THE ESCAPE.
Alfieri's fears had been groundless. His love for the wife of Charles
Edward Stuart--a love, he tells us, quite different from any he had
previously experienced, quiet, pure, and solemn--was destined not to
interfere with that austere process of detaching his soul from the base
passions of the world, and devoting it to the creation of a new style
of poetry, to the achievement of a new kind of glory; nay, rather,
by bringing to the surface whatever capacity for tenderness and
self-restraint and respect for others had hitherto lurked within this
fantastic nature, this new love helped to complete that strange
monumental personality of Alfieri--a personality more striking, more
ideal, than any of those plays by which he hoped to regenerate Italy,
and which has been far more potent than his works in the moral
regeneration of his country. Alfieri's youth had been illiterate and
stupid; and he required, in order to make up for so much waste of time
and waste of spirit, that he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere
as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in which he had previously
lived had been the reverse. After the long spiritual numbness of his
earlier years, this soul, if it was to be kept alive, must be kept in an
almost artificially high spiritual temperature, and continually plied
with spiritual cordials. These advantages he obtained in the love, or,
we ought rather to say, the friendship of the Countess of Albany, and it
is extremely improbable whether he would have obtained them otherwise.
Irritable and vain and moody, at once excessively persuaded of his own
dramatic mission and morbidly diffident of his actual powers of carrying
it out, contemptuous of others and of himself, Alfieri, who required
such constant sympathy and encouragement in his work, was not the
man who could hope to obtain much of either from other men, whom
his excessive pretensions, his ups and downs of humour, his very
dissatisfaction with himself, must have quickly exhausted of the small
amount of brotherly tenderness which seems to exist in the literary
brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of sincere helpfulness and
friendliness from the members of the Turinese Literary Club; from
Cesarotti, the translator of _Ossian_; from Parini, the great Milanese
satirist, and from one or two other men of letters; which shows that
there is more kindness in the world than he ever would admit, and
confirms me in my remark that he was singularly well treated by fate
and mankind. But all this was very lukewarm sympathy; and except from
his two great friends, Francesco Gori and Tommaso di Caluso, a
difficult-tempered man like Alfieri could receive only lukewarmness.
Now what he required was sympathy, admiration, adoration, of the most
burning description. This was possible, towards such a man, only
from a woman. But where find the woman who could give it, among the
convent-educated, early corrupted, frivolous ladies of Italy, to whom
love-making was the highest interest in life, but an interest only a
trifle higher than card-playing, dancing, or dressing? Where, even among
the very small number of women like Silvia Verza at Verona, Isabella
Albrizzi at Venice, or Paolina Castiglione at Milan, who actually had
some amount of culture, and actually prided themselves on it? The rank
and file of Italian ladies could give him only another Marchesa di Prié,
a little better or a little worse, another woman who would degrade
him in the sensual and inane routine of a _cicisbéo_. The exceptional
ladies were even worse. Fancy this morbid, conceited, self-doubtful,
violent, moody Alfieri accepting literary sympathy in a room full of
small provincial lions--sympathy which had to be divided with half a
dozen others; learned persons who edited Latin inscriptions, dapper
poet priestlets, their pockets crammed with sonnets on ladies' hats,
opera-singers, canary birds, births, deaths, and marriages, and
ponderous pedants of all sorts and descriptions. Why, a lady who set
up as the muse of a hot-tempered and brow-beating creature like
Alfieri, a man whom consciousness of imperfect education made horribly
sensitive--such a lady would have lost all the accustomed guests of her
_salon_ in ten days' time. Herein, therefore, consisted the uniqueness
of the Countess of Albany, in the fact that she was everything to
Alfieri, which no other woman could be. Originally better educated than
her Italian contemporaries, the ex-canoness of Mons, half-Flemish,
half-German by family, French by training, and connected with England
through her marriage with the Pretender, had the advantage of open
doors upon several fields of culture. She could read the books of four
different nations--a very rare accomplishment in her day; and she was,
moreover, one of those women, rarer even in the eighteenth century than
now-a-days, whose nature, while unproductive in any particular line, is
intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, and in the intellectual
domain even more intensely and almost exclusively literary--women who
are born readers, to whom a new poem is as great an excitement as a new
toilette, a treatise of philosophy (we shall see the Countess devouring
Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely
delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, with this
immense fund of intellectual energy, was living, not a normal life with
the normal distracting influences of an endurable husband, of children
and society, but a life of frightful mental and moral isolation, by the
side, or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, sordid, violent,
and jealous brute, from the reality of whose beastly excesses and
bestial fury, of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and blows, she
could take refuge only in the unreal world of books.
