SOURCE: “Alfieri between France and Italy as Reflected in the Vita,” in Voltaire, the Enlightenment and the Comic Mode, edited by Maxine G. Cutler and Peter Lang, 1990, pp. 215-39.

[In the following essay, Ragusa closely examines Alfieri's autobiography, focusing on the author's perceptions of French culture.]

Alfieri first saw Paris in mid-August 1787 at the end of a precipitous trip from Marseilles which took him across the better part of France in little more than a week. He had spent a month in Marseilles, anxious to avoid travelling in the excessive heat of July and attracted by that city's “cheerful aspect, new, well laid out, clean streets, beautiful corso, beautiful harbor, [and] graceful, lively women” (III 4)¹—“ses femmes, si jolies et agaçantes,” in the words of the anonymous translation of the Vita, his autobiography, into French.² This is the very translation from which Chateaubriand quotes in his own memoirs, precisely apropos a spit of land a little way out of the harbor of Marseilles where Alfieri remembers sitting, seeing nothing but sea and sky, “two immensities” (as the Romantic conceit has it) lit up by the setting sun.³

Alfieri had been eager to get to Paris ever since he had become tired of Italy, whose cities down to Naples he had just finished visiting in what he represents as his customary headlong rush and alternations between enthusiasm and boredom. Obliged to sit out a storm in the port city of Savona on the Riviera, for instance, the young man—he was eighteen at the time—for two days never once left the house: “I wanted neither to see nor hear anything more of Italy; and every moment of detention seemed a robbery of the pleasures I was to enjoy in France” (III 4). But with the hindsight and didactic intention born of his experiences in the intervening twenty-three years—the bulk of the Vita was written in 1790—he adds: “All this was the fruit of an unrestrained fancy which always exaggerated all the good and all the evil of the future, so that both, particularly the former, seemed nothing when I experienced it” (III 4).

It therefore comes as no surprise that Paris, which he reached “on a cold, cloudy, rainy morning,” entering it “through the squalid suburb of St. Marcellus,” proved—whether in reality or recollection, or, given the treacherous ground of autobiographical narrative, both—a disappointment: “I had exchanged the beautiful skies of Italy and Provence for this dreadful climate. When I entered the vile suburb of St. Germaine [sic], where I had taken lodgings, it seemed I was going into a filthy sepulchre, and I never, in all my life, was overshadowed by a more sepulchral feeling” (III 5). Or, as the French translation more faithfully renders the original: “En avançant dans le tombeau fétide et fangueux du faubourg Saint-Germain, où je me fus loger, mon cœur se serra; et je n'ai jamais éprouvé de ma vie une impression si douloureuse pour une si petite cause.”⁴

Had he been less tired, he writes, and ready to face the derision such an action would undoubtedly have occasioned, he would have left Paris immediately. As it was, he dragged out his stay through mid-January of the following year, first waiting for the Court and the Sardinian ambassador to return from Compiègne; later, when he was introduced to the home of the Spanish ambassador, trying his luck for the first time at a game of faro; and finally, on New Year's Day 1768, presented to Louis XV at Versailles. The King's Jove-like demeanor and disdainful look repelled him, and we are treated to one of the cameo appearances of the species tyrant, which the practice of literature between the original experience and its written version had perfected:

Louis XV inspected every man presented to him from head to foot, but never gave a sign of receiving any impression whatever. If on presenting an ant to a giant, one should say, “Behold I present you an ant, Monsieur,” one would expect that the giant would at least look at it, and either smile, or perhaps say, “Oh, what a very petite [sic] animal,” or if he chose to keep silent, let his countenance speak for him.⁵

(III 5)

Alfieri returned to Paris four years later, in 1771, on his way from northern Europe to Spain and Portugal, virtually the only (European) countries he had not yet visited. During the month he spent there—it was again mid-summer—he could have met Rousseau, whose “pure and manly character … sublime and independent conduct” he esteemed more than his books, he tells us, “for the few I have been able to read seem rather tiresome offsprings of affectation and labor” (III 12).⁶ But he preferred not to make Rousseau's acquaintance for he felt that he (Alfieri) was “much prouder and more inflexible” and would run the risk of returning tenfold any “unkindness” he might receive from that “vain and whimsical man.” Instead, he “made an acquaintance” in the long run infinitely more important to him: he bought a collection of thirty-six “beautiful small volumes”—the principal Italian poets and prose writers—which he was hardly able or inclined to read at the time, but which would henceforth accompany him wherever he went. On the way to Spain, however—and it is one instance of the proximity and yet distance between the two linguistic cultures of his youth—the only fitful reading he did was in his copy of Montaigne's Essais, which he had bought in a tenvolume edition in The Hague three years before, and whose volumes now filled every possible pocket in his carriage.⁷

Twelve years were to elapse before Alfieri again passed through Paris, twice this time, once on the way to England to buy horses and several months later on the way back to Turin and Siena. 1783 was a difficult year for him. While, on the one hand, he had the satisfaction of putting the finishing touches on the first edition of his tragedies (he had written fourteen since 1775) and of being elected to the Academy of the Arcadia, the international intellectual center located in Rome; on the other, he was officially asked to leave the city because of his liaison with the Countess of Albany (wife of the pretender to the English throne, Charles Edward Stuart), whom Alfieri had met in 1777 and made his life-long “worthy affection.” The trip to France and England had a therapeutic objective: “I no longer felt prompted by an ungratified curiosity, for these feelings had already been gratified and extinguished; but I wished to travel, for I have never found any other remedy or solace for pain” (IV 11). Now a famous poet, he took with him letters of introduction to a number of writers, but—and the complaint is a familiar one given the reflux of influence after the Renaissance, no longer from Italy to France but from France to Italy—he found that his French counterparts knew little about Italian literature, seldom going beyond Metastasio, musical poet par excellence, with whom he certainly did not wish to be associated.⁸ Thus for the 1783 trip he noted only that the rage of the moment in Paris was for balloon flights. And on the return trip, he was so absorbed in the well-being of the fourteen horses he had acquired (one for each tragedy he had written) that he passed through France unaware of anything but the cough of the one and the lameness of the other, the gravelled feet of a third and the lack of appetite of a fourth, “a continual sea of troubles” that wore down the resistance of the “poet turned horse trader” (IV 11), as with the epigrammatic forcefulness that is an earmark of his style he describes his sudden change in status.⁹

