The singular being with whom chance had thus brought him acquainted wasto have a lasting1 influence on the formation of Odo's character.
Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, hisdesultory years of academic schooling2, was probably the mostextraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel's dominion3. Of the futurestudent, of the tragic4 poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italyby raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody5 boy withhis craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for hisown class, his liberal theories and insolently6 aristocratic practice,must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. It seemsindeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passedamong his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant7 youngnoblemen in a society where idleness and extravagance were held to bethe natural attributes of the great. But in the growth of character thelight on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitorygleams; and even in his frivolous8 days at the Academy Alfieri carried aVirgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto's verse.
It was the instant response of Odo's imagination that drew the twotogether. Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the samewing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri's class, and enjoyed analmost equal freedom. Thus, despite the difference of age, the ladsfound themselves allied9 by taste and circumstances. Among the youth oftheir class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, howeverobscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide ofrenovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to thesame uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the youngerlad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odocould never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneidand Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies ofGoldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy withhis own half-dormant tastes the first incentive10 to a nobler activity.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, theelder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious ofpossessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vividsensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths ofhis own sluggish11 nature.
The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune,which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since hisfifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but ifAlfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tasteswere always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who aremore engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining forwhat escapes them. Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossiblefor the latter to condescend12 to him; and the equality of intercoursebetween the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeitedwith adulation.
Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became inafter years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio tothe latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished13 and amiable14 man, who had for many years devoted15 histalents to the King's service, was lodged16 in a palace adjoining theAcademy; and thither17, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio conducted hisyoung friend.
Ignorant as Odo was of all the arts, he felt on the very threshold thenew quality of his surroundings. These tall bare rooms, where busts18 andsarcophagi were ranged as in the twilight19 of a temple, diffused20 aninfluence that lowered the voice and hushed the step. In thesemi-Parisian capital where French architects designed the King'spleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panellings fromParis and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfierirepresented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the "grandmanner," which had held its own through all later variations of taste,running parallel with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and theeffeminate caprices of the rococo21 period. He had lived much in Rome, inthe company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society wherethe revival22 of classical research was being forwarded by the liberalityof Princes and Cardinals23 and by the indefatigable24 zeal25 of the scholarsin their pay. From this centre of aesthetic26 reaction Alfieri hadreturned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the gracefuland ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a viewraised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past: the view of ageneration of architects in whom archeological curiosity had stifled27 theartistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of thepast like their great predecessors28, were engrossed29 in a sterilerestoration of the letter. It may be said of this school of architectsthat they were of more service to posterity30 than to theircontemporaries; for while they opened the way to modern antiquarianresearch, their pedantry31 checked the natural development of a stylewhich, if left to itself, might in time have found new and more vigorousforms of expression.
To Odo, happily, Count Benedetto's surroundings spoke32 more forcibly thanhis theories. Every object in the calm severe rooms appealed to the boywith the pure eloquence33 of form. Casts of the Vatican busts stoodagainst the walls and a niche34 at one end of the library contained amarble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their wingedgenii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragmentsof Roman mosaic35 and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity asif they had been the scattered36 letters of a new alphabet; and he sawwith astonishment37 his friend Vittorio's indifference38 to these wonders.
Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack ofinterest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to the youthonly the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake ofwhat his pocket may procure39; and such kindly40 tolerance41 made Odo regretthat Vittorio should not at least affect an interest in his uncle'spursuits.
Odo's eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simplejoy. He brought forth42 all his treasures for the boy's instruction andthe two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings,Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegantpencil-drawings of classical remains43. Like all students of his day hehad also his cabinet of antique gems44 and coins, from which Odo obtainedmore intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumedbefore him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiargestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nordid the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and forthe first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the greatclassical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, andthe divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named withoutbaring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his firstconception of the earlier, more virile45 manner which the first contactwith Graeco-Roman antiquity46 had produced. The Count told him, too, ofthe great painters whose popularity had been lessened47, if their fame hadnot been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of theVatican, the dreadful majesty48 of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odothe beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur49 broke into bombast50.
His early association with the expressive51 homely52 art of the chapel53 atPontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions hadformed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected54;and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the LatinParnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quietrooms, chattering55 about his horses, boasting of his escapades, orranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the oldCount's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.
Such an initiation56 was the more precious to him from the indifference ofthose about him to all forms of liberal culture. Among the greaterItalian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to newinfluences, the most rigidly58 bound up in the formulas of the past. WhileMilan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophicthought; while Naples was producing a group of economists59 such asGaliani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome wasdedicating herself to the investigation60 of ancient art and polity, andeven flighty Venice had her little set of "liberals," who read Voltaireand Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capitallay in the grasp of a bigoted61 clergy62 and of a reigning63 house which wasalready preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudaldiscipline of the border. Generations of hard fighting and rigorousliving had developed in the nobles the qualities which were preparingthem for the great part their country was to play; and contact with theWaldensian and Calvinist heresies64 had stiffened65 Piedmontese piety66 into asombre hatred67 of schism68 and a minute observance of the mechanical rulesof the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense ofintellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles likeMassimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children hisfirst and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of hiswife's conventual training by "consecrating69 to her daily four hours ofreading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner viewwas that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in theirson's hearing "the old maxim70 of the Piedmontese nobility" that there isno need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was theopinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters ofCasa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of hisduties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of povertyand ennui71, had sunk into a state of rigid57 pietism; so that the lad, onhis visits to his mother, found himself in a world where art wasrepresented by the latest pastel-portrait of a court beauty, literatureby Liguori's Glories of Mary or the blessed Battista's Mental Sorrows ofChrist, and history by the conviction that Piedmont's efforts to stampout the enemies of the Church had distinguished72 her above every othercountry of Europe. Donna Laura's cicisbeo was indeed a member of thelocal Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in thenoble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a petcanary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whoseLettere Virgiliane had so conclusively73 shown Dante to be a writer ofbarbarous doggerel74; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard lessof Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than ofthe Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime75 "heroico-comic" poemon the infancy76 of Jesus.
