ANTIGONE.
About three months after the Countess of Albany's flight from her
husband, the Pope granted her permission to leave the Ursuline convent;
and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, offered her hospitality in his
magnificent palace of the Cancelleria. Alfieri was at Naples when he
received this news, riding gloomily along the sea-shore, weeping
profusely (for we must remember that to an Italian, especially of the
eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a would-be ancient Roman
shedding love-sick tears), unable to give his attention to work, living,
as he expresses it, on the coming in and going out of the post. "I
wished to return to Rome," he writes, "and at the same time I felt very
keenly that I ought not to do it yet. The struggles between love and
duty which take place in an honourable and tender heart, are the most
terrible and mortal pain that a man can suffer. I delayed throughout
April, and I determined to drag on through May; but on the 12th May I
found myself, I scarcely know how, back in Rome."
Alfieri found the Countess of Albany established in the palace of the
Cancelleria, the mistress of the establishment, for her brother-in-law
was living in his episcopal town of Frascati. They were free to see each
other as much as they chose, to love each other as much as they would;
for the Cardinal and the priestly circles seem to have gone completely
to sleep in the presence of this critical situation; and the habits of
Roman society, which were even a shade worse than those of Florence,
were not such as to give umbrage to the lovers. But those years during
which they had loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles Edward, had
apparently fostered a love which was accustomed and satisfied with being
only a more passionate kind of friendship; the indomitable power of
resistance to himself, the passion for realising in himself some heroic
attitude which he admired, and the almost furious desire to reverse
completely his former habits of life, kept Alfieri up to the point of a
platonic connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, cold,
passive, easily moulded by a more vehement nature, loved Alfieri much
more with the head than with the heart, and loved in him just that which
made him prefer that they should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch
and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the Countess of Albany had much
more mind than personality, and that she was therefore mere wax in the
hands of a man who had become so exclusively and violently intellectual
as Alfieri: she had seen too much of the coarse realities of life, of
the brutal giving way to sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the
deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this
as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all
contemporaries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri himself, whose
cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the same footing as in
Florence.
And these months in Rome seem to have been the happiest months of
Alfieri's life, the happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess
of Albany. Alfieri hired the villa Strozzi, on the Esquiline, a small
palace built by one of Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, including
the use of furniture, stables, and garden, he paid the now incredibly
small sum of ten scudi a month, about two pounds of our money. Permitting
himself only two coats, the black one for the evening, and the famous
blue one for ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to one dish of
meat and vegetables, without wine or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make
the comparatively small pension paid to him by his sister, go almost
as far as had the fine fortune of which he had despoiled himself. He
spent lavishly on books, and more lavishly on horses, on horses which,
according to his own account, were his third passion, coming only after
his love for Mme. d'Albany, and sometimes usurping the place of his love
of literary glory.
The mania for systematic division of his time, the invincible tendency
to routine, which follows in most Italians after the disorder and
wastefulness of youth, had already got the better of Alfieri. He had,
almost at the moment when the passion for literature first disclosed
itself, made up his mind to write a definite number of tragedies, first
twelve, then fourteen, and no more; and to devote a certain number of
years to the elaborate process of first constructing them mentally, then
of writing them full length in prose, and finally of turning this prose
into verse; and he was later to devise a corresponding plan of writing
an equally fixed number of comedies and satires in an equally fixed
number of years, after which, as we have seen, he was to give up his
thoughts, having attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for death.
This routine is a national characteristic, and absorbs many an Italian,
turning all the poetry of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful
inevitableness; but Alfieri did not merely submit to routine, he enjoyed
it, he devised and carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature.
To this man, who cared so much for the figure he cut, and so little for
all the things which surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony
of grinding work was almost an object of æsthetic pleasure, almost
an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless
white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets,
enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities and mottled colours of
existence. So Alfieri arranged for himself, in his house near Santa
Maria Maggiore, what to him was a life of exquisite delightfulness.
He spent the whole early morning reading the Latin and Italian classics,
and grinding away at his tragedies, which, after repeated sketching out,
repeated writing out in prose, were now going through the most elaborate
process of writing, re-writing, revising, and re-revising in verse.
