Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 7

_El._ Alas, Pylades! Why dost thou not answer?

_Or._. Speak! What hath been?

_Pyl._ Slain--

_Or._ And by whose hand?

_Pyl._ Come!

_El._ (_To_ ORESTES.) Thou slewest her!

_Or._ I parricide?

_Pyl._ Unknowing Thou plungedst in her heart thy sword, as blind With rage thou rannest on Aegisthus--

_Or._ Oh, What horror seizes me! I parricide?

My sword! Pylades, give it me; I'll have it--

_Pyl._ It shall not be.

_El._ Brother--

_Or._ Who calls me brother?

Thou, haply, impious wretch, thou that didst save me To life and matricide? Give me my sword!

My sword! O fury! Where am I? What is it That I have done? Who stays me? Who follows me?

Ah, whither shall I fly, where hide myself?-- O father, dost thou look on me askance?

Thou wouldst have blood of me, and this is blood; For thee alone--for thee alone I shed it!

_El._ Orestes, Orestes--miserable brother!

He hears us not! ah, he is mad! Forever, Pylades, we must go beside him.

_Pyl._ Hard, Inevitable law of ruthless Fate!

IV

Alfieri himself wrote a critical comment on each of his tragedies, discussing their qualities and the question of their failure or success dispa.s.sionately enough. For example, he frankly says of his Maria Stuarda that it is the worst tragedy he ever wrote, and the only one that he could wish not to have written; of his Agamennone, that all the good in it came from the author and all the bad from the subject; of his Fillippo II., that it may make a very terrible impression indeed of mingled pity and horror, or that it may disgust, through the cold atrocity of Philip, even to the point of nausea. On the Orestes, we may very well consult him more at length. He declares: "This tragic action has no other motive or development, nor admits any other pa.s.sion, than an implacable revenge; but the pa.s.sion of revenge (though very strong by nature), having become greatly enfeebled among civilized peoples, is regarded as a vile pa.s.sion, and its effects are wont to be blamed and looked upon with loathing. Nevertheless, when it is just, when the offense received is very atrocious, when the persons and the circ.u.mstances are such that no human law can indemnify the aggrieved and punish the aggressor, then revenge, under the names of war, invasion, conspiracy, the duel, and the like, enn.o.bles itself, and so works upon our minds as not only to be endured but to be admirable and sublime."

In his Orestes he confesses that he sees much to praise and very little to blame: "Orestes, to my thinking, is ardent in sublime degree, and this daring character of his, together with the perils he confronts, may greatly diminish in him the atrocity and coldness of a meditated revenge.... Let those who do not believe in the force of a pa.s.sion for high and just revenge add to it, in the heart of Orestes, private interest, the love of power, rage at beholding his natural heritage occupied by a murderous usurper, and then they will have a sufficient reason for all his fury. Let them consider, also, the ferocious ideas in which he must have been nurtured by Strophius, king of Phocis, the persecutions which he knows to have been everywhere moved against him by the usurper,--his being, in fine, the son of Agamemnon, and greatly priding himself thereon,--and all these things will certainly account for the vindictive pa.s.sion of Orestes....

Clytemnestra is very difficult to treat in this tragedy, since she must be here,

"Now wife, now mother, never wife nor mother,

"which is much easier to say in a verse than to manage in the s.p.a.ce of five acts. Yet I believe that Clytemnestra, through the terrible remorse she feels, the vile treatment which she receives from Aegisthus, and the awful perplexity in which she lives ... will be considered sufficiently punished by the spectator. Aegisthus is never able to elevate his soul; ... he will always be an unpleasing, vile, and difficult personage to manage well; a character that brings small praise to the author when made sufferable, and much blame if not made so.... I believe the fourth and fifth acts would produce the highest effect on the stage if well represented. In the fifth, there is a movement, a brevity, a rapidly operating heat, that ought to touch, agitate, and singularly surprise the spirit. So it seems to me, but perhaps it is not so."

This a.n.a.lysis is not only very amusing for the candor with which Alfieri praises himself, but it is also remarkable for the justice with which the praise is given, and the strong, conscious hold which it shows him to have had upon his creations. It leaves one very little to add, but I cannot help saying that I think the management of Clytemnestra especially admirable throughout. She loves Aegisthus with the fatal pa.s.sion which no scorn or cruelty on his part can quench; but while he is in power and triumphant, her heart turns tenderly to her hapless children, whom she abhors as soon as his calamity comes; then she has no thought but to save him. She can join her children in hating the murder which she has herself done on Agamemnon, but she cannot avenge it on Aegisthus, and thus expiate her crime in their eyes. Aegisthus is never able to conceive of the unselfishness of her love; he believes her ready to betray him when danger threatens and to s.h.i.+eld herself behind him from the anger of the Argives; it is a deep knowledge of human nature that makes him interpose the memory of her unatoned-for crime between her and any purpose of good.

