THE MISOGALLO.
Alfieri and Madame d'Albany were scarcely back in Paris, and settled in
a new house, when the disorders in Paris and the movements of the
Imperial troops on the frontier began to make the situation of
foreigners difficult and dangerous. The storming of the Tuileries, the
great slaughter of the 10th August 1792, admonished them to sacrifice
everything to their safety. With considerable difficulty a passport for
the Countess had been obtained from the Swedish Minister, one for
Alfieri from the Venetian Resident (almost the only diplomatic
representatives, says Alfieri, who still remained to that ghost of a
king), and a passport for each of them and for each of their servants
from their communal section. Departure was fixed for the 20th August,
but Alfieri's black presentiments hastened it to the 18th. Arrived at
the Barrière Blanche, on the road to Calais, passports were examined by
two or three soldiers of the National Guard, and the gates were on the
point of being opened to let the two heavily-loaded carriages pass, when
suddenly, from out of a neighbouring pot-house, rushed some twenty-five
or thirty ruffians, ragged, drunken, and furious. They surrounded the
carriages, yelling that all the rich were running away and leaving them
to starve without work; and a crowd rapidly formed round them and the
National Guards, who wanted the travellers to be permitted to pass on.
Alfieri jumps out of the carriage, brandishing his seven passports, and
throws himself, a long, lean, red-haired man, fiercely gesticulating and
yelling at the top of his voice, among the crowd, forcing this man and
that to read the passports, crying frantically, "Look! Listen! Name
Alfieri. Italian and not French! Tall, thin, pale, red-haired; that is
I; look at me. I have my passport! We have our passports all in order
from the proper authorities! We want to pass; and, by God! we will
pass!"
After half an hour of this altercation, with voices issuing from the
crowd, "Burn the carriages!" "Throw stones at them!" "They are running
away, they are noble and rich; take them to the Hotel de Ville to be
judged!" at last Alfieri's vociferations and gesticulations wearied even
the Paris mob, the crowd became quieter, the National Guards gave the
sign for departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the carriage where Mme.
d'Albany was sitting more dead than alive, shouted to the postillions to
gallop off.
At a country house near Mons, belonging to the Countess of Albany's
sister, the fugitives received the frightful news of the September
massacres; of those men and women driven, like beasts into an arena,
down the prison-stairs into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces
by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Maillard's amateur executioners,
on to the blood-soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, morally
divided on separate benches, the gentlemen here, the ladies there, sat
and looked on; of those men and women many had frequented the salon of
the Rue de Bourgoyne, had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks back,
with Alfieri and the Countess; amongst those men and women Alfieri and
the Countess might themselves easily have been, had the ruffians of the
Barrière Blanche dragged them back to their house, where an order to
arrest Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 20th August which
had originally been fixed for their departure. The thought of this
narrow escape turned the recollection of that scene at the Barrière
Blanche into a perfect nightmare, which focussed, so to speak, all the
frenzied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French Revolution, for the
"Tiger-Apes" of France.
By November Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were in Florence, safe; but
established in a miserable inn, without their furniture, their horses,
their books; all left in Paris; nay, almost without the necessary
clothes, and with very little money. From the dirty inn they migrated
into rather unseemly furnished lodgings, and finally, after some
debating about Siena and inquiring whether a house might not be had
there on the promenade of the Lizza, they settled down in the house, one
of a number formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi family, on the Lung
Arno, close to the Ponte Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is
one of the most delightful in Florence: across the narrow quay the
windows look almost sheer down into the river, sparkling with a hundred
facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut by the deep shadows of the
old bridges, to where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars by
the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of the Cascine, closed in by
the pale blue peaks of the Carrara Alps; or else, in autumn and winter,
scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and browns, wonderfully veined,
like some strange oriental jasper, with transparent violet streakings,
and above which arise, veiled, half washed out by mist, the old
corbelled houses, the church-steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of
pine and ilex plumes on the hill opposite.
