moulding into an
artistic whole the heterogeneous elements of the mask comedy, and of
substituting a national for a local stage, his birth, parentage, education,
his whole life and whole character, were ingeniously arranged by fate for
this purpose. He was an admirable mechanism, such as can be evolved
but not constructed, for producing the greatest possible number of excel¬
lent comedies ; and he was interesting only as such, as his life is interesting
only inasmuch as it served as a long apprenticeship to his art. A man
of insignificant temperament, of limited intelligence, but with an enor¬
mous endowment for comic observation and construction, and a series of
influences calculated to develope this genius,—such is Goldoni, and
such Goldoni's life. Nature would waste no other material upon him,
and fate would give him only comic adventures: his character and his
life resemble nothing so much as his works.
Born a mongrel Italian, half Modenese and half Venetian, in the house
of a grandfather who squandered his fortune upon actors and actresses,
Goldoni was made a present of a puppet-show when he was four; he was
encouraged to compose a play when he was eight, and was, in his earliest
childhood, bundled off on a series of journeys throughout Italy. His
father, a sort of irregular genteel physician, and his amiable intelligent
mother, made several attempts to turn him into an ordinary child and an
ordinary youth by means of teachers, colleges, logical barbaras and bara-
liptons and theological transcendental metaphysics ; but even they were
forced to help the irresistible fate which destined Carlo Goldoni to be a
comic writer and nothing else. At Perugia the urchin was made to play
a woman's part in a comedy performed by the seminarists in the Antinori
248
Golcloni and the Realistic Comedy.
palace ; a few years later, being left at school at Rimini, he was so
fascinated by a company of actors as to leave all his books and shirts
behind, and embark with them for Chiozza, where his mother was living,
enjoying beyond all things the life on board, among the harlequins and
pantaloons, the parrots, cats, dogs, monkeys, and pseudo-mothers of the
actresses. At Chiozza the boy, intensely anxious to see his family, can¬
not summon up courage to present himself at home ; the good-natured
Leander of the Company offers to help him, takes him home, and hides
him in the passage while breaking the news of his arrival to his mother.
" Signora," says the Leander,." I have brought you news of your son
from Rimini." " My son ! how is the boy ?" " Very well, but he does
not like his position ; he suffers very much from being parted from his
mother." Signora Goldoni is intensely moved by the pathetic words of
the buffoon. " Poor child ! How I wish I had him with me !" Leander
siezes his opportunity. " I offered to bring him here." " You did !
and why has he not come?" "Would you have approved of such a
step?" gravely asks Leander. "Of course," cries Signora Goldoni, in
an agony of motherly affection. " But his studies—what of his studies ?"
" His studies ! Oh—why—he might have gone back to them later."
" Then you would really have been glad to see him, Signora ?" " Glad!
I think so, indeed!" " Signora, here he is," and Leander throws open
the door, and the boy rushes into the good woman's arms. The same
scene, with the addition of hiding under the valance of a dressing-table,
is repeated on the return home of the father; comic scenes, absolutely
of the kind which Goldoni used in his plays. At fifteen Carlo is sent to
finish his studies at the ecclesiastical college of Pavia—studies which had
mainly consisted in reading the Latin, French, and Spanish dramatists,
and, 011 these being confiscated as unfit for youth, of the horrible comedies
of Machiavelli, innocently furnished as a consolation by an unsuspecting
old canon. At Pavia more surreptitious reading of comedies, varied with
flirtations with sundry professorial young ladies ; the whole wound up by
the writing of a dramatic satire, on the model of the ancient Atellanae,
an immense scandal and hubbub in consequence, and ignominious expul¬
sion from college.
Goldoni's Memoirs—a huge work undertaken in his extreme old age—
are unlike anything else of the kind. They are neither romantic, nor
scandalous, nor philosophic : they are intensely professional; they are
neither the outpourings of a man of feeling, nor the gossip of an old man
of the world, nor the psychological study of a novelist or metaphysician 5
they are a series of analyses on all of his innumerable plays, embedded in
a biography which reads like a running commentary upon them ; the
man's feelings, actions, and adventures appearing like the rough material
for his works. As in his plays, so in Goldoni and in Goldoni's life there
Goldoni and the .Realistic Comedy.
249
is nothing sentimental, tragic, libertine, and adventurous ; all his
emotions and impressions have the levity, the good-natured simplicity, of
his works; all his actions and adventures have the light movement,
the comic complication of his comedies. We no more expect a deep
mental conflict, or a real catastrophe in this book, than we do in the
Smanie -per la Villeggiatura or the Putta Onorata; neither Goldoni nor
any of the other actors in the Memoirs will ever commit any desperate
action, experience any violent passions, or suffer any great misfortune;
all the mistakes will be cleared up, all the peccadilloes condoned, all the
scrapes got out of; all will come right at the end of the comedy. Gol¬
doni is the hero or the victim of a dozen love adventures and matrimonial
schemes with citizens' daughters, lemonade sellers, waiting-maids, and
smart young ladies ; from the first love for the charming girl whose
abigail, in true Goldonian-Colombina style, fomented his passions with
forged letters and interviews at windows, in which she acted her lady's part,
until she finally deluded the youth into expressing his love by means of a
set of glass beads, worth six sequins, which she sold for double the price
to her unsuspecting mistress ; from this little early comedy down to his
final breaking off his match with the lovely young lady of the Friulian
journey, on the sagacious reflection that if she were to fall into ill health
and fade as her elder sister had done he would find it difficult to remain
faithful in his affection ; these loves are a series of strange little imbroglios,
out of which Goldoni invariably emerges, crestfallen indeed, but never
broken-hearted or remorseful. As it is with love so it is with all else: Gol¬
doni slips in and out of social positions and professional arrangements with
the same light-hearted, well-behaved, imperturbable slipperiness. Edu¬
cated for the law, and successful at the Venetian bar, he throws up every¬
thing at Venice because he doubts of the wisdom of another matrimonial
scheme, and because he is seized with the desire to present a tragic poem
to the opera directors of Milan. The reading of the opera libretto being
interrupted by the criticisms, harpsichord strummings, and general imper¬
tinence of the singers, and the manuscript committed to the flames,
Goldoni, with nothing, or next to nothing, in the world, takes service
as secretary with the Venetian minister at Milan. A little later, being
accused of treachery by the minister, he goes off with a company of
actors; arrives at Genoa, and seeing a beautiful young lady at a
window, makes a deep bow, and gives her a tender glance. The young
lady curtsies ; Goldoni returns again next day and the following days ;
more bows, more curtsies, more tender glances : a perfect little comedy
courtship, with a stage-like quiet street and balcony, and two stage-like
little graceful silhouettes, Florindo and Rosaura. After a few days
Goldoni is introduced to the lady's father; invites him, like some Signor
Pantalone de' Bisognosi, to the play ; asks for the hand of his daughter,
250
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
and is immediately accepted, and almost immediately married. And,
like the marriages in his plays, this off-hand marriage, a marriage
neither of passion nor of interest, but of whim, proves extremely happy ;
Goldoni and his wife live childless, without quarrels or jealousies, for
more than fifty years, as we imagine that Sior Menegheto does with Siora
Lucietta, or the Signor Evaristo with the Signora Chiara. For ever
falling on his feet, or, if falling elsewhere, up in a trice and with no
bruises upon him, Goldoni, amiable, honest, superficial though perfectly
sincere in all his attachments, never once, as he himself tells us, lets any
misfortune interfere with his supper. He is 110 cynic; on the contrary,
all his feelings are on the right side : he never succumbs to temptation,
he is never drawn down to vice ; he is for ever flitting about, skimming
over the surface of life with a little reproachful shake of the head for the
unfortunates who stick in its mire, and a little nod of approbation for
heroes who trudge manfully up its rough and dangerous paths. For ever
shifting his quarters, Goldoni saw a great deal of the world, and a great
deal of life : he never failed to visit Roman ruins, alum-mines, or cele¬
brated writers ; he never failed to hear all good music and to attend all
good sermons; but though he forgot nothing, and could tell the number
of arches of the amphitheatre, of cartloads of alum in the mines, of sub¬
jects of conversation of the writers ; although lie remembered the tunes
of the operas and the arguments of the preachers, nothing of all this
was assimilated by his own nature, neither history, nor art, nor literature.
The man's nature was capable of really absorbing only those common¬
place comic scenes and incidents which came before him. He was for
ever getting into the way of that lightly treated but serious and most
eventful war of Bourbon Spain against the house of Hapsburg, con¬
tinually renewed from about 1732 to 1745. He almost witnessed the
battle of Parma; he was jammed up between the Austrian and French
armies in the Milanese, seeing sieges and capitulations ; he was robbed
of his clothes and money by marauders, and fled before the enemy reading a
comedy of his—the only thing remaining to him—to a fellow traveller ; he
was retained,—after being abandoned by his coachman, losing his trunks,
and carrying his wife on his back through swollen torrents and along
broken roads,—as a sort of comic prisoner by the Austrian troops at
Rimini; but all these personal experiences of warfare left only comic im¬
pressions in the cheery, flighty, little man, and served to produce no
other pictures than those of officers gambling and making love to quarter¬
masters' daughters, of soldiers stealing fowls and eggs, of wandering
hucksters selling their wares at monstrous prices; of the misery, the
ruin, the wounded, and the widowed, Carlo Goldoni, true son of the
light, cheerily benevolent eighteenth century, appears to have remembered
nothing. Goldoni was eminently respectable : to swindle, to live off
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
251
others, to live the Gil Bias life of many another Venetian of his day, was
impossible for him ; it savoured too much of romance, and romance was
quite out of his line, as the rope ladders, daggers, disguises, and other
cloak and sword paraphernalia of Moreto and Calderon were foreign to
his comedy. A good husband though not a passionate lover, an agree¬
able acquaintance though not a devoted friend, an honest and kind-
hearted man though not a hero, he was fully persuaded of the necessity
of a decent mode of life. He was first a lawyer at Venice, then attached
to the Venetian resident at Milan, then Genoese consul at Venice, then
lawyer again in Tuscany, working just as much or as little as was
required by honour and poverty ; doing what had to be done properly,
witli indifference, and then throwing up the profession without reluctance:
neither love of work, nor avarice nor ambition, could anchor him to any
occupation.
But light as was Goldoni's character, and fickle as were his habits, he
had one mental ballast, he had one loadstone ; the ballast was his comic
genius, the loadstone was the comic stage. Comedy, either in the shape
of plays which lie had written and acted, of actors and actresses whom he
had followed, or of comic accidents which had befallen him, had been
wound up with his whole life : comedy absolute was for ever haunting him.
He had from the earliest a vague feeling of dissatisfaction at the absence
of really Italian written comedies; he had a hazy notion that he might
do something himself, a notion which gradually developed into a quiet, self-
satisfied belief in his own mission to give Italy what it lacked. As a youth
he had written one or two comic interludes for his Friulian lady-love ; at
Milan, while attached to the Venetian minister, he wrote some scenes for
the excellent mask actors in the service of a quack doctor, Buonafede Vitali,
who, after wandering through Asia, had made his fortune in Italy by the
alexipliarmacon which he sold in the streets with interludes of mask
comedy to attract the crowd. The quack introduced Goldoni to Casali,
generally called the Tooth Extractor, a famous capo comico, for whose
company some more trifles were written. Expelled from the house of
the Venetian resident, and buffeted to and fro by the war of 1734,
Goldoni made acquaintance in the amphitheatre of Verona with another
capo comico named Imer, and was engaged by him to write for the
theatre of St. John Clirysostom at Venice. For St. John Chrysostom
he continued to write after his marriage and during his tenure of the
Genoese consulate at Venice, but on losing this post he gave up the
stage for good and sought his fortune elsewhere. But comedy would not
let him slip : taken prisoner with his wife by the Austrian army at
Cesena, he was immediately set to work writing plays by military com¬
mand. At length, delivered from this courteous servitude, he settled at
252
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
Pisa as a lawyer, and in a year or so obtained a promising practice : no
more comedies for the rest of his life. So, at least, it seemed. Bnt one
day an enormously tall and fat man, dressed in Quakerish fashion, stalks
into the Advocate Goldoni's study ; he has come on business. Doixbtless
some steward or shopkeeper wishing to consult on legal matters. The
fat stranger seats himself, and rolling to and fro on his chair, and
making the most wondrous grimaces, explains his errand. He has
come to offer employment to the Advocate Goldoni, come with sequins
in his pocket, and full liberty to treat: the employment is that of
comic writer to the company directed by the capo comico Medebac; he
himself is Cesare Darbes, pantaloon of the above company. Will the
Advocate Goldoni name his terms ? The Advocate Goldoni declines : he
has made law his profession, he is very sorry to be unable to give his
time, &c. &c. Pantalone Darbes presses; Goldoni becomes obdurate ;
Darbes supplicates, making the most deliciously comic grimaces the
while; the man of law protests ; but the grimaces of the pantaloon are
too much for him; while refusing louder and louder he is in reality
giving way ; he smiles, he laughs. Darbes siezes his opportunity ;
Goldoni is lost for evermore to the legal profession. Medebac drags him
to Venice, where he has hired the theatre of S. Angelo, places at Gol¬
doni's disposal his magnificent comic company, and bids him write any¬
thing, everything, bids him summon up all his powers to please the most
ingenious, the most fanciful, the most artistic, the most fastidious and
fickle comic audience in Italy.
In 1740 Venice was still something of what she had been in 1540.
The development of northern nations and of northern commerce which
had, in a moment as it were, broken to pieces and bled to death Florence,
Milan, and Genoa, had not dispatched Venice, but had imprisoned and
starved her: she had been let off with her life, permitted to linger on and
die slowly of paralysing inaction and bloating anemia. In the eighteenth
century she had become very incapable of exertion, very subject to ail¬
ments, so wretchedly sick that she died of the first storm-blast of the
revolution; but she retained her general aspect of manner of other days.
The mode of life and way of thinking of the Renaissance were maintained
in Venice, as were the institutions and dresses of the sixteenth century.
