Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 3

II

I once fancied that a parallel between Alfieri and Byron might be drawn, but their disparities are greater than their resemblances, on the whole. Both, however, were born n.o.ble, both lived in voluntary exile, both imagined themselves friends and admirers of liberty, both had violent natures, and both indulged the curious hypocrisy of desiring to seem worse than they were, and of trying to make out a shocking case for themselves when they could. They were men who hardly outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in the longest life; and he was ruled by pa.s.sions and ideals; he hated with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who dethroned them.

When he left the life of a dissolute young n.o.ble for that of tragic authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and such pa.s.sages of Roman history as those relating to the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia, and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races, and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same spirit--the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover, and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible and abhorrent to him.

Emiliani-Giudici, the Italian critic, writing about the middle of our century, declares that when the fiery love of freedom shall have purged Italy, the Alfierian drama will be the only representation worthy of a great and free people. This critic holds that Alfieri's tragical ideal was of such a simplicity that it would seem derived regularly from the Greek, but for the fact that when he felt irresistibly moved to write tragedy, he probably did not know even the names of the Greek dramatists, and could not have known the structure of their dramas by indirect means, having read then only some Metastasian plays of the French school; so that he created that ideal of his by pure, instinctive force of genius. With him, as with the Greeks, art arose spontaneously; he felt the form of Greek art by inspiration. He believed from the very first that the dramatic poet should a.s.sume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of action, he dispensed with all those parts which did not seem to him the most princ.i.p.al, and he studied how to show the subject of the drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but he so wrought "that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the literary ineducation of Alfieri was the princ.i.p.al exterior cause of this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of originality of feeling and conception. "Tragedy, born sublime, terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were, redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, rea.s.sumed the masculine, athletic forms of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost ministry."

I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects.

In Alfieri's Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked.

The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with the b.l.o.o.d.y dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.

III

But such incongruities as these do not affect us in the tragedies based on the heroic fables; here the poet takes, without offense, any liberty he likes with time and place; the whole affair is in his hands, to do what he will, so long as he respects the internal harmony of his own work. For this reason, I think, we find Alfieri at his best in these tragedies, among which I have liked the Orestes best, as giving the widest range of feeling with the greatest vigor of action.

The Agamemnon, which precedes it, and which ought to be read first, closes with its most powerful scene. Agamemnon has returned from Troy to Argos with his captive Ca.s.sandra, and Aegisthus has persuaded Clytemnestra that her husband intends to raise Ca.s.sandra to the throne. She kills him and reigns with Aegisthus, Electra concealing Orestes on the night of the murder, and sending him secretly away with Strophius, king of Phocis.

In the last scene, as Clytemnestra steals through the darkness to her husband's chamber, she soliloquizes, with the dagger in her hand:

It is the hour; and sunk in slumber now Lies Agamemnon. Shall he nevermore Open his eyes to the fair light? My hand, Once pledge to him of stainless love and faith, Is it to be the minister of his death?

Did I swear that? Ay, that; and I must keep My oath. Quick, let me go! My foot, heart, hand-- All over I tremble. Oh, what did I promise?

Wretch! what do I attempt? How all my courage Hath vanished from me since Aegisthus vanished!

I only see the immense atrocity Of this, my horrible deed; I only see The b.l.o.o.d.y specter of Atrides! Ah, In vain do I accuse thee! No, thou lovest Ca.s.sandra not. Me, only me, thou lovest, Unworthy of thy love. Thou hast no blame, Save that thou art my husband, in the world!

Of trustful sleep, to death's arms by my hand?

And where then shall I hide me? O perfidy!

Can I e'er hope for peace? O woful life-- Life of remorse, of madness, and of tears!

How shall Aegisthus, even Aegisthus, dare To rest beside the parricidal wife Upon her murder-stained marriage-bed, Nor tremble for himself? Away, away,-- Hence, horrible instrument of all my guilt And harm, thou execrable dagger, hence!

I'll lose at once my lover and my life, But never by this hand betrayed shall fall So great a hero! Live, honor of Greece And Asia's terror! Live to glory, live To thy dear children, and a better wife!

--But what are these hushed steps? Into these rooms Who is it comes by night? Aegisthus?--Lost, I am lost!

_Aegisthus._ Hast thou not done the deed?

_Cly._ Aegisthus----

_Aeg._ What, stand'st thou here, wasting thyself in tears?

Woman, untimely are thy tears; 't is late, 'T is vain, and it may cost us dear!

_Cly._ Thou here?

But how--woe's me, what did I promise thee!

What wicked counsel--

_Aeg._ Was it not thy counsel?

