Builders of United Italy

by Rupert Sargent Holland

Finally he left London and went to Holland. There he met Don Joseph d’Acunha, the Portuguese Ambassador, a man of considerable literary taste, who induced him to read Machiavelli, and first led him to think of trying his literary skill. At The Hague he also fell deeply in love, and, quite according to the fashionable custom of the time, with a young married woman. For the moment his fits of morbidness and continual unrest left him, he contrived constantly to be with the woman he loved, and even followed her and her husband to Spa. A short time afterwards the husband started for Switzerland, and the young wife returned to The Hague. For ten days Alfieri was constantly in her society, then came a message from her husband bidding her follow him. She wrote Alfieri a note saying farewell and sent it to him through D’Acunha after she had left the city. The youth was prostrated and with the violence of his nature planned to kill himself. He complained of illness and had himself bled. When he was alone he tore off the bandages with the idea of bleeding to death. His faithful valet, however, knew the peculiar nature of his master, and entered Alfieri’s room. The bandages were replaced, and the incident ended, although it was long before the young man could recover from the parting with his fair lady. He passed through Belgium to Switzerland, and so on back to Piedmont, still wrapped in recollections, and unable to awaken any lasting interest.

Living with his sister, first in the country, and later in Turin, a short term of peace succeeded in Alfieri’s life. He set himself to reading, and studied with considerable care the popular French authors, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Plutarch, however, became his chief companion. In one of the most characteristic pages of his memoirs we find him writing, “The book of all others which gave me most delight and beguiled many of the tedious hours of winter, was Plutarch. I perused five or six times the lives of Timoleon, Cæsar, Brutus, Pelopidas, and some others. I wept, raved, and fell into such a transport of fury, that if any one had been in the adjoining chamber they must have pronounced me out of my senses. Every time I came to any of the great actions of those celebrated individuals, my agitation was so extreme that I could not remain seated. I was like one beside himself, and shed tears of mingled grief and rage at having been born in Piedmont and at a period and under a government where it was impossible to conceive or execute any great design.” Plutarch first set before him vividly the contrast between the Italy of the past and of his own day. As a result he became dissatisfied with his own inability to win any high distinction.

The winter of his twentieth year found Alfieri still without any definite plans, now studying astronomy, now considering a diplomatic career. With spring he determined again to travel, and in May set off for Vienna. The spirit of unrest had given place to a brooding melancholy. In this sense of the times being out of joint and himself without work to do was born the gradual desire to write something different from and in a more heroic strain than the rigorously conservative dramas of the day. He traveled with Montaigne’s Essays in his pockets, and Montaigne, he says, first taught him to think. He still found difficulty in reading Italian and much preferred foreign authors to those of his own land.

In Vienna Alfieri had a chance to meet the most eminent of then living Italian authors, a man much admired in his generation. The opportunity he declined. “I had seen Metastasio,” he says, “in the gardens of Schönbrunn, perform the customary genuflection to Maria Theresa in such a servile and adulatory manner, that I, who had my head stuffed with Plutarch, and who embellished every theory, could not think of binding myself, either by the ties of familiarity or friendship, with a poet who had sold himself to a despotism which I so cordially detested.” In Berlin he was presented to Frederick the Great, and as he writes “mentally thanked Heaven I was not born his slave. Towards the middle of November I departed from this Prussian encampment, which I regarded with detestation and horror.”

From Berlin the young man went to Denmark, thence to Sweden, thence to Russia. He says, “I approached Petersburg with a mind wound up to an extraordinary pitch of anxiety and expectation. But alas! no sooner had I reached this Asiatic assemblage of wooden huts, than Rome, Genoa, Venice, and Florence rose to my recollections, and I could not refrain from laughing. What I afterwards saw of this country tended still more strongly to confirm my first impression that it merited not to be seen. Everything but their beards and their horses disgusted me so much, that during the six weeks I remained among these savages I wished not to become acquainted with any one, nor even to see the two or three youths with whom I had associated at Turin, and who were descended from the first families of the country. I took no measure to be presented to the celebrated Autocratrix Catherine II., nor did I even behold the countenance of a sovereign who in our days has out-stripped fame.”

