The Works of Lord Byron Volume II Part 71

[407] {348} ["Friuli's mountains" are the Julian Alps, which lie to the north of Trieste and north-east of Venice, "the h.o.a.r and aery Alps towards the north," which Julian and Count Maddalo (_vide post_, p. 349) saw from the Lido. But the Alpine height along which "a sea of glory"

streamed--"the peak of the far Rhaetian hill" (stanza xxviii. line 4)--must lie to the westward of Venice, in the track of the setting sun.]

[408] The above description may seem fantastical or exaggerated to those who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky; yet it is but a literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the eighteenth), as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the Brenta, near La Mira.

[Compare Sh.e.l.ley's _Julian and Maddalo_ (_Poetical Works_, 1895, i. 343)--

"How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

... We stood Looking upon the evening, and the flood, Which lay between the city and the sh.o.r.e, Paved with the image of the sky ... the h.o.a.r And aery Alps towards the north appeared, Thro' mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared Between the East and West; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue, Brighter than burning gold."]

[409] {349} [The Brenta rises in Tyrol, and flowing past Padua falls into the Lagoon at Fusina. Mira, or La Mira, where Byron "colonized" in the summer of 1817, and again in 1819, is on the Brenta, some six or seven miles inland from the Lagoon.]

[410] {350} [The Abbe de Sade, in his _Memoires pour la vie de Petrarque_ (1767), affirmed, on the strength of doc.u.mentary evidence, that the Laura of the sonnets, born de Noves, was the wife of his ancestor, Hugo de Sade, and the mother of a large family. "Gibbon," says Hobhouse (note viii.), "called the abbe's memoirs a 'labour of love'

(see _Decline and Fall_, chap. lxx. note 1), and followed him with confidence and delight;" but the poet James Beattie (in a letter to the d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon, August 17, 1782) disregarded them as a "romance,"

and, more recently, "an ingenious Scotchman" [Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee)], in an _Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch_ (1810), had re-established "the ancient prejudice" in favour of Laura's virginity. Hobhouse appears, but his note is somewhat ambiguous, to adopt the view of "the ingenious Scotchman." To pa.s.s to contemporary criticism, Dr. Garnett, in his _History of Italian Literature_, 1898 (pp. 66-71), without attempting to settle "the everlasting controversy," regards the abbe's doc.u.mentary evidence as for the most part worthless, and, relying on the internal evidence of the sonnets and the dialogue, and on the facts of Petrarch's life as established by his correspondence (a complete series of Petrarch's letters was published by Giuseppe Fraca.s.setti, in 1859), inclines to the belief that it was the poet's status as a cleric, and not a husband and family, which proved a bar to his union with Laura.

With regard, however, to "one piece of doc.u.mentary evidence," namely, Laura de Sade's will, Dr. Garnett admits that, if this were producible, and, on being produced, proved genuine, the coincidence of the date of the will, April 3, 1348, with a note in Petrarch's handwriting, dated April 6, 1348, which records the death of Laura, would almost establish the truth of the abbe's theory "in the teeth of all objections."]

[411] {351} ["He who would seek, as I have done, the last memorials of the life and death of Petrarch in that sequestered Euganean village [Arqua is about twelve miles south-west of Padua], will still find them there. A modest house, apparently of great antiquity, pa.s.ses for his last habitation. A chair in which he is said to have died is shown there. And if these details are uncertain, there is no doubt that the sarcophagus of red marble, supported on pillars, in the churchyard of Arqua, contains, or once contained, his mortal remains. Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse visited the spot more than sixty years ago in a sceptical frame of mind; for doubts had at that time been thrown on the very existence of Laura; and the varied details of the poet's life, which are preserved with so much fidelity in his correspondence, were almost forgotten."--_Petrarch_, by H. Reeve, 1879, p. 14. In a letter to Hoppner, September 12, 1817, Byron says that he was moved "to turn aside in a second visit to Arqua." Two years later, October, 1819, he in vain persuaded Moore "to spare a day or two to go with me to Arqua. I should like," he said, "to visit that tomb with you--a pair of poetical pilgrims--eh, Tom, what say you?" But "Tom" was for Rome and Lord John Russell, and ever afterwards bewailed the lost opportunity "with wonder and self-reproach" (_Life_, p. 423; _Life_, by Karl Elze, 1872, p.

