Alfieri was more than a great poet, he was the discoverer of a new national life in the scattered states of Italy. Putting aside consideration of his tragedies as literature, no student of the eighteenth century can fail to appreciate his influence over Italian thought. It was as though a people who had forgotten their nationality suddenly heard anew the stories of their common folk-lore. The race of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Tasso spoke again in the words of Alfieri.

It was high time that disunited Italy should find a poet’s voice. There was no vigor, no resolution, no originality from Turin to Naples, people of all classes were sunk in apathy. No wonder that foreign lovers of mediÆval Italy turned their eyes away from the seats of so much former glory; there seemed little hope in a people given over to trivial personal enjoyment. There was no liberty of speech or action—sentiment, reason, passion were all measured by the grand-ducal yard-stick.

At about the middle of this artificial eighteenth century, in 1749, Vittorio Alfieri was born at Asti, in Piedmont. His parents were of the upper rank in the close social order of the small kingdom, his father Antonio Alfieri, a man of independent means, who, as one biographer has it, “had never soiled his mind with ambition or his hands with labor.” His mother was the widow of the Marquis of Cacherano, and had two daughters and a son before she married Antonio Alfieri. After the latter’s death, which occurred when Vittorio was scarcely a year old, she married again, and it was this stepfather, the Chevalier Giacinto Alfieri di Magliano, who stood in place of father to Vittorio and his sister, as well as to their older half-brother and sisters. Although these other children were near his own age the boy Vittorio seems to have passed a lonely childhood, driven into unusual solitude by the waywardness of his nature.

While still a child, Alfieri was sent away to the Academy of Turin, the first of those journeys in which he was later to take such delight. He cared little for books or study of any sort, he was over-critical, and yet without the ambition to perfect himself. He spent his time, as he says, in his famous memoirs, in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he left the Academy not only with no knowledge of what were termed the humanities, but with no interest in any language, speaking a mixed jargon of French and Piedmontese, and reading practically nothing. Knowledge was held in small esteem by all classes at that particular time, and the priests, who formed the teaching class, were at small pains to spread a zeal for learning which they did not share. Alfieri says, “We translated the Lives of Cornelius Nepos; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under what government, nor what any government was!”

In spite of the extraordinary incapacity of his teachers, Alfieri did succeed in learning something, although he was always at great pains to decry his early education. He learned sufficient Latin to translate the Georgics of Virgil into his Italian dialect, and he was fond of reading Goldoni and Metastasio. A little later he passed into a more advanced grade, where he met many foreign youths who had been sent to Turin to study, and where he was allowed some liberty in choosing his own course. He found as much fault with these new conditions as with the old. “The reading of many French romances,” he says, “the constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric.” In place of it he learned and read much French, then the language of polite society.

In such aimless desultory fashion Alfieri passed his boyhood. He hated all restraint, and was continually getting into difficulties with the officers of the Academy. He had more money than was good for him, and spent it in the wildest extravagances whenever the opportunity offered. He bade fair to become a more or less typical member of the Piedmont nobility, perhaps a little more of a free-thinker than most, and considerably more restive. He chafed at the lack of freedom allowed him at the Academy, and on the marriage of his sister to the Count Giacinto Cumiana besought her and the Count to use their influence to have his scholar’s bonds loosened. They succeeded, and Alfieri promptly took advantage of his liberty to join in all the dissipations of the capital, and to gratify his passion for riding. In about a year he became the owner of a stable of eight horses. When his older friends cautioned the boy against his extravagance he answered that he was his own master and intended to do as he chose.

While still at the Academy the youth had sought a position in the army, but very short service as ensign in a militia regiment proved to him that he was as little fond of military restraint as of scholastic. He traveled to Genoa with two boy friends and fell in love with their sister-in-law, a vivacious brunette. He worshiped her from a distance, becoming, as he writes in his ardent Italian, “a victim to all the feelings which Petrarch has so inimitably depicted ... feelings which few can comprehend, and which fewer still ever experienced.” On his return from Genoa he considered himself a great traveler, and spoke as such, only to be laughed at by the English, French, and German boys who had been his classmates. Immediately he was seized with a passion for travel. He was only seventeen years old, and knew that he would not be permitted to travel alone. Fortunately an English teacher was about to set out with two scholars on a journey through Italy, and was willing to have Alfieri join his party. So strict was the court of that day that the King’s consent had to be obtained before the youth could leave the country. Through his brother-in-law’s influence Alfieri obtained the royal permission to go abroad.

The travels had been looked forward to with the greatest excitement. When they were begun Alfieri professed himself utterly bored by almost everything he saw. As one of his biographers says, “He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness.” Whether this desire to surprise his readers is really the keynote of the first years in his memoirs or not, it would appear that the youth was about as restless and turbulent-minded a creature as could be met with. The further he traveled in Italy the less he liked it; he would not speak the language or read the literature, he looked at an autograph manuscript of Petrarch with supreme indifference, and wished to be mistaken for a Frenchman. Yet this boy was to become, in time, the real reviver of Italian letters.

