Maffei nevertheless was to yield to one of the most extraordinary men that Italy ever produced, one brought up under so many disadvantages that it might seem impossible that he should occupy a high place in the literature of his country, and who nevertheless, by the mere force of will and character, has fought his way to almost the highest in his own field. It must be added that although Count VITTORIO ALFIERI (1749-1803) might probably have been eminent as an historian or a political writer, tragedy and satire were the only departments of poetry in which it seems possible that he should have excelled. This is as much as to say that he was by nature little of a poet. He was also little of an Italian, being by birth a Piedmontese, a people whom the Italians of that day regarded, from an ethnographical point of view, much as the Greeks of Philip’s day regarded the Macedonians, and who were in truth destined to work out the parallel by subduing the rest of the peninsula, though with very different aims and to very different results. Alfieri was indeed more like an Englishman than an Italian, and might well have sat as a model to some delineator of the haughty, eccentric, whimsical, misanthropic, hopelessly perverse, but on occasion extravagantly generous being who is still accepted on the Continent as the embodiment of British national character. He did, in fact, belong to a type more common in England than elsewhere, the patrician republican of the mould of Algernon Sidney or Savage Landor, animated by an unaffected passion for liberty, and yet arrogant, exacting, domineering; fired by a disinterested love of man, and always quarrelling with men.
Alfieri fortunately felt moved to write his Autobiography, a work of intense interest, and perhaps the most thoroughly sincere among celebrated books of its order of literature. It depicts a man continually under the influence of pride and discontent, but whom pride and discontent stimulate to lofty endeavour and noble actions. Vivid indeed is the picture of his self-contempt for his wasted youth and his ignorance of his own language, the speech of Piedmont being then the worst of all provincial jargons. Most interesting is the detail of his self-education, both in purity of diction and in the dramatic art. This psychological interest is relieved and enhanced by the detail of his numerous adventures, his extensive travels, and his love affairs, three of which were memorable. In London, in 1772, he fought, by the last rays of the setting sun, unattended by seconds, a duel with the injured husband of Lady Ligonier, and wounded in the right arm, was immediately afterwards back in the theatre out of which he had been summoned to the fray. His Milan adventure, if less romantic, was more whimsical: convinced of the unworthiness of his siren, he imitated Ulysses by compelling his servant to bind him to his chair until the craving for her company had passed away.
Alfieri’s third escapade of the kind is world-famous, his rescue of Louise von Stolberg, Countess of Albany, from the drunken husband who habitually maltreated her, and who, one blushes to record, was no other than Charles Edward Stuart, the chivalrous and adventurous Young Pretender of a former generation. Alfieri’s attachment to the Countess was undoubtedly deep and permanent, and although she seems to have forgotten him after his death, she felt for him when he was the only resource she had in the world. The intimacy might long have remained Platonic but for the extreme brutality of Charles Edward, which compelled the Countess to escape by Alfieri’s contrivance to a convent where she saw neither her husband nor her lover. After a while the Cardinal of York, the Pretender’s brother, offered her an asylum in a Roman palace, where her acquaintance with Alfieri became more intimate. Afterwards, legally separated by the interposition of the King of Sweden, she withdrew to Alsace, where Alfieri followed her. They eventually established themselves in Paris, and the death of Charles Edward made no change in their existence. Louise, though apparently not a warm-hearted, was a highly intellectual woman; half French, half German, she possessed a range of knowledge and accomplishment which Alfieri could hardly have found in any Italian woman at that date, and her sympathy, without doubt, contributed greatly to the development of his genius. Driven from France by the storms of the Revolution, which he had at first hailed with a warmth which he afterwards repented, Alfieri settled with his mistress at Florence. There he wrote the Misogallo, a furious denunciation of France, and exhausted by hard study and an ascetic life, died in October 1803, as, with an unconscious touch of irony, he was compelling himself to write comedies. There seems no ground for believing that he was privately married to the Countess, who honoured him with a monument beautifully sculptured by Canova. If, however, the mourning figure by the tomb represents the bereaved one, she has taken the lion’s share, Alfieri appearing merely as a medallion head in profile. Room should have been found for a bust at least, for whimsical, saturnine, arrogant as he was, he possessed not only a head but a heart. Scornful of superstition, he was endowed with deep religious feeling, and the defects of his harsh, angular character were at all events remote from those national failings which had chiefly contributed to the ruin of Italy.
