In his twenty-second year he had such a love malady, he had been the scandal of all London in an intrigue with a certain very lovely Lady Ligonier, who, divorced by her husband for her guilt with the young Italian, was on the point of being joyfully taken to wife by Alfieri when it came out that before being his mistress she had been the mistress of her own groom; a termination of the adventure which, much as it distressed the writer of Alfieri"s autobiography, is extremely satisfactory to the reader. A few years later, after a variety of minor love affairs, he became entangled at Turin in the nets of a Marchesa di Prie, a rather faded Armida of very tarnished reputation, and whom he thoroughly despised and even disliked at the very height of his attachment. The struggles between his sense of weariness and degradation and his unworthy love for this woman half wore him out, and brought on a severe malady, from which he recovered only to swear he would never enter her house again, and to return to it as soon as he could stand on his feet. The beautiful social customs of eighteenth-century Italy authorised and even imposed upon a man who had accepted the position of _cavaliere servente_ (a sort of pseudo-platonic vice-husbandship which covered illicit connections with a worldly propriety) to attend upon his lady from the moment of her getting up in the morning to the moment when she returned home or dismissed her guests at night, with only a few intervals during which the lover might have his meals or pay his visits; so, when the Marchesa di Prie fell ill of a malady which required absolute repose and silence, Alfieri was bound to spend the whole morning seated at the foot of her bed. During one of these weary watches, it came into his head to kill time by scribbling some dramatic scenes on loose sheets of paper, which he hid during the intervals of his visits under the cushion of an arm-chair. A Piedmontese and a thorough ignoramus, he had scarcely ever attempted to write even so much as a letter in Italian; and as to a literary composition in any language, such a thing had never occurred to him. The _Cleopatra_ thus written in his lady"s bed-room and secreted under the chair cushion, was a most worthless performance, but it made Alfieri an author. Always devoured by a desire to shine, hitherto by the excellence of his get-up, the beauty of his person, and the number of his horses, it suddenly flashed across him that he might shine in future as a poet. This was the turning-point of his life, or what he called his liberation. 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.
His ignorance was appalling. He could no longer construe a line of Latin, he had not for months opened a book; and as to Italian, he knew it no better than any Piedmontese street porter. His idleness, his habit of absolute vacuity, was even worse; his desire to shine before the frivolous women, the inane young men of Turin, nay, merely to have himself, his well-cut coat, his well-frizzled hair, the horse he rode or drove, noticed by any chance loafer in the street, was another almost incredible obstacle; and, worst of all, there was his degrading serfdom to a woman whom he knew he neither loved nor respected, and who had never loved, still less respected, him. 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. He had, moreover, at this moment, when all the energies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power of deliberate, complacent, and pitiless moral self-vivisection, a power of performing upon his character such cutting and ripping-open operations as he thought beneficial to himself, which makes one think of the abnormal faculty of enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel satisfaction in examining the mechanism of one"s own suffering, occasionally displayed by hysterical women; and which brings back the impression already conveyed by the morbid sensitiveness, the frenzied violence, the moody torpor of his youth, that there was something abnormal in Alfieri"s whole nature. He was now employing that very hysterical satisfaction in pain and impatience of half measures, to reduce himself, by heroic means, to at least such moral and mental health as would permit the full exercise of his faculties. There exists a diary of his, written in 1777, which is an almost unique example of the seemingly cold, but really excited and hysterical kind of self-vivisection of which I have spoken. Alfieri had always been extraordinarily truthful, not merely for his time and country, but truthful quite beyond the limits of a mere negative virtue. But he was also, what seems almost incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness, excessively self-conscious and morally att.i.tudinising, a thin-skinned _poseur_. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory characteristics, to become what he wished to appear, to pose as what he was, to make himself up (if I may say so) as himself, to intensify what he recognised as his main characteristics and efface all his other ones, now became to Alfieri a sort of unconscious aim of life, closely connected with his avowed desire to become a great poet; "the reason of which desire," he himself wrote in his diary, "is my immoderate ambition, which, finding no other field, has devoted itself entirely to literature." Nothing can be more serious, as I have already remarked, than this diary of Alfieri"s struggles, where he notes, day by day, the laziness, the meanness, the want of frankness to himself and others, the despicable vanity, the attempt to appear what he is not, the indulged unfounded suspiciousness towards his friends, all the little base defects which must have pained a nature like his more than any real sinfulness, as the prodding of a surgeon"s instruments would have agonised such a man more than an actual amputation. He narrates _in extenso_ all his vacillations about nothing at all, all his givings way to laziness, all his insincere confidences made to others. One morning is consumed in debating whether or not he will buy a certain Indian walking-stick: "Torn by avarice and the ambition of having it, I go away without deciding whether I will buy it or not, yet I know full well that before two days are out I shall have bought it. Seeking to understand this contradiction, I discover a thousand ridiculous dirtinesses in my character (_mille ridicole porcherie_)." Another day he notes down, after describing the mean envy with which he has listened to the praises of another member of his little club of dilettante authors: "I do believe that as much praise as is being given and will ever be given to all mankind for every sort of praiseworthy thing, I should like to snap up for myself alone." Again, another day he writes: "More lazy than ever. Walking with a friend, and talking about our incomes, &c. I thought I was giving him a perfectly open account of my money matters; but, with the best intention of telling him the truth, I find that, in order to deceive myself as well as him, I increased my fortune by one-fifth." Again, "I had some doubts whether, as it was blowing hard on the promenade, I would go on as far as where the ladies were walking; because, knowing that I was looking pale and ill, and that the wind had taken the powder out of my hair, I was unwilling to show myself in a condition so unsuitable to my pretensions to beauty."
