Goldoni was the child of Italy and of the eighteenth century. He had no serious quarrel with his environment. He was not greatly superior, in actual character or aspirations, to his associates. His affection for his devoted wife did not save him from many a wandering passion. The promising prima donnas, in particular, found in him an all too devoted instructor and protector. The gaming-table and the lottery are apparently irresistible to any true Italian, and Goldoni knew by heart the passions which he ridicules or condemns, though without bitterness, upon his stage. His oft-repeated claim to have reformed the Italian theatre meant chiefly this: that between the lyrical drama of Metastasio on the one hand, and the popular masque with stock characters on the other,—and while contributing to both these forms of art,—he did firmly establish the comedy of plot and dialogue, carefully learned and rehearsed, in which the players must speak the speech as it is pronounced to them by the poet. Goldoni himself acknowledges, perhaps not too sincerely, in his Parisian memoirs, the superiority, the mastership, of Molière. In truth, the great Frenchman stands, with Aristophanes and Shakespeare, upon a lonely height quite unapproached by lesser devotees of Thalia. We must not seek in Goldoni a prober of the human heart, not even a fearless satirist of social conditions. In his rollicking good-humor and content with the world as he finds it, Goldoni is much like Plautus. He is moreover under a censorship hardly less severe. He dares not, for instance, introduce upon his stage any really offensive type of Venetian nobleman. As for religious dictation, the convent must not even be mentioned, though the aunt with [Pg 6478] whom the young lady is visiting sometimes becomes as transparent an idiom as the "uncle" of a spendthrift cockney! The audience, moreover, demand only diversion, not serious instruction (as Goethe complains, even of his grave Germans, in the 'Prolog im Theater'). It is remarkable, under all these conditions, how healthy, how kindly, how proper, most of Goldoni's work is. Doubtless, like Goldsmith, he could preach the more gracefully, persuasively, and unobservedly, because he never attempted to escape from the very vices or indulgences that he satirizes. But even the most determined seeker for the moral element in art will find little indeed thereof in Goldoni's merry comedies. Incredible as it seems to us Puritans, he really made it his mission to amuse. Thoroughly in love with the rather ignoble, trivial life of his day, he holds the dramatic mirror up to it with lifelong optimism and enjoyment. His wit is not keen, his poetic imagination is slight indeed. Aside from the true dramatist's skill in construction, in plot, his power lies chiefly in the rapid, clear, firm outlines of his character-drawing. These characters are for the most part just about such men and women, such creatures of impulse