THE COMEDY OF MASKS--THE OPERA--DRAMA OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century, if chiefly remarkable in Italian literary
history for the dawn of national regeneration, and the assimilation
of literature to the type prevailing in other European countries, is
also memorable as the period when Italian dramatists first acquired a
European renown. This recognition may be considered to date from the
production of Count Maffei’s _Merope_ in 1714, and from the summons
of Apostolo Zeno to Vienna a few years afterwards. These two men
represented, one, the classical tragedy, which, notwithstanding its
conventional acceptance, has ever remained an exotic in Italy; the
other, that special creation of Italian genius, the musical play or
opera. Later in the century, Alfieri and Metastasio carried both forms
nearer to perfection, and Goldoni gave his country a comedy at once
brilliant and regular. Yet the genuine dramatic life of the nation is
to be found in the _commedia dell’ arte_, or Comedy of Masks, contemned
by the learned, but dear to the people, which, except for a brief
interval in the hands of Carlo Gozzi, failed to clothe itself with
literary form, but has pervaded the theatres of Europe in the costume
of harlequin, columbine, and pantaloon.
As the simplest, the _commedia dell’ arte_ is probably the oldest
form of the drama. There can be no question that the Greek rustics who
smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and
from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed,
virtually enacted the same parts as the Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants,
who, inheriting this rude entertainment from Roman times, preserved
it through the Middle Ages, until it assumed new importance in the
general awakening of the sixteenth century. The original wine-lees
gave place to masks, and as masks cannot be varied _ad infinitum_, the
characters became limited to a few well-defined and salient types.
Hence every piece had substantially the same personages; although the
Italian comedy allows of numerous variations upon its four stock parts.
This caused the dialogue to be mainly extemporaneous; and as comedy is
more easily extemporised than tragedy, the pieces tended more and more
towards farce. At the same time, “the fertility of fancy, quickness
of intelligence, facility of utterance, command of language, and
presence of mind,” indispensable to a good impromptu comedian, bestowed
a certain regularity upon the performance. The actor was obliged
to observe the conditions imposed by the character he represented,
conventional as this was: if he enacted Pantaloon, he must not comport
himself as Brighella or the Doctor, and _vice versâ_. As in the Indian
drama, the comic passages were usually in dialect; the serious, if any,
in cultivated language. Despised as literature, these pieces attained
great popularity even beyond the limits of Italy, especially in Paris,
where they divided public favour with the national theatre for a
hundred and fifty years. As, however, they were mainly improvised, and
no care was taken of such parts as might chance to be written down,
they have virtually perished. No literary relic of their palmy days
seems to exist except the _scenarios_ or skeleton plans of some of
them, mere outlines to be filled up by the performers. Modern readers
will hardly obtain a better idea of their spirit than from Vernon
Lee’s inimitable _Prince of the Hundred Soups_, a fantastic tale laid
in the seventeenth century, the culminating period of these dramatic
impromptus, towards the close of which they began to yield to the
musical drama. Their capability of real dramatic excellence is revealed
by two more recent developments--the improved Pulcinello farces of
FRANCESCO CERLONE, a Neapolitan tailor, who, in the later half of the
eighteenth century, “lifted,” says Scherillo, “Pulcinello from the
crowd of masks, and made him the monarch of the popular theatre”; and
the fairy dramas of Carlo Gozzi, a Venetian of the same period. Both
usually wrote their plays out, or at least left comparatively little
to the invention of the actors; but Cerlone composed entirely in the
spirit of the _commedia dell’ arte_. His Pulcinello is commonly a butt,
designed to keep the audience throughout in a roar of laughter by his
ridiculous adventures, an object most fully attained. Gozzi’s pieces
are of higher literary quality, and demand a more particular notice.
