It is difficult to understand, and impossible to sympathise with, the sort of frenzy he describes. He did not esteem the lady, and he despised himself for the humiliating state to which he was reduced. The situation of a cavaliere servente is, we are told by high English authority in such matters, "no sinecure." To be constantly in attendance is its chief duty. A cavaliere sits with his lady, drives with her, walks with her, goes to assemblies and the opera with her: he follows her like her shadow, and no matrimonial exigence can equal the total abnegation of all independent occupation to which the cavaliere must submit. The lady, indeed, may equally become weary; but an Italian woman is used to this excess of indolence. Her life is monotonous, her passage from one amusement to the other invariable, sameness forming the essence of her existence: nothing animates it except love, scandal, or quarrelling: these, and the natural vivacity of southern blood, which can diversify the indolence which would otherwise mantle over and incrust every faculty. But all this was torture to the fiery spirit of the count, who, born for better things, struggled with his fetters, and roared like a lion in the toils. His slavery lasted for two years. At one time, the nervous irritation produced a violent and inexplicable malady, which the wits of Turin declared he had invented exclusively for himself. He was unable for several days to swallow aliment in any shape; and the convulsions brought on by any attempt to force it on him almost deprived him of life. At another time, he acquired resolution enough to scheme a journey to Milan, and actually set out; but scarcely had he passed the gates of Turin than his heart failed him, and he returned, burning with indignation against himself, to resume his chains. His friends saw and pitied his miserable state, and their compassion aggravated his sufferings, while it did not enable him to rise above the enthralment. Day after day, month after month, he formed new resolves to extricate himself, and for a long time in vain.
At length, in the February of 1775, being now twenty-six years of age, he, in desperation, came to a determination to break off the disgraceful intercourse. His old remedy of change of place had proved of no avail, so he resolved to remain on the same spot; to shut himself up in his own house, which was opposite that of the lady, but to receive no letters, hear no messages, and to be induced by no failing of the heart ever to behold her more. In token of his fixed purpose, he cut off his long hair, and sent it to a friend, as a proof that he could not present himself in society so shorn and disfigured.
And now a better day dawned on the tempest of passion that darkened his soul. In Lisbon he had been acquainted with the abate Caluso, a man of learning and talent, who had, in some degree, awakened in him a desire for knowledge, while, with the utmost forbearance and kindness, he tried to lighten the shame inspired by every glimmering light that displayed his excessive ignorance. They had passed many long evenings together, and Alfieri preferred his instructive but unpretending conversation to the gaieties of society; and here he felt an awakening of that dormant power of composition which afterwards was to expand into worthy and perennial fruit. In Turin, also, he was acquainted with several literati; and now, a voluntary prisoner, and passing many long hours in entire solitude, unaware and almost unsought, a true, strong, and enduring love of knowledge sprang up within him, never after to be weakened or destroyed. The first token of the spirit of composition, was a sonnet in commemoration of the freedom he had acquired. Some years before, in Paris, he had bought a collection of Italian poets, and by reading them had gained a slight knowledge of versification, and of his native language; yet so ludicrously imperfect was this, that, when he showed his sonnet to a literary man, the first advice he received was to learn to spell. Orthography, grammar, and rhythm were alike defective in his production. He was not discouraged. This same friend, father Paciaudi, had given him the "Cleopatra" of cardinal Delfino. Alfieri fancied that he could write a better tragedy himself; and he began one on the same subject. He consulted his friends upon it, and tried to gain some instruction as to style and poetic laws, of which, hitherto, he had remained in profound ignorance. His house became a sort of academy; while he, desirous of learning, but proud and indocile, wearied himself and all around him by his alternate fits of industry and despondency. At length, a tragedy and a farce were the result of his endeavours, and both were acted on the same nights, at the theatre of Turin, with applause, on two consecutive evenings, and were given out for a third representation. But Alfieri by this time began to discover the entire want of merit of these productions: which prove, as we may judge from the passages he has preserved, that ideas and feelings are of no avail in composition, where there is a total absence of style, and an absolute incapacity of finding language in which to clothe the naked and unformed conceptions of the brain. On the third night, therefore, Alfieri prevented the representation; and on the same night he was seized by so vehement and burning a wish to deserve the applause of an audience, that, he tells us, no fever of love had ever assailed him with similar impetuosity.
"And thus," he says, "at the age of seven and twenty, I entered into the difficult engagement with the public and myself to become a writer of tragedies; and these were the props I had to sustain me in my undertaking,—a resolved, obstinate, and untamed spirit; a heart boiling over with all sorts of emotions, among which predominated the transports of love, and a profound and indignant abhorrence of every species of tyranny; a very slight recollection of the French tragedies I had seen acted, having read and studied none; an entire ignorance of the rules of the drama; and a total incapacity to command the language of which I made use;—all this was surrounded by a husk, not so much of presumption, as of petulance, and an impetuosity of character which stood in the way of my ever, except with reluctance, acknowledging, investigating, or giving ear to truth."