But while thus a.n.a.lyzing himself, while working at Latin and grammar like a school-boy, this fashionable young man, ashamed of being seen when he was not in good looks, ashamed of having one horse less than usual, was continually ruminating over the glory for which he intended living, and which he appears never for a moment to have doubted of attaining.
"In my mind, which is completely given up to the idea of glory, I frequently go over the plan of my life. I determine that at forty-five I will write no more, but merely enjoy the fame which I shall have obtained, or imagine that I have obtained, and prepare myself for death.
One thing only makes me uneasy: I fear that as I approach the prescribed limit, I may push it continually back, and that at forty-five I may still be thinking only of continuing to live and, perhaps, of continuing to scribble. Hard as I try to think, or to make others think, that I am different from the rest of mankind, I fear, I tremble lest I be extremely like them."
But in order to devote himself to the pursuit of literary glory, one thing remained to be achieved by this strange, self-conscious, frank, contemptuous, and vain creature, by this young man who, even in his weaknesses, has a certain heroic air about him. It was necessary to break through the bonds of unworthy love. Unable to trust any longer to his often baffled resolution and self-command, Alfieri devised a primitive and theatrical remedy too much in harmony with his whole nature to be otherwise than efficacious. The lady occupied a house in the great rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one which he rented; she could not go in or out of her door without being seen by Alfieri, and the sight of her was too much for him: he invariably broke all his resolves and went across the square to his Armida. Knowing this, Alfieri obliged a friend of his to receive from him a solemn written promise to the effect that he would not merely never go to the lady, nor take any notice of her messages, but that, until he felt himself absolutely indifferent and beyond her reach, he would go out only in solitary places and at unlikely hours, and spend the greater part of the day seated at his window looking at her house, seeing her pa.s.s, hearing her spoken of, receiving her letters, without ever approaching her or sending her the smallest message. As a pledge of this engagement, Alfieri cut off his long red hair, and sent the plait to his friend, leaving himself in a state of crop-headedness, which made it utterly impossible, in that day when wigs had been given up but short hair had not yet been adopted, for him to appear anywhere. And then he had himself tied to his chair with ropes hidden under his cloak, and spent day after day looking at his mistress" windows, quite unable to read a word or attend to conversation, raging and sobbing and howling like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied; until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, he was rewarded, most characteristically, by being at once delivered of all love for his lady, and inspired with the idea for a sonnet.
Alfieri worked harder and harder at his Latin and Italian lessons, sketched out the plan of several plays: and, then, in the early summer of 1776, got together his horses, procured a permission to travel from the King of Sardinia, and set out for Tuscany in order to learn the language in which he was to achieve that great literary glory to which he had dedicated his life.
CHAPTER VII.
THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE.
Alfieri"s greatest terror in life was to fall in love once more. All his love affairs had been degrading to his good sense, his will and his manhood; they had been odious, even at the moment, to his extraordinary innate pa.s.sion, or, one might almost say, monomania for independence; he who even in his dullest and most inane years had hated the thought of any sort of military or diplomatic position which should imply subjection to a despotic government, whose only strong feeling about the world in general had long been a fierce hatred and contempt both for those who tyrannised and those who were tyrannised over, this Alfieri had always, as he tells us, fled, though unsuccessfully, from the presence of women whose social position (though the words sound like a sarcasm) was sufficiently good to make any regular love intrigue possible or probable. How much more must he not defend his liberty now that he saw before him the direct road to glory, and felt within himself the power to journey along it.
