One of the singularities of Alfieri's character was the extravagant hatred of France which he cherished all his life. He attributed this, in the first place, to a vehement childish dislike of his French dancing-master. Still he read nothing but French books, French was the language he commonly spoke, and he left Italy in eager anticipation of the pleasures of Paris. But Alfieri did not know his own nature; nor was he aware that he could find happiness through the medium of his passions and intellect only, while amusement and even dissipation had the effect of wearying and disgusting him. The circumstance of his first entrance into Paris sufficed to cloud his stay; nay, the feelings of his whole life were influenced by the painful impression then made. It was the month of August, in Italy so sunshiny and festal; a drizzling rain, accompanied by a chilling temperature of air, impressed him most disagreeably; the streets, houses, and people were all mean, dirty, and impertinent in his eyes; his illusions vanished, and, but for a sense of shame, he would on the instant have quitted the city he had come so far to visit. The lapse of a quarter of a century did not erase the profound traces of disgust and aversion that were then trenched in his mind. At the time, the principal effect of his disappointment was a little to diminish his passion for travelling; and to find that, beyond the Alps, he learned to appreciate the beauties of the divine country he had been so eager to quit.
He delayed his departure from Paris till January, and then hurried to London, which delighted as much as Paris had disgusted him; and he thus gives evidence of a fact of which many English, who have travelled, must be aware—that there is something in Italy and the Italians, in the rural beauty of the country, and in the unpretending but highly gifted natives, more congenial to our taste, than in the peculiar habits and manners of the French. Industry does here, in beautifying the landscape, what nature does beyond the Alps; while in France, there is a discomfort and a desolation apparent in the midst of its civilisation and plenty, which is singularly disagreeable. In this country, the roads, the inns, the horses, the women, all charmed Alfieri; the appearance of general competence, the activity of life, and the cleanliness and comfort of the houses, diminutive as they struck him to be, made an agreeable impression, which each successive visit renewed. Yet he led a strange life—avoiding society, although in the midst of it. He had been accompanied from Paris by a friend; and he amused himself, each morning, by driving him about town, and acting the coachman for him at night, sitting on the box for hours, and taking pride in his dexterity in extricating his carriage amidst the difficulties and confusion attendant on the vast multitude of equipages that throng round places of amusement during the London season. This did for a little while; then, in obedience to his wandering propensity, he made a tour to Portsmouth, Bristol, and Oxford. He was pleased with all he saw; and began to entertain a wish to settle in a country whose aspect was so agreeable, where the manners were simple, the women modest and beautiful, the laws equitable, and the men free. The enthusiasm he felt, made him disregard the melancholy generated by the gloomy climate, and the ruinous expense of living. He observes, and with justice, that Italy and England are the only countries in which it is desirable to live: the former, because there nature vindicates her rights, and rises triumphant over the evils produced by the governments; the latter, because art conquers nature, and transforms a rude ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and laughing abundance.
In June, he left England for Holland; and at the Hague for the first time became really in love, and at the same time his heart opened itself to friendship. The lady whom he admired, and who returned his affection, was unfortunately a married woman, but an Italian education and habits prevented any scruples of conscience from interrupting the felicity he enjoyed. His friend was Don José d'Alcunha, Portuguese minister in Holland. Alfieri describes him as clever and original, with a cultivated understanding and firm unbending character: with tact and efficacy the Portuguese awoke in his new friend shame for his idle, aimless life. It was a curious circumstance, he tells us, that he never felt a strong desire for mental improvement, except at such periods as when he was passionately in love, and his time so employed that he could bestow none of it on literature. In process of time, when he became worthily attached, he may have perceived in this, the beneficent action of the passions in our nature, when their objects are what they ought to be—ennobling and permanent.
After a period of great happiness, he was forced to separate from the lady to whom he was attached,—she being obliged to join her husband, who had gone to Switzerland; and Alfieri suffered the mildest of the punishments that result from loving one to whom you cannot consecrate your life. But though a separation, attended neither by disastrous incident nor infidelity, is the gentlest penance for such an error, it visited the young Italian in no gentle manner. It was a natural wish, as any one will acknowledge who has attended to his own sensations, on first being subjected to passionate sorrow, that which he formed—for being bled: prevented by his friend and a faithful servant from allowing this bleeding to be fatal, his grief became gloomy and taciturn; Holland grew hateful to him; and he returned to Italy with the utmost speed—never resting till he found himself at Cumiano, in his sister's villa, after a three weeks' journey, during which time he saw nothing and said nothing, communicating only by signs with his faithful servant, Elia, who never lost sight of him, and bore with exemplary patience his caprices and heedless tyranny.