CARLO GOZZI (1720-1808), brother of Gaspare Gozzi, already mentioned,
would merit an honourable place among Italian writers merely on the
strength of his entertaining memoirs, translated by Symonds. His real
significance in literary history, however, is confined to the four
brilliant years in which he carried all before him on the Venetian
stage by his _fiabe_ or dramatised fairy tales, composed in the spirit
of the _commedia dell’ arte_, in so far that many of the characters
belonged to the old conventional types, and that a portion of the
action was highly farcical. These characteristics were nevertheless
combined with a regular plot capable of exciting deep interest. The
_fiabe_ originated in a literary quarrel. Goldoni, the restorer of true
comedy to Italy, had denounced the buffooneries of the old _commedia
dell’ arte_, and Gozzi, who had himself cultivated that form, and whose
partiality for it was enhanced by a misunderstanding with Goldoni,
determined to show its capabilities, and at the same time to ridicule
his dramatic rivals, Goldoni and the Abate Chiari. To this end he
hit upon the extremely happy idea of dramatising the fairy tales in
Basile’s _Pentamerone_, thus creating a form represented in English
literature by the admirable burlesques of Planché, but with even more
resemblance to an ancient form of which no complete example remains,
the mythological parodies of the Attic Middle Comedy, which combined
ridicule of the tragic poets with a regular plot derived from ancient
tradition.
In the _scenario_ of his _Three Oranges_, a play not preserved in
its entirety, Gozzi has explained how he burlesqued his rivals, as,
for instance, when the long journeys which Chiari’s personages are
supposed to perform within the compass of a single action are ridiculed
by Tartaglia and Truffaldino being propelled two thousand leagues by
the devil with a pair of bellows. (“They sprawled on the grass at the
sudden cessation of the favouring gale.”) The success of the _Three
Oranges_ was immense, and contributed to drive Goldoni from Venice. It
was followed by a rapid succession of similar pieces, tending, however,
to assume more of a literary character, and become more and more remote
from the original type of the Comedy of Masks. This, if diminishing
their value as illustrations of popular manners and sentiment, renders
them more generally enjoyable; and they would have a wide European
reputation were they not principally composed in the Venetian dialect.
_Turandot_, in the translation, or rather imitation, of Schiller, is
known wherever German literature extends; but the scarcely inferior
merits of the _Blue Monster_, the _Green Bird_, and the like, have not
in general induced foreigners to learn the Venetian patois.
Gozzi, in truth, just missed greatness; he had the artistic talent
to work out a clever idea, but not the poetical fancy requisite to
elevate this lo a region of ideal beauty. As suggested by Symonds, his
pieces would supply excellent material for operatic libretti. Tieck
subsequently undertook the task with higher qualifications, but the
favourable moment had gone by. Gozzi’s plays are the true offspring of
the national spirit, Tieck’s merely importations. After four years of
brilliant triumphs, Gozzi slopped short, fearing to fatigue the public
taste, or conscious of having exhausted his vein. The remainder of his
career as a dramatic author was chiefly occupied with adaptations from
the Spanish.
While in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Comedy
of Masks was decaying, a new form of drama was silently growing up,
the operatic, “a thing,” says Vernon Lee, “born of scenic displays
and concerts, moulded into a romantic, wholly original shape, by the
requirements of scenery, music, and singing.” Its character as a
literary production is indicated by the fact that its proper title
of _melodrama_ has become synonymous with something quite different,
the prose tragedy which aims at strong sensational situations, while
_melodramatic_ evokes no association with music.
The chief representatives of new literary forms are frequently heralded
by precursors, who, if serving in some sense as foils to their genius,
yet deprive them of the praise of absolute originality. What Phrynichus
was to Æschylus, and Marlowe to Shakespeare, APOSTOLO ZENO (1668-1750),
a Venetian of Candiote extraction, was to PIETRO METASTASIO. It was
not Metastasio but Zeno who gave the musical drama literary rank, and
proved that poets as well as musicians might make their reputations
and their fortunes by it. Zeno produced his first serious attempt in
musical drama in 1695, and long held the position of chief dramatic
poet of Italy. After founding and for many years conducting the
influential _Giornale de’ Letterati_, he became court poet at Vienna
in 1718, and eleven years afterwards retired voluntarily in favour of
the rising Metastasio, who completely eclipsed him on the stage, but
could not deprive him of the honour of having first taught Italy how
dramatic poetry of a high order might be associated with music. Zeno,
moreover, was no mere playwright, but a good lyrical poet with a strong
dramatic instinct, a scholar, moreover, and antiquary, and a renowned
collector of medals. His last years were spent in honour and comfort at
his native Venice. Ere his life terminated in 1750 the productiveness
of his successor had almost come to an end.
