Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
Mrs Browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out "not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of Alfieri's," but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, "we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass."
The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he had, after Gori, was summoned from Turin to console the Countess and put all papers in order. Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books and MSS., and whatever small property he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany, leaving her to dispose of them entirely according to her good pleasure.
Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri's question, and the meaning of Gori's answer; let us try and realise the ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year 1777.
But follies with women of less respectable position and less obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear of degradation to Alfieri's mind.
In order, therefore, to understand the nature of Alfieri's plays, it is necessary, first of all, to understand what were Alfieri's innate likings and dislikings in the domain of the drama. Before all other things, Alfieri was not a poet: he lacked all, or very nearly all, the faculties which are really poetical.
Though the Hadendowas were well armed, and outnumbered them by two to one, Royson felt that the presence of the Englishmen, all of whom were ex-sailors of the Royal Navy, would nerve his Arab helpers to attack and defeat Alfieri's band of cutthroats.
Occasionally a grand performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno.
For myself though I remember Chateaubriand's bareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri's passionate prostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron's offering of poems on the poet's shrine I confess that a single canto of the 'Inferno, a single passage of the 'Vita Nuova, seems more full of soul-stirring associations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust was laid.
Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme simplicity of mind and gentleness of spirit, was still living at Asti, cheerfully depriving herself of every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as she devoted her thoughts and her strength, to the services of the poor and of the sick.
The moral attitude, the 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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking