tervals of
his visits under the cushion of an arm-chair. A Piedmontese and a
thorough ignoramus, he had scarcely ever attempted to write even so
much as a letter in Italian; and as to a literary composition in any
language, such a thing had never occurred to him. The _Cleopatra_ thus
written in his lady's bed-room and secreted under the chair cushion, was
a most worthless performance, but it made Alfieri an author. Always
devoured by a desire to shine, hitherto by the excellence of his
get-up, the beauty of his person, and the number of his horses, it
suddenly flashed across him that he might shine in future as a
poet. This was the turning-point of his life, or what he called his
liberation. But, like a man bound in all his limbs, and who at length
has slipped the cord from off one hand, there still remained to Alfieri
an infinite amount of struggle, of bitter effort, of hopeless inaction,
before he could completely liberate himself from the bonds of sloth, of
worldly vanity, dissipation, and unworthy love, before he could step
forth and walk steadily along the new road which had appeared to him.
His ignorance was appalling. He could no longer construe a line of
Latin, he had not for months opened a book; and as to Italian, he knew
it no better than any Piedmontese street porter. His idleness, his habit
of absolute vacuity, was even worse; his desire to shine before the
frivolous women, the inane young men of Turin, nay, merely to have
himself, his well-cut coat, his well-frizzled hair, the horse he rode or
drove, noticed by any chance loafer in the street, was another almost
incredible obstacle; and, worst of all, there was his degrading serfdom
to a woman whom he knew he neither loved nor respected, and who had
never loved, still less respected, him. But Alfieri, once awakened out
of that strange long torpor of his youth, was able to put forth as
active and invincible forces all that extraordinary obstinacy, that
morose doggedness, that indifference to comfort and pleasure, that
brutal violence which had more than once, in their negative condition,
made him seem more like some wild animal or half-savage monomaniac
than an ordinary young man under five-and-twenty. He had, moreover, at
this moment, when all the energies of his nature suddenly burst out, a
power of deliberate, complacent, and pitiless moral self-vivisection, a
power of performing upon his character such cutting and ripping-open
operations as he thought be