235).]

[mc] {352} _His mansion and his monument_----.--[MS. M., D. erased.]

[md] ----_formed his sepulchral fane_.--[MS. M.]

[412]

[Compare Wordsworth's _Ode_, "Intimations of," etc., xi. lines 9-11--

"The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."]

[413] ["Euganeis istis in collibus ... domum parvam sed delectabilem et honestam struxi ... hic quanquam aeger corpore, tranquillus animo frater dego, sine tumultibus, sine erroribus, sine curis, legens semper et scribens, Deum laudans."--Petrarca, _Epistolae Seniles_, xiv. 6 (_Opera_, Basileae, 1581, p. 938).

See, too, the notes to _Arqua_ (Rogers's _Italy: Poems_, 1852, ii.

105-109), which record the pilgrimage of other poets, Boccaccio and Alfieri, to the great laureate's tomb; and compare with Byron's stanzas the whole of that exquisite cameo, delicate and yet durable as if graved on chalcedony.]

[me] {353} _Society's the school where taught to live._--[MS. M.

erased.]

[mf] ----_the soul with G.o.d must strive_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[414] The struggle is to the full as likely to be with demons as with our better thoughts. Satan chose the wilderness for the temptation of our Saviour. And our unsullied John Locke preferred the presence of a child to complete solitude.

["He always chose to have company with him, if it were only a child; for he loved children, and took pleasure in talking with those that had been well trained" (_Life of John Locke_, by H. R. Fox-Bourne, ii. 537). Lady Masham's daughter Esther, and "his wife" Betty Clarke, aged eleven years, were among his child-friends.]

[mg] {354} _Which dies not nor can ever pa.s.s away_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[mh] _The tomb a h.e.l.l--and life one universal gloom_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[415] [Byron pa.s.sed a single day at Ferrara in April, 1817; went over the castle, cell, etc., and a few days after wrote _The Lament of Ta.s.so_, the ma.n.u.script of which is dated April 20, 1817. The Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_ was not begun till the end of June in the same year.]

[416] [Of the ancient family of Este, Marquesses of Tuscany, Azzo V. was the first who obtained power in Ferrara in the twelfth century. A remote descendant, Nicolo III. (b. 1384, d. 1441), founded the University of Parma. He married for his second wife Parisina Malatesta (the heroine of Byron's _Parisina_, published February, 1816), who was beheaded for adultery in 1425. His three sons, Lionel (d. 1450), the friend of Poggio Bracciolini; Borso (d. 1471), who established printing in his states; and Ercolo (d. 1505), the friend of Boiardo,--were all patrons of letters and fosterers of the Renaissance. Their successor, Alphonso I.

(1486-1534), who married Lucrezia Borgia, 1502, honoured himself by attaching Ariosto to his court, and it was his grandson, Alphonso II.

(d. 1597), who first befriended and afterwards, on the score of lunacy, imprisoned Ta.s.so in the Hospital of Sant' Anna (1579-86).]

[417] {355} [It is a fact that Ta.s.so was an involuntary inmate of the Hospital of Sant' Anna at Ferrara for seven years and four months--from March, 1579, to July, 1586--but the causes, the character, and the place of his imprisonment have been subjects of legend and misrepresentation.

