Mme. d'Albany, if I may judge by the enormous piles of her letters which I have myself seen, and by the report of my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, who has examined another huge collection for my benefit, was getting to make herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, reading so many hours a day, writing letters so many more hours; taking the quite unenthusiastic, business-like interest in literature and politics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory, more cynical, more misanthropic and tittle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one such is preserved in the library at Florence) in the hall, pursuing and flogging street-boys because they splashed his stockings by playing in the puddles; insulting Ginguené and General Miollis when they attempted to be civil; groaning over the victories of the French, rejoicing over the brutal massacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan populace; going to Florence (when they were spending the summer in a villa) for the pleasure of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of witnessing (as Gino Capponi records) the French prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines being pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary mob. Besides such demonstrations of an unamiable disposition as these, working with the fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a holiday at that house where the doggrel verses were written. The Countess of Albany, who had been so horribly unhappy with her legitimate husband, must have been rather dreary of soul with her world-authorised lover.
It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, desultory, neither happy nor unhappy woman, rapidly growing old, watching the century draw to a close amid chaos and misery,—it was at this moment that an eccentric English prelate, Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the house on the Lung Arno a friend of his, a French painter, a former pupil of David, and who had won the Prix de Rome, by name François Xavier Fabre. M. Fabre was French, but he was a royalist; he hated the Revolution; he had settled in Italy; and, in consideration of this, he was tolerated by Alfieri. To Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, the fact of Fabre being French must secretly have been a great recommendation. French in language, habits, mode of thought, French in heart, cut off, as it seemed, for ever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped up among this pedantic small fry of Florentines, listening all day to Alfieri's tirades against the French nation, the French reforms, the French philosophy, the French language, the French everything, the poor woman must have heartily enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a real Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Alfieri might say, was really French; she must have enjoyed talking about his work, his pictures, about everything and anything that was not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's Hebrew, or Alfieri's tragedies, or comedies or satires. Alfieri was a great genius and a great man; and she loved, or imagined she loved, Alfieri like her very soul. But still—still, it was somehow a relief when young Fabre, with his regular south-of-France face, his rather mocking and cynical French expression, his easy French talk, came to give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was pacing up and down translating Homer and Pindar with the help of a lexicon.
CHAPTER XVII.
CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI.
Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno. A room was filled with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a select company invited to see the poet (for by this respectful title he appears always to have been mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his own admiration, but apparently less so to that of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany would go for a few days to Siena to enjoy the conversation of a little knot of friends of their dead friend Gori; a certain Cavaliere Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani, and one or two others, who met in the house of a charming and intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper, married to another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who was one of Mme. d'Albany's most intimate friends. Occasionally, also, some of these would come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and the Countess moved heaven and earth (recollecting their own aversion to husbands) that the Grumbler, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly called, should be left behind, and la chère Thérèse come accompanied (in characteristic Italian eighteenth-century fashion) only by her children and by her cavaliere servente, Mario Bianchi. These were the small excitements in this curious double life of more than married routine. Alfieri, who, as he was getting old and weak in health, was growing only the more furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had determined to learn Greek, to read all the great Greek authors; and worked away with terrific ardour at this school-boy work, crowning his efforts with a self-constituted Order of Homer, of which he himself was the sole founder and sole member. He was, also, having finally despatched the sacramental number of tragedies, working at an equally sacramental number of satires and comedies, absolutely unconscious of his complete deficiency in both these styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his nation to set them on the right road in comedy and satire, as he had set them on the right road in tragedy.