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There is one theme that emerges apropos this third visit which had not been present in the account of the two previous ones. It recurs with such frequency, however, that the Vita is considered unique among Italian eighteenth-century autobiographies for the amount of attention it pays to two intimately related problems: Alfieri's perception as a Piedmontese of his generation of the age-old Italian questione della lingua, and his revealing the difficulties faced by a writer—specifically himself—who for many years feels unsure of the linguistic tool with which he expresses himself.¹⁰ We pass now from the humors of the young aristocrat on the Grand Tour to the poet's workshop, in which French figures as the bugbear to be at all costs avoided.

With reference to his 1783 stop in Paris, Alfieri writes: “Enraged with myself at having got into the necessity of again hearing and speaking that most anti-Tuscan nasal jargon, I hastened as much as possible the moment of my departure” (IV 12). Distaste for that “jargon“had already surfaced earlier in the Vita in a passage referring this time to his first trip to Florence in 1766. The moment written about and the moment of writing come together in the shame he now feels at the thought of having then squandered an opportunity to learn “from the living Tuscans to speak at least, without barbarism, in their divine tongue, which babbling I mangled every time I was forced to use it” (III 1).¹¹ The height of folly had been to spend his month in Florence taking English lessons from an insignificant little pedagogue who happened to be there! However, he had made some progress on that occasion: he had broken himself of “the horrible Lombard or French u” which, he says, he had always “disliked intensely because of its narrow articulation and that grimace of the lips so very similar to the ridiculous face made by monkeys when they are trying to speak” (III 1). “And even now,” he continues not only from the perspective of 1790 but also from that of the five years he had been living in France, “although my ears are absolutely lined with this u, yet it makes me laugh every time it comes to my attention, especially on the stage or in salon conversations (where acting never ceases), for on these contracted lips that seem forever to be blowing on hot soup the word nature reigns supreme” (III 1).¹²

Of course, Alfieri's quarrel with French reached deeper than a sound grating on his ears or social affectations repellent to a disdainful and introspective individual. French—his French, the French he heard all about him, the language of political and cultural relations—stood in the way of his Italian, the language in which he aspired to gaining literary fame.¹³ It is not a unique case of a writer struggling to find his linguistic medium, but it is remarkably well recorded. Twice in its history written Italian ran the risk of being supplanted by another language in Italy: by Latin in the early part of the fifteenth century, by French in the eighteenth. We can briefly allude to the well-known eighteenth-century situation by borrowing the words of the linguist Alfredo Schiaffini: “From Gibraltar to Moscow, although with unequal intensity, eighteenth-century Europe was French. And the French language which already in the Middle Ages had spread to Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, became the common language of educated people in almost all of Europe, reaching the universality acclaimed by the Count of Rivarol.”¹⁴

Alfieri was born in Asti, a city in the bilingual region of Piedmont, and by bilingual here is meant that the dominant languages were French and the local dialect. His father descended from an old Asti family, but his mother, Monica Maillard de Tournon, was of Savoyard origin—“as her barbarous surnames show,” her son was to write (I 1). It is difficult to reconstruct the precise linguistic situation of his childhood and adolescence: Alfieri's narration reflects a reality well-known to him and his contemporary readers, but one which, aided by what we know of the history and development of Italian, must today often be recreated between the lines. The lines themselves tell a gloomy story of his education in general, an Enlightenment version of traditional, Ancien Régime scholastic systems and as such accepted as truthful by liberal and nationalistic nineteenth-century Italy.¹⁵ Language study, not surprisingly, plays only an incidental, passing role in it.

Until the age of nine Alfieri was educated at home by a Don Ivaldi, “a good priest,” whom he later discovered to have been quite ignorant. With him he progressed as far as the translation of the lives of Cornelius Nepos and the fables of Phaedrus. Alfieri does not specify translation into what; we assume that it was the local version of Italian, i.e., not Tuscan. In 1758 he entered the Turin Royal Academy, a school for the education of young noblemen destined for service at the court of the king of Sardinia, and for aristocrats up to the age of thirty from the rest of Europe. He remained there until 1766, also frequenting some courses at the university. “Here I was then an ass among asses, and under an ass for a teacher,” he writes with the usual sarcasm of the beginning of his studies at the academy (II 2). The curriculum was the familiar one, passing from the study of Latin in all its gradations (grammar, prosody, rhetoric, humanity) to philosophy, physics, ethics, music, geography, and the social accomplishments: fencing, dancing, horsemanship. Alfieri's success in his studies is attested to by his winning his “master of arts” in 1763; but he was not satisfied by this formal recognition, for when he was after that admitted to the First Apartment of the Academy, he felt at loose ends, not knowing to what to turn his attentions: “Destitute of any solid basis of education, without a guide, knowing no language well, I did not know what to apply myself to, nor how to go about it” (II 7). The language situation especially was to deteriorate rapidly as the little bit of Tuscan he had acquired during the years of “buffoon studies in Humanity and donkey Rhetoric”¹⁶ was driven out by his reading of French novels, the continual conversation with foreigners (the boarders in the First Apartment were mostly foreigners), and the absence of opportunities for speaking Italian or hearing it spoken. The finishing blow came when in a sudden fit of study he plunged into the thirty-six volumes of Fleury's Histoire ecclésiastique, writing summaries of the first eighteen volumes in French, until he grew tired of the self-imposed task.