Orestes always sees his revenge as something sacred, and that is a great scene in which he offers his dagger to Clytemnestra and bids her kill Aegisthus with it, believing for the instant that even she must exult to share his vengeance. His feeling towards Aegisthus never changes; it is not revolting to the spectator, since Orestes is so absolutely unconscious of wrong in putting him to death. He shows his blood-stained sword to Pylades with a real sorrow that his friend should not also have enjoyed the rapture of killing the usurper. His story of his escape on the night of Agamemnon's murder is as simple and grand in movement as that of figures in an antique bas-relief.

Here and elsewhere one feels how Alfieri does not paint, but sculptures his scenes and persons, cuts their outlines deep, and strongly carves their att.i.tudes and expression.

Electra is the worthy sister of Orestes, and the family likeness between them is sharply traced. She has all his faith in the sacredness of his purpose, while she has, woman-like, a far keener and more specific hatred of Aegisthus. The ferocity of her exultation when Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upbraid each other is terrible, but the picture she draws for Orestes of their mother's life is touched with an exquisite filial pity. She seems to me studied with marvelous success.

The close of the tragedy is full of fire and life, yet never wanting in a sort of lofty, austere grace, that lapses at last into a truly statuesque despair. Orestes mad, with Electra and Pylades on either side: it is the att.i.tude and gesture of Greek sculpture, a group forever fixed in the imperishable sorrow of stone.

In reading Alfieri, I am always struck with what I may call the narrowness of his tragedies. They have height and depth, but not breadth. The range of sentiment is as limited in any one of them as the range of phrase in this Orestes, where the recurrence of the same epithets, horrible, b.l.o.o.d.y, terrible, fatal, awful, is not apparently felt by the poet as monotonous. Four or five persons, each representing a purpose or a pa.s.sion, occupy the scene, and obviously contribute by every word and deed to the advancement of the tragic action; and this narrowness and rigidity of intent would be intolerable, if the tragedies were not so brief: I do not think any of them is much longer than a single act of one of Shakespeare's plays.

They are in all other ways equally unlike Shakespeare's plays. When you read Macbeth or Hamlet, you find yourself in a world where the interests and pa.s.sions are complex and divided against themselves, as they are here and now. The action progresses fitfully, as events do in life; it is promoted by the things that seem to r.e.t.a.r.d it; and it includes long stretches of time and many places. When you read Orestes, you find yourself attendant upon an imminent calamity, which nothing can avert or delay. In a solitude like that of dreams, those hapless phantasms, dark types of remorse, of cruel ambition, of inexorable revenge, move swiftly on the fatal end. They do not grow or develop on the imagination; their character is stamped at once, and they have but to act it out. There is no lingering upon episodes, no digressions, no reliefs. They cannot stir from that spot where they are doomed to expiate or consummate their crimes; one little day is given them, and then all is over.

Mr. Lowell, in his essay on Dryden, speaks of "a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being", and this I conceive to be the virtue of the Alferian poetry. The Italians love beauty of form, and we Goths love picturesque effect; and Alfieri has little or none of the kind of excellence which we enjoy. But while

I look and own myself a happy Goth,

I have moods, in the presence of his simplicity and severity, when I feel that he and all the cla.s.sicists may be right. When I see how much he achieves with his sparing phrase, his spa.r.s.ely populated scene, his narrow plot and angular design, when I find him perfectly sufficient in expression and entirely adequate in suggestion, the Cla.s.sic alone appears elegant and true--till I read Shakespeare again; or till I turn to Nature, whom I do not find sparing or severe, but full of variety and change and relief, and yet having a sort of elegance and truth of her own.

In the treatment of historical subjects Alfieri allowed himself every freedom. He makes Lorenzo de' Medici, a brutal and very insolent tyrant, a tyrant after the high Roman fas.h.i.+on, a tyrant almost after the fas.h.i.+on of the late Edwin Forrest. Yet there are some good pa.s.sages in the Congiura dei Pazzi, of the peculiarly hard Alfierian sort:

An enemy insulted and not slain!