Metastasio’s long prosperous life was not destitute of romance. The
son (born 1698) of a petty Neapolitan druggist settled at Rome, he was
adopted by the famous jurist and excellent dramatic critic Gravina,
who had heard him singing in the street, for although at the time an
inglorious, he was fortunately not a mute Milton. Victor Cousin was
similarly snatched from the gutter, for different issues and from
different motives. His sonorous appellative was the gift of his patron,
who Hellenised his protégé’s original name of Trapassi, and left him
a fortune. After wasting most of his benefactor’s legacy, Metastasio
articled himself to a Neapolitan lawyer named Castagnola, who received
him on condition that he should not even read, much less write, a line
of verse. This pledge was broken by the composition in 1722 of the
_Gardens of the Hesperides_, a little mask composed under compulsion
from the Austrian viceroy. The secret of the authorship was ferreted
out by La Romanina, the celebrated _cantatrice_, who pounced upon
Metastasio, bore him from Castagnola’s house to her own, and made him a
dramatic poet. She was a married woman much older than Metastasio, and
there seems no suggestion that her affection was other than maternal.
It ended, however, unhappily, perhaps tragically.
The immense success of his _Didone Abbandonata_, performed at Rome in
1723, and followed by a number of similar pieces, had made Metastasio
the undisputed sovereign of the lyric stage, and in 1730 he was invited
to Vienna to replace the veteran Zeno. He went. La Romanina wished to
follow, but never did, and died very suddenly in 1734. Had Metastasio,
now devoted to Countess Althan, to whom he is said to have been
privately married, obstructed her journey? and was her death natural?
There is nothing but surmise as to the precise nature of the case; but
Vernon Lee’s tragical summing-up is true as a statement of fact: “Thus
ended the romance of Metastasio’s life, and with it his youth, and soon
after his hope and his genius.” His Vienna period between 1730 and 1740
was artistically the most brilliant of his life, but he wrote little
afterwards; though his dramas long monopolised the Italian lyric stage;
and the decline of his productive power seems to have been chiefly
owing to the untoward interruption to dramatic performances occasioned
by the Austrian war of succession in 1740 and following years. When
peace returned, Metastasio had become nervous and hypochondriacal; he
yet gained his culminating triumph with the _Atilio Regolo_ in 1750,
and the later half of his life, which ended in 1782, was embellished by
his friendship with the Italian singer-statesman, Farinelli. Metastasio
was selfish, but not cold-hearted; he pined for affection, but shrank
from self-sacrifice; and his self-regarding instinct was not ennobled
by devotion to any of the causes or pursuits which inspired Goethe. Yet
he was a connoisseur in virtue, and his dramas represent her in some of
her most attractive shapes. He saw forty editions of his works in his
own library; he had not only accumulated but had refused distinctions;
if he could feel free from blame towards La Romanina, there was nothing
with which he needed to reproach himself. His life had been a continual
triumph; no wonder if he had become weary of it at last.
Operatic success requires two endowments rarely united in the same
person, the ingenuity of a playwright and the melody of a nightingale.