Thus it was, as he explains in his autobiography, that on his first arrival in Florence, hearing everyone praising the character and talents of the wife of Charles Edward Stuart, and seeing the beautiful young woman at theatres and in the public promenade, he resolutely declined to be introduced to her. The very charm of the impression which she had thus accidentally made upon him, the vivid image of those very dark eyes (I am translating his words, and must explain that her eyes, which seemed blue to Bonstetten and dark to Alfieri"s, were in reality of that hazel colour which gives great prominence to the pupil, and therefore leaves the idea of black eyes) contrasting with the brilliant fair skin and pale blonde hair, of the graciousness and sweetness and perhaps even a certain sad austerity in her whole appearance and manner,--all this made Alfieri determine to avoid all personal acquaintance.
But after some months at Siena, where his thoughts had been entirely absorbed in the literary projects which he discussed with his new friend, the grave and good and serious-minded Gori, and one or two Sienese professors, after that first feeling of attraction had died away, and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an impenetrable armour of poetic interests, Alfieri decided, on his return to Florence, that he was quite sufficiently of a new man to expose himself without any danger to such a lady as the Countess of Albany. He was, after all, a different individual from that inane, dull, violent young man who in the vacuity of life had raged and roared in the chains of unworthy love.
And she, she also, was quite a different woman from the Lady Ligonier and from the Marchesa di Prie, the shameless, unfaithful wives, and heartless, vain, worldly coquettes who had made such havoc of his heart.
She was a cold, virtuous, extremely intellectual woman, trying to find consolation for her quietly and bravely supported miseries in study, in abstract interests which should take away her thoughts from the sickening reality of things; a woman who would be valuable as a friend to a poet, and who would know how to value his friendship. And he, continually seeking for people who could understand his literary ambitions, with whom he could discuss all his poetical projects, and from whom he might receive a.s.sistance in this new intellectual life, was he not in need of such a friendship? Would he not appreciate its usefulness and uniqueness sufficiently to see that it did not turn to a mere useless and demoralising love affair? There may also have been something very rea.s.suring to Alfieri"s apprehensions in the knowledge that he would be dealing, not with an Italian woman, accustomed and almost socially obliged to hold a man in the degrading bonds of cicisbeism, but with a foreigner, the jealously-guarded wife of a sort of legendary ogre, with whom, however much the old fury of love might awaken in him, there could by no possibility be anything beyond the most strictly watched friendship. So Alfieri went to the palace of the Count of Albany; and, having once been, returned there.
The palace bought by Charles Edward about 1776 stands in the most remote and peaceful quarter of Florence. A few quiet streets, unbroken by shop-fronts and unfrequented by vehicles, lead up to that quarter; streets of low white-washed convent walls overtopped by trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, from behind whose iron window-gratings and blistered green shutters one expects even now, as one pa.s.ses in the silence of the summer afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some harpsichord-strummed minuet, the turns and sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song by Cimarosa or Paisiello. It is a region of dead walls, over which bend the acacias and elms, over which shoot up the cypresses and cedars of innumerable convent and palace-gardens, on whose flower-beds and fountains and quincunxes the first-floor windows look down. In the midst of all this, at the corner of two very quiet streets, stands the palace, now of the Duke of San Clemente, an ungainly, yellow structure of various epochs, with a pretty late sixteenth-century belvedere tower on one side; a lot of shuttered and heavily-grated seventeenth-century windows, ornamented with stone stay-laces and tags, upon the dark street; and to the back a desolate old garden, where the vines have crawled over the stonework, and the grotesque seventeenth-century statues, green and yellow with lichen, stand in niches among the ill-trimmed hedges of ilex and laurel: the most old-world house and garden in the old-world part of the town. The eighteenth century still seems very near as we walk in those streets and look in, through the railings, at the ilex and laurel quincunxes, the lichened statues of that garden; and from the roof of the house still floats, creaking in the wind, regardless of the triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of the many banners which have been thrown, mere heaps of obsolete coloured tatters, on the dust-heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the standard that was raised in Glenfinnan.
In this house was now developing one of the most singular loves that ever were. Shortly after his introduction to the Countess of Albany, Alfieri, terrified lest he might be forfeiting his spiritual liberty once more, took to flight and tried to forget the lady in a mad journey to Rome. But he had not forgotten her; and on his pa.s.sage through Siena, returning to Florence, he had explained his feelings, his fears, to his friend Francesco Gori. This Gori, a young Sienese of the middle cla.s.s, extremely cultured, of "antique uprightness," to use the eighteenth-century phrase, seems to have taken to his heart, as one might some wild younger brother, or some eccentric, moody child, the strange, self-engrossed, pa.s.sionate Piedmontese. A gentle, grave, and quiet man, he had loved the magnanimity and independence so curiously mingled with mere vanity and egotism in Alfieri"s nature; he had never tired of hearing his friend"s plans for the future, had never smiled at his almost comic certainty of supreme greatness, he had never lost patience with the self-meritorious egotism which made all Alfieri"s actions seem the one interest of the world in Alfieri"s own eyes. To Francesco Gori, therefore, Alfieri went for advice: ought he, or ought he not, to fly from this new love while it was still possible to do so?
