In the third place, I resented the extinction of all sense for proportion and propriety in style, that sense which prompts us to treat matters sublime, familiar, and facetious upon various planes and in different keys of feeling, whether the vehicle employed be verse or prose. Instead of this, one monstrous style, now bombastically turgid, now stupidly commonplace, has become the fashion for everything which is written or sent to press, from the weightiest of arguments down to the daily letter which a fellow scribbles to his mistress.
Let it not be supposed, however, that my resentment against these literary curses of our century--for such I thought them--ever goaded me beyond my naturally jesting humour. All the compositions I have printed on the topics in dispute, regarding purity of diction, ancient authors, and the corrupters of young minds in Italy, witness to my joviality and coolness in the zeal and ardour of the conflict.
Finally, I must confess that all my endeavours in the good cause, joined to those of others, have been impotent to stem the tide of extravagance, the exaltation of heated brains, the absurdities of so-called philosophical reforms; also, as regards the purity of Italian diction, all that we have said and written has been thrown away. The charlatans have had the upper hand of us, by persuading the vast mult.i.tude of working brains that to seek purity in language is a waste of time and hide-bound imbecility, and that to spare the pains of gaining it is a mark of free and liberal talent. The remedy must be left to time and to the inscrutable ebb and flow of fashion, which makes the world at one time eager for the true, at another no less eager for the false, in spite of any human efforts to control it.
It was about the year 1740, when an Academy was founded in Venice by some people of gay humour, versed in literary studies, and amateurs of polish and simplicity and nature. Caprice and chance brought us together. But we followed in the wake of Chiabrera, Redi, Zeno, Manfredi, Lazarini, valiant predecessors in the warfare against those false, emphatic, metaphorical, and figured fashions, which had been introduced like plague-germs by the Seicentisti.[16] This Academy imbued the minds of young men with higher ideas, and fostered the seeds it planted by a generous emulation.
The lively and learned little band happened to alight upon a simpleton called Giuseppe Secch.e.l.lari, who had been bamboozled by his own vanity and the cozenage of merry knaves agog for fun into thinking himself a man of profound erudition, and who accordingly blackened reams of paper with inept.i.tudes and blunders so ridiculous that n.o.body could listen to them without fits of laughter. It was decided to elect this queer fish Prince of the Academy. The election took place unanimously amid shouts of merriment. He was dubbed Arcigranellone, and received the t.i.tle of Prince of the Accademia Granellesca, by which names he and the club were henceforth to be known.[17]
A solemn coronation of this precious simpleton with a wreath of plums followed in due course. All the Academicians were grouped around him, and nothing could be more burlesque than his proud satisfaction at the honours he received, the air and grace with which he thanked us for some thirty odes and rigmaroles, which were really witty squibs and gibes upon our princely b.u.t.t, and which he took for panegyrics.
A large arm-chair of antique build and very high, so high that the dwarfish Prince had to take two or three jumps before he leaped into it, was the throne from which he lorded over us. There he sat and swaggered, having been gulled into thinking it the chair of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, that renowned and ill.u.s.trious author. An owl with two b.a.l.l.s in its right claw stood over him, and was the object of his veneration as the crest of the Academy. Perched there aloft, he used to draw from his bosom a roll of papers, and recited in a quavering falsetto some preposterous gibberish or other which he styled a dissertation. After a few lines had been declaimed, the clapping of hands and mocking plaudits of his audience brought him to a pause. Fully persuaded that he had entranced his hearers, he then handed his ma.n.u.scripts with majestic condescension to the secretary, and bade him enroll them in the archives of the Academy.
When we met together in the heat of summer, iced drinks were handed round to the members; but the prince, to mark his superiority, received a bowl of boiling tea upon a silver salver. In the depth of winter, on the other hand, hot coffee was served out to us and iced water to the Prince. The venerable Arcigranellone, puffed up with this distinction, swallowed the tea in summer and the water in winter, dissolving into sweat or shivering with cold according to the season.
I could not reckon all the pleasantries, for ever new and always witty, which we played off upon our Prince, and which his stupid vanity made him accept as honours. Each time the Academy met, these diversions acted like an antidote to melancholy. And since he never would admit that he was ignorant of anything a member asked, at one time he was made to rhyme extempore, at another to sing a song, and sometimes even to descend and strip to the shirt and fence with a master in the n.o.ble art, who rained down whacks with the foil upon his hide and sent him spinning like a peg-top round the room. Arcigranellone as he truly was, the man essayed everything, and never failed to triumph in the deafening derisive plaudits which he raised.
