Vittorio Alfieri

“ Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, his desultory years of academic schooling, was probably the most extraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel's dominion. Of the future student, of the tragic poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italy by raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody boy with his craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for his own class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice, must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. ”

“ Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti, a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe. “What a singular country is ours!” ”

“ But Vittorio Alfieri was nevertheless one of the least happy of little boys, and one of the least happy of young men. He was born with an uncomfortable and awkward and unwieldy character, as some men are born lame, or scrofulous, or dyspeptic. ”

“ Count Vittorio Alfieri, a celebrated Italian dramatist, was born at Asti in Piedmont, January 17, 1749, and died at Florence, October 8, 1803. Among his many works may be mentioned: “Cleopatra,” “Polinice,” “Antigone,” “Agide,” “Bruto,” “Saul,” “Filippo,” etc. He also wrote: “Tyranny,” “Essays on Literature and Government,” odes on “American Independence,” and “Memoirs of His Life.”
A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes. ”

“ The whole road from Turin to Alexandria della Paglia is a fine broad chausée. The first day's journey brought us to Asti. A rich plain on each side of the road, the horizon on our right bounded by the Appennines, on our left by the Alps, both diverging, formed the landscape. Asti is an ancient, well and solidly built city, but rather gloomy in its appearance. It is remarkable for being the birthplace of Vittorio Alfieri, the celebrated tragic poet, who has excelled all other dramatic poets in the general dénouement of his pieces, except, perhaps, Voltaire alone. ”

“ The subject was popular, and treated with much feeling and poetic fervour. After lamenting Alfieri as the patriot, as well as the bard, and as the glory of his country, he concluded, by indignantly repelling the supposition that "the latest sparks of genius and freedom were buried in the tomb of Vittorio Alfieri." A thunder of applause followed; and cries of "O bravo Sestini! bravo Sestini!" were echoed from the Italian portion of the audience, long after the first acclamations had subsided. The men rose simultaneously from their seats ”

“ Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri; and such, at the age of seventy-two, did death overtake her, on the 29th January 1824. Her property she bequeathed to Fabre whom a false rumour had called her husband; and Fabre left it jointly to his native town of Montpellier, and to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, who still lives and recollects Mme. d'Albany. ”

“ Count Vittorio Alfieri; and all of them doubtless took a great interest in him as her lover, and a little interest in him as the great poet of Italy; not certainly without wondering—amiable people as they were, and persuaded that France and Paris alone existed—that Mme. d'Albany should find anything to love in this particularly rude and disagreeable man, and that a country like Italy should have the impudence to set up a poet of its own. The Countess of Albany, made to be a leader of intellectual society, was happy ”

“ It is a beautiful edifice, and can boast in the interior of it several columns and pilasters of jaune antique and of white marble. But they have a most barbarous custom in Florence of covering these columns with red cloth on jours de Fête, which spoils the elegant simplicity of the columns and makes the church itself resemble a théâtre des Marionnettes. But the Italians are dreadfully fond of gaudy colours. In the church of Santa Croce what most engaged my attention was the monument erected to Vittorio Alfieri, sculptured by Canova. It is a most beautiful piece of sculpture. ”

“ One can imagine the curiosity, much vaguer and more indifferent, with which the woefully cold and woefully weary young woman met the scrutiny of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend, whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the Countess of Albany Count Vittorio Alfieri. ”

“ The political economists of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese Beccaria on "Crimes and Punishments" stimulated the reform of criminal law in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri, the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. ”

“ Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) is one of numerous real and ideal personages with whom, as he tells us (Life, p. 644) , Byron was wont to be compared. Moore perceives and dwells on the resemblance. A passage in Alfieri's autobiography (La Vie de V. A. écrite par Lui-même, Paris, 1809, p. 17) may have suggested the parallel ”

“ Asti has still numerous medieval towers, a fine Gothic cathedral of the 14th century, the remains of a Christian basilica of the 6th century, and the octagonal baptistery of S. Pietro (11th century) . It was the birthplace of the poet Vittorio Alfieri. In ancient times it manufactured pottery. It is now famous for its sparkling wine (Asti spumante) , and is a considerable centre of trade. ”

“ A foreigner can hardly enter into the bitterness of vituperation which finds utterance in such poems as those “In Santa Croce” [XXVIII] , or “The Voice of the Priests” [XXIX] , the sonnet addressed to Vittorio Alfieri [XXV] ,
O de l'italo agon supremo atleta,
and that to Goldoni, the “Terence of the Adria”; but all of these, which we may call the literary sonnets, have a certain universal value in that they reflect more than individual feeling. Each poet addressed is identified in some way with the nation's weal or woe ”