It is this something of former days, mixed with the modern, which gives
Venice in the eighteenth century so peculiar an aspect, something
analogous to the portraits of doges in the robes of the Middle Ages over
knee-breeches, and the cap of Byzantine days stuck upon a powdered
bagwig. Tlie Spaniards and the Jesuits had not been at Venice and
covered all things with the dirty white monotony of their social and
moral whitewash: the old colours, the old patches of half-mediaeval, half-
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
253
oriental gold and colour, the old dabs of sea-stain and filth, still remained
in the spirit of Venice as on its walls. It had kept the licence, the
practical spirit, the incredulity, the magnificence, fancifulness, and
splendid cynical corruption of the Renaissance: it was the town of bro¬
caded courtezans and dare-devil adventurers; of learned dissipated nobles,
who spent their mornings in the council-room, their evenings in their
libraries, their nights, masked and dominoed, over the great public
gaming-table : half Cato, half Petronius; it was the town of enterprising
booksellers, who, under the eye of a censor who cut out all which
" offended princes and good morals," openly sold the boldest diatribes,
the foulest romances of the encyclopaedists; it was the town whence
medals were sent to Voltaire, and in which Montesquieu, crossing the
lagoon, threw his note-book into the water for fear of the terrible Messer
Grande and his spies; the town of all the strange picturesque anomalies
of the Renaissance, with a semblance of Renaissance life about it; with
an art and a literature, and a corruption and a beauty of its own ; with
Marcello, Lotti, and Galuppi composing, instead of Giorgione, Titian, and
Tintoret painting; with an infamous Baffo instead of an infamous Ai'etino ;
with a clever local poet Gritti instead of Beolco ; with a judicious, elegant
purist Gasparo Gozzi instead of Bembo; with all it had once possessed
except vitality to endure. Venice, in the year 1740, was the head¬
quarters of Italian gaiety, and as such the head-quarters of Italian
comedy. The Comedy of Masks, gradually degraded into puppet and
acrobat performances by the music of Naples and the della Cruscan
purism of Tuscany, was in full force at Venice; indeed its characters
had become gradually reduced to the four Venetian masks, Panta-
lone, Arlecchino, Brighella and the Doctor. Venice, where the mask
and domino were habitually worn for several months in the year; where
high-born nuns frizzled their hair, and invited their friends to see harle¬
quinades and to dance furlane in convent refectories; where the people
crowded round story-tellers and extemporary poets under the Palace
arches; Venice, whose whole superficial life was a profane farce, was the
natural home of the Commedia delV Arte. The whole population crowded
the comic theatres : the senators in their robes and perriwigs, the priests
and monks disguised in domino, the flaunting painted Jezebels, the severe
ascetic merchants with their quaker-like wives and daughters, the ribald
scum of the square of St. Mark's, the simple, patriarchal fisherfolk of
Torceles, the blustering gondoliers in red sash and loose jacket, the quiet
black-dressed familiars of the State Inquisition; all this motley mixture
filled the theatres, forming an audience fastidious like the effeminate
nobles, judicious like the solid men of law, austere like the merchants'
wives of the Merceria, free and easy like the libertines of the Piazza,
254
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
wonder-loving like the townsfolk, rough and violent like the fisherpeople,
intriguing like the spies and adventurers; and altogether laughter-loving
and fickle, like all good Venetians. How please, how satisfy, how fasci¬
nate such a chaotic audience ?
Goldoni, violently pushed forward by the manager Medebac, looked
round him, doubted, advanced a few steps, receded a little ; felt his way,
looked from one side of the audience to the other, fumbled, and only
gradually began to understand what to do. He was to amuse this many-
headed monster: he began by examining the instrument upon which he
had to play for its amusement. This instrument was the Comedy of
Masks; in 1748 it was already going to pieces. The old masks were
daily dropping off, and no new ones arose to take their place; the sig¬
nificance, local and historical, of many of the types had been lost. The
people of the eighteenth century, accustomed to pacific soldiery and
rapid, orderly, almost courteous warfare, forgetful that any Spanish had
ever been spoken in Italy, took no interest in the rodomontades of Captain
Matamoros or the ceremonious swagger of Giangurgolo ; they had ceased
to delight in the mouthings and caperings of such children of the dust-
heap as Francatrippa, Fritellino, and Coviello ; all this had too much of
the fair-booth and tavern smell to be endurable in a civilized theatre ;
the upper and middle classes, once more the life of the country, took no
pleasure in the ruffianly buffoons who had arisen triumphant out of the
slums of Naples and Rome. As the Comedy of Masks had left the
streets and the fair-sheds for tidy urban theatres, and found itself before
a cultivated and respectable audience, it had been obliged to trim and
clean itself, to conform to the decencies of civilized life ; to exchange its
rags for smart fancy dresses or for gala suits. The actors were once
more a class of educated artists, instead of being mountebanks and ballad-
singers as in the days of Salvator Iiosa ; they had more artistic sense,
but less spontaneity than their predecessors ; in proportion as they were
well-trained they ceased to be inventors; the jokes and acrobatic feats
began to be learnt by rote. To interest the public something new was
required, and that something new could be found only in the written
element ; the improvisations were all stale, the only hope of novelty was
in the plots of the written dialogue. Goldoni set about weaving his
works on the old frame. He began by merely new-setting old stories
like that of Don Giovanni Tenorio and of Griseldis, adding a character
or an incident here and there to some old play of Spanish or French
origin; manufacturing new frameworks for the improvisation of the
masks, as in the Thirty-three Misfortunes of Harlequin., adding more and
more of his own as he was emboldened by applause. He left the four
old masks, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Brighella, and the Doctor, to their own
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
255
devices, merely giving tliem a rough outline of action,* and turning all
his attention to the other characters, those not belonging to the Mask
Comedy, and which had been in it mere insignificant lay figures. These
parts, which he was free to dress, employ, and write for as he pleased, he
made into clever sketches of living types, slight at first—card-sharpers,
waiting-maids, cavalieri serventi of the eighteenth century—gradually
assuming new importance by the side of the masked and fantastic buffoons
who were wont to lord it over them. He unconsciously took up and de¬
veloped the two most insignificant parts of the comedy, the two lovers,
who had been there merely to give opportunity for the action of the other
characters ; these dramatic shadows, with but a dim outline, vague
features, lifeless voice, and limp action, gradually took body and shape,
became alive, real men and women, strongly marked, vigorously acting
realities ; and at length,—Oh ! wonder of wonders !—the audience began
to be perfectly engrossed in the loves and adventures of Lelio and Beatrice,
of Rosaura and Florindo, of Leandro and Giacinta. One day the mask
actors awoke and found themselves subordinate : Harlequin might tumble
and giggle, Brighella might plot and caper as he pleased, the audience
* As a sample of Goldoni's treatment of the masks, we give the following :—
II Buon Compatriotto, alto 1°.
Leandro. Quest'uomo, signora contessa, mi figuro che sara il vostro servo.
Hasina. Si certo, e il mio servitore.
Traccagnino (Tarocca, e dice piano a Rosina che non vuole passare per
servitore ).
Rosina. Tase, abie pazienza ; za nol ve cognosse ; no perde gnente del vostro.
Traccagnino (Insiste che non vuole, e scoprira tutto.
Rosina. Tase, rio me ravine, no me precipite : Soffri per mi e per la patria.
Traccagnino (che non vuol far qvesto disonore ai suoi parenti, che so no cent'anni
che fanno a Bergamo i ciahattini, e non vuole passare per un servitore), &c. &c.
SCENA Y.
Eosina, e detti.
Segue come in soggetto.
SCENA VI.
Rosina e Traccagnino.
SCENA VII.
Costanza e detti.
SCENA VIII.
llidolfo e detti.
SCENA IX.
Pantalone e Brighella.
256
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
gave them but partial attention. Goldoni developed the unmasked and
written parts, and in so doing naturally restricted the masked and im¬
provised parts; as the lovers, the housekeepers, the mothers, and tutors
became all important, so gradually the buffoons were reduced to little
or nothing ; Harlequin, as a servant bringing a message, or Brighella
as an innkeeper, had little time to amuse the public; Pantaloon him¬
self, the immortal Venetian father, was hurried through his parts by
the all-engrossing interest in his offspring. Moreover, in proportion as
Goldoni imitated the real types and habits of his time, the old ideal buf¬
foons were forced down to reality ; Harlequin could not jabber and stand
on his head in the midst of a real scene of Venetian life with the freedom
he had enjoyed when surrounded by the fantastic world borrowed from
Tirso de Molina or Lope de Vega. It was one thing to be the servant
of Don Juan, introducing the marble visitor; and another to be the hus¬
band of Catte, the washerwoman of Castello. For a long while indeed
the four masks continued to form strange spots of outlandish colour in
the midst of the sober reality of Goldoni's comedy ; for a long time, and
even in some of Goldoni's masterpieces, Pantalone dei Bisognosi, in his
grey beard, mediaeval hood, and scarlet stockings, is the father of some
modern Venetian girl, with powdered hair beneath her black net zendado,
and buckle-shoes peering from beneath her hoop. Harlequin, in his
patches, with his rabbit's tail and lath, is the brother of some gondolier in
scarlet scarf and velveteen knee-breeches; Brighella, in his white-striped
dress of the sixteenth century, is the valet of a well-shaven, pig-tailed
Sior Momolo, with his three-cornered hat beneath his arm, and his
snuff-box in his hand ; once or twice the old Bolognese man of law,
Doctor Graziano, habited like Portia's uncle, comes forward to draw out
his marriage contract between Venetian contemporaries of Clarissa and
Sir Charles Grandison. The tradition of centuries could not be destroyed
in a day, nor could men even dream of destroying it. Gradually Goldoni
began to feel that these buffoons were anachronisms, that these masks
on the faces of some of the actors were wholly out of harmony with
the subtly moving features of the others ; the pantaloons and har¬
lequins also began to feel that their talents were beginning to be hidden,
to be wasted on parts which had become unimportant, that, if they
would regain their former popularity, they must strip off their fanciful cos¬
tumes and appear as realities. But they shrank from throwing aside those
beloved absurd old garments, from showing their real face, hitherto hidden
by the black mask, to the audience ; the audience, on the other hand, though
tired of the masks would not summon up the courage to bury the old
friends of its childhood, the friends of its grandfathers and great-grand¬
fathers. But the step must be taken. Goldoni, without any sentimental
attachment for the past, bold from levity of nature as well as from con-
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
257
viction, took the fatal step : Collalto, a handsome and intelligent young
man, recently engaged as pantaloon to replace Darbes, was sent on to the
stage in plain clothes and unmasked, trembling at his own transformation
into a real human being. The audience applauded ; it had given its
consent to the final demolition of the old Comedy of Masks, and to the
building up of a modern national comedy in its stead.
But the new comedy owed its existence to the old ; it was built with
the old materials, not only with the old bricks and stone but with
the old pillars and lintels; it was also built upon the same basements.
The ground-plan could not be altered, the fragments of old masonry
could not be displaced ; the site, the substructions, and the materials of
the old building necessarily implied also its general shape. The comedy
of Goldoni was constructed out of the old Comedy of Masks; its audience,
its actors, its habits, its whole being was dependent upon the national
improvised comedy: it was therefore a national written comedy. The old
elements left by Beolco and Calmo could not be moulded into imitations
of Moliere and Regnard ; the old popular types born of the market-place
and the tavern could not be metamorphosed into types borrowed from La
Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld ; the old multifarious, largely plebeian
audience, from the shops and canals quite as much as from the palaces,
could not be turned into a polished and subtle audience like that which
filled the French theatres; the actors who had been trained to talk dialect
in grotesque costumes, and to cut capers while making extemporary jokes,
could not be taught to declaim verse with nobility, and to represent a
subtle, delicately-marked character: add to all this, that Italy in the
eighteenth century was far less feudal, less aristocratic, less polished,
less intelligent, less cynical and depraved than France even in the seven¬
teenth; and that Goldoni, its comic representative, was as frivolous, as
plebeian, as frankly cheerful, as unpsychological as Moliere had been the
contrary. Add up all this, and it will be clear that the theatre of St.
Angelo at Venice could never produce the Misanthrope or Tartuffe, as the
theatre of the Petit Bourbon could never have produced the Baruffe
Chiozzotte, or Zelinda e Lin doro.
The basement of the new comedy was the basement of the old: the
whole general cut and tendency of the play was therefore the same. The
Comedy of Masks, popular, unliterary, improvised above all things, was
essentially a comedy of action. There could be 110 psychological interest
in a play intended mainly for the lower classes and performed by typical
buffoons ; the analysis of character and of feeling would have been
unintelligible to the audience and unfeasible to the actors ; the illiterate
artisans, boatmen, labourers, and bravos, the violent or business dike
nobles, wanted to be interested by action and amused by buffooneries ;
the pantaloons and harlequins, in their traditional fantastic costume,
s
258
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
with their grinning pieces of black leather instead of faces, with their
local dialects and acrobatic tricks, conld wrangle, tussle, scream, kick,
fly at each other; they could pour forth volleys of street jests and street
abuse ; they could dance and tumble, and play tricks ; they could move
and amuse, and that was all. Moreover, the traditional, conventional
types, and the extemporarising of the parts, precluded any original study
of character, any class satire, any defined impersonation : the words and
the gestures were left to the individual actor's whim,—how then could
the writer instruct him to produce a given effect ? The actor's move¬
ments and sallies depended on the other hand on the movements and
sallies of his companion ; where all was extemporary nothing could be
concerted, and, where nothing could be concerted, only the roughest
outlines of character and situation were possible, only effects of move¬
ment and plot could be directly counted upon. Thus, then, the comedy
of Goldoni, inasmuch as it was founded upon the Comedy of Masks, was
necessarily a comedy not of character, type, and satire, but a comedy of
movement; derived from an unwritten performance, it could not pos¬
sibly be a thing for the closet. The Comedy of Masks gave Goldoni
not only action, but natural action; the business of the play, being
extemporary, was almost a reality; the actors had so great a habit of
realising their parts, of moving and speaking really 011 the spur of the
moment, that, even when their words and their actions were prescribed to
them, they retained their old naturalism : the word had so long been
spontaneous that the intonation long continued to be so. Moreover,
these actors could not deliver artificial speeches ; their sole art had con¬
sisted in having none, in being real ; they had no habit of artistic, ideal
performance; they would have repeated, like a page of catechism, with¬
out inflexion or gesture, the speeches of Moliere's Alceste or Chrysale;
unaccustomed to rhetoric, nay, to anything written, they could be trusted
only with such words as might have been improvised by themselves.