After a fortnight in Milan the party traveled to Florence by way of Parma, Modena, and Bologna. Neither people, buildings, views, pictures, nor sculpture interested Vittorio; he no sooner reached a city than he was eager to be posting on. Even Florence, later to be his home, did not attract him; the only object he found to admire in the city was Michael Angelo’s tomb at Santa Croce. He must have been the worst traveling companion possible; he hurried his friends from Florence to Rome, and finding nothing there to interest him except St. Peter’s, went on to Naples. Naples was in the midst of a carnival, and Alfieri plunged into its extravagances as though to distract his thoughts from some brooding melancholy. He was presented to the King, went to all the balls and operas, rode, gamed, made one of the fastest set, and yet in the midst of it all was discontented. He wanted to be alone, and finally applied to the King of Piedmont through his minister at Naples for permission to travel by himself. His request was granted, and at nineteen he set out to make what was then the fashionable grand tour. He traveled in state, with plenty of money, and a body servant, and with letters of introduction to the various courts.

It so happened that Alfieri had met certain French actors during a summer holiday, and from talking with them he felt a desire to see something of the French stage. He had no wish to try his own skill at dramatic compositions—indeed his only thought of an occupation at this time was that he should some day enter the diplomatic service—but he was anxious to see something different from the absurdly conventional Italian plays produced by the school which took its name from Metastasio. He went first to Marseilles, where he spent his time between the theater and solitary musing on the seashore. Thence, after a short stay, he journeyed to Paris, full of the keenest anticipations of finding pleasure in that famous city. His memoirs tell us his feelings there. He writes: “The mean and wretched buildings, the contemptible ostentation displayed in a few houses dignified with the pompous appellation of hotels and palaces, the filthiness of the Gothic churches, the truly vandal-like construction of the public theaters at that time, besides innumerable other disagreeable objects, of which not the least disgusting to me was the painted countenances of many very ugly women, far outweighed in my mind the beauty and elegance of the public walks and gardens, the infinite variety of the carriages, the lofty faÇade of the Louvre, as well as the number of spectacles and entertainments of every kind.” Verily the young Alfieri was either the hardest of all travelers to suit, or the older man, looking back, wished to emphasize the perverseness of his youth.

The Piedmontese Minister presented the young traveler to Louis XV., concerning whom Alfieri wrote, “He received with a cold and supercilious air those who were presented to him, surveying them from head to foot. It seemed as if on presenting a dwarf to a giant he should view him smiling, or perhaps say, ‘Ah! the little animal!’ or if he remained silent his air and manner would express the same derision.” He was not at all attracted by the French court, which he considered very pompous, and was anxious to be out on the highroads again, driving his post-horses. In January, 1768, he crossed the channel and landed at Dover.

England delighted him, he found London far more to his taste than Paris, he was charmed with the country, the large estates, the inns, the roads, the horses, the people, all pleased him. He was particularly struck with the absence of poverty. For a time he even thought of settling there permanently, and years afterwards when he had seen much of all the European countries he said that Italy and England were the two he infinitely preferred as residences.

But of the pleasures of London’s fashionable life the young wanderer soon tired, and for variety turned coachman, and drove a friend with whom he was staying through all the city streets, leaving him wherever he wished, and waiting patiently on the box for his return. “My amusements through the course of the winter,” he wrote, “consisted in being on horseback during five or six hours every morning, and in being seated on the coach-box for two or three hours every evening, whatever might be the state of the weather.” His tastes at this time were closely akin to those of many of his English friends.

Finally he left London and went to Holland. There he met Don Joseph d’Acunha, the Portuguese Ambassador, a man of considerable literary taste, who induced him to read Machiavelli, and first led him to think of trying his literary skill. At The Hague he also fell deeply in love, and, quite according to the fashionable custom of the time, with a young married woman. For the moment his fits of morbidness and continual unrest left him, he contrived constantly to be with the woman he loved, and even followed her and her husband to Spa. A short time afterwards the husband started for Switzerland, and the young wife returned to The Hague. For ten days Alfieri was constantly in her society, then came a message from her husband bidding her follow him. She wrote Alfieri a note saying farewell and sent it to him through D’Acunha after she had left the city. The youth was prostrated and with the violence of his nature planned to kill himself. He complained of illness and had himself bled. When he was alone he tore off the bandages with the idea of bleeding to death. His faithful valet, however, knew the peculiar nature of his master, and entered Alfieri’s room. The bandages were replaced, and the incident ended, although it was long before the young man could recover from the parting with his fair lady. He passed through Belgium to Switzerland, and so on back to Piedmont, still wrapped in recollections, and unable to awaken any lasting interest.

