The Countess of Albany Part 3

Leaning on Gahagan's arm, the Pretender was slowly making his way up the steps when his companion, looking up, suddenly exclaimed that the two ladies had already entered the convent and that the nuns had stupidly and rudely shut the door in his and the Count of Albany's face. "They will soon have to open," answered Charles Edward, and began to knock violently. Mr. Gahagan doubtless knocked also. But no answer came. At length the door opened, and there appeared behind a grating no less a person than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously informed the Count that she was unable to let him in, as his wife had sought an asylum in her convent under the protection of Her Highness the Grand d.u.c.h.ess of Tuscany.

Sir Horace Mann says that Alfieri, who is not mentioned in the very circ.u.mstantial narrative of Dutens, was hanging about the convent, in order to prevent the Pretender, who always carried pistols in his pockets, from committing any violence. This seems extremely unlikely, as the first use to which Charles Edward would naturally have put his pistols would have been shooting Alfieri, for whose murder he immediately offered a thousand sequins. At any rate, raging like a maniac, the discomfited husband went back to his empty house.

It would be pretty and pathetic to insert in this part of my narrative a page of half-condemnatory condolence with Charles Edward. But this I find it perfectly impossible to do. Of course, if we call to mind Falkirk and Skye, if we conjure up in our fancy the Prince Charlie who still lived in the thoughts of Flora MacDonald, there is something very frightful in this tragi-comic flight of the Countess of Albany: the slamming of that convent door in his face is the worst injury, the worst injustice, the worst ignominy reserved by fate for the last of the unhappy Stuarts.

But of the Charles Edward of the Forty-five there remained so little in this Count of Albany that we have no right to consider them any longer as one individual, to condone the brutishness of the Count of Albany for the sake of the chivalry of Prince Charles, to degrade our conception of the young man by tacking on to it the just ignominy inflicted upon the old man, the man who had inherited his name and position, but scarcely his personality. Above all, we have no right to add to whatever reproaches we may think fit to shower upon the Countess of Albany and on Alfieri, the imaginary reproach that the husband whose rights they were violating was the victor of Gladsmuir and Falkirk.

There must always be something which shocks us in the behaviour, however otherwise innocent and decorous, of a woman who runs away from her husband with the a.s.sistance of her lover; but this quality of offensiveness is not, in such a case as the present one, a fault of the woman: it is one of her undeserved misfortunes, as much as is the bad treatment, the solitude, the temptation, to which she has been subjected. The evil practice of the world, its folly and wickedness in permitting that a girl like Louise of s...o...b..rg should be married to a man like Charles Edward, its injustice and cruelty in forbidding the legal breaking of such an unrighteous contract; the evil practice of the world which condemned the Countess of Albany to be for so much of her life an unhappy woman, also condemned her to be in some of her actions a woman deserving of blame. We shall see further on how, in the attempt to work out their happiness in despite of the evil world in which they lived, the Countess and Alfieri, infinitely intellectually and morally superior to many of us whom circ.u.mstances permit to live blameless and comfortable, were splashed with the mud of unrighteousness, which was foreign to their nature, and remained spotted in the eyes of posterity.

Charles Edward did what he had done once before in his life: he applied to the Government to put him again in possession of the woman whom he had victimised; but as the French Government had refused to recognise his claims over his fugitive mistress, so the Government of the Grand Duke of Tuscany now refused to give him back his fugitive wife. The Countess of Albany had naturally taken no clothes with her in her flight; and she presently sent a maid to the palace in Via San Sebastiano to fetch such things as she might require. But Charles Edward would not permit a single one of her effects to be touched; if she wanted her clothes and trinkets, she might come and fetch them herself. However, after a few days, a message came from the Pope, ordering the Pretender to supply his wife with whatever she might require; a threat to suspend the pension was probably expressed or implied, for Charles Edward immediately obeyed.

Meanwhile, the Countess of Albany was anxiously awaiting at the convent of the Bianchette a decision from her brother-in-law, to whom she had written immediately after her flight. Those first days must have been painfully unquiet. What if the Tuscan Court should listen to the Count of Albany's entreaties? What if Cardinal York should take part with his brother? Return to the house of her husband would be death or worse than death. Cardinal York answered immediately: a long, kind, rather weak-minded letter, the ideal letter of a well-intentioned, rather silly priest, in curious Anglo-Roman French. He informed her that for some time past he had expected to hear of her flight from her husband; he protested that he had had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and begged her to believe that it had been out of his power to protect her. He had informed the Pope of the whole affair, and with His Holiness' approval had prepared for his sister-in-law a temporary asylum in the Ursuline convent in Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon as possible.

In January 1781 the Countess of Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan, who appears to have formed part of her household, and two maids, started for Rome; but such had been the threats of Charles Edward, and his ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri and Gahagan, armed and dressed as servants, accompanied the carriage a considerable part of its way. The Pretender, we must remember, had offered a thousand sequins to anyone who would kill Alfieri; and even in that humdrum late eighteenth century a man of position might easily hire a couple of ruffians to waylay a carriage and kidnap a woman.

