Solon! Aristides! Epaminondas! Phocion! ye are authors and abettors of wild theories. Who in the world, O Demosthenes, would listen to thy calumnious tongue against Philip? Eschylus ! we deemed thee generous, heroic, self-devoted as thy own Prometheus: thy blood we thought flowed for thy country, for civilisation, for enlightened and free mankind. It flowed for wild theories. O Sophocles! O Euripides! what lessons have you given us! Wild theories! And yet, sir, (for scorn must have its period,) if we use our memories, and reject our reason, which autocrats would tell us we are bound to do... as for national power, which many look chiefly to, as for national defence, which interests all, Rome existed in a state of infancy under her kings, of maturity under her consuls, of decrepitude and decay under her emperors. People are disposed to acknowledge that a monarch is more prompt in giving his orders for invasion and annoyance, and that he can commence hostilities with greater secrecy, and conduct them with greater decision. Glorious prerogative! There must then be some strangely countervailing disadvantage in the form and structure of his government; for never since the creation of the world was there an instance of a monarchy conquering a republic, where the people were equally numerous, or within a third; while republics in all ages have conquered many kingdoms, of which the population was the double and even the triple of theirs. Monarchy has all her blood in the head: she looks healthy to those who see health in flushed faces, and strong to those who look for strength in swollen limbs. Strange deception! if indeed anything is strange where all principles are perverted; where what is best must not be; where what is worst must be; where tyranny alone has rights, and usurpation alone has privileges. Colocotroni. "You shall enchain Poland: you shall do with Italy and with Illyria what you please; you shall dismember free and happy Saxony." "What! no more? my brothers!" "Wait a little, our brother, wait a little! Wait, our brother, four years at farthest; then advance: you will be hailed as a deliverer from within and from without. His most Christian Majesty is anxious to recover the influence of his family in Spain: the English, who waged war to prevent it from having any, are not in a condition to interpose an impediment; and the ministers are more interested in suppressing the growth of constitutions than in maintaining the dignity of the throne." The Emperor of Russia has had the address, by the Congress of Verona, to involve the states of Europe in confusion; and within a year or two he will be able to execute his project on the side of Turkey, having first broken the sinews of Persia by pushing her on precipitately. Greece meanwhile will lie prostrate before her, ready, and perhaps not unwilling, to be bound by her, blinded as she is by feebleness. Maurocordato. The other great Powers have declared on many occasions their resolution to set limits to the aggression of the Czar. Colocotroni. Austria hath demonstrated that her sympathies are stronger with despotism than with us, or even than with Christianity. Her ships, both of commerce and of war, have repeatedly brought succour to the Turks, blockaded and besieged. Even the most Christian King hath conveyed in his navy the money sent by the Pasha of Egypt for the pay of his troops in the Peloponnese. The military hirelings, who were the readiest instruments of Bonaparte's tyranny, are become the stirrup-holders (and indeed may without shame) of this ambitious satrap, who, barbarian as he is, is a soldier of more firmness and valour, a prince of more magnanimity and dignity, a politician of more clear-sightedness and conduct. If the French ministry has engaged them in such a service, it has acted with wisdom, and may triumphantly cry out to the factious, "See, what a detestable gang of rogues and vagabonds are not only those who long ago betrayed you, but those also in whom you still place your trust." Maurocordato. The Amaranthe, a French vessel of the royal navy, acted in the service of the Egyptians, both before Rhodes and against Crete. But if the report be true that Cochrane is about to take a command in our defence, we may confidently hope that he will destroy any force the French government may appoint to act against us. The same blow will dissipate the Turks and disunite the body of the Holy Alliance. Colocotroni. Indeed it is time; unless the lowest in civilisation are to supplant the highest. Maurocordato. In the animal world the insects have the largest empire, in the political the Rus sians. Their dominion extends over a space equal to a third of the old world, and seven times larger than the nearest planet. The subjects are educated in blind submission; and about two millions are soldiers, or may become so, without any loss to agriculture. Is there no danger to Europe from so enormous a power, put into motion and directed by ministers who mostly have been raised from obscurity or from indigence, who have abjured their own countries, and must flourish on the decomposition of others! Lately, a vast portion of North America has been claimed by the Autocrat, from the United States, Mexico, and England : beginning at the thirty-first and extending to the sixtieth degree: enough of itself to constitute three empires. Colocotroni. If Russia should protect us, which God forbid ! she will break our bones by the