Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 attitude 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, bloody, terrible, fatal, awful, is not apparently felt by the poet as monotonous. Four or five persons, each representing a purpose or a passion, 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 passions 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 retard 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 classicists may be right. When I see how much he achieves with his sparing phrase, his sparsely populated scene, his narrow plot and angular design, when I find him perfectly sufficient in expression and entirely adequate in suggestion, the Classic 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 fashion, a tyrant almost after the fashion of the late Edwin Forrest. Yet there are some good passages 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 � 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 circumstances: “Education had been classic 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 classical 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 passed 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 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.”

  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 passions, 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, compassion, 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 pass ‘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.

  Thou mirror of veracious speech sublime,

  What I am like in soul and body, show:

  Red hair, — in front grown somewhat thin with time;

  Tall stature, with an earthward head bowed low;

  A meager form, with two straight legs beneath;

  An aspect good; white skin with eyes of blue;

  A proper nose; fine lips and choicest teeth;

  Face paler than a throned king’s in hue;

  Now hard and bitter, yielding now and mild;

  Malignant never, passionate alway,

  With mind and heart in endless strife embroiled;

  Sad mostly, and then gayest of the gay.

  Achilles now, Thersites in his turn:

  Man, art thou great or vile? Die and thou ‘lt learn!

  VINCENZO MONTI AND UGO FOSCOLO

  I

  The period of Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo is that covered in political history by the events of the French revolution, the French invasion of Italy and the Napoleonic wars there against the Austrians, the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic and of the kingdom of Italy, the final overthrow of the French dominion, and the restoration of the Austrians. During all these events, the city of Milan remained the literary as well as the political center of Italy, and whatever were the moral reforms wrought by the disasters of which it was also the center, there is no doubt that intellectually a vast change had taken place since the days when Parini’s satire was true concerning the life of the Milanese nobles. The transformation of national character by war is never, perhaps, so immediate or entire as we are apt to expect. When our own war broke out, those who believed that we were to be purged and ennobled in all our purposes by calamity looked for a sort of total and instant conversion. This, indeed, seemed to take place, but there was afterward the inevitable reaction, and it appears that there are still some small blemishes upon our political and social state. Yet, for all this, each of us is conscious of some vast and inestimable difference in the nation.

  It is instructive, if it is not ennobling, to be moved by great and noble impulses, to feel one’s self part of a people, and to recognize country for once as the supreme interest; and these were the privileges the French revolution gave the Italians. It shed their blood, and wasted their treasure, and stole their statues and pictures, but it bade them believe themselves men; it forced them to think of Italy as a nation, and the very tyranny in which it ended was a realization of unity, and more to be desired a thousand times than the shameless tranquillity in which it had found them. It is imaginable that when the revolution advanced upon Milan it did not seem the greatest and finest thing in life to serve a lady; when the battles of Marengo and Lodi were fought, and Mantua was lost and won, to court one’s neighbor’s wife must have appeared to some gentlemen rather a waste of time; when the youth of the Italian legion in Napoleon’s campaign perished amidst the snows of Russia, their brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers, must have found intrigues and operas and fashions but a poor sort of distraction. By these terrible means the old forces of society were destroyed, not quickly, but irreparably. The cavaliere servente was extinct early in this century; and men and women opened their eyes upon an era of work, the most industrious age that the world has ever seen.

  The change took place slowly; much of the material was old and hopelessly rotten; but in the new generation the growth towards better and greater things was more rapid.

  Yet it would not be well to conjure up too heroic an image of Italian revolutionary society: we know what vices fester and passions rage in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war. Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do. It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the Italians to improve the opportunity, they did it partially, fitfully, as men do everything.

  II

  The poets who belong to this time are numerous enough, but those best known are Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. These men were long the most conspicuous literati in the capital of Lombardy, but neither was Lombard. Monti was educated in the folds of Arcadia at Rome; Foscolo was a native of one of the Greek islands dependent on Venice, and passed his youth and earlier manhood in the lagoons. The accident of residence at Milan brought the two men together, and made friends of those who had naturally very little in common. They can only be considered together as part of the literary history of the time in which they both happened to be born, and as one of its most striking contrasts.

  In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican constitution on Lombardy and the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state. Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet’s vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent principles until we are tempted, and it was Monti’s misfortune to be born in an age which put his principles to the test, with a prospect of more than the usual prosperity in reward for servility and compliance, and more than the usual want, suffering, and danger in punishment of candor and constancy.

  He was born near Ferrara in 1754; and having early distinguished himself in poetry, he was conducted to Rome by the Cardinal-Legate Borghesi. At
Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples, appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Bassville’s death, and turned it to epic account. In the moment of dissolution, Bassville, repenting his republicanism, receives pardon; but, as a condition of his acceptance into final bliss, he is shown, through several cantos of terza rima, the woes which the Revolution has brought upon France and the world. The bad people of the poem are naturally the French Revolutionists; the good people, those who hate them. The most admired episode is that descriptive of poor Louis XVI.’s ascent into heaven from the scaffold.

  {Illustration: VINCENZO MONTI.}

  There is some reason to suppose that Monti was sincerer in this poem than in any other of political bearing which he wrote; and the Dantesque plan of the work gave it, with the occasional help of Dante’s own phraseology and many fine turns of expression picked up in the course of a multifarious reading, a dignity from which the absurdity of the apotheosis of priests and princes detracted nothing among its readers. At any rate, it was received by Arcadia with rapturous acclaim, though its theme was not the Golden Age; and on the Bassvilliana the little that is solid in Monti’s fame rests at this day. His lyric poetry is seldom quoted; his tragedies are no longer played, not even his Galeoto Manfredi, in which he has stolen almost enough from Shakespeare to vitalize one of the characters. After a while the Romans wearied of their idol, and began to attack him in politics and literature; and in 1797 Monti, after a sojourn of twenty years in the Papal capital, fled from Rome to Milan. Here he was assailed in one of the journals by a fanatical Neapolitan, who had also written a Bassvilliana, but with celestial powers, heroes and martyrs of French politics, and who now accused Monti of enmity to the rights of man. Monti responded by a letter to this poet, in which he declared that his Bassvilliana was no expression of his own feelings, but that he had merely written it to escape the fury of Bassville’s murderers, who were incensed against him as Bassville’s friend! But for all this the Bassvilliana was publicly burnt before the cathedral in Milan, and Monti was turned out of a government place he had got, because “he had published books calculated to inspire hatred of democracy, or predilection for the government of kings, of theocrats and aristocrats.” The poet was equal to this exigency; and he now reprinted his works, and made them praise the French and the revolutionists wherever they had blamed them before; all the bad systems and characters were depicted as monarchies and kings and popes, instead of anarchies and demagogues. Bonaparte was exalted, and poor Louis XVI., sent to heaven with so much ceremony in the Bassvilliana, was abased in a later ode on Superstition.