Love gave it thee and fear annuls it--well!

Since thou repentest, I am glad; and glad To know thee guiltless shall I be in death.

I told thee that the enterprise was hard, But thou, unduly trusting in the heart, That hath not a man's courage in it, chose Thyself thy feeble hands to strike the blow.

Now may Heaven grant that the intent of evil Turn not to harm thee! Hither I by stealth And favor of the darkness have returned Unseen, I hope. For I perforce must come Myself to tell thee that irrevocably My life is dedicated to the vengeance Of Agamemnon.

He appeals to her pity for him, and her fear for herself; he reminds her of Agamemnon's consent to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and goads her on to the crime from which she had recoiled. She goes into Agamemnon's chamber, whence his dying outcries are heard:--

O treachery!

Thou, wife? O headens, I die! O treachery!

Clytemnestra comes out with the dagger in her hand:

The dagger drips with blood; my hands, my robe, My face--they all are wet with blood. What vengeance Shall yet be taken for this blood? Already I see this very steel turned on my breast, And by whose hand!

The son whom she forebodes as the avenger of Agamemnon's death pa.s.ses his childhood and early youth at the court of Strophius in Phocis. The tragedy named for him opens with Electra's soliloquy as she goes to weep at the tomb of their father:--

Night, gloomy, horrible, atrocious night, Forever present to my thought! each year For now two l.u.s.ters I have seen thee come, Clothed on with darkness and with dreams of blood, And blood that should have expiated thine Is not yet spilt! O memory, O sight!

Upon these stones I saw thee murdered lie, Murdered, and by whose hand!...

I swear to thee, If I in Argos, in thy palace live, Slave of Aegisthus, with my wicked mother, Nothing makes me endure a life like this Saving the hope of vengeance. Far away Orestes is; but living! I saved thee, brother; I keep myself for thee, till the day rise When thou shalt make to stream upon yon tomb Not helpless tears like these, but our foe's blood.

While Electra fiercely muses, Clytemnestra enters, with the appeal:

_Cly._ Daughter!

_El._ What voice! Oh Heaven, thou here?

_Cly._ My daughter, Ah, do not fly me! Thy pious task I fain Would share with thee. Aegisthus in vain forbids, He shall not know. Ah, come! go we together Unto the tomb.

_El._ Whose tomb?

_Cly._ Thy--hapless--father's.

_El._ Wherefore not say thy husband's tomb? 'T is well: Thou darest not speak it. But how dost thou dare Turn thitherward thy steps--thou that dost reek Yet with his blood?

_Cly._ Two l.u.s.ters now are pa.s.sed Since that dread day, and two whole l.u.s.ters now I weep my crime.

_El._ And what time were enough For that? Ah, if thy tears should be eternal, They yet were nothing. Look! Seest thou not still The blood upon these horrid walls the blood That thou didst splash them with? And at thy presence Lo, how it reddens and grows quick again!

Fly, thou, whom I must never more call mother!

_Cly._ Oh, woe is me! What can I answer? Pity-- But I merit none!--And yet if in my heart, Daughter, thou couldst but read--ah, who could look Into the secret of a heart like mine, Contaminated with such infamy, And not abhor me? I blame not thy wrath, No, nor thy hate. On earth I feel already The guilty pangs of h.e.l.l. Scarce had the blow Escaped my hand before a swift remorse, Swift but too late, fell terrible upon me.

From that hour still the sanguinary ghost By day and night, and ever horrible, Hath moved before mine eyes. Whene'er I turn I see its bleeding footsteps trace the path That I must follow; at table, on the throne, It sits beside me; on my bitter pillow If e'er it chance I close mine eyes in sleep, The specter--fatal vision!--instantly Shows itself in my dreams, and tears the breast, Already mangled, with a furious hand, And thence draws both its palms full of dark blood, To dash it in my face! On dreadful nights Follow more dreadful days. In a long death I live my life. Daughter,--whate'er I am, Thou art my daughter still,--dost thou not weep At tears like mine?

Clytemnestra confesses that Aegisthus no longer loves her, but she loves him, and she shrinks from Electra's fierce counsel that she shall kill him. He enters to find her in tears, and a violent scene between him and Electra follows, in which Clytemnestra interposes.

_Cly._ O daughter, he is my husband. Think, Aegisthus, She is my daughter.

_Aeg._ She is Atrides' daughter!

_El._ He is Atrides' murderer!

_Cly._ Electra!

Have pity, Aegisthus! Look--the tomb! Oh, look, The horrible tomb!--and art thou not content?

_Aeg._ Woman, be less unlike thyself. Atrides,-- Tell me by whose hand in yon tomb he lies?