of friendship.

CHAPTER IX.

ROME.

This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, as it were, of two
long-repressed, long solitary intellectual lives, austerely satisfied
with itself and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have sufficed for
the happiness of two such over-wrought natures as were at that moment
Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany.

But there could be no happiness for the wife of the Pretender, and no
happiness, therefore, for the man who saw her the daily victim of the
cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence of her drunken husband.
To an imaginative mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the
reality, striving for ever after some poetical or heroic model of love
and of life, trying to be at once a patriot out of Plutarch and a
lover after the fashion of the _Vita Nuova_, there are few trials more
exasperating than to have to see the real creature who for the moment
embodies one's ideal, the creature whom one carefully garlands with
flowers and hangs round with lamps, raised above all vulgar things in
the niche in one's imagination, elbowed by brutish reality, bespattered
with ignoble miseries. And this Alfieri had constantly to bear.
Perhaps the very knowledge of the actual suffering, of the unjust
recriminations, the cruel violence, the absolute fear of death, among
which Louise d'Albany spent her life, was not so difficult for her lover
to bear as to see her, the beautiful and high-minded lady of his heart,
seated in her opera box near the sofa where the red and tumid-faced
Pretender lay snoring, waking up, as Mann describes him, only to summon
his lacqueys to assist him in a fit of drunken sickness, or to be
carried, like a dead swine, with hanging bloated head and powerless
arms, down-stairs to his carriage; not so difficult to bear as to hear
her, his Beatrice, his Laura, made the continual victim of her bullying
husband's childish bad-temper, of his foul-mouthed abuse, to hear it and
have to sit by in silence, dependent upon the good graces of a besotted
ruffian against whom Alfieri's hands must have continually itched.

A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri's lyrics, written about this time,
and complaining of having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged through
ignoble filth, shows that Alfieri, like most poetical minds, resented
the vulgar and the disgusting much more than he would have resented what
one may call clean tragedy. But things got worse and worse, and t