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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Martellian verse, a bad imitation of the Alexandrine, is a downright torture to the ear. Chiari, and occasionally Goldoni, came at last to use it, and Gozzi by way of derision. It still remains therefore to the prejudice of a more elegant style of prose. Of Comedy, the modern Italians have nothing worth the name.
Gozzi, and so when I went back to him I was in a pitiable state, for I had not only spent money which did not belong to me, but I had spent it for so small a favour as a kiss. I knew that the next day I should have to give an account of the money he had entrusted to me, and not having the least idea as to what I should say, I had a bad night of it.
The language used by the inferior characters of his comedies is the Venetian dialect. Gozzi introduced a new style of comedy, by reviving the familiar fictions of childhood; he selected and dramatized the most brilliant fairy tales, such as "Blue Beard," "The King of the Genii," etc., and gave them to the public with magnificent decorations and surprising machinery.
Here Gozzi had fallen almost accidentally on a fund of whose value he was not, perhaps, fully aware: his prosaical, and for the most part improvisatory, masks, forming altogether of themselves the irony on the poetical part.
Tartaglia in the flesh how old Gozzi would have revelled in him! Those pathetic, oyster-eyes, that round, flabby face, that comic nose, and the bleating voice with the sentimental quaver in it, reeling off the live man's dying speech...." He wiped his brimming eyes.
He once told Eckermann and Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected.
They, if ever any were, are pieces for effect, of great boldness of plot, still more fantastic than romantic; even though Gozzi was the first among the comic poets of Italy to show any true feeling for honour and love. The execution does not betoken either care or skill, but is sketchily dashed off.
Parties, however, became so envenomed about the whole affair that Gratarol was finally banished from Venice, on the ground of having slanderously attacked the reputation of Gozzi in a pamphlet which was suppressed; and he withdrew to Stockholm, where he died. But for that episode of his picturesque life Gozzi would never have given us his memoirs.
Doctor Gozzi was in the habit of giving us the sacrament in his own church, but he always sent us for our confession to the church of Saint-Augustin, in which the Jacobins of Padua officiated.
His numerous pieces seem formed upon the general model of dramatic works, and not copied from real life. The true character of Italian gaiety is not satire, but imagination; not delineation of manners, but poetical exaggeration. It is Ariosto, and not Molière, who can amuse Italy. Gozzi, the rival of Goldoni, has more originality in his compositions; they bear less resemblance to regular comedy.
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