She seemed to call, while from the gilded vaults Compa.s.sionate Echo answered her again, And from their cloistral bas.e.m.e.nts in dismay The servants rushed, and from the upper rooms The pallid maidens trembling flew; all came.
Thy lady"s face was with reviving essence Sprinkled, and she awakened from her swoon.
Anger and grief convulsed her still; she cast A lightning glance upon the guilty menial, And thrice with languid voice she called her pet, Who rushed to her embrace and seemed to invoke Vengeance with her shrill tenor. And revenge Thou hadst, fair poodle, darling of the Graces.
The guilty menial trembled, and with eyes Downcast received his doom. Naught him availed His twenty years" desert; naught him availed His zeal in secret services; for him In vain were prayer and promise; forth he went, Spoiled of the livery that till now had made him Enviable with the vulgar. And in vain He hoped another lord; the tender dames Were horror-struck at his atrocious crime, And loathed the author. The false wretch succ.u.mbed With all his squalid brood, and in the streets With his lean wife in tatters at his side Vainly lamented to the pa.s.ser-by.
It would be quite out of taste for the lover to sit as apathetic as the husband in the presence of his lady"s guests, and he is to mingle gracefully in the talk from time to time, turning it to such topics as may best serve to exploit his own accomplishments. As a man of the first fashion, he must be in the habit of seeming to have read Horace a little, and it will be a pretty effect to quote him now; one may also show one"s acquaintance with the new French philosophy, and approve its skepticism, while keeping clear of its pernicious doctrines, which insidiously teach--
That every mortal is his fellow"s peer; That not less dear to Nature and to G.o.d Is he who drives thy carriage, or who guides The plow across thy field, than thine own self.
But at last the lady makes a signal to the cavalier that it is time to rise from the table:
Spring to thy feet The first of all, and drawing near thy lady Remove her chair and offer her thy hand, And lead her to the other rooms, nor suffer longer That the stale reek of viands shall offend Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums That meanwhile burn sweeten and purify The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence All lingering traces of the feast.--Ye sick And poor, whom misery or whom hope perchance Has guided in the noonday to these doors, Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng, With mutilated limbs and squalid faces, In litters and on crutches, from afar Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils Drink in the nectar of the feast divine That favorable zephyrs waft to you; But do not dare besiege these n.o.ble precincts, Importunately offering her that reigns Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!
--And now, sir, "tis your office to prepare The tiny cup that then shall minister, Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady"s lips; And now bethink thee whether she prefer The boiling beverage much or little tempered With sweet; or if perchance she like it best As doth the barbarous spouse, then, when she sits Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers The bearded visage of her lord caressing.
With the dinner the second part of the poem, ent.i.tled The Noon, concludes, and The Afternoon begins with the visit which the hero and his lady pay to one of her friends. He has already thought with which of the husband"s horses they shall drive out; he has suggested which dress his lady shall wear and which fan she shall carry; he has witnessed the agonizing scene of her parting with her lap-dog,--her children are at nurse and never intrude,--and they have arrived in the palace of the lady on whom they are to call:
And now the ardent friends to greet each other Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase, Subtle and pointed, at the other"s heart, Hinting of certain things that rumor tells, And in her turn the other with a sting a.s.sails. The lovely face of one is flushed With beauteous anger, and the other bites Her pretty lips a little; evermore At every instant waxes violent The anxious agitation of the fans.
So, in the age of Turpin, if two knights Ill.u.s.trious and well cased in mail encountered Upon the way, each cavalier aspired To prove the valor of the other in arms, And, after greetings courteous and fair, They lowered their lances and their chargers dashed Ferociously together; then they flung The splintered fragments of their spears aside, And, fired with generous fury, drew their huge, Two-handed swords and rushed upon each other!
But in the distance through a savage wood The clamor of a messenger is heard, Who comes full gallop to recall the one Unto King Charles, and th" other to the camp Of the young Agramante. Dare thou, too, Dare thou, invincible youth, to expose the curls And the toupet, so exquisitely dressed This very morning, to the deadly shock Of the infuriate fans; to new emprises Thy fair invite, and thus the extreme effects Of their periculous enmity suspend.
Is not this most charmingly done? It seems to me that the warlike interpretation of the scene is delightful; and those embattled fans--their perfumed breath comes down a hundred years in the verse!
