But this very celebrity was the cause of the disaster that hung over his head, and, by drawing attention to him, engendered enmity and disturbance. His familiar intercourse with the countess, and the daily habit of his life, in forming a part of the society she gathered around her, began to excite censure: this roused at once his fears and indignation. His mode of life was in strict accordance with the notions of propriety, as they rule manners in Italy. Injurious and to be deprecated as the system of society is, no individual thinks, when he follows the example of the whole of his countrymen, that he should be selected as an object for blame. However, in a moral and religious view, the so-named friendship of the countess and Alfieri was blameable, yet they scrupulously attended to the rules of decorum, which form the whole of an Italian's conscience, generally speaking, and believed that they had every right to be happy in each other. As we have said in another place, we are not inclined to bestow vehement blame on individual conduct, resulting from a system of manners which has endured for ages, while that system itself merits the utmost abhorrence, and, we are happy to be able to say, is in progress of being extirpated in Italy: until it is, there can be no hope of moral regeneration, or for the happiness and improvement of its inhabitants.
However, it must be remembered that though, especially in those days, no one would have been so unreasonable or barbarous as to prevent a lady from having a cavaliere servente, yet the peculiar cavaliere she selects is usually forbidden; and as much misery is often produced by an interference in the lady's choice as by a total prohibition to be allowed a friend at all. In the present instance, the husband of the countess complained to his brother, the priests of the holy city were roused to a perception of the scandal, and the pope induced to consider it right to interfere. Alfieri found only one mode of mitigating the violence of the menaced storm, which was to meet it: he voluntarily quitted Rome, and, to prevent any actual measures of prohibition and banishment, went into voluntary exile.
Affections and habits which had subsisted so long could not be thus rudely torn up without intense suffering. After several years of happiness, Alfieri found himself cast from the shelter he had selected, wherein to place his warm and sensitive heart, upon solitude, uncertainty, and bitter regret. Poetry and composition became distasteful to him; he could not even enjoy his friend Gori's society, whom he visited immediately upon quitting Rome: he was ashamed to annoy him by his melancholy, and his restlessness and desire for travel returned. He visited Venice, and wandered for some time in Lombardy, and then again returned to Siena, to attend to the printing of six other tragedies, although he had become indifferent even to the lately engrossing desire of fame; and then he suddenly resolved to visit England, for the sole purpose of buying horses. 1783.
Ætat.
34. He had long put himself on short allowance with regard to these favourite animals; but, having saved a large sum of ready money, during several years, at first of parsimony, and then of economy, he determined to spend it on the purchase and maintenance of a number of English horses of the best breed. A journey thus undertaken, with but one object, was executed with a mixture of impetuosity and persevering patience characteristic of Alfieri. He went to England; he bought his horses, fourteen in number, to equal that of his tragedies; he transported them safely across the straits of Dover, conducted them with unwearied care through France, and led them across Mont Cenis with a success—they being injured neither in wind or limb—on which he for the moment prided himself scarcely less than on his dramatic labours.
On his return to Italy, he remained a few weeks at Turin; and the king showed a disposition to employ him under government. His minister sounded the count: but he refused to entertain any proposition on the subject; for, although he acknowledges that the sovereigns of the house of Savoy were not tyrannically inclined, but showed every inclination to benefit their subjects, his uncompromising, and even fierce, spirit of independence spurned every shackle, and he felt to breathe more freely when he had quitted the territories of Piedmont. The countess of Albany was now on her way to Baden for the summer. She passed northwards along the shores of the Adriatic, while Alfieri proceeded south, by Modena and Pistoia, to Siena. He had resisted the temptation of crossing the narrow portion of Italy between them, and obtaining a brief interview; but when she had arrived at Baden, and he at Siena, this fortitude gave way, and he suddenly left his horses, and his friend Gori, and posted with all haste to Alsatia, there for three months to enjoy her society.
During the two years of absence which he had endured. Alfieri had forgotten poetry, study, glory, and his tragedies. But the countess's presence awoke every dormant energy, and scarcely had he arrived, before he conceived and wrote "Agis," "Sofonisba" and "Mirra." The last deserves to be particularly mentioned as one of the best of his dramas, particularly as he overcomes difficulties of the most appalling description. "I had never thought," he says, "either of Myrrha or Biblis as subjects for the drama. But, in reading Ovid's "Metamorphoses," I hit upon the affecting and divinely eloquent speech of Myrrha to her nurse, which caused me to burst into tears, and, like a flash of lightning, awoke in me the idea of a tragedy. It appeared to me that a most original and pathetic piece might be written, if the author could contrive that the spectator should discover by degrees the horrible struggles of the burning but pure heart of the more miserable than guilty Myrrha, without her betraying the half, nor scarcely owning to herself so criminal a passion. My idea was, that she should do in my tragedy what Ovid describes her as relating, but do it in silence."
