The Comedies of Carlo Goldoni. Goldoni Carlo
a bygone time. And his satire, though keen, is never bitter. His laugh is an honest one. As Thackeray says of Fielding, "it clears the air." His dramatic censure is considered to have been instrumental in putting down the State-protected gambling which was the plague-spot of Venice in those days, and further in giving the first death-blows to that debased survival from the time of chivalry, the Cavaliere Servente, or Cicisbeo.
Goldoni's diligence was as great and untiring as his invention was fertile. Thus once, provoked by an unjust fiasco, he publicly promised that he would write and produce sixteen new comedies in the course of the next year, and he kept his pledge, though at the time of making it he had not one of these plays even planned. And among this sixteen are some of his Masterpieces, such as "Pamela" and the "Bottega del Caffé." The theme of Pamela was not exactly his choice. He had been teased to compose a play after the novel of Richardson, then all the fashion in Italy. At first he believed it an impossible task, owing to the great difference in the social rules of the two countries. In England a noble may marry whom he likes; his wife becomes his equal, his children in no wise suffer. Not so in the Venice of that time. The oligarchical rule was so severe, that a patrician marrying a woman of the lower class forfeited his right to participate in the government, and deprived his offspring of the patriciate. "Comedy, which is or should be," says Goldoni, "the school of society, should never expose the weakness of humanity save to correct it, wherefore it is not right to recompense virtue at the expense of posterity." However, the necessity of finding themes, conjoined to this insistence on the part of his friends, induced Goldoni to try his hand with Pamela. He changed the dénouement, however, in compliance with Venetian social prejudices, making Pamela turn out to be the daughter of a Scotch peer under attainder, whose pardon Bonfil obtains.
It must not be supposed, however, that Goldoni, although he had now reached the apex of success and fame, was to find his course one of plain sailing. Enmities, rivalries, assailed him on all sides; and these, in the Italy of that date, took a peculiarly venomous character, men's ambitions and energies having no such legitimate outlets as are furnished to-day by politics and interests in the general welfare. Everything was petty, everything was personal. Goldoni's chief rival, and consequently enemy, was Carlo Gozzi, the writer of fantastic dramas, and stilted, hyperbolical dramatic fables, entirely forgotten now, which found a certain favour among the public of that day, one having indeed survived in European literature in the shape of Schiller's "Turandot." A fierce skirmish of libellous fly-sheets and derisive comedies was carried on by the respective combatants and partisans, filling now one theatre, now another, according as the taste of the public was swayed or tickled.
Annoyances with the actors, graspingness on the part of Medebac, made Goldoni abandon his company and pass over to that conducted by Vendramin, an old Venetian noble, – for in those days men of birth thought it no dishonour to conduct a theatre. He was then forty-six years of age, and had written more than ninety theatrical works. For his new patron and theatre he laboured with various interruptions, caused by political events and by his own restless temperament, until 1761, in which space of time he produced some sixty more comedies, besides three comic operas and plays written for a private theatre. And all this labour in less than ten years, and among them some of his best works, such as the trilogy of the Villeggiatura, Il Curioso Accidente, I Rusteghi, Le Barufe Chiozote, and many others, removed from changes of fashion, schools, methods, to which no public has ever been or can be indifferent, eternally fresh and sunny, filled with the spirit of perpetual youth. Notwithstanding, however, the excellence of Goldoni's dramas, the current literary rivalries made themselves felt, and there was a moment when Gozzi's Fables left Goldoni's theatre empty.
