There is no history more alternately desperate and hopeful than that of the scattered Italian states in their efforts to form a united nation. Many forces fuse in the progress of such a popular movement, and each force has its own particular spokesman or leader. The prophet and the soldier, the poet and the statesman, each gives his share of genius. Those men who seemed to represent the most potent forces in this history are included here.
[CONTENTS]
ALFIERI
[ALFIERI, THE POET]
Alfieri was more than a great poet, he was the discoverer of a new national life in the scattered states of Italy. Putting aside consideration of his tragedies as literature, no student of the eighteenth century can fail to appreciate his influence over Italian thought. It was as though a people who had forgotten their nationality suddenly heard anew the stories of their common folk-lore. The race of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Tasso spoke again in the words of Alfieri.
It was high time that disunited Italy should find a poet’s voice. There was no vigor, no resolution, no originality from Turin to Naples, people of all classes were sunk in apathy. No wonder that foreign lovers of mediæval Italy turned their eyes away from the seats of so much former glory; there seemed little hope in a people given over to trivial personal enjoyment. There was no liberty of speech or action—sentiment, reason, passion were all measured by the grand-ducal yard-stick.
At about the middle of this artificial eighteenth century, in 1749, Vittorio Alfieri was born at Asti, in Piedmont. His parents were of the upper rank in the close social order of the small kingdom, his father Antonio Alfieri, a man of independent means, who, as one biographer has it, “had never soiled his mind with ambition or his hands with labor.” His mother was the widow of the Marquis of Cacherano, and had two daughters and a son before she married Antonio Alfieri. After the latter’s death, which occurred when Vittorio was scarcely a year old, she married again, and it was this stepfather, the Chevalier Giacinto Alfieri di Magliano, who stood in place of father to Vittorio and his sister, as well as to their older half-brother and sisters. Although these other children were near his own age the boy Vittorio seems to have passed a lonely childhood, driven into unusual solitude by the waywardness of his nature.