The cavalier and his lady now betake them to the promenade, where all the fair world of Milan is walking or driving, with a punctual regularity which still distinguishes Italians in their walks and drives. The place is full of their common acquaintance, and the carriages are at rest for the exchange of greetings and gossip, in which the hero must take his part. All this is described in the same note of ironical seriousness as the rest of the poem, and The Afternoon closes with a strain of stately and grave poetry which admirably heightens the desired effect:
Behold the servants Ready for thy descent; and now skip down And smooth the creases from thy coat, and order The laces on thy breast; a little stoop, And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance, And then erect thyself and strut away Either to pace the promenade alone,-- "T is thine, if "t please thee walk; or else to draw Anigh the carriages of other dames.
Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy head And arms and shoulders, half thyself within The carriage door. There let thy laughter rise So loud that from afar thy lady hear, And rage to hear, and interrupt the wit Of other heroes who had swiftly run Amid the dusk to keep her company While thou wast absent. O ye powers supreme, Suspend the night, and let the n.o.ble deeds Of my young hero shine upon the world In the clear day! Nay, night must follow still Her own inviolable laws, and droop With silent shades over one half the globe; And slowly moving on her dewy feet, She blends the varied colors infinite, And with the border of her mighty garments Blots everything; the sister she of Death Leaves but one aspect indistinct, one guise To fields and trees, to flowers, to birds and beasts, And to the great and to the lowly born, Confounding with the painted cheek of beauty The haggard face of want, and gold with tatters.
Nor me will the blind air permit to see Which carriages depart, and which remain, Secret amidst the shades; but from my hand The pencil caught, my hero is involved Within the tenebrous and humid veil.
The concluding section of the poem, by chance or by wise design of the author, remains a fragment. In this he follows his hero from the promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and att.i.tude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable pa.s.sages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down at those games of chance with which every fashionable house was provided and at which the lady loses or doubles her pin-money. In Milan long trains were then the mode, and any woman might wear them, but only patricians were allowed to have them carried by servants; the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the n.o.bility of our hero"s lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy in our time and country.
IV
The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure, and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in n.o.ble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others), in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also, at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one"s copyright was good for nothing across the border--scarcely a fair stone"s-throw away--of one"s own little duchy or province, and the printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which, later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in London, where he had seen the prosperity of "the trade of an author"
in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country.
So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a _maestro in casa_. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused sense of the artist as with the moralist"s indignation; some of his contemporaries accused him of a sn.o.bbish fondness for the great, but certainly he did not flatter them, and in one pa.s.sage of his poem he is at the pains to remind his n.o.ble acquaintance that not the smallest drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins.
His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor of the government newspaper,--the only newspaper in Milan,--and yet easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor.
The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a mob was severely handled by the military, and for "insulting" a tree of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of the munic.i.p.al government, which, apparently popular, could really do nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and, giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and folly of the n.o.bles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes, principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799, having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died suddenly in his arm-chair.
Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried out, "Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!" "No,"
shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the liberators, "long live the republic, death to n.o.body!" They were going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public business. "Very well," he observed; "where Citizen Christ cannot stay, I have nothing to do," and went out. "Equality doesn"t consist in dragging me down to your level," he said to one who had impudently given him the _thou_, "but in raising you to mine, if possible. You will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can"t help my being the Abbate Parini." To another, who reproached him for kindness to an Austrian prisoner, he answered, "I would do as much for a Turk, a Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need." In his closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard the first, and, without waiting further, besought him "Print the other!"
VITTORIO ALFIERI
Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Ta.s.so, and who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct dramatic power, not surpa.s.sed 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 n.o.bility which is still the proudest in Europe.
"What a singular country is ours!" said the Chevalier Nigra, one of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. "In Paris they admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;" and if this was true in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.
I
It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it from the Italian priests of the last century. "We translated," he says, "the "Lives of Cornelius Nepos"; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under what governments, nor what any government was." He learned Latin enough to turn Virgil"s "Georgics" into his sort of Italian; but when he read Arios...o...b.. stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Ta.s.so. This was whilst he was still in the primary cla.s.ses, under strict priestly control; when he pa.s.sed to a more advanced grade and found himself free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well, he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. "The reading of many French romances," he goes on, "the constant a.s.sociation with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of it," he says, "the French entered into my empty brain"; but he is careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very bitterly.