There is something touchingly beautiful in the first description of Myrrha, in a scene between her mother and her nurse. She is described as so gentle, docile, soft, and pliable of nature—so fearful of doing wrong—so sweetly earnest to please her parents—and now to be labouring under a melancholy so dark and gloomy, as to deface her beauty, and bow her in appearance to the grave. As the action is developed, the notion that she is under a supernatural curse adds to the awe and pity of the reader; but, at last, it must be confessed, her violence and frenzy pass the bounds of modest nature, and the passion she nurtures fails in exciting our sympathy. This is the fault of the subject; inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability: but then a worse evil would ensue; and the more possible such criminal passion becomes, the more violently does the mind revolt from dwelling on it.
While at Baden, Alfieri received the afflicting intelligence of the unexpected death of his friend Gori. This misfortune disturbed his enjoyment of the last days of his visit, which of themselves were sad, from the approximation of so painful and bitter a separation. With reluctance and grief he left the countess and returned to Siena; but his sorrow was too acute to admit of a prolonged stay in a town where he had enjoyed the company of a friend lost for ever. He removed to Pisa; while the countess took up her abode at Bologna. The Apennines only divided them, but he dared not cross them. The gossip of the small Italian towns is unconceivably eager and pertinacious; and it was necessary for her future liberty to guard their conduct from all remark. Early in the following spring, the countess departed for Paris, resolving to fix herself in France, where she had friends, relations, and resources. In the month of August she again visited Baden, and Alfieri joined her. Again his mind was vivified and warmed by happiness, and again two tragedies were the result of the inspiration. The subjects were the Brutus of the monarchy of Rome and the Brutus who died at Philippi. In the first he displays great force and energy; but the second, we must be permitted to say, is a complete failure. To make a perfect equality of sacrifice between the two heroes, as Lucius Junius Brutus caused his sons to be decapitated, so he makes his descendant, Marcus, assassinate his parent. The idea that Cæsar was the father of Brutus is so totally devoid of foundation, and so little in consonance with the simple majesty of the character of the patriot, that it deteriorates from the interest of the drama, and, instead of exalting him, the discovery, the resolution he declares nevertheless to persist in the assassination, the sympathy and admiration he gains, is all so feeble, so puerile, and so false, that it is astonishing that Alfieri did not detect his mistake. To us, who possess the most admirable portrait ever drawn of magnanimous and single-minded virtue in Shakspeare's delineation of the character of Brutus, this failure becomes more glaring, and gives further proof of the Italian poet's error in not studying the pages of the greatest writer the world ever produced.
After some months spent at Colmar, the countess returned to Paris; while Alfieri remained at the former place, writing letters and sonnets, mourning over his separation, and correcting his tragedies. He passed two or three years at this place, the countess joining him during the summers. In that of 1787, he had a most dangerous illness. His friend, the abbate Caluso, came from Turin to visit him; and but for this illness, he had been perfectly happy. On the approach of winter that year, he accompanied the countess back to Paris, and established himself there. The death of her husband restored her to liberty; but a number of circumstances led them to continue for some time in France. Whether they were married now, is a secret that never has been revealed; but their union was acknowledged, and it was understood that their constant, inviolable attachment had received from time a sanction which prevented any blame from being cast on it by their relations and friends. Alfieri mourned over the necessity that brought him back to his abjured Gallicisms; but he was somewhat consoled, during a three years' residence in Paris, by superintending and bringing out an edition of his tragedies, on which he bestowed the last labours of correction with regard to style, and brought the language as near to his standard of perfection as he was capable of attaining.
