"I hate thy want of love and truth:
How should I then hate thee?"
Self-knowledge deracinated pride in himself, and contempt for others; and thus, humbly occupied in his shop, he could extend forbearance to all, except the primal causes of the degradation of his countrymen; while his only happiness was derived from books, and his chief grief from comparing himself and his times with the men and times of which he read.
There is a simplicity in Italian manners that renders the friendship between count Alfieri and Gori, the mercer, by no means extraordinary. To the sympathy produced by an agreement in opinions was added the respect which Alfieri felt for the virtuous qualities of his unpretending friend. Their talk was of the ancient glory of their country, and of the literary ambition of Alfieri. In the course of conversation, Gori suggested the conspiracy of the Pazzi as a good subject for a tragedy. Alfieri was ignorant of the history of the republic of Florence, and had never heard of the Pazzi. Gori placed the Florentine annals of Machiavelli in his hands. Machiavelli (whatever his motives were for writing "The Prince") was an enthusiastic republican. He tells us in his letters, that while writing the history, he delighted himself by exposing the conduct of the princes who had ruined Italy: his spirit of freedom found an echo in Alfieri's heart, and so sharpened his hatred of despotism, and his love of liberty, that, throwing aside his tragedies, he wrote a treatise on tyranny,—a work of eloquence, but rather a juvenile ebullition of feeling, than an argumentative essay.
On the advance of winter, Alfieri transferred himself to Florence; and here an event happened that altered the colour of his future life, through the influence of a constant attachment, which, accompanied by esteem for the good qualities and talents of its object, remained fixed in his heart to the end of his life.
Louisa de Stolberg, countess of Albany, was at that time twenty-five years of age, beautiful and full of talent. Her rank and wealth gave her a distinguished place in society. She was the wife of the last of the Stuarts who made pretensions to the throne of England, who unfortunately disgraced his illustrious house, and even the private station to which he was reduced, by habits the most deplorable. Alfieri now regarded his future prospects as fixed: he had long determined never to marry, considering that, under the despotic government to which he was a subject, the ties of husband and father would add weight to the chains imposed upon him: attached for life to a woman whom he esteemed worthy of him, and beyond all things ambitious of distinguishing himself as an author and a defender of the cause of liberty, he began to put into execution the schemes which had long presented themselves to his imagination, for acquiring entire personal freedom. The nobles of Piedmont were in a peculiarly enslaved state: they could not quit the territories of their sovereign except by especial leave, granted for a limited time; nor could they publish any writings in a foreign country, without the licence of their native prince, under penalty of a fine, and even imprisonment, "if" (so the law was expressed) "it was necessary to make a public example." These shackles were intolerable to a man of independent mind, bent upon giving testimony of his abhorrence of despotic rule: but few men would have freed themselves at the cost that Alfieri paid. He came to a resolve to make a donation of the whole of his property to his sister Julia, reserving to himself only the annual income of 1400 sequins, or about 600l. a year, the half of his actual receipt. To execute this design, the king's permission was necessary, who readily gave it, "being," says Alfieri, "as willing to get rid of me as I was to emancipate myself from his authority."
The transfer, however, was not completed without a good deal of annoyance; and Alfieri was irritated, at one time, into making a declaration, that, if his brother-in-law would not receive the donation, he must the count's abandonment of his whole property; and that he would resign his claim to every possession rather than be fettered by the laws attendant upon keeping it. In the exaltation of his imagination, he almost imagined that this latter offer would be acted on; and, finding himself reduced to merely a few thousand sequins of ready money, he fell into his second fit of avarice, selling his horses, and all his superfluous plate, furniture, and even dress, renouncing the Sardinian uniform, to which he had adhered, from boyish vanity, even after quitting the service. He spent a good deal of money in books; but this was his sole expense; while his abstemiousness of living, directed by economy, became of the most rigid kind. Thus, even in extremes, resolved never to marry, resolved to be an author, he completed sacrifices, which a thousand circumstances might afterwards have caused him to regret, but which, he assures us, he never for a moment repented. He did not confide the secret of this change in his affairs to the countess until it was past recal; for, as their ultimate effect was to render their union more stable and permanent, he felt that she might consider it right, as a mark of her disinterestedness, to oppose them. When all was over, her blame was of no avail, and she forgave the mystery he had practised.