Thus, while the general framework of the old comedy, the absolute
preponderance of movement over character, remained unchanged, the
written dialogue with which Goldoni filled it up remained also equivalent
to the improvised dialogue of former days. Moreover, the mask actors,
accustomed to perform the typical buffoons of the populace, could scarcely
be used except in the parts of middle and lower class people ; the Har¬
lequins and Columbines, Pantaloons and Brighellas of the Comedy of
Masks, could turn into gondoliers and maid-servants, into shopkeepers
and card-sharpers, but never into dapper Dorantes and stately Dori-
menes ; they could never learn to talk and sit and walk with courtly
elegance ; they could never forget to cry, shout, jabber, jump, scuffle, and
tussle together. The written offspring of the plebeian Comedy of Masks
was necessarily democratic. At the same time the old comedy, which had
Goldoni and the, Realistic Comedy.
259
indulged largely in scenes of magic and other raree shows, gave to the
comedy of Goldoni great scenic and mechanical means which despised
the monotony of the no-place no-where of Moliere, and encouraged a
reckless changing of scene, from house to street and from street to canal,
and which produced those wonderful complete pictures of everyday life
like the village street in the Ventaglio, the outside of the theatre in the
Putta Onorata, the whole camp in La Guerra, and the street, the strand,
and the shipping in the Baruffe Chiozzotte. Above all, the Comedy of
Masks had bequeathed to Goldoni its mixed audience. The nobles and
the men of letters in the theatre might, perhaps, have enjoyed a comedy
like that of Moliere, a comedy of psychology, of satire, and of wit; but
on the innumerable shopkeepers, artisans, and fishing-people, everything of
the sort would have been lost; they would have clamoured for intelligible
dialect, for feats, for scenes of common life, for intrigues and squabbles.
And this audience, inasmuch as it was mixed, required a comedy purified
of the evil which each class, taken in itself, might have required: the
healthy feeling of the lower classes precluded any Congrevian impurity of
subject and inuendo which might perhaps have pleased the nobles; the
refinement and elegance of the upper classes precluded that clownish
grossness of word and gesture which might have been relished by the
artisans and boatmen ; the austere and patriarchal shopkeepers kept in
check the giddy buffoonery of the idlers; and the wit and love of fun of
the idlers leavened the over domestic gravity of the shopkeepers.
Thus the comedy born of the Comedy of Masks was by virtue of its
parentage a comedy not of character but of movement, not of wit but
of fun; not of eloquent speeches but of easy dialogue; not courtly but
popular; not confined to an ideal nullity of place but indulging in scenic f
realisation; not a satire but an amusement; neither elegantly dissolute,
nor coarsely simple, nor giddily farcical, nor whimperingly serious; the
offspring of the Comedy of Masks could be neither the comedy of C011-
greve and Wycherley, nor the comedy of Tabarin and Hanswurst, nor the
comedy of Goldsmith, nor the comedy of Diderot: it could be nothing
except the comedy of Goldoni.
260
II.
The genius of Goldoni, like his character and his life, was in perfect
harmony with his allotted work. The artistic perfector of the demo¬
cratic, unliterary, essentially natural and dramatic Comedy of Masks, was
by nature and education a man of the middle classes—ungenteel and un-
aristocratic, a man of no literary faculty, incapable of regarding writing
as an art ; without the moral fibre or intense sense of disproportion of
the satirist ; cheerful, good-natured, regarding mankind with indulgence
and optimism, disbelieving in great evil, refusing to examine beneath an
agreeable surface; a man of immense powers of light dialogue and light
action. Given the style, no individual could be imagined more supremely
its master : he had the perfect facility of conception, the perfect ease of
execution, the absolute felicity of finish and detail, the immense fecun¬
dity of the providentially sent artist. He was never at a loss for a
subject, and never at a standstill for its treatment;—a moment at a
window, a glance round a drawing-room, a word caught in the street, was
sufficient material for a comedy. The sight of the dirty grey-beard
Armenian goody-seller, snarling out " Baggigi, Abaggigi" over his
basket of lollipops, near the clock-tower of St. Mark's, produced the
delightful little play, " I pettegolezzi delle donne ; " Goldoni's mind im¬
mediately caught at the ludicrous notion of making this nasal old
Oriental the supposed father of a Venetian girl ; and in a second he
heard all the sneers, the whispers, the mocking words, he saw all the
movements and gestures, which such a situation would produce. When
no external incident suggested a plot, Goldoni would quietly take a piece
of paper and boldly write, " Act I. scene I. Rosaura and Florindo," and
by the time the two names were down a fragment of dialogue was ready,
and after that another, until at length, without any apparent why or
wherefore, the play had taken shape. When Goldoni, having achieved
the almost supernatural feat of writing sixteen comedies in a twelve¬
month, fell ill and exhausted, the exhaustion was more bodily than
intellectual, for as soon as he had recovered from his prostration one
Goldoui and the Realistic Comedy. 261
comedy flew from under his pen after another, comedies showing a
greater richness and elasticity of invention than their predecessors. Gol-
doni's genius lay particularly in this power of making something out of
nothing, of creating a play out of an incident the most insignificant, out
of a situation the most ordinary; he did not construct his plays, he
created them—blew them out like soap-bubbles ; a drop of prose dilated
into a delicate, delicately-tinted, winged bubble by the breath of genius,
lie never manufactured a plot like Calderon and Goldsmith, he never
borrowed one like Moliere ; a plot, a stiff, angular, awkward piece of me¬
chanism, whereon to stick bits of character and satire, whereon to hang
out elaborate humour—what could he want with such a thing ? Had
he not what perhaps only Sterne possessed in equal degree, that
subtle, fluid, floating essence of action; that ever-shifting, moving,
oscillating reality of incident and feeling, which disdained fixed
and ready-made shapes ? Goldoni was a Sterne in dramatic form;
the same power of realising with a single touch, of filling trifles with the
importance of life and feeling, of riveting and charming us with a couple
of figures employed in unimportant action, with a simple every-day inci¬
dent, with a simple every-day character; Sterne on the stage in short,
but of a simpler, purer essence than Sterne, with the indefinable, just per¬
ceptible relish of good bread or pure water, not made up and flavoured like
Sterne with the mysterious and subtle mixture of poetry and nastiness, and
having no insipid or nauseous aftertaste. Goldoni was entirely destitute
of either wit or poetic feeling, and wholly without any hankering after
either: in him this was less a deficiency than the absence of faculties
which would have marred his particular style. Goldoni's excellence lay
in his realism and life; his artistic merit consisted in the perfect spon¬
taneity and simplicity, in the absence of the artist in his own work ;
the lifelike scenes, carefully sifted and arranged by a delicate intention,
have the additional charm of apparent absence of arrangement; a con¬
scious ornament of poetry or wit, an underlining of any thought or feeling
would mar the whole. In these bright, light, fresh, and spontaneous
pieces of realism there is not a metaphor, not a thought, not a jest; Gol¬
doni's figures, with their wonderful ease and grace of movement, neither
attitudinize nor grimace. They are never caricatures, as they are never
made-up ideals. Goldoni never blunted his pencil-tip from the anxiety to
bring out a salient characteristic, he never dabbed colour on to a given
feature; such an emphasized figure as Tartuffe, as Trissotin, or as Oronte,
he could not conceive; his instrument was the etching-pen, sharp, light,
delicate, leaving the lights white and clean, distinctly marking the
shadows, avoiding every unnecessary line, giving the living, moving,
individual outline, graceful and natural in gesture. The Hogaithian
262
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
satire, coarse and insipid, alternations of ugly vacuity and ugly grimace,
as of some dull old almanack caricatures or would-be humorous Longlii,
of liis imitators Albergati and Pepoli, was entirely hostile both to Gol¬
doni',s genius and to the nature of his comedy. Goldoni, averse to
caricature, preferred subjects where it could be avoided; and, where satire
there must be, it was attenuated away into mere comic drollery. The
gentry, the small titled nobility, as distinguished from the patrician
class, which no Venetian dramatist could handle, he did not like : it was
too tight-laced, too tight-shoed, too painted and dancing-master'd, to
afford the light comic elements he required; it might suggest strongly-
marked and heavily-coloured caricature, but that he did not want; it
was too artificial, too vicious, and too ridiculous for him. His aristo¬
cratic figures, when not mere dummies, are usually insignificant outline
satires : ruined gamblers, cardsharpers, rakes and prigs, kept in the
background of the play. When he dealt with the upper classes he ap¬
proached as far as possible to the burghers: counts and marquises of
little fame and modest habits, different from shopkeepers only by the
prefix Don to their names, as in the Ventaglio, Zelinda e Lindoro, La
Villeggiatura, and other comedies not in dialect. In all cases he sim¬
plified aristocratic society, attenuating its vices and absurdities, turning
the ridiculous and the disgusting into the merely amusing. The cava-
liere servente, that miserable and loathsome piece of rococo drawing-
room furniture, is never in Goldoni what lie is in Parini, in Gasparo
Gozzi's satires, or in the Marchese Albergati's plays: a social disgrace,
a bedizened conceited puppy, a sort of fashionable fungus. Even in the
Cavaliere e la Dama, a play directly turning upon this stale and pre¬
scribed sort of gallantry, the cavalieri serventi are mere light idiots,
dangling, without any harm, after their ladies; Goldoni shrank from
any thought of domestic corruption. In the delightful Dama Prudente
Goldoni has turned the cavaliere servente theme into a most charming
comic stuff totally without satire or inuendo. Don Roberto, madly
jealous of his wife, and nervously desirous of hiding his jealousy, mortally
afraid of a cavaliere servente, and mortally afraid of appearing to be afraid,
insists upon giving Donna Eularia not only one, but two of these ap¬
pendages, the one to check the other. Donna Eularia, devoted to her
husband, is continually pulled from side to side by his jealousy and his
desire to appear indifferent, by his wish that she should appear perfectly
unwatched and his desire to watch over her ups and downs of temper;
which cause continual absurd blunders and scrapes, heightened by the
rivalry of the two cavalieri serventi, both indifferent to the lady but
jealous of each other; a concatenation of bungles and contradictions from
which the prudent lady gets loose only by carrying off her husband,
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
263
unknown to everyone, to a remote country town, where a lmsband may
walk out and pay visits with his own wife and where the fashion of
cavalieri serventi lias yet to be introduced.
To these attenuated, simplified gentry, Goldoni vastly preferred the
middle classes, shopkeepers, doctors, and lawyers, people of more domestic
life and easier manners, into whose houses it was less difficult to introduce
the audience. He enjoyed giving, as it were, a vertical section of a middle-
class house, showing at the same time the inhabitants of the various
floors, letting us see the richer and poorer inmates at their amusements
and occupations, at their meetings; displaying two or three households at
once, with their efforts to make a fine show to each other, with their whole
life not only of the parlour and the office but of the staircase and house-
door. He would let us see the supposed head of the family walking
about in dressing-gown and slippers, eating dates out of a paper, assenting
feebly to every order of a younger brother, always referred to but never
displayed in public; or the old bullying dotard, continually blustering
with his children and led by the nose by some sly housekeeper or defe¬
rential agent, endless types of Pantaloon, lightly and rapidly sketched;
he would display the son and heir running into debt, attempting to
reform, determining to marry and live an orderly life, and then borrowing
more money in order to entice a wife. Above all, Goldoni delighted in
pulling the wires of his female puppets, of his charmingly simple, vain,
lecturing, half stupid, half sensible girls, from the little weak-headed
daughter of Pantalone, who plays with her dolls at fifteen and asks the
first man she ever meets to marry her, up to the independent and serious
Giacinta of the Villeggiatura trilogy—gentle, self-sacrificing, resisting her
own passion, but with just a little vanity and desire to be better dressed
than her sister-in-law; Beatrices, Rosauras, Vittorias, Giacintas innume¬
rable, little figures, lively or sedate, malicious or forgiving, invariably
graceful and sympathetic, alive and individual, infinitely different from
the insipid, ever bashful and resigned, ever properly behaved young ladies
of Moliere; for Moliere's girls were mere pieces of stage mechanism,
required for the plot, and replacing for the moral public of the seventeenth
century the slaves and light damsels of Terence and Ariosto; whereas
Goldoni's girls were realities, really moving and chattering in every
burgher's house in Italy, reproduced by the dramatist for their own sake.
Goldoni shows us these young women in their visits, affectionate and sar¬
castic to each other, kissing on both cheeks while counting up the yards
of ribbon 011 each other's dresses; in their agonized consultations with
dressmakers and ladies' maids; in their tragic rage at not going to the
country, in their malicious jubilation at their neighbours staying in town.