It then happened that at this juncture there came to him an offer from Paris to go thither as playwright to the Italian Comedy Company, established there under royal patronage. Was it fatigue, a desire for new laurels, a love of change, the hope of larger gains, that induced him to accept the offer? Perhaps a little of all these. In any case, he assented, binding himself for two years. He was never again to leave France. Paris fascinated him, though he regretted his lovely Venice, and a certain nostalgia peeps forth from his letters now and again. Still his social and pecuniary position was good in the French capital, he was honoured and esteemed, his nephew and adopted son had found lucrative employment there, and, added to all this, even Goldoni was growing old. His eyesight began to fail; he was often indisposed, and no longer inclined to move about and pitch his tent in various cities. A post as Italian teacher at the court brought him much in contact with the royal family. It strikes the readers of the Memoirs with some amazement to see how Goldoni could live in that society, could hear the talk of intellectual Paris, and not be aware upon the brink of how frightful a precipice all French society then hovered. He actually held the king to be adored by his subjects, and these subjects as happy as it was possible for a people to be, well ruled, kindly governed. The narrative of his life ends at the age of eighty, six years before his death, two before the outbreak of the Revolution. We have not, therefore, his impression of the storm when it broke. We only know, alas! that this light-hearted, gay old child – for a child he remained to the end – died in misery, involved in the general ruin and wreck that overwhelmed all France within that brief space of time. It was, in fact, his nephew who stood between him and starvation; for with the king's deposition had vanished the pension allowed to the aged Italian dramatist. A day after his death a decree of the National Convention restored it to him for the term of his days. The proposed gift came too late, but it honours those who voted it and him who pleaded for it, no less a person than Joseph-Marie Chénier, the poet. When the orator learned that the benevolence he invoked could no longer help its object, he again pleaded for the octogenarian, or rather that the pension should be passed on to the faithful wife in whose arms Goldoni had passed away. "She is old," said Chénier, "she is seventy-six, and he has left her no heritage save his illustrious name, his virtues, and his poverty." It is pleasant to learn that this request was conceded to by the Convention. The French, to their honour be it said, are ever ready to pay tribute to genius.
So sad, so dark, so gloomy, was the end of that gay, bright spirit, Italy's greatest and most prolific comic author. To sum up his merits in a few words is no easy task. It is doubtful whether we should rank him among the geniuses of the world. On the plea of intelligence he certainly cannot claim this rank; his intellectual perceptions might even be called mediocre, as his Memoirs amply prove, but he had a gift, a certain knack of catching the exterior qualities of character and reproducing them in a skilful and amusing mode upon the boards. His art is not of the closet kind. What he put down he had seen, not elaborated from out his brain, and his own genial temperament gave it all an amiable impress. The turning-point of his comedies is always the characters of his personages. His plays are founded on that rather than on the artifice of a plot, which, as compared to the former, was held by him as of secondary importance. He distinguished between the comedy of plot and the comedy of character, and imposed the latter on the former, which he held the easier of the two. His mode was in direct contrast to that of the Spanish dramatists, then held in great vogue, who were masters at spinning plots, but whose characters were usually mere conventional types. In Goldoni, action results in most part as a consequence of the individuality of the personages depicted, and his intrigue is directed and led with the purpose that this may develop itself, more especially in the protagonist. Herein consists his great claim to being a theatrical reformer. What is to-day a commonplace was then a novelty. We moderns study character almost to exaggeration. In earlier drama it was ignored, and complicated plot absorbed its place. It was on this that Goldoni prided himself, and justly. It was he who first invented the Commedia del Carattere. Yet another of Goldoni's merits was his rare skill in handling many personages at the same time, without sacrificing their individuality or hindering the clear and rapid progress of the scene. This gift is specially manifest in "The Fan."
Roughly speaking, we may perhaps divide Goldoni's plays into three classes: Those that deal with Italian personages, and which are written in pure Italian, among which may be comprised those written in Martellian verse; those, including the largest number, which are written partly in Italian and partly in dialect; and finally, those written entirely in Venetian dialect, which are the fewest, eleven in all. From this it will be seen how unjust is the criticism of those who would look on Goldoni as merely a writer of comedies in a local dialect. It is this admixture of dialect, however, – and a racy, good-humoured, and amiable dialect it is, that Venetian, – which renders Goldoni's