It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet, which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to capital, with letters to your sovereign"s amba.s.sadors everywhere, and spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries through which you pa.s.sed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal, and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than edifying. He had a ruling pa.s.sion for horses, and then several smaller pa.s.sions quite as wasteful and idle. He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness. At the Ambrosian Library in Milan they showed him a ma.n.u.script of Petrarch"s, which, "like a true barbarian," as he says, he flung aside, declaring that he knew nothing about it, having a rancor against this Petrarch, whom he had once tried to read and had understood as little as Ariosto. At Rome the Sardinian minister innocently affronted him by repeating some verses of Marcellus, which the sulky young n.o.ble could not comprehend. In Ferrara he did not remember that it was the city of that divine Ariosto whose poem was the first that came into his hands, and which he had now read in part with infinite pleasure. "But my poor intellect," he says, "was then sleeping a most sordid sleep, and every day, as far as regards letters, rusted more and more. It is true, however, that with respect to knowledge of the world and of men I constantly learned not a little, without taking note of it, so many and diverse were the phases of life and manners that I daily beheld."
At Florence he visited the galleries and churches with much disgust and no feeling, for the beautiful, especially in painting, his eyes being very dull to color. "If I liked anything better, it was sculpture a little, and architecture yet a little more"; and it is interesting to note how all his tragedies reflect these preferences, in their lack of color and in their sculpturesque sharpness of outline.
From Italy he pa.s.sed as restlessly into France, yet with something of a more definite intention, for he meant to frequent the French theater. He had seen a company of French players at Turin, and had acquainted himself with the most famous French tragedies and comedies, but with no thought of writing tragedies of his own. He felt no creative impulse, and he liked the comedies best, though, as he says, he was by nature more inclined to tears than to laughter. But he does not seem to have enjoyed the theater much in Paris, a city for which he conceived at once the greatest dislike, he says, "on account of the squalor and barbarity of the buildings, the absurd and pitiful pomp of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women."
He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court, where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.
In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite in the polite society of that day, the object of his pa.s.sion was another man"s wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it came to a duel with the lady"s husband and a great scandal in the newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked everything in England. "The streets, the taverns, the horses, the women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island, the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely little,"--as they still strike every one coming from Italy,--these and other charms of "that fortunate and free country" made an impression upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says, "study profoundly the const.i.tution, mother of so much prosperity," but he "knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects."
Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose delighted and whose verse wearied him. "But the book of books for me,"
he says, "and the one which that winter caused me to pa.s.s hours of bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears, and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or feel it."
{Ill.u.s.tration: Vittorio Alfieri.}
These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri"s bitterest contempt when in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial gardens at Schonbrunn, "performing the customary genuflexions with a servilely contented and adulatory face." This loathing of royalty was naturally intensified beyond utterance in Prussia. "On entering the states of Frederick, I felt redoubled and triplicated my hate for that infamous military trade, most infamous and sole base of arbitrary power." He told his minister that he would be presented only in civil dress, because there were uniforms enough at that court, and he declares that on beholding Frederick he felt "no emotion of wonder, or of respect, but rather of indignation and rage.... The king addressed me the three or four customary words; I fixed my eyes respectfully upon his, and inwardly blessed Heaven that I had not been born his slave; and I issued from that universal Prussian barracks ...
abhorring it as it deserved."
In Paris Alfieri bought the princ.i.p.al Italian authors, which he afterwards carried everywhere with him on his travels; but he says that he made very little use of them, having neither the will nor the power to apply his mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him, and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante, Petrarch, Ta.s.so, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli.