The first thing he found he had to do, was to apply himself to a spelling-book and grammar: this necessity was not admitted without a struggle; but the ardour of his enthusiasm enabled him to triumph over these petty but perplexing and irritating obstacles; and he gave himself up to the study of language with a mixture of impatience and perseverance that kept his mind in a perpetual tumult. He was under the necessity of driving away all French words and forms of speech from his mind, and of imbuing his thoughts in the idiom of Tuscany,—a work of unspeakable labour, uniting the studies of a man with those of a child, and sufficient to have overcome the resolution of any temper less ardent and ambitious than his own. After all, it must be acknowledged that it was to a great degree an insuperable difficulty; and, though overcome, in appearance, by Alfieri, yet in composition he had always two labours,—that of giving birth to ideas, and that of examining with the attention and scepticism of a foreigner the words in which he clothed them. This, perhaps, is the cause, that although, in process of time, his prose style became unexceptionable, and that of his tragedies full of fire and strength, his lyrics are such lamentable failures.
For nearly a year he was given up to the ungrateful task of clearing away the rubbish of another language, and placing the foundation stones of a pure and classic Italian. He retired to a village near Turin, that his attention might not be called off; and there, with a literary friend, he laboured at all that nauseates a schoolboy, with the still greater disgust of mere verbal difficulties which is felt by a man. After a year of much industry, he began to be aware that he should never attain his object as long as he merely translated himself from the French, which had become the language of his thoughts; and he resolved to pass six months in Tuscany, to learn, to hear, speak, think, and feel Tuscan only.
In this journey he sought the acquaintance of the first literary men, and exerted himself strenuously to acquire the knowledge of which he was so deficient. He never deceived himself by fancying his deficiencies were less than they were. He was born endowed with genius; uncultivated and empty of all knowledge as his mind was, yet it was filled with thought and feeling, and, during his solitary journeys and long incommunicative days of reverie, he had studied his own character. At one time he had kept a journal, in which he put down not only his actions, but their motives, investigating his moral nature in its inmost recesses. This was an exercise of mind which, joined to his natural talent, peculiarly adapted him to developement of feeling and motive, which is the essence of the tragic art; and it was towards this species composition that, from the first, he felt himself irresistibly impelled.
He had now fully entered on his dramatic enterprise. Several months before, he had written his tragedies of "Philip" and "Polinices," in French prose, which with unwearied industry, he put into Italian verse three or four several times; endeavouring to form a rhythm adapted to dialogue, and to concentrate and simplify his style as much as possible. While studying Italian, he had also applied himself to re-learning Latin; and the tragedies of Seneca suggested other subjects. "Antigone," "Agamemnon," "Orestes," and "Don Garzia," were all conceived, and in part written, while he was indefatigable in the labour, it cannot so well be said of polishing his language, as of modelling and remodelling it, as his greater use of Tuscan, and his critical taste suggested.
He had now an aim in life, from the pursuit of which he never deviated, but followed it up with incredible enthusiasm and perseverance. His labours were great in literature, yet confined chiefly to the formation of style; and he translated Sallust, and other Latin authors, for the sake of improving in force and conciseness. 1777.
Ætat.
28. He did not continue in one place: after a few months spent at Florence, he returned to Turin, recalled by the love of his friends and his stud: but during the following spring he obtained the necessary permission of the king to quit Piedmont and return to Tuscany, for the purpose of imbibing at the purest source that energetic and concise language, which he considered yielded in elegance and force of expression to no other in the world.
As the city where the purest Tuscan is spoken. Alfieri visited Siena, and spent the summer there. He there formed an intimacy which served to encourage him in his laborious pursuits; for he tells us he was never capable of arduous and sustained undertakings, except when the feelings of his heart were exercised by an intercourse of friendship or love. Francesco Gori was of ignoble birth, and his ostensible pursuits were those of traffic, which he pursued more for the sake of pleasing his family than for gain. In the obscurity of his warehouse he occupied himself with classical literature, and nurtured an admirable and delicate taste for the fine arts. Extreme philanthropy formed the essence of his character, and a warm-hearted sympathy, that led him to forgive and love all mankind. The idle and opulent nobles of the city could not, by their worthlessness, excite his hatred or contempt. With Tacitus in his hand, and the pure love of liberty in his heart, how could he hate the victims of tyranny? he might exclaim, with a poet of modern days, whose political principles were equally derived from the sensibility of his heart,—