The country! that was Goldoni's richest theme: not the trees, and skies
and flowers, for which he cared as little as did his dramatis jwrsoncE, but
264
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
the rilleggiatura, with its financial and tailoring preparations, its prologue
of entreaties and sulks and rages, and usurers and dressmaking and
family agonies ; its joys of card-playing, flirting, chocolate-drinking and
scandal-mongering, and its tragic sequel of unpaid bills, recriminations,
and domestic shipwreck. Goldoni wrote at least a dozen plays about villeg-
giatura, its preparations and consequences: rilleggiatura on the Brenta, in
the Euganean hills, on the Montagnola of Bologna, and at Montenero near
Leghorn, summing up everything in that almost epic trilogy, the " Smanie
per la Villeggiatura," the "Avventure della Yilleggiatura," and the
" Ritorno dalla Yilleggiatura"—Yilleggiatura! talismanic word, which now
means solitude in a country-house or town-life at a watering-place, but
never fails to evoke in our mind, thanks to the genius of Goldoni, the
thought of those immense parties of five or six families, huddled together
on the top of some hill or on the banks of some stream, for ever going in
and out of each other's houses, for ever gambling, eating, drinking,
singing, dancing, love-making, gossipping, squandering during a month
the revenue of a year—villeggiatura ! delightful pastoral life among
autumn rains, floods, mud, mosquitoes, and damp yellow foliage, bought
cheaply by a winter without carpets or fires, and a summer within red-hot
city walls. Yes, the word has retained a quaintness and a charm, and we
cannot now pass before the rusty gates of the melancholy suburban
gardens, with their drenched sere groves and broken earthenware statues
and vases; nor go up and down the long flights of steps between the con¬
gregated stained houses, with battered shutters, blackened escutcheons,
faded sun-dial, and tawdry soaking autumnal flowers, without thinking of
the Pantaloons and Rosauras and Leandros whose delight they were in
the days gone by. And when we enter that vast half-furnished entrance,
with gilded high-backed chairs marshalled stiffly round the walls, and
card-tables pushed into every corner, we cannot help fancying that
Giacinta and Lelio may be whispering behind yonder screen; that the
parasite Ferdinando may just have shuffled the cards on yonder green
baize; and we catch ourselves half expecting that the folding gilded doors
may open, and the foolish, jolly old Signor Filippo, in his knee-breeches,
embroidered waistcoat, and little wig, enter, beaming with vanity and
pleasure, and cry out, rapping his snuff-box: "What, children! no one
playing, no one eating, 110 one drinking ? The country is made for amuse¬
ment, and in my house it shall never be wanting. Quick ! cards and
lights! and chocolate and lemonade; and afterwards call the fiddlers, and
we'll dance a couple of minuets—and those who won't, need not; let all
do as tliey choose ! Long live liberty and long live the villeggiatura!"
Goldoni was best pleased with the humblest, forming in this a strange
contrast with the French comic writers; the shopkeepers, ridiculous
gullible M. Jourdains and Sganarelles in the eyes of Moliere, never
Goldoni and the Realistic Comechj.
265
ceased to be respectable for Goldoni; in the Putta Onorata he made the
Venetian shopkeeper Pantalone address the half-feudal card-sharping
Marquis of Ripaverde, bidding him order people about elsewhere: " La
vaga a commandar en tel so marchesato," in a manner which would
have shocked the public of Gresset and of Diderot. In the delightful
Locandiera he showed a noble who had just sold his title, and another
who had just bought his, treated like monkeys by a pretty and inde¬
pendent hostess, who, after bringing them and another woman-hating and
gruffer specimen of nobility on to their knees, laughs in all their faces
and marries her faithful head-waiter; while in the three comedies, bearing
the names of Zelinda and Lindoro, he showed the loves and jealousies of
a poor secretary and a waiting-maid with a sympathy, a tender homely
admiration, which makes this trilogy the most suggestive companion-piece
to Beaumarchais' picture of the courtship of Figaro and Suzanne. This
democratic, domestic Goldoni naturally refused to show us the effeminate,
corrupt Venice of nobles, and spies, and courtesans, which shameful
adventurers like Casanova, heaping up all the ordure of their town and
times, have made some of us believe to have been the sole, the real Venice
of the eighteenth century. But Goldoni has another Venice to show, a
Venice undiscovered by gallant idlers like the President de Brosses, or
pedantic guide-book makers like La Lande. Let us follow Goldoni across
the square of St. Mark's, heedless of the crowd in mask and cloak, of the
nobles in their silk robes, of the loungers at the gilded coffee-houses, of
the gamblers and painted women lolling out of windows; let us pass
beneath the belfry where the bronze twins strike the hours in vain for the
idlers and vagabonds who turn day into night and night into day; and
let us thread the network of narrow little streets of the Merceria. There,
in those tall dark houses, with their dingy look-out on to narrow canals
floating wisps of straw, or on to dreary little treeless, grassless squares,
in those houses is the real wealth, the real honour, the real good of
Venice; there, and not in the palaces of the Grand Canal, still lingers
something of the spirit and the habits of the early merchant princes.
Merchant princes no longer, alas ! only shopkeepers and brokers, but
thrifty, frugal, patriarchal as in olden days, the descendants of the great
Pantalone de' Bisognosi, once clothed in scarlet-lined robe and pointed
cap, now dressed austerely in black, without liair-powder, gold lace,
swords, or scarlet cloaks; active,honest, gruff, and puritanical; with wives
and daughters forbidden to wear silk, permitted to go alone no further
than to church, early and with rapid step, their face half concealed beneath
the black net zenda; with sons in the counting-house and the store¬
rooms, working from dawn till dusk, strictly forbidden to go near the
square of St. Mark's, and too afraid to even wish for the forbidden joy.
Over all this family the father, the merchant, the patriarch, lords it undis-
266
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
puted, the married sons and daughters submitting as if they were ten
years old. The father is sometimes an intolerable puritan tyrant, like Ser
Todero Brontolon and the four Eusteghi, making his unfortunate family
live like anchorites, and driving his servants like negroes; but more often,
beneath all the puritanism and gruffness, there is deep kindliness and
charity; and in the austere dark house there is excellent eating and
drinking, and hearty laughter and bluff merriment when the master
invites his friends and their wives and daughters.
This is all that remains in the eighteenth century of the frugal, indus¬
trious, austere Venice of the Middle Ages. Let us follow Goldoni yet
further from St. Mark's to the distant wharves, to the remoter canals and
campieli, to the further islands of the archipelago of Venice, and he will
show us all that remains of the force of the city, of the savage simplicity
and austerity of the boatmen, and fishers, and working classes. There
are the gondoliers, forming a link between the artisans and the seamen—
a strange, Janus-like class which Goldoni loved to depict: servants of the
upper classes, devoted, faithful and pliant; steering along with equal
indifference political conspiracy, household corruption, or venal gallantry
beneath the black, tasselled roof of their boats; witnesses of all the most
secret life of the nobles and merchants, and, while on their prow, mute
and cynical; but, once on shore, independent, arrogant, despising the
in-door servants, contemptuous towards their masters, whose secrets they
possess, frugal and austere at home, jealous and revengeful among each
other. Goldoni has shown us the gondoliers seated on the slimy steps by
their moored boats, exchanging witticism on witticism, criticising the
performances at the theatres, discussing city life with ineffable arrogance:
he has shown them coming along the Grand Canal, chanting the flight
of Erminia through the ancient forest; he has shown them again, quar¬
reling in the narrow twisting channels, each refusing to make way for
another, yelling and cursing, forcing their passengers to alight in terror,
and then pursuing each other with their oars and their short, sharp tatare
daggers. The gondoliers, besides being good comic stuff for Goldoni, were
an influential part of his audience, and had to be propitiated by being
shown on the stage in all their originality and waywardness. The gon¬
doliers lived, when off their boats, among a savage population of ferry¬
men, bargees, and fishers; poor, violent and austere, whose daughters had
at once the freedom of speech and strength of action of amazons, and the
purity, nay prudery, of nuns: large-limbed, sun-burnt, barefoot creatures,
with the golden tints of hair and cheek of Titian and Palma, with the
dark, savage eyes of an animal, with the arms of an athlete and the lan¬
guage of a trooper, of whom Goldoni has painted a magnificent portrait,
idealised but intensely real, in his Bettina, who, in her perfect self-
reliance, her complete knowledge of evil and determination to avoid it,
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
267
her ferocious chastity, refusing to let her own betrothed enter the house,
and her passionate tenderness and dog-like attachment, is one of the
grandest female figures which any stage can boast. Such deep apprecia¬
tion of the lower classes, such a really idyllic conception of the life of the
people, equalled in Italian literature, though in more poetic realism
perhaps, only by the Nencia of Lorenzo dei Medici, can be explained in
the middle of the eighteenth century, in the midst of the Dresden china
shepherdesses and cotton wool, beribboned lambs of Boucher and Dorat,
of the fashionable milkmaids and cow-boys of Rousseau and of Greuze,
only by the fact that the comedy of Goldoni, as the offspring of the
Comedy of Masks, had its origin in the very heart of the people.
Bettina is a single individual, a splendid savage creature, half lost in
the artificial world of gentlemen who cheat at cards and ladies who borrow
money from gondoliers; but Goldoni can show us the world to which she
belongs, which is made up of nothing but her brothers and sisters. Let
us call Goldoni's favourite gondolier, the rough and caustic Menego
Cainello, and bid him steer us through the last canals, among the
remotest Venetian islands, leaving the towers of Venice behind us; bid
him row us across the shallow open lagoon, with its vast snake-like rows
of sea-corroded posts, its stunted marine reeds, and its tangled sea-grass
waving lazily on the rippled water; row on till we get to that tiny other
Venice, still perhaps like the greater Venice in the days of her earliest
doges, to the little fishing-town of Chiozza. There, in the port, Goldoni
will show us the heavy fishing-boat, grimy and oozy, just returned from a
Aveek's cruise in the Adriatic, with her yellow sail, emblazoned with the
winged lion, leisurely flapping, and her briny nets cast over her sides; the
master of the boat, Paron Fortunato, is shouting in unintelligible dialect,
Venetian further insularised into Chiozzot, and Chiozzot rarefied on sea
into some strange nautical lisping jargon; the rest of the fishermen, Tita-
Nane, and Meneglieto, and Toni, arc collecting the fish they have brought
into baskets, reserving the finest for his Excellency the Governor of
Chiozza. And, when the fish are disposed of, follow we the fishermen to
the main street of the little town, where, facing the beach, their wives,
daughters, and sisters sit making lace on their cushions, chattering like
magpies; some eating, others holding disdainfully aloof from the baked
pumpkin with which the gallant peasant Toffolo Marmottina regales them.
Suddenly a tremendous gabble begins, gabble turning into shrieking and
roaring, and upsetting of chairs and cushions; and a torrent of abuse
streams forth in dialect, and all is lost in scuffling confusion; the men
come up, seize sticks, daggers, and stones, and rush to the rescue of their
female relatives, till the police hasten up and separate the combatants.
Then let us watch the recriminations of the lovers, hear them accusing
O
each other of perfidy, calling each other dog, assassin, beggar, ginger-
268
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
bread, jewel, pig, all in turns; clinging and nudging, weeping and roaring,
till at length the good-natured little Venetian magistrate of Chiozza, con¬
temptuously called "Mr. Wig-of-Tow" (Sior paruca de stop a), makes
up all the quarrels, bids the innkeeper send wine and pumpkins and
delicious fried things, and, after regaling the pacified Chiozzoti and
Cliiozzote, calls for fiddles and invites them all to dance some furlane.
Is it a reality? Has Menego rowed us over the lagoon? Have we seen
the ship come in and the fish put in baskets? Have we seen the women
at their lace cushions ? Have we heard that storm of cries, and shrieks,
and clatter, and scuffling feet? Have we really witnessed this incident of
fishing life on the Adriatic? No; we have only laid down a little musty
volume, at the place marked '• Le Baruffe Chiozzotte."
The public of the theatre of S. Angelo were delighted and dazzled by
this series of ever new, ever varying pictures, which Goldoni projected for
them through the wonderful magic lantern of his genius. The plays were
printed at Venice, at Florence, at Pesaro, at Bologna; Venetian nobles
formed an association to smuggle in pirated editions; Goldoni, travelling
about Italy during the dead season of the Venetian theatres, was every¬
where beset by entreaties for new comedies; a custom-house officer, over¬
whelmed with enthusiasm, risked his position rather than let the illus¬
trious dramatist pay duty on his parcels of snuff and of chocolate. About
1755 M. de Voltaire himself addressed to Goldoni a strange polyglot
epistle, half prose, half verse, saying : " Je voudrois appellor vos comedies
l'ltalia Liberata dai Goti," exclaiming " Che felicita ! mio signore, che
purita!" and winding up by making Nature declaim some verses to the
effect that—
Tout auteur a ses defauts
Mais ce Goldoni m'a peinte ;
and about the same time Lessing, then working at his " Hamburgsche
Drammaturgie," and Emilia Galotti, wrote that he was busy reading
and adapting some of the plays of Doctor Goldoni, a Venetian lawyer,
whose name at least must be familiar to his correspondent Moses Men¬
delssohn. Goldoni, beset by managers and actors, petted by cardinals
and senators, praised by a host of critics and imitators, and receiving a
sort of preliminary immortality from the Sage of Fcrney, seemed at the
very summit of all possible good fortune. But while the fabric of his
fame spread wider and rose higher and more splendid, it was being
sapped at the base, and, strange to say, Goldoni himself was blindly help¬
ing to undermine it. As soon as the written comedies of Goldoni had
begun to be popular, he had been attacked by the managers of rival
theatres, whose audience streamed to the Teatro S. Angelo; and by
mask actors, whose buffooneries and repartees were being thrown into
the shade by the written parts of the unmasked actors, mere obscure and
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
269
stupid libels, pricks of invisible critics. But they caused Goldoni to look
up. He thought fit to answer his accusers by his seventeenth comedy,
11 Tecitro Comico, in which he brought on to the stage the masked
actors and the unmasked actors in succession, and held forth to prove
that leathern faces and chequered bodies were detrimental to real dramatic
interest. This answer provoked a reply, and the reply produced a retort.
Goldoni, attacked in his practice, took refuge in theory, and the theory
in its turn had to be supported by practice; thus, little by little, Goldoni
let himself be goaded into entirely suppressing all improvisation, into
entirely rejecting the masks; into abusing the old Commedia delV Arte,
from which his own style had originated, and into appealing to French
models with which his own style had nothing in common; injustice made
him unjust; folly was to make him foolish. His detractors, ever multi¬
plying, accused him of being incapable of anything above prose dialect
plays. Goldoni immediately set to work 011 rhymed comedies, ill versified,
in bad Italian, and extremely dull; they accused him of being unable to
rise above the squabbles of boatmen and the intrigues of servants. Goldoni
instantly scribbled off half-a-dozen romantic plays, with bravos, daggers,
sultanas, noble savages, and every species of dramatic vermine. They
accused him of being deficient in pathos and moral tone ; Goldoni forth¬
with patched up a number of whimpering, paternal, maternal comedies,
with patterns of virtue, attempted seductions, reformed prodigals, Milor
Bonfils, Miledy Duvres, Mosu Wamberts, and scraps of morality and
sentiment cut out of Richardson, Diderot, and Mme. Riccoboni. He was
accused of being new-fangled and incorrect; Goldoni rushed off and
dramatised the persecutions of three other literary innovations, Terence,
Tasso, and Moliere, who turned out respectively a sentimental professor
of ancient literature, a crackbrained academic sonnetteer, and a melan¬
choly jocose comedian. He was accused of being limited; he immediately
jumped over the limits of his genius in order to show himself limitless.
