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BOOK I - THE OLD ORDER: CHAPTER 9
1.9.
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 leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid
and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of
Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with
his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the
elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of
possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid
sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of
his own sluggish nature.
The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune,
which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his
fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if
Alfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes
were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are
more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for
what escapes them. Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossible
for the latter to condescend to him; and the equality of intercourse
between the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeited
with adulation.
Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in
after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to
the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished and amiable man, who had for many years devoted his
talents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining the
Academy; and thither, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio conducted his
young friend.
Ignorant as Odo was of all the arts, he felt on the very threshold the
new quality of his surroundings. These tall bare rooms, where busts and
sarcophagi were ranged as in the twilight of a temple, diffused an
influence that lowered the voice and hushed the step. In the
semi-Parisian capital where French architects designed the King's
pleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panellings from
Paris and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfieri
represented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the "grand
manner," which had held its own through all later variations of taste,
running parallel with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and the
effeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in
the company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society where
the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality
of Princes and Cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars
in their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri had
returned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the graceful
and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;
bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view
raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past: the view of a
generation of architects in whom archeological curiosity had stifled the
artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the
past like their great predecessors, were engrossed in a sterile
restoration of the letter. It may be said of this school of architects
that they were of more service to posterity than to their
contemporaries; for while they opened the way to modern antiquarian
research, their pedantry checked the natural development of a style
which, if left to itself, might in time have found new and more vigorous
forms of expression.
To Odo, happily, Count Benedetto's surroundings spoke more forcibly than
his theories. Every object in the calm severe rooms appealed to the boy
with the pure eloquence of form. Casts of the Vatican busts stood
against the walls and a niche at one end of the library contained a
marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their winged
genii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments
of Roman mosaic and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity as
if they had been the scattered letters of a new alphabet; and he saw
with astonishment his friend Vittorio's indifference to these wonders.
Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack of
interest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to the youth
only the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake of
what his pocket may procure; and such kindly tolerance made Odo regret
that Vittorio should not at least affect an interest in his uncle's
pursuits.
Odo's eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simple
joy. He brought forth all his treasures for the boy's instruction and
the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings,
Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegant
pencil-drawings of classical remains. Like all students of his day he
had also his cabinet of antique gems and coins, from which Odo obtained
more intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumed
before him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiar
gestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nor
did the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and for
the first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the great
classical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, and
the divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named without
baring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his first
conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact
with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of
the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had
not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,
Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the
Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo
the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at
Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had
formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected;
and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin
Parnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet
rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or
ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old
Count's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.
Such an initiation was the more precious to him from the indifference of
those about him to all forms of liberal culture. Among the greater
Italian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to new
influences, the most rigidly bound up in the formulas of the past. While
Milan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophic
thought; while Naples was producing a group of economists such as
Galiani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome was
dedicating herself to the investigation of ancient art and polity, and
even flighty Venice had her little set of "liberals," who read Voltaire
and Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capital
lay in the grasp of a bigoted clergy and of a reigning house which was
already preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudal
discipline of the border. Generations of hard fighting and rigorous
living had developed in the nobles the qualities which were preparing
them for the great part their country was to play; and contact with the
Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into a
sombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rules
of the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense of
intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles like
Massimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children his
first and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of his
wife's conventual training by "consecrating to her daily four hours of
reading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner view
was that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in their
son's hearing "the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility" that there is
no need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was the
opinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters of
Casa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of his
duties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of poverty
and ennui, had sunk into a state of rigid pietism; so that the lad, on
his visits to his mother, found himself in a world where art was
represented by the latest pastel-portrait of a court beauty, literature
by Liguori's Glories of Mary or the blessed Battista's Mental Sorrows of
Christ, and history by the conviction that Piedmont's efforts to stamp
out the enemies of the Church had distinguished her above every other
country of Europe. Donna Laura's cicisbeo was indeed a member of the
local Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in the
noble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a pet
canary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whose
Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown Dante to be a writer of
barbarous doggerel; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard less
of Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than of
the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime "heroico-comic" poem
on the infancy of Jesus.
It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, owed her literature and her art, as well as the
direction of her religious life. Though the reaction against the order
was everywhere making itself felt, though one Italian sovereign after
another had been constrained to purchase popularity or even security by
banishing the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained their
hold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastes
they affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious and
political conservatism, against which invisible forces were already felt
to be moving. For the use of their noble supporters, the Jesuits had
devised a religion as elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages of
the aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels in imitation of
great ladies' boudoirs and prescribed observances in keeping with the
vapid and gossiping existence of their inmates.
To Odo, fresh from the pure air of Donnaz, where the faith of his
kinsfolk expressed itself in charity, self-denial and a noble decency of
life, there was something stifling in the atmosphere of languishing
pietism in which his mother's friends veiled the emptiness of their
days. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's
conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his
devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices." It
was in his nature to grudge no sacrifice to his ideals, and he might
have accomplished without question the monotonous observances his
confessor exacted, but for the changed aspect of the Deity in whose name
they were imposed.
As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come
from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned.
Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined
complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one
rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the
religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the
ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly
Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to."
Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that
chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the
mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet
uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned
like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in
artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where
the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera
singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed
in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was
gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity,
and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on
wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory--
Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae!
It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.
Content of BOOK I - THE OLD ORDER: CHAPTER 9 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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