Then, before resuming his solitary studies in the afternoon, he would
have one of his many horses saddled, and ride about in the desolate
tracts of the town, which in papal times extended from Santa Maria
Maggiore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, and St. John Lateran:
miles of former villa gardens, with quincunxes and flower-beds, cut up
for cabbage-growing, wide open spaces where the wall of a temple, the
arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the
rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and
plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of
vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green
serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed
walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the
festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses
within the city walls, where the silence was broken only by the lowing
of the herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on his shaggy horse, by
the long-drawn, guttural chant of the carter stretched on the top of his
cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells; places inaccessible to the
present, a border-land of the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking
of those many times when he must have reined in his horse, and vaguely
and wistfully looked out on to the green desolation islanded with ruins
and traversed by the vast procession of the aqueducts, invited one to
meditate, and cry, and be a poet. And sometimes--we know it from the
sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri tells us, carried the
beloved burden of his lady--Alfieri did not ride out alone. One of the
horses of the villa Strozzi was saddled for the Countess of Albany; and
this strange pair of platonic lovers rode forth together among the
ruins, the wife of Charles Edward listening, with something more than
mere abstract interest, to Alfieri's fiercest contemptuous tirades
against the tyranny of soldiers and priests, the tyranny of sloth and
lust which had turned these spots into a wilderness, and which had left
the world, as Alfieri always felt, and a man not unlike Alfieri in
savage and destructive austerity, St. Just, was later to say, empty
since the days of the Romans.
Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and descended through the twilit
streets of the upper city--where the troops of red and yellow and blue
seminarists, and black and brown monks, passed by like ants, homeward
bound after their evening walk--into the busier parts of Rome, and
crossing the Corso filled with painted and gilded coaches, and making
his way through the many squares where the people gathered round the
lemonade-booth near the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortuous
black streets filled with the noise of the anvils and hammers of
the locksmiths and nailors behind the Pantheon, made his way towards
the palace, grand and prim in its architecture of Bramants, of the
Cancelleria, perhaps not without thinking that in the big square before
its windows, where the vegetable carts were unloaded every morning, and
the quacks and dentists and pedlars bawled all day, a man as strange, as
wayward and impatient of tyranny as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been
burned two centuries before by Cardinal York's predecessor in that big
palace of the Cancelleria. Fortunately there was no Cardinal York in the
Cancelleria, or at least only rarely; but instead only the beautiful
blonde woman with the dark hazel eyes, whom Alfieri spoke of as his
"lady," and, somewhat later, "as the sweet half of himself," and in
whose speech Alfieri was never Alfieri, or Vittorio, or the Count, but
merely "the poet," so completely had these strange, self-modelling,
unconsciously-attitudinising lovers, arrayed themselves and their love
according to the pattern of Dante and Petrarch.
To the Countess, we may be sure, Alfieri never failed to give a most
elaborate account of his day's work, nor to read to her whatever scenes
of his plays he had blocked out, in prose, or worked up in verse. By 11
o'clock, he tells us, he was always back in his solitary little villa on
the Esquiline.
But this, although it is probably correct with regard to his visits to
Mme. d'Albany, with whom consideration for gossip prevented his staying
much after ten at night, must not be taken as the invariable rule; for
Alfieri, devoted as he was to his lady, by no means neglected other
society. He was finishing his allotted number of tragedies, and, as the
solemn moment of publication approached, he began to be tormented with
that same desire to display his work to others, to hear their praises
even if false, to understand their opinion even if unfavourable, which
came, by gusts, as one of the passions of his life. Rome was at that
time, like every Italian town, full of literary academies, conventicles
of very small intellectual fry meeting in private drawing-rooms or at
coffee-houses, and swayed by the overlordship of the famous Arcadia,
which had now sunk into being a huge club to which every creature who
scribbled, or daubed, or strummed, or had a coach-and-pair, or a bad
tongue, or a pretty face, or a title, belonged without further claims.