The grave and virtuous Gori answered that he should not: this new love had been sent to him as a cure for all baser loves; instead of crushing it as an obstacle to his higher life and his glory, he should thankfully cultivate it as an incentive and a.s.sistance in working out his intellectual redemption.
Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri"s question, and the meaning of Gori"s answer; let us try and realise the ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year 1777. Here was Alfieri, pa.s.sionately desirous to redeem his own existence by intellectual efforts, and confident of a vague mission to awaken his countrymen to his own n.o.bler feelings: to the contempt of sensual pleasures and worldly vanities, the hatred of political and religious servitude, the love of truth and justice, the love of Italy.
Here was this Alfieri, at the very outset of his new career, solemnly confiding to his kindest and wisest friend the scruples, the fears, which restrained him from seeking the company of a woman whom he was beginning to love, and who was beginning to love him, a young woman married by mere worldly convention to a sickly, brutal, and brutish drunkard, old enough to be her father. And what were these scruples?
Merely that a new love might distract Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of the tragic drama which would school her to virtue. That there could be any other scruples appears never to have crossed Alfieri"s brain: that there could be any reason to pause and ask himself whether he was doing wrong or ill before exposing to temptation the woman whom he loved, and the honour which he loved more than her; whether he had a right to return to the palace of Charles Edward and, while receiving his hospitality, while enjoying his confidence, to teach the wife of his host how to love another man than her husband; whether he had a right to return to the presence of that beautiful and intellectual lady, who had hitherto suffered only from the brutishness of her husband, and add to these sufferings the sufferings of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty conscience?
But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, even to the man who most thoroughly despised and loathed his country"s and century"s corruption, no such scruple ever came. What consideration need any man or any woman waste upon a husband? What possible disgrace could come to a woman in having a lover? And did not the frantic jealousy of the besotted old husband, his continual attendance, his perpetual spying, most effectually remove any further consideration there might be for him?
I scarcely know whether it is a thing about which to be cheerful or sad, proud or ashamed; but the more one studies the ideas and feelings of even one"s nearest neighbours, in place or in time, the more is one impressed with the sense that, say what people choose, men and women do not think and feel, even upon the most important subjects, in anything like a uniform manner. Social misarrangements, which are crimes towards the individual, are invariably partially righted, made endurable, by individual rearrangements, which are crimes towards society. The woman was not consulted by her parents before her marriage, she was not restrained by her conscience afterwards; she was given for ambition to a man whose tenure of her received legal and religious sanction; she gave herself for love to a man whose possession of her was against society and against religion; but society received her to its parties, and the Church gave her its communion. And thus, in Italy, and in the eighteenth century, where no one had found any fault at a girl of nineteen being married by proxy to a man who turned out to be a disgusting and brutal sot; no one also could find any fault at a young man of twenty-eight seeking, and obtaining, the love of a married woman of twenty-five. The immoral law had produced the immoral lawlessness. So, to the scruples of Alfieri, Francesco Gori had answered: "Return to Florence."
We shall now see how, out of this vile piece of prose, the higher nature of Alfieri and of the Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon poetic and platonic affection!) most of all, the monomaniac jealousy of Charles Edward, contrived to make a sort of poetry.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ESCAPE.
Alfieri"s fears had been groundless. His love for the wife of Charles Edward Stuart--a love, he tells us, quite different from any he had previously experienced, quiet, pure, and solemn--was destined not to interfere with that austere process of detaching his soul from the base pa.s.sions of the world, and devoting it to the creation of a new style of poetry, to the achievement of a new kind of glory; nay, rather, by bringing to the surface whatever capacity for tenderness and self-restraint and respect for others had hitherto lurked within this fantastic nature, this new love helped to complete that strange monumental personality of Alfieri--a personality more striking, more ideal, than any of those plays by which he hoped to regenerate Italy, and which has been far more potent than his works in the moral regeneration of his country. Alfieri"s youth had been illiterate and stupid; and he required, in order to make up for so much waste of time and waste of spirit, that he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in which he had previously lived had been the reverse. After the long spiritual numbness of his earlier years, this soul, if it was to be kept alive, must be kept in an almost artificially high spiritual temperature, and continually plied with spiritual cordials. These advantages he obtained in the love, or, we ought rather to say, the friendship of the Countess of Albany, and it is extremely improbable whether he would have obtained them otherwise.