“ In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers sleep together their last sleep, beneath a beautiful monument fashioned by Canova's hands—Louise, wife of the "Bonnie Prince" (as we still choose to remember him) and Vittorio Alfieri, to whom, to quote his own words, "she was beyond all things beloved."
CHAPTER III THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS
Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the "playthings of an hour" ”

“ The cavaliere Giacinto was handsome and amiable; the couple grew old together in happiness; and the lady, as she advanced in {Pg 250} years, gained the love and respect of all by her piety and works of charity and kindness.
On the marriage of his mother, Vittorio and his sister went to live in their father-in-law's house, who proved himself a kind parent to the orphans. Although his health was not robust, Alfieri's childhood was little interrupted by sickness; and his first grief was experienced at the age of seven, when his sister Julia was sent to a convent for her education. ”

“ 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 ”

“ At this time Alfieri was in the very prime of his splendid manhood, one of the handsomest and most fascinating men in all Europe. Some four years older than herself, he was a tall, stalwart, soldierly man, blue-eyed and auburn-haired, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, a daring horseman, a poet, and a man of rare culture—just the man to set any woman's heart a-flutter, as he had already done in most of the capitals of the Continent. ”

“ With such a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an intimate by the husband, who doubtless thought one hare-brained poet more easy to manage than two or three fashionable gallants—with such a woman as this, Alfieri might talk over plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his essays on liberty and literature, and all the things by which he intended to redeem Italy and make himself immortal, without any fear of his listener ever growing weary; from her he could receive that passionate sympathy and encouragement without which life and work were impossible to him. ”

“ Man subsists upon love; love makes him a god: for I call God an intensely felt love, and I call dogs, or French, which comes to the same, the frozen philosophisers who are moved only by the fact that two and two make four."
Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive his beloved was fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he expected. The eccentric figure, the tall, gaunt man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red hair and flying scarlet cloak, driving the well-known phaeton, or sauntering moodily along the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, was soon to be seen no more. ”

“ But, like a man bound in all his limbs, and who at length has slipped the cord from off one hand, there still remained to Alfieri an infinite amount of struggle, of bitter effort, of hopeless inaction, before he could completely liberate himself from the bonds of sloth, of worldly vanity, dissipation, and unworthy love, before he could step forth and walk steadily along the new road which had appeared to him. ”

“ Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremost figures in Italy. His love for the Countess of Albany, persisting through the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied the scattered forces of his nature. Ambitious to excel for her sake, to show himself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strange torpor of his youth, and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italy waited. In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteen tragedies--among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration of the Pazzi. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The passion for political liberty, the abhorrence of any kind of despotism, however glorious or however paternal, had grown in Alfieri with every journey he had made through France, Spain, Germany, Russia—with every sojourn in England; it had grown with every page of Livy and Tacitus, with every line of Dante and Petrarch which he had read; it had grown with every word that he himself had written. He had determined to be the poet who should make men ashamed of being slaves and ashamed of being tyrants. ”

“ But Alfieri, once awakened out of that strange long torpor of his youth, was able to put forth as active and invincible forces all that extraordinary obstinacy, that morose doggedness, that indifference to comfort and pleasure, that brutal violence which had more than once, in their negative condition, made him seem more like some wild animal or half-savage monomaniac than an ordinary young man under five-and-twenty. ”

“ Having said this, we have told the good and evil of Alfieri. He desired a political reform by means of letters; he saved literature from Arcadian vacuities, leading it towards a national end; he armed himself with patriotism and classicism in order to drive the profaners out of the temple of art. But in substance he was rather a patriot than an artist. ”

“ Alfieri was, in the sense of certain ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, blind and deaf to suffering. That a man of education and mind, a gentleman, should have to sweep the ground with his hat on the passage of another man, because that other happened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he should be liable to exile, to imprisonment, for a truthful statement of his opinion: these were to Alfieri the insupportable things of tyranny. ”

“ As he grew old, Alfieri seems to have lost that power, nay that irresistible desire, of speaking the truth and the whole truth which made him record with burning shame the caress of Pius VI. Perhaps, on the other hand, Alfieri, who, after all, was but a sorry mixture of an ancient Roman and a man of the eighteenth century, thought that a certain amount of baseness and dirt-eating, quite degrading in a man, might be permitted to a woman, even to the lady of his thoughts. ”

“ The characters are mere types of passion or sentiment; there is no variety of action, no episodes, and no poetical adornments. Yet in his own age Alfieri was regarded as a great tragic poet, not only in his own country, but beyond the Alps. His influence on Italian literature was very great. For the next two generations there was scarcely a poet who did not admire and imitate him. Parini, Foscolo, Monti, Manzoni, Leopardi, and Pellico, all looked up to him as their master.
Alfieri was the first to speak of a fatherland, a united Italy ”