BEFORE THE STORM.
The well-born and amusing people of the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century did not stickle at the question
of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne,
attracted by the peculiar cosmopolitan charm, the very undeniable
talent for society, the extraordinary intellectual superiority of Mme.
d'Albany; attracted, also, by a certain easy-going and half-motherly
kindliness which seems, to all those who wanted sympathy, to have been
quite irresistible. It was the moment of the great fermentation, when
even trifling things and trifling people seemed to boil and seethe with
importance; when cold-hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness
and chivalry, selfish people full of generosity, prosaic people full of
poetry, and mediocre people full of genius: the brief carnival-week
of the old world, when men and women masqueraded in all manner of
outlandish and antiquated thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the
excitement of dressing-up so much that they actually believed themselves
for the moment to be what they pretended: it was the brief moment,
grotesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes of society, who were
fatally going to be exterminated for their long selfishness and
indifference, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and shovel and tore
down the bricks of the edifice which was destined to fall and to crush
them all beneath its ruins.
All these men and women, their deep in-born corruption momentarily
transfigured by this enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for sentiment,
for austerity, which mingled oddly with their childish pleasure in all
new things, in mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Montgolfier
balloons, with their habitual pleasure in all their big and small futile
and wicked pleasures of worldliness;--all these men and women, these
_morituri_ delighted at the preparations, the scaffoldings, red clothes,
black crape, torches and drums and bugles, for their own execution, all
assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne.
A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomatists, and artists and
pamphleteers, and wits and beautiful women; perishable and perished
things, out of which we must select one or two, either as types of that
which has perished, or as types of the imperishable; and the perished,
the amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and brilliantly-improvising
orators and philosophers of the half-hour, are often that which, could
we have chosen, we should have preserved. Most notable among the women,
the young daughter of Necker, the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Mme.
la Baronne de Staël Holstein: a rather mannish superb sort of creature,
with shoulders and arms compensating for thick swarthy features; eyes
like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the
stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an
unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to
be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with
northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Krüdener, as yet
noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and
the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand
francs from Mdlle. Bertin, the Queen's milliner; but later to be famous
for her literary and religious vagaries, her influence on Mme. de Staël,
her strange influence on Alexander of Russia. Near her, doubtless, that
fascinating Suard, in the convent of whose sister Mme. de Krüdener was
wont to spend a month in religious exercises, thanking God, at the foot
of the altar, for giving her a sister like Mdlle. Suard, and a lover
like Suard himself. As yet but little noticed, except as the pet friend,
the "younger sister" of Mme. d'Albany, a Mme. de Flahault, later married
to the Portuguese Souza; a simple-natured little woman, adoring her
children and the roses in her garden, and who, if I may judge by the
letters which, many, many years later, she addressed to Mme. d'Albany,
would be the woman of all those one would rather resuscitate for a
friend, leaving Mmes. de Staël and de Krüdener quiet in their coffins.
Further on, the delicate and charming Pauline de Beaumont, who was to be
the Egeria of Joubert and the tenderly-beloved friend of Châteaubriand;
and a host of women notable in those days for wit or heart or looks,
wherewith to make a new Ballade of Dead Ladies, much sadder than the one
of Villon: "But where are the snows of yester-year?"
Round about these ladies an even greater number of men of what were, or
passed for, eminent qualities; political for the most part, or busied
with the new science of economy, like the Trudaines; and most notable
among them, as the typical victim of genius of the Reign of Terror, poor
André Chénier, his exquisite imitations of Theocritus still waiting to
be sorted and annotated in prison; and the typical blood-maniac of
genius, the painter David, who was to startle Mme. d'Albany's guests,
soon after the 10th August, by wishing that the Fishwives had stuck
Marie Antoinette's head without more ado upon a pike. Imagine all these
people assembled in order to hear M. de Beaumarchais, in the full glory
of his millions and his wonderful garden, give a first reading of his
_Mère Coupable_, after inviting them to prepare themselves to weep
(which was easy in those days of soft hearts) "_à plein canal_." Or else
listening to the cold and solemn M. de Condorcet, prophesying the time
when science shall have abolished suffering and shall abolish death;
little dreaming of those days of wandering without food, of those nights
in the quarries of Montrouge, of that little bottle of poison, the only
thing that science could give to abolish his suffering.