Living with his sister, first in the country, and later in Turin, a short term of peace succeeded in Alfieri’s life. He set himself to reading, and studied with considerable care the popular French authors, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Plutarch, however, became his chief companion. In one of the most characteristic pages of his memoirs we find him writing, “The book of all others which gave me most delight and beguiled many of the tedious hours of winter, was Plutarch. I perused five or six times the lives of Timoleon, CÆsar, Brutus, Pelopidas, and some others. I wept, raved, and fell into such a transport of fury, that if any one had been in the adjoining chamber they must have pronounced me out of my senses. Every time I came to any of the great actions of those celebrated individuals, my agitation was so extreme that I could not remain seated. I was like one beside himself, and shed tears of mingled grief and rage at having been born in Piedmont and at a period and under a government where it was impossible to conceive or execute any great design.” Plutarch first set before him vividly the contrast between the Italy of the past and of his own day. As a result he became dissatisfied with his own inability to win any high distinction.

The winter of his twentieth year found Alfieri still without any definite plans, now studying astronomy, now considering a diplomatic career. With spring he determined again to travel, and in May set off for Vienna. The spirit of unrest had given place to a brooding melancholy. In this sense of the times being out of joint and himself without work to do was born the gradual desire to write something different from and in a more heroic strain than the rigorously conservative dramas of the day. He traveled with Montaigne’s Essays in his pockets, and Montaigne, he says, first taught him to think. He still found difficulty in reading Italian and much preferred foreign authors to those of his own land.

In Vienna Alfieri had a chance to meet the most eminent of then living Italian authors, a man much admired in his generation. The opportunity he declined. “I had seen Metastasio,” he says, “in the gardens of SchÖnbrunn, perform the customary genuflection to Maria Theresa in such a servile and adulatory manner, that I, who had my head stuffed with Plutarch, and who embellished every theory, could not think of binding myself, either by the ties of familiarity or friendship, with a poet who had sold himself to a despotism which I so cordially detested.” In Berlin he was presented to Frederick the Great, and as he writes “mentally thanked Heaven I was not born his slave. Towards the middle of November I departed from this Prussian encampment, which I regarded with detestation and horror.”

From Berlin the young man went to Denmark, thence to Sweden, thence to Russia. He says, “I approached Petersburg with a mind wound up to an extraordinary pitch of anxiety and expectation. But alas! no sooner had I reached this Asiatic assemblage of wooden huts, than Rome, Genoa, Venice, and Florence rose to my recollections, and I could not refrain from laughing. What I afterwards saw of this country tended still more strongly to confirm my first impression that it merited not to be seen. Everything but their beards and their horses disgusted me so much, that during the six weeks I remained among these savages I wished not to become acquainted with any one, nor even to see the two or three youths with whom I had associated at Turin, and who were descended from the first families of the country. I took no measure to be presented to the celebrated Autocratrix Catherine II., nor did I even behold the countenance of a sovereign who in our days has out-stripped fame.”

A little later he was back in England, and now again he fell in love, this time also with a married woman of rank. With a truly Byronic audacity he defied all the conventions, accompanied the woman everywhere, and became a subject of town scandal. Finally confronted by the husband, he fought a duel with swords in a field near St. James’s Park, his left arm being in a sling at the time as the result of a bit of too daring horsemanship. Alfieri was slightly wounded, and the husband declared himself satisfied. Shortly after the latter sued for divorce, bringing the Italian’s name into the case. The newspapers took up the scandal, and the matter became a cause celÈbre. Alfieri was on the point of proposing marriage, when the woman, by her own confessions, told him that such a result was impossible. With his ardor completely cooled and his mind given to the bitterest thoughts he left London, and after short stays in The Hague and Paris journeyed into Spain.

In Paris he had bought the best known Italian authors and at this time commenced to read them, although it was not until much later that he began to appreciate them at their real worth. He did, however, carry them with him on his travels, and gradually learned something at first hand of that great galaxy, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. His mind was not yet ripe for any study, even as he traveled in Spain he was still subject to those wild outbreaks of despondency and passion which alternately seemed to seize upon him. He became a creature of chance whims, now he was ready to yield to the quiet contentment of a suitable marriage, now burning with rage against all the customs of society. Morbid ideas continually pressed his footsteps. The atmosphere of a malevolent passion seems almost always surrounding the great tragedies he later penned, and that atmosphere was generated by a nature which from earliest youth had been extraordinarily violent. His temper was wholly ungovernable. One evening in Madrid, as Alfieri’s faithful valet, the companion of all his travels, was curling his hair, he accidentally pulled it so sharply with the tongs that Alfieri winced. Instantly he sprang from his chair, and seizing a heavy candlestick, hurled it at the servant. It struck the man on the temple, and instantly his face was covered with blood. He rushed at his master, but fortunately a young Spaniard who was present came to the rescue, and separated them. Immediately Alfieri was covered with shame. “Had you killed me,” he said to the man, “you would have acted rightly. If you wish, kill me while I sleep to-night, for I deserve it.” The valet took no such reprisal, he had been with his young master long enough to understand the sudden outbursts of his temper, and was content to keep the two blood-stained handkerchiefs that had bandaged his head and show them occasionally to Alfieri as a reminder.

In Lisbon the traveler formed a close friendship with the Abbot of Caluso, whom he called a “true, living Montaigne.” The Abbot tried to interest the young man in literature, induced him to write some verses, and gave him the benefit of his criticism. For a short time the interest in poetry lasted, then it flagged, and again Alfieri felt himself without any purpose. He decided to return home, and in May, 1772, arrived at Turin.

Now he took a house for himself, furnished it elaborately, and made it the headquarters of a youthful society that sought amusement in various forms. Some of them wrote, and Alfieri tried his pen for their amusement, but soon tired of writing as a sport, and gave himself up to other occupations. Continually searching for something to still his restlessness he again fell in love, this time with a woman of rank, some ten years his senior, and of a most unenviable reputation. He became absolutely her slave, worked himself into frenzies on her account, would consider nothing but the happiness of being with her. He fell very ill, but when he recovered found himself as much in love as ever. For two years he lived in this state of obsession, tormented by self-reproach, but unable to rid himself of his own yoke.

Finally he decided to quit Turin and break his fetters. When he was only a short distance on the road to Rome his resolution failed and he returned. Again he resolved to leave the city for a year. The year lasted eight days. He was thoroughly ashamed, disliked being seen in Turin, but could not keep away. He felt finally that he must take one last stand or lose all self-respect and control forever. He had his hair cut so short that he dared not appear in society, and shut himself into his house to read. He could not keep his thoughts on the books, and tried composition. He wrote a sonnet, and sent it to a friend, and received a reply highly praising it. Then he remembered that a year before as he sat watching by the sick bed of the woman who had so charmed him he had lightly outlined a tragedy on the life of Cleopatra, taking his subject from tapestries that hung in the room. He threw himself into the work of writing that tragedy now, and found that interest in it drove all other thoughts away. He wrote rapidly, continually, only stopping when he was completely tired. When those times came, still frightened with the possibility of leaving the house, he had himself tied into a chair. He only allowed himself freedom when he knew he had won self-control. By that time he had finished his tragedy in blank verse called “Cleopatra,” and a short farce called “The Poets,” the latter ridiculing the former. He sent them to a theater in Turin, where they were produced on June 16, 1775, and met with success. The author did not value either play highly himself, and sought to have them withdrawn. He wrote later, comparing these works with those of his contemporaries, “The sole difference which existed between their pieces and mine was that the former were productions of learned incapacity, whereas mine was the premature offspring of ignorance, which promised one day to become something.”

His battle against what he considered a highly unworthy infatuation had restored Alfieri’s self-respect and health, and out of this curious struggle sprang his first real and lasting ambition. “A devouring fire took possession of my soul,” he says, “I thirsted one day to become a deserving candidate for theatrical fame.” The date of that first performance marked a turning point, not only for Alfieri, but for his country’s literature. It was, said the Italian critic, Paravia, “a day and a year of eternal memory not only for the Turinese, but for all Italians; because it was, so to speak, the dawn of the magnificent day which, thanks to Alfieri, was to rise upon Italian tragedy.”

The restless energy which had driven Alfieri across the various European countries now concentrated in an all-pervading determination to become a tragic poet. He launched into that effort with the same unbounded ardor with which he had so frequently before launched into love. He was twenty-seven years of age when he seriously set himself to work to acquire command of Italian so that he might think in the language of his native land rather than in that of France. He described his resources as “a resolute, obstinate, and ungovernable character, susceptible of the warmest affections, among which, by an odd kind of a combination, predominated the most ardent love, and hatred approaching to madness against every species of tyranny; an imperfect and vague recollection of several French tragedies which I had seen represented several years before, but which I had then neither read nor studied; a total ignorance of dramatic rules, and an incapability of expressing myself with elegance and precision in my own language.”

To accomplish his purpose Alfieri now began at the very beginning and took up the study of Italian grammar, and thence made a first-hand acquaintance with all the best of the early Italian writers. He would not allow himself any longer to read French, and tried to break himself of the habit of thinking in that tongue. He moved from town into a small country village in order that nothing might distract him. There he re-wrote for the third time his tragedy of “Cleopatra,” and practised turning into Italian verses the outlines of two tragedies which he had recently written in French. He pored over Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, and Dante until he felt that he at last really caught the full spirit of each author’s style, then he tried writing poetry of his own.

