THE PROPHECY OF DANTE.
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'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,And coming events cast their shadows before." Campbell, [_Lochiel's Warning_]. INTRODUCTION TO _THE PROPHECY OF DANTE_. The _Prophecy of Dante_ was written at Ravenna, during the month ofJune, 1819, "to gratify" the Countess Guiccioli. Before she left Venicein April she had received a promise from Byron to visit her at Ravenna."Dante's tomb, the classical pinewood," and so forth, had afforded apretext for the invitation to be given and accepted, and, at length,when she was, as she imagined, "at the point of death," he arrived,better late than never, "on the Festival of the _Corpus Domini_" whichfell that year on the tenth of June (see her communication to Moore,_Life_, p. 399). Horses and books were left behind at Venice, but hecould occupy his enforced leisure by "writing something on the subjectof Dante" (_ibid_., p. 402). A heightened interest born of fullerknowledge, in Italian literature and Italian politics, lent zest to thislabour of love, and, time and place conspiring, he composed "the bestthing he ever wrote" (Letter to Murray, March 23, 1820, _Letters_, 1900,iv. 422), his _Vision_ (or _Prophecy_) _of Dante_. It would have been strange if Byron, who had sounded his _Lament_ overthe sufferings of Tasso, and who had become _de facto_ if not _de jure_a naturalized Italian, had forborne to associate his name and fame withthe sacred memory of the "Gran padre Alighier." If there had been anytruth in Friedrich Schlegel's pronouncement, in a lecture delivered atVienna in 1814, "that at no time has the greatest and most national ofall Italian poets ever been much the favourite of his countrymen," thereproach had become meaningless. As the sumptuous folio edition (4vols.) of the _Divina Commedia_, published at Florence, 1817-19; aquarto edition (4 vols.) published at Rome, 1815-17; a folio edition (3vols.) published at Bologna 1819-21, to which the Conte GiovanniMarchetti (_vide_ the Preface, _post_, p. 245) contributed his famousexcursus on the allegory in the First Canto of the _Inferno_, andnumerous other issues remain to testify, Dante's own countrymen wereeager "to pay honours almost divine" to his memory. "The last age,"writes Hobhouse, in 1817 (note 18 to Canto IV. of _Childe Harold'sPilgrimage_, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 496), "seemed inclined toundervalue him.... The present generation ... has returned to theancient worship, and the _Danteggiare_ of the northern Italians isthought even indiscreet by the more moderate Tuscans." Dante was in theair. As Byron wrote in his Diary (January 29, 1821), "Read Schlegel[probably in a translation published at Edinburgh, 1818]. Not afavourite! Why, they talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Danteat this moment (1821), to an excess which would be ridiculous, but thathe deserves it." There was, too, another reason why he was minded to write a poem "on thesubject of Dante." There was, at this time, a hope, if not a clearprospect, of political change--of throwing off the yoke of the Bourbon,of liberating Italy from the tyrant and the stranger. "Dante was thepoet of liberty. Persecution, exile, the dread of a foreign grave, couldnot shake his principles" (Medwin, _Conversations_, 1824, p. 242). The_Prophecy_ was "intended for the Italians," intended to foreshadow as ina vision "liberty and the resurrection of Italy" (_ibid_., p. 241). Ashe rode at twilight through the pine forest, or along "the silent shoreWhich bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood," the undying past inspired himwith a vision of the future, delayed, indeed, for a time, "the flameending in smoke," but fulfilled after many days, a vision of a redeemedand united Italy. "The poem," he says, in the Preface, "may be considered as a metricalexperiment." In _Beppo_, and the two first cantos of _Don Juan_, he hadproved that the _ottava rima_ of the Italians, which Frere had been oneof the first to transplant, might grow and flourish in an alien soil,and now, by way of a second venture, he proposed to acclimatize the_terza rima_. He was under the impression that Hayley, whom he had heldup to ridicule as "for ever feeble, and for ever tame," had been thefirst and last to try the measure in English; but of Hayley's excellenttranslation of the three first cantos of the _Inferno_ (_vide post_, p.244, note 1), praised but somewhat grudgingly praised by Southey, he hadonly seen an extract, and of earlier experiments he was altogetherignorant. As a matter of fact, many poets had already essayed, buttimidly and without perseverance, to "come to the test in themetrification" of the _Divine Comedy_. Some twenty-seven lines, "thesole example in English literature of that period, of the use of _terzarima_, obviously copied from Dante" (_Complete Works of Chaucer_, by theRev. W. Skeat, 1894, i. 76, 261), are imbedded in Chaucer's _Compleintto his Lady_. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt and HenryHoward, Earl of Surrey ("Description of the restless state of a lover"),"as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, andPetrarch" (Puttenham's _Art of Poesie_, 1589, pp. 48-50); and lateragain, Daniel ("To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford"), Ben Jonson, andMilton (_Psalms_ ii., vi.) afford specimens of _terza rima_. There was,too, one among Byron's contemporaries who had already made trial of themetre in his _Prince Athanase_ (1817) and _The Woodman and theNightingale_ (1818), and who, shortly, in his _Ode to the West Wind_(October, 1819, published 1820) was to prove that it was not impossibleto write English poetry, if not in genuine _terza rima_, with itsinterchange of double rhymes, at least in what has been happily styledthe "Byronic _terza rima_." It may, however, be taken for granted that,at any rate in June, 1819, these fragments of Shelley's were unknown toByron. Long after Byron's day, but long years before his dream wasrealized, Mrs. Browning, in her _Casa Guidi Windows_ (1851), in the samemetre, re-echoed the same aspiration (see her _Preface_), "that thefuture of Italy shall not be disinherited." (See for some of theseinstances of _terza rima_, _Englische Metrik_, von Dr. J. Schipper,1888, ii. 896. See, too, _The Metre of Dante's Comedy discussed andexemplified_, by Alfred Forman and Harry Buxton Forman, 1878, p. 7.) The MS. of the _Prophecy of Dante_, together with the Preface, wasforwarded to Murray, March 14, 1820; but in spite of some impatience onthe part of the author (Letter to Murray, May 8, 1820, _Letters_, 1901,v. 20), and, after the lapse of some months, a pretty broad hint(Letter, August 17, 1820, _ibid_., p. 165) that "the time for the Dantewould be good now ... as Italy is on the eve of great things,"publication was deferred till the following year. _Marino Faliero, Dogeof Venice_, and the _Prophecy of Dante_ were published in the samevolume, April 21, 1821. The _Prophecy of Dante_ was briefly but favourably noticed by Jeffrey inhis review of _Marino Faliero_ (_Edinb. Rev._, July, 1821, vol. 35, p.285). "It is a very grand, fervid, turbulent, and somewhat mysticalcomposition, full of the highest sentiment and the highest poetry; ...but disfigured by many faults of precipitation, and overclouded withmany obscurities. Its great fault with common readers will be that itis not sufficiently intelligible.... It is, however, beyond allquestion, a work of a man of great genius." Other notices of _Marino Faliero_ and the _Prophecy of Dante_ appearedin _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, April, 1821, vol. 9, pp. 93-103; inthe _Monthly Review_, May, 1821, Enlarged Series, vol. 95, pp. 41-50;and in the _Eclectic Review_, June 21, New Series, vol. xv. pp.518-527.
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