There were also several houses of women who affected intelligence or
culture, having no claims to beauty or fashion; and foremost among these,
but differing from them by the real originality and culture of the lady
of the house, the charm of her young daughter, and the superior quality
of the conversation and music to be enjoyed there, was the house of a
Signora Maria Pizzelli, of all women in Rome the one to whom, after the
Countess of Albany, Alfieri showed himself most assiduous. In her house
and in many others Alfieri began to give almost public readings of his
plays; trying to persuade himself that his object in so doing was to
judge, from the expression of face and even more from the restlessness
or quiescence of his listeners on their chairs, how his work might
affect the mixed audience of a theatre; but admitting in his heart of
hearts that the old desire to be remarked had as much to do with these
exhibitions as with the six-horse gallops which used to astonish the
people of Turin and Florence.
But something better soon offered itself. The Duke Grimaldi had had a
small theatre constructed in the Spanish palace, his residence as
Ambassador from the Catholic King, and a small company of high-born
amateurs had been playing in it translations of French comedies and
tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Alfieri offered his _Antigone_,
which was accepted with fervour. The beautiful and majestic Duchess
of Zagarolo was to act the part of the heroine; her brother and
sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Ceri, respectively the parts of
Hæmon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, the villain of the
piece, was reserved for Alfieri himself. The performance of _Antigone_
was a great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the Spanish Embassy were
crowded with the fashionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782,
included priests and princes of the Church quite as much as painted
ladies and powdered cavaliers. A contemporary diary, kept by the page of
the Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, enables us to form some
notion of the assembly. Foremost among the ladies were the two rival
beauties, equally famous for their conquests in the ecclesiastical as
well as the secular nobility, the Princess Santacroce and the Princess
Altieri, vying with each other in the magnificence of their diamonds and
of their lace, and each upon the arm of a prince of the Church who had
the honour of being her orthodox _cavaliere servente_; the Princess
Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan Francesco Albani, the very gallant and
art-loving nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro; the Princess
Santacroce escorted by the French Ambassador Cardinal de Bernis, the
amiable society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom Frederick the Great
had surnamed _Babet la bouquetière_. In the front row sat the wife of
the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being the niece of the late
Pope Clement XIII., affected an almost royal pomp, and by her side sat
the wittiest and most literary of the Sacred College, the still very
flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The hall was nearly full when the stir
in the crowd, and the general looking in one direction, announced the
arrival of a guest who excited unwonted attention. A young woman, who
scarcely looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very simply and
elegantly dressed, with something still girlish in her small irregular
features and complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted along the
gangway between the rows of chairs, and, as if she were the queen of the
entertainment, solemnly installed by the side of the Princess Rezzonico
in the first row. Was it because her husband had called himself King of
England, or because her lover was the author of the play about to be
performed? Be it as it may, the Countess of Albany was the object of
universal curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed during the play
was a second and perhaps more interesting performance for the
scandal-loving Romans.
While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous
brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace
and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes
and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their
Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman nobles all in the strange old-world
costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the
Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava,
secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats,
ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace,
and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black
of their clothes;--while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all
their finery (long since gone to the _bric-à-brac_ shops) to fill the
theatre-hall of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the symphony
which Cimarosa himself has written for _Antigone_, sit and watch the
magnificent Duchess of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and
stomacher and piled-up feathered hair, and the red-haired eccentric
Piedmontese Count, the d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon;
let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Alfieri are for us people of
to-day, and what they must have been for those people of a hundred years
ago.
While scribbling for mere pastime at his earliest play, Alfieri had felt
his mind illumined by a sort of double revelation: he would make his
name immortal, and he would create a new kind of tragedy. These two
halves of a proposition, of which he appears never to have entertained a
single moment's doubt, had originated at the same time and developed in
close connection: that he could be otherwise than an innovator was as
inconceivable to Alfieri as that he could be otherwise than a genius,
although, in reality, he was as far from being the one as from being
the other. The fact was that Alfieri felt in himself the power of
inventing a style and of producing works which should answer to the
requirements of his own nature: considering himself as the sole audience,
he considered himself as the unique playwright. Excessively limited in
his mental vision, and excessively strong in his mental muscle, it was
with his works as with his life: the ideal was so comparatively within
reach, and the will was so powerful, that one feels certain that he
nearly always succeeded in behaving in the way of which he approved, and
in writing in the style which he admired. And the most extraordinary
part of the coincidence was, that as he happened to live in a time and
country which had entirely neglected the tragic stage, and consequently
had no habits or aspirations connected with it, his own desires with
reference to Italian tragedy preceded those of his fellow-countrymen,
his own ideal was thrust upon them before they well knew where they
were; and his own nature and likings became the sole standard by which
he measured his works, his own satisfaction the only criterion by which
they could be judged. In order, therefore, to understand the nature of
Alfieri's plays, it is necessary, first of all, to understand what were
Alfieri's innate likings and dislikings in the domain of the drama.