He made a journey into Spain, among other countries, where he admired the Andalusian horses, and bored himself as usual with what interests educated people; and he signalized his stay at Madrid by a murderous outburst of one of the worst tempers in the world. One night his servant Elia, in dressing his hair, had the misfortune to twitch one of his locks in such a way as to give him a slight pain; on which Alfieri leaped to his feet, seized a heavy candlestick, and without a word struck the valet such a blow upon his temple that the blood gushed out over his face, and over the person of a young Spanish gentleman who had been supping with Alfieri. Elia sprang upon his master, who drew his sword, but the Spaniard after great ado quieted them both; "and so ended this horrible encounter," says Alfieri, "for which I remained deeply afflicted and ashamed. I told Elia that he would have done well to kill me; and he was the man to have done it, being a palm taller than myself, who am very tall, and of a strength and courage not inferior to his height. Two hours later, his wound being dressed and everything put in order, I went to bed, leaving the door from my room into Elia"s open as usual, without listening to the Spaniard, who warned me not thus to invite a provoked and outraged man to vengeance: I called to Elia, who had already gone to bed, that he could, if he liked and thought proper, kill me that night, for I deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;" though here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a servant except as he would have done an equal--not with a cane, but with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he rose he was no longer a slave to his pa.s.sion. Shortly after, he wrote a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.
Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his qualifications for tragical authorship being "a resolute spirit, very obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with pa.s.sions of every kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ...
an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing and managing my own language." With this stock in trade, he set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr.
Macpherson, and Cesarotti"s translation of him came into Alfieri"s hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for the verse of dialogue.
He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the cla.s.sics, which he read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already given up Shakespeare. "The more that author accorded with my humor (though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was resolved to abstain," he tells us.
This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to accustom himself "to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not otherwise evermore." Here he versified his first two tragedies, and sketched others; and here, he says, "I deluged my brain with the verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Ta.s.so, and of Ariosto, convinced that the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified with my own ideas and emotions."
He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had been making love. He abandoned everything else for it--country, home, money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany, and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese n.o.ble of that day could not reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet"s expatriation. The long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century, with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The countess"s husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead, she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing its ties, and after Alfieri"s death the countess gave to the painter Fabre "a heart which," says Ma.s.simo d"Azeglio in his Memoirs, "according to the usage of the time, and especially of high society, felt the invincible necessity of keeping itself in continual exercise." A cynical little story of Alfieri reading one of his tragedies in company, while Fabre stood behind him making eyes at the countess, and from time to time kissing her ring on his finger, was told to D"Azeglio by an aunt of his who witnessed the scene.
In 1787 the poet went to France to oversee the printing of a complete edition of his works, and five years later he found himself in Paris when the Revolution was at its height. The countess was with him, and, after great trouble, he got pa.s.sports for both, and hurried to the city barrier. The National Guards stationed there would have let them pa.s.s, but a party of drunken patriots coming up had their worst fears aroused by the sight of two carriages with sober and decent people in them, and heavily laden with baggage. While they parleyed whether they had better stone the equipages, or set fire to them, Alfieri leaped out, and a scene ensued which placed him in a very characteristic light, and which enables us to see him as it were in person. When the patriots had read the pa.s.sports, he seized them, and, as he says, "full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my pa.s.sion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my pa.s.sport in my hand, and shouted at the top of my voice, "Look!
Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am he; look at me: I have my pa.s.sport, and I have had it legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pa.s.s, and, by Heaven, we _will_ pa.s.s!""
They pa.s.sed, and two days later the authorities that had approved their pa.s.sports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that Alfieri had left behind him in Paris, and declared him and the countess--both foreigners--to be refugee aristocrats!
He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of the first two acts.
Alfieri"s remaining years were spent in study and the revision of his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a very pitiable state of terror or disaster.
Nothing in Alfieri"s life was more like him than his death, of which the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the poet"s biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his mind was molested by many memories of things long past. "The studies and labors of thirty years," says the Abbate, "recurred to him, and what was yet more wonderful, he repeated in order, from memory, a good number of Greek verses from the beginning of Hesiod, which he had read but once. These he said over to the Signora Contessa, who sat by his side, but it does not appear, for all this, that there ever came to him the thought that death, which he had been for a long time used to imagine near, was then imminent. It is certain at least that he made no sign to the contessa though she did not leave him till morning.
About six o"clock he took oil and magnesia without the physician"s advice, and near eight he was observed to be in great danger, and the Signora Contessa, being called, found him in agonies that took away his breath. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, and going to the bed, leaned upon it, and presently the day was darkened to him, his eyes closed and he expired. The duties and consolations of religion were not forgotten, but the evil was not thought so near, nor haste necessary, and so the confessor who was called did not come in time."
D"Azeglio relates that the confessor arrived at the supreme moment, and saw the poet bow his head: "He thought it was a salutation, but it was the death of Vittorio Alfieri."