Gozzi broke off his Memoirs on the 18th of March 1798. He lived another
eight years, and died upon the 4th of April 1806, aged eighty-six. On
reviewing his life, we find four clearly marked periods. The first ends
with the death of his father in 1745, and includes his three years'
service in Dalmatia. The second closes with the year 1756, and is marked
by the break-up of the Gozzi family and his engagement in those
litigations and affairs of business which formed his real occupation for
a long series of years. Short as was this second period, it gave a
decisive tone to his character by confirming the man's natural obstinacy
and litigiousness. Undoubtedly it was not for nothing that he frequented
the Venetian law-courts and studied the arts of chicanery. In all his
polemical writings we detect the habit of forensic warfare, the wariness
of an experienced pleader, and the licensed plausibility of one who is
accustomed to conceal the weak points in his own case while magnifying
the shortcomings of his adversary. His unremitting attention to
practical matters made him an experienced man of business. This was the
true Carlo Gozzi; not that fantastic dreamy plaything of the sprites and
fairies which his romantic French and German critics have discerned in
the author of the _Fiabe_. At the same time, during this second period,
he never neglected literature, but went on writing in the intervals of
serious affairs. Self-taught, well-nigh devoid of systematic culture in
history, philosophy, and language, but gifted with a sincere admiration
for the best Italian authors, with an active fancy and a natural bias
for burlesque humour, he formed that peculiar manner, at once prolix and
forcible, effective and slovenly, which distinguishes his published
works. Unequal in style, incorrect in diction, incapable of giving
perfect form or polish to his compositions, he nevertheless posed as a
purist and threw himself with passion as a conservative into the
literary polemics of his day. The Accademia Granellesca, founded at the
close of this period, recognised in him its stoutest champion and most
quarrelsome fore-fighter. I have mentioned the year 1756 as the date
which opens the third period in Gozzi's life. It marks the publication
of his _Tartana degli Influssi_ and the return of Sacchi's company to
Venice. This period terminates in 1781, and includes all that was most
memorable in his career--the quarrel with Goldoni and Chiari, the
alliance with Sacchi, the composition of the _Fiabe_ and twenty-three
plays on Spanish subjects, the liaison with Teodora Ricci, and the
episode of Gratarol. Gozzi was past sixty when Sacchi's company broke
up, and Gratarol's misfortunes threw a gloomy light upon his past
theatrical career. The fourth period of seventeen years is distinguished
by little literary activity. Yet we owe to it the _Memorie Inutili_,
which were professedly written as an answer to Gratarol's _Narrazione
Apologetica_. Partly composed in 1780, but suppressed by order of the
Government, they did not see the light until the year 1797-98, when
Gozzi completed the work and sent it in a hurry to the press. Meanwhile
the Republic of S. Mark had fallen, never to rise again. In the midst of
this political earthquake, Gozzi retained his old aristocratic
principles intact, though he bowed to custom and used the shibboleths of
the French Revolution, as he confesses, with conscious cynicism.[85] The
period of old age was passed in comparative solitude, cheered, however,
by the friendly relations which he maintained with the surviving
members of his family. The cycle of his dramatic works was closed; and
after 1782 he had the mortification of seeing his _Fiabe_ neglected,
while Goldoni's star reascended the firmament of popularity and fame.
