Reading his
tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how
he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more
distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two
links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more
achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy
reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the
Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic
creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the
literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of
this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would
have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way
before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of
originality of feeling and conception. "Tragedy, born sublime,
terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were,
redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms
of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost
ministry."
I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his
acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to
write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of
Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for
his obligation to them.
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