from Shakspere’s fancy or from Aristophanic satire, is always laid in middle life.  Though Goldoni tried to write tragedies, they were unimpassioned, dull, and tame.  He lacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of form essential for tragic art.  On the other hand, Alfieri composed some comedies before his death which were devoid of 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.

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