Both these are combined in Metastasio; he is a very Scribe for
briskness, deftness, and clever contrivance of plot; ere he had become
nervous and depressed, his Neapolitan brain seethed at a dramatic
situation; his _Achille in Sciro_, one of the best of his pieces, was
written, provided with music and scenery, and thoroughly organised
for representation, within eighteen days. Other Italian librettists
may have rivalled him in tunefulness or in the faculty of dramatic
construction, none in both these respects, and none have been able
to impart the like literary quality to their compositions; partly
because he possessed and they lacked the indescribable something that
makes the poet; partly because the sentiment which with them is merely
theatrical, is with him sincere.
The general inferiority of operatic libretti has occasioned the
musical drama to be despised as a branch of literature; although,
to say nothing of the recent achievements of Richard Wagner, the
Euripidean play, with its frequent predominance of solos over choral
parts, approximated to the modern opera. It is no doubt true that the
first requisite is that the words should be a vehicle for the music,
and that, supposing this object attained, it is feasible to dispense
with poetry. It follows that poetry usually is dispensed with, and
that the only literary gift deemed absolutely indispensable for opera
is that of dramatic construction. It is the great distinction of
Metastasio to have been at the same time a consummate playwright and
a true lyrical poet. Other great playwrights have been great poets
in blank verse; but, at any rate for the first half of his life,
Metastasio’s bosom was as affluent a storehouse of melody as Rückert’s;
to sing was for him as easy as to speak. He was constrained to submit
himself to the laws of the opera, inexorable because founded upon the
reason of things. As an opera can be nothing without a _cantatrice_,
it follows that it must turn chiefly upon the passion of love; as
the principal performers’ throats will not bear a perpetual strain,
they must necessarily be sometimes relieved by inferior executants;
hence the necessity of an underplot, and of constructive ability to
interweave this with the main action. As the musical drama is not,
after all, natural, the audience’s attention must be kept occupied
by continual action and bustle; as the singer must leave the stage
at his best, the recitative must be followed by an air. Such tags
must be judged simply with reference to the musical effect, which
with Metastasio was always very great. On the whole, few writers have
adapted means to ends more successfully than he has done, or have more
completely solved the problem of investing the amusement of the moment
with abiding literary worth.
The most celebrated of Metastasio’s lyrical dramas are perhaps the
_Olimpiade_, the _Achille in Sciro_, the _Clemenza di Tito_, and the
_Atilio Regolo_. The _Artaserse_, the _Temistocle_, the _Zenobia_,
have also a high reputation, and in truth the intervals of merit among
his pieces are not very wide. The operatic dramatist is released from
many of the obligations which press most heavily upon the tragic
or comic poet; he is at liberty to mingle the manners and ideas of
different ages and nations as much as he pleases; no great profundity
of psychological analysis can be expected from him, for if he possessed
this gift the conditions of his field of art would debar him from
manifesting it. It is enough if his subject is interesting, his action
lively and well combined, and his melody copious and spontaneous.
Metastasio selected his themes with consummate judgment, and showed a
Scribe-like power of devising bustling action and sudden surprises,
while his tunefulness is remarkable even for an Italian poet. His
pieces would have enthralled audiences even without literary charm.
That they retain their place in the library after their disappearance
from the stage proves him a poet as well as a dramatist. His oratorios
resemble his secular pieces, but are less interesting. His cantatas
have the air of loppings from his dramas. The chief merit of his other
lyrical compositions is their inexhaustible melody.
The vogue of the lyrical drama under Zeno and Metastasio was not
favourable to the more legitimate forms of the art. “_Ce beau
monstre_,” said Voltaire, “_étouffe Melpomène_.” If so, the Italian
drama was stifled, like Desdemona, in her sleep. The extravagance of
the first half of the seventeenth century had been succeeded by the
torpor of the second, and nothing really good had been produced in
either. It was not until 1713 that a tragedy appeared which deserved
and obtained a European reputation. This was the _Merope_ of Count
Scipione Maffei, whose principal work, his _Verona Illustrata_,
has already been mentioned, and who, besides many other claims to
distinction, gained an honourable fame as a natural philosopher, as
the critical historian of chivalric orders, and as the denouncer of
duelling. A man of this stamp, however gifted, was not likely to be
richly endowed with the poetical temperament, and Maffei’s _Merope_
shares the almost universal fault of modern tragedies on classical
subjects, it is essentially a work of reflection. It was composed
with the deliberate purpose of retrieving the Italian drama from its
degraded condition, and was the result of conversations wilh the
actor Riccoboni, author of an esteemed work on the Italian stage, who
lamented that the theatre of his own country afforded him no fine
parts. The want was well supplied by _Merope_, the plot being highly
dramatic, and the treatment, in the opinion of Matthew Arnold, more
poetical than that of either of Maffei’s successors, Voltaire and
Alfieri.