His ignorance of Latin continually vexed him, and now he employed a teacher to begin over those lessons he had so thoroughly disliked at school. It was very hard work at first, but he would learn what he now considered essential to his purpose, and after three months’ study of Horace he found that he could read Latin. He took up the other classics and translated some of them into modern Italian for practice in their varied styles.

Turin was too near France to satisfy his new passion for only the purest Italian and so he went to Pisa, and thence to Florence. In the latter city he found that his ideas were at last shaping themselves in the rich and clear Italian he was seeking, he wrote verses which critical friends pronounced at last worthy of the name of poetry, and planned several poetic tragedies. He had worked hard and felt that he needed a little rest. For this purpose he returned to Turin and had the pleasure of entertaining his old friend the Abbot of Caluso there. He, as well as other friends, urged Alfieri to make literature his field. He decided that it was best for him to live in Tuscany, and as he hated to have to ask royal permission each year to allow him to remain away from Piedmont—as was the custom with the nobility—he gave his estates at Asti to his sister, and contented himself with half his former income. Then he moved to Florence, which, except for intervals spent at Rome and Naples, was for a considerable time to be his home.

On his way to Florence Alfieri was obliged to stop at Sarzana, where he chanced upon a copy of Livy, and was so impressed with the story of Virginia and Icilius that he immediately planned a tragedy on the subject. Soon after he reached Pisa, but there he did not dare stay, fearful that he might be involved in a marriage with a young girl whom he had met there before and with whom he says that he had almost fallen in love. He himself contrasts his feelings at that time with those he had entertained when he had first thought of marriage. “Eight years afterwards, my travels through Europe, the love of glory, a passion for study, the necessity for preserving my freedom, in order to speak and write the truth without restraint—all these reasons powerfully warned me that under a despotic government it is sufficiently difficult even to live single, and that no one who reflects deeply will either become a husband or a father; thus I crossed the Arno and arrived at Siena.”

In Siena he met a company of strongly intellectual people, and from one of these, a friend who became a close confidant, he gained the idea of writing a tragedy founded upon the conspiracy of the Pazzi. Here he also wrote the first two books of an essay upon Tyranny, which was printed several years later. Thoroughly absorbed in his literary work Alfieri moved to Florence at the beginning of the winter, and took up his residence there.

At that time there were living in Florence, under the titles of Count and Countess of Albany, Charles Edward, “the Young Pretender” to the English throne, and his wife. The latter, who had been Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, had been married when nineteen to the Stuart prince, who was considerably her elder. Charles Edward had an unsavory reputation and knew more drunk than sober moments. As a result the young Countess, who was very beautiful and extremely fond of the fine arts and of society, was the object of much romantic pity. When Alfieri came to Florence he found the entire city at the feet of the Countess. Every one condemned the Count’s quarrelsome, tyrannical, libertine nature, every one praised the Countess’s sweet and sunny disposition. Friends offered to introduce Alfieri to the star of Florence, but he declined on the ground that he always shunned women who were the most beautiful and most admired. He could not avoid, however, seeing her in the park and at the theater, and the first sight of her was destined never to be effaced. Thus he writes of her: “The first impression she made on me was infinitely agreeable. Large black eyes full of fire and gentleness, joined to a fair complexion and flaxen hair, gave to her beauty a brilliancy difficult to withstand. Twenty-five years of age, possessing a taste for letters and the fine arts, an amiable character, an immense fortune, and placed in domestic circumstances of a very painful nature, how was it possible to escape where so many reasons existed for loving?”

De Stendhal gives an account of their first meeting, which if inaccurate (it does not appear in Alfieri’s memoirs) is at least characteristic of the man. According to this story Alfieri was presented to the Countess in one of the galleries of Florence, and noticed at the time that the lady was much interested in a portrait on the walls of Charles XII. She told the poet that she admired the costume exceedingly. Two days later Alfieri appeared in Florence dressed exactly like the portrait of the Swedish King, and so presented himself before the Countess. The act was quite in keeping with the poet’s nature.

Alfieri made a determined effort to fight against the passion he had cause to fear, and made a hurried journey to Rome. He could not stay there, and returned to Florence, stopping at Siena to see his friend Gandellini, to whom he spoke of the Countess, and who did not counsel him against giving way to the fascination.

On his return to Florence he acknowledged that he was deeply in love. This love, however, he felt ennobled him, and instead of causing him to give up his work, continually inspired him to new literary heights. He wrote, “I soon perceived that the object of my present attachment, far from impeding my progress in the pursuit of useful knowledge, or deranging my studies, like the frivolous woman with whom I was formerly enamoured, urged me on by her example to everything dignified and praiseworthy. Having once learned to know and appreciate so rare and valuable a friend, I yielded myself up entirely to her influence.” From the commencement of this new affection, the best and most lasting of his life, date the finest works of his genius.