The only bright moments Alfieri remembers of his Academy years—“eight years of non-education” reads the sub-title of the second of the “epochs” into which his autobiography is divided—were the moments devoted to extracurricular readings, in Italian first, later in French, and finally, as we have already seen apropos his 1771 trip to Paris, in both languages in close proximity to one another. In his second year at the Academy, at the same time that in class he was translating the Georgics into Italian prose, he happened upon a four-volume edition of Ariosto's works. He was fascinated by it, probably more by the surreptitious manner in which he had acquired the forbidden volumes than by the text, for he notes with some wonder that he understood only half of this easiest of Italian poets. The next year he found a copy of Annibal Caro's translation of the Aeneid, which he read and reread with enthusiasm, cribbing from it for his Latin assignments, much to the detriment of his study of that language. He also read Metastasio and Goldoni: the former's musical dramas he came by in the form of librettos during the Carnival season; the latter, whom he found extremely entertaining, was actually lent him by one of his teachers. It was also a teacher who lent him the first French books he read: his geography instructor in 1763 came from the Val d'Aosta, in the northernmost corner of Piedmont, and he held his lessons in French. Among the books Alfieri read at that time was Gil Blas, the first book after Caro's Aeneid, he tells us, that he read from cover to cover, but enjoying it a great deal more. Thereafter he fell into the reading of French novels—“for there are no readable Italian ones” (II 7), he specifies in an aside. He mentions La Calprenède's Cassandre, Mlle. de Scudéry's Almahide ou l'esclave reine, and Prévost's Les mémoires d'un homme de qualité, which last he reread “at least ten times.”

In studying the question of Alfieri's use and command of French, Carmine Jannaco places his “conversion” to French in 1763.¹⁷ “Conversion” is probably too strong a word for there seems to have been no conscious intention but only the pull of circumstances. And it is certainly the wrong word in light of the real conversion that took place in July 1775, when reversing the order so as to take “the first step toward Tuscan purity … [he] utterly banished every kind of French reading … determined never again to utter a single word of that language, and took special pains to avoid every person who did” (IV 1).

The reason for such drastic action was his decision at the age of twenty-seven to turn himself into a writer of tragedies, the underrepresented genre in Italian literature and the recent great achievement of France.¹⁸ The pages of the Vita leading up to Alfieri's decision are among the liveliest and most frequently referred to in the book. Four years earlier, in 1772, he had returned home from that rushing about through Europe of which we have spoken. It would have been time to settle down to the kind of occupation for which his background and education had prepared him. But when his brother-in-law, himself a gentleman of the King's bedchamber, suggested that he solicit some diplomatic post, Alfieri answered disdainfully that during his travels he had had the opportunity “to inspect a little more closely” kings and their representatives, “and having not the smallest iota of respect for any of them, [he] would not have represented even the Great Mogul, and [he] certainly would not consent to represent the pettiest of all the Kings of Europe” (III 13). Instead, sufficiently wealthy and free, with a high opinion of himself although still ignorant—and foolhardy in affairs of the heart—he took up a life of luxury and dissipation in Turin. Thus he again fell in love—his most famous escapade thus far had been with Penelope Pitt in London—this time with a woman he considered unworthy but whose cavalier servente he remained for two long years. It was while he was in her “service” that, bored beyond all compare one time because she was ill and he was obliged to sit by her bed all day, he took up a few sheets of paper “and began without plan or design, to scribble a scene of, I know not what to call it, of one act, or five, or ten, but at any rate some words in the form of a dialogue, and in the shape of verses, between a certain Photine, a woman, and a certain Cleopatra, who came in after a rather protracted conversation between the two first-mentioned characters” (III 14). Looking at it now, he adds (in 1790), “that sudden undertaking of mine seems all the more strange, since for more than six years I had not written a word of Italian, or even read it, except rarely and at long intervals” (III 14). Why Cleopatra, might be asked, “rather than Berenice, or Zenobia, or any other queen of tragedy?” Simply, because for months and years he had seen in his “beloved”'s entrance hall a series of beautiful tapestries representing scenes from the life of Anthony and Cleopatra.

Much of the popular success of the Vita, its extraordinary readability, is no doubt owed to its wealth of anecdotes, but Alfieri also intended it to be informative, indeed documentary. Thus we find a footnote at this point, which reproduces the first few scenes of what goes by the title of Cleopatra Prima (there were two later drafts as well). Jannaco, who had access to the manuscripts, was able to trace the steps that took Alfieri from “l'11 février [sic] 1774,” which is the date he noted at the head of his turning the subject into verses,¹⁹ to July 1775, when, as already indicated, he repudiated French. Alfieri is writing in Italian but with an occasional yielding to French: the date just referred to; the stage direction, “Scène quarta—Antonio, et les sudits”; the sudden intrusion of two verses in French followed by the breaking off of this particular draft, “Et ne devroit on pas à des signes certains / Reconnoître le cœur de(s) perfides humains [?];” and finally, the most interesting point cited by Jannaco, Cleopatra's lines, “… Chi crederò de' due, Antonio vien di lasciarmi, furieux, et faible a son ordinaire. …,” where the Gallicism “vien di lasciarmi” leads directly to a switch into French.²⁰ Confused and disoriented, we may surmise, by his lack of control over the structure of the play as well as by the failure of the linguistic instrument, Alfieri henceforth gave up the attempt of working directly from subject to versification, and adopted the intermediate step of a scene by scene summary in prose. Through the next two plays, Filippo and Polinice, this summary was in French, although Alfieri “raged and wept” (IV 1) at being forced to use a language he did not recognize as his own.

