GOLDONI.*

Exclaim/ scholars have boon considerably attracted by various aspects of Italian literature in late years, and often with most happy remits. Mr. Bickersteth's Carducci, Mr. McIntyre's Giordano Bruno and the no Jess illuminating article by Professor. Elton it occasioned—these are most valuable con- tributions to the respective subjects. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor now acids: to the list a biography of Goldoni which ought to prepare the way for a better understanding of a writer whose fame has suffered more from his friends than from his detractors. Had. Voltaire wished deliberately to injure the reputation of Goldoni, lie could have done nothing more fatal than to call him " Italy's Moliere." To compare Goldoni with Moliere la the one way to belittle the Italian's work. It is not the efficacy of the satire or the deadly accuracy of the thrust that makes the greatness of Goldoni's finest comedies, but the love that wont to their composition. Goldoni himself acknow- ledged frankly Moliere his master. " If I had Moiiere's wit, I would do in Italy what Afoliere did in France," he wrote in the• dedication to Federigo Borronteo. " Italy's Moliere " has been an excuse for shallow criticism as well as for tepid, unintelligent admiration, By the side of the Frenchman's, Goldoni's satire pales almost to insignificance. It has obviously neither the civil importance nor the merciless indignation of Moliera's. Monsieur Jourdain's sudden delight in the discovery that he had used prose for forty years might have never occurred to Goldoni. He loved humanity too well to be a groat satirist. He could not believe in vice beyond cure. His characters may be odd, stupid, boastful, ignorant, but they are not repellent. The needy nobleman reduced to accept with an appearance of indifference the means to satisfy his hunger is a pathetic as well as ludicrous figure. The erring husband of Goldoni repents sincerely and is heartily forgiven. This generous compassion for bis own moat frail creatures as well as his championship and understanding of women are the features which distinguish the best comedy. of Goldoni from that of his predecessors. There is little advance between the Penionbas of the Menaeohmi and the gluttons of Trissino and Firenzuola. But the Marquis of li'orlipopoli is a very considerable improvement on the conven- tional glutton and parasite of the Lucid'.

It is also misleading to point to Goldoni as a great reformer

of the theatre, as some of the partisans of " Menem " have sometimes done. Goldoni's reforms put an end to a decadent form of art, and deserve in consequence just praise. But if Goldoni lives now where the Venetian dialect is Spoken or well understood, from Milan to Zara, it is not that the reform gave comedy the gift of immortality, but that the plays contain the seed of ideas which men and women have ever found interesting when they have been put before them in an attractive fashion. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor remarks that Mr. Bernard Shave found possibly in Golder-tea Man, of the World the source from which (fame Man and Superman. With, apparently, greater justice it might be suggested that the late Mr. Stanley Houghton was indebted to I Rusteghl for the main idea of The Younger generation. Such themes must ever concern the dramatist until in a perfect world comedy and tragedy cease to • Goldoni; a llagrapity. Ey IL O. Ohatileirl-Taylor, Litt.D. London Matte awl Windus. Lies. notd be. The struggle between youth and crabbed old age did not begin with the very effective tableau with which Mr. Houghton, closes the first act of The Younger Generation., nor was the

question of woman's duties and privileges discussed first at a suffrage meeting. Goldoni was not of the stuff from which reformers are made. Parini, Alfieri, Baretti were the men to flay the vicious tendencies of an age still tainted with seeentiamo, when only extremes seemed to be applauded and supported— the extremely artificial artistry of the academies and the

extremely crude art of improvisation. The Coermedia Dell' Arta against which Goldoni tilted successfully was only another symptom of the disease. The aim of the poet and the musician was also to astonish rather than charm. The cadenza we still hear in

our concert-rooms is the legacy of that age. A lover of men and women, one who could not believe in evil, who was later to

live unsuspecting through the opening stages of the French RevolutiOn and die in its -vortex, who extended sympathy to all men—fisherfolk, noblemen, merchants, servants—such a man could not probe to its depth the ugly wound. He is a typical Venetian of the time in this, that most of his fellow-townsmen seem, like him, to have believed no longer in the possibilities of evil ; to have thought that, because their city was joyous and their citizens were merry, men should die no longer ; that, because they wished to live in peace, the rest of the world would leave them to themselves. They ceased to admit war as a

possibility in so perfect a world, until Napoleon came, and for Long the price of improvidence had to be paid. The tragic end of Goldoni in Paris matches well the fall of Venice.

It is strange to note how indissolubly connected Venice and Goldoni are, because Goldoni travelled much and with obvious. enjoyment, because he .formed a theatre where men so widely apart as Beaumarchais and Goethe, to say nothing of moderns, could find something to their taste. He was so much of a Venetian that all his characters bear the same stamp of nationality. Whether they speak Italian or French, be they serious merchants or needy noblemen, witty rogues or modest wives, we invariably detect the Venetian accent. It is obvious, in consequence, that he is at his best when the words match the • .accent, when he can express himself in language he knows best

—the Venetian dialect. And this is perhaps the maims reason why Goldoni has seldom received just recognition, for unless the student is familiar with the Venetian dialect--used to this day by peasant and nobleman alike—Goldoni's best. work is beyond his reach " These 'Venetian plays not only do him the greatest honour,"

says Mr. Chatfield-'Taylor, but they distinguish him as the pioneer naturalist in the drama of the world; the pioneer poet of a people, too, no previous dramatist having painted the lifo of the; streets in colours no truthful nor voiced plebeian sentiments upon the • stage by faithfully drawn characters of the proletariat, noithor clownish nor obscure."

