Of course, his defection gave exquisite pain to the lovers of Italian
good taste, as the classicists called themselves, but these were
finally silenced by the success of his tragedy. The reader of it
nowadays, we suspect, will think its success not very expensively
achieved, and it certainly has a main fault that makes it strangely
disagreeable. When the past was chiefly the affair of fable, the
storehouse of tradition, it was well enough for the poet to take
historical events and figures, and fashion them in any way that served
his purpose; but this will not do in our modern daylight, where a
freedom with the truth is an offense against common knowledge, and
does not charm the fancy, but painfully bewilders it at the best,
and at the second best is impudent and ludicrous. In his tragedy,
Niccolini takes two very familiar incidents of Venetian history: that
of the Foscari, which Byron has used; and that of Antonio Foscarini,
who was unjustly hanged more than a hundred years later for privity
to a conspiracy against the state, whereas the attributive crime of
Jacopo Foscari was the assassination of a fellow-patrician. The poet
is then forced to make the Doge Foscari do duty throughout as the
father of Foscarini, the only doge of whose name served out his term
very peaceably, and died the author of an extremely dull official
history of Venetian literature.
Pages:
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218