There had been long delays in settling Alfieri’s estate in Piedmont, and arranging that he might live in Tuscany, but the presence of the Countess urged him imperatively to remain in Florence. When the business arrangements were finally at an end he found it would be necessary for him to curtail his former expensive style of living. This he did, giving up his horses, all his servants, except a valet and cook, and most of his personal luxuries. Books were the only expense he indulged in, he acquired gradually a very large and choice library. He took a small house, and devoted himself to his dramas, seeing as much as he could in leisure moments of the beautiful Countess. During these three quiet years he wrote his tragedies “Virginia,” “Agemennone,” “Don Garzia,” “Maria Stuarda,” and “Oreste,” a poem on the death of Duke Alexander, killed by Lorenzino de’ Medici, had rewritten his drama of “Filippo,” and partly prepared the tragedies “Timoleone,” “Ottavia,” and “Rosmunda.” All of these works are built on the classic Grecian model, and flame with hatred of tyranny, and burn with civic virtue. In that they show their kinship to the author’s times. De Sanctis, always a brilliant critic, says: “The situations that Alfieri has chosen in his tragedies have a visible relation to the social state, to the fears, and to the hopes of his own time. It is always resistance to oppression, of man against man, of people against tyrant.... In the classicism of Alfieri there is no positive side. It is an ideal Rome and Greece, outside of time and space, floating in the vague ... which his contemporaries filled up with their own life.”

At about the end of the dramatist’s third year of residence in Florence, the ill-treatment of the Countess of Albany by her husband caused her friends, and chief among them Alfieri, to plan for her release from such servitude. To this end they secured her entrance first into a convent at Florence, and then, with the consent of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Count’s own brother the Cardinal of York, her removal to Rome. So afraid were her friends lest the Count should effect a rescue that they surrounded her carriage with a body of horsemen as she left Florence, and Alfieri rode on the coach box until she was well on her road.

While the Countess had been in Florence, Alfieri had worked assiduously there; now that she was gone he found composition impossible, and after a very short interval went to Naples, planning to wait there until he should learn what the Countess would do. It was not long before it became apparent that the courts of Europe had taken up the wife’s cause against her husband. The Pope gave her a pension and approved of her taking apartments in the house of her brother-in-law. The court of France gave her the pension which the Count had previously indignantly declined as being insufficient for his position. Alfieri learned at last that the Countess was living in entire independence of her husband, and after a further stay of a month in Naples in order to avoid possible scandal he moved to Rome, and took up his residence there.

With this new settled existence he began to write again, and produced at this time “Saul,” his fourteenth tragedy, and one of his finest works. He took infinite pains with all his dramas, planned them again and again, wrote version after version, and then selected the forms he preferred after careful judgment, polished them line by line and word by word until he was satisfied. He wished to try the effect of his characters upon an audience, and had himself acted, together with some of his friends, his play of “Antigone.” He found he had not mistaken his ability as a dramatist. At about the same time he published part of his works, sending four dramas to the printer. Their publication excited immediate and flattering attention. His life in Rome was the most delightful he had yet known. His house was a pleasant villa near the Baths of Diocletian. Here he wrote and studied in the morning. Later in the day he went for long rides through the neighboring country, and the evenings he spent with the woman who had become his chief inspiration.

In time, however, the poet’s visits to the Countess became the subject of unfavorable comment, and the Cardinal, her brother-in-law, brought the matter to the attention of the Papal Court. Realizing the delicacy of the situation, Alfieri reluctantly decided that he must quit Rome, and in May, 1783, he set out again as a wanderer, his ambition lost, his life offering him no further interests.

As in early youth he now took to rapid traveling for solace, carrying on at the same time a continual correspondence with the Countess. He wrote a few sonnets, but found that his mind was too unsettled to allow him to engage in any more lengthy labors. He went to France, and then to England, and in each country visited scenes which the impetuosity of his youth had neglected. Horses again made their appeal to him in London, and he bought fourteen, “as many horses as he had written tragedies,” he states. With these horses he soon returned to Turin, and made a short visit to his mother, whom he had not seen for a long time. When he left her he went to Piacenza, and here he heard that the Countess had at last been released from the restraint under which she had lived at Rome, and that as her health was delicate she had gone to Baden. He was in two minds as to his course, the thought of possible calumny to her bade him refrain from going to Baden at once, and he tried to content himself in Siena with his old friend Gandellini. The continual interchange of letters gradually wore away his resolution, and at last the time came when he could keep from her no longer. August 4, 1784, he set out to join her and within a fortnight felt his old joy return. Immediately his thoughts grew fertile, he began to write again as he had not done since he had quitted her in Rome. There was no question but that her presence acted as a continual inspiration to his genius.

