In Germany Gozzi enjoyed wide posthumous reputation, not as a playwright with the public, but as a poet among men of letters. He was early chosen, during the _Sturm und Drang_ period, to perform the part of champion of Romantic against Classical forms of art. How mistaken this view of Gozzi really is, I have attempted to prove. Yet if critics ignore what Gozzi wrote about the origin of his _Fiabe_, and keep out of sight his intentions while composing them--if they only regard the printed plays--it is not difficult to make him assume this false position. Franz A. C. Werthes translated the _Fiabe_ into German so early as 1777-79, and published them at Bern. No less than twelve separate versions of selected plays have since appeared, up to the date 1877.[92] Among these may be mentioned Schiller's _Turandot_, which was executed from the translation of Werthes, and a reproduction of _I Pitocchi Fortunati_ by Paul Heyse. Schlegel introduced the _Fiabe_ to public notice, emphasising their value as specimens of the Romantic style, and connecting them with the indigenous art of Italy. Hoffmann declared his enthusiasm for Gozzi; and if he did not borrow motives from the _Fiabe_ and the _Memoirs_ for his own fantastic productions, he undoubtedly regarded their author as a genius of the same species as himself. Wagner, I may parenthetically observe, based one of his earliest operatic productions on _La Donna Serpente_. It was composed in 1833, and was first exhibited at Munich in 1888. To follow the several steps by which Gozzi came to be regarded in Germany as a Romanticist, snuffed out by the Revolution, would lead me beyond the limits of this introduction. I suspect that he was known there mainly in the translation of Werthes, and that his works were quarried as a mine of motives by writers of romantic tendencies, who lacked invention. There is a pocket edition of the _Fiabe_ in Italian, 3 vols., published by Hitzig, 1808.
The German conception of Gozzi as a Romantic poet of the purest water spread to France. It took the French imagination just when the Romantic movement was at its height. Philarète Chasles treated his works from the point of view of Spanish dramatic literature. Paul de Musset pounced upon the Memoirs, condensed them into a small volume with considerable literary ability, and so ingeniously manipulated their text in the process as to create the illusion that Gozzi had pronounced himself to be in fact what his German admirers found in him. This clever travesty of Gozzi's autobiography presented him to the world as the victim of sprites, the creature of his own inventions, the plaything of superstition, instead of the caustic, practical, sometimes dissembling, and often sinister, man of thwarted passion, violent caprice, hard head, and conservative heart, who will presently be revealed in my version of the Memoirs. I do not blame Paul de Musset for his literary escapade. I understand his motive, and appreciate the joke. He wanted, at one and the same time, to place Gozzi, as the Germans had already placed him, among the fathers of Romanticism, and also to construct a telling novel of adventure out of the copious materials furnished by the Memoirs. But, by so doing, Paul de Musset misled writers who had no access to the sole edition of Gozzi's _Memorie_, or who were perhaps too careless to seek this document out. Among these I may mention M. Paul Royer, the translator of five of Gozzi's _Fiabe_ into French,[93] and Vernon Lee, the talented authoress of a deservedly popular book entitled _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_.[94] Both of these distinguished writers have fallen into the trap laid for them by Paul de Musset, and have accepted a false conception of the man who forms the subject of these volumes.