Goldoni strove honestly to make all his plays equally good, but he was to keen a judge not to perceive the difference. "There is a considerable number of Venetian plays in my collection," he writes in the autobiography, " and perhaps it is these that do me the greatest honour." He knew Venice as Dickens knew London, with a knowledge which encompassed every aspect, every variety of the theme, and uceeptod a meaner side as a natural counterpart of riches and splendour. The poor.

people attracted him both for their humour and for their not very serious foibles. He felt the kinship of blood which makes

Venetians a different race from all others in Italy. From them

he derived the material he needed in order to make Italian comedy what it had never been before ; to substitute for conventional types men and women who carried on the stags the thoughts, the feelings, as well as the words of the people ; to teach audiences to laugh, not at vice or at some cruel injustice of Nature, but at their own weaknesses and mistakes. The fishermen of the Barge Ciozote should not resent the picture, and the four Busleghl would thank the author for being the means of teaching others pleasantly a lose= they had to learn with many a ,pang of disappointment and honest sorrow. These two plays are Goldoni's finest contribution to the comedy of the world. The Rusteglii is even finer than the .Barufe Ciozote, end, granting that the dramatic texture is very slight, the skill of the writer is all the greater when lie draws so charming and even moving a picture of life with such flimsy material. The Italian plays are, on the whole, more concerned with character-drawing than with life and Nature. They' ,depend in consequence for their full effect on the skill of the, interpreter. An incompetent Don Mania in The Coffee-house or an inefficient MirandaUna in La Locandiera would make the plays intolerable. They are like certain Italian operas of the past, which, although not utterly devoid of merit, needed the support of a virtuoso in order to convince and give pleasure. La Local?.Vera is very good comedy without being actually great comedy. How well it stands the test of time both Signora Duso and Miss Mahe O'Neil have shown us. But it is in part a comedy of virtuosity, and this pre-eminenee of the character is common to the most primitive forms of comedy. It is found in the Plautine comedy as well as in the Italian comedy of the Middle Ages. It was the very marrow of the Commedia Doll' Arta. Pantalone dei Bisognosi was only a little more abjectly poor and less pretentious than the Marquis of Forlipopoli. It is only in the best Venetian plays that the question of holding the mirror up to Nature comes seriously before us. Hero, indeed, Goldoni is "glassing half Venice "—merchants, judges, fishermen, porters, men of pleasure, sharpers, devoted wives, aspiring young girls, lovers of every kind. The characters are still sharply outlined, but the issue is no longer narrow and egotistical. We can go in imagination beyond the actual limits of the play. The dramatis personae do not rise from nowhere just to divert the spectator, and then retire to live happily ever after in story-book fashion. The four Rusteghi (the word defies translation, but Means one who does not like the Society of his fellows—a bear, though not necessarily a very redoubtable one) are not of the class to which belong the woman-hater of La Locandiera, the mischief-maker of The Coffee-house. They are not solely domestic tyrants. Lunato, the leader of the four, has some of the Puritan's want of toleration, but also the Puritan's uprightness. He is perfectly just according to his light. He is not very demonstrative, and we should not think him particularly affectionate or generous if we had not his wife's word for it. In Venice the " corrupt society squandered the eights in dancing and gambling," says Mr. Chatfield-Taylor. Well, that is exactly what Lunato and his friends believe. Hence it would be absurd to expect plays and masquerades. Even the balcony is forbidden to the womenfolk lest they might be seen by some Mohock. Work is not only a means of honour- able employment,' but a refuge from the evil of the age, and becomes an obsession. It does not often•cease for the Rustvhi themselves in their fight against the " modern " ideas, and as for the others : " Go on," says Lunato to his daughter when she drops her knitting to curtsy ; " you need not stop working when you say good-day." Of course all finery, silks; lace are banned from the household. Only jewels may be seen on special occasions, because jewels, after all, are as marketable as gold. But do not set jewels according to fashion. Nowadays people have their jewels reset every ten years—says Rustego Maurizio-T—because of the fashion. In a hundred years they have paid the price of the jewels twice over. In a way these Re.sleghi seem the natural creatures of an age given overmuch to self- gratification, for one extreme often generates its opposite Their ambitions are, on the whole, quite praiseworthy. What objection can there be to—" It is good to say I possess enough for my needs. I want nothing, and, in an emergency, I know

here to find a little more"

The Itusteghi have been often mistaken for tormentors who delight in their tyrannical rule. Nothing could be more inaccurate. This is what one of their wives tells us at the end of the play, and her evidence ought surely to be conclusive : " I know. I understand you. You are honest and generous. You are a loving husband, but you have one fault—you are a little stubborn."

In the fisherfolk of Chioggia and in these stern, rude, but honest men and devoted women of the Rusteghi we seem to find a truer image of the author than elsewhere. And seen at this distance of timo he recalls somehow one of the most lovable of all English writers—Oliver Goldsmith.