Irritable and vain and moody, at once excessively persuaded of his own dramatic mission and morbidly diffident of his actual powers of carrying it out, contemptuous of others and of himself, Alfieri, who required such constant sympathy and encouragement in his work, was not the man who could hope to obtain much of either from other men, whom his excessive pretensions, his ups and downs of humour, his very dissatisfaction with himself, must have quickly exhausted of the small amount of brotherly tenderness which seems to exist in the literary brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of sincere helpfulness and friendliness from the members of the Turinese Literary Club; from Cesarotti, the translator of _Ossian_; from Parini, the great Milanese satirist, and from one or two other men of letters; which shows that there is more kindness in the world than he ever would admit, and confirms me in my remark that he was singularly well treated by fate and mankind. But all this was very lukewarm sympathy; and except from his two great friends, Francesco Gori and Tommaso di Caluso, a difficult-tempered man like Alfieri could receive only lukewarmness.
Now what he required was sympathy, admiration, adoration, of the most burning description. This was possible, towards such a man, only from a woman. But where find the woman who could give it, among the convent-educated, early corrupted, frivolous ladies of Italy, to whom love-making was the highest interest in life, but an interest only a trifle higher than card-playing, dancing, or dressing? Where, even among the very small number of women like Silvia Verza at Verona, Isabella Albrizzi at Venice, or Paolina Castiglione at Milan, who actually had some amount of culture, and actually prided themselves on it? The rank and file of Italian ladies could give him only another Marchesa di Prie, a little better or a little worse, another woman who would degrade him in the sensual and inane routine of a _cicisbeo_. The exceptional ladies were even worse. Fancy this morbid, conceited, self-doubtful, violent, moody Alfieri accepting literary sympathy in a room full of small provincial lions--sympathy which had to be divided with half a dozen others; learned persons who edited Latin inscriptions, dapper poet priestlets, their pockets crammed with sonnets on ladies" hats, opera-singers, canary birds, births, deaths, and marriages, and ponderous pedants of all sorts and descriptions. Why, a lady who set up as the muse of a hot-tempered and brow-beating creature like Alfieri, a man whom consciousness of imperfect education made horribly sensitive--such a lady would have lost all the accustomed guests of her _salon_ in ten days" time. Herein, therefore, consisted the uniqueness of the Countess of Albany, in the fact that she was everything to Alfieri, which no other woman could be. Originally better educated than her Italian contemporaries, the ex-canoness of Mons, half-Flemish, half-German by family, French by training, and connected with England through her marriage with the Pretender, had the advantage of open doors upon several fields of culture. She could read the books of four different nations--a very rare accomplishment in her day; and she was, moreover, one of those women, rarer even in the eighteenth century than now-a-days, whose nature, while unproductive in any particular line, is intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, and in the intellectual domain even more intensely and almost exclusively literary--women who are born readers, to whom a new poem is as great an excitement as a new toilette, a treatise of philosophy (we shall see the Countess devouring Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, with this immense fund of intellectual energy, was living, not a normal life with the normal distracting influences of an endurable husband, of children and society, but a life of frightful mental and moral isolation, by the side, or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, sordid, violent, and jealous brute, from the reality of whose beastly excesses and b.e.s.t.i.a.l fury, of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and blows, she could take refuge only in the unreal world of books.
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 pa.s.sionate sympathy and encouragement without which life and work were impossible to him.
For we must bear in mind what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his youth, his beauty, and that genius which was the indomitable energy and independence of his nature, must have been in the eyes of the Countess of Albany. She had been married at nineteen--she was now twenty-six: in those seven years of suffering there had been ample time to obliterate all traces of the frivolous, worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen light-heartedly laughing at her old husband"s jokes; there had been plenty of time to produce in this excessively intellectual nature that vague dissatisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is the price too often paid for the consolation of mere abstract and literary interests.
The pressure of constant disgust and terror at her husband"s doings, the terrible mental and moral solitude of living by such a husband"s side, had probably wrought up Louise d"Albany to the very highest and almost morbid refinement of nature--a refinement far surpa.s.sing the normal condition of her character, even as the extra fining off of already delicate features by illness will make them surpa.s.s by far their healthy degree of beauty. In such a mental condition the sense of what her husband was must have exasperated her imagination quite as much as his actual loathsomeness must have repelled her feelings; the knowledge of the frightful moral and intellectual fall of Charles Edward must have been as bad as the filthy place to which he had fallen. And opposite to the image of the Pretender must constantly have arisen the image of Alfieri--opposite to the image of the man, once heroic and charming and brilliant, who had sold his heroism and his charm, his mind and his manhood, for the b.e.s.t.i.a.l pleasure of drink--who had rewarded the devotion and self-sacrifice and n.o.ble enthusiasm of his followers by the sight, worse than the scaffold on Tower Hill, of their idol turning into a half-maniac, besotted brute; opposite to this image of degradation must have arisen the image of the man who had wrestled with the baser pa.s.sions of his nature, who had broken through the base habits of his youth, who had fashioned himself into a n.o.ble moral shape as the marble is fashioned by the hand of the sculptor; who was struggling still, not merely with the difficulties of his art, but with whatever he thought mean and slothful in himself.