Maffei nevertheless was to yield to one of the most extraordinary men
that Italy ever produced, one brought up under so many disadvantages
that it might seem impossible that he should occupy a high place in
the literature of his country, and who nevertheless, by the mere force
of will and character, has fought his way to almost the highest in
his own field. It must be added that although Count VITTORIO ALFIERI
(1749-1803) might probably have been eminent as an historian or a
political writer, tragedy and satire were the only departments of
poetry in which it seems possible that he should have excelled. This
is as much as to say that he was by nature little of a poet. He was
also little of an Italian, being by birth a Piedmontese, a people
whom the Italians of that day regarded, from an ethnographical point
of view, much as the Greeks of Philip’s day regarded the Macedonians,
and who were in truth destined to work out the parallel by subduing
the rest of the peninsula, though with very different aims and to very
different results. Alfieri was indeed more like an Englishman than an
Italian, and might well have sat as a model to some delineator of the
haughty, eccentric, whimsical, misanthropic, hopelessly perverse, but
on occasion extravagantly generous being who is still accepted on the
Continent as the embodiment of British national character. He did,
in fact, belong to a type more common in England than elsewhere, the
patrician republican of the mould of Algernon Sidney or Savage Landor,
animated by an unaffected passion for liberty, and yet arrogant,
exacting, domineering; fired by a disinterested love of man, and always
quarrelling with men.
Alfieri fortunately felt moved to write his _Autobiography_, a
work of intense interest, and perhaps the most thoroughly sincere
among celebrated books of its order of literature. It depicts a man
continually under the influence of pride and discontent, but whom pride
and discontent stimulate to lofty endeavour and noble actions. Vivid
indeed is the picture of his self-contempt for his wasted youth and his
ignorance of his own language, the speech of Piedmont being then the
worst of all provincial jargons. Most interesting is the detail of his
self-education, both in purity of diction and in the dramatic art. This
psychological interest is relieved and enhanced by the detail of his
numerous adventures, his extensive travels, and his love affairs, three
of which were memorable. In London, in 1772, he fought, by the last
rays of the setting sun, unattended by seconds, a duel with the injured
husband of Lady Ligonier, and wounded in the right arm, was immediately
afterwards back in the theatre out of which he had been summoned to
the fray. His Milan adventure, if less romantic, was more whimsical:
convinced of the unworthiness of his siren, he imitated Ulysses by
compelling his servant to bind him to his chair until the craving for
her company had passed away.