It has long been known and acknowledged (see Hobhouse's _Historical Ill.u.s.trations_, 1818, pp. 5-31) that a real or feigned pa.s.sion for Duke Alphonso's sister, Leonora d'Este, was not the cause or occasion of his detention, and that the famous cell or dungeon ("nine paces by six, and about seven high") was not "the original place of the poet's confinement." It was, as Sh.e.l.ley says (see his letter to Peac.o.c.k, November 7, 1818), "a very decent dungeon;" but it was not Ta.s.so's. The setting of the story was admitted to be legendary, but the story itself, that a poet was shut up in a madhouse because a vindictive magnate resented his love of independence and impatience of courtly servitude, was questioned, only to be rea.s.serted as historical. The publication of Ta.s.so's letters by Guasti, in 1853, a review of Ta.s.so's character and career in Symonds's _Renaissance in Italy_, and, more recently, Signor Angelo Solerti's monumental work, _Vita di Torquato Ta.s.so_ (1895), which draws largely upon the letters of contemporaries, the accounts of the ducal court, and other doc.u.mentary evidence, have in a great measure exonerated the duke at the expense of the unhappy poet himself. Briefly, Ta.s.so's intrigues with rival powers--the Medici at Florence, the papal court, and the Holy Office at Bologna--aroused the alarm and suspicion of the duke, whilst his general demeanour and his outbursts of violence and temper compelled, rather than afforded, a pretext for his confinement. Before his final and fatal return to Ferrara, he had been duly warned that he must submit to be treated as a person of disordered intellect, and that if he continued to throw out hints of designs upon his life and of persecution in high places, he would be banished from the ducal court and dominions. But return he would, and at an inauspicious moment, when the duke was preoccupied with the ceremonies and festivities of a third marriage. No one attended to him or took heed of his arrival; and, to quote his own words, "in a fit of madness" he broke out into execrations of the ducal court and family, and of the people of Ferrara. For the offence he was shut up in the Hospital of Sant' Anna, and for many months treated as an ordinary lunatic. Of the particulars of his treatment during these first eight months of his confinement, apart from Ta.s.so's own letters, there is no evidence. The accounts of the hospital are lost, and the _Libri di spesa_ (_R. Arch.

di Stato in Modena_; _Camer. Ducale: Casa_; _Amministrazione_, Solerti, iii. _Docu_. 47) do not commence till November 20, 1579. Two years later, the _Libri di spenderia_ (Solerti, in. _Docu_. 51), from January, 1582, onward, show that he was put on a more generous diet; and it is known that a certain measure of liberty and other indulgences were gradually accorded. There can, however, be little doubt that for many months his food was neglected and medical attendance withheld. His statement, that he was denied the rites of the Church, cannot be gainsaid. He was regarded as a lunatic, and, as such, he would not be permitted either to make his confession or to communicate. Worse than all, there was the terrible solitude. "E sovra tutto," he writes (May, 1580), "m'affligge la solitudine, mia crudele e natural nimica." No wonder the attacks of delirium, the "unwonted lights," the conference with a familiar spirit, followed in due course. Byron and Sh.e.l.ley were ignorant of the facts; and we know that their scorn and indignation were exaggerated and misplaced. But the "pity of it" remains, that the grace and glory of his age was sacrificed to ignorance and fear, if not to animosity and revenge. (See _Ta.s.so_, by E. J. Hasell; _History of the Italian Renaissance_, by J. A. Symonds; _Quart. Rev._, October, 1895, No. 364, art. x.; _Vita di Torquato Ta.s.so_, 1895, i. 312-314, 410-412, etc.)]

[mi] {357} _And thou for no one useful purpose born_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[418] [Solerti (_Vita_, i. 418) combats the theory advanced by Hobhouse (see _note_ x.), that Lionardo Salviati, in order to curry favour with Alphonso, was responsible for "the opposition which the Jerusalem encountered from the Cruscan Academy." He a.s.signs their unfavourable criticism to literary sentiment or prejudice, and not to personal animosity or intrigue. The _Gerusalemme Liberata_ was dedicated to the glory of the house of Este; and, though the poet was in disgrace, the duke was not to be propitiated by an attack upon the poem. Moreover, Salviati did not publish his theses in his own name, but under a _nom de guerre_, "L'Infarinato."]

[mj] {358} _And baffled Gaul whose rancour could allow_.--[MS. M.

erased.]

[mk] _Which grates upon the teeth_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[419] [Hobhouse, in his note x., quotes Boileau, but not in full. The pa.s.sage runs thus--

"Tous les jours, a la cour, un sot de qualite Peut juger de travers avec impunite, A Malherbe, a Racan, prefere Theophile, Et le clinquant du Ta.s.se a tout l'or de Virgile."

