A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 7

London, 1823. "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq., with Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer," London, 1826.

Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21.

M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq., and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed at London, in 1822.

[18] "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail," etc.

"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call," etc.

"Are those her sails that glance in the sun Like restless gossamers?

Are those her ribs," etc.

_Cf._ "Christabel":

"Is the night chilly and dark?

The night is chilly, but not dark."

And see vol. i., p. 271.

[19] "Anima Poetae," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginalia has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk." It is the English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books," full of a.n.a.logies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possible development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, and mental illusions of all sorts.

[20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster; Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster."

--"The Miller's Tale."

[21] _Vide supra_, p. 27.

[22] "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv.

[23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed., vol. iii., p. 4.

[24] _Vide supra_, p. 14.

[25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his "Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed with a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence."

[26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed no compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw itself upon the 'cla.s.siques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in particular, was presented in its full depth and richness of meaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable on that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation of literary quality--than in the a.n.a.lysis of the principles on which its appreciation was founded." (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth," p.

50).

[27] See "Biographia Literaria." chap. i. "From the common opinion that the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen Anne's reign, I altogether dissent." (Lecture "On Style," March 13, 1818).

[28] See vol. i., p. 421 ff.

CHAPTER III.

Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival.

In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during the last years of the eighteenth century, it is observable that the English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries for their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated or imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the modern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughts upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations like Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824); Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807).

By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante."

Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Ta.s.so and their English scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington and Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a very accomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually upholding Ariosto and Ta.s.so against French detraction:

"In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3]

Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Ta.s.so is serious, but submits his romantic matter--G.o.dfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade--to the cla.s.sical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court.

Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine _homme du moyen age_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals.

"Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music."

The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its mult.i.tudinous references to local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth.

Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5]

In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiver of repulsion,

"How grim the master was of Tuscan song."

"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed by the Abbe Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno"

was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of Dante to their countrymen.

Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules"

and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A pa.s.sage from the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of h.e.l.l in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance with the "Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the nineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on increasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him."

In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound of cla.s.sical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real and fict.i.tious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on h.e.l.l, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circ.u.mstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's "disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace.

Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But Warton felt Dante's greatness. "h.e.l.l," he wrote, "grows darker at his frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes.

If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among cla.s.sical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his "Sat.u.r.day papers" misses the very obvious chance for a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin cla.s.sics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven and h.e.l.l together; and shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived." [1]

In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very mild poem "The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno." "Voltaire,"

he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which so frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the n.o.blest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has. .h.i.therto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country.

Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," _i.e._, the _terza rima_, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used before in English. His translation is by no means contemptible--much better than Boyd's,--but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he renders

"Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco,"

"Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute";

and the poet is made to address Beatrice--O donna di virtu--as "bright fair," as if she were one of the belles in "The Rape of the Lock." In this same year a version of the "Inferno" was printed privately and anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy"

into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the "Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802.

Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a Spenserian poem ent.i.tled "The Woodman's Tale," and his translation attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with Homer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . has been long neglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual cla.s.sical tests.

"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own."

Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for rendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single pa.s.sage will ill.u.s.trate his manner:

"So full the symphony of grief arose, My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes, With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast.

Too strong at last for life my pa.s.sion grew, And, sickening at the lamentable view, I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." [10]

The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation in blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire "Commedia" in 1814, with the t.i.tle "The Vision of h.e.l.l, Purgatory, and Paradise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11]

of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan of Lichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the "snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes: "How can you profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its English dress, is vulgar and obscure.

Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. The translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet "leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the preeminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtle beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and energy of his style. In this he p.r.o.nounced him superior to Milton; and in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpa.s.sed all other poets ancient or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness which . . . distinguishes all the cla.s.sic from all the modern poetry."

It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" was limited to the "Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca pa.s.sages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and Francesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it would be pedantry to a.n.a.lyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven engravings in ill.u.s.tration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his ill.u.s.trations of the whole "Commedia," extending to a hundred plates.[12]