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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creonta cried:

And the rope, still observing the text, answered:

Creonta howled aloud:

The dog retorted:

Creonta, again:

And the gate:

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

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

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

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

ACT THE THIRD.

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

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

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

Then she breathed her last, and the other continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[The rival partisans of Chiari and Goldoni, who were present in the theatre, and saw that a strong stroke of satire was about to fall, did their best to excite the indignation of the audience, and to stir up a commotion. They did not succeed, however. I have already said that Celio represented Goldoni, and Morgana Chiari. The former of these gentlemen had served his apprenticeship at the Venetian bar, and his style smacked of forensic idioms. Chiari plumed himself upon his sublime pindaric flights of poetry; but I may submit, with all respect, that there never was a tumid and irrational author of the seventeenth century who surpassed him in extravagant conceits and bombast.

Truffaldino appeared spitting a joint. He related how, there being no turnjack in the kitchen, he was obliged to watch the revolutions of the spit himself. While thus engaged, a dove alighted on the window-sill, and a conversation took place between him and the bird. The dove had said: "Good morning, cook of the kitchen." He had replied: "Good morning, white dove." She continued: "I pray to Heaven that you may fall asleep, that the roast may burn, so that the Moor, that ugly mug, may not be able to eat." A mighty slumber overcame him; he fell asleep, and the roast was burned to cinders. This accident happened twice. In a precious hurry he set the third joint before the fire. Then the dove reappeared, and the conversation was repeated. Again the mighty slumber overcame his senses. Truffaldino, honest fellow, did all he could to keep awake. His lazzi were in the highest degree facetious. But he could not resist the spell, began to nod, and the flames reduced the third roast to ashes.

You must ask the audience why and wherefore this scene afforded exquisite amusement.

The attempts to catch the dove, made by these facetious personages, amused the audience above measure. At last they caught it, placed it on a table, and began to stroke its feathers. Then they detected the enchanted pin stuck into a knot upon its head. Truffaldino drew the pin forth, and behold the bird was transformed into the Princess Ninetta!

Celio warned Truffaldino that it was his most solemn duty to keep Martellian verses, those inventions of the devil, out of all dishes served up at the royal table. His function was to make his sovereigns laugh.

The play wound up with that marriage festival which all children know by heart—the banquet of preserved radishes, skinned mice, stewed cats, and so forth. And inasmuch as the journalists were wont in those days to blow their trumpets of applause over every new work which appeared from Signor Goldoni's pen, we concluded with an epilogue, in which the spectators were besought to use all their influence with these journalists, in order that a crumb of eulogy might be bestowed upon our rigmarole of mystical absurdities.

VI.

Such is Gozzi's own account of his first acted fable.

Il Corvo was produced at Milan in the summer of 1761, and at Venice in October 1761. Il Rè Cervo appeared in January 1762; Turandot perhaps in the same month; La Donna Serpente in October 1762; Zobeide in November 1763; I Pitocchi Fortunati in November 1764; Il Mostro Turchino in December of the same year; L'Augellino Belverde in January 1765; Zeim, Rè de'Geni in November 1765. These, with L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie, form the ten Fiabe. After the production of Zeim, Gozzi judged that the vein had been worked out, and turned his attention to adaptations of Spanish dramas for the stage.

VII.

Pantalone retains marked psychological outlines under all his transformations. He is the good-humoured, honourable, simple-hearted Venetian of the middle class, advanced in years, Polonius-like, with stores of worldly wisdom, strong natural affections, and healthy moral impulses. Gozzi has drawn the character in a favourable light, purging away those baser associations which gathered round it during two centuries of the Commedia dell' Arte. His Pantalone recalls the Cortesani, described in a chapter of the Memoirs; but a touch of senility has been added, which lends comic weakness to the type.

Tartaglia stammers, and preserves something of the knave in his composition, burnished with Neapolitan abandonment to appetite and brazen disregard for moral rectitude. This general conception of the character explains the transformation of Tartaglia, in the Three Oranges, into the Tartaglia of the Augellino Belverde.

Smeraldina, under her numerous manifestations, maintains the lineaments of vulgar womanhood. Sometimes a good mother or nurse, sometimes a shifty waiting-woman, sometimes a blustering amazon, sometimes a bad wife or would-be virgin, she never soars into the regions of ideality, and mates eventually with Truffaldino, if she escapes from being burned for blundering atrocities upon the road to commonplace felicity.

With these fixed characters, which form the most delightful ingredients of the Fiabe, Gozzi interweaves a fairy-tale, abounding in magic, flights of capricious fancy, marvels, transformations, perilous adventures. There is always a conflict of beneficent and malignant supernatural powers, ending in the triumph of good over evil, the reward of innocence, and the punishment of crime. There is a fate to which the heroes and heroines are subject, and which can only be overcome by protracted trials, by patience through dark years, by sustained endurance, terrible struggles, and faith in supernatural protectors. Thus the texture of the Fiabe is similar to that of our pantomimes, except that in the former the fairy-tale and the harlequinade are interwoven instead of being disconnected.

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

VIII.

Having recapitulated the chief features of the Fiabe in their later form, I will now analyse L'Augellino Belverde.

X.

A new scene introduces Renzo and Barbarina. They have returned to the city, and are standing in front of the palace. Renzo begs his sister to throw the magic stone. Barbarina reminds him that if they become rich, all will be over with their philosophy. At last he persuades her to throw it, and she does so, bidding herself be mindful that a wretched pebble is the source of her future magnificence. In a moment a gorgeous palace rises, fronting the royal dwelling. Renzo's and Barbarina's rags are exchanged for splendid raiment. Moorish servants issue from the great gates with torches, and welcome their princely masters.