ntality, the high
falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything
that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of
last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness
of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the
end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri,
when once he disliked a person or a thing, justly or unjustly, could
only increase but never diminish his dislike. Let us look at this
matter, which is instructive to all persons whose nobility of character
runs to injustice, a little closer; it will help us to understand the
_Misogallo_, the extraordinary apostasy which, quite unconsciously,
Alfieri was later to commit towards the principle of freedom. Alfieri,
intensely Italian, if mediaeval and peasant Italy may give us the
Italian type, in a certain silent or rather inarticulate violence of
temper--violence which roars and yells and stabs and strangles, but
which never talks, and much less argues--could not endure the particular
sort of excitement which surrounded him in France; excitement mainly
cerebral, heroism or villainy resulting, but only as the outcome of
argument and definition of principle and of that mixture of logic and
rhetoric called by the French _des mots_. Alfieri was not a reasoning
mind, he was not an eloquent man; above all, he was not a witty man; his
satirical efforts are so many blows upon an opponent's head; they are
almost physical brutalities; there is nothing clever or funny about
them. In such a society as this Parisian society of the years '87, '88,
'89, '90, he must have been at a continual disadvantage; and at a
disadvantage which he felt keenly, but which he felt, also, that
any remarkable piece of Alfierism which would have moved Italy to
admiration, such as glaring, or stalking off in silence, or punching a
man's head, could only increase. To feel himself at a disadvantage on
account of his very virtues, and with people whom those virtues did
not impress, must have been most intolerable to a man as vain and
self-conscious as Alfieri, and to this was added the sense that,
from mere ignorance of the language (the language whose nobility, as
contrasted with the "low, plebeian, nasal disgustingness" of French, he
so often descanted on) in which he wrote, it was quite impossible for
these people to be reduced to their right place and right mind by the
crushing superiority