This novel kind of Calandrino,[18] of whom I am sketching a mere outline, served chiefly as a lure to young men who care more for mirth than serious scholarship, and drew them to enroll themselves with zeal beneath the banner of the owl.
When we had amused ourselves enough, at the commencement of our sessions, with the marvellous diatribes, wholly unexpected answers, and harlequinesque contortions of our Arcigranellone, we left him up there alone upon the chair of Bembo, and drew from our portfolios compositions in prose and verse, serious or facetious as the theme might be, but sensible, judicious, elegant in phrase, varied in style, and correct in diction. An agreeable reading followed, which entertained the audience for at least two hours. Each reader, when he had finished his recitation, turned to the Arcigranellone, whose whimsical opinions and distorted reasonings renewed the clatter of tongues and laughter.
This serio-comic Academy had for its object to promote the study of our best old authors, the simplicity and harmony of chastened style, and above all the purity of the Italian tongue. It drew together a very large number of young men emulous of these things; and few foreigners of culture came to Venice without seeking to be admitted to its sessions. I shall not attempt to catalogue the names of its innumerable members. But I may observe that many names might be found upon our books whose owners had no inkling of the fact; for the following reason. Some of our merriest wags used to amuse themselves and the company by inflating the Arcigranellone"s vanity with burlesque epistles addressed to him by very exalted personages. These great people wrote to say that, induced by the renown of his learning, wise rule, and sublime administration of his princ.i.p.ality, they begged to be inscribed by him upon the list of his fortunate subjects, the Academicians. In this way it came about that Frederick II. of Prussia, the Sultan, the Sophy of Persia, Prester John, and other notables of like eminence, appeared among us on paper. All the members, I ought to mention, had an academical name a.s.signed to them and published by his Magnificence the Prince. I was dubbed the Solitary.
The compositions produced in our Academy were candidly exposed to criticism; and, after receiving polish at the hands of accomplished scholars in the club, many works of style and value, in all kinds of verse and prose, went forth to the world. Serious poems, humorous poems, satires in the manner of Berni, Horatian satires with the masculine and trenchant phrase of ancient Rome, orations on occasions of importance in the State, dissertations in defence of the great masters of Italian literature, commentaries upon Dante, novellettes in graceful diction, familiar letters, volumes of occasional and moral essays, Latin verses and prose exercises, translations from choice books in foreign languages; all these, after pa.s.sing the review of the Academicians, were sent to press. I need not speak further about what has become common property through publication.
Perhaps I shall be accused by modern innovators of seeking to attach importance to frivolities. That will not hurt me. Those are far more hurt and wounded who allow themselves to be seduced into believing that the works of these same innovators contain things better worth their notice than frivolities--uncouth frivolities, ill-thought, unnatural, and written in a monstrous jargon.
Who could have imagined that a single word, wrested from its proper sense, made common in the mouths of boys and women to denote what does not suit their inclinations, should have the power to turn established rules--based on the experience of sages, and confirmed by ancient usage--all topsy-turvy? This word is nothing more nor less, in naked truth, than--_prejudice_.[19]
I have just said that the word in question has been wrested from its proper meaning; and I am prepared to maintain this proposition.
According to my principles, which will have to bear the shame of being stigmatised as _prejudices_ by the innovators, it is impossible to apply the term "prejudice" to things which are not only harmless, but beneficial, nay, necessary to the totality of mankind.
Now I am bound to believe that religion and its accessories are beneficial to society and nations. But our new-fangled philosophers have dubbed all these things the prejudices of intellects enfeebled and intimidated by seductive superst.i.tion. Consequently, religion, that salutary curb on human pa.s.sion, has languished and become a laughing-stock.
I am bound to believe that the gallows is beneficial to society, being an instrument for punishing crime and deterring would-be criminals. But our new-fangled philosophers have denounced the gallows as a tyrannical prejudice, and by so doing have multiplied murders on the highway, robberies and acts of sacrilege, a hundred-fold.
I am bound to believe that heroism, probity, good faith and equity are beneficial to society. But our unprejudiced philosophers, who identify felicity with enjoyment and getting hold by any means of what you can, call these virtues mere romantic prejudices. Accordingly, justice has been sold with brazen impudence, knaveries and tricks and treachery have triumphed, and a mult.i.tude of simple, innocent, down-trodden creatures, poor in spirit and impoverished in substance, have wept tears of blood.
It was p.r.o.nounced a musty and barbarous prejudice to keep women at home, for the supervision of their sons and daughters, their hirelings, their domestic service and economy. Immediately, the women poured forth from their doors, storming like Bacchantes, screaming out "Liberty! liberty!"