What breast in triple iron armed, but needs Must tremble at him?

is a saying of Giuliano de' Medici, who, when asked if he does not fear one of the conspirators, puts the whole political wisdom of the sixteenth century into his answer,--

Being feared, I fear.

The Filippo of Alfieri must always have an interest for English readers because of its chance relation to Keats, who, sick to death of consumption, bought a copy of Alfieri when on his way to Rome. As Mr.

Lowell relates in his sketch of the poet's life, the dying man opened the book at the second page, and read the lines--perhaps the tenderest that Alfieri ever wrote--

Misero me! sollievo a me non resta Altro che il pianto, e il pianto e delitto!

Keats read these words, and then laid down the book and opened it no more. The closing scene of the fourth act of this tragedy can well be studied as a striking example of Alfieri's power of condensation.

Some of the non-political tragedies of Alfieri are still played; Ristori has played his Mirra, and Salvini his Saul; but I believe there is now no Italian critic who praises him so entirely as Giudici did. Yet the poet finds a warm defender against the French and German critics in De Sanctis, {note: Saggi Critici. Di Francesco de Sanctis.

Napoli: Antonio Morano. 1859.} a very clever and brilliant Italian, who accounts for Alfieri in a way that helps to make all Italian things more intelligible to us. He is speaking of Alfieri's epoch and social circ.u.mstances: "Education had been cla.s.sic for ages. Our ideal was Rome and Greece, our heroes Brutus and Cato, our books Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch; and if this was true of all Europe, how much more so of Italy, where this history might be called domestic, a thing of our own, a part of our traditions, still alive to the eye in our cities and monuments. From Dante to Machiavelli, from Machiavelli to Metastasio, our cla.s.sical tradition was never broken.... In the social dissolution of the last century, all disappeared except this ideal. In fact, in that first enthusiasm, when the minds of men confidently sought final perfection, it pa.s.sed from the schools into life, ruled the imagination, inflamed the will. People lived and died Romanly.... 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 cla.s.sicism of Alfieri there is no positive side. It is an ideal Rome and Greece, outside of time and s.p.a.ce, floating in the vague, ... which his contemporaries filled up with their own life."

Giuseppe Arnaud, in his admirable criticisms on the Patriotic Poets of Italy, has treated of the literary side of Alfieri in terms that seem to me, on the whole, very just: "He sacrificed the foreshortening, which has so great a charm for the spectator, to the sculptured full figure that always presents itself face to face with you, and in entire relief. The grand pa.s.sions, which are commonly sparing of words, are in his system condemned to speak much, and to explain themselves too much.... To what shall we attribute that respectful somnolence which nowadays reigns over the audience during the recitation of Alfieri's tragedies, if they are not sustained by some theatrical celebrity? You will certainly say, to the mediocrity of the actors. But I hold that the tragic effect can be produced even by mediocre actors, if this effect truly abounds in the plot of the tragedy.... I know that these opinions of mine will not be shared by the great majority of the Italian public, and so be it. The contrary will always be favorable to one who greatly loved his country, always desired to serve her, and succeeded in his own time and own manner.

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, compa.s.sion, would certainly not say what was far from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain that dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasms 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 his time we had bleated, and he roared." "In fact," says D'Azeglio, "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."

Besides his tragedies, Alfieri wrote, as I have already stated, some comedies in his last years; but I must own my ignorance of all six of them; and he wrote various satires, odes, sonnets, epigrams, and other poems. Most of these are of political interest; the Miso-Gallo is an expression of his scorn and hatred of the French nation; the America Liberata celebrates our separation from England; the Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in the truest sense sonnets.

Here is one, which loses, of course, by translation. In this and other of my versions, I have rarely found the English too concise for the Italian, and often not concise enough:

HE IMAGINES THE DEATH OF HIS LADY.

The sad bell that within my bosom aye Clamors and bids me still renew my tears, Doth stun my senses and my soul bewray With wandering fantasies and cheating fears; The gentle form of her that is but ta'en A little from my sight I seem to see At life's bourne lying faint and pale with pain,-- My love that to these tears abandons me.

"O my own true one," tenderly she cries, "I grieve for thee, love, that thou winnest naught Save hapless life with all thy many sighs."

Life? Never! Though thy blessed steps have taught My feet the path in all well-doing, stay!-- At this last pa.s.s 't is mine to lead the way.

There is a still more characteristic sonnet of Alfieri's, with which I shall close, as I began, in the very open air of his autobiography:

HIS PORTRAIT.