Alfieri’s third escapade of the kind is world-famous, his rescue
of Louise von Stolberg, Countess of Albany, from the drunken husband
who habitually maltreated her, and who, one blushes to record, was
no other than Charles Edward Stuart, the chivalrous and adventurous
Young Pretender of a former generation. Alfieri’s attachment to the
Countess was undoubtedly deep and permanent, and although she seems
to have forgotten him after his death, she felt for him when he was
the only resource she had in the world. The intimacy might long have
remained Platonic but for the extreme brutality of Charles Edward,
which compelled the Countess to escape by Alfieri’s contrivance to
a convent where she saw neither her husband nor her lover. After a
while the Cardinal of York, the Pretender’s brother, offered her an
asylum in a Roman palace, where her acquaintance with Alfieri became
more intimate. Afterwards, legally separated by the interposition of
the King of Sweden, she withdrew to Alsace, where Alfieri followed
her. They eventually established themselves in Paris, and the death
of Charles Edward made no change in their existence. Louise, though
apparently not a warm-hearted, was a highly intellectual woman;
half French, half German, she possessed a range of knowledge and
accomplishment which Alfieri could hardly have found in any Italian
woman at that date, and her sympathy, without doubt, contributed
greatly to the development of his genius. Driven from France by the
storms of the Revolution, which he had at first hailed with a warmth
which he afterwards repented, Alfieri settled with his mistress at
Florence. There he wrote the _Misogallo_, a furious denunciation of
France, and exhausted by hard study and an ascetic life, died in
October 1803, as, with an unconscious touch of irony, he was compelling
himself to write comedies. There seems no ground for believing that he
was privately married to the Countess, who honoured him with a monument
beautifully sculptured by Canova. If, however, the mourning figure
by the tomb represents the bereaved one, she has taken the lion’s
share, Alfieri appearing merely as a medallion head in profile. Room
should have been found for a bust at least, for whimsical, saturnine,
arrogant as he was, he possessed not only a head but a heart. Scornful
of superstition, he was endowed with deep religious feeling, and the
defects of his harsh, angular character were at all events remote from
those national failings which had chiefly contributed to the ruin of
Italy.
It is remarkable indeed that a Piedmontese, who had to teach himself
classical Italian with infinite labour, and whose character possessed
few distinctively national traits, should have been the reviver of
the national spirit in Italy. This Alfieri unquestionably was. He had
what is so deplorably wanting among the gifted men of the golden age
of Italian literature, a passion for freedom and a hatred of tyranny,
which impart to his works, however remote in subject from modern times,
the air of indignant protests against the subjection and degradation of
his country. This feeling, as well as the haughty and self-sufficing
independence of his character, brings him very near to the stoical
Romans of the age of Nero, whose literary productions he approaches
by his declamatory eloquence, his defective feeling for nature, and
the generally studied and laboured character of his poetry. Had Seneca
possessed the leading requisites of a tragic poet, he would have been
a kind of Roman Alfieri. Comparing Alfieri’s tragedy with the modern
form of the art which owes most to Seneca, the French drama of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are sensible of a great
advance; not that Alfieri is comparable as a poet or a stylist to
Corneille or Racine, but that his dramatic economy is improved by the
suppression of much conventional machinery, and the subordination of
amorous gallantry to more dignified and serious emotion.
The strongest family likeness prevails among Alfieri’s tragedies.
“He is,” says Arnold, “a noble-minded, deeply interesting man, but a
monotonous poet.” The quality of “narrow elevation” which Arnold finds
in Alfieri is indeed most apparent throughout all his plays; but they
are not, like so many productions of the classical school tame and
frigid from pedantic over-correctness, nor are they untrue to nature
through servile adherence to tradition and convention. Their dignity
and nobility of feeling inspire deep respect; the author is evidently
akin to the heroes he depicts, and in their place would have been
capable of their actions. His genius did not lead him to the imitation
of the Greeks; his plays are rather such as a Roman poet might have
produced if he could have more completely emancipated himself from
Greek models. He aimed at nervous conciseness, and attained it. The
eloquence which he acquired by a Demosthenic severity of study may
be fitter for the forum than the stage, but rarely degenerates into
mere rhetoric. His theme is always some grand action derived from
history or mythology. His predilection is rather for the heroes of
liberty, like Timoleon or the Brutuses. _Saul_, however, is probably
his most successful play upon the whole, though _Myrrha_ may produce
the greatest effect when an actress can be found competent for so
exceptional a part. _Philip the Second_ inspired Schiller’s _Don
Carlos_. _Antigone_, _Orestes_, and the _Conspiracy of the Pazzi_ may
also be named among Alfieri’s most successful pieces.