One should note exactly how Alfieri describes the predicament he faced in Filippo and Polinice, for although in the genetic history of his whole œuvre these two plays represent only a point of transition, nowhere is the proximity of the two languages in the actual elaboration of a text closer:

But to my great misfortune, whatever may have been the merit of these tragedies, they were conceived and brought forth in French prose, so that they had a long and difficult road to travel before they were transformed into Italian poetry. I had outlined them in this unpleasant and paltry language (spiacevole e meschina), not because I knew it or pretended to know it, but because during five years of travelling I had spoken and heard spoken that jargon exclusively, and I was able to express myself in it a little more and betray my thought a little less than in Italian.

(IV 1)

And with an image that combines the classical reminiscence of foot races with his everyday experience of footmen running along the coach to light the way, Alfieri compares what was happening to him for want of a language in which to write to a runner who has lost the use of his legs: “What was happening to me because I knew no language was exactly what would happen to one of the best runners in Italy, if, being ill and dreaming that he was running with his equals or inferiors, he found that to gain the victory he lacked nothing but his legs” (IV 1).

Alfieri found his running legs through a program of study that went beyond the negative stage of shunning the use of French to the positive step of acquiring a literary culture in Italian. It is now no longer a question of learning Italian, of overcoming the “babbling” and “mangling” referred to earlier, but of acquiring a specific linguistic register, the Italian of an uninterrupted literary tradition going back to its origins. The method Alfieri devised, as far as the evidence goes by himself,²¹ was tailor-made to his needs for it filled the gap left by his years of study at the Academy.

In one of his rapid self-portraits,²² Alfieri tells us that the only capital he had for putting his program into effect was “a resolute, most obstinate, and indomitable spirit, a heart full to overflowing of passions of all kinds, [and] … an imperfect and indistinct recollection of the various French tragedies [he] had seen performed many years before” (IV 1).²³ After a somewhat inauspicious start (he had fled from the temptations of Turin to the isolation of the village of Cezannes at the foot of Montgenèvre where again he bumped into “that most accursed language,” French), he settled down to reading and studying verse by verse and in their chronological order all the great poets of Italy. According to well-established custom he annotated them, but not with the usual verbal comments. Instead—and again it is important to note precisely what he is saying—he marked with perpendicular strokes in the margin those ideas, expressions, and sounds which either pleased or displeased him. The reading was so concentrated, he was so intent on observing different and often contradictory points, he adds, that after a few stanzas (he had been forced to begin with Tasso, having found Dante too difficult) he was in a state of utter exhaustion, feeling as though he himself had written those stanzas and that the effort had been so great that he could no longer even remember what he had read. Surely we have here an unusual application of the principle and practice of imitation. The emphasis is not on the end result but on the process required to achieve it. Alfieri's heart, “full to overflowing of passions of all kinds,” was subjecting itself to a difficult discipline, that of finding its expression, both linguistically and conceptually, in an established tradition freely chosen.²⁴

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The ten years that followed the completion of his formal education were characterized by Alfieri as a period of travel and dissipation, and we have given some indication of the appropriateness of this description. Nevertheless, they were a formative cultural experience and their portrayal in the Vita is a source for documenting the probable sources of ideas then of wide currency reflected in his work. But it is precisely in this connection that it becomes obvious how much the Vita is the autobiography of a writer, of an artist, that is, concerned with the creative process, the imaginative genesis of a work and its structural coherence—in short, with the relationship between author and work in the latter's becoming, and not with the place of the work as a monument in a historical development. The play by play examination of his production in the Parere sulle tragedie (the first and probably still the most important critical discussion of his work) is strictly formalistic. Invenzione, sceneggiatura, stile are the categories according to which the examination is conducted, corresponding to the divisions of inventio (discovery), dispositio (arrangement), and elocutio (expression or style) of the ancient theories of rhetoric. As for his reading of Dante, it was stylistic and esthetic avant la lettre. As untroubled as any “new critic” by the historical references in which the Comedy abounds and consequently cavalierly dismissive of the usual annotated editions intended to elucidate meaning, he concentrated all the powers of his understanding on the difficulties of “expression, or sentiment, or style” (IV 1).²⁵ For the purpose at hand, however, it is still important to look at these ten years to see what they can tell us in terms of literary sources and the transmission of ideas about the bi-cultural tension we have been pursuing.

In September 1766, having concluded his training at the Academy and found the military service for which it prepared him unpalatable, Alfieri received permission to leave Piedmont for a year. He joined a party of two young men, a Fleming and a Dutchman, who were setting out under the guidance of an elderly pedagogue, an Irish Jesuit who has won some degree of fame in France for having been ridiculed by Voltaire.²⁶ The language of communication between the four travelling companions was French, and it was also French that was spoken in the aristocratic households they visited along the way. “Any stray thought or reflection that entered my stupid brain was clothed in French rags” (III 1), Alfieri writes (and the typical Tuscan turn of phrase with which he humorously expresses himself, “quel pochin pochino ch'io andava pur pensando e combinando nel mio povero capino,” stands as evidence of the linguistic mastery achieved between the moment remembered and the moment of writing it down). His letters and diaries at the time, he tells us further, were likewise written in “a doubtful idiom,” and here the adjective may refer to the fact that he had learned French—as indeed he had learned Italian—empirically, by using it and not by learning its rules.²⁷ There is no mention of reading matter taken along on this journey, except for some guide books: possibly Misson's Voyage d'Italie, the “Baedeker” of its time; Gresley's Observations sur l'Italie par deux gentilshommes Suédois; or perhaps the anonymous Voyage historique et politique en Suisse, en Italie et en Allemagne, which had appeared in 1736.²⁸ On the way home, however—the trip had been extended for another year and had come to include the stay in Paris mentioned earlier—Alfieri stopped in Geneva and bought a trunk-load of books, among them “the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and others of that ilk” (III 7), where “that ilk” very economically makes the distinction between works in French generically, and works by the “new” writers then in vogue, those who became the classics of the French Enlightenment. Contrary to what would happen to the collection of Italian classics he acquired in Paris in 1771, he did read these works at once, and critics have studied their influence especially on the two political-philosophical treatises, Della tirannide and Del principe e delle lettere. The former is similar to other attacks on absolutism but is distinguished by its exceptionally acute psychological insights into the relationship between oppressor and oppressed. The latter, possibly of greater continued relevance today, is a discussion of “sponsored” artist as against “free” artist, carried out with a fine eye for everything that is servile and inauthentic in the one, impassioned and “natural” in the other.