Goldoni, the author of masterpieces in his own style, weakly and foolishly
let himself be deluded into writing inanities in the style of other people;
he was accused of ruining the national Italian stage; he declared that he
had come to reform it. He was told that he was nobody; ho answered that
he was omnipotent and providential. The faults of Goldoni's bad pieces
were exaggerated by numberless imitators, by the scribes who worked for
the other comic theatres, which, without having a Goldoni to write,
followed the fashion of written plays ; the pretensions of Goldoni as a
reformer and destroyer were exaggerated by numberless foolish fashionable
critics, who, without really understanding Goldoni's genius and position,
made his theories a theme for invective against things Italian and lauda¬
tion of things French. Little by little the trumpery libels of theatre
proprietors and rival authors turned into criticisms of greater importance;
2?0
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
Goldoni, serenely conceited, answered in prose and in verse, answered
stupidly and offensively; tlie number of critics increased. In a few years
the most original dramatist of the eighteenth century, the most intensely
Italian of writers, the most moral of humorists, had raised against him¬
self nearly all the original thinkers, the patriots and the moralists of
Italy, and found himself supported only by those very frenchified, vicious,
vapid people of fashion whom he most despised. In the rapid succession
of his plays, the critics of the eighteenth century, uncritical and hasty,
did not distinguish the genuine style of the man from his imitations ; they
confounded masterpieces with imbecilities; they condemned the grace,
the life, the truth of such plays as La Locandiera and Le Baruffe Chiozotte
on account of the dullness, the vulgarity, the falseness, the lachrymosity
of the Sposa Persiana, the Bella Peruviana, and the Pamela. Moreover
they credited Goldoni with all the imbecility and immorality and galli¬
cisms of the numberless scribblers whom the destruction of the improvised
comedy had brought into existence; they tied like a stone to Goldoni's
neck the immense weight of nauseous idiotcy of the plays of a certain
Abate Pietro Chiari, the dullest, coarsest, most sentimental scribbler of
melodramatic rubbish about Polish castles, Russian shepherdesses, arti¬
ficial cows, harems, negroes, and slave-dealers, that ever lived. Goldoni
had no connection with Chiari, either personal or literary; he hated and
despised the reptile, yet in the furious polemics which his own thought¬
lessness had produced it was Goldoni's fate always to have this odious
idiot as a companion, never to be mentioned except in the same breath
as Chiari. The confusion between Goldoni's good and bad plays, the
confusion between Goldoni and Chiari, the connection between Goldoni and
the odious French imitation, raised a hurricane against the unfortunate
reformer. Every immoral novel translated, every lachrymose play imitated
from the French, every encyclopedic disbelief, every un-cruscan expression,
was more or less put down to Goldoni's baleful influence; he was con¬
founded with Helvetius and Rousseau; he was associated with the too
open boddices of ladies, with gambling-tables, with the use of new¬
fangled words like Toelette and Fricando, with pastoral inanities, with
masonic mysteries; and this miserable depraved idiot, who was perverting
Italian morals and corrupting the Italian language, was in reality the
mere tool, the toy, the laughing-stock of that horrible M. de Voltaire,
whose mixture of royalism and irreligion, of morality and indecency, of
jest and earnest, whose strange laugh of scorn, indignation, and cynicism
entirely baffled the good Italians of the eighteenth century. This Gol¬
doni was destroying the Italian comedy, the national comedy which Italy
had possessed for two centuries, in order to introduce French lachrymosities
and immoralities, and was being told that he had liberated Italy from
the Goths—by whom ? By the evil being who had twitted Tasso, patted
6roldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
271
Maffei contemptuously on tlie shoulder, and had declared (oh sacrilege of
sacrileges !) that Father Dante was crazy and the Divina Commedia a
monster, and had carried his audacious and insolent ignorance so far as
to call Can Grande della Scala " Le Grand Khan." No, Goldoni could
never be forgiven his unpatriotic imbecility and insolence, his frivolous
frenchified wickedness, his criminal attempts upon the old Italian comedy;
all the pedants who two centuries before would have spat upon the Com¬
media deW Arte with Messer Niccolb Secchi and Messer Giorgio Trissino,
now rushed forward to defend the honour and existence of the ever
venerated Harlequins and Pantaloons. Pamphlet upon pamphlet, and
volume upon volume, was hurled against Goldoni; Baretti, the patriotic
and rabid, lashed Goldoni's plays to rags with his " Literary "Whip," and
the two Gozzis poured forth epigram and sonnets by the bushel to
annihilate him; the storm was raging.
In the middle of it, one fine day about the year 17G0, rumour was
spread through Venice that the advocate Carlo Goldoni had accepted an
offer to go to Paris and provide plays for the Italian stage, which had
been established there ever since the days of the Gelosi and the Fedeli; a
few months later, while the enemies of Goldoni were still wondering
whether they were to believe their ears, a new play called " One of the
last Evenings of Carnival " was performed at the Teatro S. Angelo. It
was one of those charming, simple pictures of Venetian merchant life
which were Goldoni's masterpieces ; in it was represented the departure
from Venice of a certain Sior Anzoleto, a designer of patterns for silk
stuffs, who had been called away to Russia, and was leaving with a heavy
heart the weavers whose looms he had so long provided with patterns ;
the allegory was evident: the weavers were the comedians of S. Angelo,
the designer of patterns was the comic writer. Russia meant Paris, and
when Sior Anzoleto came forward for the last time, and said, in the
quaint, graceful Venetian lisping dialect, "This is not the first time that
I go away, and wherever I have been I have carried the name of Venice
engraven in my heart; I have always remembered the good offices and
kindness I have received; I have always wished to return; when I have
returned, it has always been with joy . . . . and so it will be this time
also, if Heaven permit me to return. I attest on my honour that I go
away with a sore heart; that no pleasure, no fortune, if I have any, will
be able to compensate the pain of absence from people who are fond of
me. Preserve your love for me, dear friends; and God bless you. I say
so from my heart—" when Anzoleto, moved by the part he was playing,
bowed before the spectators, the audience, half crying, half laughing,
forgetful of whatever pasquinades they might have written, and awake
once more to the greatness of Goldoni, burst out like one man, shouting,
"Good-bye, Goldoni! A good journey to thee! Remember thy pro-
272
Goldoni and the Realistic Comedy.
niisc ! Return soon ! Return soon!" Goldoni did not show himself ;
lie was perhaps crying behind the scenes; in the midst of his hopes of
future success and of speedy return, this farewell of his old public sad¬
dened even his light and cheerful nature. " A good journey, and return
soon !" cried the last spectators in their dominoes, as they left the already
darkened theatre. Goldoni never returned, never saw again the theatre
of 8. Angelo, never again heard his beloved Venetian, never again wrote
a masterpiece.* A frivolous, cheerful old man, called Carlo Goldoni,
was indeed destined to live some thirty years more, obscurely and happily,
and to leave the world unnoticed in the midst of the chaos and darkness
of the year '93 ; but Carlo Goldoni, the great Venetian comic writer, the
incomparable author of the Ventaglio, the Locandiera, and the Baruffe
Chiozzotte, ceased to exist as the curtain of the Teatro Sant' Angelo fell
upon that " last of the Evenings of Carnival."
* The charming plays Zclinda c Lindoro were merely corrected and copied out
in 1'aris, as they had long existed in rough form under the name of " Gliamori di
Arlecchino e Cammilla," in Goldoni's portfolio ; the Burbero Bcncfico (Le Bourru
Bienfaisant) is a weak and insipid French adaptation of the " Casa Nova," with all
the best parts left out.
CAELO GOZZI
AND
THE VENETIAN FAIBY COMEDY.
CARLO GOZZI AND THE VENETIAN
FAIRY COMEDY.
Goldoni's plays had been the artistic development of the purely comic
and realistic elements of the Commedia delV Arte; its other elements,
fantastic and humorous, its masks, its transformations, and its extempo¬
rised quips and cranks, Goldoni had roughly eliminated and contemptu¬
ously cast aside. There they had lain during the days of Goldoni's
popularity, neglected and despised; but the eyes of one man had been
fixed upon them with sorrow and admiration in their ignominy, and when
Goldoni's style was on the wane, he had silently approached the heap of
degraded tinsel and gimcrack, and tenderly, reverently, picked out of the
dustbin the ragged checks of Harlequin, the battered mask of Pantaloon,
the tarnished tinsels of the fairy Morgana; had carried them away like
relics under his cloak, close to his heart. What would he do with them ?
The tall, gaunt man, stalking about in his old-fashioned clothes, splash¬
ing into every pool of water, letting his scarlet cloak trail along the
muddy steps of every Venetian bridge; always silent, self-absorbed, his
eyes fixed on an unseen world, his lips smiling at unspoken jests; the
kindly, idle, half-crazy Count Carlo Gozzi could himself not have ex¬
plained why he had treasured up all that discarded trumpery of the Corn-
media deW Arte. Had you asked him, he would have answered with
some half-serious, unintelligible jest, he would have told you that it was
his veneration for the antiquity of Harlequin's lath, his gratitude for the
laughter the poor dethroned buffoons had given him as a child, his hatred
of new-fangled French things ... a hundred ill-defined reasons, pedantic
and grotesque and pathetic, jumbled up into an argument which you
could not understand, at which you laughed and felt the while as if you
would have cried . . . Enough, Carlo Gozzi was whimsical, sentimental,
metaphysical; in short, a humourist of the temper of Sterne and of Jea:
Paul: he believed in the superior wisdom of childishness, in the philo¬
sophy of old nurses' tales, in the venerableness oi' clowns; why, he knew
not. So he scolded against the prosaic Goldoni, who was driving
romance and buffoonery off the stage; sighed at the world growing daily
more dull, more obtuse, more philosophical; and cherished the cast-oil"
mummeries of the Commedia delV Arte as if sunshine and youth were
t 2
27(3
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
lurking in their tatters; objectless and heedless, until one day it flashed
across him to build a temple in which the dear and venerable relics would
be enshrined and worshipped.
Baretti tells the story how one day Goldoni, with the swagger of suc¬
cess, sauntered into the shop of the bookseller Bettinelli, in the narrow
streets behind the clock-tower of St. Mark's, and began holding forth to
the literati there assembled on the grandeur and success of his reforma¬
tion of the Italian comedy; until at length Carlo Gozzi, outraged by the
upstart's insolence towards the Commedia deW Arte, jumped up from
the pile of books on which he was seated, and cried out: " I wager that
with the masks of the old comedy I will draw a greater audience to hear
the story of the Love of the Three Oranges than you can with all your
Ircanas and Bettinas and Pamelas ! " Goldoni burst out laughing at
this threat: the Love of the Three Oranges was a fairy tale told by
every nursemaid from Venice to Naples, a ridiculous childish piece of
nonsense, whose mere name was enough to make people laugh: it was
like telling Sheridan that Jack and the Bean Stalk would draw a larger
audience than the School for Scandal.
But Carlo Gozzi was sincerely persuaded that nursery tales were worth
all Goldoni's volumes of comedies : the Love of the Three Oranges had a
charm for his mind, the charm of fancy and of association; the Pamelas
and Ircanas had his hatred as a hater of French things, as a hater of
false sentiment, as a hater of modern philosophy, as a noble, a Venetian,
a poet, and a humourist; so Carlo Gozzi set to work to make good his
threat. Some weeks later the comic company, directed by the famous
Truffaldino-Harlequin Sacclii, which had recently returned from Portu¬
gal in consequence of the earthquake at Lisbon, announced at its theatre
of S. Samuele a new comedy entitled The Love of the Three Oranges. All
Venice stared at this announcement. Was Sacchi gone mad? Had they
read correctly? Were they really invited to hear a nursery tale? Every¬
one rushed to S Samuele for the explanation of this mystery. The
curtain rose, and displayed the strangest medley ever conceived. The
King of Clubs, dressed as on the playing cards, consulting with Panta¬
loon, in his mediaeval robe and scarlet hose, about the mysterious
melancholy malady of his son, the Prince Tartaglia; Pantaloon, the
inimitable fat Cesare Darbes, who, with all the best mask actors, had
left the Medebac company in consequence of Goldoni's reforms, answering
the King of Clubs that the malady of the prince must be attributed to
his having been poisoned by the opiate verse of Goldoni and Chiari;
the Prince Tartaglia, stammering heroic verse, with his thick Neapolitan
utterance, smitten with the Love of the Three Oranges, and going out to
seek them in company with the harlequin Sacchi; the first orange being
opened, giving birth to a beautiful maiden, who withered into thin air for
Carlo Gozz'i and the Venetian Fairy Comedy. 277
want of ,1 draught of water. Harlequin, in his anxiety to slake her thirst,
breaking open the second orange, and thus liberating a second princess,
who vanished like her sister; the agony of Prince Tartaglia at the
thought of losing his only remaining bride, enclosed in the rind of the
third orange; the jealousies of the negress, Smeraldina, who, cast into
the flames, issued forth white like a clay pipe; the battles between a
hideous witch, Margana, talking the tumid gibberish of Chiari's plays,
and a ridiculous wizard spouting the semi-legal verses of Goldoni's bad
plays; . . . enchantments, harlequinades, satire, nursery tales, all mixed
up together. The Venetians were puzzled, then amused, then delighted :
they shouted that the old masks and their improvisations were after all
more amusing than the Pamelas and Monsu Wamberts, that the en¬
chantments of nursery tales were more delightful than the whimperings
of French translations, that the Love of the Three Oranges was a master¬
piece. Like the Prince Tartaglia of the play, the Venetian public, sick
with the stupefying drugs of the pseudo-wizard Goldoni, and the dotard-
witch Chiari, had laughed and found itself cured.
