"I had no rivals to combat," he writes, "I had only prejudices to surmount."
The first play written for unmasked actors proved unsuccessful. Goldoni was not daunted. He wrote a second. It was applauded to the echo, and he saw himself well launched upon his career as a reformer. The great obstacle to his entire success lay in the difficulty of finding actors, as the masked parts could be taken by greatly inferior players; and also by the circumstance, already pointed out to him by his critic of "Amalasunta," that an Italian playwright had to think more of pleasing his actors than his public. What Goldoni had to endure from this _gens irritabilis_, from their rancour, vapours, caprices, stolid and open opposition to his reform, is told with much good nature and sense of fun in his Memoirs. It can have been far from easy to endure, and no doubt often exasperated the author, though in his old age he can speak of it so calmly and dispassionately. But Goldoni, even as a young man, was wise, and proceeded slowly, first making himself and his name known and popular on the old lines, and only risking his new ideas under favourable conditions. Thus he respected the antique unities of time and action, which, after all, save in the hands of great genius, are most conducive to dramatic success, and he only infringed the unity of place to a certain extent, always confining the action of the comedies within the walls of the same town. He says, with a sagacity not common in his profession, that he should not have met with so much opposition, had it not been for the indiscreet zeal of his admirers, who exalted his merits to so excessive a degree, that wise and cultivated people were roused to contradict such fanaticism. As to the ill feeling roused by the ridicule freely showered by Goldoni upon the corrupt customs of his time, he takes no heed of it, save to redouble his efforts in the same direction. Like Molière, he had the courage to put upon the boards the defects and absurdities of his own age, not merely those of a bygone time. And his satire, though keen, is never bitter. His laugh is an honest one. As Thackeray says of Fielding, "it clears the air." His dramatic censure is considered to have been instrumental in putting down the State-protected gambling which was the plague-spot of Venice in those days, and further in giving the first death-blows to that debased survival from the time of chivalry, the _Cavaliere Servente_, or _Cicisbeo_.