The Countess of Albany was installed in the Ursuline convent in Via Vittoria, a street near the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family memory hung about the place: it had been the asylum of Clementina Sobieska when she had fled from the elder Pretender as Louise d'Albany had fled from the younger. But the wife of Charles Edward was in a very different mood from the wife of James III.; and it is probable that, despite the many charms of the convent, and the excellent manners of its aristocratic inmates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great store, the Countess, with her heart full of the thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined to give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, which he apparently expected, of developing a sudden vocation for Heaven.

She had left Florence at the end of the year; in the spring she saw Alfieri again. The quiet work which had seemed so natural and easy while he was sure of seeing his lady every day, had become quite impossible to him. He felt that he ought to remain in Florence, that he ought not to follow her to Rome. But Florence had become insufferable to him; and he determined to remove to Naples, because to get to Naples it was necessary to pa.s.s through Rome. The melancholy barren approach to the Eternal City, which, three years before, had inspired Alfieri with nothing but melancholy and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly paradise; and Rome, which he hated, as the most delightful of places.

He hurried to the Ursuline convent, and was admitted to speak to the Countess of Albany. "I saw her," he wrote many years later, "but (O G.o.d!

my heart seems to break at the mere recollection) I saw her a prisoner behind a grating; less tormented than in Florence, but yet not less unhappy. We were separated, and who could tell how long our separation might not last? But, while crying, I tried to console myself with the thought that she might at least recover her health, that she would breathe freely, and sleep peacefully, no longer trembling at every moment before the indivisible shadow of her drunken husband; that she might, in short, live."

CHAPTER X.

ANTIGONE.

About three months after the Countess of Albany's flight from her husband, the Pope granted her permission to leave the Ursuline convent; and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, offered her hospitality in his magnificent palace of the Cancelleria. Alfieri was at Naples when he received this news, riding gloomily along the sea-sh.o.r.e, weeping profusely (for we must remember that to an Italian, especially of the eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a would-be ancient Roman shedding love-sick tears), unable to give his attention to work, living, as he expresses it, on the coming in and going out of the post. "I wished to return to Rome," he writes, "and at the same time I felt very keenly that I ought not to do it yet. The struggles between love and duty which take place in an honourable and tender heart, are the most terrible and mortal pain that a man can suffer. I delayed throughout April, and I determined to drag on through May; but on the 12th May I found myself, I scarcely know how, back in Rome."

Alfieri found the Countess of Albany established in the palace of the Cancelleria, the mistress of the establishment, for her brother-in-law was living in his episcopal town of Frascati. They were free to see each other as much as they chose, to love each other as much as they would; for the Cardinal and the priestly circles seem to have gone completely to sleep in the presence of this critical situation; and the habits of Roman society, which were even a shade worse than those of Florence, were not such as to give umbrage to the lovers. But those years during which they had loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles Edward, had apparently fostered a love which was accustomed and satisfied with being only a more pa.s.sionate kind of friendship; the indomitable power of resistance to himself, the pa.s.sion for realising in himself some heroic att.i.tude which he admired, and the almost furious desire to reverse completely his former habits of life, kept Alfieri up to the point of a platonic connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, cold, pa.s.sive, easily moulded by a more vehement nature, loved Alfieri much more with the head than with the heart, and loved in him just that which made him prefer that they should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the Countess of Albany had much more mind than personality, and that she was therefore mere wax in the hands of a man who had become so exclusively and violently intellectual as Alfieri: she had seen too much of the coa.r.s.e realities of life, of the brutal giving way to sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all contemporaries, and according to the a.s.surance of Alfieri himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the same footing as in Florence.

And these months in Rome seem to have been the happiest months of Alfieri's life, the happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess of Albany. Alfieri hired the villa Strozzi, on the Esquiline, a small palace built by one of Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, including the use of furniture, stables, and garden, he paid the now incredibly small sum of ten scudi a month, about two pounds of our money. Permitting himself only two coats, the black one for the evening, and the famous blue one for ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to one dish of meat and vegetables, without wine or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make the comparatively small pension paid to him by his sister, go almost as far as had the fine fortune of which he had despoiled himself. He spent lavishly on books, and more lavishly on horses, on horses which, according to his own account, were his third pa.s.sion, coming only after his love for Mme. d'Albany, and sometimes usurping the place of his love of literary glory.

The mania for systematic division of his time, the invincible tendency to routine, which follows in most Italians after the disorder and wastefulness of youth, had already got the better of Alfieri. He had, almost at the moment when the pa.s.sion for literature first disclosed itself, made up his mind to write a definite number of tragedies, first twelve, then fourteen, and no more; and to devote a certain number of years to the elaborate process of first constructing them mentally, then of writing them full length in prose, and finally of turning this prose into verse; and he was later to devise a corresponding plan of writing an equally fixed number of comedies and satires in an equally fixed number of years, after which, as we have seen, he was to give up his thoughts, having attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for death.