The streets swarmed with them. Their children, servants, daily duties, were neglected. They meanwhile abandoned their vapoury brains to fashions, frivolous inventions, rivalries in games, amus.e.m.e.nts, loves, coquetries, and all sorts of nonsense which their own caprices and their counsellors, the upstart sages, could suggest. The husbands had not courage to oppose this ruin of their honour, of their substance, of their families. They were afraid of being pilloried with that dreadful word, prejudice.
The law which punishes infanticide with death was styled a prejudice.
Good morals, modesty, and chast.i.ty received the name of prejudice--enforced, so ran the tale, by bugbears of the Levites and the foolish training of poor superst.i.tious females. What the result was, I blush to record. The infinite advantages conferred upon society and families by these fine philosophical discoveries, and by their triumph over prejudices of the sort I have described, had better remain unwritten.
The few who stood aloof and mocked at fashions--fashions which fade and fall each year like autumn leaves--were quizzed as ignoramuses, blockheads, zanies tainted with the leprosy of prejudice.[20] They pa.s.sed for stolid, coa.r.s.e-grained creatures, void of thrill, of sentiment, of taste, of culture, delicacy, and refined perception. Women and men, in one vast herd, became illuminated visionaries. They piqued themselves upon their intuition and originality. They discovered endless harmonies and discords, all imaginary; endless comforts and discomforts, all imaginary; endless imaginary savours, insipidities, depravities in things about them, in furniture, in dress, in colours, in decorations, in the kitchen, in food, in wine, in dressing of the table, all imaginary. They detected elegance or inelegance in every dumb and senseless object: down to the basest of utensils there was nothing which escaped the epithet of elegant. Let thus much be said for truth"s sake, with the patience which is needful nowadays in speaking truth to folk infected by the real and not the spurious leprosy of prejudice.
Well, when all the so-called prejudices which I have just described had been put to flight and dissipated by the piercing sunbeams of the innovators, many great and remarkable blessings appeared in their room.
These were the blessings of irreligion, of respect and reverence annulled, of justice overturned, of law-courts made the play-ground for flagitious vices, of criminals encouraged and bewept, of heated imaginations, sharpened senses, animalism, indulgence in all l.u.s.ts and pa.s.sions, of imperious luxury, with her brood of violent insatiable desires, deceits, intrigues, oppressions, losses of faith and honesty and honour, swindlings, pilferings, bankruptcies, pecuniary straits, base traffickings in s.e.xual bargains, adulteries, the marriage-tie made unendurable and snapped by force or cold collusion.
After such wise, by turning the innocent word "prejudice" into a weapon of attack against everything which restrained vice, crime, illicit pleasure, violence, and social profligacy--against whatever, in short, rationally deserves to be called prejudice--the human race plunged willingly and universally into a pitiable and apparently immedicable state of pure unvarnished prejudice. And this has been effected by the flattering enthusiasm for curing us of prejudices! Indeed it is fine to notice how that poor word "prejudice" is bandied about. The folk who suffer from the real disease, and who complain most loudly of its miserable consequences, declare themselves atheists, declaim against what they call prejudice in their sophisticated jargon, while they bless the legitimate, veracious prejudice, which is the fount and source of all the evils over which they weep, lament, and shriek.
Compared with these weighty topics, what follows may appear a trifle hardly worthy of consideration. I allude to the revolution in literary taste attempted by the Jesuit Father, now the Abbe Xavier Bettinelli, together with some other restless spirits. Twisting that unfortunate word "prejudice" to suit their purpose, they scouted sound studies, established models, correction of style, and the authority of acknowledged masters. All such things were reckoned prejudices by these iconoclasts, who would fain have burned down the temple of Diana in their insolent ambition to be stared at as new stars, original thinkers, independent writers.
Bettinelli, a man not dest.i.tute of parts, fecundity, and eloquence, began by preaching to our youth that it was a prejudice to stand at gaze and slumber over our old authors. What good could the study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio do us now? How could the imitation of their successors in Italian poetry and prose be profitable to us in the middle of the eighteenth century? Students of the good old type he derided as arid word-mongers, who had lost their wits by poring over languid, prosy, frigid models of an antiquated style. To Dante, without understanding him, he condescendingly allowed a few fine verses, a few felicitous images, amid that vast ocean of scurrilities and repulsive barbarisms--the Divine Comedy!
