neficial to himself, which makes one think of
the abnormal faculty of enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel
satisfaction in examining the mechanism of one's own suffering,
occasionally displayed by hysterical women; and which brings back the
impression already conveyed by the morbid sensitiveness, the frenzied
violence, the moody torpor of his youth, that there was something
abnormal in Alfieri's whole nature. He was now employing that very
hysterical satisfaction in pain and impatience of half measures, to
reduce himself, by heroic means, to at least such moral and mental
health as would permit the full exercise of his faculties. There exists
a diary of his, written in 1777, which is an almost unique example
of the seemingly cold, but really excited and hysterical kind of
self-vivisection of which I have spoken. Alfieri had always been
extraordinarily truthful, not merely for his time and country, but
truthful quite beyond the limits of a mere negative virtue. But he was
also, what seems almost incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness,
excessively self-conscious and morally attitudinising, a thin-skinned
_poseur_. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory characteristics, to
become what he wished to appear, to pose as what he was, to make himself
up (if I may say so) as himself, to intensify what he recognised as his
main characteristics and efface all his other ones, now became to
Alfieri a sort of unconscious aim of life, closely connected with his
avowed desire to become a great poet; "the reason of which desire," he
himself wrote in his diary, "is my immoderate ambition, which, finding
no other field, has devoted itself entirely to literature." Nothing
can be more serious, as I have already remarked, than this diary of
Alfieri's struggles, where he notes, day by day, the laziness, the
meanness, the want of frankness to himself and others, the despicable
vanity, the attempt to appear what he is not, the indulged unfounded
suspiciousness towards his friends, all the little base defects which
must have pained a nature like his more than any real sinfulness, as the
prodding of a surgeon's instruments would have agonised such a man more
than an actual amputation. He narrates _in extenso_ all his vacillations
about nothing at all, all his givings way to laziness, all his insincere
confidences made to others. One morning is consumed in debating whether
or not he will buy a certain Indian walking-stick: "Torn by