Alfieri’s prose-writings possess no great value, except the
_Autobiography_, which is invaluable alike from the interest of the
character depicted and of the events narrated, and from its transparent
candour. As a rule, the only quite trustworthy autobiographic
delineations are the unconscious ones. Pepys has undoubtedly portrayed
himself just as he was, but it is equally certain that he had no
intention of doing so. Alfieri may or may not have depicted himself
as he was, although the portrait is perfectly in harmony with the
impression derived from his writings. But he has unquestionably
depicted himself as he appeared to himself, and more could not be
expected. Alfieri’s minor poems display the “narrow elevation” ascribed
by Matthew Arnold to his tragedies. He has little music, fancy, or
variety, but expresses strong feeling with unusual energy, especially
when moved to wrath:
_Was Angelo born here? and he who wove
Love’s charm with sorcery of Tuscan tongue
Indissolubly blent? and he whose song
Laid bare the world below to world above?
And he who from his lowly valley clove
The azure height and trod the stars among?
And he whose searching mind the monarch’s wrong
Fount of the people’s misery did prove?
Yea, these had birth when men might uncontrolled
Speak, read, write, reason with impunity;
Not from the chair was cowardice extolled;
Not for free thinking would indictment lie;
Nor did the city in her Book of Gold
Inscribe the name and office of the spy._
If Alfieri was a manifest child of Melpomene, the third great
dramatic writer of the age bore the impress of Thalia with no less
distinctness. CARLO GOLDONI’S memoirs paint with the utmost liveliness
the born comedian, careless, light-hearted, proof by a happy
temperament against all strokes of Fate, yet thoroughly respectable
and honourable. Such characters abound in Italy, and wonderful it is
that only one member of so observant and lively a race should have won
an European reputation as a comic author. Tragedy has in some measure
flourished since the death of Alfieri, but Goldoni still stands alone.
The absence of any predecessor is explicable from the circumstances
enumerated at the beginning of this chapter: the national style of
comedy was not literary, and no literary reputation could be built
upon or out of it; while those who followed a different path produced
simply academic work devoid of all vitality. Goldoni broke the spell,
and gave Italy a classical form of comedy, which has not indeed
remained uncultivated, but has never since his time been cultivated
by a master. He was born at Venice in 1707, and was the son of a
physician. His dramatic tastes were inherited from his grandfather, a
Modenese, and all the endeavours of his parents to direct his activity
into other channels came to nothing. He was indeed educated for a
lawyer, graduated, held at different times a secretaryship and a
councillorship, seemed to have settled steadily down to the practice of
law, when an unexpected invitation carried him off to Venice, and for
years he did nothing but manage theatres and write plays, directing all
his energies to supersede the national Comedy of Masks, and comedies of
intrigue dependent upon intricacy of plot, by representations of actual
life and manners. Many of his best plays were written in the Venetian
dialect. At length (1761) umbrage, as was thought, at the vogue of
Gozzi’s fairy dramas induced Goldoni to accept a royal invitation to
Paris, where he spent the remainder of his life composing plays in
French, and writing his memoirs in the same language. He survived
the downfall of the monarchy, and died in 1793, just as the pension
of which he had been deprived was about to be restored to him. The
first half of his life had been full of vicissitudes and entertaining
adventures, agreeably recounted in his memoirs.