weight of her wing; and other nations will fight over us, not for us. The people of England are zealous in our cause: but England is the only country in the world where the ministers are chosen from their dissimilitude to the people. I never think of them without the idea of the bear ridden by the monkey; the strong by the weak, the grave by the pert, the quiet by the mischievous. Since the time of Pitt the First (in this manner will politicians teach historians to write) she has been governed, with hardly an interval, by the most inordinate and desperate gamesters that ever her subscriptionhouses drove penniless down-stairs. Maurocordato. There is an axiom, that the best if corrupted is the worst. It grieves me to think of England, once the favourite of Liberty, and sitting in light alone. All the French, however, can not have lost entirely that spirit with which twenty millions were animated lately. Colocotroni. His most Christian Majesty is said in the Chamber of Deputies to be "destined by Providence to close the abyss of revolutions." He may perhaps close that abyss (as he would any other) by falling into it. to be totally changed in the state by the Christians, and this change the civil power always prevents; but the popes, as these usurpers called themselves, were under no apprehension that the new religion should itself be subverted; for it is one of their tenets that it never shall be; their only fear was, that they should lose a portion of their power by the rejection of absurdities, and a portion of their wealth by the reduction of ceremonies to the simplicity and paucity of the original institution. These however, popes or pagans, are not so censurable as those princes whose power and riches are in no danger on any side, and who by seceding from the cause of humanity, which we vindicate and defend, expose to the world their utter indifference to that faith which they, one and all, have sworn publicly to protect. Maurocordato. The saints of the Holy Alliance punish with imprisonment and poverty those who Colocotroni. To rise against oppression; to teach write against the Christian religion, while they themselves act against it openly, and assist in our children their duties and their rights; to recrushing its defenders, men descended from those mind them of their ancestors, and to rescue them who first received it among the Gentiles. Not from the seraglio; these are crimes! They are only the catholic princes, professing the most in-crimes, in the eyes of whom? of those who proWe, Maurocordato, tolerant, the most rapacious, and the most inso- fess the religion of Christ! holy men! sacred lent of superstitions, but the potent and sole pro- allies! catholic, apostolic! tector of the Greek church abandons it to the lust are inconsiderate, we are rash, we are frantic. For I dare not call this pusilla- what gain we by our vigils, fasts, and toils; by of the Mussulman. nimity, still less dare I call it perfidiousness, base- our roofless houses, our devastated farms, our ness, infamy; but I may lawfully ask whether any broken sleep upon the snowy mountains; unless it prince, in modern days or ancient, has been guilty be the approbation of our fathers now in bliss, and of a greater. For in my zeal in favour of royalty, the consolatory hope of it from our posterity? The always amiable, always august, and in our times rest of Europe is reduced to slavery, one heroic more than ever, I would fondly hope that none race excepted. God alone can foresee the termihas committed anything beyond a peccadillo, and nation of our conflict; but of this we both are that in political computation, even this is nothing certain; that, whenever we fall, in whatever part worse. Diocletian, and the other Roman Emperors of Greece our bodies lie, they will lie by the side who persecuted the Christians, did less than was of those who have defended the same cause; and done by their successors from pulpits and con- that there is not a pillar, in ancient days erected vents, monks and priests, who took upon them- by a grateful country, that does not in its fragselves the ridiculous title of pope. Religion was ments tell our story. ALFIERI AND SALOMON THE FLORENTINE JEW. Alfieri. Let us walk to the window, Signor crat. The principal difference is, that the one Salomon. And now, instead of the silly simpering compliments repeated at introductions, let me assure you that you are the only man in Florence with whom I would willingly exchange a salutation. Salomon. I must think myself highly flattered, signor Conte, having always heard that you are not only the greatest democrat, but also the greatest aristocrat, in Europe. Alfieri. These two things, however opposite, which your smile would indicate, are not so irreconcilable as you imagine. Let us first understand the words, and then talk about them. The democrat is he who wishes the people to have a due share in the government, and this share, if you The aristoplease, shall be the principal one. crat of our days is contented with no actual share in it: but if a man of family is conscious of his dignity, and resentful that another has invaded it, he may be, and is universally, called an aristo carries outward what the other carries inward. head and a picklock key at his girdle) the titles | Undivided power he will continue to enjoy; but, of counts and marquises. In Piedmont the matter is different: we must either have been the rabble or their lords: we were military, and we retain over the populace the same rank and spirit as our ancestors held over the soldiery. But we are as prone to slavery as they were averse and reluctant. Under the best of princes we are children all our lives. Under the worse we are infinitely more degraded than the wretches who are reduced to their servitude by war, or even by crimes; begging our master to take away from us the advantages of our education, and of our strength in mind and body. Is this picture overcharged? Salomon. Not with bright colours certainly. Alfieri. What think you then if we are threatened with hell by those who take away earth from us, and scourge and imprison and torture us? Salomon. Hell is a very indifferent hospital for those who are thrust into it with broken bones. It is hard indeed if they who lame you, will not let you limp. Indeed I do hear, signor Conte, that the churchmen call you an atheist and a leveller. Alfieri. So, during the plague at Milan, if a man walked upright in the midst of it, and without a sore about him, he was a devil or an anointer it was a crime and a curse not to be infected. But, signor Salomon, a poet never can be an atheist, nor can a gentleman be a leveller. For my part, I would rather walk alone in a rugged path than with the many in a smoother. Salomon. Signor Conte, I have heard of levellers, but I have never seen one: all are disposed to level down, but nobody to level up. As for nobility, there is none in Europe beside the Venetian. Nobility must be self-constituted and independent: the free alone are noble: slavery, like death, levels all. The English comes nearest to the Venetian: they are independent, but want the main characteristic, the self-constituted. You have been in England, signor Conte, and can judge of them better than I can. Alfieri. England, as you know, is governed by Pitt, the most insidious of her demagogues, and the most hostile to Aristocracy. Jealous of power, and distrustful of the people that raised him to it, he enriches and attaches to him the commercial part of the nation by the most wasteful prodigality both in finance and war, and he loosens from the landed the chief proprietors by raising them to the peerage. Nearly a third of the lords have been created by him, and prove themselves devotedly his creatures. This Empusa puts his ass's foot on the French, and his iron one on the English. He possesses not the advantage possessed by insects, which, if they see but one inch before them, see that inch distinctly. He knows not that the machine which runs on so briskly, will fall to pieces the moment it stops. He will indeed carry his point in debasing the Aristocracy; but he will equally debase the people. after his death, none will be able to say from any visible proof or appearance, how glorious a people did he govern! He will have changed its character in all ranks and conditions. After this it is little to say that he will have exalted its rival, who, without his interposition, would have sunk under distress and crime. But interposition was necessary to his aggrandizement, enabling him to distribute in twenty years, if he should live so long, more wealth among his friends and partisans, than has been squandered by the uncontrolled profusion of French monarchs, from the first Louis to the last. Salomon. How happens it that England, richer and more powerful than other states, should still contain fewer nobles? Alfieri. The greater part of the English nobility has neither power nor title. Even those who are noble by right of possession, the hereditary lords of manors with large estates attached to them, claim no titles at home or abroad. Hence in all foreign countries the English gentleman is placed below his rank, which naturally and necessarily is far higher than that of your slipshod counts and lottery-office marquises, whose gamekeepers with their high plumes, cocked hats, and hilts of rapiers, have no other occupation than to stand behind the carriage, if the rotten plank will bear them: whose game is the wren and red-breast, and whose beat is across the market. Menestrier, who both as a Frenchman and as a jesuit speaks contemptuously of English nobility, admits the gentlemen to this dignity. Their property, their information, their political influence, and their moral character, place them beyond measure above the titularies of our country, be the rank what it may; and it is a remarkable proof of moderation in some and of contemptuousness in others, that they do not openly claim from their king, or assume without such intervention, the titles arising from landed wealth, which conciliate the attention and civility of every class, and indeed of every individual, abroad. It is among those who stand between the peerage and the people that there exists a greater mass of virtue and of wisdom than in the rest of Europe. Much of their dignified simplicity may be attributed to the plainness of their religion, and, what will always be imitated, to the decorous life of their king: for whatever may be the defects of either, if we compare them with others round us, they are excellent. Salomon. A young religion jumps upon the shoulders of an older one, and soon becomes like her, by mockery of her tricks, her cant, and her decrepitude. Meanwhile the old one shakes with indignation, and swears there is neither relationship nor likeness. Was there ever a religion in the world that was not the true religion, or