Carlo Gozzi - The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi; Volume the Second

In the course of these Memoirs I have promised more than once to give an exact description of my external appearance and internal qualities, and also to narrate the story of my love-affairs.

In stature I am tall. Of this I am made conscious by the large amount of cloth needed for my cloaks, and by the frequent knocks I give my forehead on entering rooms with low doors. I have the good luck to be neither crook-backed, lame, blind, nor squint-eyed. I call this good luck; and yet if I were afflicted with one or other of these deformities, I should bear it with the same lightness of heart at Venice as Scarron put up with his deformities in Paris.

This is all I know or have to say about my physical frame. From early youth I have left to women the trouble of telling me that I was handsome with a view to flatter me, or that I was ugly with a view to irritate, in neither of which attempts have they succeeded. Dirt and squalor I always loathed. Otherwise, if I ever chanced to wear clothes of a new cut, this was due to my tailor, and not to my orders. Ask Giuseppe Fornace, my rogue of a snip for over forty years, if I ever racked my brains about such matters, as so many do. From the year 1735 to 1780, at which date I am writing, I stuck to the same mode of dressing my hair with heroic constancy. Fashion has changed perhaps a hundred times during this period, yet I have never deviated from my adopted style of coiffure. In like manner I have worn the same type of buckles; except when I happened to break a pair, and was forced to change them from square to oval; and then I did so at the instance of the goldsmith, who made me take the lightest in his shop, because they would break sooner and give him more to do in mending them.

Men who talk little and think much, to which class, peradventure, I belong, being immersed in their own meditations, catch the habit of knitting their brows in the travail of reflection. This gives them an air of savagery, sternness, almost ferocity. Though I am gay by nature, as appears from my published writings, yet the innumerable thoughts which kept my brains in a turmoil, through anxieties about our family, lawsuits, schemes of economy, literary plans, and so forth, bred in me a trick of contracting my forehead and frowning, which, combined with my slow gait, taciturnity, and preference for solitary places, won me the reputation among those who were not my familiar friends of being a surly, sullen, unapproachable fellow, perhaps even an enemy of mankind. Many who have come upon me, pondering, with knitted brows and gloomy downcast eyes, will have suspected that I was planning how to kill an enemy, while really I was constructing the plot of my Green Bird .

In the society of people new to me, I always appeared drowsy, stupid, silent, and lethargic, until I had studied their characters and ways of thinking. Afterwards I turned out quite the opposite; not, however, that I may not have remained a fool; but I was one of those fools who utter laconisms, less tiresome to the company than interminable flowery speeches.

I was not miserly, because I always loathed that vice, nor prodigal, for the sole reason that I was not rich. I cannot form any conception of the influence which wealth might have exercised over my imagination and my moral nature, both being doubtless not more free from foibles than in the case of other men and women.

I might have earned considerably by my numerous published works, but I made a present of them all to comedians and booksellers, or to persons who sought to profit by giving them to the press. Perhaps I shall not be believed when I say that I invariably refused such profit for myself. Yet this is the fact. Some who are aware that I was far from rich, will take me to task for my indifference to gain; they will attribute my generosity to vainglory or to stupidity. I had, however, my own reasons, which were as follows. My writings were always marked by freedom, boldness, pungency, and satire upon public manners; at the same time, moral and playful in expression. Being unpaid, they gained the advantage of a certain decent independence, which secured for them toleration, appreciation, and applause on their own merits. Had I been paid for them, they would have lost their prestige; my antagonists might have stigmatised them as a parcel of insufferable mercenary calumnies, and I should have been exposed to universal odium.

In addition to this: there is no degradation for men of letters in Italy worse than that of writing for hire in the employ of publishers or of our wretched comedians. The publishers begin by caressing authors, with a view to getting hold of their works; then they turn round and cast their pretended losses in the author's teeth. To hear them, you would imagine that books for which they had begged on their knees before they sent them to press, were now a load of useless stones encumbering their shelves. The wretched pence they fling at a writer for some masterpiece on which he has distilled the best part of his brains, are doled out with the air of bestowing alms. More fuss is made about it, and it costs more effort, than if the money were being paid for masses for the dead, who have no need to clothe and feed themselves. All this is bad enough. But Apollo protect a poet from being reduced to serve a troop of our comedians at wages! There is not a galley-slave more abjectly condemned to servitude than he. There is not a stevedore who carries half the weight that he does; not an ass who gets more blows and fouler language, if his drama fails to draw the whole world in a fever of excitement to the theatre.

For these reasons, I have always shrunk from letting out my pen to hire. On the frequent occasions when family affairs and litigation have emptied my purse, I always chose rather to borrow from friends than to plunge into the mire and rake up a few filthy stinking sequins. In the one case I incurred the pleasing burden of gratitude to my obligers; in the second I should have bent beneath the weight of shameful self-abasement.

Not even the brotherly terms on which I lived with comedians, nor my free gift to them through five-and-twenty years of all my writings for the stage, preserved me from the acts of ingratitude, and the annoyances which are described in the ensuing chapters of my Memoirs. Think then what would have become of me if I had been their salaried poet!

Italy lacks noblemen, to play the part of Mecænas, and to protect men of letters and the theatre. Had there been such, and had they thought me worthy of their munificence, I should not have blushed to receive it. Knowing my country, however, and Venice in particular, I never allowed myself to indulge flattering dreams of any such honourable patronage.

Sustained by my natural keen sense of the ludicrous, I have never even felt saddened by seeing the morality, which I held for sound and sought to diffuse through my writings, turned upside down by the insidious subtleties and sophisms of our century. On the contrary, it amused me vastly to notice how all the men and all the women of this age believed in good faith that they had become philosophers. It has afforded me a constant source of indescribable recreation to study the fantastic jargons which have sprung up like mushrooms, the obscure and forced ways of expressing thoughts, spawned by misty self-styled science, invested with bombastic terms and phrases alien to the genius of our language. Not less have I diverted myself with the spectacle of all the various passions to which humanity is subject, suddenly unleashed, playing their parts with the freedom of emancipated imps, let loose from their hiding-place by famous discoverers – just like those devils in the tale of Bonaventura des Périers, whom Solomon sealed up in a caldron and buried beneath the ground until a pack of wiseacres dug them up and sent them scampering across the world again. [1] Despériers lived in France between 1480 and 1544. He was servant to Marguerite de Navarre, and a writer of Rabelaisian humour. His two principal works are called Cymbalum Mundi and Nouvelles, Récréations et Joyeux Dévis .