He, entering, stopsErect upon the threshold, elevatingBoth shoulders; then contracting like a tortoiseHis neck a little, at the same time dropsSlightly his chin, and, with the extremest tipOf his plumed hat, lightly touches his lips.
In their order come the singing-master and the master of the violin, and, with more impressiveness than the rest, the teacher of French, whose advent hushes all Italian sounds, and who is to instruct the hero to forget his plebeian native tongue. He is to send meanwhile to ask how the lady he serves has passed the night, and attending her response he may read Voltaire in a sumptuous Dutch or French binding, or he may amuse himself with a French romance; or it may happen that the artist whom he has engaged to paint the miniature of his lady (to be placed in the same jeweled case with his own) shall bring his work at this hour for criticism. Then the valets robe him from head to foot in readiness for the hair-dresser and the barber, whose work is completed with the powdering of his hair.
At last the labor of the learned combIs finished, and the elegant artist strewsWith lightly shaken hand a powdery mistTo whiten ere their time thy youthful locks.
Now take heart,And in the bosom of that whirling cloudPlunge fearlessly. O brave! O mighty! ThusAppeared thine ancestor through smoke and fireOf battle, when his country's trembling godsHis sword avenged, and shattered the fierce foeAnd put to flight. But he, his visage stained,With dust and smoke, and smirched with gore and sweat,His hair torn and tossed wild, came from the strifeA terrible vision, even to compatriotsHis hand had rescued; milder thou by far,And fairer to behold, in white arrayShalt issue presently to bless the eyesOf thy fond country, which the mighty armOf thy forefather and thy heavenly smileEqually keep content and prosperous.
When the hero is finally dressed for the visit to his lady, it is in this splendid figure:
Let purple gaiters, clasp thine ankles fineIn noble leather, that no dust or mireBlemish thy foot; down from thy shoulders flowLoosely a tunic fair, thy shapely armsCased in its closely-fitting sleeves, whose bordersOf crimson or of azure velvet letThe heliotrope's color tinge. Thy slender throat,Encircle with a soft and gauzy band.Thy watch alreadyBids thee make haste to go. O me, how fairThe Arsenal of tiny charms that hangWith a harmonious tinkling from its chain!What hangs not there of fairy carriagesAnd fairy steeds so marvelously feignedIn gold that every charger seems alive?
This magnificent swell, of the times when swells had the world quite their own way, finds his lady already surrounded with visitors when he calls to revere her, as he would have said, and he can therefore make the more effective arrival. Entering her presence he puts on his very finest manner, which I am sure we might all study to our advantage.
Let thy right hand be pressed against thy sideBeneath thy waistcoat, and the other handUpon thy snowy linen rest, and hideNext to thy heart; let the breast rise sublime,The shoulders broaden both, and bend toward herThy pliant neck; then at the corners closeThy lips a little, pointed in the middleSomewhat; and from thy month thus set exhaleA murmur inaudible. Meanwhile her rightLet her have given, and now softly dropOn the warm ivory a double kiss.Seat thyself then, and with one hand draw closerThy chair to hers, while every tongue is stilled.Thou only, bending slightly over, with herExchange in whisper secret nothings, whichYe both accompany with mutual smilesAnd covert glances that betray, or seemAt least, your tender passion to betray.
It must have been mighty pretty, as Master Pepys says, to look at the life from which this scene was painted, for many a dandy of either sex doubtless sat for it. The scene was sometimes heightened by the different humor in which the lady and the cavalier received each other, as for instance when they met with reproaches and offered the spectacle of a lover's quarrel to the company. In either case, it is for the hero to lead the lady out to dinner.
With a boundRise to thy feet, signor, and give thy handUnto thy lady, whom, tenderly drooping,Support thou with thy strength, and to the tableAccompany, while the guests come after you.And last of all the husband follows....
Or rather—
If to the husband stillThe vestige of a generous soul remain,Let him frequent another board; besideAnother lady sit, whose husband dinesYet somewhere else beside another lady,Whose spouse is likewise absent; and so addNew links unto the chain immense, wherewithLove, alternating, binds the whole wide world.Behold thy lady seated at the board:Relinquish now her hand, and while the servantPlaces the chair that not too far she sit,And not so near that her soft bosom pressToo close against the table, with a springStoop thou and gather round thy lady's feetThe wandering volume of her robe. Beside herThen sit thee down; for the true cavalierIs not permitted to forsake the sideOf her he serves, except there should ariseSome strange occasion warranting the useOf so great freedom.
