PREFACE.
The following story is founded on a passage in Dante, the substance of which is contained in the concluding paragraph of the second canto. For the rest of the incidents, generally speaking, the praise or blame remains with myself. The passage in question—the episode of Paulo and Francesca—has long been admired by the readers of Italian poetry, and is indeed the most cordial and refreshing one in the whole of that singular poem the Inferno, which some call a satire, and some an epic, and which, I confess, has always appeared to me a kind of sublime night-mare. We even lose sight of the place, in which the saturnine poet, according to his summary way of disposing both of friends and enemies, has thought proper to put the sufferers; and see the whole melancholy absurdity of his theology, in spite of itself, falling to nothing before one genuine impulse of the affections.
The interest of the passage is greatly increased by its being founded on acknowledged matter of fact. Even the particular circumstance which Dante describes as having hastened the fall of the lovers,—the perusal of Launcelot of the Lake,—is most likely a true anecdote; for he himself, not long after the event, was living at the court of Guido Novello da Polenta, the heroine's father; and indeed the very circumstance of his having related it at all, considering its nature, is a warrant of its authenticity.
The commentators differ in their accounts of the rest of the story; but all agree that the lady was in some measure beguiled into the match with the elder Malatesta,—Boccaccio says, by being shewn the younger brother once, as he passed over a square, and told that that was her intended husband. I have accordingly turned this artifice to account, though in a different manner. I have also omitted the lameness attributed to the husband; and of two different names by which he is called, Giovanni and Launcelot, have chosen the former, as not interfering with the hero's appellation, whose story the lovers were reading.
The Italians have been very fond of this little piece of private history, and I used to wonder that I could meet with it in none of the books of novels, for which they have been so famous; till I reflected, that it was perhaps owing to the nature of the books themselves, which such a story might have been no means of recommending. The historians of Ravenna, however, have taken care to record it; and besides Dante's episode, it is alluded to by Petrarch and by Tassoni. The former mentions the lovers among his examples of calamitous passion, in the Trionfo d'Amore, cap. 3. Tassoni, in his tragi-comic war, introduces Paulo Malatesta, as leading the troops of Rimini, and paints him in a very lively manner, as contemplating, while he rides, a golden sword-chain, which Francesca had given him, and which he addresses with melancholy enthusiasm as he goes. See the Secchia Rapita: canto 5. st. 43. &c. and canto 7. st. 29. &c.
The romance of Launcelot of the Lake, upon the perusal of which the principal incident turns, is little known at present, but was a great favorite all over Europe, up to a late period. Chaucer, no long time after the event itself, mentions it, in his significant way, as a work held in great estimation by the ladies. The Nun's Priest, speaking of the tale of the Cock and the Fox, which he is relating, says to his hearers,
"As is the book of Launcelot du Lake,
"That women holde in ful gret reverence."
Canterbury Tales: V. 15147.
The great father of our poetry, by the way, is a little ungrateful with his jokes upon chivalrous stories, of which he has left such noble specimens in the Palamon and Arcite, and in the unfinished story of Cambuscan, which Milton delighted to remember; but both he and the Italian poets appear to have laughed at them occasionally, as lovers affect to do at their mistresses. I have in my possession an imperfect copy of Launcelot of the Lake in Italian, and have taken occasion of my story, to give an abstract of the beginning of it, which appears to me as fine as any thing in Amadis de Gaul or Tristan de Leonois.
There are no notes to the present poem. I have done my best, as every writer should, to be true to costume and manners, to time and place; and if the reader understands me as he goes, and feels touched where I am most ambitious he should be, I can be content that he shall miss an occasional nicety or so in other matters, and not be quite sensible of the mighty extent of my information. If the poem reach posterity, curiosity may find commentators enough for it, and the sanction of time give interest to whatever they may trace after me. If the case be otherwise, to write notes is only to shew to how little purpose has been one's reading. I shall merely observe, that of the direct obligations, of which I am conscious, and which perhaps, after all, I have not handled well enough to make worth the acknowledgment,—the simile of the patches of moss to sunshine, in the second canto, was borrowed from Gilpin's Forest Scenery;—that of unfortunate poets to crushed perfumes, in the fourth, from one about good men in adversity in Bacon's Apophthegms;—Giovanni's praise of his dead brother, from the panegyric pronounced over Launcelot of the Lake, which the reader may find in Ellis's Specimens of Early Romances;—and part of the description of the nymphs, in the third canto, from Poussin's exquisite picture of Polyphemus piping on the mountain.
For the same reason, I suppress a good deal which I had intended to say on the versification of the poem,—or of that part of it, at least, where, in coming upon household matters calculated to touch us nearest, it takes leave, as it were, of a more visible march and accompaniment. I do not hesitate to say however, that Pope and the French school of versification have known the least on the subject, of any poets perhaps that ever wrote. They have mistaken mere smoothness for har mony; and, in fact, wrote as they did, because their ears were only sensible of a marked and uniform regularity. One of the most successful of Pope's imitators, Dr. Johnson, was confessedly insensible to music. In speaking of such men, I allude, of course, only to their style in poetry, and not to their undisputed excellence in other matters. The great masters of modern versification are, Dryden for common narrative, though he wanted sentiment, and his style in some respects was apt to be artificial,—Spenser, who was musical from pure taste,—Milton, who was learnedly so,—Ariosto, whose fine ear and animal spirits gave so frank and exquisite a tone to all he said,—Shakspeare, whose versification escapes us, only because he over-informed it with knowledge and sentiment;—and, though the name may appear singular to those who have not read him with due attention to the nature of the language then existing,—Chaucer,—to whom it sometimes appears to me, that I can trace Dryden himself, though the latter spoke on the subject without much relish, or, in fact, knowledge of it. All these are about as different from Pope, as the church organ is from the bell in the steeple, or, to give him a more decorous comparison, the song of the nightingale, from that of the cuckoo.
With the endeavour to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater importance, that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language. There is a cant of art as well as of nature, though the former is not so unpleasant as the latter, which affects non-affectation. But the proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks. It is only adding musical modulation to what a fine understanding might actually utter in the midst of its griefs or enjoyments. The poet therefore should do as Chaucer or Shakspeare did,—not copy what is obsolete or peculiar in either, any more than they copied from their predecessors,—but use as much as possible an actual, existing language,—omitting of course mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases, which are the cant of ordinary discourse, just as tragedy phrases, dead idioms, and exaggerations of dignity, are of the artificial style, and yeas, verilys, and exaggerations of simplicity, are of the natural. The artificial style, it is true, has its beauties, as some great poets have proved; but I am here speaking of the style that is most beautiful; and those poets, it is to be observed, were not the greatest. Of the style, to which I allude, exquisite specimens, making allowances for what is obsolete, are to be found in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, and his Troilus and Cressida; and you have only to open the first books of Pulci and Ariosto to meet with two charming ones, the interview of Orlando with the Abbot, in the Morgante Maggiore (canto 1. towards the conclusion), and the flight of Angelica, her meeting with Rinaldo's horse, &c. in the Orlando Furioso. Homer abounds with them, though, by the way, not in the translation; and I need not, of course, warn any reader of taste against trusting Mr. Hoole for a proper representation of the delightful Italian. Such versions, more or less, resemble bad engravings, in which all the substances, whether flesh, wood, or cloth, are made of one texture, and that a bad one. With the Greek dramatists I am ashamed to say I am unacquainted; and of the Latin writers, though Horace, for his delightful companionship, is my favourite, Catullus appears to me to have the truest taste for nature. But an Englishman need go no farther than Shakspeare. Take a single speech of Lear's, such for instance as that heart-rending one,
and you have all that criticism can say, or poetry can do.
In making these observations, I do not demand the reader to conclude that I have succeeded in my object, whatever may be my own opinion of the matter. All the merit I claim is that of having made an attempt to describe natural things in a language becoming them, and to do something towards the revival of what appears to me a proper English versification. There are narrative poets now living who have fine eyes for the truth of things, and it remains with them perhaps to perfect what I may suggest. If I have succeeded at all, the lovers of nature have still to judge in what proportion the success may be;—but let me take them with me a while, whether in doors or out of doors, whether in the room or the green fields,—let my verses, in short, come under the perusal of ingenuous eyes, and be felt a little by the hearts that look out of them, and I am satisfied.