Some eighteen months after their first acquaintance, Alfieri announced to the wife of Charles Edward that he had just happily settled a most important piece of business, the success of which was one of the most fortunate things of his life. He had made a gift of all his estates to his sister, reserving for himself only a very moderate yearly income; he had reduced himself from comparative wealth to comparative poverty; he had cut himself off from ever making a suitable marriage; he had made himself a pensioner of his sister"s husband: but at this price he had bought independence--he was no longer the subject of the King of Sardinia, nor of any sovereign or State in the world.
The pa.s.sion 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 he was himself the subject of the little military despotism of Piedmont, whose n.o.bles required, every time they wished to travel or live abroad, to beg civilly for leave of absence, which was usually most uncivilly granted; and one of whose laws threatened any person who should print books in foreign countries, and without the permission of the Sardinian censor, with a heavy fine, and, if necessary, with corporal chastis.e.m.e.nt.
In order to become a poet, Alfieri required to become a free agent; and the only way to become a free agent, to break through the bars of what he called his "abominable native cage," the only way to obtain the power of writing what he wished to write, was to give up all his fortune, and live upon the charity of the relatives whom he had enriched. So, during the past months, he had been in constant correspondence with his sister, his brother-in-law, and his lawyer; and now he had succeeded in ridding himself of all his estates and all his capital. The Countess of Albany knew Alfieri sufficiently well by this time to understand that this alienation of all his property was a real sacrifice. Alfieri was the vainest and most ostentatious of men; young, handsome, showy and eccentric, accustomed to cut a grand figure wherever he went, it must have cost him a twinge to be obliged to reduce his. .h.i.therto brilliant establishment, to dismiss nearly all his servants, to sell most of his horses, to exchange his embroidered velvets and satins for a plain black coat for the evening, and a plain blue coat for the afternoon. The worst sacrifice of all he doubtless confided, with savage bitterness, to the Countess, as he confided it to the readers of his autobiography, it was to resign the nominal service of Piedmont--to put aside, for good and all, that brilliant Sardinian uniform in which he looked to such advantage. We can imagine how this subject was talked over--how Alfieri, with that savage pleasure of his in the self-infliction of pain and humiliation, exposed to the Countess all the little, mean motives which had deterred him or which had encouraged him in his liberation from political servitude; we can imagine how she chid him for his rash step, and how, at the same time, she felt a delicious pride in the meanness which he so frankly revealed, in the rashness which she so severely reproved; we can imagine how the thought of Alfieri, who had thus sacrificed fortune, luxury, vanity, to the desire to be free, met in the Countess of Albany"s mind the thought of Charles Edward, living the pensioner of a sovereign who had insulted him and of a sovereign whom he had cheated, spending in liquor the money which France had paid him to get himself an heir and the Stuarts another king.
A strange and dangerous situation, but one whose danger was completely neutralised. Of all the various persons who speak of the extraordinary friendship between Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d"Albany which existed at this time, not one even ventures to hint that the relations between them exceeded in the slightest degree the limits of mere pa.s.sionate friendship; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom truthfulness was not merely an essential part of his natural character, but an even more essential part of his self-idealised personality, merely confirm the words of all contemporary writers. Now, if there was a country where an intrigue between a woman noted for her virtue and a poet noted for his eccentricity would, had it existed, have been joyfully laid hold of by gossip, it was certainly this utterly-demoralised Italy of _cavalieri serventi_: every fashionable woman and every fast man would have felt a personal satisfaction in tearing to pieces the reputation of a lady whose whole character and life had been a censure upon theirs. But, as there are women the intensity of whose pure-mindedness, felt in every feature and gesture and word, paralyses even the most ribald wish to shock or outrage, and momentarily drags up towards themselves the very people who would dearly love to drag them down even for a second; so also it would appear that there are situations so strange, meetings of individuals so exceptional, that calumny itself is unable to attack them. No one said a word against Alfieri and the Countess; and Charles Edward himself, jealous as he was of any kind of interference in his concerns, appears never to have attempted to rid himself of his wife"s new friend.
