CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI.
Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand performance of one of
Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno. A room was filled
with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a select company invited to see
the poet (for by this respectful title he appears always to have been
mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his own admiration, but apparently
less so to that of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and Mme.
d'Albany would go for a few days to Siena to enjoy the conversation of a
little knot of friends of their dead friend Gori; a certain Cavaliere
Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani,
and one or two others, who met in the house of a charming and
intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper,
married to another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who was one of Mme.
d'Albany's most intimate friends. Occasionally, also, some of these
would come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and the Countess moved
heaven and earth (recollecting their own aversion to husbands) that the
_Grumbler_, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly called, should be left
behind, and _la chère_ Thérèse come accompanied (in characteristic
Italian eighteenth-century fashion) only by her children and by her
_cavaliere servente_, Mario Bianchi. These were the small excitements in
this curious double life of more than married routine. Alfieri, who, as
he was getting old and weak in health, was growing only the more
furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had determined to learn
Greek, to read all the great Greek authors; and worked away with
terrific ardour at this school-boy work, crowning his efforts with a
self-constituted Order of Homer, of which he himself was the sole
founder and sole member. He was, also, having finally despatched the
sacramental number of tragedies, working at an equally sacramental
number of satires and comedies, absolutely unconscious of his complete
deficiency in both these styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his
nation to set them on the right road in comedy and satire, as he had set
them on the right road in tragedy.
A ridiculous man! Not so. I have spoken many hard words against Alfieri;
and I repeat that he seems to me to have often fallen short, betrayed by
his century, his vanity, his narrowness and hardness of temper, even of
the ideal which he had set up for himself. But I would not have it
supposed that I do not see the greatness of that ideal, and the nobleness
of the reality out of which it arose. That Alfieri, a strange mixture of
the passionate man of spontaneous action, and of the self-manipulating,
idealising _poseur_, should have fallen short of his own ideals, is
perhaps the one pathetic circumstance of his life; the one dash of
suffering and failure which makes this heroic man a hero. Alfieri did
not probably suspect wherein he fell short of his own ideal; he did
not, could not see that his faults were narrowness of nature, and
incompleteness, meanness of conception, for, if he had, he would have
ceased to be narrow and ceased to be mean. But Alfieri knew that there
was something very wrong about himself, he felt a deficiency, a jar in
his own soul; he felt, as he describes in the famous sonnet at the back
of Fabre's portrait of him, that he did not know whether he was noble or
base, whether he was Achilles or Thersites.
"_Uom, sei tu grande o vile? Mori, il saprai._" ("Man, art thou noble
or base? Die, and thou shalt know it.") Thus wrote Alfieri, making, as
usual, fame the arbiter of his worth; and showing, even in the moment of
seeking for truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly impossible
it was for him to feel it. Mean and great; both, I think, at once. But
of the meanness, the narrowness of nature, the want of resonance of
fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality in so many things; of
Alfieri's vanity, intolerance, injustice, indifference, hardness; of all
these peculiarities which make the real man repulsive, the ideal man
unattractive, to us, I have said more than enough, and when we have
said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his vanity, selfishness,
meanness, narrow-mindedness, a man of grander proportions, of finer
materials, nay, even of nobler moral shape, than the vast majority of
men superior to him in all these points. Let us look at him in those
last decaying years, at those studies which have seemed to us absurd:
self-important, pedantic, almost monomaniac; or brooding over those
feelings which were, doubtless, selfish, morbid; let us look at him,
for, despite all his faults, he is fine. Fine in indomitable energy, in
irrepressible passion. Alfieri was fifty; he was tormented by gout; his
health was rapidly sinking; but the sense of weakness only made him more
resolute to finish the work which (however mistakenly) he thought it his
duty to leave completed; more determined that, having lived for so many
years a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed of the stain of
ignorance, having read and appreciated as much of the great writers of
antiquity as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a studious
manhood. Soon after his great illness (which, I believe, changed him so
much for the worse by hastening premature old age) at Colmar, he had
written to his friends at Siena that he had very nearly been made a fool
of by Death; but that, having escaped, he intended, by hurrying his
work, to make a fool of Death instead. And in 1801 he wrote in his
memorandum-book: "Health giving way year by year; whence, hurrying to
finish my six comedies, I make it decidedly worse."
Soon after, as Mme. d'Albany later informed his friend Caluso, Alfieri,
finding that his digestion had become so bad as to produce inability to
work after meals, began systematically to diminish his already extremely
sober allowance of food; while, at the same time, he did not diminish
the exercise, walking, riding, and driving, which he found necessary to
keep himself in spirits. Knowing that death could not be far ahead, and
accustomed since his youth to think that his life ought not to extend
over sixty years, Alfieri was calmly and deliberately walking to meet
Death.