Little of this ideological background, however, shines through Alfieri's comments on his readings in the Vita. He tells us that he tried reading La Nouvelle Héloïse more than once, but never got through even the first volume for he found it affected and cold, the very opposite of his own passionate nature. He was “singularly charmed” by Voltaire's prose works, but fails to tell us whether he is thinking of Candide, the Dictionnaire philosophique, or what. He only read bits and pieces of the Henriade and nothing of La Pucelle d'Orléans, “for the obscene never attracted [him]” (III 7). “And a few of his tragedies,” the phrase with which the sentence on Voltaire ends, leaves us hanging for it is not connected grammatically to what precedes.²⁹ On the other hand, Alfieri was deeply impressed by Montesquieu, reading him through from beginning to end twice (but again it is not clear whether he is referring to the Lettres persanes, L'Esprit des lois, or the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence), and he was deeply but “unpleasantly” impressed by Hélvetius' De l'Esprit. But “the book of books” for him in that winter of readings, the book that gave him absolute bliss, was not by a Frenchman. It was Plutarch's Lives, a work firmly established in the common European heritage, but Alfieri probably read it, as did others at that time, in the French translation of André Dacier.³⁰

A distinct aspect of the artistic and intellectual background we are reviewing, as it is revealed in the Vita, concerns the extent to which Alfieri may have been influenced by French tragedy. We have already quoted the passage in which he mentions that one of the factors that made him turn to tragedy in 1775 was “the imperfect and indistinct recollection” of the French tragedies he had seen performed years before. Earlier he had written that one of the reasons for his first French trip was his desire “to enjoy the theatre,” for which he had developed a taste during his Academy years and of which he recalls specifically a French company that came to Turin in 1765 and gave “many of the principal tragedies, and almost all of the famous comedies” (III 5). At that time he was inclined more to comedy than to tragedy, and reflecting on what now appeared an anomalous preference, he came to the conclusion that there were basic structural and stylistic features in French tragedy that elicited a negative reaction in him:

… there [are], in nearly all French tragedies, some entire scenes, and often entire acts, made up of secondary characters; this damped my intellect and my feelings, for it unnecessarily spun out the action, or, to speak more properly, interrupted it. Besides, although I did not wish to be Italian, my ear, in spite of myself, served me very well, and informed me of the tiresome and insipid monotony of versifying by couplets and hemistichs, with their triviality of manner and unpleasant nasal sounds. So that, I don't know exactly why, although those actors were excellent in comparison to our vile Italian ones, and the works they played for the most part first rate insofar as affections, conduct, and ideas (affetto, condotta, pensieri) were concerned, I nevertheless felt all my enthusiasm expire from time to time, leaving me dissatisfied.

(III 4)

The case is clearly stated; the negative features of French tragedy as perceived by Alfieri are spelled out. But the reactions described gain their full impact when we juxtapose to this passage Alfieri's famous definition of his own kind of tragedy contained in his 1783 answer to Calsabigi:

A five-act tragedy, filled exclusively with its own subject; with dialogues exclusively between the primary characters (personaggi attori, i.e., agents of the action), with no confidants or spectators; a tragedy woven from one thread alone, as rapid as the passions permit, for they are all more or less long-winded; as simple as the use of art allows; as harsh and gloomy (tetra e feroce) as nature suffers it; as passionate as it was in me to make it—this is the kind of tragedy which I know not if I have succeeded in creating, but which I have perhaps hinted at, or certainly at least conceived.³¹

In the light of Alfieri's comprehensive view of the configuration of French tragedy as against his own, the few titles specifically mentioned in the Vita tell us little. Alfieri names Racine's Phèdre and Voltaire's Alzire and Mahomet as the French tragedies he liked best. He recognizes that he derived his Polinice from Les Frères ennemis and that Pierre Brumoy's translation into French of Aeschylus' The Seven Against Thebes also contributed to that early play. When he rejected French in 1775, he turned to Italian translations. He may have read Voltaire's Mahomet, Tancrède, and La Mort de César, and Corneille's Polyeucte and Nicodème in the three-volume collection, Scelta di alcune eccellenti tragedie francesi tradotte in verso sciolto italiano (Liège, but actually Modena, 1764), where the substitution of Italian unrhymed verse for the alexandrine may have removed one source of irritation. As for Voltaire's Brutus, it served as a spur for two tragedies by Alfieri. Angered by a letter from the Countess of Albany in which she praised a performance of Voltaire's play she had just seen, Alfieri felt his heart and mind fired with disdainful emulation at the thought that a “servile pen” should have dared to celebrate a hero of liberty:

… I said to myself: “What Brutus? What Brutus of a Voltaire? I'll make a Brutus—two of them, and time shall show if these subjects of tragedy are treated better by me or by a Frenchman born a plebeian, who for seventy and more years has signed his name—Voltaire, gentleman in ordinary to the king.”