Much, of course, must be set down to the very madness of the Pretender"s jealousy, to his more than Oriental systematic guarding and watching of his wife. Mann, we must remember, had written, long before Alfieri appeared upon the scene, that Charles Edward never went out without his wife and never let her go out without him; he barricaded her apartment, and was never further off than the next room. Charles Edward undoubtedly conferred upon two people, living in a day of excessive looseness of manners, the inestimable advantage of confining their love within the bounds of friendship, of crushing all that might have been base, of liberating all that could be n.o.ble, of turning what might have been merely a pa.s.sion after the pattern of Rousseau into a pa.s.sion after the pattern of Dante. But what Charles Edward could not do, what no human being or accidental circ.u.mstances could bring about, was due to the special nature of Alfieri and of the Countess; namely, that this strange platonic pa.s.sion, instead of dying out after a very brief time, merely intensified, became long-lived, inextinguishable, nay continued, in its absolute austerity and purity, long after every obstacle and restraint had been removed, except the obstacles and restraints which, from the very ideality of its own nature, increased for itself. And, if we look facts calmly in the face, and, letting alone all poetical jargon, ask ourselves the plain psychological explanation, we see that such things not only could, but, considering the character of the Countess of Albany and of Alfieri, must have been. The Countess had found in Alfieri the satisfaction of those intellectual and ideal cravings which in a nature like hers, and in a situation like hers, must have been the strongest and most durable necessities. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his past life, mortally afraid of falling once more under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking on all sides a.s.sistance in that terrible struggle of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar coc.o.o.n in which it had lain torpid so long, was wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual pa.s.sion just in proportion as it was absolutely and completely intellectual.
A poet especially in his conception of his own personality, an artist who manipulated his own nature, a _poseur_ whose _pose_ was his concentrated self cleared of all things which recalled the vulgar herd; moreover, a furiously literary temper with a mad devotion to Dante and Petrarch: Alfieri must have found in this love, which fate in the Pretender"s person ordained to be platonic, the crowning characteristic of his present personality, the almost miraculous confirmation of his mystic relationship to the lover of Beatrice and the lover of Laura.
And, in the knowledge of what he was to this poor, tormented young wife; in the consciousness of being the only ray of light in this close-shuttered prison--nay, rather bedlam-like existence; in the sense of how completely the happiness of Louise d"Albany depended upon him, whatever there was of generous and dutiful in the selfish and self-willed nature of Alfieri must have become paramount, and enjoined upon him never to vacillate or grow weary in this strange mixture of love and of friendship.
CHAPTER IX.
ROME.
This strange intellectual pa.s.sion, the meeting, as it were, of two long-repressed, long solitary intellectual lives, austerely satisfied with itself and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have sufficed for the happiness of two such over-wrought natures as were at that moment Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d"Albany.
But there could be no happiness for the wife of the Pretender, and no happiness, therefore, for the man who saw her the daily victim of the cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence of her drunken husband.
To an imaginative mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the reality, striving for ever after some poetical or heroic model of love and of life, trying to be at once a patriot out of Plutarch and a lover after the fashion of the _Vita Nuova_, there are few trials more exasperating than to have to see the real creature who for the moment embodies one"s ideal, the creature whom one carefully garlands with flowers and hangs round with lamps, raised above all vulgar things in the niche in one"s imagination, elbowed by brutish reality, bespattered with ign.o.ble miseries. And this Alfieri had constantly to bear.
Perhaps the very knowledge of the actual suffering, of the unjust recriminations, the cruel violence, the absolute fear of death, among which Louise d"Albany spent her life, was not so difficult for her lover to bear as to see her, the beautiful and high-minded lady of his heart, seated in her opera box near the sofa where the red and tumid-faced Pretender lay snoring, waking up, as Mann describes him, only to summon his lacqueys to a.s.sist him in a fit of drunken sickness, or to be carried, like a dead swine, with hanging bloated head and powerless arms, down-stairs to his carriage; not so difficult to bear as to hear her, his Beatrice, his Laura, made the continual victim of her bullying husband"s childish bad-temper, of his foul-mouthed abuse, to hear it and have to sit by in silence, dependent upon the good graces of a besotted ruffian against whom Alfieri"s hands must have continually itched.
A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri"s lyrics, written about this time, and complaining of having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged through ign.o.ble filth, shows that Alfieri, like most poetical minds, resented the vulgar and the disgusting much more than he would have resented what one may call clean tragedy. But things got worse and worse, and the real tragedy threatened. Charles Edward had outraged and beaten his mistress; older and much more profoundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon the "cruel and indecent behaviour" of which Mme. d"Albany was the victim. Ill-treatment and terror were beginning to undermine her health, and there can be no doubt, I think, that the symptoms of a nervous disorder, of which she complained a couple of years later to Alfieri"s bosom friend Gori, must originally have been produced in this unusually robust young woman by the horrible treatment to which she was at this time subjected. Mme.
d"Albany, who had astonished the world by her resignation, appears to have fairly taken fright; she wrote to her brother-in-law Cardinal York, entreating him to protect her from her husband. The weak-minded, conscientious cardinal was not the man to take any bold step; he promised his sister-in-law all possible a.s.sistance if she were driven to extremities, but begged her to endure a little longer and save him the pain of a scandal. So the Countess of Albany, long since abandoned by her own kith and kin, abandoned also by her brother-in-law, alone in the world between a husband who was daily becoming more and more of a wild beast, and a lover who was fearful of giving any advice which might compromise her reputation or separate them for ever, went on suffering.
