He was perfectly satisfied with the no-place, no-where--with the vague temple, or palace hall, or public square where, as in the country of the abstract, the action of pseudo-classic tragedy always takes place, or, more properly speaking, the talking of pseudo-classic tragedy always goes on; he was perfectly satisfied with sending in a servant or a messenger to inform the public of a murder or suicide committed behind the scenes; he was perfectly satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its original causes or developing it through its various phases. In such matters Alfieri was as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Nevertheless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense: an intense _poseur_ himself, enjoying nothing so much as working himself up to produce a given effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical, for the moral attitude which may be struck so as to be effective, and for the arrangement of subordinate parts so that this attitude surprise and move the audience. The moral attitude, the psychological gesture, which thus became the main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be expected from such a man, nearly always his own moral attitude, his own psychological gesture; he himself, his uncompromising, unhesitating, unflinching, curt and emphatic nature, is always the hero or heroine of the play, however much the situation, the incidents, the other characteristics may vary. Antigone is generous and tender, Creon is inhuman in all save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious madman, Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, Clytaemnestra is sinful and self-sophisticating, Virginia pure and open-minded; yet all these different people, despite all their differences, speak and act as Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of his words, the length of his sentences, are always the same: so much so that in one play there may be two or three Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly virtuous or perfectly vicious; but anything that is not an Alfieri in some tolerably transparent disguise, is sure to be a puppet, a lay figure with as few joints as possible, just able to stretch out its arms and clap them to its sides, but dangling suspended between heaven and earth.