SOME ITALIANS OF THE LAST CENTURY.* IN these fascinating "studies,"
the author does not seek to treat of Italy in the eighteenth century as a whole, nor even of its litera- ture and music from a historical and critical point of view ; but writing on these subjects from an msthetic point of view, desires to trace out the constitution and evolution of the arts compared with each other, and in particular of those which constituted
the national art of a time when they spontaneously, and, as it were, unheeded, sprang into a singular state of efflorescence,—
namely, the drama and music. In doing this, Vernon Lee gives us, after her well-known fashion, a number of impersonations so vividly depicted amid the surroundings that formed their characters, moulded their daily life, and repressed or developed their genius, that we seem to be transported into another country and another time, and see before us many men and women of Italy who had been hitherto little more than half-forgotten names. The preparation for such a work must have been long, arduous, and engrossing; but so well has the mass of material been assimilated, that the result, far from being a series of heavy papers redolent of the musty tomes from which they have been gathered, has evolved itself, as we have said, for the most part into a number of charming sketches touched in with the light and sure hand of a master.
We are less satisfied when the writer chooses to generalise. Her sweeping assertions are apt to be at such times more caustic than accurate, more brilliant than just, and even, as in the few pages devoted to the seventeenth century, to become, under the guise of sarcasm, as revolting as they are bitter; these, however, are the exceptions ; a few lines taken from the introduction shall be inserted here as giving a good general idea of the contents of
the volume :—
"Following the sound of the music of Pergolesi and Cimarosa, trying to catch closer glimpses of the Bettinas and Lindoros of Goldoni, of the Truffaldinos and Brighellas of Carlo Gozzi, we have strayed into the every-day world of Italy in the eighteenth century, the world of the ladies in stomachers and hoops, of dapper cavalieri serventi, of crabbed pedants, of hungry Arcadian rhymesters, of Gallo-maniacs and Anglo-maniacs,—a world of some good, some evil, some folly, and much inanity ; rambling through which, in search of some composer or singer, of some playwright or mask-actor, we have occasionally seen at a distance noble intellectual figures like Parini and Alfieri, and have stopped to look at them, although they were not the objects of our pursuit ; or we have glanced at one or two faint forgotten celebrities like Rolli and Frugoni ; or we have wandered into some assembly of drolly solemn pedants, dreaming of pastoral life and dinner-giving patrons ; or again into the drawing-room of some beauti- ful Sappho, some Fanstina Maratti or Silvia Verza, seated, sentimental and coquettish, in a circle of enamoured poetasters. Often, also, we have idly followed the crowd of periwigged and stomachered citizens through the squares and streets of old Italian cities, or have watched them, chatting and card-playing, in their country-houses. Strolling about and prying in odd nooks and corners in hopes of meeting a buffoon of Goldoni, or of hearing a snatch of song of Jommelli, we have come across quaint little old-fashioned figures, droll little old-world groups fit for Hogarth or for Watteau, and have stopped and tried co sketch their grotesque outline."
Vernon Lee's studies are six in number, beginning with "The Arcadian Academy," and ending with "The Venetian Fairy Comedy of Carlo Gozzi," the intervening ones dealing with "The Musical Life of Italy," with "Metastasio and the Opera," with "The Comedy of Masks," and with Goldoni and his inimitable plays. Of these, the first and second essays are, to our think- ing, the best; but all of them possess a charm due to picturesque and poetic handling, and the little touches by which the author makes us realise so completely what she wishes to put before us, —as, for instance, when she speaks of Metastasio's cantatas as the embodiments of impressions derived from the "Elysian ruralness of those sweet, solemn Roman villas, where the horses graze beneath the red-stemmed pines, where you tread on a carpet of lilac anemones and starry daffodils, where the bays meet overhead, and the water trickles over the maidenhair of the broken fountains ;" or when she shows us Goldoni wooing his beautiful wife at the balcony in the quiet, stage-like street; or Dr. Burney at an accademia or private concert in Bologna, with its quaint company of thoroughly instructed dilettanti and its violins, viols, hautboys, bassoons, violoncellos, and the harpsichords, with their slender little legs and the black keys on which you could play a fugue, a brilliant scherzo, or an intricate lesson, but which always remained in its due position of respectable mediocrity, not having become, like its descendant the modern piano, a machine "on which you
could execute with considerable disadvantage the music written for other instruments, besides the sentimental and thundering • Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. By Vernon Lee. London : T. Fisher Unwin, imbecility written expressly for it." Dr. Barney's travels in quest of material for his History of Music afford many a bit of pleasant reading, as he is found in company with one celebrity after another, and amongst them the old singer Farinello, from whom he was quite loth to part, having been fascinated, like every one else, by the singular attraction of this unmistakably good man. Of this cavalier, Don Carlo Broschi, better known by his nickname, Vernon Lee has much to say, from the time of his introduction to us in his boyhood at the house of Metastasio's friend, the Romanina, until, in his declining years, his nobility of character comes out in such strong contrast with that of the poet " twin-brother " in whose greatness he always persistently believed. Vernon Lee has shown us Metastasio in no pleasing light—selfish, servile, sometimes mean and ungrateful—as such must he be recognised by those who take the trouble to study his life ; yet though it has long been the fashion to decry his poetry, and though his plays are now scarcely remembered, there will come a time, says the writer, when his artistic worth will be acknowledged, the time when the musical efflorescence of the last century shall be recognised, and with it shall be associated the efflorescence of the Italian tragic drama, "when, in short, the Italians shall recognise that their last great artistic gift to the world was the opera,"—the opera, a creation, as the author points out, that was slowly elaborated by the whole Italian people,—a creation that existed in germ in the very essence of the Italian language, and could have found its development in no country save the one where artistic pleasure was a necessity for its people of every class. Apostolo Zeno was the first opera poet, Metastasio the second ; and just as the latter owed his success to the fact of there being no regular tragic stage in Italy, so was Goldoni's excellence derived from the absence of a comic one, the commedia dell' arts, the comedy of masks, being its only sub- stitute until the writer who still so firmly holds his own, seizing upon popular types, types not of a single province but of the whole Kingdom, and devoting his fertile genius to the elabora- tion of new plots, new scenes, and new combinations, "with a quiet self-satisfied belief in his own mission to give Italy just what it lacked," took up his position as a playwright and kept it. In Vernon Lee's description of him and of his work, she is at her best, and she is happy in describing him as "a Sterne in dramatic form ; the same power of realising with a single touch, of filling trifles with the importance of life and feeling, of riveting and charming us with a couple of figures employed in unimportant action, with a simple every-day incident, with a simple every-day character ; Sterne on the stage, in short, but of a simpler, purer essence than Sterne." Yet while she BO thoroughly does justice to the realism of Goldoni, the writer warms not a little to the whimsical, sentimental, metaphysical Carlo Gozzi, who was so sincerely persuaded that nursery-tales were worth all Goldoni's volumes of comedies, and who succeeded for a time in achieving popularity with his fanciful productions on the Venetian stage, and she reproduces for us the story of "The Love of the Three Oranges and the Little Green Bird." With poor Carlo Gozzi she ends her "studies," quitting them, as she says in her conclusion, "with the impres- sion of having been wandering through rooms long closed and darkened, and brushing away, perhaps over-roughly, cobwebs and dust which lay reverently on things long untouched."
Previous page