This would-be innovator was possibly justified in his contempt for the fashionable keepsake books of poetry which we call _Raccolte_.[21] I will not defend them, though much might plausibly be urged in favour of a custom which does no harm, which reflects l.u.s.tre on n.o.ble families, and which affords the rich an opportunity of succouring needy men of letters. However that may be, Bettinelli wrote and published a satire ent.i.tled _Le Raccolte_, which was intended to crush them, and to serve as a specimen of his originality in works of fancy. The Granelleschi had always watched with humorous attention Signor Bettinelli"s pranks and gambols, and they now resolved on doing something to sober him down a bit. Two of the best scholars in the Academy, Signor Marco Forcellini and the Abbe Dottore Natale dalle Laste, undertook the task of examining his poem. They had little difficulty in proving that its author, while seeking to pa.s.s for a giant of original genius, was nothing better than the servile plagiarist of Ariosto and Boileau. This conclusion they put forth in an essay, ent.i.tled "A criticism of the little poem _Le Raccolte_." It seemed to us, however, that the essay was somewhat serious in style for an Academy which aimed at playfulness. Accordingly, I was commissioned to enliven it with an epistle in a lighter strain.
This epistle I wrote, as my poor brains dictated, but with perhaps too much of boldness and asperity. The essay and the epistle were published together in one volume. Meanwhile, my brother Gasparo, indignant that Dante, whose resplendent genius has shed the light of glory upon Italy through so many centuries, should become the b.u.t.t of a mere seeker after notoriety, wrote his _Defence of Dante_, which was also printed.
Intelligent judges allow that this book is full of truth, and that its arguments are convincingly victorious over Bettinelli"s arrogant and puerile scoffings. I am therefore at liberty to say that my brother"s _Difesa di Dante_ is a really fine work.
What good came of these polemics? Very little, I am bound to say.
Novelties, whether they are really new or only seem to be so, have the power of seducing and exciting innumerable intellects among the ma.s.s of those who cannot grasp the truth, but who respond at once to clamorous fanaticism. In number such folk infinitely exceed the small minority who, remaining loyal to truth, seek her even at the bottom of the well into which imposture plunges her.
I have always shared the hardihood of politicians, who dare to raise their minds aloft, and look down from a height upon the lowly vale in which humanity resides. But with this difference: They regard the valley as inhabited by a swarm of insects, whom it is their art to sway, oppress, and drive about in their own interest; nor do they stoop to fraternise with these same insects until death reduces all to one brotherhood. I regard the valley as peopled by creatures of my kith and kindred, making observations on them, laughing at their grotesque gestures, motions, and contortions; then I descend to their level, a.s.sociate once more with my neighbour, a.s.sure him that we are all alike ridiculous, and try to make him laugh at himself no less than at me by the proofs I give him of my proposition.
I do not need to study astronomy in order to discover whether there are planets which control the course of human thought. The natural seeds of levity, inconsistency, ennui, thirst for new sensations, with which our brains are crowded, when they begin to germinate, suffice to change the thoughts of mortals, and occasion fits of fashion, which not all the cables of all the dockyards in the world can check before their course is run. When one fashion is exhausted, the seeds I have described above set others in motion; and without interrogating the stars--unless indeed it be the vogue to do so--any patient student of past history may easily arrive at the conclusion that an unbroken chain of such manias and fits of fashion, due to the same natural causes, have always swayed, and will always sway, the stupidity of man; and man in his stupidity is always blind, always possessed of the a.s.surance that his glance is eagle-eyed.
What our forefathers saw, we see, and our posterity is doomed to see--a constant ebb and flow of opinions, determined in some part by a few bold thinkers, who publish to the world discoveries now useful and now useless, now frivolous and now pernicious. Let not, however, these thinkers flatter themselves that when they have contrived to set a fashion going, their most clamorous supporters will take and stick to it more firmly than they do to the vogue created by the opening of some new magnificent caffe or by Blondi"s magazine of novelties, that very phnix of fashion-makers in things our b.u.t.terflies of human frailty think the most important.
As regards literature, in the middle of this century, and under the rising sun of Signor Bettinelli, we were condemned to behold a decided change for the worse. All that had been done to restore purity and simplicity, after the decadence of seventeenth-century taste, was swept away by a new and monstrous fit of fashion. The Granelleschi cried out in vain for sound principles and cultivated taste; contended in vain that, Italy being a nation which could boast a mother-language, with its literary usage, its vulgar usage, and its several dialects, reason bade us hold fast by the Della Cruscan vocabulary, and seek to enrich that, instead of disputing its authority. We cried to the winds, and were obliged to look on while the world was deluged with fanatical, obscure, bombastic lucubrations--laboured sophisms, rounded periods with nothing in them, the flimsy dreams of sick folk, sentiments inverted and distorted--and the whole of this farrago indited in a language mixed of all the vernacular dialects, with interlarded bits of the Greek tongue, but above all with so many French words and phrases that our own Italian dictionaries and grammars seemed to have become superfluous.
x.x.xVIII.