The future master of comedy commenced his dramatic career with a
melodrama, _Amalasunta_, which he burned, and followed this up with
another, of whose success he afterwards professed himself ashamed. He
was not long, nevertheless, in discovering his proper vocation; he
inwardly, and from his point of view rightly--for he could never have
been a Gozzi--declared war against the popular Comedy of Masks, and
when a piece of his succeeded, whispered to himself, “Good, but not
yet Molière.” The great Frenchman was the object of his idolatry, and
justly, for not only was Molière the true monarch of the comic stage,
but his period was neither too near nor too remote, and his world
neither too like nor unlike Goldoni’s, for successful imitation. By
1753 Goldoni’s apprenticeship was over, and none but literary enemies
contested his title of the Italian Molière, a title confirmed by the
suffrage of posterity. _Un Curioso Accidente_, _Il Vero Amico_, _La
Bottega del Caffè_, _La Locandiera_, and many other comedies that
might be named, while true to the manners of a past age, retain all
their freshness in our own. Italian audiences yet take delight in his
pictures of their ancestors. “One of the best theatres in Venice,” says
Symonds, “is called by his name. His house is pointed out by gondoliers
to tourists. His statue stands almost within sight of the Rialto. His
comedies are repeatedly given by companies of celebrated actors.” Yet
as Cæsar called Terence a halved Menander, so we may term Goldoni a
halved Molière. The Menandrine element in Molière is present with
him; the Aristophanic is missing. Goldoni wants the French writer’s
overpowering _vis comica_, and is happier in “catching the manners
living as they rise” than in laying bare the depths of the heart.
Wit, gaiety, elegance, simplicity, truth to nature, skill in dramatic
construction, render him nevertheless a most delightful writer, and
his fame is the more assured from his position as his country’s sole
eminent representative in the region of polite comedy.
The eighteenth century had thus endowed Italy with dramatic poets of
European reputation, worthy to be inscribed on the same roll as Racine
and Molière. All the varied dramatic activity of the Cinque Cento,
Machiavelli’s _Mandragola_ and the two great pastoral dramas excepted,
belonging essentially to a lower sphere, fails to counterweigh
the masterpieces of Alfieri and Goldoni. Even their achievement,
nevertheless, did not amount to the creation of a national drama. If
tragedy and comedy can be said to have taken root at all, the latter
degenerated, while the former put forth only sparse and occasional
flowers. Alfieri’s best plays continue stock-pieces to this extent,
that they are revived as offering the most suitable opportunities for
the display of the brilliant histrionic genius which from time to
time irradiates the Italian stage. A succession of gifted men--Monti,
Foscolo, Manzoni, Pellico, Niccolini, Cossa--have continued the
tradition, and on the whole the state of tragedy seems much the same in
Italy as in England. Comedy, on the other hand, notwithstanding some
encouraging signs of revival, is far from vigorous, and the melodrama
which occupies the stage is devoid of literary pretensions. Under
these discouraging circumstances it is not perhaps very extraordinary,
though assuredly it is very amusing, that the Italian _literati_ of
the present day, as reported by their interviewer-general, Signor
Ojetti, should gravely pronounce the drama which they cannot write
a rudimentary and superannuated form of art in comparison with the
novel which they can--_ein ueberwundener Standpunkt_, as would be
said in Germany. The idea of modern romancers transcending the art of
Shakespeare and Sophocles is delightful from its modesty; but it must
be evident that the short story alone can rival the artistic finish of
a perfect drama, for every romance on a large scale must necessarily be
eked out by descriptions, reflections, and episodes unessential to the
main action.
The cause of the failure of the drama to establish itself in the land
of opera is certainly not to be found in any preference on the part of
the public for the tedious psychological analysis of the modern school
of fiction over the rapidity and variety of the stage, but rather in
some deep-seated trait of the national character. This is most probably
the prevailing sensuousness of the people--a term not here used in
any disparaging sense, but as expressing the national preference for
the eye to the ear. _Segnius irritant_, as an ancient Italian has it.
The shows of the _Rappresentazioni_ were undoubtedly more attractive
to the Florentine public than the verses which expounded them; and we
have seen that magnificent scenic equipments were needed to bring the
people to share the dramatic amusements of the courts of the sixteenth
century. This tendency would probably be found to be inveterate, and
to date from the period when the Atellan farces of Latium prefigured
the _Commedia dell’ Arte_. It was not mere love of bloodshed that
made gladiatorial shows popular at Rome. Professor Mahaffy remarks
that while the refinement of Terence’s translations from the Greek in
comparison with Plautus attests the improvement of the taste of the
Roman aristocracy, “this brilliant success was not popular with the
masses, and led to no further attempts in the same direction.”