It is remarkable indeed that a Piedmontese, who had to teach himself classical Italian with infinite labour, and whose character possessed few distinctively national traits, should have been the reviver of the national spirit in Italy. This Alfieri unquestionably was. He had what is so deplorably wanting among the gifted men of the golden age of Italian literature, a passion for freedom and a hatred of tyranny, which impart to his works, however remote in subject from modern times, the air of indignant protests against the subjection and degradation of his country. This feeling, as well as the haughty and self-sufficing independence of his character, brings him very near to the stoical Romans of the age of Nero, whose literary productions he approaches by his declamatory eloquence, his defective feeling for nature, and the generally studied and laboured character of his poetry. Had Seneca possessed the leading requisites of a tragic poet, he would have been a kind of Roman Alfieri. Comparing Alfieri’s tragedy with the modern form of the art which owes most to Seneca, the French drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are sensible of a great advance; not that Alfieri is comparable as a poet or a stylist to Corneille or Racine, but that his dramatic economy is improved by the suppression of much conventional machinery, and the subordination of amorous gallantry to more dignified and serious emotion.
The strongest family likeness prevails among Alfieri’s tragedies. “He is,” says Arnold, “a noble-minded, deeply interesting man, but a monotonous poet.” The quality of “narrow elevation” which Arnold finds in Alfieri is indeed most apparent throughout all his plays; but they are not, like so many productions of the classical school tame and frigid from pedantic over-correctness, nor are they untrue to nature through servile adherence to tradition and convention. Their dignity and nobility of feeling inspire deep respect; the author is evidently akin to the heroes he depicts, and in their place would have been capable of their actions. His genius did not lead him to the imitation of the Greeks; his plays are rather such as a Roman poet might have produced if he could have more completely emancipated himself from Greek models. He aimed at nervous conciseness, and attained it. The eloquence which he acquired by a Demosthenic severity of study may be fitter for the forum than the stage, but rarely degenerates into mere rhetoric. His theme is always some grand action derived from history or mythology. His predilection is rather for the heroes of liberty, like Timoleon or the Brutuses. Saul, however, is probably his most successful play upon the whole, though Myrrha may produce the greatest effect when an actress can be found competent for so exceptional a part. Philip the Second inspired Schiller’s Don Carlos. Antigone, Orestes, and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi may also be named among Alfieri’s most successful pieces.
Alfieri’s prose-writings possess no great value, except the Autobiography, which is invaluable alike from the interest of the character depicted and of the events narrated, and from its transparent candour. As a rule, the only quite trustworthy autobiographic delineations are the unconscious ones. Pepys has undoubtedly portrayed himself just as he was, but it is equally certain that he had no intention of doing so. Alfieri may or may not have depicted himself as he was, although the portrait is perfectly in harmony with the impression derived from his writings. But he has unquestionably depicted himself as he appeared to himself, and more could not be expected. Alfieri’s minor poems display the “narrow elevation” ascribed by Matthew Arnold to his tragedies. He has little music, fancy, or variety, but expresses strong feeling with unusual energy, especially when moved to wrath:
Was Angelo born here? and he who wove
Love’s charm with sorcery of Tuscan tongue
Indissolubly blent? and he whose song
Laid bare the world below to world above?
And he who from his lowly valley clove
The azure height and trod the stars among?
And he whose searching mind the monarch’s wrong
Fount of the people’s misery did prove?
Yea, these had birth when men might uncontrolled
Speak, read, write, reason with impunity;
Not from the chair was cowardice extolled;
Not for free thinking would indictment lie;
Nor did the city in her Book of Gold
Inscribe the name and office of the spy.