_Sequel of my literary quarrels.--Goldoni and Chiari.--My resolve to amuse my fellow-citizens with fantastic dramatic pieces on the stage._
This new fashion of unlicensed freedom and of sheer enthusiasm made rapid strides, because it was convenient and comfortable. Intellects, misled and muddled, lost the sense of what is good and bad in writing.
They applauded the worst and the best without distinction. Little by little, commonplace and transparent stupidities on the one hand--stupidities sonorous and oracular upon the other, were adopted in the practice of literature. Pure, cultivated, judicious, and natural style took on the aspect of debilitated languor and despicable affectation.
The contagion spread so rapidly and so widely, that even men like Doctor Carlo Goldoni and the Abbe Pietro Chiari were universally hailed and eulogized as first-rate Italian authors. Their original and incomparable achievements were lauded to the skies. To them we owed a fit of fashion, which lasted some few l.u.s.tres, and which helped to overthrow the principles of sound and chaste expression.
These rivals, both of them dramatic poets, and each the critic of the other, were strong enough to heat the brains of our Venetian folk to boiling-point, so that the public formed two stormy parties, which came well-nigh to fisticuffs over the sublimities of their respective idols.
A whirlwind of comedies, tragi-comedies, and tragedies, composts of imperfections, occupied the public stage; the one genius of inculture vying with the other in the quant.i.ty he could produce. A diarrha of dramatic works, romances, critical epistles, poems, cantatas, and apologies by both the Vandals poured from the press and deluged Venice.
All the youth were stunned, distracted, and diverted from good sense by din and tumult. Only the Granelleschi kept themselves untainted by this Goldonio-Chiaristic epidemic.
We did not shun the theatres. We were not so unjust as to refuse his share of merit as a playwright to Goldoni. We did not confound him with Chiari, to whom we conceded nothing, or but little. Yet we were unable to glance with other eyes than those of pitying derision upon the tables of fine ladies, the writing-desks of gentlemen, the stalls of booksellers and artisans, the hands and arms of pa.s.sers in the street, the rooms of public and private schools, colleges, even convents--all of which were loaded with Goldoni"s comedies, Chiari"s comedies and romances, the thousand trivialities and absurdities of both quill-drivers--while everything the scribblers sent to press was valued as a mirror of reform in literature, a model of right thinking and good writing.
I hope that no one will be scandalised if I report a saying which I heard with my own ears. There was a certain Abbe Salerni, Venetian-born, a preacher of the gospel. He was in the habit of thundering forth Lenten-sermons from the pulpits, and had a mult.i.tude of eager listeners.
This man announced one day, with the air of frank and st.u.r.dy self-conceit, that he had arrived at composing his oratorical masterpieces upon sacred themes by the unremitting study of Goldoni"s comedies.
I ought to render a candid account here of the impression made upon me by those two deluges of ink, Goldoni and Chiari. To begin with Goldoni.
I recognised in him an abundance of comic motives, truth, and naturalness. Yet I detected a poverty and meanness of intrigue; nature copied from the fact, not imitated; virtues and vices ill-adjusted, vice too frequently triumphant; plebeian phrases of low double meaning, particularly in his Venetian plays; surcharged characters; sc.r.a.ps and tags of erudition, stolen Heaven knows where, and clumsily brought in to impose upon the crowd of ignoramusses. Finally, as a writer of Italian--except in the Venetian dialect, of which he showed himself a master--he seemed to me not unworthy to be placed among the dullest, basest, and least correct authors who have used our idiom.
In spite of all the praises showered upon Goldoni, paid for or gratis, by journalists, preface-writers, romancers, apologists, Voltaires, I do not think that, with the single exception of his _Bourru Bienfaisant_, which he wrote at Paris, which suited the French theatre, but which had no success in its Italian translation here, he ever produced a perfect dramatic piece. At the same time I must add that he never produced one without some excellent comic trait. In my eyes he had always the appearance of a man who was born with the innate sense of how sterling comedies should be composed, but who, by defect of education, by want of discernment, by the necessity of satisfying the public and supplying new wares to the poor Italian comedians through whom he gained his livelihood, and by the hurry in which he produced so many pieces every year to keep himself afloat, was never able to fabricate a single play which does not swarm with faults.