Indeed, the _Fiabe_ had no chance of surviving the improvised style of
comedy, to support which Gozzi composed them, and which he fondly
imagined immortal. Goethe, in 1788, was present at a performance given
by the last debris of Sacchi's company; but when the old _Commedia
dell'Arte_ and the old actors died out, the _Fiabe_ were relegated to
marionettes and puppet-shows. The poet and the man of letters dwindled
in Gozzi, but the man of business survived. His correspondence during
this fourth period shows him engaged in various commercial affairs upon
a small scale, minute in his accounts, involved in litigation, attentive
to the produce of his farms, busied about the interests of friends,
trafficking in lace and stuffs, groceries, wine, fowls, and
carriages.[86] This forms a curious contrast to the romantic portrait of
the old man vamped up for us by Paul de Musset. The ordinary troubles of
advanced age--rheums, aches, and infirmities--fell upon him. In one of
his letters to Innocenzio Massimo he describes their correspondence as
"a hypochondriacal gazette." On the 13th of February 1804 he signed a
holographic will, which shows him still loyal to his conservative creed
in religion, politics, philosophy, and morals. At this time he appears
to have been living in the Campo S. Angelo, one of the broadest,
busiest, and sunniest squares of Venice. Indeed, he had quitted the
ancestral palace of the Gozzi at S. Cassiano many years before, finding
it too distant from the theatres and the piazza. For a long while he
occupied a casino alone in the Calle Lunga S. Moise. The little dwelling
belonged to him; and in a passage of his Memoirs, which did not lend
itself to the scheme of my translation, he relates the circumstances of
his removal to this habitation.[87] I shall insert it here, because it
throws light upon the last stage of Gozzi's journey in this world. "Many
years," he says, "had passed away since my brothers Francesco and Almoro
with their families were established in Friuli, while I remained at
Venice, the sole occupant of our paternal mansion. For me alone, the
vast place was like a wilderness. In the winter I shivered with cold
there. Snow, rain, and the Rialto caused me innumerable annoyances when
I left the theatres at night to gain my distant home. I was growing old,
and this made the journey seem each year more irksome. A casino which I
owned in the quarter of S. Maria Zobenigo, Calle Lunga S. Moise, not far
from S. Marco, had been let for sixty ducats a year to the majordomo of
a Venetian nobleman. This man left Venice with his master on an
embassy, giving me no notice that he had sold his furniture and handed
over my casino to the mistress of some man about the town. By a series
of similar changes, the tenement passed successively through the hands
of several women of the same sort. I always got the rent and asked no
questions. The best of it was that the money was punctually paid me by
priests, who uttered panegyrics on the heroism of my female tenants. The
last of these heroines sent to tell me that my house needed certain
repairs. Accordingly I went there, and was received by a well-restored
relic of womanhood, who pointed out the alterations she judged necessary
in her dwelling-place. Casting my eyes over the lodgings, I thought that
they would serve my purpose admirably, and told the lady so. In a moment
she changed her honeyed tone and language of affected flattery to oaths
and threats and declarations that nothing in the world would make her
turn out. I phlegmatically remarked that she had no lease, that my
lessee had no power to sublet, and that I would grant her sufficient
time to seek another nest. In such matters, as is well known to readers
of these Memoirs, I have always had some trouble. But at last, by taking
over certain pieces of damaged furniture, I came to terms with the Nymph
of Cocytus, and installed myself in my casino. I did it up, and stayed
there fourteen years, letting on lease my former abode at S. Cassiano. I
should have been there still, had not my brother Almoro written to say
that he was tired of Friuli. A widower, with a son and daughter, he
should like to send the former to the university at Padua, and to make a
home with me in Venice. I was always ready to oblige my brother, and
this casino could not hold us all. Accordingly, we took a larger house
at S. Benedetto; and here my brother, much aged in my eyes, as I must
probably have seemed in his, came to live with me. His children, whom I
had only known as little creatures, had grown into giants. Before a year
was over, the daughter made a good match in Friuli, and the son went to
Padua, whence the troubles of the Revolution drove him away before he
had obtained the laurels of a doctor's degree. In that commotion the
laurel, destined for the brows of students, was consecrated to the
kitchen and the garnishing of dishes on the table."[88]
It is possible that the marriage of this niece and the subsequent
marriage of his nephew broke up the joint-household at S. Benedetto, and
that Gozzi then removed to the neighbouring quarter of S. Angelo.[89]
Almoro and his son Gasparo were appointed executors to Carlo Gozzi's
will, which winds up with the following characteristic admonition to the
young man: "Preserve your affection for your well-bred, well-behaved,
and excellent wife. Look to the careful education of your children, and
protect them from the false maxims of that sophistic science which is
the bane of our age, involving all humanity in disastrous mists of error
and confusion, in labyrinths of infelicity and misery." Gozzi died on
the 4th of April 1806, and was buried in the church of S. Cassiano.