When one reads of these springs and little hops, which were once so elegant, it is almost with a sigh for a world which no longer springs or hops in the service of beauty, or even dreams of doing it. But a passage which will touch the sympathetic with a still keener sense of loss is one which hints how lovely a lady looked when carving, as she then sometimes did:
Swiftly now the blade,That sharp and polished at thy right hand lies,Draw naked forth, and like the blade of MarsFlash it upon the eyes of all. The pointPress 'twixt thy finger-tips, and bowing lowOffer the handle to her. Now is seenThe soft and delicate playing of the musclesIn the white hand upon its work intent.The graces that around the lady stoopClothe themselves in new forms, and from her fingersSportively flying, flutter to the tipsOf her unconscious rosy knuckles, thenceTo dip into the hollows of the dimplesThat Love beside her knuckles has impressed.
Throughout the dinner it is the part of the well-bred husband—if so ill-bred as to remain at all to sit impassive and quiescent while the cavalier watches over the wife with tender care, prepares her food, offers what agrees with her, and forbids what harms. He is virtually master of the house; he can order the servants about; if the dinner is not to his mind, it is even his high prerogative to scold the cook.
The poet reports something of the talk at table; and here occurs one of the most admired passages of the poem, the light irony of which it is hard to reproduce in a version. One of the guests, in a strain of affected sensibility, has been denouncing man's cruelty to animals:
Thus he discourses; and a gentle tearSprings, while he speaks, into thy lady's eyes.She recalls the day—Alas, the cruel day!—what time her lap-dog,Her beauteous lap-dog, darling of the Graces,Sporting in youthful gayety, impressedThe light mark of her ivory tooth uponThe rude foot of a menial; he, with boldAnd sacrilegious toe, flung her away.Over and over thrice she rolled, and thriceRumpled her silken coat, and thrice inhaledWith tender nostril the thick, choking dust,Then raised imploring cries, and “Help, help, help!”She seemed to call, while from the gilded vaultsCompassionate Echo answered her again,And from their cloistral basements in dismayThe servants rushed, and from the upper roomsThe pallid maidens trembling flew; all came.Thy lady's face was with reviving essenceSprinkled, and she awakened from her swoon.Anger and grief convulsed her still; she castA lightning glance upon the guilty menial,And thrice with languid voice she called her pet,Who rushed to her embrace and seemed to invokeVengeance with her shrill tenor. And revengeThou hadst, fair poodle, darling of the Graces.The guilty menial trembled, and with eyesDowncast received his doom. Naught him availedHis twenty years' desert; naught him availedHis zeal in secret services; for himIn vain were prayer and promise; forth he went,Spoiled of the livery that till now had made himEnviable with the vulgar. And in vainHe hoped another lord; the tender damesWere horror-struck at his atrocious crime,And loathed the author. The false wretch succumbedWith all his squalid brood, and in the streetsWith his lean wife in tatters at his sideVainly lamented to the passer-by.
It would be quite out of taste for the lover to sit as apathetic as the husband in the presence of his lady's guests, and he is to mingle gracefully in the talk from time to time, turning it to such topics as may best serve to exploit his own accomplishments. As a man of the first fashion, he must be in the habit of seeming to have read Horace a little, and it will be a pretty effect to quote him now; one may also show one's acquaintance with the new French philosophy, and approve its skepticism, while keeping clear of its pernicious doctrines, which insidiously teach—
That every mortal is his fellow's peer;That not less dear to Nature and to GodIs he who drives thy carriage, or who guidesThe plow across thy field, than thine own self.