was there ever a king that was not the best of kings? Alfieri. In the latter case we must have arrived nigh perfection; since it is evident from the authority of the gravest men, theologians, pre sidents, judges, corporations, universities, senates, humour than Socrates. Quintilian says of De- Salomon. This temper or constitution of mind Salomon. I think differently. No satire can be excellent where displeasure is expressed with acrimony and vehemence. When satire ceases to smile it should be momentarily, and for the purpose of inculcating a moral. Juvenal is hardly more a satirist than Lucan: he is indeed a vigorous and bold declaimer, but he stamps too often, and splashes up too much filth. We Italians have no delicacy in wit; we have indeed no conception of it; we fancy we must be weak if we are not offensive. The scream of Pulcinello is imitated more easily than the masterly strokes of Plautus, or the sly insinuations of Catullus and of Flaccus. Alfieri. We are the least witty of men because we are the most trifling. Salomon. You would persuade me then that to be witty one must be grave: this is surely a contradiction. Alfieri. I would persuade you only, that banter, pun, and quibble, are the properties of light men and shallow capacities; that genuine humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind; which is always a grave one. Contemptuousness is not incompatible with them: worthless is that man who feels no contempt for the worthless, and weak who treats their emptiness as a thing of weight. At first it may seem a paradox, but it is perfectly true, that the gravest nations have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men. In England Swift and Addison, in Spain Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier. Salomon. This is to me no proof; for the most tender and impassioned of all poets is Shakspeare, who certainly was himself far removed from gravity, however much of it he imparted to some personages of his drama. Alfieri. That Shakspeare was gay and pleasurable in conversation I can easily admit; for there never was a mind at once so plastic and so pliant; but, without much gravity, could there have been that potency and comprehensiveness of thought, that depth of feeling, that creation of imperishable ideas, that sojourn in the souls of other men? He was amused in his workshop; such was society. But when he left it, he meditated intensely upon those limbs and muscles on which he was about to bestow new action, grace, and majesty; and so great an intensity of meditation must have strongly impressed his whole character. Salomon. You will however allow that we have no proof of gravity in Horace or Plautus. Alfieri. On the contrary, I think we have many. Horace, like all the pusillanimous, was malignant: like all courtiers, he yielded to the temper of his masters. His lighter touches were agreeable less to his own nature than to the nature of Augustus and Mecænas, both of them fond of trifling; but in his Odes and his Discourses there is more of gravity than of gaiety. That he was libidinous is no proof that he was playful; for often such men are even melancholic. Plautus, rich in language, rich in reflection, rich in character, is oftener grave than could have suited the inclinations of a coarse and tumultuous populace. What but the strong bent of his nature could have moved him to it? The English display an equal share of facetiousness and of humour (as they call it) in their comedies. Salomon. It is indeed a remarkable thing that such should be the case among the moderns: it Salomon. I do not understand the distinction. does not appear to have been so among the ancients. Alfieri. Nor indeed is it well understood by Alfieri. I differ from you, M. Salomon. When many of their best authors. It is no uncommon we turn toward the Athenians, we find many thing to hear, “He has humour rather than wit." comic writers, but few facetious. Menander, if Here the expression can only mean pleasantry: we may judge from his fragments, had less for whoever has humour has wit, although it does not follow that whoever has wit has humour. Humour is wit appertaining to character, and indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point. Wit vibrates and spirts; humour springs up exuberantly as from a fountain, and runs on. In Congreve you wonder what he will say next: in Addison you repose on what is said, listening with assured expectation of something congenial and pertinent. The French have little humour because they have little character: they excel all nations in wit because of their levity and sharpness. The personages on their theatre are generic. Salomon. You do allow that they are facetious: from you no small concession. Alfieri. This I do concede to them; and no person will accuse me of partiality in their favour. Not only are they witty, but when they discover a witty thing, they value it so highly that they reserve it for the noblest purposes, such as tragedies, sermons, and funeral orations. Whenever a king of theirs is inaugurated at Rheims, a string of witticisms is prepared for him during his whole reign, regularly as the civil list; regularly as menageries, oratories, orangeries, wife, confessor, waterworks, fireworks, gardens, parks, forests, and chases. Sometimes one is put into his mouth when he is too empty, sometimes when he is too full; but he always hath his due portion, take it when or how he may. A decent one, somewhat