With such a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an intimate by the husband, who
doubtless thought one hare-brained poet more easy to manage than two or
three fashionable gallants--with such a woman as this, Alfieri might
talk over plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his essays on
liberty and literature, and all the things by which he intended to
redeem Italy and make himself immortal, without any fear of his listener
ever growing weary; from her he could receive that passionate sympathy
and encouragement without which life and work were impossible to him.
For we must bear in mind what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his
youth, his beauty, and that genius which was the indomitable energy and
independence of his nature, must have been in the eyes of the Countess
of Albany. She had been married at nineteen--she was now twenty-six: in
those seven years of suffering there had been ample time to obliterate
all traces of the frivolous, worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen
light-heartedly laughing at her old husband's jokes; there had been
plenty of time to produce in this excessively intellectual nature that
vague dissatisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is the price too
often paid for the consolation of mere abstract and literary interests.
The pressure of constant disgust and terror at her husband's doings, the
terrible mental and moral solitude of living by such a husband's side,
had probably wrought up Louise d'Albany to the very highest and almost
morbid refinement of nature--a refinement far surpassing the normal
condition of her character, even as the extra fining off of already
delicate features by illness will make them surpass by far their healthy
degree of beauty. In such a mental condition the sense of what her
husband was must have exasperated her imagination quite as much as his
actual loathsomeness must have repelled her feelings; the knowledge of
the frightful moral and intellectual fall of Charles Edward must have
been as bad as the filthy place to which he had fallen. And opposite to
the image of the Pretender must constantly have arisen the image of
Alfieri--opposite to the image of the man, once heroic and charming and
brilliant, who had sold his heroism and his charm, his mind and his
manhood, for the bestial pleasure of drink--who had rewarded the
devotion and self-sacrifice and noble enthusiasm of his followers
by the sight, worse than the scaffold on Tower Hill, of their idol
turning into a half-maniac, besotted brute; opposite to this image of
degradation must have arisen the image of the man who had wrestled with
the baser passions of his nature, who had broken through the base habits
of his youth, who had fashioned himself into a noble moral shape as the
marble is fashioned by the hand of the sculptor; who was struggling
still, not merely with the difficulties of his art, but with whatever he
thought mean and slothful in himself.
Some eighteen months after their first acquaintance, Alfieri announced
to the wife of Charles Edward that he had just happily settled a most
important piece of business, the success of which was one of the most
fortunate things of his life. He had made a gift of all his estates to
his sister, reserving for himself only a very moderate yearly income; he
had reduced himself from comparative wealth to comparative poverty; he
had cut himself off from ever making a suitable marriage; he had made
himself a pensioner of his sister's husband: but at this price he had
bought independence--he was no longer the subject of the King of
Sardinia, nor of any sovereign or State in the world.
The passion for political liberty, the abhorrence of any kind of
despotism, however glorious or however paternal, had grown in Alfieri
with every journey he had made through France, Spain, Germany,
Russia--with every sojourn in England; it had grown with every page of
Livy and Tacitus, with every line of Dante and Petrarch which he had
read; it had grown with every word that he himself had written. He had
determined to be the poet who should make men ashamed of being slaves
and ashamed of being tyrants. But he was himself the subject of the
little military despotism of Piedmont, whose nobles required, every
time they wished to travel or live abroad, to beg civilly for leave of
absence, which was usually most uncivilly granted; and one of whose laws
threatened any person who should print books in foreign countries, and
without the permission of the Sardinian censor, with a heavy fine, and,
if necessary, with corporal chastisement.
In order to become a poet, Alfieri required to become a free agent; and
the only way to become a free agent, to break through the bars of what
he called his "abominable native cage," the only way to obtain the power
of writing what he wished to write, was to give up all his fortune, and
live upon the charity of the relatives whom he had enriched. So, during
the past months, he had been in constant correspondence with his sister,
his brother-in-law, and his lawyer; and now he had succeeded in ridding
himself of all his estates and all his capital. The Countess of Albany
knew Alfieri sufficiently well by this time to understand that this
alienation of all his property was a real sacrifice. Alfieri was the
vainest and most ostentatious of men; young, handsome, showy and
eccentric, accustomed to cut a grand figure wherever he went, it must
have cost him a twinge to be obliged to reduce his hitherto brilliant
establishment, to dismiss nearly all his servants, to sell most of his
horses, to exchange his embroidered velvets and satins for a plain black
coat for the evening, and a plain blue coat for the afternoon. The worst
sacrifice of all he doubtless confided, with savage bitterness, to the
Countess, as he confided it to the readers of his autobiography, it was
to resign the nominal service of Piedmont--to put aside, for good and
all, that brilliant Sardinian uniform in which he looked to such
advantage. We can imagine how this subject was talked over--how Alfieri,
with that savage pleasure of his in the self-infliction of pain and
humiliation, exposed to the Countess all the little, mean motives which
had deterred him or which had encouraged him in his liberation from
political servitude; we can imagine how she chid him for his rash step,
and how, at the same time, she felt a delicious pride in the meanness
which he so frankly revealed, in the rashness which she so severely
reproved; we can imagine how the thought of Alfieri, who had thus
sacrificed fortune, luxury, vanity, to the desire to be free, met in the
Countess of Albany's mind the thought of Charles Edward, living the
pensioner of a sovereign who had insulted him and of a sovereign whom he
had cheated, spending in liquor the money which France had paid him to
get himself an heir and the Stuarts another king.
