When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the nineteenth century, at the
moment of the high tide of his work for the Venetian stage, English
people were put into possession of some idea of his drama in the
readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to be, more or less, a later
Goldoni with a warmer heart. This was a brief description—or rather a
mere sign—of an author whom few strangers would ever seek to know
better. He is, indeed, so barred out of the knowledge of English readers
by his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase was necessary as a
first and final _mémoire_. It gave the news of his death with a first
mention of his name and a compendious definition of his career, in one
sentence.
Gallina certainly followed Goldoni in finding the arguments, action, and
passions of his plays in the home life of the Venetians—a life more
domestic than anything an English dramatist would have the courage to
offer to a self-conscious public inclined to ‘humour’. Although our
countrymen are much afraid lest men should accuse them of exceeding
domesticity, and are inclined to defend themselves with irony, they are
in fact less domestic than any of their neighbours. You may hear two
young Italian men, of what would be called among ourselves with some
pride the frivolous world, exchange reports of the state and progress of
their children (their babies really, but one hardly dares to say so; and
one’s reluctance denotes the peculiar insular sense of dignities and
indignities, the reserve, and the clowning that covers its hasty
retreat). One hesitates, for fear of burlesque, to report in English a
conversation that is in Italy quite simple, human, and unconnected with
any kind of raillery.
If this almost majestic candour is found in ‘the world’, the home is at
least equally important in the classes whereof Goldoni chiefly wrote,
and Giacinto Gallina in succession to him. These middle classes are very
homely, and also peculiarly Italian. Nothing quite so local is to be
found among the very poor, whose customs are those of necessity all the
world over, and whose manners are small; the rich also tend to resemble
each other, luxury grows monotonous, and cookery, for example, is as
French in a good hotel in Athens as in a good hotel in Rome. But the
little professional world everywhere in Italy keeps deep and inner
places wherein it is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller,
and beyond the reach of alteration. The same thing that makes so much of
Goldoni and of Gallina illegible to the rest of Europe encloses that
sequestered home, and this is dialect. Business, especially if it be
official, the business of an _impiegato_, is done in choice Italian, and
all acquaintance with foreigners (which in these classes is not much)
uses the same polite manner of speech. ‘Toscaneggia’—‘he
tuscanizes’—says one provincial of another, bantering the choice of
words and the careful conjugations of verbs which he himself also will
put on with the dignities of office.
But within the flat, within the _palazzo_, within the country _villino_
alike, dialect has its nest of intimacy, and makes all speech homely
with an intensity of homeliness that people without patois can hardly
conceive. It sets up an understanding, it runs up a code of signals, it
makes confidence, and is heard in a laugh. Habit has not blunted the
people’s sense of their locality of speech, even as it has left them the
full consciousness of their sun. The barbarisms of local dialect are to
the Italian citizens snug (as Swift would say) beyond description: their
speech closes in their gossip, it prompts their allusions, it
interprets, it understands, at close quarters. It is a kind of refuge
from the generalities of literature; it consoles the heart from the
threats of the preacher. But it scolds as no other kind of language can
scold: scolds the servants with an equality of expression and a tyranny
of oppression together that makes one of the curiosities of Italian
domestic life; it scolds with the peculiar fury of the southern
kitchen—a fury that casts itself implicitly upon the fellow-feeling of
bystanders for excuse in the future time of calm. Dialect, in fine,
sustains, comforts, winks, excludes the burden of the unintelligible
world, deprecates, assuages; it keeps up the old, old habits of
childhood, it knows the things that the citizen and the citizen’s wife
know best, it is aloof from politics.
Inasmuch as the little professional classes of the South do not live
without society, their dialect associates them closely with their
neighbours—closely yet without any defect of ceremony. The rites are as
many, the farewells are as repeated, as though Tuscan were the language;
and the speakers of a comparatively gross dialect, full of twang, are
yet not people to spend their evenings in ungraceful isolation. Their
domesticity is not of the English kind that is made by the habit of
reading, and dialect dispenses them from none of the duties and
dignities of entertainment. It is only that all is done within, within
certain bonds of concentrated mutual understanding.
Indeed, the necessity of companionship for every evening causes a very
courteous waiving of the differences of rank. The general asks the
village druggist (who is also the barber), and all others of like
condition, to his country house to play tombola, there being no other
neighbours, or but few. The intercourse between them is that of
perfectly equal and easy courtesy, the only sign of difference being the
use of the address ‘eccellenza’ on one side only, but with the
infrequence of natural good manners. Without dialect you could hardly
have an understanding so close yet so decorous.
Even a remote dialect serves this intimate purpose. It was my fortune to
know in childhood the inner interior of such a house. Genoese was my own
tongue, and the barber’s, and all the countryside’s, and the General’s
was Modenese. His Modenese and his wife’s had never abated a jot, for
all their many years of dwelling in Liguria; as for their Italian, it
was singularly exquisite (the General’s recitation of Dante was the most
perfect speech in the world), but it was not forthcoming for their
tombola parties. Modenese met the quite alien Genoese in a kind of
rivalry of historic provincialism. Hosts and guests understood each
other barely, and the hard Modenese consonants snapped in reply to the
Ligurian sing-song; but it was at any rate dialect, it was _noi altri_,
it was the strong Italian home.
That the women should have their interests in these narrow things—narrow
but not dull—is intelligible enough. Many of the older women remain
indoors from Sunday noon to the next Sunday morning, in a jacket and
slippers; not a few of the younger have their distractions, romances,
emotions, at the window. Poverty, moreover, fosters these customs by
forbidding much toilette, and thus the Italian woman of these middle
classes, and of remote towns, who always dresses _much_, is content to
dress _seldom_, and this perforce means a habit of home-keeping. But the
men, with the slight alternative of the _caffè_, are equally absorbed by
the things of the house. So does Goldoni show them to be in the whole
series of his plays, and so must the men of his audience have been in
the eighteenth century, or they would not have endured this perpetual
comedy of domestic affairs, in the least exalted sense of the word
domestic. Venetian men, and the citizens of other cities equally noble,
sat to see the play that turns chiefly on the strife of a man’s mother
and his wife for the services of a single maid, and they sit to-day to
see the same thing. Giacinto Gallina, too, has half a comedy occupied
with that contention. He need hardly—but for its unflagging
popularity—have taken the self-same motive, inasmuch as Goldoni is by no
means out of date; he holds the stage as freshly as ever. Indeed,
Italian women, except in the richer classes that have international
examples more constantly before their eyes, alter little in a matter of
a hundred or two hundred years. In the women of Goldoni and in the women
of Giacinto Gallina you may see the virtual contemporaries of Mrs.
Samuel Pepys and of Mercer.