humour,
grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their
utmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever
in extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy.
He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. His
chiaroscuro was too strong; virtue and villany appearing in pure
black and white upon his pages. His hatred of tyrants induced him to
transgress the rules of probability, so that it has been well said
that if his wicked kings had really had such words of scorn and hatred
thrown at them by their victims, they were greatly to be pitied. On
the other hand, his pithy laconisms have often a splendidly tragical
effect. There is nothing in the modern drama more rhetorically
impressive, though spasmodic, than the well-known dialogue between
Antigone and Creon:--

'_Cr_. Scegliesti?

'_Ant_. Ho scelto.

'_Cr_. Emon?

'_Ant_. Morte.

'_Cr_. L'avrai!'

Goldoni's comedies, again, have not enough of serious thought or of
true creative imagination to be works of high art. They lean too much
to the side of farce; they have none of the tragic salt which gives
a dignity to Tartuffe. They are, in a word, almost too enethistically
comic.

The contrast between these authors might lead us to raise the question
long ago discussed by Socrates at Agathon's banquet--Can the same man
write both comedies and tragedies? We in England are accustomed to
read the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, and
to think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom of
the Elizabethan theatre obliged this double authorship; yet it must be
confessed that Shakspere's comedies are not such comedies as Greek
or Romnan or French critics would admit. They are works of the purest
imagination, wholly free from the laws of this world; while the
tragedies of Fletcher have a melodramatic air equally at variance with
the classical Melpomene. It may very seriously be doubted whether the
same mind could produce, with equal power, a comedy like the 'Cortese
Veneziano' and a tragedy like Alfieri's 'Brutus.' At any rate,
returning to our old position, we find in these two men the very
opposite conditions of dramatic genius. They are, as it were,
specimens prepared by Nature for the instruction of those who analyse
genius in its relations to temperament, to life, and to external
circumstances.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

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