A strange and dangerous situation, but one whose danger was completely
neutralised. Of all the various persons who speak of the extraordinary
friendship between Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany which existed at
this time, not one even ventures to hint that the relations between
them exceeded in the slightest degree the limits of mere passionate
friendship; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom truthfulness was
not merely an essential part of his natural character, but an even more
essential part of his self-idealised personality, merely confirm the
words of all contemporary writers. Now, if there was a country where an
intrigue between a woman noted for her virtue and a poet noted for his
eccentricity would, had it existed, have been joyfully laid hold of by
gossip, it was certainly this utterly-demoralised Italy of _cavalieri
serventi_: every fashionable woman and every fast man would have felt a
personal satisfaction in tearing to pieces the reputation of a lady
whose whole character and life had been a censure upon theirs. But, as
there are women the intensity of whose pure-mindedness, felt in every
feature and gesture and word, paralyses even the most ribald wish to
shock or outrage, and momentarily drags up towards themselves the very
people who would dearly love to drag them down even for a second; so
also it would appear that there are situations so strange, meetings of
individuals so exceptional, that calumny itself is unable to attack
them. No one said a word against Alfieri and the Countess; and Charles
Edward himself, jealous as he was of any kind of interference in his
concerns, appears never to have attempted to rid himself of his wife's
new friend.
Much, of course, must be set down to the very madness of the Pretender's
jealousy, to his more than Oriental systematic guarding and watching of
his wife. Mann, we must remember, had written, long before Alfieri
appeared upon the scene, that Charles Edward never went out without his
wife and never let her go out without him; he barricaded her apartment,
and was never further off than the next room. Charles Edward undoubtedly
conferred upon two people, living in a day of excessive looseness of
manners, the inestimable advantage of confining their love within the
bounds of friendship, of crushing all that might have been base, of
liberating all that could be noble, of turning what might have been
merely a passion after the pattern of Rousseau into a passion after the
pattern of Dante. But what Charles Edward could not do, what no human
being or accidental circumstances could bring about, was due to the
special nature of Alfieri and of the Countess; namely, that this strange
platonic passion, instead of dying out after a very brief time, merely
intensified, became long-lived, inextinguishable, nay continued, in its
absolute austerity and purity, long after every obstacle and restraint
had been removed, except the obstacles and restraints which, from the
very ideality of its own nature, increased for itself. And, if we look
facts calmly in the face, and, letting alone all poetical jargon, ask
ourselves the plain psychological explanation, we see that such things
not only could, but, considering the character of the Countess of Albany
and of Alfieri, must have been. The Countess had found in Alfieri the
satisfaction of those intellectual and ideal cravings which in a nature
like hers, and in a situation like hers, must have been the strongest
and most durable necessities. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his
past life, mortally afraid of falling once more under the tyranny of his
baser nature, seeking on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle
of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar cocoon in which it had
lain torpid so long, was wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of
enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual passion just in proportion as
it was absolutely and completely intellectual.
A poet especially in his conception of his own personality, an artist
who manipulated his own nature, a _poseur_ whose _pose_ was his
concentrated self cleared of all things which recalled the vulgar herd;
moreover, a furiously literary temper with a mad devotion to Dante and
Petrarch: Alfieri must have found in this love, which fate in the
Pretender's person ordained to be platonic, the crowning characteristic
of his present personality, the almost miraculous confirmation of his
mystic relationship to the lover of Beatrice and the lover of Laura.
And, in the knowledge of what he was to this poor, tormented young
wife; in the consciousness of being the only ray of light in this
close-shuttered prison--nay, rather bedlam-like existence; in the sense
of how completely the happiness of Louise d'Albany depended upon
him, whatever there was of generous and dutiful in the selfish and
self-willed nature of Alfieri must have become paramount, and enjoined
upon him never to vacillate or grow weary in this strange mixture of
love and of friendship.