This routine is a national characteristic, and absorbs many an Italian, turning all the poetry of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful inevitableness; but Alfieri did not merely submit to routine, he enjoyed it, he devised and carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature.

To this man, who cared so much for the figure he cut, and so little for all the things which surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony of grinding work was almost an object of aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities and mottled colours of existence. So Alfieri arranged for himself, in his house near Santa Maria Maggiore, what to him was a life of exquisite delightfulness.

He spent the whole early morning reading the Latin and Italian cla.s.sics, and grinding away at his tragedies, which, after repeated sketching out, repeated writing out in prose, were now going through the most elaborate process of writing, re-writing, revising, and re-revising in verse.

Then, before resuming his solitary studies in the afternoon, he would have one of his many horses saddled, and ride about in the desolate tracts of the town, which in papal times extended from Santa Maria Maggiore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, and St. John Lateran: miles of former villa gardens, with quincunxes and flower-beds, cut up for cabbage-growing, wide open s.p.a.ces where the wall of a temple, the arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the rank gra.s.s, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, sc.r.a.ps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken only by the lowing of the herds driven along by the s.h.a.ggy herdsman on his s.h.a.ggy horse, by the long-drawn, guttural chant of the carter stretched on the top of his cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells; places inaccessible to the present, a border-land of the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking of those many times when he must have reined in his horse, and vaguely and wistfully looked out on to the green desolation islanded with ruins and traversed by the vast procession of the aqueducts, invited one to meditate, and cry, and be a poet. And sometimes--we know it from the sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri tells us, carried the beloved burden of his lady--Alfieri did not ride out alone. One of the horses of the villa Strozzi was saddled for the Countess of Albany; and this strange pair of platonic lovers rode forth together among the ruins, the wife of Charles Edward listening, with something more than mere abstract interest, to Alfieri's fiercest contemptuous tirades against the tyranny of soldiers and priests, the tyranny of sloth and l.u.s.t which had turned these spots into a wilderness, and which had left the world, as Alfieri always felt, and a man not unlike Alfieri in savage and destructive austerity, St. Just, was later to say, empty since the days of the Romans.

Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and descended through the twilit streets of the upper city--where the troops of red and yellow and blue seminarists, and black and brown monks, pa.s.sed by like ants, homeward bound after their evening walk--into the busier parts of Rome, and crossing the Corso filled with painted and gilded coaches, and making his way through the many squares where the people gathered round the lemonade-booth near the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortuous black streets filled with the noise of the anvils and hammers of the locksmiths and nailors behind the Pantheon, made his way towards the palace, grand and prim in its architecture of Bramants, of the Cancelleria, perhaps not without thinking that in the big square before its windows, where the vegetable carts were unloaded every morning, and the quacks and dentists and pedlars bawled all day, a man as strange, as wayward and impatient of tyranny as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been burned two centuries before by Cardinal York's predecessor in that big palace of the Cancelleria. Fortunately there was no Cardinal York in the Cancelleria, or at least only rarely; but instead only the beautiful blonde woman with the dark hazel eyes, whom Alfieri spoke of as his "lady," and, somewhat later, "as the sweet half of himself," and in whose speech Alfieri was never Alfieri, or Vittorio, or the Count, but merely "the poet," so completely had these strange, self-modelling, unconsciously-att.i.tudinising lovers, arrayed themselves and their love according to the pattern of Dante and Petrarch.

To the Countess, we may be sure, Alfieri never failed to give a most elaborate account of his day's work, nor to read to her whatever scenes of his plays he had blocked out, in prose, or worked up in verse. By 11 o'clock, he tells us, he was always back in his solitary little villa on the Esquiline.

But this, although it is probably correct with regard to his visits to Mme. d'Albany, with whom consideration for gossip prevented his staying much after ten at night, must not be taken as the invariable rule; for Alfieri, devoted as he was to his lady, by no means neglected other society. He was finishing his allotted number of tragedies, and, as the solemn moment of publication approached, he began to be tormented with that same desire to display his work to others, to hear their praises even if false, to understand their opinion even if unfavourable, which came, by gusts, as one of the pa.s.sions of his life. Rome was at that time, like every Italian town, full of literary academies, conventicles of very small intellectual fry meeting in private drawing-rooms or at coffee-houses, and swayed by the overlordship of the famous Arcadia, which had now sunk into being a huge club to which every creature who scribbled, or daubed, or strummed, or had a coach-and-pair, or a bad tongue, or a pretty face, or a t.i.tle, belonged without further claims.

There were also several houses of women who affected intelligence or culture, having no claims to beauty or fashion; and foremost among these, but differing from them by the real originality and culture of the lady of the house, the charm of her young daughter, and the superior quality of the conversation and music to be enjoyed there, was the house of a Signora Maria Pizzelli, of all women in Rome the one to whom, after the Countess of Albany, Alfieri showed himself most a.s.siduous. In her house and in many others Alfieri began to give almost public readings of his plays; trying to persuade himself that his object in so doing was to judge, from the expression of face and even more from the restlessness or quiescence of his listeners on their chairs, how his work might affect the mixed audience of a theatre; but admitting in his heart of hearts that the old desire to be remarked had as much to do with these exhibitions as with the six-horse gallops which used to astonish the people of Turin and Florence.

