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This French Revolution was merely a revolt of slaves; and what tyranny could be more odious than the tyranny of those whom nature had fitted only for slavery? What are the French? "The French," answers one of the epigrams of the Misogallo, "have always been puppets; formerly puppets in powder, now stinking and blood-stained puppets."
But we feel, as we turn over the pages of the Misogallo, and collate with its epigrams a certain passage in Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, narrow, pedantic doctrinaire, whose very magnanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no longer sympathise with the hatred of the French, which in juster and more modest men, as for instance Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our sympathy.
The Misogallo, published for the first time after the fall of Napoleon, though aimed at the French, served equally well as an onslaught on every foreign dominion or even moral or intellectual influence.
It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal expression, the severest conceivable retribution, Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all the stronger as there entered into it the petty personal vanity as well as the noble abstract feeling of the man it was as an expression of this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous but little-read Misogallo.
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.
Much as we dislike the republican French who descended into Italy, the Misogallo makes us like Alfieri even less.
Misfortune had given a finer savour to the Marquis's philosophy, and there was a kind of heroic grace in his undisturbed cultivation of the amenities. While the Marquis was struggling to preserve the conversational art, and Alfieri planning the savage revenge of the Misogallo, the course of affairs in France had gained a wilder impetus.
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