_A review of the origin and progress of the literary quarrels in which I
was engaged.--Also of the foundation of the Accademia Granellesca.--A
diatribe on prejudice.--Father Bettinelli._
The introduction to the first volume of my dramatic caprices (published
in 1772) gave a sufficiently full account of the dates and origins of my
ten _Fiabe Teatrali_, together with some notice of the literary quarrels
which occasioned them.[15] Yet I find it necessary to pass these matters
once more in review, since they concerned me not a little for the space
of twenty-five years and more, and have consequently much to do with my
Memoirs.
Here then are the steps which led me to bring those poetical
extravagances on the stage--extravagances which I never sought to value
or have valued at more than their true worth--which never had, or have,
or will have detractors among real lovers of literature--which always
had, and have, and will have the entire population of great cities for
their friends--which made, and make, and will for ever make a certain
sort of self-styled _literati_ mad with rage--Here then, as I said, are
the steps which led me to their publication.
I must begin by confessing three weaknesses, which pertained to my way
of looking upon literature.
In the first place, I resented the ruin of Italian poetry, established
in the thirteenth century, fortified and strengthened in the fourteenth,
somewhat shaken in the fifteenth, revived and consolidated in the
sixteenth by so many noble writers, spoiled in the seventeenth,
rehabilitated at the end of the last and at the beginning of the present
eighteenth century, then given over to the dogs and utterly corrupted by
a band of blustering fanatics during the period which we are doomed to
live in. These men, who have wrought the ruin I resent by their pretence
to be original, by their habit of damning our real masters and
institutors in the art of writing as puerile and frigid pedants,--these
men who lead the youth astray from solid methods and praiseworthy
simplicity, incite them to trample under foot whatever in past centuries
was venerated like the angel who conducted young Tobias, hurl them with
hungry and devouring intellects into the gulf of entities which have no
actual existence--these men, I say, have turned a multitude of hopeful
neophytes, if only they were guided by sound principles, into mere
visionary fools and the demoniacs of spurious inspiration.
In the second place, I resented the decadence of our Italian language
and the usurpations of sheer ignorance upon its purity. Purity of
diction I regarded as indispensable to plain harmonious beauty of
expression, to felicitous development of thought, to just illumination
of ideas, and to the proper colouring of sentiment, especially in works
of wit and genius in our idiom.
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 multitude 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 Secchellari, 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 ineptitudes and blunders so ridiculous that nobody 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 title 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 butt, 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 illustrious author. An owl with two
balls 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
manuscripts 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 noble 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
principality, 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 assigned 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 passing 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 superstition. Consequently, religion, that
salutary curb on human passion, 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 multitude of simple, innocent, down-trodden creatures,
poor in spirit and impoverished in substance, have wept tears of blood.
It was pronounced 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, amusements, 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 chastity received the name of
prejudice--enforced, so ran the tale, by bugbears of the Levites and the
foolish training of poor superstitious 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
passed for stolid, coarse-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 lusts and
passions, 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 sexual 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 destitute 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 lustre on noble families,
and which affords the rich an opportunity of succouring needy men of
letters. However that may be, Bettinelli wrote and published a satire
entitled _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 pass 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, entitled "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 butt 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 mass 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,
associate once more with my neighbour, assure 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 assurance 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
phoenix of fashion-makers in things our butterflies 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.