But the moment came when she could suffer no more. At the beginning of the winter of 1780, the celebration of St. Andrew"s day by Charles Edward and his drinking companions, was followed by a scene over which Alfieri drops a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent baccha.n.a.l which endangered the life of his lady. From the biographers of Charles Edward we learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the middle of the night with a torrent of insulting language which provoked her to vehement recriminations; that he beat her, committed foul acts upon her, and finished off with attempting to choke her in her bed, in which he would probably have succeeded had the servants not been waked by the Countess"s screams and dragged Charles Edward away.[1]
Alfieri, partly from an honourable reluctance to see his lady made the heroine of a public scandal, and partly, no doubt, from the more selfish fear lest a separation from her husband might imply a separation also from her lover, had long persisted in advising the Countess against any extreme measure. Alfieri tells us that with the desire for freedom of speech and writing at the bottom of his act of self-spoliation in his sister"s favour, there had mingled a sense also that by breaking all connections with Piedmont, and liberating himself from all temptation of marrying for the sake of his family, he was, in a manner, securing the continuation of his relations with Mme. d"Albany. The Countess"s flight from her husband, they both well knew, would in all probability put an end to these relations; the Catholic Church could grant no divorce, and Charles Edward would probably refuse a separation; so that the honour, nay, the life of the fugitive wife would be safe only in a convent, whence Alfieri would be excluded together with Charles Edward. The choice was a hard one to make; the choice between a life of peace and safety, but separated from all that made life dear to her, and a life consoled by the presence of Alfieri, but made wretched and absolutely endangered by the violence of a drunken maniac. But after that frightful night of St. Andrew no choice remained; to remain under the Pretender"s roof was equivalent for his wife either to a violent death in another such fit of madness, or to a lingering death from sheer misery and daily terror. The Countess of Albany must leave her husband.
To effectuate this was the work of Alfieri--of Alfieri, who, of all men, was most interested to keep Mme. d"Albany in her husband"s house; of Alfieri, who, of all men, was the least fitted for any kind of underhand practices. The actual plot for escape was the least part of the business; the conspiracy would have utterly miscarried, and Mme.
d"Albany have been condemned to a life of much worse agony, had not provision been made against the Pretender"s certain efforts to get his wife back. Mme. d"Albany may have remembered how her mother-in-law Clementina Sobieska, although protected by the Pope, had been eventually got out of the convent whither she had escaped, and had been restored to her husband the Pretender James; she was probably aware, also, how Charles Edward had stormed at the French Government to have Miss Walkenshaw sent back to him from the convent at Meaux. No Government could give a man back his mistress, but it was different with a wife; and both Alfieri and the Countess must have known full well that however lax the Grand Ducal Court might be on the subject of conjugal infidelity, when quietly carried on under the domestic roof and dignified by the name of _serventismo_, no court, no society, could do otherwise than virtuously resent so great a turpitude as a wife publicly running away by herself from her husband"s house. It became necessary to win over the sympathies of those in power, to secure their connivance, or at all events their neutrality; and this task of talking, flattering, wheedling, imploring, fell to Alfieri, whose sense of self-debas.e.m.e.nt appears to have been mitigated only by the knowledge that he was working for the good of a guiltless and miserable woman, of the woman whom he loved more than the whole world; by the bitter knowledge that the success of his efforts, the liberation of his beloved, meant also the sacrifice of that intercourse which made the happiness of his life.
Alfieri succeeded; the Grand Duke and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess were won over.
The actual flight alone remained to be accomplished.
[2]In the first days of December 1780 a certain Mme. Orlandini, a half Irish lady connected with the Jacobite Ormonds, was invited to breakfast at the palace in the Via San Sebastiano. She skilfully led the conversation into a discussion on needle-work, and suggested that the Countess of Albany should go and see the last embroidery produced at the convent of Bianchette, a now long-suppressed establishment in the adjoining Via del Mandorlo. The Countess of Albany ordered her carriage for immediately after breakfast, and the two ladies drove off, accompanied, of course, by Charles Edward, who never permitted his wife to go out without him. Near the convent-gate they met a Mr. Gahagan, an Irish Jacobite and the official _cavaliere servente_ of Mme. Orlandini, who, hearing that they were going to pay a visit to the nuns, offered to accompany them. Gahagan helped out the Countess and Mme. Orlandini, who rapidly ran up the flight of steps leading to the convent door; he then offered his arm to Charles Edward, whose legs were disabled by dropsy.