But something better soon offered itself. The Duke Grimaldi had had a small theatre constructed in the Spanish palace, his residence as Amba.s.sador from the Catholic King, and a small company of high-born amateurs had been playing in it translations of French comedies and tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Alfieri offered his _Antigone_, which was accepted with fervour. The beautiful and majestic d.u.c.h.ess of Zagarolo was to act the part of the heroine; her brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Ceri, respectively the parts of Haemon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, the villain of the piece, was reserved for Alfieri himself. The performance of _Antigone_ was a great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the Spanish Emba.s.sy were crowded with the fashionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782, included priests and princes of the Church quite as much as painted ladies and powdered cavaliers. A contemporary diary, kept by the page of the Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, enables us to form some notion of the a.s.sembly. Foremost among the ladies were the two rival beauties, equally famous for their conquests in the ecclesiastical as well as the secular n.o.bility, the Princess Santacroce and the Princess Altieri, vying with each other in the magnificence of their diamonds and of their lace, and each upon the arm of a prince of the Church who had the honour of being her orthodox _cavaliere servente_; the Princess Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan Francesco Albani, the very gallant and art-loving nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro; the Princess Santacroce escorted by the French Amba.s.sador Cardinal de Bernis, the amiable society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom Frederick the Great had surnamed _Babet la bouquetiere_. In the front row sat the wife of the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being the niece of the late Pope Clement XIII., affected an almost royal pomp, and by her side sat the wittiest and most literary of the Sacred College, the still very flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The hall was nearly full when the stir in the crowd, and the general looking in one direction, announced the arrival of a guest who excited unwonted attention. A young woman, who scarcely looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very simply and elegantly dressed, with something still girlish in her small irregular features and complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted along the gangway between the rows of chairs, and, as if she were the queen of the entertainment, solemnly installed by the side of the Princess Rezzonico in the first row. Was it because her husband had called himself King of England, or because her lover was the author of the play about to be performed? Be it as it may, the Countess of Albany was the object of universal curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed during the play was a second and perhaps more interesting performance for the scandal-loving Romans.

While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman n.o.bles all in the strange old-world costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black of their clothes;--while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all their finery (long since gone to the _bric-a-brac_ shops) to fill the theatre-hall of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the symphony which Cimarosa himself has written for _Antigone_, sit and watch the magnificent d.u.c.h.ess of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and stomacher and piled-up feathered hair, and the red-haired eccentric Piedmontese Count, the d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon; let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Alfieri are for us people of to-day, and what they must have been for those people of a hundred years ago.

While scribbling for mere pastime at his earliest play, Alfieri had felt his mind illumined by a sort of double revelation: he would make his name immortal, and he would create a new kind of tragedy. These two halves of a proposition, of which he appears never to have entertained a single moment's doubt, had originated at the same time and developed in close connection: that he could be otherwise than an innovator was as inconceivable to Alfieri as that he could be otherwise than a genius, although, in reality, he was as far from being the one as from being the other. The fact was that Alfieri felt in himself the power of inventing a style and of producing works which should answer to the requirements of his own nature: considering himself as the sole audience, he considered himself as the unique playwright. Excessively limited in his mental vision, and excessively strong in his mental muscle, it was with his works as with his life: the ideal was so comparatively within reach, and the will was so powerful, that one feels certain that he nearly always succeeded in behaving in the way of which he approved, and in writing in the style which he admired. And the most extraordinary part of the coincidence was, that as he happened to live in a time and country which had entirely neglected the tragic stage, and consequently had no habits or aspirations connected with it, his own desires with reference to Italian tragedy preceded those of his fellow-countrymen, his own ideal was thrust upon them before they well knew where they were; and his own nature and likings became the sole standard by which he measured his works, his own satisfaction the only criterion by which they could be judged. In order, therefore, to understand the nature of Alfieri's plays, it is necessary, first of all, to understand what were Alfieri's innate likings and dislikings in the domain of the drama.

Before all other things, Alfieri was not a poet: he lacked all, or very nearly all, the faculties which are really poetical. To begin with the more gross and external ones, he had no instinct for, no pleasure in, metrical arrangements for their own sake; he did not think nor invent in verse, ideas did not come to him on the wave of metre; he thought out, he elaborately finished, every sentence in prose, and then translated that prose into verse, as he might have translated (and in some instances actually did translate) from a French version into an Italian one. Moreover he was, to a degree which would have been surprising even in a prose writer, deficient in that which const.i.tutes the intellectual essence of poetry as metre const.i.tutes its material externality; in that tendency to see things surrounded by, disguised in, a swarm, a masquerade, of a.s.sociated ideas; deficient in the power of suggesting images, of conceiving figures of speech; in fancy, imagination, in the metaphorical faculty, or whatever else we may choose to call it. Nor did he perceive or describe visible things, visible effects, in their own unmetaphorical shapes and colours: not a line of description, not an adjective can be found in his works except such as may be absolutely indispensable for topographical or similar intelligibility; Alfieri obviously cared as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful sound.

