I once fancied that a parallel between Alfieri and Byron might be
drawn, but their disparities are greater than their resemblances, on
the whole. Both, however, were born noble, both lived in voluntary
exile, both imagined themselves friends and admirers of liberty,
both had violent natures, and both indulged the curious hypocrisy of
desiring to seem worse than they were, and of trying to make out a
shocking case for themselves when they could. They were men who hardly
outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so
many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in
the longest life; and he was ruled by passions and ideals; he hated
with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who
dethroned them.
When he left the life of a dissolute young noble for that of tragic
authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the
freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory
nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of
the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra,
Orestes, and such passages of Roman history as those relating to
the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such
characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia,
and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the
Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic
history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races,
and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same
spirit--the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from
the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the
romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely
anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque
expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic
drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and
saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four
hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that
most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished
with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of
time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover,
and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible
and abhorrent to him.
Emiliani-Giudici, the Italian critic, writing about the middle of
our century, declares that when the fiery love of freedom shall have
purged Italy, the Alfierian drama will be the only representation
worthy of a great and free people. This critic holds that Alfieri's
tragical ideal was of such a simplicity that it would seem derived
regularly from the Greek, but for the fact that when he felt
irresistibly moved to write tragedy, he probably did not know even the
names of the Greek dramatists, and could not have known the structure
of their dramas by indirect means, having read then only some
Metastasian plays of the French school; so that he created that ideal
of his by pure, instinctive force of genius. With him, as with the
Greeks, art arose spontaneously; he felt the form of Greek art by
inspiration. He believed from the very first that the dramatic poet
should assume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical
artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished
from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would
not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from
place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the
representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of
action, he dispensed with all those parts which did not seem to him
the most principal, and he studied how to show the subject of the
drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but
he so wrought “that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field
of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his
tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how
he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more
distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two
links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more
achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy
reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the
Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic
creations of any literature.” Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the
literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of
this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would
have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way
before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of
originality of feeling and conception. “Tragedy, born sublime,
terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were,
redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms
of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost
ministry.”
I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his
acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to
write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of
Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for
his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea
than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects.
In Alfieri's Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is
required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time
and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked.
The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within
twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of
Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with
the bloody dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and
organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are
found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.