But at last the lady makes a signal to the cavalier that it is time to rise from the table:
Spring to thy feetThe first of all, and drawing near thy ladyRemove her chair and offer her thy hand,And lead her to the other rooms, nor suffer longerThat the stale reek of viands shall offendHer delicate sense. Thee with the rest invitesThe grateful odor of the coffee, whereIt smokes upon a smaller table hidAnd graced with Indian webs. The redolent gumsThat meanwhile burn sweeten and purifyThe heavy atmosphere, and banish thenceAll lingering traces of the feast.—Ye sickAnd poor, whom misery or whom hope perchanceHas guided in the noonday to these doors,Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng,With mutilated limbs and squalid faces,In litters and on crutches, from afarComfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrilsDrink in the nectar of the feast divineThat favorable zephyrs waft to you;But do not dare besiege these noble precincts,Importunately offering her that reignsWithin your loathsome spectacle of woe!—And now, sir, 'tis your office to prepareThe tiny cup that then shall minister,Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady's lips;And now bethink thee whether she preferThe boiling beverage much or little temperedWith sweet; or if perchance she like it bestAs doth the barbarous spouse, then, when she sitsUpon brocades of Persia, with light fingersThe bearded visage of her lord caressing.
With the dinner the second part of the poem, entitled The Noon, concludes, and The Afternoon begins with the visit which the hero and his lady pay to one of her friends. He has already thought with which of the husband's horses they shall drive out; he has suggested which dress his lady shall wear and which fan she shall carry; he has witnessed the agonizing scene of her parting with her lap-dog,—her children are at nurse and never intrude,—and they have arrived in the palace of the lady on whom they are to call:
And now the ardent friends to greet each otherImpatient fly, and pressing breast to breastThey tenderly embrace, and with alternate kissesTheir cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they dropPlummet-like down upon the sofa, bothTogether. Seated thus, one flings a phrase,Subtle and pointed, at the other's heart,Hinting of certain things that rumor tells,And in her turn the other with a stingAssails. The lovely face of one is flushedWith beauteous anger, and the other bitesHer pretty lips a little; evermoreAt every instant waxes violentThe anxious agitation of the fans.So, in the age of Turpin, if two knightsIllustrious and well cased in mail encounteredUpon the way, each cavalier aspiredTo prove the valor of the other in arms,And, after greetings courteous and fair,They lowered their lances and their chargers dashedFerociously together; then they flungThe splintered fragments of their spears aside,And, fired with generous fury, drew their huge,Two-handed swords and rushed upon each other!But in the distance through a savage woodThe clamor of a messenger is heard,Who comes full gallop to recall the oneUnto King Charles, and th' other to the campOf the young Agramante. Dare thou, too,Dare thou, invincible youth, to expose the curlsAnd the toupet, so exquisitely dressedThis very morning, to the deadly shockOf the infuriate fans; to new emprisesThy fair invite, and thus the extreme effectsOf their periculous enmity suspend.
Is not this most charmingly done? It seems to me that the warlike interpretation of the scene is delightful; and those embattled fans—their perfumed breath comes down a hundred years in the verse!
The cavalier and his lady now betake them to the promenade, where all the fair world of Milan is walking or driving, with a punctual regularity which still distinguishes Italians in their walks and drives. The place is full of their common acquaintance, and the carriages are at rest for the exchange of greetings and gossip, in which the hero must take his part. All this is described in the same note of ironical seriousness as the rest of the poem, and The Afternoon closes with a strain of stately and grave poetry which admirably heightens the desired effect:
Behold the servantsReady for thy descent; and now skip downAnd smooth the creases from thy coat, and orderThe laces on thy breast; a little stoop,And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance,And then erect thyself and strut awayEither to pace the promenade alone,—'T is thine, if 't please thee walk; or else to drawAnigh the carriages of other dames.Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy headAnd arms and shoulders, half thyself withinThe carriage door. There let thy laughter riseSo loud that from afar thy lady hear,And rage to hear, and interrupt the witOf other heroes who had swiftly runAmid the dusk to keep her companyWhile thou wast absent. O ye powers supreme,Suspend the night, and let the noble deedsOf my young hero shine upon the worldIn the clear day! Nay, night must follow stillHer own inviolable laws, and droopWith silent shades over one half the globe;And slowly moving on her dewy feet,She blends the varied colors infinite,And with the border of her mighty garmentsBlots everything; the sister she of DeathLeaves but one aspect indistinct, one guiseTo fields and trees, to flowers, to birds and beasts,And to the great and to the lowly born,Confounding with the painted cheek of beautyThe haggard face of want, and gold with tatters.Nor me will the blind air permit to seeWhich carriages depart, and which remain,Secret amidst the shades; but from my handThe pencil caught, my hero is involvedWithin the tenebrous and humid veil.