The popularity of Goldoni began rapidly to sink; the popularity of the
Sacchi company began to rise; the fickle Venetians abandoned S. Angelo
for S. Samuele: the old centenarian masks, banished out of sight for a
few years by the real men and women of Goldoni, re-appeared with all the
charms of youth and novelty. No more realisms, no more lachrymosities,
away with the unpatriotic prosaic Goldoni: fairy tales, harlequinades,
wizards, witches, kings of clubs, pantaloons, and brighellas, aristophanesc
absurdities improvised in dialect,—that was what really and truly suited
the poor deluded Venetian public. Truffaldino-Sacchi, overjoyed at the
miracle, beset and clung to Carlo Gozzi, entreating him for more fairy plays,
more fiabe, Jiabe da putei, more Loves of the Three Oranges. Carlo Gozzi,
dreading to become a regular hack playwright, who might be called upon
to produce sixteen plays in a year, like Goldoni,—lazy, whimsical, and
with the instinct of a dilettante,—refused all Sacclai's offers of money,
refused to enter into any engagements, refused to promise to write.
But Carlo Gozzi had created a new style, and he who creates a style
becomes its slave; he had, unconsciously, evoked the weird grotesque
world of the supernatural, and the supernatural would not let its wizard
go-
Carlo Gozzi himself was of opinion that the invisible world obtained
some mysterious power over him from the moment of his writing the
Jjove of the Three Oranges, and that the series of persecutions which he
relates in his very quaint autobiography were due to the vengeance of the
fairy world, which he had dared to bring on to the stage. But in this
Carlo Gozzi was certainly mistaken; his connection with the supernatural
world was much older. Carlo Gozzi had been destined from his birth to
278 Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
be the familiar, the crony, and the bntt of all the fairies and goblins who
still haunted Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century; some
crabbed and contradictory fairy godmother must have been present at his
birth, have endowed him with the humour and fancy of Beckford and
Jean Paul and Hoffmann, and then, irritated at the sceptical levity of
Count Giaconio Gozzi and the patrician haughtiness of the Lady Tiepolo,
his wife, have cursed her godchild with the terrible curse of being misun¬
derstood by his contemporaries and forgotten by posterity. The ancestral
Gozzi palace at S. Canziano, at Venice, was the chosen abode of all the
hobgoblins of the lagoons: the doors were off their hinges, the window-
panes broken, immense spiders dangled from the rafters. Of the magni¬
ficent furniture of former days, long since gone to the pawnbrokers, there
remained only a couple of senatorial portraits by Titian and Tintoret,
looking down grimly in their purple and ermine and cobweb upon the
miserable disorderly household of the noble Counts Gozzi. All in this
Gozzi palace was melancholy, ludicrous, and grotesque: an old, paralysed
father, dying by inches, with every piece of ancestral property which had
to be sold; an elder brother, Count Gasparo, absent-minded, slovenly,
contented, poring over his books and writing his satires and commentaries,
while his innumerable brothers and sisters were growing up without pro¬
fession or chance of marriage; devoted to a blue-stocking wife considerably
older than himself, who translated plays and setup journals, while her
babies, hungry, dirty, and tattered, played with the ragamuffins of the
quarter; money continually wanting, squabbles for ever arising; state
halls turned into dirty kitchens, gala clothes cut up into children's pina¬
fores; musty books encumbering the floors: dust, cobwebs, rats, ink-
stains, howling brats—such were the surroundings of Carlo Gozzi on his
return from military service in Dalmatia at the age of twenty. About
1740 his combat had begun with those invisible enemies who were to per¬
secute him throughout his life. Carlo Gozzi manfully determined to
break the spell which hung over his family: he went about examining the
Gozzi property on terra-firma; he tried to let part of the premises ; he
sought for the title-deeds of bonds left by his father; but the goblins met
him on all his journeys with flooded roads and broken bridges, with bugs
and thievish stewards. They sent to him polyplike tenants who never
paid, scandalised the quarter by their doings, and, when legally ejected,
clambered back into their former premises during the night; they inspired
the Countess Gasparo Gozzi with the happy thought of selling all the
family papers and parchments to a neighbouring porkshop. However,
Carlo was victorious: he reclaimed the terra-firma property; he finally
ejected the non-paying, disreputable tenants; he recovered, among the
heaps of cheeses, the rolls of sausages, and the compact rows of hams,
the venerable documents of his family; he put his younger brothers into
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
279
government offices, his sisters into convents; had the little Gasparo
Gozzi swashed and shocd and stockinged; quietly shipped off the resigned
philologist Gasparo and his furious poetess wife to Pordenone; and then,
with a few books and just sequins enough to cat meagrely and dress tidily
for the rest of his days, he established himself alone in the haunted palace
at S. Canziano, with his Spanish plays and his collections of Arabian and
Neapolitan fairy talcs. But the goblins did not let him off so easily:
tliey delighted in pulling, pinching, twitching, and tripping him up; they
led his silk-stockinged feet into every pool of water; they jolted his
coffee-cup out of his hand on to every new pair of satin breeches; they
enveloped him in some mysterious cloud which made people mistake him
for opera directors, Greek merchants, and astronomers, and give him
playful blows intended for other persons; they lost the letters addressed
to him, and wrote answers of which he knew nothing, so that one evening,
returning travel-worn, weary, and ravenous, from Friuli, he found his own
house brilliantly lit up and garlanded, filled with cooks and lacqueys, and
with a crowd of masked rioters eating, drinking, and dancing to celebrate
the accession to the patriarchal chair of Monsignor Bragadin, whose
flunkeys politely told the astonished owner of the house that he had written
to give permission for the momentary annexation of his palace, and that
for the three days and nights of Monsignor Bragadin's festivities he had
better retire to the nearest inn. The hobgoblins, the fairies, the enchanters,
and their earthly representatives, the fantastic Pantaloons and Harlequins
of the Commedia delVArte — unearthly, swarthy, gibbose, imp-like creatures,
two thousand years old—this world of the supernatural and the grotesque,
in which Carlo Gozzi had been born and bred, completely enslaved him
immediately on the appearance of the Love of the Three Oranges. lie had
written one fairy comedy, one fiaba teatrate, as he styled it; the fairy
comic style, the fiabesqne, was created; he must continue.
And we must not be astonished that this grotesque and fanciful mixture
of the comic and the supernatural, which at first sight seems the exclusive
creation of northern imagination, should have originated in this hum¬
drum Italy of the humdrum eighteenth century; for in the midst of this
Italy of the eighteenth century, with its prim little ways, its dapper little
costume, its minuet-tripping cavalieri serrenti and sonnetteering abatini,
its stuccoed house-fronts and shell grottoes and volumes of academic
verses ; its novels, caps, boddices, and philosophy supplied by third-rate
Parisian milliners and philosophers—in the very midst and heart of all
this was one strange, weird, beautiful, half oriental, half mediaeval thing,
one city of gorgeous colour and mysterious shadow, in which the Creole
wizard of Fonthill felt as if he were moving in his own magic world of
Vathek; and that city was Venice. Even now-a-days, when we return to
280 Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
Venice after an interval of years, melancholy with the first impression of
the livid green canals, the dilapidated discoloured palaces, the black and
brown stains and shadows on stone and water, lugubrious beneath the
grey twilight, our first sight of the squares of St. Mark's in the summer
evening is like the transition from the world of Childe Harold to the world
of the Love of the Three Oranges. The two squares, smooth like huge
ball-rooms, enclosed by the lace-like stonework of the Proccuratie and the
Ducal Palace, the arcades brilliant with yellow light of the jewellers and
bronze and glass shops, and of the gilded and painted coffee-houses
crowded with loungers; the middle of the square, where the yellow light
from the porticos dies away into the white twilight, with its scantier pro-
menaders; the indistinct shapes and colours of St. Mark's, with its con¬
fused stories of pillarets and piles of cupolas and gleaming mosaics and
gold, facing the hazy sea; the great belfry rising, shooting up into the
dim, distant sky ;—all this is fairy-like, fiabesque in Carlo Gozzi's sense of
the word. And if we re-people it with the crowd in domino and mask,
the nobles in their scarlet tabarro mantle, the Greeks and Dalmatians in
their plaited skirts and red caps, the fiddlers and singers at the coffee¬
houses, the mask buffoons .surrounding the nostrum-seller shouting the
virtues of his alexipharmacon, the story-tellers and improvvisatori beneath
the half-lit arches of the palace: if we do this, we get the background of
one of Carlo Gozzi's comedies, and we can imagine how in the last gay
days of Venice, when Marcello was teaching his psalms in the palace
near the Rialto, when Porpora was directing the choruses of girls at the
Mendicanti, when Longhi was painting his carnival caricatures and Gritti
writing his dialect drolleries, when the dying republic gathered its tar¬
nished grandeur about it and awaited its death in merriment, the fiabesqne
comedy, the precursor of Beckford and Hoffmann's fantastic buffooneries,
originated in the brain of the amiable, crochety, humorous, haunted
Carlo Gozzi. We can fancy him sauntering lazily through the crowd of
masks and idlers, unconscious of greetings and nudges, dreaming over his
boyish loves with the fierce little sultanas of Zara, of his serenades
beneath Ragusan windows, of his wanderings in the Epirot hills among
the fierce Morlac brigand-peasants and the half-oriental Greek women,
listening to their tales of revenge and murder, to their nasal, dirge-like
songs: we can fancy him meditating over the hobgoblins in the Palazzo a
S. Canziano, over the squabbles with Goldoni, over the ignominy of the
dear, venerable Comedy of Masks; thinking perhaps how best to make a
play, with Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Smeraldina, of some Arabian tale of
Turandot or Zobeide, of some nursery tale of the Stag King or the Little
Green Bird, just heard for the hundredth time from the red-sashed story¬
teller Cigolotti, vociferating " e cussi, sior mio benedetta , , , le piu bele
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fair>/ Comedy. 281
cose, le piu maraviose," to his audience of gondoliers, even as Carlo Gozzi
was to make him appear on the stage, carrying the magic parrot of the
sore ore r D ur and art e.
Carlo Gozzi, as we have remarked, took up and artistically manipu¬
lated just those elements of the old Commedia deW Arte which Goldoni
had rejected—the masks, the buffoonery, the supernatural, and the tragic.
The stuff upon which he worked was essentially different from that of
Goldoni; the artist's own nature and endowment was also essentially dif¬
ferent. Goldoni was much less a Venetian than an Italian, and less an
Italian than a man of the eighteenth century. Of the middle class him¬
self, and wholly without imagination, he saw of the upper classes only the
despicable artificiality: he detested illusions, having none himself; he
enjoyed the manners of the shopkeepers and gondoliers, and painted them
as he saw them, with a keen interest in natural character, action, and
speech ; the past for him was neither a reality as to the student nor a
poem as to the dreamer ; it was an uninteresting blank for which he felt
no sympathy ; to him Venice was merely a state rather older and more
eccentric than any other; the canals of Venice were the same canals as
the canals of Leghorn or the canals of Holland, had he seen them; the
ducal palace was a large building with arcades very convenient in rainy
weather; the motley dress of the old comedy, the magic and transfor¬
mations of the Spaniards, were to him imbecilities good for children, and
children, in the eyes of Goldoni, were silly ignorant little donkeys. With
an immense power of sympathising with everyday feeling and arranging
prosaic plots, Goldoni was wholly destitute of the power of weaving subtle
and fanciful shapes, of colouring and gilding with the imagination, of
realising, in dream or nightmare, the distant and the impossible ; he had
all the faculties required to do what he wished to do, he was complete
because he was limited, and his work was executed with the same felicity
with which it was conceived; there was no horizon for Goldoni, he could
grasp all that he could see. Carlo Gozzi was totally different ; he was
as fragmentary, as incomplete, as those very elements of humour and
fancy which he had saved out of the wreck of the Commedia dell' Arte;
lie was full of poetic aspirations and humorous fancy, thrust back by
reality, and without the force to create a world of their own. A Venetian
citizen on his father's side, a patrician on his mother's, he clung with
tenderness and veneration to the Republic: he loved its traditions, its
glamour, its unrealities; its realities, its corruption and meanness, pained
him intensely; he was neither a bigot nor a retrograde, but, though
seeing the good which might come of the revolutionary and pre-revo-
lutionary movements, he shrank back from their hardness, their prosaic
materialism: a poet and a humourist, he loved the ivy and the delicate
fanciful cobweb; the ivy might mean ruin and the cobweb might mean
282 Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
dirt, but lie had not the heart to tear off the one and sweep down the
other. He did not like realities like Goldoni; an aristocrat, and a dreamer,
lie did not sympathize with the people; he would accept their poetry,
their fairy tales and quaint sayings, but he would not endure their prose.
His matter-of-fact century, philosophic and pedantic, drove him back
upon himself, and made him brood over his fancies and whimsies more
than is healthy for an artist. He found little sympathy without, and he
had not enough in himself to suffice for himself. The world surrounding
him was prosaic and dull and could not satisfy him, and he had not the
power to create a world for himself which should be satisfactory. Every
great poet and great humourist creates a sphere into which he can rise
and in which dwell in happiness, be it among clouds and rainbows like
Shelley, among moss and leafage like Keats, or among Uncle Tobys like
Sterne, or advocates of the poor like Jean Paul; Carlo Gozzi could not
do this ; both as a poet and as a humourist he could rise out of reality
only for a few minutes, and then drop back into it wearied and bruised ;
he was full of aspiration and suggestion: wondrous dreams, beautiful and
grotesque, flitted before him without his being able to seize them, like
that fiddler trying for a lifetime to reproduce the exquisite sonata heard
in sleep from the fiend ; here ! here it comes, the wierd melody—quick!
the bow across the strings —alas !—that was not the piece. Carlo Gozzi,
like every imaginative mind, saw in everything much more than it con¬
tains ; but, unlike the great artist, he could not extract that something
and make it his own. In his plays he seems for ever pointing to some
suggestion of poetry, of pathos, and of humour, calling upon us to under¬
stand what he would do but cannot ; saying almost piteously, " Do you
not see, do you not feel ? Does not that situation, that word, appeal
to your fancy ? Do you not see dimly those fairy princesses, too beautiful
to be seized, there, do you not hear the music ? Do you not feel
that a world of wonder is half visible to you ? Always suggestive, and
sometimes successful in working out the suggestion; such must be the
final verdict on Carlo Gozzi's plays ; and it explains why they have been
so warmly admired by individuals and so completely forgotten by the
public. Give the world of suggestion contained in The Stag King, in
Turandot, in The Raven, to such readers as Goethe and Madame de Stael,
as Schiller and Hoffmann, and it will suffice; they will see what poor Carlo
Gozzi can only point to. They can sympathize, imagine, and complete.