To this period of new happiness belonged the dramas of “Agide,” “Sofonisba,” and “Mirra.” The plot of the latter came to him as he was reading the speech of Mirra to her nurse in the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid, and was written in the first heat of his emotion at the woman’s words. He was somewhat in doubt as to the success of a play written on such a subject, but it was hailed as a triumph at its first presentation some years later, and made a remarkable impression on Byron and on Madame de StaËl, and was considered by most critics as Ristori’s finest impersonation.

After two months the Countess had to return to Italy, and Alfieri’s gloom at the separation was further increased by the news of the death of his friend Gandellini. He went to Siena, but found that city lonely without his friend, and passed the winter in Pisa. He did a great amount of reading, repolished his later dramas, and prepared new volumes of them for the press. When winter ended he spent another two months of summer with the Countess at Colmar, and then again they separated. This time he resolved to work unremittingly, and did so until his health failed and he had to rest. At about the same time the Countess decided to leave Italy permanently, and at length Alfieri, towards the close of 1786, joined her and went with her to Paris. He writes in his memoirs of this journey into France, “This country which had always proved extremely disagreeable to me, as much on account of my own character, as the manners of the people, now appeared a perfect elysium.” There are many glimpses to be had of this new life in the French capital. Montanari recounts how the Marquis Pindemonte, himself a dramatist, used each evening to take an omelette soufflÉ in the Countess’s room, while Alfieri sat in the chimney corner sipping his chocolate. Under such peaceful auspices the poet spent many months in a critical preparation of all his works for new publication.

In February, 1788, word reached the Countess that her husband had died in Rome, and it would appear that she was soon afterwards married to Alfieri, although in the will of the latter she is referred to as the Countess of Albany and not as his wife. His memoirs do not once speak of her as his wife, but from the date of her husband’s death their life together was uninterrupted. It is now generally assumed that they were privately married about this time.

For three years the two lived quietly in Paris, spending their summers and autumns at a new home Alfieri had acquired in Alsace. During these years he printed two editions of his works, supervised their sales, and wrote his remarkably entertaining memoirs, which were finished up to May, 1790. The end of the three years found Paris on the brink of the great Revolution.

Alfieri saw the black clouds gathering on the French horizon, but stayed on in the desire to complete the printing of his works. He was in turn amazed, alarmed, and disgusted at the succeeding events in the establishment of a republic. The principles proclaimed by these so-called destroyers of tyrants were not the principles of his own freedom-loving heart, nor those of any of his heroic characters. He writes, “My heart was torn asunder on beholding the holy and sublime cause of liberty betrayed by self-called philosophers,—so much did I revolt at witnessing their ignorance, their folly, and their crimes; at beholding the military power, and the insolence and licentiousness of the civilians stupidly made the basis of what they termed political liberty, that I henceforth desired nothing more ardently than to leave a country which, like a lunatic hospital, contained only fools or incurables.”

Circumstances, however, conspired to keep them in Paris, the Countess was dependent upon France for two-thirds of her income, Alfieri was finishing the printing of his dramas. The hour came when Alfieri determined that further delay would be more than foolhardy, and so, on August 18, 1792, having obtained passports with great difficulty, he drove with the Countess to the city barrier. A dramatic scene followed. The National Guards found the passports correct, and would have let the travelers pass, but at the same moment a crowd of drunken revelers broke from a neighboring cabaret, and attracted by the well-laden carriage, proceeded to stop its passage, while they debated whether they should stone it or set it on fire. The Guards remonstrated, but the revelers complained bitterly that people of wealth should leave the city. Alfieri lost all prudence, and jumping from his carriage, seized the passports from the man who held them and, as he himself tells the incident, “Full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my passport in my hand and shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Look! Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am he; look at me; I have my passport, and I have had it legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and by Heaven, we will pass!’”

The crowd was surprised, and before they had recovered Alfieri and the Countess had driven past the barriers and were safely on their way. They had left Paris none too soon. Two days later the same authorities that had granted the passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that Alfieri had left behind in Paris and declared both the Countess and Alfieri refugee aristocrats. The fact that they were both foreigners appeared to be of no importance. It was well that they had gone. The Countess was too illustrious a personage to have escaped for long the fury of the fast-gathering mob, and had she been lost Alfieri would have shared her fate.

Florence thenceforth became the home of the Countess and of Alfieri. He wrote desultorily, commenting upon what he had seen in France, but for the most part devoted himself to a study of the classics. In 1795, when he was forty-six years of age, he started to learn Greek, and was so fired with the desire that in a short time he had added an intimate knowledge of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to that he already had of the Latin authors. He was so much interested in the “Alcestis” of Euripides that he wrote an original drama based on the same theme. He was described at this time as of a tall and commanding figure, with a face of intelligence, and the look of one born to command, rather than obey. His forehead was broad and lofty; his red hair fell in thick masses around it.

