Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

it would have been impossible to associate with the bugbear tales of Donnaz or with the coarse antics of the comedians at Chivasso. A temple girt with mysterious shade, lifting its colonnades above a sunlit harbor; and before the temple, vine-wreathed nymphs waving their thyrsi through the turns of a melodious dance—such was the vision that caught up Odo and swept him leagues away from the rouged and starred assemblage gathered in the boxes to gossip, flirt, eat ices and chocolates, and incidentally, in the pauses of their talk, to listen for a moment to the ravishing airs of Metastasio’s Achilles in Scyros.

      The distance between such performances—magic evocations of light and color and melody—and the gross buffoonery of the popular stage, still tainted with the obscenities of the old commedia dell’ arte, in a measure explains the different points from which at that period the stage was viewed in Italy: a period when in such cities as Milan, Venice, Turin, actors and singers were praised to the skies and loaded with wealth and favors, while the tatterdemalion players who set up their boards in the small towns at market-time or on feast-days were despised by the people and flung like carrion into unconsecrated graves. The impression Odo had gathered from Don Gervaso’s talk was of the provincial stage in all its pothouse license; but here was a spectacle as lofty and harmonious as some great religious pageant. As the action developed and the beauty of the verse was borne to Odo on the light hurrying ripples of Caldara’s music he turned instinctively to share his pleasure with those about him. Cantapresto, in a new black coat and ruffles, was conspicuously taking snuff from a tortoiseshell box which the Countess’s cicisbeo had given him; but Odo saw that he took less pleasure in the spectacle than in the fact of accompanying the heir-presumptive of Pianura to a gala performance at the royal theatre; and the lads about them were for the most engaged either with their own dress and appearance, or in exchanging greetings with the royal pages and the older students. A few of these sat near Odo, disdainfully superior in their fob-chains and queues; and as the boy glanced about him he met the fixed stare of one of the number, a tall youth seated at his elbow, and conspicuous, even in that modish company, for the exaggerated elegance of his dress. This young man, whose awkward bearing and long lava-hued face crowned with flamboyant hair contrasted oddly with his finical apparel, returned Odo’s look with a gaze of eager comprehension. He too, it was clear, felt the thrill and wonder, or at least re-lived them in the younger lad’s emotion; and from that moment Odo felt himself in mute communion with his neighbor.

      The quick movement of the story—the succession of devices by which the wily Ulysses lures Achilles to throw off his disguise, while Deidamia strives to conceal his identity; the scenic beauties of the background, shifting from sculpture-gallery to pleasance, from pleasance to banquet-hall; the pomp and glitter of the royal train, the melting graces of Deidamia and her maidens; seemed, in their multiple appeal, to develop in Odo new faculties of perception. It was his first initiation into Italian poetry, and the numbers, now broken, harsh and passionate, now flowing into liquid sweetness, were so blent with sound and color that he scarce knew through which sense they reached him. Deidamia’s strophes thrilled him like the singing-girl’s kiss, and at the young hero’s cry—

      Ma lo so ch’io sono Achille,

      E mi sento Achille in sen—

      his fists tightened and the blood hummed in his ears.

      In the scene of the banquet-hall, where the followers of Ulysses lay before Lycomedes the offerings of the Greek chieftains, and, while the King and Deidamia are marvelling at the jewels and the Tyrian robes, Achilles, unmindful of his disguise, bursts out

      Ah, chi vide finora armi più belle?—

      at this supreme point Odo again turned to his neighbor. They exchanged another look, and at the close of the act the youth leaned forward to ask with an air of condescension: “Is this your first acquaintance with the divine Metastasio?”

      “I have never been in a play-house before,” said Odo reddening.

      The other smiled. “You are fortunate in having so worthy an introduction to the stage. Many of our operas are merely vulgar and ridiculous; but Metastasio is a great poet.” Odo nodded a breathless assent. “A great poet,” his new acquaintance resumed, “and handling a great theme. But do you not suffer from the silly songs that perpetually interrupt the flow of the verse? To me they are intolerable. Metastasio might have been a great tragic dramatist if Italy would have let him. But Italy does not want tragedies—she wishes to be sung to, danced to, made eyes at, flattered and amused! Give her anything, anything that shall help her to forget her own abasement. Panem et circenses! that is always her cry. And who can wonder that her sovereigns and statesmen are willing to humor her, when even her poets stoop to play the mountebank for her diversion?” The speaker, ruffling his locks with a hand that scattered the powder, turned on the brilliant audience his strange corrugated frown. “Fools! simpletons!” he cried, “not to see that in applauding the Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women’s finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory—but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot’s blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their masters!” He paused and drew back with a supercilious smile. “But doubtless, sir,” said he, “I offend you in thus arraigning your sacred caste; for unless I mistake you belong to the race of demi-gods—the Titans whose downfall is at hand?” He swept the boxes with a contemptuous eye.

      Little of this tirade was clear to Odo; but something in the speaker’s tone moved him to answer, with a quick lifting of his head: “My name is Odo Valsecca, of the Dukes of Pianura;” when, fearing he had seemed to parade his birth before one evidently of inferior station, he at once added with a touch of shyness: “And you, sir, are perhaps a poet, since you speak so beautifully?”

      At which, with a stare and a straightening of his long awkward body, the other haughtily returned: “A poet, sir? I am the Count Vittorio Alfieri of Asti.”

      —————

IX.

      The singular being with whom chance had thus brought him acquainted was to have a lasting influence on the formation of Odo’s character.

      Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, his desultory years of academic schooling, was probably the most extraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel’s dominion. Of the future student, of the tragic poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italy by raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody boy with his craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for his own class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice, must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. It seems indeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passed among his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant young noblemen in a society where idleness and extravagance were held to be the natural attributes of the great. But in the growth of character the light on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitory gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto’s verse.

      It was the instant response of Odo’s imagination that drew the two together. Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the same wing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri’s class, and enjoyed an almost equal freedom. Thus, despite the difference of age, the lads found themselves allied by taste and circumstances. Among the youth of their class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, however obscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide of renovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to the same uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odo could never forget the youth who first lent him Annibale Caro’s Æneid and Metastasio’s opera libretti, Voltaire’s Zaïre and the comedies of Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion’s