To all these great and illustrious people the Countess of Albany--I had
almost said the Queen of England--introduced her "incomparable friend"
(style then in vogue) Count Vittorio Alfieri; and all of them doubtless
took a great interest in him as her lover, and a little interest in him
as _the_ great poet of Italy; not certainly without wondering--amiable
people as they were, and persuaded that France and Paris alone
existed--that Mme. d'Albany should find anything to love in this
particularly rude and disagreeable man, and that a country like Italy
should have the impudence to set up a poet of its own. The Countess of
Albany, made to be a leader of intellectual society, was happy; but
Alfieri was not. Ever since his childhood, when a French dancing-master
had vainly tried to unstiffen his rigid person, he had mortally hated
the French nation; ever since his first boyish travels he had loathed
Paris as the sewer, the _cloaca maxima_ (the expression is his own) of
the world; his whole life had been a struggle with the French manners,
the French language, which had permeated Piedmont; one of the chief
merits of the new drama he had conceived was (in his own eyes) to sweep
Corneille, Racine, and particularly Voltaire, his arch-aversion
Voltaire, off the stage.
Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was specially constructed, if
I may use the expression, to ignore all the good points, and to feel
with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, of the French nation;
and more especially of the French nation of the pre-revolutionary and
revolutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's ideal were austerity,
inflexibility, pride and contemptuousness of character, coldness,
roughness, decision of manner, curtness, reticence, and absolute
truthfulness of speech; above all, no consideration for other folks'
likings and dislikings, no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more
so than the ideal of other idealising minds, was the mere outcome of
himself; it contained his faults as well as his virtues. Now all that
fell short of, or went beyond, his ideal--that is to say, himself--was
abomination in Alfieri's eyes. Consequently France and the French,
all the nobility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-heartedness, the
enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the
instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentimentality, the high
falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything
that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of
last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness
of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the
end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri,
when once he disliked a person or a thing, justly or unjustly, could
only increase but never diminish his dislike. Let us look at this
matter, which is instructive to all persons whose nobility of character
runs to injustice, a little closer; it will help us to understand the
_Misogallo_, the extraordinary apostasy which, quite unconsciously,
Alfieri was later to commit towards the principle of freedom. Alfieri,
intensely Italian, if mediæval and peasant Italy may give us the
Italian type, in a certain silent or rather inarticulate violence of
temper--violence which roars and yells and stabs and strangles, but
which never talks, and much less argues--could not endure the particular
sort of excitement which surrounded him in France; excitement mainly
cerebral, heroism or villainy resulting, but only as the outcome of
argument and definition of principle and of that mixture of logic and
rhetoric called by the French _des mots_. Alfieri was not a reasoning
mind, he was not an eloquent man; above all, he was not a witty man; his
satirical efforts are so many blows upon an opponent's head; they are
almost physical brutalities; there is nothing clever or funny about
them. In such a society as this Parisian society of the years '87, '88,
'89, '90, he must have been at a continual disadvantage; and at a
disadvantage which he felt keenly, but which he felt, also, that
any remarkable piece of Alfierism which would have moved Italy to
admiration, such as glaring, or stalking off in silence, or punching a
man's head, could only increase. To feel himself at a disadvantage on
account of his very virtues, and with people whom those virtues did
not impress, must have been most intolerable to a man as vain and
self-conscious as Alfieri, and to this was added the sense that,
from mere ignorance of the language (the language whose nobility, as
contrasted with the "low, plebeian, nasal disgustingness" of French, he
so often descanted on) in which he wrote, it was quite impossible for
these people to be reduced to their right place and right mind by the
crushing superiority of his dramatic genius. He, who hungered and
thirsted for glory, what glory could he hope for among all these monkeys
of Frenchmen, jabbering and gesticulating about their States-General,
their Montgolfier, their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, their
Necker, who had not even the decent feeling to know Italian, and who
bowed and smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Metastasio and Goldoni
when introduced by the Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as an
Italian poet. "Does Monsieur write comedies or tragedies?" One fancies
one can hear the politely indifferent question put with a charming
smile by some powdered and embroidered French wit to Mme. d'Albany in
Alfieri's hearing; nay, to Alfieri himself.