For a moment, with the full luminousness of the Tuscan sky once more
in his eyes, and the guttural strength of the Tuscan language once more
in his ears, Alfieri seems to have been delighted. But his cheerfulness
was not of long duration. Ever since his great illness at Colmar,
Alfieri had, I feel persuaded, become virtually an old man; his strength
and spirits were impaired, and the strange morose depression of his
half-fructified youth seemed to return. Coming at that moment, the
disappointment, the terror, the horror of the French Revolution became,
so to speak, part of a moral illness which lasted to his death. Alfieri
was not a tender-hearted nor a humane man; had he been, he would have
felt more sympathy than he did with the beginning of the great movement,
with the strivings after reform which preceded it; he had, on the
contrary, the sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self-righteousness
and cut-and-dryness which would have made him, had he been a Frenchman,
a terrorist of the most dreadful type; a regular routinist in extermination
of corrupt people. Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may have been
shocked by the news of the September massacres, of the _grandes
fournées_ which preceded Thermidor, and much as he may have been
distressed by Mme. d'Albany's anxiety and grief for so many friends who
lost their property or life, Alfieri was the man to be driven mad by
the mere thought of bloodshed. But Alfieri had, ever since his earliest
youth, made liberty his goddess, and the worship of liberty his special
religion and mission. That such a religion and mission, to which he had
devoted himself in a time and country when and where no one else dreamed
of anything of the sort, should suddenly become, and without the
smallest agency of his, the religion and mission of the very nation
and people whom he instinctively abhorred from the depths of his soul;
that liberty, which he alone was to teach men to desire, should be the
fashionable craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, sentiment, and
everything he hated most in the French, this was already a pain that
gnawed silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty was, as it were,
dragged out of his own little private temple, where he adored and hymned
it, decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and Livy, and carried
about, dressed in the garb of a Paris fish-wife, a red cotton night-cap
on her head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained crew of
_sansculottes_, nay, worse, rolled along on a triumphal car by an
assembly of lawyers and doctors and ex-priests and journalists--when
liberty, which had been to him antique and aristocratic, became modern
and democratic; when the whole of France had turned into a blood-reeking
and streaming temple of this Moloch goddess, then a sort of moral
abscess, long growing unnoticed, seemed to burst within Alfieri's soul,
and a process of slow moral blood-poisoning to begin.
The Reign of Terror came to an end, the reaction of Thermidor set
in; but this was nothing to Alfieri, for, whereas the unspeakable
profanation of what was his own personal and quasi-private property,
liberty, had hitherto been limited to France, it now spread, a
frightful invading abomination, with the armies of the Directory all
over the world; nay, to Italy itself.
It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal expression, the severest
conceivable retribution, Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all
the stronger as there entered into it the petty personal vanity as well
as the noble abstract feeling of the man--it was as an expression of
this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous but little-read
_Misogallo_. This collection of prose arguments and vituperations and
versified epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations from all the
Latin and Greek authors whom Alfieri was busy spelling out, does
certainly contain many things which, old as they are, strike even us
with the force of living contempt and indignation. Nay, even including
its most stupid and dullest violent parts, we can sympathise with its
bitterness and violence, when we think of the frightful deeds of blood
which, talking heroically of justice and liberty, France had been
committing; of the miserable series of petty rapines and extortions
which, talking patronisingly of the Greeks and Romans, the French nation
was practising upon the Italians whom it had come to liberate. That such
feeling should be elicited was natural enough. But we feel, as we turn
over the pages of the _Misogallo_, and collate with its epigrams a
certain passage in Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet
it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, narrow, pedantic
doctrinaire, whose very magnanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no
longer sympathise with the hatred of the French, which in juster and
more modest men, as for instance Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our
sympathy. Much as we dislike the republican French who descended into
Italy, the _Misogallo_ makes us like Alfieri even less. Whether this
revolution, despite the oceans of blood which it shed, might not be
bringing a great and lasting benefit to mankind by sweeping away the
hundred and one obstacles which impeded social progress; whether this
French invasion, despite the money which it extorted, the statues and
pictures which it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it told,
might not be doing Italy a great service in accustoming it to modern
institutions, in training it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of
inept little tyrants: such questions did not occur to Alfieri, for whom
liberty meant everything, progress and improvement nothing. As the
century drew to a close, and the futility of so many vaunted reforms,
the hollowness of so many promises, became apparent to the Italians with
the shameful treaty which gave Venice, liberated of her oligarchy, to
Austria, all the nobler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Foscolo, and
the crowds of nameless patriotic youths who filled the universities,
were seized by a terrible soul-sickness; everything seemed to have given
way, each course was as bad as the other, and Italy seemed destined to
servitude and indignity, whether under her new masters the French, or
under her old masters the Austrians and Bourbons and priests. But the
feelings of Alfieri were not of this kind; he was not torn by
patriotism; he was simply pushed into sympathy with the tyrannies which
he had so hated by the intolerable pain of finding that the liberty
which he had preached was being propagandised by the nation and the
class of society which he detested most.