This being the case, everything that we might call distinctly poetical, all those things which are precious to us in Shakespeare, or Marlowe, or Webster, in Goethe or Schiller, nay, even, occurring at intervals, in Racine himself, at least as much as mere psychology or oratory or pathos, appeared to Alfieri in the light of mere meretricious gewgaws, which took away from the interest of dramatic action without affording him any satisfaction in return. As it was with metre and metaphor and description, so it was also with the indefinable something which we call lyric quality: the something which sings to our soul, and which sends a thrill of delight through our nerves or a gust of emotion across our nature in the same direct way as do the notes of certain voices, the phrases of certain pieces of music: instantaneously, unreasoningly and unerringly. Of this Alfieri had little, so little that we may also say that he had nothing; the presence of this quality being evidently unnoticed by him and unappreciated. So much for the absolutely poetical qualities. Of what I may call the prose qualities of a playwright, only a certain number appealed to Alfieri, and only a certain number were possessed by him. In a time when the novel was beginning to become a psychological study more minute than any stage play could ever be, Alfieri was only very moderately interested in the subtle a.n.a.lysis or representation of character and state of mind; the fine touches which bring home a person or a situation did not attract his attention; nor was he troubled by considerations concerning the probability of a given word or words being spoken at a particular moment and by a particular man or woman: realism had no meaning for him. As it was with intellectual conception, so was it also with instructive sympathy: Alfieri never subtly a.n.a.lysed the anatomy of individual nature, nor did he unconsciously mimic its action and tones; what most of us mean by pathos did not appeal to him. Neither metrical nor imaginative pleasurableness, nor descriptive charm, nor lyric poignancy, nor psychological a.n.a.lysis or intention entered, therefore, into Alfieri's conception of a desirable tragedy, any more than any of these things fell within the range of his special talents; for, we must always bear in mind that with this man, whose feelings and desires were in such constant action and reaction, with this man whose will imposed his intellectual notions on his feelings, and his emotional tendencies on his thoughts, the thing which he enjoys is always as the concave to the convex of the thing which he produces. But although Alfieri was not a poet, and was not even a potential novel writer, he was, in a sense, essentially a dramatist; though even here we must distinguish and diminish. Alfieri was not a man who cared for rapid action or for intricate plot: he never felt the smallest inclination to violate the old traditions of the pseudo-cla.s.sic stage by those thrilling scenes or sights which had to be described and not shown, nor by those complications of interest which require years for an action instead of the orthodox twenty-four hours.

He was perfectly satisfied with the no-place, no-where--with the vague temple, or palace hall, or public square where, as in the country of the abstract, the action of pseudo-cla.s.sic tragedy always takes place, or, more properly speaking, the talking of pseudo-cla.s.sic tragedy always goes on; he was perfectly satisfied with sending in a servant or a messenger to inform the public of a murder or suicide committed behind the scenes; he was perfectly satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its original causes or developing it through its various phases. In such matters Alfieri was as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Nevertheless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense: an intense _poseur_ himself, enjoying nothing so much as working himself up to produce a given effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical, for the moral att.i.tude which may be struck so as to be effective, and for the arrangement of subordinate parts so that this att.i.tude surprise and move the audience. The moral att.i.tude, the psychological gesture, which thus became the main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be expected from such a man, nearly always his own moral att.i.tude, his own psychological gesture; he himself, his uncompromising, unhesitating, unflinching, curt and emphatic nature, is always the hero or heroine of the play, however much the situation, the incidents, the other characteristics may vary. Antigone is generous and tender, Creon is inhuman in all save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious madman, Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, Clytaemnestra is sinful and self-sophisticating, Virginia pure and open-minded; yet all these different people, despite all their differences, speak and act as Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of his words, the length of his sentences, are always the same: so much so that in one play there may be two or three Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious; but anything that is not an Alfieri in some tolerably transparent disguise, is sure to be a puppet, a lay figure with as few joints as possible, just able to stretch out its arms and clap them to its sides, but dangling suspended between heaven and earth.

The att.i.tude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I have said, the att.i.tude and gesture of Alfieri.

But the moral att.i.tude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral att.i.tude and gesture which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth, and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the att.i.tude and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the att.i.tude and gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism. To have written tragedies whose whole value depended upon the striking exhibition of these qualities; and to have made this exhibition interesting, nay, fascinating to the very people, to the amiable, humane, indifferent, lying, feeble-spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, till these very men were ashamed of what they had hitherto been; to stamp the new generation with the clear-cut die of his own strong character; this was the reality of the mission which Alfieri had felt within himself: a reality which will be remembered when his plays shall have long ceased to be acted, and shall long have ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined himself to be a great poetic genius, and a great dramatic innovator: he scorned with loathing the works of Corneille, of Racine, and of Voltaire, all immeasurably more valuable as poetry and drama than his own; he hated the works of Metastasio, a poet and a playwright by the divine right of genius; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest Shakespeare should spoil the perfection of his own conceptions. He slaved for months and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth century. His use consisted in his mere existence among men so different from himself; and his dramas, his elaborately constructed and curtailed and corrected dramas, were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which the image of this strange new-fangled personality might be flashed everywhere into the souls of his contemporaries. To perceive the moral att.i.tude and gesture specially characteristic of himself, to artificially correct and improve and isolate them in his own reality, and then to multiply their likeness for all the world; to know himself to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and to write plays whereof the heroes and heroines were mere repet.i.tions of Alfieri; such was the mission of this powerful and spontaneous nature, of this self-conscious and self-manipulating _poseur_.