Perhaps he divined that the phrase, "un sot de qualite," might glance back on a "n.o.ble author," who was about to admit that he could not savour Horace, and who turned aside from Mantua and memories of Virgil to visit Ferrara and the "cell" where Ta.s.so was "encaged." (See Darmesteter's _Notes to Childe Harold_, pp. 201, 217.)

If "the Youth with brow serene," as Hugo calls him, had lived to read _Dedain. A Lord Byron, en_ 1811, he would have pa.s.sed a somewhat different criticism on French poetry in general--

"En vain vos legions l'environnent sans nombre, Il n'a qu'a se lever pour couvrir de son ombre A la fois tous vos fronts; Il n'a qu'a dire un mot pour couvrir vos voix greles, Comme un char en pa.s.sant couvre le bruit des ailes De mille moucherons!"

_Les Feuilles d'Automne_, par Victor Hugo, Bruxelles, 1833, pp. 59, 63.]

[ml] {359} _Could mount into a mind like thine_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[mm] ----_they would not form the Sun_.--[MS. M.]

[420] [In a letter to Murray (August 7, 1817) Byron throws out a hint that Scott might not like being called "the Ariosto of the North," and Murray seems to have caught at the suggestion. "With regard to 'the Ariosto of the North,'" rejoins Byron (September 17, 1817), "surely their themes, Chivalry, war, and love, were as like as can be; and as to the compliment, if you knew what the Italians think of Ariosto, you would not hesitate about that.... If you think Scott will dislike it, say so, and I will expunge." Byron did not know that when Scott was at college at Edinburgh he had "had the audacity to produce a composition in which he weighed Homer against Ariosto, and p.r.o.nounced him wanting in the balance," or that he "made a practice of reading through ... the _Orlando_ of Ariosto once every year" (see _Memoirs of the Life, etc._, 1871, pp. 12, 747); but the parallel had suggested itself. The key-note of "the harpings of the north," the chivalrous strain of "s.h.i.+eld, lance, and brand, and plume and scarf," of "gentle courtesy," of "valour, lion-mettled lord," which the "Introduction to _Marmion_" preludes, had been already struck in the opening lines of the _Orlando Furioso_--

"Le Donne, i Cavalier', l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto."

Scott, we may be a.s.sured, was neither disconcerted nor uplifted by the parallel. Many years before (July 6, 1812), Byron had been at pains to inform him that so august a critic as the Prince Regent "preferred you to every bard past and present," and "spoke alternately of Homer and yourself." Of the "placing" and unplacing of poets there is no end.

Byron had already been sharply rebuked by the _Edinburgh Review_ for describing _Christabel_ as a "wild and singularly original and beautiful poem," and his appreciation of Scott provoked the expostulation of a friendlier critic. "Walter Scott," wrote Francis Hodgson, in his anonymous _Monitor of Childe Harold_ (1818), "(_credite posteri_, or rather _praeposteri_), is designated in the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_ as 'the Northern Ariosto,' and (droller still) Ariosto is denominated 'the Southern Scott.' This comes of mistaking horse-chestnuts for chestnut horses."]

[421] {361} The two stanzas xlii. and xliii. are, with the exception of a line or two, a translation of the famous sonnet of Filicaja:--"Italia, Italia, O tu, cui feo la sorte!"--_Poesie Toscane_ 1823, p. 149.

["Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte Dono infelice di bellezza, ond'hai Funesta dote d'infiniti guai Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte: Deh fossi tu men bella, o almen piu forte, Onde a.s.sai piu ti paventa.s.se, o a.s.sai T'ama.s.se men, chi del tuo bello ai rai Par che si strugga, e pur ti sfida a morte, Che or giu dall' Alpi non vedrei torrenti Scender d'armati, ne di sangue tinta Bever l'onda del Po gallici armenti; Ne te vedrei, del non tuo ferro cinta, Pugnar col braccio di straniere genti, Per servir sempre, o vincitrice, o vinta."]

[mn]

_And on thy brow in characters of flame_ _To write the words of sorrow and of shame_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[mo]

----_unbetrayed_ _To death by thy vain charms_----.--[MS. M. erased.]