Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would
undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and
who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct
dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than
a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti,
a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater
regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he
belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe.
“What a singular country is ours!” said the Chevalier Nigra, one
of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the
delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the
second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. “In Paris they
admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen
are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for
me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;” and if this was true
in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what
society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.
I
It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri
should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of
Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he
spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever
he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the
humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of
French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he
does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like
could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it
from the Italian priests of the last century. “We translated,” he
says, “the 'Lives of Cornelius Nepos'; but none of us, perhaps not
even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated,
nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under
what governments, nor what any government was.” He learned Latin
enough to turn Virgil's “Georgics” into his sort of Italian; but when
he read Ariosto by stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing
to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first
scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses
even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and
Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Tasso. This was
whilst he was still in the primary classes, under strict priestly
control; when he passed to a more advanced grade and found himself
free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in
common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying
the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in
no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well,
he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. “The reading
of many French romances,” he goes on, “the constant association with
foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear
it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan
which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of
burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of
it,” he says, “the French entered into my empty brain”; but he is
careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he
afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very
bitterly.
It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet,
which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old
soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the
poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent
three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days
when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to
travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to
capital, with letters to your sovereign's ambassadors everywhere, and
spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries
through which you passed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have
us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal,
and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than
edifying. He had a ruling passion for horses, and then several smaller
passions quite as wasteful and idle. He was driven from place to place
by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city,
in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough
in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise
of his future literary greatness. At the Ambrosian Library in Milan
they showed him a manuscript of Petrarch's, which, “like a true
barbarian,” as he says, he flung aside, declaring that he knew nothing
about it, having a rancor against this Petrarch, whom he had once
tried to read and had understood as little as Ariosto. At Rome the
Sardinian minister innocently affronted him by repeating some verses
of Marcellus, which the sulky young noble could not comprehend. In
Ferrara he did not remember that it was the city of that divine
Ariosto whose poem was the first that came into his hands, and
which he had now read in part with infinite pleasure. “But my poor
intellect,” he says, “was then sleeping a most sordid sleep, and every
day, as far as regards letters, rusted more and more. It is true,
however, that with respect to knowledge of the world and of men I
constantly learned not a little, without taking note of it, so many
and diverse were the phases of life and manners that I daily beheld.”
At Florence he visited the galleries and churches with much disgust
and no feeling, for the beautiful, especially in painting, his
eyes being very dull to color. “If I liked anything better, it was
sculpture a little, and architecture yet a little more”; and it is
interesting to note how all his tragedies reflect these preferences,
in their lack of color and in their sculpturesque sharpness of
outline.
From Italy he passed as restlessly into France, yet with something
of a more definite intention, for he meant to frequent the French
theater. He had seen a company of French players at Turin, and had
acquainted himself with the most famous French tragedies and comedies,
but with no thought of writing tragedies of his own. He felt no
creative impulse, and he liked the comedies best, though, as he says,
he was by nature more inclined to tears than to laughter. But he does
not seem to have enjoyed the theater much in Paris, a city for which
he conceived at once the greatest dislike, he says, “on account of the
squalor and barbarity of the buildings, the absurd and pitiful pomp
of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and
gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of
that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that
all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably
misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women.”
He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which
breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he
was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court,
where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot
and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.
In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite
in the polite society of that day, the object of his passion was
another man's wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as
fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it
came to a duel with the lady's husband and a great scandal in the
newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked
everything in England. “The streets, the taverns, the horses, the
women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island,
the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely
little,”--as they still strike every one coming from Italy,--these and
other charms of “that fortunate and free country” made an impression
upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says,
“study profoundly the constitution, mother of so much prosperity,” but
he “knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects.”
Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin
reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose
delighted and whose verse wearied him. “But the book of books for me,”
he says, “and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of
bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and
some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and
others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears,
and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would
surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of
these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my
senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was
born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high
thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or
feel it.”
{Illustration: Vittorio Alfieri.}
These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his
admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was
his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even
those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the
bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri's bitterest contempt when
in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial
gardens at Schonbrunn, “performing the customary genuflexions with a
servilely contented and adulatory face.” This loathing of royalty was
naturally intensified beyond utterance in Prussia. “On entering the
states of Frederick, I felt redoubled and triplicated my hate for that
infamous military trade, most infamous and sole base of arbitrary
power.” He told his minister that he would be presented only in civil
dress, because there were uniforms enough at that court, and he
declares that on beholding Frederick he felt “no emotion of wonder, or
of respect, but rather of indignation and rage.... The king addressed
me the three or four customary words; I fixed my eyes respectfully
upon his, and inwardly blessed Heaven that I had not been born
his slave; and I issued from that universal Prussian barracks ...
abhorring it as it deserved.”
In Paris Alfieri bought the principal Italian authors, which he
afterwards carried everywhere with him on his travels; but he says
that he made very little use of them, having neither the will nor the
power to apply his mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little
Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him,
and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante,
Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli.
