The whole road from
Turin to Alexandria della Paglia is a fine broad _chausee_. The first day's
journey brought us to Asti. A rich plain on each side of the road, the
horizon on our right bounded by the Appennines, on our left by the Alps,
both diverging, formed the landscape. Asti is an ancient, well and solidly
built city, but rather gloomy in its appearance. It is remarkable for being
the birthplace of Vittorio Alfieri, the celebrated tragic poet, who has
excelled all other dramatic poets in the general _denouement_ of his
pieces, except, perhaps, Voltaire alone. I do not speak of Alfleri so much
as a poet as a _dramaturgus_. I may be mistaken, and it is, perhaps,
presumptuous in me to attempt to judge, but it has always appeared to me
that Voltaire and Alfieri have managed dramatic effect and the intrigue and
catastrophe of their tragedies better than any other authors. Shakespeare,
God as he is in genius, is in this particular very deficient. Schiller,
too, the greatest modern poetic genius perhaps and the Shakespeare of
Germany, has here failed also, and nothing can be more correct than the
estimate of Alfieri made by Forsyth[79] when, after speaking of his
defects, he says: "Yet where lives the tragic poet equal to Alfieri?
Schiller (then living also) may perhaps excel him in those peals of terror
which flash thro' his gloomy and tempestuous scene, but he is far inferior
in the mechanism of his drama.
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