The disagreeable and, to his sensitive temperament, irritating task of correcting the press, seems to have exercised an injurious influence over his temper and genius. According to his own account, it dried up his brain, quenched the fire of youthful enthusiasm, and prevented his ever again writing with equal vigour and felicity. After terminating the correction of his tragedies, he fortunately betook himself to writing the memoirs of his life, which are the groundwork from which the present pages are taken. It is written unaffectedly, and with great frankness and self-knowledge; the style is unstudied, and the egotism of feeling which produced it imparts extreme interest to the details. After bringing down the history of his life till the year 1790, when he was forty-one years of age, he still felt an utter inability to any high flight in literature, and he occupied himself in translating the "Æneid" and the Comedies of Terence. He had long enthusiastically admired the versification of Virgil, and tried to model his own upon it, adapting it, at the same time, to dramatic dialogue. This circumstance is curious, since no style can be so opposite; the mellifluous, dignified, and graceful flow of the Latin poet being a contrast to the rough and concise energy of the modern Italian. This observation regards, however, only his tragedies; less praise must be bestowed on his other productions in verse: his translation of the "Æneid" is feeble in the extreme; his longer original poems are devoid of even secondary merit; and his love sonnets are, to say all in a word, the very antipodes of his immortal master, Petrarch. Alfieri is a great tragedian: it is impossible to read his best dramas without being carried away by the eloquence and passion of the dialogue, and deeply interested by the situations of struggle or peril in which his personages are placed. The rapidity of the action, and the earnestness and life with which every scene is instinct, renders it impossible to close the volume till the catastrophe ends all. Alfieri was also an excellent prose writer: his treatise on "Princes and Literature" is full of power; the style is correct, flowing, yet simple, and without meretricious ornament. The pure spirit of independence burns like a holy lamp throughout, and gives a charm to every sentiment and expression. But never was line so distinctly drawn between the poetry of circumstance, so to speak, and ideal poetry: In all the pages of Alfieri there is not one imaginative image; and we feel this most in his lyrics, since ideality is the soul of lyric poetry. He seems never to have been conscious of this defect. He would readily have admitted that Dante and Petrarch were superior to him in genius; but he seems unaware that they possessed a quality of which not one glimmering ray is to be found in the whole course of the flood of rhymes to the composition of which he alludes frequently as being the overflowings of poetic inspiration. It is possible that Alfieri might have been a great novelist, had he ever turned his attention to that species of composition. Or had he continued to invent, instead of drying his brain up with the irksome task of correcting what he had already written, he might have bestowed on us tragedies finer than any we have of his, or, at least, several equal to the "Saul." But, with all his philosophy and self-examination, he did not understand the texture and capabilities of his intellect.
To return to his life in Paris. The disquietude arising from the French revolution added to the irritable state of Alfieri's mind. We all see the visible universe through a medium formed by our individual peculiarities; but it is curious to find the advocate of liberty lay most stress on his fear lest the tumults of Paris should interrupt the completion of Didot's edition of his works. Probably his intense abhorrence of the French prevented his fostering rational hopes for the ultimate advantages to be gained by the overthrow of the time-worn and corrupt monarchy of France, at the same time that it prevented his ever being blinded by any illusion as to the real character of the events passing around him. He prides himself on never having seen or conversed with any one of the revolutionary leaders, and on having always regarded the rise of a lawless democracy as the stepping-stone to military despotism. From the first, he was eager to get away from these scenes of bloodshed and horror, and in the spring of 1791 accompanied the countess of Albany to England. This country did not please her; and he, grown querulous and subject to the gout, was quickly disgusted by the climate, and annoyed by the peculiar habits of life of the English. A great portion of his and the countess's fortune was in the French funds; and the fall of the assignats made it advisable for them to live in the country where they still bore a value. This circumstance induced them to return to Paris; and, resolving to fix themselves there, they took a house, furnished it, and Alfieri collected a voluminous library: but the whirlwind that swept over unhappy France included them in its devastations. They became alarmed by the increase of lawless violence; and when, on the 10th of August, 1792, Louis XVI. was dragged from the Tuilleries and imprisoned in the Temple, they determined to fly from a city, where it appeared that no one of rank or wealth could remain in safety. The impetuosity of the poet's character was of great advantage on this occasion. With infinite difficulty passports were obtained for the countess and himself; and they fixed on the 20th of August for their departure. The impatience of Alfieri caused them to anticipate their journey, and they set out on the 18th. With a good deal of difficulty they passed the barrier of St. Denis, and hastened to a place of safety. Two days after, on the 20th, the municipality of Paris sent to arrest the countess: had she remained, she would have been thrown into prison, and, in all probability, have fallen a victim during the massacres of the 2d of September. Not finding her, their income arising from the French funds was sequestrated, their furniture, horses, and books confiscated, and though foreigners, they were both declared emigrants. Alfieri chiefly lamented his library, and the edition of his works. Some years after, a French general, then at Turin, with a good deal of ostentation, offered to obtain the restoration of his books, a list of which he sent him. Alfieri has left about 1600 volumes: the list contained the names of 150 of the least valuable. He refused to avail himself of what he ironically calls a "French restitution;" and surely, if national contempt and hatred is ever pardonable, it was to be excused in an Italian, who saw his country over-run by soi-disant liberators, who displayed their friendly intentions by a thousand acts of plunder and arrogance.