But humanity at large cannot: it can see only what is absolutely shown
it; mediocre Mr. A, B, or C, must have complete realization, absolute
perfection; he must have Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, the finished statue
with every inch properly chiselled, the finished picture with every line in
its place and every colour well laid on; the block of stone with the mys¬
terious figure still veiled in its rough mass, the sketch with its vague
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy. 283
faces and forms rising shadowlike out of the confusion of blurs ; the
indistinct voice in the wind, the hazy shapes in the moonlight, all this
is incomprehensible to him; he wants art, and he is right; but below art,
below the clear, the realized, the complete, is a limbo of fair unborn
ghosts, shadowy and vague, of distantly heard melodies, of vaguely felt
emotions of pathos and joy. Let us not despise that limbo, that chaos;
out of it emerges every masterpiece, and in it lies hidden many a charming
or sublime shape which those who know the secret spell can evoke out of
the mist of ever-changing forms which surround it.
To this limbo belong the fairy plays of Carlo Gozzi; they are things
which in order to be thoroughly enjoyable must be completed; in our
days they can be thus completed only by the fancy of the reader; in his own
time they were completed by the scenic realization of the excellent comic
company directed by Sacchi. The machinery, improvisations, acting, and
dresses of the Teatro San Samuele filled up the gaps left by the in¬
sufficient talents of the writer; the grotesque shape of Pantalone Darbcs,
with his immense paunch protruding beneath his mediaeval robe, the
mouthings and gestures of Fiorilli-Tartaglia, stammering Neapolitan
brogue and blinking through his goggle spectacles, the capers and jests
of the admirable Truffaldino-Sacclii, witty, quaint, and graceful ; the
coquettish audacity of the servant Smeraldina, the dignity and passion
of the beautiful Teodora Ricci, Gozzi's capricious platonic flame; the
outlandish and shrovetide dresses, the admirable effects of scenery, and
lighting, and mechanism—all this realised and rendered visible upon the
stage of San Samuele that grotesque and fantastic world of the Three
Oranges, the Blue Monster, the Serpent Woman, and the Stag King,
which Gozzi had conceived and suggested, but unlike the greater masters
of the art, Shakespeare, Beckford, and Hoffmann, had been unable to
display. With the Sacchi company at his command, Carlo Gozzi ap¬
peared a genius; as soon as the Sacchi company broke up he was for¬
gotten; and if another such company could be formed, if we could have
another Truffaldino-Sacclii, another Brighella-Zannoni, another Panta-
lone-Darbes, another Fiorilli-Tartaglia, another Teodora Ricci, if we could
resuscitate those admirable last buffoons of the Commedia dell' Arte, the
fiabesque comedies of Carlo Gozzi would once more be as popular as a
hundred years ago; and Carlo Gozzi would seem as great an author to
those compilers of histories of Italian literature in which his very name
is omitted, as he seemed to Hoffmann, to Schiller, and to Schlegel.
There is, however, one of Carlo Gozzi's plays which, by some fortunate
accident, is almost perfect, which might be read and enjoyed even after
Vatheh or Chapclmaster Kreisler, or Alfred de Musset's Fantasio; and
that is the philosophic fairy play VAugellino Bel Verde, or, if we may
translate the untranslateable—The Little Bird Fair Green; for in it
284
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
Gozzi has almost shown us the masks, almost let us hear the improvisa¬
tions, and has given all the quaint charm of the old nursery tale, originally
told by some ancient Hindoo poet to the Persians, moulded into shape
by some beautiful Sheherazade, written out in grotesque Neapolitan
dialect by Basile in the sixteenth century, re-written in dainty and stately
French by Perrault, the architect of Versailles, wandering from country to
country, changing now into Princesse Belle Etoile, now into Peau d'Ane,
and still repeated, as the Uccello Biverde, in thick-mouthed Roman or lisping
Venetian, by many an illiterate granny beside the blazing ruddy mouth
of the bread-baking oven, or in the cool gloom of the farmyard beneath
the spreading fig-tree, to the sound of the sawing cicala and the splash¬
ing fountain. In this comedy Carlo Gozzi has woven together with
wonderful art the prose buffoonery of the Comedy of Masks with the
stateliest tragic verse and the sharpest moralising of a satire; his love of
the droll Venetian dialect, of the supernatural, of the grotesque, and his
moral indignation against the philosophic sophisms of his day, have
balanced each other, and united to form a little masterpiece, in which for
the only time perhaps in his life Carlo Gozzi has succeeded in making
us see and feel completely and satisfactorily all that he wants us to see
and to feel. The wicked old queen-mother Tartagliona has buried alive
her daughter-in-law Ninetta, on the pretence that she has given birth
to two spaniel puppies, and has bid Pantalone, the prime minister, drown
the real twin children of the King and Queen. Good old Pantalone has
not had the heart to execute the order, but has made a parcel of the
twins with twenty-four ells of oilcloth and let them float down the river,
whence they are rescued by Smeraldina, the wife of the pork-seller
Truffaldino, who adopts and educates them as her own children. But
Truffaldino, who is a lying, bullying, and cynical sort of harlequin, hates
the twins, and when they are grown up turns Renzo and Barbarina out
of doors. The brother and sister, who have read odd pages of Helvetius
and Ilolbach, in which Truffaldino was wont to wrap up his cheese and
sausages, wander about destitute but philosophical, having come to the
conclusion that morality is a social fiction, that all human action springs
from self-love, and that the only wisdom is to suppress every feeling and
to hold aloof from mankind. While thus philosophising they are met by a
broken, noseless, ancient statue, who tells them that four hundred years
before, he also, Calmon the philosopher, reasoned as they reason, dis¬
believed in good, and hardened himself against his fellow men, until by
degrees his heart became a stone, his limbs turned to marble, and he fell
upon the ground there to lie, the butt of ignominy, among weeds and
filth, for four centuries. Renzo and Barbarina argue with him, try and
persuade the statue that according t© all natural laws statues cannot
speak, and go off as philosophical and famishing as ever. But at last
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy. 285
this hunger humbles their reason, and they throw into the air a magic
stone given them by Calmon and invoke the philosopher statue. Im¬
mediately a fairy palace, full of magnificent furniture and splendidly-
arrayed servants, rises out of the ground and receives them as its owners.
This sudden change of worldly position entirely changes the philosophy
of the twins ; and when Truffaldino, who is also a philosopher of the
modern school, comes to them, and, thinking to please them, cynically
avows that he drove them away when they were poor, but that he comes
to them when they are rich because self-love is the sole motive of human
action, Renzo has him kicked out of the palace as an ill-conditioned cur,
and consents to rc-admit him only when Truffaldino goes in for the most
abject hypocrisy and knee-kissings: a humorous scene admirably indicated
by Gozzi, and which must have been magnificent in Sacchi's hands.
Barbarina, on her side, becomes so vain and conceited as completely to
despise the attentions of a certain little green bird, the " Augellino Bel
Verde," whose courtship had been her solace while living in poverty.
Meanwhile the unwitting father of the twins, the blinking, stammering
Tartaglia, King of Sliadowland, little guessing that his wife is still alive
(owing to the provisions brought her in lier tomb by the benevolent Little
Green Bird), is for ever whimpering over his lost spouse, shedding tears
at the sight of the floor upon which his Ninetta (one of the magic damsels
of the Love of the Three Oranges) was wont to tread, of the kitchen in
which, appearing in the shape of a bird to the cook Truffaldino, she had
caused the royal dinner to be burnt; lamenting and cursing his mother
Tartagliona, who vainly tries to cheer him by suggesting that he should
play at blind man's buff and similar games; nothing can amuse him. At
last Pantalone the minister rushes in to tell the King that a palace has
risen up in one night opposite his; the King languidly consents to go
011 to his balcony, and there, with Pantalone, he examines the magic
palace and its inhabitants through an opera-glass. He has scarcely seen
Barbarina on his terrace before he falls madly in love with her—" Panta¬
lone," lie cries, " she has on a dress made by the dressmaker Canziani!
Her hair has been dressed by Carletto ! I am in love as a donkey; look
at my eyes, do they not shed sparks? " Pantalone entreats his Majesty
not to lose his gravity, especially as the young woman 011 the balcony is
turning her back upon him. King Tartaglia kisses his hand at Barbarina,
who laughs contemptuously; he entreats Pantalone to teach him some
pretty speech to make to her. Pantalone, disapproving of such un¬
dignified conduct, demurs, so Tartaglia begins, " Wait a bit; I want to
begin the conversation in a brilliant way. Beautiful lady, do you feel
this seirocco blowing? JJo you not think the sun has risen very bright
this morning?" Barbarina, determined to conquer the King, answers
rudely and leaves the terrace; and Tartaglia immediately despatches
28(3 Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
Pantalone to ask her to marry him, little dreaming that she is his
daughter. But the old wicked Queen Mother has a cavaliere serrente
who is a poet and a prophet, Brighella, whose mixture of Bergamasc
prose and tumid prophetic verse is intensely funny, and he warns her
that danger bodes her from Barbarina, bidding her refuse her consent to
the King's marriage unless the bride can bring as dower the Singing
Apple, the Dancing Water, and the Little Green Bird, all of which are
in the possession of a fairy, who guards them with numberless monsters.
Of all the princes who have gone in search of the Singing Apple, the
Dancing Water, and the Little Green Bird, not one has ever returned;
but Barbarina, blinded by ambition, entreats her brother to go in quest of
them. Renzo refuses to risk his life ; but, when he hears that a feather
of the Little Green Bird (who lias ceased visiting his sister) is necessary
to give life to a beautiful female statue of which he is enamoured, he sets
off with TrufFaldino, leaving with Barbarina a magic knife, whose blade,
clean as long as he lives, will be blood-stained as soon as he dies. After
some time Barbarina looks at the knife and sees it is bloody; forgetting
all her vanity and ambition, and in despair at having caused her brother's
death, she sets off with Smeraldina to share his fate. This generous
impulse breaks the spell hanging over the twins ; Barbarina meets
Calinon, who, calling to his assistance the statues of Moors of the Campo
dei Mori at Venice, who hold open the magic door with their shoulders,
and the fountain nymph of Treviso, who spirts water out of her breasts
and extinguishes the magic flames, he enables her to get the Green Bird
in his cage. The Little Green Bird bids Barbarina tear a feather out of
his wing and touch with it liis brother and Truffaldino, who stand turned
into statues in niches among many other seekers of the Singing Apple
and the Dancing Water; Barbarina does so, and Renzo and Truffaldino
resume life. Then Barbarina touches with the feather all the other
statues, kings and princes and sultans, among whom is also Cigolotti,
the story-teller of St. Mark's, who, taking a pinch of snuff, remarks in
Venetian that he ought never to have let himself be tempted by the hope
of getting the Apple, the Water, and the Green Bird, and making a
fortune by showing them off at Venice, and that henceforward he will be
faithful to his tales of Bovo d'Antona and King Pepin. The Green Bird
reveals that Renzo and Barbarina are the children of Tartaglia ; Renzo
marries his statue vivified; Barbarina the Little Green Bird, who turns
into a handsome prince ; Truffaldino returns to his pork-shop; the Queen
Mother and her poet Brighella are metamorphosed into a toad and an
ass, and the good stone philosopher, Calinon, is promised a restored nose
as soon as the audience of Sail Samuele shall have paid their money.
Thus ends the comedy of the Little Bird Fair Green, which, with its
buffooneries, its transformations, its tragic passion, its philosophising, its
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
281
moralising antique statue, its apple singing opera songs, accompanied by
the dancing water as orchestra, its whimpering comic king, its mephis-
tophelian pork-selling harlequin, its clown poet-seer Brighella (who
restores his prophetic vein at the tavern), its hero Renzo madly ena¬
moured of a woman of stone, its bird in love with a mortal, its fantastic,
semi-philosophic s.uggestiveness, has altogether a strange analogy with
the second part of Faust; an enigmatic work, we know not whether too
loftily meaningful or too childishly meaningless for full comprehension ;
amusing, tickling, pleasing; above all filling the mind with a queer and
delightful medley of thoughts. Thefiabesque comedy of Carlo Gozzi was,
in its mixture of humour and pathos, of the grotesque, the fanciful, and
the supernatural, the apotheosis of the Comedy of Masks, its highest
triumph given it by its most fervent votary; but the apotheosis is a
funeral rite, and shows that the old Commedia detV Arte had expired.