(IV 16)

.....

Toward the end of 1785, Alfieri, who had lived almost uninterruptedly in Italy since 1772, joined the Countess at her villa in Alsace on the Rhine. She was now legally separated and, supported by a French government pension, found it more convenient to live in France. Until August 1792, except for two brief trips, Alfieri remained in France, and the specter of France, by way of the French invasions of Italy during the Napoleonic period, followed him back to Italy—to be precise, to Tuscany—as well. Much of his attention during this period was devoted to the new edition of his tragedies which he entrusted to Didot the Elder (François Ambroise), printer to the Royal house; and the new-found enthusiasm for fine books led him also to make use of Beaumarchais' printing establishment at Kehl. The Vita is reticent on the long periods he spent in Paris: there were a thousand things in that Babylon that he disliked intensely, he writes, among them now (added, that is, to those singled out apropos earlier trips), the fact that there was nothing for him to learn there. The French knew Italian too little for him to discuss problems of versification with them, and they thought they knew everything there was to know about dramaturgy. Conversations with them on this latter subject became more and more onesided and eventually died down: “from those gabbers I learned the sublime art of silence” (IV 17) is his parting shot.

Before the gathering storm that put an end to the golden age of the Enlightenment—the half-century of peace and relative stability that Europe enjoyed after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle—in the summer of 1787, Alfieri sat with his old friend the Abbé Caluso, who had come to visit him from Piedmont, in the idyllic Rhenish landscape which so reminded him of the Tuscan countryside around Siena: “We poured out our hearts to one another in conversations upon our beloved letters” (IV 17). The passage that follows epitomizes in the context of Alfieri's total French experience his estimate of his own work, seeing it in the final analysis as the writer's response in spite of all odds to the challenge of keeping his linguistic heritage alive. In reading it we cannot help hear echoes of the feelings of homelessness and exile of those who in our own time must live because of circumstances not of their own choosing in linguistic environments that are foreign to them. And we sense further that rebelliousness against dominant, hegemonic cultures with which we have become ever more familiar in our own declining century:

I felt the absolute necessity of talking about art, speaking in Italian about Italian things. I had been deprived of this for two years and felt the loss strongly. … And surely, if these recent famous Frenchmen, like Voltaire and Rousseau, would have had to wander for a great portion of their lives in countries where their native tongue was unknown or neglected, without finding anyone to converse with, maybe they would not have had the imperturbability and tenacious constancy to write for the simple love of art and merely to vent their feelings as I have done and continued to do for many years in succession, forced by circumstances to live and converse forever with barbarians. For such a term can readily be applied to all of Europe as far as Italian literature is concerned, as it can unfortunately also be applied to Italy itself: sui nescia. For who is there today in Italy for whom one can write sublimely, for whom one can attempt to write verses in which the art of Petrarch and Dante breathes? Who is there who really reads and understands and enjoys and vividly feels Dante and Petrarch? One in a thousand is saying much. Yet, immovable in the persuasion of the true and the beautiful, I infinitely prefer (and seize every occasion to make this protestation), I prefer immeasurably to write in a language nearly dead, and for a people quite dead, and even to see myself buried before I die, to writing in those deaf and dumb tongues, French and English, although their cannons and armies may go forcing them into fashion.

(IV17).

In the nineteenth century the Vita became “the unique, exemplary book of the Italians of the Risorgimento,”³² a model for life lived with high moral and patriotic ideals and the will to achieve them. In that perspective some equally important aspects of Alfieri's reflections on his life and times were overlooked and became blurred. It was the purpose of this examination of the work to bring some of these aspects to light. Nationalistic aspirations no longer divide Europe as they once did and dichotomies that at one time were as familiar as the air one breathed have lost much of their poignancy. But the great political upheavals of the twentieth century have repeatedly created that particular condition of exile for the writer which Alfieri felt and eloquently expressed.

Notes

1. The edition of the Vita used is Giampaolo Dossena's (1967; Turin: Einaudi, 3rd ed., 1981), referred to within the text by Epoch and Chapter numbers. However, since this paper was originally prepared for oral presentation to the Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture, all quotations are in English, derived from The Autobiography of Vittorio Alfieri, the Tragic Poet, trans. with an original essay on the genius and times of Alfieri by C. Edward Lester (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1845), and revised by the present writer as needed.

2. Mémoires de Victor Alfieri écrits par lui-même, trans. by M**** [M. Petitot], introduction and notes by M. Fs. Barrière (1809; Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie., 1862).

3. François René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, éds. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier, 2 vols. (1951: Paris: Gallimard, 3rd ed., 1957) 1: 483. Paul Sirven, Vittorio Alfieri, 8 vols. (1934-1951; Vols. 1-5, Paris: Librairie E. Droz, Vols. 6-8, Paris: Boivin & Cie.), 1: 339-40, claims that Chateaubriand translated the passage himself, but the version actually reproduces Petitot's word for word.

4. The original reads: “… il progredire poi quasi in un fetido fangoso sepolcro nel sobborgo di San Germano, dove andava ad albergo, mi serrò sí fortemente il cuore, ch'io non mi ricordo di aver provato in vita mia per cagione sí piccola una più dolorosa impressione.” As is documented with a rich exemplification in Pierre Citron, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1961), a highly negative representation of Paris is not unique to Alfieri. Indeed, critics have wondered how much a description such as the above owes to literary rather than factual reminiscences. Given the great diffusion and fame of Rousseau's work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, recent studies on modern autobiography have privileged his Confessions in the European development of the genre. In such a perspective it is only a step to suggest, as Angelica Forti-Lewis does in Italia autobiografica (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1986), that Alfieri's failure to mention Rousseau's work as contributing to his decision to write his autobiography is equivalent to suppression of evidence and that a passage such as that on Paris is proof that he was acquainted with it. But the recurrence of portrayals of Paris similar to Alfieri's and Rousseau's in non-autobiographical works by Montesquieu and Voltaire, among others, should lead to a different conclusion, i.e., that we have here a deceptive instance of intertextuality resulting from lifting a text out of its non-textual contexts. It is interesting to note that the Genevan Rousseau had first experienced the impact of a large city in Turin and that the shock of Paris came to him in contrast to “la décoration extérieure que j'avais vue à Turin, la beauté des rues, la symétrie et l'alignement des maisons. …” (Confessions, Livre Quatrième).

