ows on
the damp clay floor, eating bread mainly composed of straw, should have
all the profits of his hard labour taken from him in taxes, while
another man, a splendid gentleman covered over with gold, riding over
acres of his land with his hounds, or a fat priest dressed in silk,
snoozing over his Lucullus dinner, should be exempt from taxation and
empowered to starve, rob, beat, or hang the peasant: such a thing as
this did not fall within the range of Alfieri's feelings. To his mind,
for ever wrapped in an intellectual toga, there was no tragedy in mere
misery; there was no injustice in mere cruelty, or rather misery,
cruelty, nay, all their allied evils, ignorance, brutality, sickness,
superstition, vice, were unknown to him. Hence, as I have said, all the
philanthropic side of the revolutionary movement was lost to him; just
as the defence of Labarre, the vindication of Calas, never disturbed
the current of his contempt for Voltaire. So also the abolition of
privileges, the secularisation of church property, the equalisation of
legal punishment, the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation of
slaves; all these things, which stirred even the most corrupt and
apathetic minds of the late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much
declamation to Alfieri. To him, who could conceive no virtues beyond
independent truthfulness, such things were mere sentimental trash, mere
hypocritical nonsense beneath which base men hid their baseness. And
the baseness, unhappily, was there: baseness of absolute corruption,
or of scandalous levity, even in the noblest. To Alfieri, a man like
Beaumarchais, for all his quick philanthropy, his audacious outspokenness,
must have seemed base, with his background of money-jobbing, of dirty
diplomatic work, of legal squabbles. How much more such a man as
Mirabeau, with his heroic resolution, his heroic kindliness, his whole
Titan nature, carous, eaten into by a hundred mean vices. That Mirabeau
should have gained his bread writing libels and obscene novels, meant to
Alfieri not that a man born in corruption and tainted thereby had, by
the force of his genius, by the force of the great humanitarian
movement, raised himself as morally high as he had hitherto grovelled
morally low; it merely meant that the immaculate name of hero was
degraded by a foul writer.

From such figures as these Alfieri turned away in indignant disgust. The
great movement of the eighteenth century seemed to him a mere