's 'Aminta' is as sweet
and musical, and hardly so artificial, as that famous 'Pastor Fido' of
Guarini, which has become the ideal type of all the mock-pastoral comedy
out of which the modern opera has risen.

So, when Goldoni is hailed as the father of modern Italian comedy, it
can only mean that his prolific Muse has dominated the stage in our own
century and in its native land. In his delightfully naive Memoirs he
frequently announces himself as the leader of _reform_ in the dramatic
art. And this claim is better founded; though there is a startling
discrepancy between the character, the temper, the life of this child of
the sun, and the Anglo-Saxon ideal of "Man the Reformer" as delineated,
for instance, by our own cooler-blooded Emerson!

Under the lead of Goldoni's elder contemporary Metastasio, the lyrical
drama of pastoral and artificial love had become fully wedded to music;
and it is rightly felt that the resulting modern opera is a genus of its
own, not essentially nor chiefly dramatic in character and aims. An
opera can be sung without action; it cannot be acted without music. On
the other hand, the farce had become almost restricted to the stock
masked characters, Pantaloon, the Dottore, Arlecchino, and the rest,
with a narrow range of childish buffoonery in the action. The companies
of professional actors, endowed with that marvelous power of
improvisation which the very language of Italy seems to stimulate,
hardly permitted the poet to offer them more than a mere outline of a
shallow plot, to be filled in from scene to scene at the impulse of the
moment on the stage!

Under these circumstances it was indeed necessary to reclaim the rights
of the dramatic poet, to reduce to decent limits the "gag" which the
comic actor has doubtless always been eager to use, and also to educate
or beguile his public up to the point of lending a moderately attentive
ear to a play of sustained interest and culminating plot. In this
seemingly modest but really most difficult task, Goldoni scored a
decided success,--a triumph.

Even his checkered life as a whole was, at eighty, in his own retrospect
a happy comedy, mingled with few serious reverses and hardly darkened at
all by remorse. Such lives at best are nowise numerous. Adequate
self-portraitures of successful artists are so rare that the
autobiographies of the gentle Goldoni, and of his savage
fellow-countryman Benvenuto Cellini, almost form a class of literature
b