A ridiculous man! Not so. I have spoken many hard words against Alfieri; and I repeat that he seems to me to have often fallen short, betrayed by his century, his vanity, his narrowness and hardness of temper, even of the ideal which he had set up for himself. But I would not have it supposed that I do not see the greatness of that ideal, and the nobleness of the reality out of which it arose. That Alfieri, a strange mixture of the passionate man of spontaneous action, and of the self-manipulating, idealising poseur, should have fallen short of his own ideals, is perhaps the one pathetic circumstance of his life; the one dash of suffering and failure which makes this heroic man a hero. Alfieri did not probably suspect wherein he fell short of his own ideal; he did not, could not see that his faults were narrowness of nature, and incompleteness, meanness of conception, for, if he had, he would have ceased to be narrow and ceased to be mean. But Alfieri knew that there was something very wrong about himself, he felt a deficiency, a jar in his own soul; he felt, as he describes in the famous sonnet at the back of Fabre's portrait of him, that he did not know whether he was noble or base, whether he was Achilles or Thersites.
"Uom, sei tu grande o vile? Mori, il saprai." ("Man, art thou noble or base? Die, and thou shalt know it.") Thus wrote Alfieri, making, as usual, fame the arbiter of his worth; and showing, even in the moment of seeking for truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly impossible it was for him to feel it. Mean and great; both, I think, at once. But of the meanness, the narrowness of nature, the want of resonance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality in so many things; of Alfieri's vanity, intolerance, injustice, indifference, hardness; of all these peculiarities which make the real man repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I have said more than enough, and when we have said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his vanity, selfishness, meanness, narrow-mindedness, a man of grander proportions, of finer materials, nay, even of nobler moral shape, than the vast majority of men superior to him in all these points. Let us look at him in those last decaying years, at those studies which have seemed to us absurd: self-important, pedantic, almost monomaniac; or brooding over those feelings which were, doubtless, selfish, morbid; let us look at him, for, despite all his faults, he is fine. Fine in indomitable energy, in irrepressible passion. Alfieri was fifty; he was tormented by gout; his health was rapidly sinking; but the sense of weakness only made him more resolute to finish the work which (however mistakenly) he thought it his duty to leave completed; more determined that, having lived for so many years a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed of the stain of ignorance, having read and appreciated as much of the great writers of antiquity as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a studious manhood. Soon after his great illness (which, I believe, changed him so much for the worse by hastening premature old age) at Colmar, he had written to his friends at Siena that he had very nearly been made a fool of by Death; but that, having escaped, he intended, by hurrying his work, to make a fool of Death instead. And in 1801 he wrote in his memorandum-book: "Health giving way year by year; whence, hurrying to finish my six comedies, I make it decidedly worse."
Soon after, as Mme. d'Albany later informed his friend Caluso, Alfieri, finding that his digestion had become so bad as to produce inability to work after meals, began systematically to diminish his already extremely sober allowance of food; while, at the same time, he did not diminish the exercise, walking, riding, and driving, which he found necessary to keep himself in spirits. Knowing that death could not be far ahead, and accustomed since his youth to think that his life ought not to extend over sixty years, Alfieri was calmly and deliberately walking to meet Death.
Calmly and deliberately; but not heartlessly. Engrossed in his studies, devoted to his own glory as he was, he was still full of a kind of mental passion for Mme. d'Albany. He was unfaithful to her for the sake of low women, he was neglectful of her for the sake of his work; he did not, perhaps, receive much pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic lady (like one of Rubens's women grown old, as Lamartine later described her) whom he left to her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing; to her painting lessons, and long discussions on art with Monsieur Fabre. The woman whose presence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a matter of indifference to him. But, nevertheless, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never wrote more completely from his heart than when, composing the epitaph of the Countess, he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been loved by him more than anything on earth, and held almost as a mortal divinity. "A Victorio Alferio … ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et observata." For a thought begins about the year 1796 to recur throughout Alfieri's letters and sonnets, and whenever he mentions the Countess in his autobiography; a thought too terrible not to be genuine: he or his beloved must die first; one or the other must have the horror of remaining alone, widowed of all interest on earth. How constantly this idea haunted him, and with what painful vividness, is apparent from a letter which I shall translate almost in extenso; as, together with those few words which I have quoted about Gori's death, it shows the passionate tenderness that was hidden, like some aromatic herb beneath the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of Alfieri.