psychological gesture,
which thus became the main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be
expected from such a man, nearly always his own moral attitude, his own
psychological gesture; he himself, his uncompromising, unhesitating,
unflinching, curt and emphatic nature, is always the hero or heroine
of the play, however much the situation, the incidents, the other
characteristics may vary. Antigone is generous and tender, Creon is
inhuman in all save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious madman,
Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, Clytaemnestra is sinful and
self-sophisticating, Virginia pure and open-minded; yet all these
different people, despite all their differences, speak and act as
Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar
characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would
become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of
pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he
paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig
of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and
gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of his words, the length of
his sentences, are always the same: so much so that in one play there
may be two or three Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly
virtuous or perfectly vicious; but anything that is not an Alfieri in
some tolerably transparent disguise, is sure to be a puppet, a lay
figure with as few joints as possible, just able to stretch out its arms
and clap them to its sides, but dangling suspended between heaven and
earth.

The attitude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the
play exists, are, as I have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri.
But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those
which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more
especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral attitude and gesture
which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth,
and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio
and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and
Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the attitude and
the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's
own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the attitude and gesture
of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism. To have written
t