These various annoyances, joined to the perturbations of love, and the ardour of his literary application, occasioned an illness from which he only recovered when the season of summer brought that healthiness of feeling, that lightness of spirit, and that energy for composition, which summer and its heats always imparted to his constitution. During this summer, Alfieri, as he tells us, "in a frantic delirium of a love of freedom," wrote his tragedy of the "Pazzi," and that of "Mary Stuart" (Mary Queen of Scots); the latter at the request of the countess of Albany. During the following year he completed these and made the first sketch of "Rosmunda," "Ottavia," and "Timoleon." Since his tragedies have become so numerous, and many of his best are written, it will be as well to glance over them, and to give some account of his progress and success in an art to which he devoted his life and fortune.
Energy and conciseness are the distinguishing marks of Alfieri's dramas. Wishing to bring the whole action of the piece into one focus, he rejected altogether the confidantes of the French theatre, so that his dramatis personæ are limited to the principals themselves. The preservation of the unities of time and place also contributed to curtail all excrescences; so that his tragedies are short, and all hear upon one point only, which he considered the essence of unity of action. Thus, in the "Merope," there are but four interlocutors, the queen and her son, his foster-father, and the tyrant. Instead, therefore, as is the case in the French dramas, of the action being carried on by a perpetual talk about it, at once tedious and unnatural, the interest is always at its height between the parties themselves; and it is singular, in the "Merope" in particular, with what talent and success he keeps the action in perpetual progress, and the passions developed by such slender means. It was the turn of Alfieri's character to consider it a duty in an author rather to conquer difficulties than to acquire facilities. He would read no other tragedians, for fear of imitating them, and abstained from a perusal of the great master of the art, Shakspeare, from the same mistaken notion. Genius need not fear to be imitative; but genius, unaided by cultivation, and by a study of what has gone before, can never surpass what is already written: it were as if a scientific man were to refuse to be initiated in the discoveries of science, that he might pursue his labours in a new and original path. Thus he might, we will say, re-invent gunpowder and printing, but never a new law and a new power. To use a more homely illustration, it were as if an agriculturist refused to manure the ground, and was bent on forcing the native soil, to produce by labour what would arise with greater fertility and ease if aided by extraneous nutriment. It is a law of mechanics, never to waste power, but to proportionate on all occasions the means to the end. If, instead of refusing to read the finest dramatic works, Alfieri had studied in them the genius and essence of the art; he might; instead of simply restricting his invention to the bald and inconclusive expedient of contracting the personages of his drama, have invented some original method of combining the simplicity of design consequent on an observance of the unities, with a more natural and inforced arrangement of plot, and with a greater variety and truth of character.
The great distinction between Shakspeare and almost every other dramatic writer arises from his developement and variety of character: all his personages are individuals. In other authors, we have a lover, an ambitious man, a tyrant, or a victim of tyranny; but in Shakspeare it is not the passion that makes the man, but the peculiar character of the person that gives reality and life to the passion. Thus Richard III. and Macbeth are both ambitious; but how differently do their respective dispositions modulate their conduct and feelings! The cruel, remorseless Richard can never, in a single line he utters, be mistaken for the weak, vacillating usurper, whose cruelties result from the necessities of his situation, and not from inborn ferocity of character. Juliet, Imogen, and Rosalind, are alike girls in love; but how variously do they display their sentiments! the ardent Italian, the fond, devoted wife, and the sprightly, spirited daughter of an exiled prince, are all individuals characterised by distinctive marks; so that a painter would give to each a physiognomy utterly dissimilar the one from the other. If Alfieri had read Shakspeare, he might have discovered and appreciated this incomparable mark of his excellence; and his knowledge of the human heart would have led him to imitate a model which, if succeeded in, could not, from its very nature, bear any resemblance to mere plagiarism. He himself felt that one tyrant should not quite resemble another, nor one lover be but the mirror of another: but so it is with him, with few exceptions—situation, not character, forms the interest of his pieces.
Besides this, Alfieri was not an imaginative poet: his sonnets and longer poems are failures; his tragedies are vacant of ideal imagery; his sensible objects are never animated by a soul infused into them by the speaker; his daggers and poisons, and all the other tragic paraphernalia, are the mere things themselves—the poet's eye never gives "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." His inventive powers consisted in being able to conceive situations of passion and interest, and giving to his personages feelings and language at once natural, powerful, and pathetic.