ragedies whose whole value depended upon the striking exhibition of
these qualities; and to have made this exhibition interesting, nay,
fascinating to the very people, to the amiable, humane, indifferent,
lying, feeble-spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, till
these very men were ashamed of what they had hitherto been; to stamp the
new generation with the clear-cut die of his own strong character; this
was the reality of the mission which Alfieri had felt within himself: a
reality which will be remembered when his plays shall have long ceased
to be acted, and shall long have ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined
himself to be a great poetic genius, and a great dramatic innovator:
he scorned with loathing the works of Corneille, of Racine, and of
Voltaire, all immeasurably more valuable as poetry and drama than his
own; he hated the works of Metastasio, a poet and a playwright by the
divine right of genius; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest Shakespeare
should spoil the perfection of his own conceptions. He slaved for months
and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and
curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was
always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse
unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a
delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who
never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising
notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he
first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth
century. His use consisted in his mere existence among men so different
from himself; and his dramas, his elaborately constructed and curtailed
and corrected dramas, were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which
the image of this strange new-fangled personality might be flashed
everywhere into the souls of his contemporaries. To perceive the
moral attitude and gesture specially characteristic of himself, to
artificially correct and improve and isolate them in his own reality,
and then to multiply their likeness for all the world; to know himself
to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and to write plays whereof
the heroes and heroines were mere repetitions of Alfieri; such was the
mission of this powerful and spontaneous nature, of this self-conscious
and self-manipulating _poseur_.

The success of that performance of _Antigone_ on the amateur s