The success of that performance of _Antigone_ on the amateur stage in the Spanish palace was very great. A young man, half lay, half ecclesiastic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, accustomed to write not the most sincere poetry, and to execute, perhaps, not the most creditable errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke Braschi--a young man named Vincenzo Monti, was present at this performance, or one of the succeeding ones; and from that moment became the author of the revolutionary tragedy of _Aristodemo_, the potential author of that famous ode on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners of new Italy. Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been; even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome a.s.sembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor greater than himself.

CHAPTER XI.

SEPARATION.

Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, perhaps, than at any other time of their lives; but this happiness had to be paid for. The false position in which, however faultlessly, they were placed; the illegitimate affection in which, however blamelessly, they were indulging; these things, offensive to social inst.i.tutions, although in no manner wrong in themselves, had produced their fruit of humiliation, nay, of degradation. Fate is more of a Conservative than we are apt to think; it resents the efforts of any individual, be he as blameless as possible, to resist for his own comfort and satisfaction the uncomfortable and unsatisfactory arrangements of the world; it punishes the man who seeks to elude an unjust law by condemning him to the same moral police depot, to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed; and Fate, therefore, soiled the poetic pa.s.sion of Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the base practices of any illicit love. The manner in which Fate executes these summary lynchings of people's honour could not usually be more ingenious; there seems to be a special arrangement by which offenders are punished in their most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri and of Mme. d'Albany for refusing to sacrifice their happiness to the proprieties of a society which married girls of nineteen to drunkards whom they had never seen, but which would not hear of divorce; this punishment, falling directly only upon the man, but probably just as heavy upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation of the person whom she most loved and respected, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, unflinching, into a toady, a liar, and an intriguer.

The Countess of Albany, living in the palace of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, and under the special protection of the Pope, was entirely dependent on the good pleasure of the priestly bureaucracy of the Rome of Pius VI., that is to say, of about the most contemptible and vilest set of fools and hypocrites and sinners that can well be conceived; the Papacy, just before the Revolution, had become one of the most corrupt of the many corrupt Governments of the day. Cardinal York himself was a weak and silly, but honest and kind-hearted man; but Cardinal York was entirely swayed by the prelates and priests and priestlets and semi-priestly semi-lay nondescripts among whom he lived.

He was responsible for the honour of the Countess of Albany, that is to say, of her husband and his brother; and the honour of the Countess of Albany depended exactly upon the remarks which the most depraved and hypocritical clergy in Europe, the people who did or abetted all the dirty work of Pius VI. and his Sacred College, chose to make or not to make about her conduct.

Such were the persons upon whom depended the liberty and happiness of Alfieri's lady, the possibility of that high-flown Platonic intercourse which const.i.tuted Louis d'Albany's whole happiness, and Alfieri's strongest incentive to glory; a word from them could exile Alfieri and lock the Countess up in a convent. The consequence of this state of things is humiliating to relate, since it shows to what baseness the most high-minded among us may be forced to degrade themselves. Already, during those few days' sojourn in Rome, before his stay in Naples and Mme. d'Albany's release from the Ursuline convent, Alfieri had spent his time running about flattering and wheedling the powers in command (that is to say, the corrupt ministers of the Papacy and their retinue of minions and spies), in order to obtain leave to inhabit the same city as his beloved and to see her from time to time; doing everything, and stooping to everything, he tells us, in order to be tolerated by those priests and priestlets whom he abhorred and despised from the bottom of his heart. "After so many frenzies, and efforts to make myself a free man," he writes, in his autobiography, "I found myself suddenly transformed into a man paying calls, and making bows and fine speeches in Rome, exactly like a candidate on promotion in prelatedom." At this price of bitter humiliation, nay, of something more real than mere humiliation, Alfieri bought the privilege of frequenting the palace of Cardinal York. But it was a privilege for which you could not pay once and for all; its price was a black-mail of humbugging, and wheedling, and dirt-eating.