It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in the early part ofthe eighteenth century, owed her literature and her art, as well as thedirection of her religious life. Though the reaction against the orderwas everywhere making itself felt, though one Italian sovereign afteranother had been constrained77 to purchase popularity or even security bybanishing the Society from his dominions78, the Jesuits maintained theirhold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastesthey affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious andpolitical conservatism, against which invisible forces were already feltto be moving. For the use of their noble supporters, the Jesuits haddevised a religion as elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages ofthe aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels79 in imitation ofgreat ladies' boudoirs and prescribed observances in keeping with thevapid and gossiping existence of their inmates80.
To Odo, fresh from the pure air of Donnaz, where the faith of hiskinsfolk expressed itself in charity, self-denial and a noble decency81 oflife, there was something stifling82 in the atmosphere of languishingpietism in which his mother's friends veiled the emptiness of theirdays. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy'sconscience was enervated83 by the casuistries of Liguorianism and hisdevotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious84 practices." Itwas in his nature to grudge85 no sacrifice to his ideals, and he mighthave accomplished without question the monotonous86 observances hisconfessor exacted, but for the changed aspect of the Deity87 in whose namethey were imposed.
As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to comefrom discovering not what his God condemned88, but what He condoned89.
Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refinedcomplaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be onerather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that thereligion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in theex-soprano's cynical90 aphorism91: "As respectful children of our HeavenlyFather it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to."Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for thatchill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served themass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yetuplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adornedlike aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed inartificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and wherethe florid passionate92 music of the mass was rendered by the King's operasingers before a throng93 of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayedin vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship wasgone. 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 onwings 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 oneday on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled94 into the Academy--the LettresPhilosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.
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1
lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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schooling
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| n.教育；正规学校教育 | |
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dominion
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| n.统治，管辖，支配权；领土，版图 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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moody
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| adj.心情不稳的，易怒的，喜怒无常的 | |
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insolently
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| adv.自豪地，自傲地 | |
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extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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frivolous
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| adj.轻薄的；轻率的 | |
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allied
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| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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incentive
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| n.刺激；动力；鼓励；诱因；动机 | |
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sluggish
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| adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的 | |
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condescend
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| v.俯就，屈尊；堕落，丢丑 | |
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accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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busts
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| 半身雕塑像( bust的名词复数 )； 妇女的胸部； 胸围； 突击搜捕 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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rococo
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| n.洛可可；adj.过分修饰的 | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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cardinals
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| 红衣主教( cardinal的名词复数 )； 红衣凤头鸟（见于北美，雄鸟为鲜红色）； 基数 | |
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indefatigable
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| adj.不知疲倦的，不屈不挠的 | |
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zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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stifled
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 )； 镇压，遏制； 堵 | |
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predecessors
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| n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身 | |
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engrossed
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| adj.全神贯注的 | |
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posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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pedantry
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| n.迂腐，卖弄学问 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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niche
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| n.壁龛；合适的职务(环境、位置等) | |
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mosaic
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| n./adj.镶嵌细工的，镶嵌工艺品的，嵌花式的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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procure
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| vt.获得，取得，促成；vi.拉皮条 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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gems
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| growth； economy； management； and customer satisfaction 增长 | |
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virile
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| adj.男性的；有男性生殖力的；有男子气概的；强有力的 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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lessened
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| 减少的，减弱的 | |
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majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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bombast
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| n.高调，夸大之辞 | |
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expressive
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| adj.表现的，表达…的，富于表情的 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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initiation
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| n.开始 | |
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rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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rigidly
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| adv.刻板地，僵化地 | |
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economists
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| n.经济学家，经济专家( economist的名词复数 ) | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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bigoted
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| adj.固执己见的，心胸狭窄的 | |
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clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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reigning
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| adj.统治的，起支配作用的 | |
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heresies
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| n.异端邪说，异教( heresy的名词复数 ) | |
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stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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schism
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| n.分派，派系，分裂 | |
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consecrating
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| v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的现在分词 )；奉献 | |
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maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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ennui
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| n.怠倦，无聊 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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conclusively
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| adv.令人信服地，确凿地 | |
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doggerel
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| n.拙劣的诗，打油诗 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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constrained
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| adj.束缚的,节制的 | |
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78
dominions
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| 统治权( dominion的名词复数 )； 领土； 疆土； 版图 | |
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79
chapels
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| n.小教堂， （医院、监狱等的）附属礼拜堂( chapel的名词复数 )；（在小教堂和附属礼拜堂举行的）礼拜仪式 | |
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80
inmates
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| n.囚犯( inmate的名词复数 ) | |
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81
decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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stifling
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| a.令人窒息的 | |
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enervated
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| adj.衰弱的，无力的v.使衰弱，使失去活力( enervate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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85
grudge
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| n.不满，怨恨，妒嫉；vt.勉强给，不情愿做 | |
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monotonous
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| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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87
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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88
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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condoned
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| v.容忍，宽恕，原谅( condone的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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aphorism
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| n.格言，警语 | |
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92
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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94
smuggled
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| 水货 | |
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