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 works so difficult, indeed
impossible, to translate, especially into English, where dialects such
as the Italian, which form quite distinct languages, are unknown.
Happily, for we are thus