Alfieri hated and despised all sovereigns and all priests; and if there were a sovereign and a priest whom he despised and hated more than the rest, it was the then reigning Pius VI., a vain, avaricious, weak-minded man, stickling not in the least at humiliating Catholicism before anyone who asked him to do it, by no means clean-handed in his efforts to enrich his family, without courage, or fidelity to his promise; a man whose miserable end as the brutally-treated captive of the French Republic has not been sufficient to raise to the dignity of a martyr. Of this Pope Pius VI. did Alfieri crave an audience, and to him did he offer the dedication of one of his plays; nay, the man who had sacrificed his fortune in order to free himself from the comparatively clean-handed despotism of Sardinia, who had stubbornly refused to be presented to Frederick the Great and Catherine II., who had declined making Metastasio's acquaintance on account of a too deferential bow which he had seen the old poet make to Maria Theresa; the man who had in his portfolios plays and sonnets and essays intended to teach the world contempt for kings and priests, this man, this Alfieri, submitted to having his cheek patted by Pope Braschi. This stain of baseness and hypocrisy with which, as he says, he contaminated himself, ate like a hidden and shameful sore into Alfieri's soul; yet, until the moment of writing his autobiography, he had not the courage to display this galling thing of the past even to his most intimate friends. To Louise d'Albany, to the woman between whom and himself he boasted that there was never the slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the force to tell the tale of that interview only some time later. Alfieri, honest enough to lay bare his own self-degradation, was not generous enough to hide the fact that this self-degradation was incurred out of love for her. That her hero should have stooped so low, so low that he scarcely dared to tell even her, surely this must have been as galling to the Countess of Albany as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself; this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dantesque pa.s.sion, had been dragged down, by the impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating punishment which awaited all the basest love intrigues in this base Rome of the base eighteenth century.

And, after some time, the stock of toleration bought at the price of this baseness was exhausted. The clerical friends and advisers of Cardinal York, who had hitherto a.s.sured the foolish prince of the Church that he was acting for the honour of his brother and his brother's wife in leaving a young woman of thirty-one to the sole care of a young poet of thirty-four, each being well known to be over head and ears in love with the other; these prudent ecclesiastics, little by little, began to change their minds, and the success of Alfieri's plays, the general interest in him and his lady which that success produced, suggested to them that there really might be some impropriety in the familiarity between the wife of Charles Edward and the author of _Antigone_. The train was laid, and the match was soon applied. In April 1783 the Pretender fell ill in Florence, so ill that his brother was summoned at once to what seemed his death-bed. Charles Edward recovered. But during that illness the offended husband, who, we must remember, had offered a reward for Alfieri's murder, poured out to his brother, moved and reconciled to him by the recent fear of his death, all his grievances against the Tuscan Court, against his wife, and against her lover. A letter of Sir Horace Mann makes it clear that Charles Edward persuaded his brother that his ill-usage of his wife (which, however, Mann, with his spies everywhere, had vouched for at the time) was a mere invention, and part of an odious plot by which Alfieri had imposed upon the Grand Duke, the Pope, the society of Florence and Rome, nay, upon Cardinal York himself, in order to obtain their connivance in a shameful intrigue development. The Cardinal returned to Rome in a state of indignation proportionate to his previous saintly indifference to the doings of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; he discovered that he had been shutting his eyes to what all the world (by Alfieri's own confession) saw as a very hazardous state of things; and, with the tendency to run into extremes of a foolish and weak-minded creature, he immediately published from all the housetops the dishonour whose existence had never occurred to him before. To the Countess of Albany he intimated that he would not permit her to receive Alfieri under his roof; and of the Pope (the Pope who had so recently patted Alfieri's cheek) he immediately implored an order that Alfieri should quit the Papal States within a fortnight. The order was given; but Alfieri, in whose truthfulness I have complete faith, says that, knowing that the order had been asked for, he forestalled the ignominy of being banished by spontaneously bidding farewell to the Countess of Albany and to Rome.

"This event," says Alfieri, "upset my brains for nearly two years; and upset and r.e.t.a.r.ded also my work in every way." In speaking of Alfieri's youth I have already had occasion to remark that there was in this man's character something abnormal; he was, as I have said, a moral invalid from birth; his very energy and resolution had somewhat of the frenzy and rigidity of a nervous disease, and though he would seem morally stronger than other men when strictly following his self-prescribed rule of excessive intellectual exercise, and when surrounded by a soothing atmosphere of affection and encouragement, his old malady of melancholy and rage (melancholy and rage whom he represents in one of his sonnets as two horrible-faced women seated on either side of him), his old incapacity for work, for interest in anything, his old feverish restlessness of place, returned, as a fever returns with its heat and cold and impotence and delirium, whenever he was shut out of this atmosphere of happiness, whenever he was exposed to any sort of moral hardship. On leaving Rome Alfieri went to Siena, where, years before, when he had come light-hearted and bent only upon literary fame, to learn Tuscan, he had been introduced into a little circle of men and women whom he faithfully loved, and to that Francesco Gori who shared with Tommaso di Caluso the rather trying honour of being his bosom friend. This Gori, "an incomparable man," writes Alfieri, "good, compa.s.sionate, and with all his austerity and ruggedness of virtue (_con tanta altezza e ferocia di sensi_) most gentle," appears literally to have nursed Alfieri in this period of moral sickness as one might nurse a sick or badly-bruised child. "Without him," writes Alfieri, "I think I should most likely have gone mad. But he, although he saw in me a would-be hero so disgracefully broken in spirit and inferior to himself"

(this pa.s.sage is characteristic, as showing that Alfieri considered himself, when in a normal condition, far superior to his much-praised Gori), "although he knew better than any the meaning of courage and endurance, did not, therefore, cruelly and inopportunely, oppose his severe and frozen reason to my frenzies, but, on the contrary, diminished my pain by dividing it with me. O rare, O truly heavenly gift, this of being able both to reason and to feel."