5. The portrayal of tyrants in his tragedies, in Della tirannide, and especially in Del principe e delle lettere, the treatise that deals with patronage, has autobiographical analogies in the Vita as well. The most famous one involves Metastasio, whom Alfieri saw during his visit to Vienna in 1769 “go upon his knees (after the fashion) before Maria Theresa, and with a face so utterly servile, that I—being youthfully Plutarchized and as always exaggerating what was real by turning it into an abstraction—would never have consented to friendship or familiarity with a Muse rented or sold to a despotism by me so cordially abhorred” (III 8). Equally well-known is the passage which describes Alfieri's refusal to be presented to Catherine the Great, “the notorious Autocratrix Catherine II … who has so much tired out fame in our days … this same philosophizing Clytemnestra …” (III 9).

6. Rousseau is mentioned only twice more in the Vita. Among the books Alfieri brought back from Geneva in 1769 were “the works” of Rousseau (III 7), and Rousseau is named together with Voltaire as a writer whose destiny was for linguistic and cultural reasons different from Alfieri's (IV 17).

7. Dossena identifies the edition (p. 93) as Essais de Montaigne avec les Notes de M. Coste, 10 vols. (1754; London: Jean Nourse & Vaillant). He adds that the books are “today” in the library of Carlo Alberto Chiesa (an antiquarian bookseller in Milan), and that each volume is inscribed “Vittorio Alfieri, Haia, 1768.” It should come as no surprise that the phenomenology of the book, from the composition of the text to its printing and publication, from the acquisition of books to their perusal, preservation, and transmission, plays an important part in Alfieri's narration of his life. The fame of fine French editions and the reputation of French printers induced him to prolong his residence in Paris beginning in 1787, and the fact that in 1790 he had his library come from Rome shows how permanent he considered the move. That this library, estimated at 1500 volumes (“tutti i principali Classici Greci, Latini e Italiani”) was dispersed during the revolution embittered Alfieri's last years and led to an exchange of letters with Pierre Louis Ginguené, French Ambassador in Turin in 1798 and subsequently author of one of the earliest histories of Italian literature, Histoire littéraire d'Italie, 9 vols. (1811-1819; Paris: Michaud), See Appendice quattordicesima in Dossena, pp. 334-38.

8. In an epigram dated 30 July 1783, Alfieri highlighted the two shortcomings most frequently criticized in his poetry: “Mi trovan duro? / Anch'io lo so: / Pensar li fo, / Taccia ho d'oscuro? / Mi schiarirà / Poi libertà.” Both “harshness” and “obscurity” are questions of style, and Alfieri discusses style at length in his 1783 answer to Ranieri de' Calsabigi's comments on his first four tragedies, his 1785 answer to the Abate Cesarotti's comments on Ottavia, Timoleone, and Merope, and his Parere sulle tragedie which first appeared in the fifth volume of the 1788 edition of his tragedies (Vittorio Alfieri, Parere sulle tragedie e altre prose critiche, ed. Morena Pagliai [Asti: Casa / d'Alfieri, 1978]). In these texts Alfieri makes no specific mention of Metastasio, but over and over again he speaks of “il mio stile tragico” which he aimed to make as different as possible “dallo stile della lirica poesia.” As for an overview of the changing relationships between French and Italian literature, Carlo Pellegrini's “Relazioni tra la letteratura italiana e la letteratura francese” in Letterature comparate, eds. A. Viscardi et al. (Milan: Marzorati, n.d.), pp. 41-99, can still be usefully consulted.

9. While on the one hand Alfieri invites the reader to skip his description of the crossing of the Alps with his “cavalry” because it is a digression, on the other he calls attention to a bravura piece which records an extraordinary accomplishment on his part, an accomplishment that he compares to his customary success in constructing a five-act tragedy.

10. As far as I know, Antonio Porcu, “La Vita dell'Alfieri come vicenda linguistica,” Lingua e stile, XI, 2 (1976), 245-68, is the only study devoted to this aspect of the Vita.

11. “… ch'io balbettante stroppiava …” The two verbs refer to two different aspects of language competence: balbettare, lack of fluency; stroppiare, distortion in sounds. It is significant that Alfieri, writer of dialogues and occasional actor himself, should have been so sensitive to the phonetic values of language.

12. The French u is common to the Gallo-Italian dialects, among which are the dialects of Piedmont, Lombardy, Liguria, Emilia, and other localities settled by Gallo-Italian speakers. As for Alfieri's comment on the artificiality of French society, it is a lieu commun in the social criticism of the time (for instance, Mme de Staël's). That the hated, unnatural sound should mark the word nature is an amusing paradox, which Alfieri uses to good effect.

13. Opposing the Risorgimento view of the inevitability of the triumph of the Italian language in Italy, Porcu hints that Alfieri could have just as well chosen to write in French. If he did not do so, Porcu adds, it was because he feared the power of French hegemony, just as the Savoias did when they turned southward instead of northward to carve out an expanded arena of political action for their dynasty.