Before all other things, Alfieri was not a poet: he lacked all, or very
nearly all, the faculties which are really poetical. To begin with the
more gross and external ones, he had no instinct for, no pleasure in,
metrical arrangements for their own sake; he did not think nor invent in
verse, ideas did not come to him on the wave of metre; he thought out,
he elaborately finished, every sentence in prose, and then translated
that prose into verse, as he might have translated (and in some
instances actually did translate) from a French version into an Italian
one. Moreover he was, to a degree which would have been surprising even
in a prose writer, deficient in that which constitutes the intellectual
essence of poetry as metre constitutes its material externality; in
that tendency to see things surrounded by, disguised in, a swarm, a
masquerade, of associated ideas; deficient in the power of suggesting
images, of conceiving figures of speech; in fancy, imagination, in the
metaphorical faculty, or whatever else we may choose to call it. Nor did
he perceive or describe visible things, visible effects, in their own
unmetaphorical shapes and colours: not a line of description, not an
adjective can be found in his works except such as may be absolutely
indispensable for topographical or similar intelligibility; Alfieri
obviously cared as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful sound.
This being the case, everything that we might call distinctly poetical,
all those things which are precious to us in Shakespeare, or Marlowe,
or Webster, in Goethe or Schiller, nay, even, occurring at intervals,
in Racine himself, at least as much as mere psychology or oratory or
pathos, appeared to Alfieri in the light of mere meretricious gewgaws,
which took away from the interest of dramatic action without affording
him any satisfaction in return. As it was with metre and metaphor and
description, so it was also with the indefinable something which we call
lyric quality: the something which sings to our soul, and which sends a
thrill of delight through our nerves or a gust of emotion across our
nature in the same direct way as do the notes of certain voices, the
phrases of certain pieces of music: instantaneously, unreasoningly and
unerringly. Of this Alfieri had little, so little that we may also say
that he had nothing; the presence of this quality being evidently
unnoticed by him and unappreciated. So much for the absolutely poetical
qualities. Of what I may call the prose qualities of a playwright, only
a certain number appealed to Alfieri, and only a certain number were
possessed by him. In a time when the novel was beginning to become a
psychological study more minute than any stage play could ever be,
Alfieri was only very moderately interested in the subtle analysis or
representation of character and state of mind; the fine touches which
bring home a person or a situation did not attract his attention; nor
was he troubled by considerations concerning the probability of a
given word or words being spoken at a particular moment and by a
particular man or woman: realism had no meaning for him. As it was
with intellectual conception, so was it also with instructive sympathy:
Alfieri never subtly analysed the anatomy of individual nature, nor
did he unconsciously mimic its action and tones; what most of us mean
by pathos did not appeal to him. Neither metrical nor imaginative
pleasurableness, nor descriptive charm, nor lyric poignancy, nor
psychological analysis or intention entered, therefore, into Alfieri's
conception of a desirable tragedy, any more than any of these things
fell within the range of his special talents; for, we must always bear
in mind that with this man, whose feelings and desires were in such
constant action and reaction, with this man whose will imposed his
intellectual notions on his feelings, and his emotional tendencies on
his thoughts, the thing which he enjoys is always as the concave to the
convex of the thing which he produces. But although Alfieri was not a
poet, and was not even a potential novel writer, he was, in a sense,
essentially a dramatist; though even here we must distinguish and
diminish. Alfieri was not a man who cared for rapid action or for
intricate plot: he never felt the smallest inclination to violate the
old traditions of the pseudo-classic stage by those thrilling scenes
or sights which had to be described and not shown, nor by those
complications of interest which require years for an action instead of
the orthodox twenty-four hours.