less indeed than that of their sovran, is reserved for the princes of the blood; the greater part of which is usually packed up with their camp-equipage; and I have seen a label to a bon mot, on which was written "Brillant comme la réponse de Henri IV. quand"... But the occasion had not been invented. We Italians sometimes fall into what, if you will not call it witticism, you may call the plasma of witticism, by mere mistake, and against our genius. A blunder, by its very stumbling, is often carried a little beyond what was aimed at, and falls upon something which, if it be not wit, is invested with its powers. Salomon. I have had opportunities to observe the obtuseness of the Tuscans in particular on these matters. Lately I lent my Molière to a man of talents; and when he returned the volumes, I asked him how he liked them: Per Bacco, he exclaimed, "the names are very comical; Sguanarelli and those others." They who have no wit of their own, are ignorant of it when it occurs, mistake it, and misapply it. A sailor found upon the shore a piece of amber; he carried it home, and, as he was fond of fiddling, began to rub it across the strings of his violin. It would not answer. He then broke some pieces off, boiled them in blacking, and found to his surprise and disquiet that it gave no fresh lustre to the shoe-leather. "What are you about?" cried a messmate. "Smell it, man; it is amber." "The devil take it," cried the finder, "I fancied it was rosin;" and he threw it into the sea. We despise what we cannot use. Alfieri. Your observations on Italian wit are correct. Even our comedies are declamatory: long speeches and inverted sentences overlay and stifle the elasticity of humour. The great Machiavelli is, whatever M. de Voltaire may assert to the contrary, a coarse comedian; hardly better than the cardinal Bibiena, poisoned by the Holiness of our Lord Pope Leo for wearying him with wit.* Salomon. His Holiness took afterward a stirrupcup of the same brewery, and never had committed the same offence, poor man! I should *If Cardinal Bibiena was poisoned by Leo, an opinion to which the profligacy of the pope gave rise, and the malignity of men reception, it should be recorded in justice to his Holiness that he wished to protect the family. We find among the letters of Bembo a very beautiful and energetic one written in the name of Leo to Francis I., in the mode of expression, where he repeats that, although relating to Bibiena. There is something not unsuspicious Bibiena thinks himself sure of dying, there appears to be no immediate danger... if it should happen, &c. "Cum Bernardus Bibiena cardinalis aliquot jam dies ex vi urgente, brevi se existimet moriturum... stomacho laboret, magisque timore quodam suo quam morbi Quanquam enim nihildum sanè video, quo quidem de illius vità sit omnino magnopere timendum. Si id accidat quod ipse suspicatur, tua in illum munificentia tuumque præclarum munus non statim neque unà cum ipsius vitá extinguatur, præsertim cum ei tam breve temporis spatium illo ipso quam quale quantumve fuerit percipi ab illo cognoscive potuerit. . . Ut ipse, si moriendum ei sit, &c." tuo munere frui licuerit, ut ante amissum videri possit The Italians are too credulous on poison, which at one period was almost a natural death among them. Englishmen were shocked at the confidence with which they asserted it of two personages, who occupied in the world a rank and interest due to neither, and one of whom died in England, the other in Elba. The last words of the letter are ready to make us unbelievers of Leo's guilt in this business. What exquisite language! what expressions of zeal and sincerity! "Quæ quidem omnia non tam propterea colligo, quod non illud unum existimem apud te plurimum valiturum, amorem scilicet erga illum tuum, itemque incredibilem ipsius in te cultum, quod initio dixi, sed ut mihi ipsi, qui id magnopere cupio, satisfaciam; ne perfamíliari ac pernecessario meo, mihique charissimo ac suavissimo atque in omni vitæ munere probatissimo, mea benevolentia meusque amor hoc extremo ejus vitæ tempore, si hoc extremum erit, plane defuisse videatur.” In the tenth book of these epistles there is one addressed to the Cardinal, by which the Church of Loretto is placed under his care, with every rank of friendship and partiality. "De tuâ enim in Divam pietate, in rem Romanam studio, in me autem, cui quidem familiæque meæ omnia pæne usque a puero summæ cum integritatis et fidei, tum vero stitisti, perveteri observantia voluntateque admonitus, curæ atque diligentiæ egregia atque præclara officia prænihil est rerum omnium quod tibi recte mandari credique posse non existimem." It is not in human nature that a man ever capable of these feelings toward anyone, should poison him, when no powerful interest or deep revenge was to be gratified: the opinion, nevertheless, has prevailed; and it may be attributed to a writer not altogether free from malignity, a scorner of popes and princes, and especially hostile to the Medicean family. Paolo Giovio says that Bibiena was poisoned in a fresh egg. The sixteenth century was the age of poison. Bibiena was poisoned, we may believe; not however by Leo, who loved him as being his preceptor. Leo sent him into France to persuade Francis I. to enter into a league against the Turks. The object of this league was, to divert both him and Charles V. from Italy, and to give the preponderating power in it to the family of Medici. |
