Chapter XIX: Introduction: To the Prophecy of Dante

The _Prophecy of Dante_ was written at Ravenna, during the month of June, 1819, "to gratify" the Countess Guiccioli. Before she left Venice in April she had received a promise from Byron to visit her at Ravenna. "Dante's tomb, the classical pinewood," and so forth, had afforded a pretext 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_" which fell that year on the tenth of June (see her communication to Moore, _Life_, p. 399). Horses and books were left behind at Venice, but he could occupy his enforced leisure by "writing something on the subject of Dante" (_ibid_., p. 402). A heightened interest born of fuller knowledge, in Italian literature and Italian politics, lent zest to this labour of love, and, time and place conspiring, he composed "the best thing 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_ over the sufferings of Tasso, and who had become _de facto_ if not _de jure_ a naturalized Italian, had forborne to associate his name and fame with the sacred memory of the "Gran padre Alighier." If there had been any truth in Friedrich Schlegel's pronouncement, in a lecture delivered at Vienna in 1814, "that at no time has the greatest and most national of all Italian poets ever been much the favourite of his countrymen," the reproach had become meaningless. As the sumptuous folio edition (4 vols.) of the _Divina Commedia_, published at Florence, 1817-19; a quarto edition (4 vols.) published at Rome, 1815-17; a folio edition (3 vols.) published at Bologna 1819-21, to which the Conte Giovanni Marchetti (_vide_ the Preface, _post_, p. 245) contributed his famous excursus on the allegory in the First Canto of the _Inferno_, and numerous other issues remain to testify, Dante's own countrymen were eager "to pay honours almost divine" to his memory. "The last age," writes Hobhouse, in 1817 (note 18 to Canto IV. of _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 496), "seemed inclined to undervalue him.... The present generation ... has returned to the ancient worship, and the _Danteggiare_ of the northern Italians is thought even indiscreet by the more moderate Tuscans." Dante was in the air. As Byron wrote in his Diary (January 29, 1821), "Read Schlegel [probably in a translation published at Edinburgh, 1818]. Not a favourite! Why, they talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821), to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it."

There was, too, another reason why he was minded to write a poem "on the subject of Dante." There was, at this time, a hope, if not a clear prospect, of political change--of throwing off the yoke of the Bourbon, of liberating Italy from the tyrant and the stranger. "Dante was the poet of liberty. Persecution, exile, the dread of a foreign grave, could not shake his principles" (Medwin, _Conversations_, 1824, p. 242). The _Prophecy_ was "intended for the Italians," intended to foreshadow as in a vision "liberty and the resurrection of Italy" (_ibid_., p. 241). As he rode at twilight through the pine forest, or along "the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood," the undying past inspired him with a vision of the future, delayed, indeed, for a time, "the flame ending in smoke," but fulfilled after many days, a vision of a redeemed and united Italy.

"The poem," he says, in the Preface, "may be considered as a metrical experiment." In _Beppo_, and the two first cantos of _Don Juan_, he had proved that the _ottava rima_ of the Italians, which Frere had been one of 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 held up to ridicule as "for ever feeble, and for ever tame," had been the first and last to try the measure in English; but of Hayley's excellent translation of the three first cantos of the _Inferno_ (_vide post_, p. 244, note 1), praised but somewhat grudgingly praised by Southey, he had only seen an extract, and of earlier experiments he was altogether ignorant. As a matter of fact, many poets had already essayed, but timidly and without perseverance, to "come to the test in the metrification" of the _Divine Comedy_. Some twenty-seven lines, "the sole example in English literature of that period, of the use of _terza rima_, obviously copied from Dante" (_Complete Works of Chaucer_, by the Rev. W. Skeat, 1894, i. 76, 261), are imbedded in Chaucer's _Compleint to his Lady_. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ("Description of the restless state of a lover"), "as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch" (Puttenham's _Art of Poesie_, 1589, pp. 48-50); and later again, Daniel ("To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford"), Ben Jonson, and Milton (_Psalms_ ii., vi.) afford specimens of _terza rima_. There was, too, one among Byron's contemporaries who had already made trial of the metre in his _Prince Athanase_ (1817) and _The Woodman and the Nightingale_ (1818), and who, shortly, in his _Ode to the West Wind_ (October, 1819, published 1820) was to prove that it was not impossible to write English poetry, if not in genuine _terza rima_, with its interchange of double rhymes, at least in what has been happily styled the "Byronic _terza rima_." It may, however, be taken for granted that, at any rate in June, 1819, these fragments of Shelley's were unknown to Byron. Long after Byron's day, but long years before his dream was realized, Mrs. Browning, in her _Casa Guidi Windows_ (1851), in the same metre, re-echoed the same aspiration (see her _Preface_), "that the future of Italy shall not be disinherited." (See for some of these instances of _terza rima_, _Englische Metrik_, von Dr. J. Schipper, 1888, ii. 896. See, too, _The Metre of Dante's Comedy discussed and exemplified_, by Alfred Forman and Harry Buxton Forman, 1878, p. 7.)

The MS. of the _Prophecy of Dante_, together with the Preface, was forwarded to Murray, March 14, 1820; but in spite of some impatience on the 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 Dante would be good now ... as Italy is on the eve of great things," publication was deferred till the following year. _Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice_, and the _Prophecy of Dante_ were published in the same volume, April 21, 1821.

The _Prophecy of Dante_ was briefly but favourably noticed by Jeffrey in his review of _Marino Faliero_ (_Edinb. Rev._, July, 1821, vol. 35, p. 285). "It is a very grand, fervid, turbulent, and somewhat mystical composition, full of the highest sentiment and the highest poetry; ... but disfigured by many faults of precipitation, and overclouded with many obscurities. Its great fault with common readers will be that it is not sufficiently intelligible.... It is, however, beyond all question, a work of a man of great genius."

Other notices of _Marino Faliero_ and the _Prophecy of Dante_ appeared in _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, April, 1821, vol. 9, pp. 93-103; in the _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.

DEDICATION.

Lady! if for the cold and cloudy clime
Where I was born, but where I would not die,
Of the great Poet-Sire of Italy
I dare to build[276] the imitative rhyme,
Harsh Runic[277] copy of the South's sublime,
Thou art the cause; and howsoever I
Fall short of his immortal harmony,
Thy gentle heart will pardon me the crime.
Thou, in the pride of Beauty and of Youth,
Spakest; and for thee to speak and be obeyed
Are one; but only in the sunny South
Such sounds are uttered, and such charms displayed,
So sweet a language from so fair a mouth--[278]
Ah! to what effort would it not persuade?

Ravenna, June 21, 1819.