He was perfectly satisfied with the no-place, no-where--with the vague
temple, or palace hall, or public square where, as in the country of the
abstract, the action of pseudo-classic tragedy always takes place, or,
more properly speaking, the talking of pseudo-classic tragedy always
goes on; he was perfectly satisfied with sending in a servant or a
messenger to inform the public of a murder or suicide committed behind
the scenes; he was perfectly satisfied with taking up a story, so to
speak, at the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its original causes
or developing it through its various phases. In such matters Alfieri was
as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Nevertheless Alfieri had a
distinct dramatic sense: an intense _poseur_ himself, enjoying nothing
so much as working himself up to produce a given effect upon his own
mind or upon others, he had an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical,
for the moral attitude which may be struck so as to be effective, and
for the arrangement of subordinate parts so that this attitude surprise
and move the audience. The moral attitude, the psychological gesture,
which thus became the main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be
expected from such a man, nearly always his own moral attitude, his own
psychological gesture; he himself, his uncompromising, unhesitating,
unflinching, curt and emphatic nature, is always the hero or heroine
of the play, however much the situation, the incidents, the other
characteristics may vary. Antigone is generous and tender, Creon is
inhuman in all save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious madman,
Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, Clytæmnestra is sinful and
self-sophisticating, Virginia pure and open-minded; yet all these
different people, despite all their differences, speak and act as
Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar
characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would
become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of
pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he
paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig
of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and
gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of his words, the length of
his sentences, are always the same: so much so that in one play there
may be two or three Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly
virtuous or perfectly vicious; but anything that is not an Alfieri in
some tolerably transparent disguise, is sure to be a puppet, a lay
figure with as few joints as possible, just able to stretch out its arms
and clap them to its sides, but dangling suspended between heaven and
earth.
The attitude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the
play exists, are, as I have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri.
But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those
which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more
especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral attitude and gesture
which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth,
and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio
and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and
Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the attitude and
the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's
own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the attitude and gesture
of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism. To have written
tragedies whose whole value depended upon the striking exhibition of
these qualities; and to have made this exhibition interesting, nay,
fascinating to the very people, to the amiable, humane, indifferent,
lying, feeble-spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, till
these very men were ashamed of what they had hitherto been; to stamp the
new generation with the clear-cut die of his own strong character; this
was the reality of the mission which Alfieri had felt within himself: a
reality which will be remembered when his plays shall have long ceased
to be acted, and shall long have ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined
himself to be a great poetic genius, and a great dramatic innovator:
he scorned with loathing the works of Corneille, of Racine, and of
Voltaire, all immeasurably more valuable as poetry and drama than his
own; he hated the works of Metastasio, a poet and a playwright by the
divine right of genius; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest Shakespeare
should spoil the perfection of his own conceptions. He slaved for months
and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and
curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was
always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse
unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a
delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who
never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising
notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he
first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth
century. His use consisted in his mere existence among men so different
from himself; and his dramas, his elaborately constructed and curtailed
and corrected dramas, were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which
the image of this strange new-fangled personality might be flashed
everywhere into the souls of his contemporaries. To perceive the
moral attitude and gesture specially characteristic of himself, to
artificially correct and improve and isolate them in his own reality,
and then to multiply their likeness for all the world; to know himself
to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and to write plays whereof
the heroes and heroines were mere repetitions of Alfieri; such was the
mission of this powerful and spontaneous nature, of this self-conscious
and self-manipulating _poseur_.
The success of that performance of _Antigone_ on the amateur stage
in the Spanish palace was very great. A young man, half lay, half
ecclesiastic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, accustomed to
write not the most sincere poetry, and to execute, perhaps, not the most
creditable errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke Braschi--a young
man named Vincenzo Monti, was present at this performance, or one
of the succeeding ones; and from that moment became the author of the
revolutionary tragedy of _Aristodemo_, the potential author of that
famous ode on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners of new
Italy. Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the
old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful
world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been;
even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi
prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the
funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and
spies of pontifical Rome assembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy,
than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio
had found a successor greater than himself.