The attitude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri. But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral attitude and gesture which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth, and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the attitude and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the attitude and gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism. To have written tragedies whose whole value depended upon the striking exhibition of these qualities; and to have made this exhibition interesting, nay, fascinating to the very people, to the amiable, humane, indifferent, lying, feeble-spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, till these very men were ashamed of what they had hitherto been; to stamp the new generation with the clear-cut die of his own strong character; this was the reality of the mission which Alfieri had felt within himself: a reality which will be remembered when his plays shall have long ceased to be acted, and shall long have ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined himself to be a great poetic genius, and a great dramatic innovator: he scorned with loathing the works of Corneille, of Racine, and of Voltaire, all immeasurably more valuable as poetry and drama than his own; he hated the works of Metastasio, a poet and a playwright by the divine right of genius; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest Shakespeare should spoil the perfection of his own conceptions. He slaved for months and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth century. His use consisted in his mere existence among men so different from himself; and his dramas, his elaborately constructed and curtailed and corrected dramas, were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which the image of this strange new-fangled personality might be flashed everywhere into the souls of his contemporaries. To perceive the moral attitude and gesture specially characteristic of himself, to artificially correct and improve and isolate them in his own reality, and then to multiply their likeness for all the world; to know himself to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and to write plays whereof the heroes and heroines were mere repetitions of Alfieri; such was the mission of this powerful and spontaneous nature, of this self-conscious and self-manipulating poseur.
The success of that performance of Antigone on the amateur stage in the Spanish palace was very great. A young man, half lay, half ecclesiastic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, accustomed to write not the most sincere poetry, and to execute, perhaps, not the most creditable errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke Braschi—a young man named Vincenzo Monti, was present at this performance, or one of the succeeding ones; and from that moment became the author of the revolutionary tragedy of Aristodemo, the potential author of that famous ode on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners of new Italy. Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been; even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome assembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor greater than himself.
CHAPTER XI.
SEPARATION.
Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, perhaps, than at any other time of their lives; but this happiness had to be paid for. The false position in which, however faultlessly, they were placed; the illegitimate affection in which, however blamelessly, they were indulging; these things, offensive to social institutions, although in no manner wrong in themselves, had produced their fruit of humiliation, nay, of degradation. Fate is more of a Conservative than we are apt to think; it resents the efforts of any individual, be he as blameless as possible, to resist for his own comfort and satisfaction the uncomfortable and unsatisfactory arrangements of the world; it punishes the man who seeks to elude an unjust law by condemning him to the same moral police depôt, to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed; and Fate, therefore, soiled the poetic passion of Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the base practices of any illicit love. The manner in which Fate executes these summary lynchings of people's honour could not usually be more ingenious; there seems to be a special arrangement by which offenders are punished in their most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri and of Mme. d'Albany for refusing to sacrifice their happiness to the proprieties of a society which married girls of nineteen to drunkards whom they had never seen, but which would not hear of divorce; this punishment, falling directly only upon the man, but probably just as heavy upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation of the person whom she most loved and respected, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, unflinching, into a toady, a liar, and an intriguer.
The Countess of Albany, living in the palace of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, and under the special protection of the Pope, was entirely dependent on the good pleasure of the priestly bureaucracy of the Rome of Pius VI., that is to say, of about the most contemptible and vilest set of fools and hypocrites and sinners that can well be conceived; the Papacy, just before the Revolution, had become one of the most corrupt of the many corrupt Governments of the day. Cardinal York himself was a weak and silly, but honest and kind-hearted man; but Cardinal York was entirely swayed by the prelates and priests and priestlets and semi-priestly semi-lay nondescripts among whom he lived. He was responsible for the honour of the Countess of Albany, that is to say, of her husband and his brother; and the honour of the Countess of Albany depended exactly upon the remarks which the most depraved and hypocritical clergy in Europe, the people who did or abetted all the dirty work of Pius VI. and his Sacred College, chose to make or not to make about her conduct.
