nay, rather,
by bringing to the surface whatever capacity for tenderness and
self-restraint and respect for others had hitherto lurked within this
fantastic nature, this new love helped to complete that strange
monumental personality of Alfieri--a personality more striking, more
ideal, than any of those plays by which he hoped to regenerate Italy,
and which has been far more potent than his works in the moral
regeneration of his country. Alfieri's youth had been illiterate and
stupid; and he required, in order to make up for so much waste of time
and waste of spirit, that he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere
as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in which he had previously
lived had been the reverse. After the long spiritual numbness of his
earlier years, this soul, if it was to be kept alive, must be kept in an
almost artificially high spiritual temperature, and continually plied
with spiritual cordials. These advantages he obtained in the love, or,
we ought rather to say, the friendship of the Countess of Albany, and it
is extremely improbable whether he would have obtained them otherwise.
Irritable and vain and moody, at once excessively persuaded of his own
dramatic mission and morbidly diffident of his actual powers of carrying
it out, contemptuous of others and of himself, Alfieri, who required
such constant sympathy and encouragement in his work, was not the
man who could hope to obtain much of either from other men, whom
his excessive pretensions, his ups and downs of humour, his very
dissatisfaction with himself, must have quickly exhausted of the small
amount of brotherly tenderness which seems to exist in the literary
brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of sincere helpfulness and
friendliness from the members of the Turinese Literary Club; from
Cesarotti, the translator of _Ossian_; from Parini, the great Milanese
satirist, and from one or two other men of letters; which shows that
there is more kindness in the world than he ever would admit, and
confirms me in my remark that he was singularly well treated by fate
and mankind. But all this was very lukewarm sympathy; and except from
his two great friends, Francesco Gori and Tommaso di Caluso, a
difficult-tempered man like Alfieri could receive only lukewarmness.
Now what he required was sympathy, admiration, adoration, of the most
burning description. This was possible, towards such a man, only
from a woman. But where find the woman who cou