The restless youth had changed to a methodical, studious man, he arranged his day by rule, and followed that rule exactly. Only one event disturbed him, and that was the occupation of Florence by French troops. He had distrusted the French while he lived among them, now when they came to hold Florence in subjection his hatred of tyranny bade him despise them. He refused to receive the call of the French general who, having read his works, was anxious to meet him. On the correspondence which passed between them in reference to this matter Alfieri wrote, “Dialogue between a lion in a cage, and his crocodile guardian.”

When he had fled from France he had been compelled to leave some of his printed works behind him, and he was now in fear lest their appearance and eager appeal for liberty should seem to ally him with the Revolutionary cause. Above all things he condemned the French Revolution. To avoid this possibility he now advertised in the Italian papers a disclaimer, warning the public against any edition of his writings except such as he himself issued. With this formal announcement he had to be content.

Alfieri had determined to write no more tragedies, and turned to composition of comedies, of which he had six nearly completed when his health failed. He rested for a time and then resumed his methodical life of study and work. He was advised to give himself more recreation, but was too obstinate to adopt any plan but his own. His health gave way again, and neglecting the physician’s advice, he tried to minister to his own illness. Gradually he grew weaker, and on October 3, 1803, he died. He was buried in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, and his monument, carved by Canova, rises between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli. An inscription states by whom the memorial was erected. “Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, Countess of Albany, to Vittorio Alfieri of Asti, 1810.” In 1824 she was buried in Santa Croce.

In his will Alfieri left everything to the Countess. Their love had grown deeper with time. She wrote to a friend, “You know, by experience, what it is to lose a person with whom we have lived for twenty-six years, who has never given us a moment of displeasure, whom we have always adored, respected, and venerated.” Each, tormented alone, had found happiness finally in their united life.

What was Alfieri’s part in the growth of that spirit which was preparing to set Italy free? Why did Mazzini later point him out as one of the great sources of inspiration for his “Young Italy”? We must remember that literature and the drama are more closely related to Italian public opinion than they are with us, that the appearance of a new book or play is often a vital subject to a ministry. What the people read they felt, and it was Alfieri who first showed them the immorality of national servitude. One of his best critics has said that when Alfieri first turned his glance toward the Italian stage, it presented anything but a hopeful aspect. “The degradation of a people enslaved under a foreign yoke, and without political life, could not fail to make itself felt in the theater as in the more extended arena of public affairs. No high effort of mind could be born amid such circumstances. A stage without authors soon ceases to have actors. When actors and authors both are wanting an audience will not easily be found. Thus it was, thus it had been in Italy through many troubled years. The opera,—the seductive, but enervating opera,—carried to great perfection by Metastasio, was almost alone in possession of the popular taste.... Alfieri’s first thought was to improve the taste of his countrymen, by blending the amusement they were accustomed to with something better.... Instead of attempting reform by easy stages, he determined to attempt everything at once.... It was something more than an improvement of the stage that he attempted; it was the improvement of his countrymen; the regeneration of his country!... Throughout nearly all his tragedies and his prose works, the leading idea by which he was animated stood plainly out. Several pieces he specially calls tragedies of liberty. They well deserve the name. He never tired in his denunciations of tyranny, in his invectives against oppression. These were themes upon which the more he spoke, the more eloquent he became.”

The dramas themselves, built in strict accordance with the three unities of classic taste, may seem strangely stiff and unemotional to us, but they carried an immense appeal to the Italian of the last century. They spoke a new voice and stirred a new spirit in their hearers. The voice once heard, the spirit once born, the new idea grew rapidly. Within a few years after Alfieri’s death eighteen editions of his works had passed through the press. Two great theaters, one at Milan and one at Bologna, were built by men eager to present his tragedies. The influence of his writings was tremendous; the minds of Italians from Piedmont to Sicily were stirred to a higher pitch than they had been for many centuries.

Alfieri’s character had many defects, at best his life was unmoral, but having regard to the society into which he was born and the early training he received, more was scarcely to be looked for. He was passionate, reckless, and untutored in all self-control, yet he harnessed himself to a work which possessed his fancy and in its service became the devotee of study and control. Like his life his writings lack peace and broad philosophy, but on the other hand they gain from his peculiar nature a certain domineering force. Giuseppe Arnaud in his criticism on the patriotic poets of Italy says, “Whoever should say that Alfieri’s tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain the dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasmas with which the Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to this time we had bleated and he roared.”

Let me only add the striking words of his fellow countryman, the gifted poet-statesman Massimo d’Azeglio. “In fact,” he wrote, “one of the merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond that of his verses and his tragedies.”

Alfieri reminded Italians that they had a native voice.

MANZONI