If Alfieri was a manifest child of Melpomene, the third great dramatic writer of the age bore the impress of Thalia with no less distinctness. CARLO GOLDONI’S memoirs paint with the utmost liveliness the born comedian, careless, light-hearted, proof by a happy temperament against all strokes of Fate, yet thoroughly respectable and honourable. Such characters abound in Italy, and wonderful it is that only one member of so observant and lively a race should have won an European reputation as a comic author. Tragedy has in some measure flourished since the death of Alfieri, but Goldoni still stands alone. The absence of any predecessor is explicable from the circumstances enumerated at the beginning of this chapter: the national style of comedy was not literary, and no literary reputation could be built upon or out of it; while those who followed a different path produced simply academic work devoid of all vitality. Goldoni broke the spell, and gave Italy a classical form of comedy, which has not indeed remained uncultivated, but has never since his time been cultivated by a master. He was born at Venice in 1707, and was the son of a physician. His dramatic tastes were inherited from his grandfather, a Modenese, and all the endeavours of his parents to direct his activity into other channels came to nothing. He was indeed educated for a lawyer, graduated, held at different times a secretaryship and a councillorship, seemed to have settled steadily down to the practice of law, when an unexpected invitation carried him off to Venice, and for years he did nothing but manage theatres and write plays, directing all his energies to supersede the national Comedy of Masks, and comedies of intrigue dependent upon intricacy of plot, by representations of actual life and manners. Many of his best plays were written in the Venetian dialect. At length (1761) umbrage, as was thought, at the vogue of Gozzi’s fairy dramas induced Goldoni to accept a royal invitation to Paris, where he spent the remainder of his life composing plays in French, and writing his memoirs in the same language. He survived the downfall of the monarchy, and died in 1793, just as the pension of which he had been deprived was about to be restored to him. The first half of his life had been full of vicissitudes and entertaining adventures, agreeably recounted in his memoirs.
The future master of comedy commenced his dramatic career with a melodrama, Amalasunta, which he burned, and followed this up with another, of whose success he afterwards professed himself ashamed. He was not long, nevertheless, in discovering his proper vocation; he inwardly, and from his point of view rightly—for he could never have been a Gozzi—declared war against the popular Comedy of Masks, and when a piece of his succeeded, whispered to himself, “Good, but not yet Molière.” The great Frenchman was the object of his idolatry, and justly, for not only was Molière the true monarch of the comic stage, but his period was neither too near nor too remote, and his world neither too like nor unlike Goldoni’s, for successful imitation. By 1753 Goldoni’s apprenticeship was over, and none but literary enemies contested his title of the Italian Molière, a title confirmed by the suffrage of posterity. Un Curioso Accidente, Il Vero Amico, La Bottega del Caffè, La Locandiera, and many other comedies that might be named, while true to the manners of a past age, retain all their freshness in our own. Italian audiences yet take delight in his pictures of their ancestors. “One of the best theatres in Venice,” says Symonds, “is called by his name. His house is pointed out by gondoliers to tourists. His statue stands almost within sight of the Rialto. His comedies are repeatedly given by companies of celebrated actors.” Yet as Cæsar called Terence a halved Menander, so we may term Goldoni a halved Molière. The Menandrine element in Molière is present with him; the Aristophanic is missing. Goldoni wants the French writer’s overpowering vis comica, and is happier in “catching the manners living as they rise” than in laying bare the depths of the heart. Wit, gaiety, elegance, simplicity, truth to nature, skill in dramatic construction, render him nevertheless a most delightful writer, and his fame is the more assured from his position as his country’s sole eminent representative in the region of polite comedy.
The eighteenth century had thus endowed Italy with dramatic poets of European reputation, worthy to be inscribed on the same roll as Racine and Molière. All the varied dramatic activity of the Cinque Cento, Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the two great pastoral dramas excepted, belonging essentially to a lower sphere, fails to counterweigh the masterpieces of Alfieri and Goldoni. Even their achievement, nevertheless, did not amount to the creation of a national drama. If tragedy and comedy can be said to have taken root at all, the latter degenerated, while the former put forth only sparse and occasional flowers. Alfieri’s best plays continue stock-pieces to this extent, that they are revived as offering the most suitable opportunities for the display of the brilliant histrionic genius which from time to time irradiates the Italian stage. A succession of gifted men—Monti, Foscolo, Manzoni, Pellico, Niccolini, Cossa—have continued the tradition, and on the whole the state of tragedy seems much the same in Italy as in England. Comedy, on the other hand, notwithstanding some encouraging signs of revival, is far from vigorous, and the melodrama which occupies the stage is devoid of literary pretensions. Under these discouraging circumstances it is not perhaps very extraordinary, though assuredly it is very amusing, that the Italian literati of the present day, as reported by their interviewer-general, Signor Ojetti, should gravely pronounce the drama which they cannot write a rudimentary and superannuated form of art in comparison with the novel which they can—ein ueberwundener Standpunkt, as would be said in Germany. The idea of modern romancers transcending the art of Shakespeare and Sophocles is delightful from its modesty; but it must be evident that the short story alone can rival the artistic finish of a perfect drama, for every romance on a large scale must necessarily be eked out by descriptions, reflections, and episodes unessential to the main action.