Weeping and raving, Alfieri was living once more upon letters received and sent as during his previous separation from Mme. d'Albany; and of all these love-letters, none appear to have come down to us. Carefully preserved by Mme. d'Albany and by her heir Fabre, they fell into the hands of a Mr. Gache of Montpellier, who a.s.sumed the grave responsibility of destroying them and of thus suppressing for ever the most important evidence in the law-suit which posterity will for ever be bringing against Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany in favour of Charles Edward, or against Charles Edward in favour of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany. But some weeks ago, among the pile of the Countess's letters to Sienese friends preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri at Siena, I had the good fortune to discover what are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously intended for Alfieri although addressed to his friend Francesco Gori.

I confess that an eerie feeling came over me as I unfolded these five closely-written, unsigned and undated little squares of yellow paper, things intended so exclusively for the mere moment of writing and reading, all that long-dead momentary pa.s.sion of a long-dead man and woman quivering back into reality, filling, as an a.s.sembly of ghosts might fill a house, and drive out its living occupants, this present hour which so soon will itself have become, with all its pa.s.sions and worries, a part of the past, of the indifferent, the pa.s.sionless. One is frightened on suddenly being admitted to witness, unperceived, as by the opening of a long-locked door, or by some spell said over a crystal globe or a beryl-stone, such pa.s.sion as this; one feels as if one would almost rather not. These five letters, as I have said, are addressed to a "Dear Signor Francesco, friend of my friend," and who, of course, is Francesco Gori; and are written, which no other letters of Mme.

d'Albany's are, not in French, but in tolerably idiomatic though far from correct Italian. Only one of them has any indication of place or date, "Genzano, Mardi"; but this, and the references to Alfieri's approaching journey northward and to Gori's intention of escorting him as far as Genoa, is sufficient to show that they must have been written in the summer of 1783, when Cardinal York, terrified at the liberty which he had allowed to his sister-in-law, had conveyed her safely to some villa in the Alban Hills. The woman who wrote these letters is a strangely different being from the quiet jog-trot, rather cynically philosophical Countess of Albany whom we know from all her other innumerable ma.n.u.script letters, from the published answers of Sismondi, of Foscolo and of Mme. de Souza to letters of hers which have disappeared.

The hysterical frenzy of Alfieri seems to have entered into this woman; he has worked up this naturally placid but malleable soul, this woman in bad health, deprived of all friends, jealously guarded by enemies, weak and depressed, until she has become another himself, "weeping, raving,"

like himself, but unable to relieve, perhaps to enjoy, all this frantic grief by running about like the mad Orlando, or talking and weeping by the hour to a compa.s.sionate Gori.

"Dear Signor Francesco," she writes; "how grateful I am to you for your compa.s.sion. You can't have a notion of our unhappiness. My misery is not in the least less than that of our friend. There are moments when I feel my heart torn to pieces thinking of all that he must suffer. I have no consolation except your being with him, and that is something. Never let him remain alone. He is worse, and I know that he greatly enjoys your society, for you are the only person who does not bore him and whom he always meets with pleasure. Oh! dear Signor Francesco, in what a sea of miseries are we not! You also, because our miseries are certainly also yours. I no longer live; and if it were not for my friend, for whom I am keeping myself, I would not drag out this miserable life. What do I do in this world? I am a useless creature in it; and why should I suffer when it is of no use to anyone? But my friend--I cannot make up my mind to leave him, and he must live for his own glory; and, as long as he lives, even if I had to walk on my hands, I would suffer and live. Who knows what will happen, it is so long since the man in Florence (Charles Edward) is ill, and still he lives, and it seems to me that he is made of iron in order that we may all die. You will say, in order to console me, that he can't last; but I see things clearly. This illness has not made him younger, but he may live another couple of years. He may at any moment be suffocated by the humours which have risen to his chest. What a cruel thing to expect one's happiness from the death of another! O G.o.d! how it degrades one's soul! And yet I cannot refrain from wishing it. What a thing, what a horrible thing is life; and for me it has been a continual suffering, all except the two years that I spent with my friend, and even then I lived in the midst of tears. And you also are probably not happy; with a heart like yours it is not possible that you should be. Whoever is born with any feeling can scarcely enjoy happiness. I recommend our friend to your care, particularly his health.

Mine is not so bad; I take care of myself and stay much in bed to kill the time and to rest my nerves, which are very weak. Good-bye, dear Signor Francesco, preserve your friendship for me; I deserve it, since I appreciate you."

Later on she writes again:--

"Dear Signor Francesco, friend of ours. I do all I can to take courage.