14. Alfredo Schiaffini, Momenti di storia della lingua italiana (Roma: Studium, 1953), p. 92. Rivarol, author of the prize-winning De l'universalité de la langue française, was of Piedmontese origin.

15. Sirven (1: 203-26) disputes the veracity of Alfieri's portrayal of his years at the Academy, comparing it to Joseph de Maistre's positive evaluation of his own education at the Jesuit College at Chambéry at about the same time.

16. “… quel poco di tristo toscano ch'io avessi potuto intromettervi [into his head] in quei due o tre anni di studi buffoni di umanità e rettoriche asinine” (II 7) seems to imply that there was some opportunity to study Italian (i.e., Tuscan).

17. Vittorio Alfieri, Appunti di lingua e traduzionaccie prime. Documenti inediti e rari, ed. Carmine Jannaco (Turin: Società Editrice Italiana, 1946), p. 208.

18. A typical statement on the place of tragedy in Italian literature can be found in Emilio Bertana, La tragedia (Milan: Vallardi, 1904), p. 3: “All'Italia non mancarono tragedie buone; le mancò invece un grande capolavoro di quel genere, e le manco la continuità, lo sviluppo, la caratteristica originalità d'un teatro tragico nazionale.”

19. On Alfieri's French spelling and accentuation, see Jannaco, p. 213.

20. Jannaco, p. 211.

21. The Abbé Caluso may have been a mentor in this respect. Alfieri had met him in 1772 and been told that he (Alfieri) was born to be a poet and that “by studying hard he could learn to turn out excellent verses” (III 12). Caluso is again mentioned, together with the Count of San Raffaele, as encouraging Alfieri in his readings in 1776 (IV 3). Father Paciaudi and Count Tana are also mentioned by Alfieri as having contributed to saving him from idleness and set him on the road to reading and writing.

22. The most famous of the self-portraits is the sonnet dated 9 June 1786, “Sublime specchio di veraci detti. …”

23. In order to throw light on the controversial matter of Alfieri's acquaintance with French tragedy, Sirven, 1: 347-50, has examined the record of theatre performances in Paris for the duration of Alfieri's stay there in 1767, claiming that it would have been impossible for a foreign nobleman like Alfieri not to go to the theatre and otherwise participate in social life.

24. The alternate designations of Alfieri as neo-classical, pre-Romantic, etc. have been a favorite literary-historical game. Only recently B. M. Da Rif, in reviewing the acts of an international meeting held in 1983, Vittorio Alfieri e la cultura piemontese fra illuminismo e rivoluzione (Lettere italiane, XL, 1 [1988], 140-46), again called attention to “la difficoltà della collocazione di Alfieri nella scansione canonica delle epoche letterarie. …”

25. Sirven's comment on this point is both amusing and indicative of the difficulties Alfieri encountered, as an original thinker, in being properly understood. Sirven defends the scholar's punctiliousness as reader against the amateur's enthusiasm, forgetting that the man he is writing about can hardly be compared to a student too lazy to open a dictionary: “… puisque je parle des études dantesques de Vittorio Alfieri, je dois souligner un mot de la Vita auquel l'auteur semble attacher un certain prix. Il lut le poème de Dante, nous dit-il dans une édition dépourvue de notes, senza commenti. Je ne sais s'il eût raison. Sans doute on peut accorder que les événements historiques auxquels le vieux poète fait de constantes allusions, et qui sont l'objet des notes de la plupart des éditeurs, sont moins intéressantes que sa poésie, mais peut-on goûter cette poésie si l'on n'est pas renseigné sur ces événements? Lire Dante sans les commentaires, c'est s'exposer à n'y rien comprendre. Quant aux difficultés de langue et de syntaxe—ajoute-t-il—il s'en tirait aisément, grâce à sa perspicacité naturelle, méthode que pratiquent nombre de collégiens dont les mains délicates n'aiment pas à soulever de gros dictionnaires. Je ne la recommande pas” (3: 147-48).

26. On the identity of Alfieri's two travelling companions and their guide (John Tuberville Needham), see Sirven, 1: 285-292. Sirven questions the nationality of the “Dutchman.”

27. Porcu (251) argues convincingly that Alfieri's statement concerning his imperfect knowledge of French during the 1766 trip (“non sapendo io quella linguaccia se non a caso” [III 1]) implies that he considered knowing a language equivalent to knowing “its abstract grammatical rules,” in other words, that learning Latin was his model for learning a language.

28. The list is given in Vittorio Alfieri, Vita rime e satire, ed. Luigi Fassò (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1949), p. 109, where the editor comments that neither of the two famous Voyages could have been referred to: Des Brosse's was published in 1799, Lalande's in 1769.

29. A comparison with the first draft of the Vita at this point (Vittorio Alfieri, Vita scritta da esso, ed. Luigi Fassò, 2 vols. [Asti: Casa d'Alfieri, 1951] 2: 81), although it does not clear up the grammatical difficulty, leaves no doubt that Alfieri intended to say that he read a couple of Voltaire's tragedies.

30. “… the lives of the truly great. And some of them, Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and others, I read and reread four or five times with such transport of cries, tears, and wild enthusiasm, that if anyone had been listening next door, he would surely have thought me gone mad. Upon reading about some of the great deeds of those sublime men, I would leap to my feet, carried away by excitement and almost beside myself, and tears of sorrow and rage would come to my eyes to think that I was born in Piedmont and in times and under governments where nothing noble could be said or done, indeed scarcely conceived or felt with impunity” (III 7).

31. Vittorio Alfieri, Parere sulle tragedie e altre prose critiche, p. 217; translation the present writer's.

32. Mario Fubini, “Vita di Alfieri,” Dizionario letterario Bompiani delle opere e dei personaggi di tutti i tempi e di tutte le letterature (Milan: Bompiani, 1949).