Shouts of incredulous and mocking laughter, not unnaturally, greeted this Quixotic challenge. They stung my sense of honour, and made me gird up my loins for the perilous adventure. When I had composed the scheme of my strange drama, and had read it to the Granelleschi, I could see, by the laughter it excited, that there was stuff and bottom in the business. Yet my friends dissuaded me from producing such a piece of child's-play before the public; it would certainly be hissed, they said, and compromise the dignity of our Academy.
I replied that the whole public had to be attacked in front upon the theatre, in order to create a sensation, and to divert attention from our adversaries. I meant to give, and not to sell this play, which I hoped would vindicate the honour and revenge the insults of our Academy. Finally, I humbly submitted that men of culture and learning were not always profoundly acquainted with human nature and the foibles of their neighbours.
Well, I made a present of _L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie_ to Sacchi's company of comic players, and the extravaganza was produced in the theatre of San Samuele at Venice during the Carnival of 1761. Its novelty and unexpectedness,--the surprise created by a fairy-tale adapted to the drama, seasoned with trenchant parodies of both Chiari's and Goldoni's plays, and not withal devoid of moral allegory--created such a sudden and noisy revolution of taste that these poets saw in it the sentence of their doom.
Who could have imagined that this twinkling spark of a child's fable on the stage should have outshone the admired and universally applauded illumination of two famous talents, condemning them to obscurity, while my own dramatised fairy-tales throve and enthralled the public for a period of many years? So wags the world!
_My plan of campaign for assailing Goldoni and Chiari through the militia of actors I had chosen.--The four Fiabe: Il Corvo, Il Rè Cervo, La Turandotte, I Pitocchi Fortunati._
In the long course of my observations upon human nature and the different sorts of men, I had not as yet enjoyed an opportunity of studying the race of actors. I was curious to do so, and the time had come.
With the view of attacking my two poet adversaries in the theatre, I made choice of the comic troupe of Sacchi, the famous Truffaldino.[26] It was composed for the most part of close relatives, and bore the reputation of being better behaved and more honest than any others. Professionally, they sustained our old national comedy of improvisation with the greatest spirit. This type of drama, as I have said above, Goldoni and Chiari, under the mask of zeal for culture, but really with an eager eye to gain, had set themselves to ruin and abolish.