Calmly and deliberately; but not heartlessly. Engrossed in his studies,
devoted to his own glory as he was, he was still full of a kind of
mental passion for Mme. d'Albany. He was unfaithful to her for the
sake of low women, he was neglectful of her for the sake of his work; he
did not, perhaps, receive much pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic
lady (like one of Rubens's women grown old, as Lamartine later described
her) whom he left to her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La
Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing; to her painting lessons, and long
discussions on art with Monsieur Fabre. The woman whose presence, no
longer exciting, was doubtless a matter of indifference to him. But,
nevertheless, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never wrote more
completely from his heart than when, composing the epitaph of the
Countess, he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been loved by him more
than anything on earth, and held almost as a mortal divinity. "A
Victorio Alferio ... ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen
ab ipso constanter habita et observata." For a thought begins about
the year 1796 to recur throughout Alfieri's letters and sonnets, and
whenever he mentions the Countess in his autobiography; a thought too
terrible not to be genuine: he or his beloved must die first; one or the
other must have the horror of remaining alone, widowed of all interest
on earth. How constantly this idea haunted him, and with what painful
vividness, is apparent from a letter which I shall translate almost _in
extenso_; as, together with those few words which I have quoted about
Gori's death, it shows the passionate tenderness that was hidden, like
some aromatic herb beneath the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of
Alfieri.
The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at Siena, and relates to the death
of Mario Bianchi, who had long been her devoted _cavaliere servente_.
"Your letter," writes Alfieri, "breaks my heart. I feel the complete
horror of a situation which it gives me the shivers merely to think may
be my situation one day or other; and oh! how much worse would it not be
for me, living alone, isolated from everyone, closed up in myself. O
God! I hope I may not be the survivor, and yet how can I wish that my
better self (_la parte migliore di me stesso_) should endure a situation
which I myself could never have the courage to endure? These are frightful
things. I think about them very often, and sometimes I write some bad
rhymes about them to ease my mind; but I never can get accustomed either
to the thought of remaining alone, nor to that of leaving my lady."
"Some opinions," he goes on--and this hankering after Christianity on
the part of a man who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief seems
to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the late Gino Capponi, that had
Alfieri lived much longer he would have died telling his rosary,--"some
opinions are more useful and give more satisfaction than others to a
well-constituted heart. Thus, it does our affection much more good to
believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is united to Candido (another dead
friend) and to Gori, that they are talking and thinking about us, and
that we shall meet them all some day, than to believe that they are all
of them reduced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief as the first is
repugnant to physics and to mathematical evidence, it is not, therefore,
to be despised. The principal advantage and honour of mankind is that it
can feel, and science teaches us how not to feel. Long live, therefore,
ignorance and poetry, and let us accept the imaginary as the true. Man
subsists upon love; love makes him a god: for I call _God_ an intensely
felt love, and I call dogs, or French, which comes to the same, the
frozen philosophisers who are moved only by the fact that two and two
make four."
Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive his beloved was
fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he expected. The eccentric figure, the
tall, gaunt man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red hair and
flying scarlet cloak, driving the well-known phaeton, or sauntering
moodily along the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, was soon to
be seen no more. As the year 1803 wore on he felt himself hard pressed
by the gout; he ate less and less, he took an enormous amount of
foot exercise; he worked madly at his memoirs, his comedies, his
translations, he felt almost constantly fatigued and depressed. On the
3rd October 1803, after his usual morning's work, he went out for a
drive in his phaeton; but a strange and excessive cold, despite the
still summer weather, forced him to alight and to try and warm himself
by walking. Walking brought on violent internal pains, and he returned
home with the fever on him. The next day he rose and dressed, but he was
unable to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse; the next day after
that he again tried to take a walk, but returned with frightful pains.
He refused to go to bed except at night, and tore off the mustard
plaisters which the doctors had placed on his feet, lest the blisters
should prevent his walking; dying, he would still not be a sick man. The
night of the 8th he was unable to sleep, and talked a great deal to the
Countess, seated by his bedside, about his work, and repeated part of
Hesiod in Greek to her. Accustomed for months to the idea of death, he
does not seem to have guessed that it was near at hand. But the news
that he was dying spread through Florence. A Piedmontese lady--strangely
enough a niece of that Marchesa de Prié opposite to whose windows
Alfieri had renewed the device of Ulysses and the sirens by being tied
to a chair--hastened to a learned and eccentric priest, a Padre Canovai,
entreating him to run and offer the dying poet the consolations of
religion. Canovai, knowing that both Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were
unbelievers, stoutly refused; but later on, seized with remorse, he
hurried to the house on the Lung Arno. Admitted into the sick room, he
came just in time to see Alfieri, who had got up during a momentary
absence of Mme. d'Albany, rise from his arm-chair, lean against his
bed, and, without agony or effort, unconscious "like a bird," says the
Countess, give up the ghost. It was between nine and ten of the morning
of the 9th October 1803. Vittorio Alfieri was in his fifty-fifth year.
The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he had, after Gori, was
summoned from Turin to console the Countess and put all papers in order.
Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books and MSS., and
whatever small property he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany,
leaving her to dispose of them entirely according to her good pleasure.
Among these papers was found a short letter, undated, addressed "To the
friend I have left behind, Tommaso di Caluso, at Turin," and which ran
as follows:--
"As I may any day give way beneath the very serious malady which is
consuming me, I have thought it wise to prepare these few lines in order
that they may be given to you as a proof that you have always, to my
last moment, been present to my mind and very dear to my heart. The
person whom above everything in the world I have most respected and
loved, may some day tell you all the circumstances of my illness. I
supplicate and conjure you to do your best to see and console her, and
to concert with her the various measures which I have begged her to
carry out with regard to my writings.
"I will not give you more pain, at present, by saying any more. I have
known in you one of the most rare men in every respect. I die loving and
esteeming you, and valuing myself for your friendship if I have deserved
it. Farewell, farewell."