Such Alfieri appears to me, and such I think he must appear to everyone
who conscientiously studies the extraordinary manner in which this
apostle of liberty came to preach in favour of despotism. But in his own
eyes, and in the eyes of the Countess of Albany, Alfieri doubtless found
abundant arguments to prove himself perfectly logical and magnanimous.
This French Revolution was merely a revolt of slaves; and what tyranny
could be more odious than the tyranny of those whom nature had fitted
only for slavery? What are the French? "The French," answers one of the
epigrams of the _Misogallo_, "have always been puppets; formerly puppets
in powder, now stinking and blood-stained puppets." "We indeed are
slaves," says another epigram, "but at least indignant slaves" (a
statement which the whole history of Italy in the nineties goes to
disprove); "not, as you Gauls always have been and always will be,
slaves applauding power whatever it be." The nasal and guttural
pronunciation of the French language, the bare existence of such a word
as _quatrain_, is enough to prove to Alfieri that the French can never
know true liberty. Alfieri, who had looked the _ancien régime_ more than
once in the face, actually persuaded himself that, as he writes, "the
frightful French mob robbed and slaughtered the upper classes because
those upper classes had always treated it too kindly." Alfieri actually
got to believe these things. He would, had power been put in his hands,
have headed a counter revolution and exterminated as many people again
as the republicans had exterminated. Power not being in his hands, he
hastened to do what seemed to him a vital matter to all Europe, a sort
of fatal thrust to France; he solemnly recanted all his former writings
in favour of revolutions and republics. He, who had witnessed the taking
of the Bastille and sung it in an ode, deliberately wrote as follows:
"The famous day of the 14th July 1789 crowned the victorious iniquity
(of the people). Not understanding at that time the nature of these
slaves, I dishonoured my pen by writing an ode on the taking of the
Bastille." Surely, if we admit that to see liberty degraded by its
association with revolutionary horrors must have been unbearably bitter
to the nobler portion of Alfieri's nature, we must admit that to see
Alfieri himself, Alfieri so proud of his former ferocious love of
liberty, turned into a mere ranting renegade, is an unendurable
spectacle also; we should like to wash our hands of him as he tried to
wash his hands of the Revolution.
All this political atrabiliousness did not improve Alfieri's temper;
and could not have made it easier or more agreeable to live with him.
The Countess of Albany naturally disliked the Revolution and the
French, after all the grief and inconvenience which she owed them; she
naturally, also, disliked everything that Alfieri disliked. Still, I
cannot help fancying that this woman, far more intellectual than
passionate, and growing more indifferent, more easy-going, more
half-optimistically, half-cynically charitable towards the world with
every year that saw her grow fat, and plain, and dowdy,--I cannot help
fancying that the Countess of Albany must have got to listen to
Alfieri's misogallic furies much as she might have listened to his
groans had he been afflicted with gout or the toothache, sympathising
with the pain, but just a little weary of its expression. She must
also, at times, have compared the little company of select provincial
notabilities, illustrious people never known beyond their town and their
lifetime, which she collected about herself and Alfieri in the house by
the Arno, with the brilliant society which had assembled in her hotel
in Paris. To her, who was, after all, not Italian, but French by
education and temper, and who had been steeped anew in French ideas and
habits, this small fry of Italian literature, professional and pedantic,
able to discuss and (alas! but too able) to hold forth, but absolutely
unable to talk, to _causer_ in the French sense, must have become rather
oppressive. She and Alfieri were both growing elderly, and the hearth by
which they were seated, alone, childless, with nothing but the ghost of
their former passion, the ghost of their former ideal, to keep them
company, was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. Alfieri, working off
his over-excitement in a system of tremendous self-education, sitting
for the greater part of the day poring over Latin and Greek and Hebrew
grammars, and exercises and annotated editions, till he was so exhausted
that he could scarcely digest his dinner; the Countess killing the
endless days reading new books of philosophy, of poetry, of fiction,
anything and everything that came to hand, writing piles and piles of
letters to every person of her acquaintance; this double existence of
bored and overworked dreariness, was this the equivalent of marriage?
was this the realisation of ideal love?
But there were things to confirm Mme. d'Albany in that easy-going
indifferentism which replaced passion and suffering in this fat, kindly,
intellectual woman of forty; things which, as they might have made other
women weep, probably made this woman do what in its way was just as
sad--smile.