This state of melancholy regret augmented his love of solitude, and engendered, moreover, a desire to study: he passed the winter at Turin, in his sister's house, seeing absolutely no society, and spending his time in reading. He turned over the pages of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, and Montesquieu; but his chief delight was derived from the perusal of Plutarch's lives. His mind was strongly excited by the heroic virtues of the great men of whom he read, and tears of mingled admiration and indignation gushed from his eyes. He felt the misfortune it was to be a native of Piedmont; and to have been born in a country, and at a time, when no scope was afforded for word or action, scarcely any for thought and feeling.
In the spring of 1769 he set out on another and a longer tour. He had been disappointed in a matrimonial project, proposed to him by his brother-in-law. The young lady was rich and beautiful, but she preferred a handsome young courtier to a man already remarkable for the eccentricity of his conduct and the sombreness of his disposition: for Alfieri, withdrawn from the common routine of society by his passionate and earnest nature, could but awkwardly and reluctantly fulfil the thousand minute duties which an Italian is accustomed to pay to his lady; nor, on this occasion, did love inspire him with that devotion of heart which might have proved acceptable in lieu of petty attentions. He was now twenty, and, according to the laws of his country, of age—so that his entire fortune was at his disposal: this consisted of an income of 2500 sequins, or about 1200l. a year, and a large sum of ready money; and, to augment the value of his possessions, he had acquired the habits of rational economy, which sprang from the scantiness of the allowance which his prudent trustee had made him. Thus he set out with "money in his purse," and no love in his heart, except the tender recollection of his half-extinguished Flemish flame; and if with a head not much fuller of ideas, yet with a thousand sentiments awakened, which afforded matter for thought. As he drove along, he read Montaigne, or reflected on what he read—a little galled by finding that he could not construe the Latin quotations, and still more so by being obliged to skip the Italian ones. Vienna and Berlin were hastily visited, and seen without pleasure: he had beheld the results of liberty in England, and he had read of them in Plutarch, and his natural sense of independence made him revolt from the military despotisms of the north. Instinctive good sense served him better than the philosophy of Voltaire, and he recognised the cloven foot of arbitrary power in the barrack capital of the philosopher of Sans Souçi. He hurried away from these mockeries of liberalism, and found more pleasure in the simplicity of the Swedes: the contrast which barren nature afforded, in these frozen regions, to the luxuriance and glory of Italy interested and pleased him; the velocity of his sledge, as he proceeded through the silent pine forests, and over the ice-covered lakes, fostered an agreeable melancholy; and he describes his spring journey from Sweden to St. Petersburgh with a vividness and beauty which it would spoil to abridge. Embarking at the first breaking up of the frost on the Gulf of Bothnia, his boat had to struggle through the floating ice; and the novelty of his situation was a source of amusement. "This is the country of Europe," he says, "most agreeable to me, from its savage rudeness; fantastic, gloomy, and even sublime, ideas are created in the mind by the vast, undefinable silence that reigns there, making you feel as if transported away from the globe." St. Petersburgh disappointed him; nor would he see the empress Catherine, whom he regarded as the murderess of her husband, and whose conduct—having failed in her promise of bestowing a constitution on her subjects—was unredeemed, in his eyes, by any mitigating circumstances.
