Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/115

Rh M E T M E T 105 its wearisome monotony, and come to comprehend his character, at once generous and timid, selfish and amiable, prudent almost to excess of caution, and personally cold in contradiction with the fervour of his sentimental muse. The even tenor of this dull existence was broken in the year 1734 by the one dark and tragic incident of his biography. It appears that La Romanina had at last got tired of his absence. Little satisfied with his friendly but somewhat reticent communications, impatient to see him once again, inquisitive perhaps about the terms on which he lived with his new mistress, she resolved to journey to Vienna. Could not Metastasio get her an engagement at the court theatre ? The poet at this juncture revealed his own essential feebleness of character. To La Romanina he owed almost everything as a man and as an artist. But he was ashamed of her and tired of her. He vowed she should not come to Vienna, and wrote dissuading her from the projected visit. The tone of his letters alarmed and irritated her. It is probable that she set out from Rome, but died suddenly upon the road. Nothing can be said for certain about her end, or about the part which Metastasio may have played in hastening the catastrophe. All we know is that she left him her fortune after her husband s life interest in it had expired, and that Metastasio, over whelmed with grief and remorse, immediately renounced the legacy. This disinterested act plunged the Bulgarelli- Metastasio household at Rome into confusion. La Romanina s widower married again. Leopoldo Trapassi, and his father and sister, were thrown upon their own resources. The poet in Vienna had to bear their angry expostulations upon his ill-timed generosity, and to augment the allowances he made them. As time advanced the life which Metastasio led at Vienna, together with the climate, told upon his health and spirits. From about the year 1745 onward he writes complainingly of a mysterious nervous illness, which plunged him into the abyss of melancholy, interfered with his creative energy, and constantly distressed him with the apprehension of a general breakdown. He wrote but little now, though the cantatas which belong to this period, and the canzonet Ecco quel fiero istante, which he sent to his friend Farinelli, rank among the most popular of his productions. It was clear, as his latest and most genial biographer, Vernon Lee, has phrased it, that &quot; what ailed him was mental and moral ennui.&quot; In 1755 the Countess Althann died, and Metastasio was more than ever reduced to the society which gathered round him in the bourgeois house of the Martinez. He sank rapidly into the habits of old age ; and, though his life was prolonged till the year 1782, very little can be said about it. On the 12th of April he died, bequeathing his whole fortune of some 130,000 florins to the five children of his friend Martinez. He had survived all his Italian relatives. During the long period of forty years in which Metastasio may be almost said to have overlived his originality and creative powers his fame went on increasing. In his library he counted as many as forty editions of his own works. They had been translated into French, English, German, Spanish, even into Modern Greek. They had been set to music over and over again by every composer of distinction, each opera receiving this honour in turn from several of the most illustrious men of Europe. They had been sung by the best virtuosi in every capital, from Madrid to St Petersburg, from London to Constantinople. The critics of all nations vied in raising Metastasio s credit to the skies. There was not a literary academy of note which had not conferred on him the honour of membership. Strangers of distinction passing through Vienna made a point of paying their respects to the old poet at his lodgings in the Kohlmarkt Gasse. Letters of congratulation, adulation, sympathy, respect, condolence, poured in upon him. And yet, during the whole of this long period, he was gradually outliving the artistic conditions upon which that fame was really founded. It has Tjeen already pointed out that Metastasio cannot rank as a poet in the unqualified sense of that word, but as a poet collaborating with the musical composer and performer. His poetry, further more, was intended for a certain style of music for the music of omnipotent vocalists, of thaumaturgical soprani. &quot;With the changes effected in the musical drama by Gluek and Mozart, with the development of orchestration and the rapid growth of the German manner, a new type of libretto came into request. Metastasio s plays fell into undeserved neglect, together with the music to which he had linked them. Farinelli, whom he styled &quot;twin-brother,&quot; was the true exponent of his poetry ; and, with the abolition of the class of singers to which Farinelli