Alfieri had always had what, to us, may seem very strange notions on the
subject of love, but which were not strange when we consider the times
and nation in general, and the man in particular. After the various
love manias which preceded his meeting with Mme. d'Albany, he had
determined, as he tells us, to save his peace of mind and dignity by
refusing to fall in love with women of respectable position. The
Countess of Albany, by enchaining him in the bonds of what he called
"worthy love," had saved him from any chance of fresh follies with these
alarming "virtuous women." But follies with women of less respectable
position and less obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear of
degradation to Alfieri's mind. And now, late on in the nineties, when
Mme. d'Albany was rapidly growing plain and stout and elderly, and he
was getting into the systematic habit of regarding her less in her
reality than in the ideal image which he had arranged in his mind; now,
when he was writing the autobiography where the Countess figured as
his Beatrice, and when he was composing the Latin epitaphs which were
to unite his tomb with that of the woman "a Victorio Alferio, ultra
resomnia dilecta," just at this time Alfieri appears to have returned to
those flirtations with women neither respectable nor virtuous which
seemed to him so morally safe to indulge in. A very strange note,
preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the
memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only
things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A
collection of wretched bouts-rimés and burlesque doggrel, written at
Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the
company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which
is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in
these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by an allusion to Hercules
and Omphale, shows that Alfieri frequented in Florence other society
besides that which crowded round his lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi.
Mme. d'Albany was far too shrewd and far too worldly not to see all
this; and Alfieri was far too open and cynical to attempt to hide
it. Mme. d'Albany, having her praises and his love read to her in
innumerable sonnets, in the autobiography and in the epitaphs, probably
merely smiled; she was a woman of the eighteenth century, a foreigner,
an easy-going woman, and had learned to consider such escapades as these
as an inevitable part of matrimony or quasi-matrimony. But, for all her
worldly philosophy, did she never feel a vague craving, a void, as she
sat in that big empty house reading her books while Alfieri was studying
his Greek, a vague desire to have what consoles other women for coldness
or infidelity, a son or a daughter, a normal object of devotion, something
besides Alfieri, and which she could love whether deserving or not;
something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest
whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers
with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected
with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life,
as long as both she and Alfieri were young and passionately in love; but
where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married
woman's happiness, at whose expense that romance, that poetry, had been
bought?
Mme. d'Albany, if I may judge by the enormous piles of her letters which
I have myself seen, and by the report of my friend Signor Mario Pratesi,
who has examined another huge collection for my benefit, was getting to
make herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, reading so
many hours a day, writing letters so many more hours; taking the quite
unenthusiastic, business-like interest in literature and politics of a
woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of
her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory,
more cynical, more misanthropic and tittle-tattling. And Alfieri,
meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent
in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one
such is preserved in the library at Florence) in the hall, pursuing and
flogging street-boys because they splashed his stockings by playing in
the puddles; insulting Ginguené and General Miollis when they attempted
to be civil; groaning over the victories of the French, rejoicing over
the brutal massacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan populace; going to
Florence (when they were spending the summer in a villa) for the
pleasure of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of witnessing (as Gino
Capponi records) the French prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines
being pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary mob. Besides such
demonstrations of an unamiable disposition as these, working with the
fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a holiday at that house where
the doggrel verses were written. The Countess of Albany, who had been so
horribly unhappy with her legitimate husband, must have been rather
dreary of soul with her world-authorised lover.
It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, desultory, neither happy nor
unhappy woman, rapidly growing old, watching the century draw to a close
amid chaos and misery,--it was at this moment that an eccentric English
prelate, Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the house on the
Lung Arno a friend of his, a French painter, a former pupil of David,
and who had won the _Prix de Rome_, by name François Xavier Fabre. M.
Fabre was French, but he was a royalist; he hated the Revolution; he had
settled in Italy; and, in consideration of this, he was tolerated by
Alfieri. To Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, the fact of Fabre being
French must secretly have been a great recommendation. French in
language, habits, mode of thought, French in heart, cut off, as it
seemed, for ever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped up among this
pedantic small fry of Florentines, listening all day to Alfieri's
tirades against the French nation, the French reforms, the French
philosophy, the French language, the French everything, the poor woman
must have heartily enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a real
Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Alfieri might say, was really
French; she must have enjoyed talking about his work, his pictures,
about everything and anything that was not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's
Hebrew, or Alfieri's tragedies, or comedies or satires. Alfieri was a
great genius and a great man; and she loved, or imagined she loved,
Alfieri like her very soul. But still--still, it was somehow a relief
when young Fabre, with his regular south-of-France face, his rather
mocking and cynical French expression, his easy French talk, came to
give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was pacing up and down
translating Homer and Pindar with the help of a lexicon.