The concluding section of the poem, by chance or by wise design of the author, remains a fragment. In this he follows his hero from the promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and attitude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable passages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down at those games of chance with which every fashionable house was provided and at which the lady loses or doubles her pin-money. In Milan long trains were then the mode, and any woman might wear them, but only patricians were allowed to have them carried by servants; the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the nobility of our hero's lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy in our time and country.
The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure, and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in noble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others), in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also, at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one's copyright was good for nothing across the border—scarcely a fair stone's-throw away—of one's own little duchy or province, and the printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which, later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in London, where he had seen the prosperity of “the trade of an author” in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country. So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become amaestro in casa. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused sense of the artist as with the moralist's indignation; some of his contemporaries accused him of a snobbish fondness for the great, but certainly he did not flatter them, and in one passage of his poem he is at the pains to remind his noble acquaintance that not the smallest drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins. His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor of the government newspaper,—the only newspaper in Milan,—and yet easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor. The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a mob was severely handled by the military, and for “insulting” a tree of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of the municipal government, which, apparently popular, could really do nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and, giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and folly of the nobles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes, principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799, having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died suddenly in his arm-chair.
Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried out, “Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!” “No,” shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the liberators, “long live the republic, death to nobody!” They were going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public business. “Very well,” he observed; “where Citizen Christ cannot stay, I have nothing to do,” and went out. “Equality doesn't consist in dragging me down to your level,” he said to one who had impudently given him thethou, “but in raising you to mine, if possible. You will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can't help my being the Abbate Parini.” To another, who reproached him for kindness to an Austrian prisoner, he answered, “I would do as much for a Turk, a Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need.” In his closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard the first, and, without waiting further, besought him “Print the other!”
Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti, a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe. “What a singular country is ours!” said the Chevalier Nigra, one of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. “In Paris they admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;” and if this was true in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.
It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it from the Italian priests of the last century. “We translated,” he says, “the 'Lives of Cornelius Nepos'; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under what governments, nor what any government was.” He learned Latin enough to turn Virgil's “Georgics” into his sort of Italian; but when he read Ariosto by stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Tasso. This was whilst he was still in the primary classes, under strict priestly control; when he passed to a more advanced grade and found himself free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well, he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. “The reading of many French romances,” he goes on, “the constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of it,” he says, “the French entered into my empty brain”; but he is careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very bitterly.
It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet, which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to capital, with letters to your sovereign's ambassadors everywhere, and spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries through which you passed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal, and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than edifying. He had a ruling passion for horses, and then several smaller passions quite as wasteful and idle. He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness. At the Ambrosian Library in Milan they showed him a manuscript of Petrarch's, which, “like a true barbarian,” as he says, he flung aside, declaring that he knew nothing about it, having a rancor against this Petrarch, whom he had once tried to read and had understood as little as Ariosto. At Rome the Sardinian minister innocently affronted him by repeating some verses of Marcellus, which the sulky young noble could not comprehend. In Ferrara he did not remember that it was the city of that divine Ariosto whose poem was the first that came into his hands, and which he had now read in part with infinite pleasure. “But my poor intellect,” he says, “was then sleeping a most sordid sleep, and every day, as far as regards letters, rusted more and more. It is true, however, that with respect to knowledge of the world and of men I constantly learned not a little, without taking note of it, so many and diverse were the phases of life and manners that I daily beheld.” At Florence he visited the galleries and churches with much disgust and no feeling, for the beautiful, especially in painting, his eyes being very dull to color. “If I liked anything better, it was sculpture a little, and architecture yet a little more”; and it is interesting to note how all his tragedies reflect these preferences, in their lack of color and in their sculpturesque sharpness of outline.
From Italy he passed as restlessly into France, yet with something of a more definite intention, for he meant to frequent the French theater. He had seen a company of French players at Turin, and had acquainted himself with the most famous French tragedies and comedies, but with no thought of writing tragedies of his own. He felt no creative impulse, and he liked the comedies best, though, as he says, he was by nature more inclined to tears than to laughter. But he does not seem to have enjoyed the theater much in Paris, a city for which he conceived at once the greatest dislike, he says, “on account of the squalor and barbarity of the buildings, the absurd and pitiful pomp of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women.”
He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court, where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.