belonged, Metastasio s music suffered eclipse. It was indeed a just symbolic instinct which made the poet dub this unique soprano his twin-brother. The musical drama for which Metastasio composed, and in work ing for which his genius found its proper sphere, has so wholly passed away that it is now difficult to assign his true place to the poet in Italian literary history. Compared with Shakespeare, or even with Racine, he hardly merits the title of a dramatist. His inspira tion was essentially emotional and lyrical. Instead of creating characters, he created situations for the display of very varied feel ings, for all the feelings in fact to which melody allies itself. But in doing this he showed a capable playwright s faculty. His per sonages act and react upon each other. Their characters, though not in harmony with history or fact, are clearly traced and cleverly sus tained. Each of the dramatis pcrsonse is an emotion incarnate and consistent, admirably fitted for musical effect and contrast. The clash and combat of passions arc vividly presented, with the smallest possible expenditure of rhetoric, in the dialogues intended for recitative. The climax of emotion is cadenced in appropriate stanzas, with simple but effective imagery, at the close of each important scene. The chief dramatic situations are expressed by lyrics for two or three voices, embodying the several contending passions of the agents brought into conflict by the circumstances of the plot. The total result is not pure literature, but literature supremely fit for musical effect. Language in Metastasio s hands is exquisitely pure and limpid. Of the Italian poets, he professed a special admiration for Tasso and for Marini. But he avoided the con ceits of the latter, and was no master over the refined richness of the former s diction. His own style reveals the improvisatore s facility. Or the Latin poets he studied Ovid with the greatest pleasure, and from this predilection some of his own literary qualities may be de rived. The pedantic rules of Aristotelian poetics never touched an artist who felt his real vocation to be the interpretation of music. For historical propriety, for the psychology of character, for unity of plot, for probability of incident, he had a supreme disregard. It was indeed his merit to have discarded all these considerations. His poetry was the twin-sister of Italian melody, and he was right in trusting entirely to music and action on the stage to render his con ceptions vital. What, therefore, he gained during his own lifetime, while the musical system to which he subordinated his genius was yet living, he has since lost when, as now, he must be studied by readers who have only a faint and dim conception of that perished art. For sweetness of versification, for limpidity of diction, for delicacy of sentiment, for romantic situations exquisitely rendered in the simplest style, and for a certain delicate beauty of imagery sometimes soaring to ideal sublimity, he deserves to be appreciated so long as the Italian language lasts. There are numerous editions of Metastasio s works. That by Calsabigi, Paris, 1755, 9 vols. 8vo, published under his own superintendence, was the poet s favourite. Another of Turin, 1757, and a third of Paris, 1780, deserve mention. The posthumous works were printed at Vienna, 1705. The collected editions of Genoa. 1802, and Padua, 1811, will probably be found most useful by the general student. Metastasio s life was written by Aluigi, Assisi, 1783; by Charles Buinejr, London, 1796 ; and by others; but by far the most vivid sketch of his biography will be found in Vernon Lee s Studies of the 18th Century in Jtaly, London, 1880, a work which throws a flood of light upon the development of Italian dramatic music, and upon the place occupied by Metastasio in the artistic movement of the last century. ( J - A - *) METCALFE, CHARLES THEOPHILUS METCALFE, BARON (1785-1846), a distinguished administrator, was born at Calcutta on January 30, 1785; he was the second son of Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, then a major in the Bengal army, who afterwards became a director of the East India Company, and was created a baronet in 1802. Having been educated at Eton, where he read extensively, he in 1800 sailed for India as a writer in the service of the Company. After studying Oriental languages with success at Lord Wellesley s college of Fort William, he, at the age of sixteen, received an appointment as assistant to Lord Cowley, then resident at the court of Sindhia; in 18( he became assistant in the office of the chief secretary ; in 1803 he was transferred to that of the governor-general, and in 1 806 to that of the commander-in-chief. On August 15, 1806, he became first assistant to the resident at Delhi, and in 1808 he was selected by Lord Minto for the difficult post of envoy to the court of RanjftSinh at Lahore; here, XVI. --14