From Russia he traversed Germany to Holland, and again visited England. His time, during his second visit to this country, was engrossed by an attachment for a lady of rank, who proved herself not only unworthy of the affection of the husband whom she betrayed, but the lover to whom she was false. The more violent passions of Alfieri were all roused to their utmost vehemence by the various chances of this adventure, which was attended by all those hairbreadth escapes, menacing dangers, and final ruin and misery, which usually wait upon intrigue in England. First it was love, accompanied by the "sin and fear" which attends on mystery and deceit; then separation came to drive him to despair. The London season over, the lady went to her country house near Windsor; and Alfieri could only visit her clandestinely, on such nights when her husband was absent in London. His impatience and agony during the periods of separation were only appeased by excessive exercise: he rode about all day, performing such feats of horsemanship as endangered his life. Leaping a five-barred gate, with his thoughts wandering to his lady, instead of being fixed on his bridle-hand, his horse fell on him, and dislocated his shoulder; but that did not prevent a visit to Windsor on the following evening, the last that he was destined to make. The servants observed and watched him, and the husband of the lady had intelligence of her infidelity; "and here," he writes, "it is impossible not to laugh at the contrast between English and Italian jealousy, so different are the passions in different characters, in another climate, and, above all, under other laws. Every Italian would now expect to hear of blows, poison, stabs, or, at least, of the imprisonment of the lady, under such violent provocation: nothing of all this happened, though the English husband adored his wife after his manner." It was much according to the present customs, that the English husband, besides instituting legal proceedings against his wife and her lover, called out the latter. The duel was, however, a very harmless proceeding: Alfieri could not fence, and his adversary was satisfied by merely drawing blood by a scratch in the arm, carefully abstaining from inflicting the wound or death which he had it in his power to bestow. A far deeper and more painful wound was reserved for the Italian, when he learned how grossly the lady had deceived him. A groom of her husband had formerly been her lover: he still lived in the house; and, fearing that his lord would risk his life in an encounter with Alfieri, he hastened to inform him that the lady was totally unworthy such a chivalrous encounter. All these disgraceful circumstances came out on the trial. Alfieri, maddened and enraged, was yet unable, at first, to separate from his treacherous mistress. They travelled together in England, he furious at his own weakness, and perpetually struggling to vanquish it; till, seizing on a moment when shame and indignation were stronger than love, he left her at Rochester, on her way to France with a relative, and returned to London. In after times, the chief impression left on his mind from this adventure was, a feeling of mixed respect and gratitude towards her husband, who spared both his life and his purse, neither killing him, nor demanding damages: the first the English noble, apparently, had at his mercy; but it is unlikely, under all the circumstances, that the latter should have been awarded him, to any great extent.
After tempests like these, it was long before the impetuous and sensitive soul of Alfieri settled into any thing like calm: paroxysms of rage, love, grief, and despair succeeded one to the other, and his only relief was derived from locomotion. He left London, and after visiting his friend Alcunha at the Hague, he hurried on to Paris; he traversed France, and entered Spain, struggling with the passion that warred within him, and devoured by the gloomiest melancholy. At Barcelona he bought two Spanish horses, and with these resolved to proceed on his journey to Madrid. His carriage went on first, under the care of the servants and muleteers; and he followed, chiefly on foot, his beautiful Andalusian trotting beside him with the docility of a dog. This mixture of idleness and change—of solitude and independence—soothed his disturbed mind. He was given up to endless reverie, now engrossed by melancholy and moral trains of thought; now possessed by images wild, terrible, or gay. He knew no language, and could express nothing that he felt—all was confused and vague, and mingled with violent transports of grief and despair. He spoke to no one; and his taciturn, self-devouring misery irritated him almost to madness. His faithful servant, Elia, who followed him during all his journeys, had nearly become the victim to an explosion of the pent-up volcano. In combing the count's long tresses,—which it was the fashion then to wear,—he accidentally pulled one hair; and Alfieri, starting up like lightning, hurled a candlestick at his head, which struck him on the temple and inflicted a wound. Elia's Italian nature was roused, and he flew on his master. Other people interfered, and no more harm was done. Alfieri told his servant that he might kill him if he chose: he deserved it, and would take no precautions against his vengeance; and he praises his own courage in thus exposing himself, and the magnanimity of the man for not rising in the night and murdering him as he slept. The whole scene is inexplicable to our northern imaginations, and borders on the excesses of savage nature. "It would be difficult for any one," says Alfieri, "to understand the mixture of ferociousness and generosity on both sides, who has not had experience of the manners and hot blood of the Piedmontese."
After a journey through Spain and Portugal more savage, wild, and solitary than was even his wont. 1772.
Ætat.
23. Alfieri returned to Turin; and here he seemed to be in greater danger than he had ever been of losing all the exaltation of character and feeling that clung to him despite his excesses, his ignorance, and the total absence of all mental culture. He took a magnificent house, and fitted it up with luxury and taste. He had a circle of friends, who formed themselves into a society, with laws and regulations. One of their amusements was a sort of literary budget, to which the various members contributed writings for the recreation of the general society. Alfieri wrote several papers, which obtained a good deal of applause: he had a turn for satire, and that is always a popular style of writing in a coterie. These compositions were all in French.
A worse degradation than this sort of vegetative dissipation awaited the count: he became a cavaliere servente. The lady was of rank, a good deal older than himself, but of extraordinary beauty. She was noted for her gallantries; and Alfieri, who was not in love, her style of beauty even not being exactly to his taste, was drawn in, at first, by mere idleness, and a belief in the excessive attachment she bore him. Soon a most vehement passion engrossed him. Friends, diversions, even horses, were neglected; from eight in the morning till twelve at night he was continually with her—discontented with his servitude, but unable to stay away.