Mixed with such meaner, though unconscious motives for dissatisfaction,
must have been the sense, intolerable to a man like Alfieri, of the
horrid and grotesque jumble of good and bad, of real and false, not
merely in the revolutionary movement itself, but in all these men of the
_ancien régime_ who initiated it. Alfieri conceived liberty from the
purely antique, or, if you prefer, pseudo-antique, point of view; it
was to him the final cause of the world; the aim of all struggles; to
be free was the one and only desideratum, to be master of one's own
thoughts, actions, and words, merely for the sake of such mastery. The
practical advantages of liberty entirely escaped him, as did the
practical disadvantages of tyranny; nay, one can almost imagine that
had liberty involved absolute misery for all men, and tyranny absolute
happiness, Alfieri would have chosen liberty. To this pseudo-Roman
and intensely patrician stoic, who had never known privation or
injustice towards himself, and scarcely noticed it towards others,
the humanitarian, the philanthropic movement, characteristic of the
eighteenth century, and which was the strong impulse of the revolution,
was absolutely incomprehensible. Alfieri was, in the sense of certain
ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, blind and deaf to suffering.
That a man of education and mind, a gentleman, should have to sweep the
ground with his hat on the passage of another man, because that other
happened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he should be liable to exile,
to imprisonment, for a truthful statement of his opinion: these were to
Alfieri the insupportable things of tyranny. But that a man in wooden
shoes and a torn smock frock, sleeping between the pigs and the cows on
the damp clay floor, eating bread mainly composed of straw, should have
all the profits of his hard labour taken from him in taxes, while
another man, a splendid gentleman covered over with gold, riding over
acres of his land with his hounds, or a fat priest dressed in silk,
snoozing over his Lucullus dinner, should be exempt from taxation and
empowered to starve, rob, beat, or hang the peasant: such a thing as
this did not fall within the range of Alfieri's feelings. To his mind,
for ever wrapped in an intellectual toga, there was no tragedy in mere
misery; there was no injustice in mere cruelty, or rather misery,
cruelty, nay, all their allied evils, ignorance, brutality, sickness,
superstition, vice, were unknown to him. Hence, as I have said, all the
philanthropic side of the revolutionary movement was lost to him; just
as the defence of Labarre, the vindication of Calas, never disturbed
the current of his contempt for Voltaire. So also the abolition of
privileges, the secularisation of church property, the equalisation of
legal punishment, the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation of
slaves; all these things, which stirred even the most corrupt and
apathetic minds of the late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much
declamation to Alfieri. To him, who could conceive no virtues beyond
independent truthfulness, such things were mere sentimental trash, mere
hypocritical nonsense beneath which base men hid their baseness. And
the baseness, unhappily, was there: baseness of absolute corruption,
or of scandalous levity, even in the noblest. To Alfieri, a man like
Beaumarchais, for all his quick philanthropy, his audacious outspokenness,
must have seemed base, with his background of money-jobbing, of dirty
diplomatic work, of legal squabbles. How much more such a man as
Mirabeau, with his heroic resolution, his heroic kindliness, his whole
Titan nature, carous, eaten into by a hundred mean vices. That Mirabeau
should have gained his bread writing libels and obscene novels, meant to
Alfieri not that a man born in corruption and tainted thereby had, by
the force of his genius, by the force of the great humanitarian
movement, raised himself as morally high as he had hitherto grovelled
morally low; it merely meant that the immaculate name of hero was
degraded by a foul writer.
From such figures as these Alfieri turned away in indignant disgust. The
great movement of the eighteenth century seemed to him a mere stirring
and splashing in a noisome pool, in that _cloaca maxima_, as he had
called it.
Already before settling in Paris in 1787, he had written to his Sienese
friends that, were it not for the necessity of attending to the printing
of his works (to print which permission would not be obtainable in
Italy), he would rather have established himself at Prats, at Colle,
at Buonconvento, at any little town of two thousand inhabitants near
Florence or Siena. Surrounded by, in daily contact with, some of the
noblest minds of the century, nay, of any century, by people like Mme.
de Staël, André Chénier, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Alfieri could write, with
a sort of bitter pleasure at his own narrow-mindedness: "Now I am among
a million of men, and not one of them that is worth Gori's little
finger."
I am almost prepared to say that Alfieri really felt as if living in
Paris, among such people and at such a moment, was a sort of saintly
sacrifice, the crowning heroism of his life, which he made in order to
print his books; that he endured the contact of this plague-stricken
city, merely because he knew that unless he corrected a certain number
of manuscript pages, and revised a certain number of proof-sheets, the
world would be defrauded of the great and sovereign antidote to all such
baseness as this in the shape of his own complete works.
Writing to his mother towards the end of the year 1788, he mentions
contemptuously the excitement and enthusiasm created by the approaching
election of the States-General, and adds calmly: "But all these sort of
things interest me very little; and I give my attention only to the
correction of my proofs, a piece of work with which I am pretty well
half through."