Such were the persons upon whom depended the liberty and happiness of Alfieri's lady, the possibility of that high-flown Platonic intercourse which constituted Louis d'Albany's whole happiness, and Alfieri's strongest incentive to glory; a word from them could exile Alfieri and lock the Countess up in a convent. The consequence of this state of things is humiliating to relate, since it shows to what baseness the most high-minded among us may be forced to degrade themselves. Already, during those few days' sojourn in Rome, before his stay in Naples and Mme. d'Albany's release from the Ursuline convent, Alfieri had spent his time running about flattering and wheedling the powers in command (that is to say, the corrupt ministers of the Papacy and their retinue of minions and spies), in order to obtain leave to inhabit the same city as his beloved and to see her from time to time; doing everything, and stooping to everything, he tells us, in order to be tolerated by those priests and priestlets whom he abhorred and despised from the bottom of his heart. "After so many frenzies, and efforts to make myself a free man," he writes, in his autobiography, "I found myself suddenly transformed into a man paying calls, and making bows and fine speeches in Rome, exactly like a candidate on promotion in prelatedom." At this price of bitter humiliation, nay, of something more real than mere humiliation, Alfieri bought the privilege of frequenting the palace of Cardinal York. But it was a privilege for which you could not pay once and for all; its price was a black-mail of humbugging, and wheedling, and dirt-eating.
Alfieri hated and despised all sovereigns and all priests; and if there were a sovereign and a priest whom he despised and hated more than the rest, it was the then reigning Pius VI., a vain, avaricious, weak-minded man, stickling not in the least at humiliating Catholicism before anyone who asked him to do it, by no means clean-handed in his efforts to enrich his family, without courage, or fidelity to his promise; a man whose miserable end as the brutally-treated captive of the French Republic has not been sufficient to raise to the dignity of a martyr. Of this Pope Pius VI. did Alfieri crave an audience, and to him did he offer the dedication of one of his plays; nay, the man who had sacrificed his fortune in order to free himself from the comparatively clean-handed despotism of Sardinia, who had stubbornly refused to be presented to Frederick the Great and Catherine II., who had declined making Metastasio's acquaintance on account of a too deferential bow which he had seen the old poet make to Maria Theresa; the man who had in his portfolios plays and sonnets and essays intended to teach the world contempt for kings and priests, this man, this Alfieri, submitted to having his cheek patted by Pope Braschi. This stain of baseness and hypocrisy with which, as he says, he contaminated himself, ate like a hidden and shameful sore into Alfieri's soul; yet, until the moment of writing his autobiography, he had not the courage to display this galling thing of the past even to his most intimate friends. To Louise d'Albany, to the woman between whom and himself he boasted that there was never the slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the force to tell the tale of that interview only some time later. Alfieri, honest enough to lay bare his own self-degradation, was not generous enough to hide the fact that this self-degradation was incurred out of love for her. That her hero should have stooped so low, so low that he scarcely dared to tell even her, surely this must have been as galling to the Countess of Albany as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself; this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dantesque passion, had been dragged down, by the impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating punishment which awaited all the basest love intrigues in this base Rome of the base eighteenth century.
And, after some time, the stock of toleration bought at the price of this baseness was exhausted. The clerical friends and advisers of Cardinal York, who had hitherto assured the foolish prince of the Church that he was acting for the honour of his brother and his brother's wife in leaving a young woman of thirty-one to the sole care of a young poet of thirty-four, each being well known to be over head and ears in love with the other; these prudent ecclesiastics, little by little, began to change their minds, and the success of Alfieri's plays, the general interest in him and his lady which that success produced, suggested to them that there really might be some impropriety in the familiarity between the wife of Charles Edward and the author of Antigone. The train was laid, and the match was soon applied. In April 1783 the Pretender fell ill in Florence, so ill that his brother was summoned at once to what seemed his death-bed. Charles Edward recovered. But during that illness the offended husband, who, we must remember, had offered a reward for Alfieri's murder, poured out to his brother, moved and reconciled to him by the recent fear of his death, all his grievances against the Tuscan Court, against his wife, and against her lover. A letter of Sir Horace Mann makes it clear that Charles Edward persuaded his brother that his ill-usage of his wife (which, however, Mann, with his spies everywhere, had vouched for at the time) was a mere invention, and part of an odious plot by which Alfieri had imposed upon the Grand Duke, the Pope, the society of Florence and Rome, nay, upon Cardinal York himself, in order to obtain their connivance in a shameful intrigue development. The Cardinal returned to Rome in a state of indignation proportionate to his previous saintly indifference to the doings of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; he discovered that he had been shutting his eyes to what all the world (by Alfieri's own confession) saw as a very hazardous state of things; and, with the tendency to run into extremes of a foolish and weak-minded creature, he immediately published from all the housetops the dishonour whose existence had never occurred to him before. To the Countess of Albany he intimated that he would not permit her to receive Alfieri under his roof; and of the Pope (the Pope who had so recently patted Alfieri's cheek) he immediately implored an order that Alfieri should quit the Papal States within a fortnight. The order was given; but Alfieri, in whose truthfulness I have complete faith, says that, knowing that the order had been asked for, he forestalled the ignominy of being banished by spontaneously bidding farewell to the Countess of Albany and to Rome.