He made a journey into Spain, among other countries, where he admired
the Andalusian horses, and bored himself as usual with what interests
educated people; and he signalized his stay at Madrid by a murderous
outburst of one of the worst tempers in the world. One night his
servant Elia, in dressing his hair, had the misfortune to twitch one
of his locks in such a way as to give him a slight pain; on which
Alfieri leaped to his feet, seized a heavy candlestick, and without
a word struck the valet such a blow upon his temple that the blood
gushed out over his face, and over the person of a young Spanish
gentleman who had been supping with Alfieri. Elia sprang upon his
master, who drew his sword, but the Spaniard after great ado quieted
them both; “and so ended this horrible encounter,” says Alfieri, “for
which I remained deeply afflicted and ashamed. I told Elia that he
would have done well to kill me; and he was the man to have done it,
being a palm taller than myself, who am very tall, and of a strength
and courage not inferior to his height. Two hours later, his wound
being dressed and everything put in order, I went to bed, leaving the
door from my room into Elia's open as usual, without listening to the
Spaniard, who warned me not thus to invite a provoked and outraged man
to vengeance: I called to Elia, who had already gone to bed, that
he could, if he liked and thought proper, kill me that night, for I
deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other
revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his
blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many
years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both
our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no
experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;” though
here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his
ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a
servant except as he would have done an equal--not with a cane, but
with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he
seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When
at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of
mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he
tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie
him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A
violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled
gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own
use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he
rose he was no longer a slave to his passion. Shortly after, he wrote
a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called
Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of
which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.
Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his
qualifications for tragical authorship being “a resolute spirit, very
obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every
kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its
furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against
all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of
various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ...
an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an
unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of
writing and managing my own language.” With this stock in trade, he
set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first
in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful
study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian
was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr.
Macpherson, and Cesarotti's translation of him came into Alfieri's
hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with
a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for
the verse of dialogue.
He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had
nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he
read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the
help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic
author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more
tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already
given up Shakespeare. “The more that author accorded with my humor
(though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was
resolved to abstain,” he tells us.
This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to
accustom himself “to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not
otherwise evermore.” Here he versified his first two tragedies, and
sketched others; and here, he says, “I deluged my brain with the
verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that
the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and
words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified
with my own ideas and emotions.”
He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the
business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had
been making love. He abandoned everything else for it--country, home,
money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany,
and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without
which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not
reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his
sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his
former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in
that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet's expatriation. The
long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent
chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this
time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that
relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century,
with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The
countess's husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of
the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil
destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were
difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not
perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial
grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to
bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead,
she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact
is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and
intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the
best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a
sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing
its ties, and after Alfieri's death the countess gave to the painter
Fabre “a heart which,” says Massimo d'Azeglio in his Memoirs,
“according to the usage of the time, and especially of high society,
felt the invincible necessity of keeping itself in continual
exercise.” A cynical little story of Alfieri reading one of his
tragedies in company, while Fabre stood behind him making eyes at the
countess, and from time to time kissing her ring on his finger, was
told to D'Azeglio by an aunt of his who witnessed the scene.
In 1787 the poet went to France to oversee the printing of a complete
edition of his works, and five years later he found himself in Paris
when the Revolution was at its height. The countess was with him, and,
after great trouble, he got passports for both, and hurried to the
city barrier. The National Guards stationed there would have let them
pass, but a party of drunken patriots coming up had their worst fears
aroused by the sight of two carriages with sober and decent people in
them, and heavily laden with baggage. While they parleyed whether they
had better stone the equipages, or set fire to them, Alfieri leaped
out, and a scene ensued which placed him in a very characteristic
light, and which enables us to see him as it were in person. When the
patriots had read the passports, he seized them, and, as he says,
“full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my
passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook
my passport in my hand, and shouted at the top of my voice, 'Look!
Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale,
red hair; I am he; look at me: I have my passport, and I have had it
legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and, by
Heaven, we _will_ pass!'”
They passed, and two days later the authorities that had approved
their passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that
Alfieri had left behind him in Paris, and declared him and the
countess--both foreigners--to be refugee aristocrats!
He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth
year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of
that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek
alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of
Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so
polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of
the first two acts.
Alfieri's remaining years were spent in study and the revision of
his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The
presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered
his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have
had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a
taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have
paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation
in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many
kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a
very pitiable state of terror or disaster.
Nothing in Alfieri's life was more like him than his death, of which
the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the
poet's biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he
still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at
being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to
the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that
prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and
they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his
mind was molested by many memories of things long past. “The studies
and labors of thirty years,” says the Abbate, “recurred to him, and
what was yet more wonderful, he repeated in order, from memory, a good
number of Greek verses from the beginning of Hesiod, which he had read
but once. These he said over to the Signora Contessa, who sat by his
side, but it does not appear, for all this, that there ever came to
him the thought that death, which he had been for a long time used to
imagine near, was then imminent. It is certain at least that he made
no sign to the contessa though she did not leave him till morning.
About six o'clock he took oil and magnesia without the physician's
advice, and near eight he was observed to be in great danger, and the
Signora Contessa, being called, found him in agonies that took away
his breath. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, and going to the
bed, leaned upon it, and presently the day was darkened to him, his
eyes closed and he expired. The duties and consolations of religion
were not forgotten, but the evil was not thought so near, nor haste
necessary, and so the confessor who was called did not come in time.”
D'Azeglio relates that the confessor arrived at the supreme moment,
and saw the poet bow his head: “He thought it was a salutation, but it
was the death of Vittorio Alfieri.”