In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite in the polite society of that day, the object of his passion was another man's wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it came to a duel with the lady's husband and a great scandal in the newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked everything in England. “The streets, the taverns, the horses, the women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island, the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely little,”—as they still strike every one coming from Italy,—these and other charms of “that fortunate and free country” made an impression upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says, “study profoundly the constitution, mother of so much prosperity,” but he “knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects.”
Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose delighted and whose verse wearied him. “But the book of books for me,” he says, “and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears, and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or feel it.”
{Illustration: Vittorio Alfieri.}
These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri's bitterest contempt when in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial gardens at Schonbrunn, “performing the customary genuflexions with a servilely contented and adulatory face.” This loathing of royalty was naturally intensified beyond utterance in Prussia. “On entering the states of Frederick, I felt redoubled and triplicated my hate for that infamous military trade, most infamous and sole base of arbitrary power.” He told his minister that he would be presented only in civil dress, because there were uniforms enough at that court, and he declares that on beholding Frederick he felt “no emotion of wonder, or of respect, but rather of indignation and rage.... The king addressed me the three or four customary words; I fixed my eyes respectfully upon his, and inwardly blessed Heaven that I had not been born his slave; and I issued from that universal Prussian barracks ... abhorring it as it deserved.”
In Paris Alfieri bought the principal Italian authors, which he afterwards carried everywhere with him on his travels; but he says that he made very little use of them, having neither the will nor the power to apply his mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him, and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli.
He made a journey into Spain, among other countries, where he admired the Andalusian horses, and bored himself as usual with what interests educated people; and he signalized his stay at Madrid by a murderous outburst of one of the worst tempers in the world. One night his servant Elia, in dressing his hair, had the misfortune to twitch one of his locks in such a way as to give him a slight pain; on which Alfieri leaped to his feet, seized a heavy candlestick, and without a word struck the valet such a blow upon his temple that the blood gushed out over his face, and over the person of a young Spanish gentleman who had been supping with Alfieri. Elia sprang upon his master, who drew his sword, but the Spaniard after great ado quieted them both; “and so ended this horrible encounter,” says Alfieri, “for which I remained deeply afflicted and ashamed. I told Elia that he would have done well to kill me; and he was the man to have done it, being a palm taller than myself, who am very tall, and of a strength and courage not inferior to his height. Two hours later, his wound being dressed and everything put in order, I went to bed, leaving the door from my room into Elia's open as usual, without listening to the Spaniard, who warned me not thus to invite a provoked and outraged man to vengeance: I called to Elia, who had already gone to bed, that he could, if he liked and thought proper, kill me that night, for I deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;” though here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a servant except as he would have done an equal—not with a cane, but with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he rose he was no longer a slave to his passion. Shortly after, he wrote a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.
Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his qualifications for tragical authorship being “a resolute spirit, very obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ... an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing and managing my own language.” With this stock in trade, he set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr. Macpherson, and Cesarotti's translation of him came into Alfieri's hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for the verse of dialogue.
He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already given up Shakespeare. “The more that author accorded with my humor (though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was resolved to abstain,” he tells us.
This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to accustom himself “to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not otherwise evermore.” Here he versified his first two tragedies, and sketched others; and here, he says, “I deluged my brain with the verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified with my own ideas and emotions.”
He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had been making love. He abandoned everything else for it—country, home, money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany, and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet's expatriation. The long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century, with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The countess's husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead, she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing its ties, and after Alfieri's death the countess gave to the painter Fabre “a heart which,” says Massimo d'Azeglio in his Memoirs, “according to the usage of the time, and especially of high society, felt the invincible necessity of keeping itself in continual exercise.” A cynical little story of Alfieri reading one of his tragedies in company, while Fabre stood behind him making eyes at the countess, and from time to time kissing her ring on his finger, was told to D'Azeglio by an aunt of his who witnessed the scene.
In 1787 the poet went to France to oversee the printing of a complete edition of his works, and five years later he found himself in Paris when the Revolution was at its height. The countess was with him, and, after great trouble, he got passports for both, and hurried to the city barrier. The National Guards stationed there would have let them pass, but a party of drunken patriots coming up had their worst fears aroused by the sight of two carriages with sober and decent people in them, and heavily laden with baggage. While they parleyed whether they had better stone the equipages, or set fire to them, Alfieri leaped out, and a scene ensued which placed him in a very characteristic light, and which enables us to see him as it were in person. When the patriots had read the passports, he seized them, and, as he says, “full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my passport in my hand, and shouted at the top of my voice, 'Look! Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am he; look at me: I have my passport, and I have had it legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and, by Heaven, wewillpass!'”