Little by little discord began to arise in the once united company directed
by Sacchi. Teodora Ricci, Gozzi's pupil and goddess, behaved scandal¬
ously and went off to France. Sacclii, old and worn out, became can¬
tankerous and headstrong. Darbes died or retired; the other actors, one
by one, took other engagements or entirely left the stage ; the finances
of San Samuele got into disorder, furniture and stage properties were
seized; lawsuits began among the various actors ; the owner of the
theatre ejected the manager ; the magnificent Sacchi company, the last
company of mask actors in all Italy, was dissolved. One day, about
1782, poor old Truffaldino-Sacchi came to see Carlo Gozzi, and took
leave of him all in tears. "You are the only person to whom I pay a
farewell visit; for my departure from Venice must be secret," said Sacchi,
" I shall never forget the favours you have bestowed upon me, Signor
Conte ; vouchsafe to grant me your pardon for any offences, your pity,
and the honour of embracing you." " Poor Truffaldino," writes Carlo
Gozzi, "pressed me in his withered old arms; he gave me a last sad
glance out of his goggle-eyes full of tears, and then ran away, leaving me
alone, wandering disconsolate through Venice, separated from my dear
comedians, and twenty-seven years older than when they returned from
Lisbon. Oh, my poor heart! Oh, national comedy ! All around me I
cannot find one single person who still shares my love for this comedy, so
original and so eminently Italian ! But I am waxing pathetic
Quick, let me wipe the cheek upon which Truffaldino has kissed me: the
fellow must have been eating garlic. At the same time I may brush away
unnoticed the tears on my face ; and then I can go off and dine, proud to
have succeeded in appearing philosophical, that is to say, heartless."
The Commedia dclV Arte was dead. Carlo Gozzi relapsed into ob¬
scurity. Old, whimsical, and solitary, he wandered about through Venice,
with scarce a person to point him out as the author of the Little Green
288
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy.
Bird. The tempestuous political and social horizon scared his fanciful
mind; he watched with wonder and terror the bursting of the great
revolutionary storm; he watched with vague heart-ache the fall of his
beloved republic of Venice. His friends and relatives dropped away one
by one; the eighteenth century drew to a close. We have one last
glimpse of him, seated solitary and silent on a certain bench on the Quay
of the Slavonians at Venice, watching vacantly the boatmen gambling at
the coffee-houses, the water-sellers going up and down with their yoked
pitchers, the women hurrying to and fro in their black skirt and veil; the
fishing-smacks moored to the posts, the green water lapping lazily on the
steps, the clouds sailing over the tower of St. George and the cupolas of
the Giudecca; listless, wistful, seeing perhaps nothing of the life around
him, going over the past, seeing again his loves at Zara, the haunted dis¬
mantled palace at S. Canziano, the theatre of San Samuele with its Har¬
lequins and Pantaloons and Arabian princesses and transformations;
thinking of his Jiabe, of the Stag King, of the Love of the Three Oranges,
of the dear, venerable, dead Comedy of Masks. How often may poor old
Carlo Gozzi have returned and sat upon that bench ? When did the
boatmen and coffee-house loungers of the Quay of the Slavonians miss
that familiar grey, bent old man, with the wistful, fanciful face? We
know not; for, in the total oblivion into which Carlo Gozzi has fallen, no
one has even recorded the exact year of his death; he and all that he did
is forgotten.
Out of the old, venerable Comedy of Masks, born in Greek and Oscan
days, given shape by Beolco and Calmo in the sixteenth century, deve¬
loped to its utmost among the tattered buffoons of the days of Salvator
Rosa, originated two forms of comedy, the realistic comedy of Goldoni
and the fantastic comedy of Carlo Gozzi, both essentially national and
spontaneous artistic productions. But the fate of the two comedies has
been as dissimilar as the talents of the two men: Carlo Gozzi, the fan¬
ciful, the suggestive, the romantic, the artist incapable of embodying his
finest conceptions, has been forgotten ; Goldoni, the clear, the realistic, the
positive, the intensely limited and concentrated genius, has been remem¬
bered. The bookstalls of Venice, crammed with quaint and useless
literary rarities, may be ransacked in vain for a copy of one of the only
two editions ever made of Carlo Gozzi's plays. If we ask for Carlo Gozzi,
ten to one we shall be offered the works of his brother Gasparo: the
clever mediocre, puristical satirist lias survived; the quaint, fantastic,
incorrect poet has been forgotten.
If we want Goldoni we need only enter the first best bookseller's, and
we shall be offered our choice of twenty different editions of his plays ; or,
Carlo Gozzi and the Venetian Fairy Comedy. 289
better, we need only bid our gondolier steer to the little theatre of San
Benedetto, and, entering its pit, we shall behold a perfect resuscitation of
Goldoni's men and women, in their real striped coats and powdered hair
and scarlet cloaks and Venetian skirts and veil, with their real every-day
looks and intonations and movements: not so much an admirably-per¬
formed comedy as a magic evocation of the daily life of a hundred years
back. And, returning home through the little silent squares, across the
staircase bridges with their solitary gondola light in the distance, through
the network of narrow streets behind St. Mark's, we have none of the
feeling of having been to the play: Siora Menegheta, in her chintz and
veil, may be wheedling some black-dressed, horse-hair wigged, snarly Sir
Todero Brontolon behind yonder shutters .... Menego Cainello may
be asleep on the prow of yonder moored gondola; the spendthrift Eugenio
may be gambling in yonder lit-up coffee-house; and, hearing steps behind
us in the narrow, twisting streets, we turn round and almost expect to see
beneath the lamp at the corner the disconsolate, ruined Sior Anzoleto,
flying from his creditors in his black cloak and three-cornered hat . . . ;
for after more than a century after the fall of the republic of Venice, after
the death of the Comedy of Masks, after every connecting link with the
eighteenth century has long been broken, Goldoni remains ; and his men
and women are realities to-day even as they were on that day a hundred
and twenty years ago when, in the book-shop of Bettinelli, Carlo Gozzi
challenged Goldoni with the Love of the Three Oranges, and the author of
the Baruffe Cliiozzotte laughed at the challenge of his rival.
u
CONCLUSION.
CONCLUSION.
In re-reading the foregoing pages there has come home to us ail
impression felt but vaguely while writing them ; the impression that in
our search for art we have been wandering through rooms long closed
and darkened; that we have been brushing away, perhaps over roughly,
cobwebs and dust which lay reverently on things long untouched, that we
have been intruding into a close weird atmosphere filled with invisible
ghosts. The men and things of the Italian eighteenth century have not
yet been exhumed and examined and criticised and classified; they have
not yet been arranged, properly furbished and restored, like so many
waxwork dolls decked in crumbling silks and lace, like so many pretty,
quaint, or preposterous nicknacks in the glass cases of our historical
museum, to be gaped or sniffed at by every vacant idler or heartless
antiquary, like the men and things of our English, French, and German
eighteenth century. They have been forgotten and neglected, but not
insulted; the dust of their own day has lain thick upon them, and that
dust has brought home to our hearts that the men and women once lived
and felt, and the things once charmed or amused. An old book of
cantatas of Porpora, an old volume of plays of Carlo Gozzi, does not
affect us in the same manner as a darkened canvas of Titian or a
yellowed folio of Shakespeare ; these latter have passed through too
many hands, been looked at by too many eyes, they retain the person¬
ality of none of their owners. But the volume of Gozzi's plays was
probably touched last by hands which had clapped applause to Truf-
faldino-Sacchi or Pantalone-Darbes ; the notes in the book of cantatas
may last have been glanced over by singers who had learned to sing them
from Porpora himself ; with this dust, which we shake reluctantly out of
the old volumes, vanishes we know not what subtle remains of person¬
ality. It is different with the Renaissance : its men and women are as
indifferent to us as their calm effigies by Rossellino or Donatello; they
are not dead because they have never, for our feelings, been alive. They
are a superior sort of mummy. We buy their old garments to hang
in our parlours, we knock against their old armour as we would knock
against a brand new fender, we ransack their papers, their lives ; we feel
no scruple in handling their dead personalities; they are totally dried,
embalmed, turned into something wholly different from ourselves; we
cannot, by the greatest stretch of imagination, conceive that they like or
294
Conclusion.
dislike anything we do to them or say about them ; it is so long since they
lived that the very ghosts of them are dead.
But no such stratifications of humanity and of events separate us from
the people of the eighteenth century ; we indeed have never known them,
but wTe have met occasionally men and women who have; like those two,
now themselves become part of the past, to whom this book should have
been dedicated, if dedications were not advertisments to the living rather
than homage to the dead : that sweet and sunny lady, whose hand, which
pressed ours, had pressed the hands of Fanny Burney, and that old
musician who had sung with boyish voice to Cimarosa and Paisiello those
airs which he hummed over for us in faint and husky tones. Thence it
is that our study of the things of the last century ends with a sort of
sadness which should not belong to historians or restheticians.
Moreover, we must repeat it, the art of the Italian eighteenth century
is extremely forgotten; indeed with the exception of a few plays by
Goldoni, wholly forgotten. The music and the drama may, will, nay
certainly must, sooner or later be exhumed ; but the revival will have
taken place too late, they will be things of culture and eclecticism, the
tradition will be gone. The old Italian Comedy of Masks, so quaint, so
coloured, so fantastic in its humour, has long disappeared ; a few local
masks revived and altered in our day, like the Florentine Stenterello
or the Neapolitan Pulcinella, cannot in their isolation give a notion of
the imaginative charm of the coming together of the various droll and
uncouth figures of the mask comedy. Perhaps the performance we
chanced to witness one autumn evening in a shed behind the cathedral
of Perugia was the last real representative of the Commedia delV Arte.
It was only a company of rough wooden puppets, a couple of feet high,
jerking in rectangular fashion and bobbing with rotatory movement for
the amusement of the artisans and apprentices of Perugia; and very
humble, very shabby, and very much humiliated they all were, this Harle¬
quin in his checkered doublet, this Pantaloon in his red hose and black
Dantesque cap, this swarthy Brighella in loose-girdled garb; but they
were the last of a long and mighty line. Their ancestors had amused men
and women long before the brazen griffin had first spread his porcupine
wings on the front of the grim battlemented townhouse, long before
Augustus had built his gate, perhaps even before the first Etruscan wall
had been planted upon the bleak steep of Perugia ; they were as venerable
as anything in Italy, these poor little wooden mannikins, clacking their
legs and bobbing their heads on their stage of planks, and we looked upon
them with reverence.
With respect to the Italian music of the last century, much has been
torn up, much has been made into new paper, much has been used for
the inner binding of books, much has been made into firework papers,
Conclusion.
295
and has whizzed and flamed out of existence in the shape of rockets;
much certainly still remains, carefully locked up and catalogued, and
respectfully unopened, in public and private libraries, and much ought to
remain, but perhaps does not (for no one takes the trouble to discover), in
the archives of the chapels of St. Mark's, of St. Peter's, of St. John
Lateran, and of other great musical establishments. But the men and
women who could still remember how it ought to be performed are long
dead, and while they were still alive no one cared to learn their art and
their traditions. This music of Pergolesi, of Durante, of Lotti, of Jom-
inelli, and of Cimarosa, will certainly soon be remembered and sought for,
and printed and performed, well or ill. The Italian eighteenth century
will, like Antiquity, like the Middle Ages, like the Renaissance, con¬
tribute its share to our eclectic culture ; its men and women will be
exhumed, restored, put into glass cases and exhibited mummy-fashion in
our historical museum ; we shall gape at them, pry into them, hit up
against them, understand them and feel nothing for them, just as we do
for all the other classified human fossils which we possess ; but that time
has not yet come. The men and women of the Italian eighteenth century
are still mere ghosts, whom we have scared in our search after art; for
whom we yet feel we know not what vague friendship and pity. And now
we turn away from them with reluctance, from these men and women
whom we have met in our rambles through the forgotten world of the
Italian eighteenth century, these poets, and composers, and playwrights,
and singers, to whom we have listened so long and so often; nay, even
the poor crabbed little academic pedants and fops, at whom we have so
often laughed, have become something to us, and even to them, with
their absurdities as to the others with their greatness, we bid farewell with
something akin to sorrow.
APPENDIX.
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
Professor Ernesto Masi's admirable monograph, " Francesco Albergati,
i suoi tempi ed i suoi amici," published at Bologna in 1878, came too late
to afford more than a mere note to our first Essay. We have made con¬
siderable use of Cesare Cantu's " L' Abate Parini e la Lombardia nel
secolo xviii°;" of Tipaldo's " Dizionario degli Italiani Illustri nel secolo
xviii0;" of Corniani's "History of Italian Literature," continued by
Ugoni; of Lombardi's " Continuation of Tiraboschiof the volumes of
Botta's " History of Italy," containing the eighteenth century; of Burney's
"History of Music," vol. iv. 1789; and of Maurice Sand's "Masques
et Bouffons de la Comedie Italienne."
The following is a list of some of the works we have used less largely:—
Giov. Maria de' Crescimbeni, " Notizie Istoricfie degli Arcadi Morti."
Rome, 1721, 4 vols.
Rubbi, Elogj Italiani. Venice, 1782.
Rezer, Compendio della Vita del celebre Pietro Metastasio, tradotto in
Italiano. Rome, 1783.
Aluigi, Storia dell' Ab. Pietro Metastasio. Assisi, 1783.
Anonymous, Vita del Sig. Ab. Metastasio. Roma, a spese di G. Pucci-
nelli, 1786.
Charles Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Meta¬
stasio. London, 1796, 3 vols.
Saverio Mattei, Memorie per servire alia Vita del Metastasio, ed Elogio
dell' Jommelli." Colle, 1785.
Cordara, Discorso in Morte del Metastasio. Roma, 1783.
Stefano Arteaga, Le Rivoluzioni del Teatro Musicale Italiano. Venice,
1785, 3 vols.
Majer (Andrea), Origine, Progressi e Stato Attuale della Musica
Italiana. Venice, 1822.
Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy. 1 vol. 1773.
Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, 1773.
Mancini, Riflessioni pratiche sul Canto Figurato. Milan, 1777.
To si (Pierfrancesco), l'Arte del Canto. Bologna, Lelio della Volpe,
1725.
298
Appendix.
Earl of Mount Edgcumb, Musical Reminiscences from 1773. 1834.
Baretti, La Frusta Letteraria. Re-edited 1828.
Memoires de M. Charles Goldoni (Autobiography).
Hawkins, History of Music, 1764.
Moland, Moliere et la Comedie Italienne.
Louis Riccoboni, dit Lelio, Hist, du Theatre Italien. Paris, 1725.
Paul de Musset, Memoires de Ch. Gozzi.
G. B. Magrini, Carlo Gozzi e le Fiabe. Cremona, 1878.
We have made use of various editions of Metastasio's Works and
Letters and of Goldoni's Plays.
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