A little later he was back in England, and now again he fell in love, this time also with a married woman of rank. With a truly Byronic audacity he defied all the conventions, accompanied the woman everywhere, and became a subject of town scandal. Finally confronted by the husband, he fought a duel with swords in a field near St. James’s Park, his left arm being in a sling at the time as the result of a bit of too daring horsemanship. Alfieri was slightly wounded, and the husband declared himself satisfied. Shortly after the latter sued for divorce, bringing the Italian’s name into the case. The newspapers took up the scandal, and the matter became a cause celèbre. Alfieri was on the point of proposing marriage, when the woman, by her own confessions, told him that such a result was impossible. With his ardor completely cooled and his mind given to the bitterest thoughts he left London, and after short stays in The Hague and Paris journeyed into Spain.

In Paris he had bought the best known Italian authors and at this time commenced to read them, although it was not until much later that he began to appreciate them at their real worth. He did, however, carry them with him on his travels, and gradually learned something at first hand of that great galaxy, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. His mind was not yet ripe for any study, even as he traveled in Spain he was still subject to those wild outbreaks of despondency and passion which alternately seemed to seize upon him. He became a creature of chance whims, now he was ready to yield to the quiet contentment of a suitable marriage, now burning with rage against all the customs of society. Morbid ideas continually pressed his footsteps. The atmosphere of a malevolent passion seems almost always surrounding the great tragedies he later penned, and that atmosphere was generated by a nature which from earliest youth had been extraordinarily violent. His temper was wholly ungovernable. One evening in Madrid, as Alfieri’s faithful valet, the companion of all his travels, was curling his hair, he accidentally pulled it so sharply with the tongs that Alfieri winced. Instantly he sprang from his chair, and seizing a heavy candlestick, hurled it at the servant. It struck the man on the temple, and instantly his face was covered with blood. He rushed at his master, but fortunately a young Spaniard who was present came to the rescue, and separated them. Immediately Alfieri was covered with shame. “Had you killed me,” he said to the man, “you would have acted rightly. If you wish, kill me while I sleep to-night, for I deserve it.” The valet took no such reprisal, he had been with his young master long enough to understand the sudden outbursts of his temper, and was content to keep the two blood-stained handkerchiefs that had bandaged his head and show them occasionally to Alfieri as a reminder.

In Lisbon the traveler formed a close friendship with the Abbot of Caluso, whom he called a “true, living Montaigne.” The Abbot tried to interest the young man in literature, induced him to write some verses, and gave him the benefit of his criticism. For a short time the interest in poetry lasted, then it flagged, and again Alfieri felt himself without any purpose. He decided to return home, and in May, 1772, arrived at Turin.

Now he took a house for himself, furnished it elaborately, and made it the headquarters of a youthful society that sought amusement in various forms. Some of them wrote, and Alfieri tried his pen for their amusement, but soon tired of writing as a sport, and gave himself up to other occupations. Continually searching for something to still his restlessness he again fell in love, this time with a woman of rank, some ten years his senior, and of a most unenviable reputation. He became absolutely her slave, worked himself into frenzies on her account, would consider nothing but the happiness of being with her. He fell very ill, but when he recovered found himself as much in love as ever. For two years he lived in this state of obsession, tormented by self-reproach, but unable to rid himself of his own yoke.

Finally he decided to quit Turin and break his fetters. When he was only a short distance on the road to Rome his resolution failed and he returned. Again he resolved to leave the city for a year. The year lasted eight days. He was thoroughly ashamed, disliked being seen in Turin, but could not keep away. He felt finally that he must take one last stand or lose all self-respect and control forever. He had his hair cut so short that he dared not appear in society, and shut himself into his house to read. He could not keep his thoughts on the books, and tried composition. He wrote a sonnet, and sent it to a friend, and received a reply highly praising it. Then he remembered that a year before as he sat watching by the sick bed of the woman who had so charmed him he had lightly outlined a tragedy on the life of Cleopatra, taking his subject from tapestries that hung in the room. He threw himself into the work of writing that tragedy now, and found that interest in it drove all other thoughts away. He wrote rapidly, continually, only stopping when he was completely tired. When those times came, still frightened with the possibility of leaving the house, he had himself tied into a chair. He only allowed himself freedom when he knew he had won self-control. By that time he had finished his tragedy in blank verse called “Cleopatra,” and a short farce called “The Poets,” the latter ridiculing the former. He sent them to a theater in Turin, where they were produced on June 16, 1775, and met with success. The author did not value either play highly himself, and sought to have them withdrawn. He wrote later, comparing these works with those of his contemporaries, “The sole difference which existed between their pieces and mine was that the former were productions of learned incapacity, whereas mine was the premature offspring of ignorance, which promised one day to become something.”