They passed, and two days later the authorities that had approved their passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that Alfieri had left behind him in Paris, and declared him and the countess—both foreigners—to be refugee aristocrats!
He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of the first two acts.
Alfieri's remaining years were spent in study and the revision of his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a very pitiable state of terror or disaster.
Nothing in Alfieri's life was more like him than his death, of which the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the poet's biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his mind was molested by many memories of things long past. “The studies and labors of thirty years,” says the Abbate, “recurred to him, and what was yet more wonderful, he repeated in order, from memory, a good number of Greek verses from the beginning of Hesiod, which he had read but once. These he said over to the Signora Contessa, who sat by his side, but it does not appear, for all this, that there ever came to him the thought that death, which he had been for a long time used to imagine near, was then imminent. It is certain at least that he made no sign to the contessa though she did not leave him till morning. About six o'clock he took oil and magnesia without the physician's advice, and near eight he was observed to be in great danger, and the Signora Contessa, being called, found him in agonies that took away his breath. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, and going to the bed, leaned upon it, and presently the day was darkened to him, his eyes closed and he expired. The duties and consolations of religion were not forgotten, but the evil was not thought so near, nor haste necessary, and so the confessor who was called did not come in time.” D'Azeglio relates that the confessor arrived at the supreme moment, and saw the poet bow his head: “He thought it was a salutation, but it was the death of Vittorio Alfieri.”
I once fancied that a parallel between Alfieri and Byron might be drawn, but their disparities are greater than their resemblances, on the whole. Both, however, were born noble, both lived in voluntary exile, both imagined themselves friends and admirers of liberty, both had violent natures, and both indulged the curious hypocrisy of desiring to seem worse than they were, and of trying to make out a shocking case for themselves when they could. They were men who hardly outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in the longest life; and he was ruled by passions and ideals; he hated with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who dethroned them.
When he left the life of a dissolute young noble for that of tragic authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and such passages of Roman history as those relating to the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia, and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races, and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same spirit—the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover, and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible and abhorrent to him.
Emiliani-Giudici, the Italian critic, writing about the middle of our century, declares that when the fiery love of freedom shall have purged Italy, the Alfierian drama will be the only representation worthy of a great and free people. This critic holds that Alfieri's tragical ideal was of such a simplicity that it would seem derived regularly from the Greek, but for the fact that when he felt irresistibly moved to write tragedy, he probably did not know even the names of the Greek dramatists, and could not have known the structure of their dramas by indirect means, having read then only some Metastasian plays of the French school; so that he created that ideal of his by pure, instinctive force of genius. With him, as with the Greeks, art arose spontaneously; he felt the form of Greek art by inspiration. He believed from the very first that the dramatic poet should assume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of action, he dispensed with all those parts which did not seem to him the most principal, and he studied how to show the subject of the drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but he so wrought “that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic creations of any literature.” Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of originality of feeling and conception. “Tragedy, born sublime, terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were, redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost ministry.”
I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects. In Alfieri's Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked. The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with the bloody dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.
But such incongruities as these do not affect us in the tragedies based on the heroic fables; here the poet takes, without offense, any liberty he likes with time and place; the whole affair is in his hands, to do what he will, so long as he respects the internal harmony of his own work. For this reason, I think, we find Alfieri at his best in these tragedies, among which I have liked the Orestes best, as giving the widest range of feeling with the greatest vigor of action. The Agamemnon, which precedes it, and which ought to be read first, closes with its most powerful scene. Agamemnon has returned from Troy to Argos with his captive Cassandra, and Aegisthus has persuaded Clytemnestra that her husband intends to raise Cassandra to the throne. She kills him and reigns with Aegisthus, Electra concealing Orestes on the night of the murder, and sending him secretly away with Strophius, king of Phocis.
In the last scene, as Clytemnestra steals through the darkness to her husband's chamber, she soliloquizes, with the dagger in her hand: