by A. N. Wilson
Voltaire would have spoken for his generation had his generation bothered to read the Comedy, when he wrote that ‘everybody with a spark of good sense ought to blush at that monstrous assemblage in Hell, of Dante and Virgil, of S. Peter and Madonna Beatrice. There are to be found among us in the eighteenth century, people who force themselves to admire feats of imagination as stupidly extravagant and barbarous as this.’5 (Voltaire’s contempt for the Middle Ages was wholesale. ‘What unhappily remains to us of the architecture and sculpture of these times,’ wrote a man who, in his Parisian days, had passed Notre-Dame and La Sainte-Chapelle every day, ‘is a fantastic compound of rudeness and filigree.’6)
Napoleon was therefore right in 1805 to suggest that Dante’s reputation could hardly have been lower. In that year, Napoleon, whose first language was of course Italian, had said of Dante, ‘His reputation is increasing and will continue to increase, because no one ever reads him.’7 Lamartine in 1830, in his Discours de réception à l’Académie française, said, ‘Dante seems to be the poet of our age; for every era adopts and rejuvenates one of the great immortals of the past; every age finds in the work of such an immortal an image of itself and, by such expressions of literary taste, it betrays its own nature.’8
Even when Dante’s reputation began to revive, there was a strong sense of it being for the wrong reasons, not because anyone had begun to get the Comedy back into focus, but for affectation’s sake – as when we read of Stendhal in 1817 that ‘In Rome, how bored he was by Italian “fanatics”’, who ‘strained every nerve to prove that in the true tragic stile, Dante was far superior to Racine’.9
As far as the English-speaking world was concerned, however, the year when Napoleon made that remark about the increasing reputation was a momentous one. For it was in that year that there appeared a translation of the Inferno by an Old Rugbeian clergyman by the name of Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844).
He was a Staffordshire man, born at Cannock and, after Christ Church Oxford, and ordination, held the living of Abbot’s Bromley, famed for its annual Horn Dance. Cary (it was a usual practice in those days) paid a curate to carry out his duties in Staffordshire, while living himself in London and exercising his ministry at the now-defunct Berkeley Chapel in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, and residing at the house once occupied by William Hogarth at Chiswick. When Cary lived in this quasi-rural retreat three miles from the centre of London, it would have been a beautiful peaceful place; now it is a J. G. Ballard-style Inferno of noise and air-pollution, with two major arterial roads wedging Cary’s house in a concrete sandwich, and the sky full of the everlasting roar of aircraft coming in to land at Heathrow. Cary had a miserable life. He was plagued by mental illness, and his depressions were not helped by the death, aged six, of one beloved daughter from typhus and another, aged seventeen, of consumption. He was also plagued by professional disappointment.10 He set his heart on becoming Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, what is now the British Library. Quite rightly, as it turned out, those responsible for the appointment gave the job, not only of Keeper of Printed Books, but eventually Chief Librarian, to an Italian immigrant called Antonio Panizzi, who single-handedly made the ur-British Library into the great institution which it has become today, hugely increasing the collections – from 235,000 volumes to 540,000 volumes, enlarging the intake of copyright material, increasing the staff (from thirty-four to eighty-nine) and constructing the magnificent circular Reading Room used by Karl Marx, which many London scholars, confined to the new building in the Euston Road, continue to miss.11
But while thousands of scholars are in the debt of Panizzi, many millions more readers are in the debt of Cary. It would not be true entirely to say that Cary brought about the revival of Dante in the English-speaking world single-handedly, but he played a vital role in doing so. The first part of the Comedy which he translated was the Purgatorio, but the first which he published was the Inferno. It did not make much impression on the public. It might actually have sunk without notice had it not been for a singular chance. In a deep, grief-stricken, depression, Cary was having a holiday with his remaining family at Littlehampton on the Sussex coast. Walking12 up and down the beach, he recited Homer to his young son, and expounded the text of the Iliad. A fat stranger who happened to overhear the clergyman talking Greek, eventually stopped him and said, ‘Sir, yours is a face I should know. I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’ Cary lent Coleridge a copy of his Inferno, and the very next day, when he met the poet, Coleridge was able to recite whole pages of the Cary translation by heart. The following winter, Coleridge gave a course of lectures on poetry in which the Cary translation – the Vision of Dante as it is called – largely figured. Thereafter, ‘Cary’s Dante’ became part of every educated English-speaker’s library together with Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil. It was Cary’s book that Keats read and annotated, and echoed in 1819 in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.13 It was Cary’s Dante which inspired Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Crossing the Bar’, two of his best poems. It was Cary whom John Ruskin carried with him almost always. The English-speaking world now had a Dante which was sufficiently faithful to the original to enable those without a reading knowledge of medieval Italian to appreciate the Comedy. Cary’s translation was also the version which made Dante accessible to the Americans. It reached the United States in 1822 and, as Emerson wrote, ‘it rapidly sold, and for the last twenty years all studious youths and maidens have been reading the Inferno’.14 ‘In season and out of season’, Emerson wrote in another of his letters, ‘we must all read Dante.’15
Cary might not have been a great poet, like Pope and Dryden, but he was an excellent translator. No great English poet has ever attempted a complete translation of the Comedy, and if Longfellow was a great poet, he certainly was not a great translator. Some translators, while lacking the expertise to write in the extraordinarily demanding confines of terza rima have cack-handedly made the attempt, with such disastrous consequences as those of Laurence Binyon or Dorothy L. Sayers. Italian nationalists and English Romantic Danteists were sometimes two categories of being who overlapped, or were even identical. Gabriele Rossetti, born in Vasto in 1783, and moving to Naples to become secretary to the local Marchese, was destined to become the father of a famous artistic dynasty in England. He became radicalized during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy, and in 1815, with the restoration of King Ferdinand, puppet King of the Austrian Empire, Rossetti joined the secret society of the Carbonari (a capital offence in Naples at this date) and became a Freemason. He escaped Naples thanks to the help of the admiral of the British fleet in the harbour there. When the authorities demanded his return, the reply was that he was now under the protection of the English flag. He escaped to Malta and went to live in London in 1824, eventually becoming the Professor of Italian at the newly created King’s College, London in 1830.16
Rossetti was a keen Dantean, as had first been revealed in a long autobiographical poem he composed in 1846 – Il veggente in solitudine. During his long sea-voyage from Malta to London, he revealed, he had been visited by a winged warrior in the sky who announced that the sleeping giant of Italy would awake. The angelic warrior then discloses the figure in a violet cloud, who turns out to be the Shade of Dante – L’Ombra di Dante – who prophesies the defeat of ‘the wolf’ (i.e. Austria), and the awakening of a democratic, constitutionally governed Italy. After this experience, Gabriele Rossetti returns to a reading of the Comedy, with ‘unbandaged eyes’ (‘allo sbendato ciglio’).
What the young radical poet was permitted to see, after this visionary experience, was that Dante had, in fact, been a freethinking early nineteenth-century Freemason astonishingly like Rossetti himself. He probably regarded the ‘vision’ in a semi-fictitious light, though his friend and supporter Seymour Kirkup, another believer in Dante as a supporter of the Risorgimento, received direct political messages of support from Dante at séances conducted by his mistress.17 Rossetti’s Comento [sic] analitico on Dante, publi
shed in 1824, attracted many subscribers in London. Although the vision granted to Dante the pilgrim in the Comedy had been, according to the poem, ineffable and inexpressible, Gabriele Rossetti was able to unlock its allegorical secrets for the Whig English audiences. The Human Nature of Christ was only human. Dante’s poem was an allegory of human struggle against superstition and political oppression. It is essentially a patriotic epic. Its secret messages were Rosicrucian and Freemasonic jargon, showing Dante’s sympathy with the Cathars, the Templars, the troubadours, all of whom were freethinking anti-papalists. There was just enough truth in all this – as this book has shown – for it to be a not entirely risible version of Dante for a politically burgeoning liberal age. Lord Macaulay, Isaac Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Francis Palgrave and Samuel Rogers lapped up Rossetti’s idea of a fiercely anti-papalist, anti-Catholic, just-about-monotheist, politically radical Dante. The idea appealed to the historian Henry Hallam, who passed on the enthusiasm to his precocious son Arthur when a boy at Eton. Arthur Hallam (immortalized by his Cambridge friend Tennyson in In Memoriam) passed on his Dantean interests when still a schoolboy to his friend William Ewart Gladstone. The perusal of Dante’s works was the lifetime occupation of the English statesman. As has been said by a great Gladstone scholar, ‘It is a pity that his one piece of writing on Dante was a jeu d’esprit towards the end of his life. It is a wonderfully clever argument to prove that Dante visited Oxford. Part at least of its cleverness lay in leaving anything like a shred of evidence to the end when he appears to clinch a series of tendentious deductions from poetry.’18 When Gladstone died, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his Arts and Crafts memorial at the parish church of St Deiniol’s near Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, North Wales, depicts the great Victorian and his wife lying in marble effigy on top of a tomb. At the front of the monument is the guardian angel from the Purgatorio, leading the ship of souls into the place of testing. At one corner stands St Augustine, at two other corners, King David and Aristotle, and, perhaps a little strangely, on one side of this monument to marital fidelity, is a bronze bas-relief of the tormented adulterous souls of Paolo and Francesca. The whole monument, the work of William Blake Richmond, was designed to reflect Gladstone’s lifelong devotion to, indeed obsession with, the works of Dante.
The reasons adduced by Gladstone to demonstrate Dante’s presence in Oxford were indeed, as Agatha Ramm observed, ‘wonderfully clever’, and reflect the sense that ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’ (as he called it on another occasion) might actually have provided Dante, not merely with a refuge in his exile, but with the inspiration to describe Paradise itself. For, ‘He did not go to saunter by the Isis [as the Thames is called while it flows through Oxford]… he went to refresh his thirst at a fast-swelling fountainhead of knowledge, and to imp the wings by which he was to mount, and mount so high that few have ever soared above him, into the Empyrean of celestial wisdom.’19
The ingenious argument begins with an analysis of topography in the Comedy. In the fifteenth canto of the Inferno, Dante compares the roadway on the edge of the burning sand where they were protected from falling flakes of fire to the sea-walls along the coast between Bruges and Guizzante (Wissant). Gladstone suggests that Dante knew these places as a port for departure to England. In his analysis of the rivers in the Comedy, he points out the ‘mere mention of the Thames by Dante is a notable fact; for nowhere else, outside of Italy, does he name a river theretofore so unknown and of such secondary importance, unless in connection with his own travels. Except in this case, the rivers named by him and unconnected with his personal knowledge are either great waterways or streams historically famous… The introduction of the Thames and its association with a local contemporary incident, crowns the presumptive evidence derivable from his other references to England, all coloured with local interest, and all of them contemporary with his own life.’ (Gladstone is thinking of the references, for example, to Henry III, Edward I and Guy de Montfort.) Put this together with Boccaccio’s throwaway line that Dante studied among the Parisians and the faraway Britons – ‘Parisios dudum extremosque Britannos’ – and Giovanni of Serravalle (Bishop and Prince of Fermo), who translated the Comedy into Latin in the fifteenth century, stating that Dante studied first in Paris and then in Oxford, and Gladstone’s case is complete. He added, but scarcely needed to, ‘when we have landed Dante at Dover, or even in London, we have only brought him a stage nearer to the end of his journey, which could, at that date, lie nowhere but in Oxford’.20 Of course, the article was meant as a sort of joke, as Miss Ramm reminded us (the epigram at its head is from Manzoni – ‘scrivi ancor questo: allegrati’), but of course, equally, anyone who worships the stones of Oxford with Gladstone’s intensity would wish it were true.
Gladstone’s argument was destroyed, but with great good humour, two years later in the Italian periodical L’Arcadia by Agostino Bartolini. There was no evidence that Dante had ever visited Paris, let alone Oxford; Boccaccio and Giovanni of Serravalle wrote long after Dante’s death. But the Italian scholar was gracious towards Gladstone, who had died by the time Bartolini’s article appeared. He saw it as flattering to Italy and the Italians that Gladstone should have wished to claim Dante as his own. He had especially liked Gladstone’s ‘argument’ that the existence of an Oxford Dante Society, and the abiding love of Dante which survives in the English university town, suggested a genetic memory of the Italian’s stay there with the Greyfriars of the early fourteenth century.21
Gladstone’s life had been punctuated by constant returns to the Comedy, constant re-readings. Punch, the comic magazine, depicted Gladstone in a cartoon of 1881 in Dante’s laurel crown and robes, staring at the Irish mob, wondering how to solve the Irish crisis. The drawing is accompanied by a tag from Cary’s Inferno – Canto XI – ‘Death, violent death, and painful wounds,/Upon his neighbour he inflicts; and wastes/By devastation, pillage, and the flames,/His substance.’
When England went wild with enthusiasm for the visit of Garibaldi, biscuits were named after him and Wedgwood busts were fashioned in the shape of the great Italian nationalist. Karl Marx could for once find himself in total agreement with Queen Victoria. Marx saw the visit as ‘a miserable spectacle of imbecility’ and Queen Victoria was ‘half ashamed at being the head of a nation capable of such foibles’.22 But for Gladstone and the great Liberal British public, Garibaldi was a hero, Italian nationalism was a cause to be supported wholeheartedly, and Dante was a prophet of this nationalism.
These are only some of the ways in which Gladstone saw Dante, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, as a self-image, as a poet not of the Middle Ages but of the nineteenth century. Similarly, in Dante’s denunciations of the corrupt Papacy, Gladstone the High Church defender of the Church of England could deplore the setting-up of Roman Catholic dioceses in England (the so-called Papal Aggression) or the politics of Pio Nono, and find an ally in his favourite Italian poet. Dante, the Church of England Victorian Liberal who had studied at Oxford, was a figure who could plausibly be extracted from the surviving evidence, as could Dante the Pre-Raphaelite Visionary and Dante the Garibaldista.
The visual artists who responded to Dante responded similarly, not so much as antiquaries reconstructing an actual medieval past, but as interpreters who saw Dante as their contemporary.23 The son of Gabriele Rossetti was the much more famous Dante Gabriel whose translations of Dante and the other early Italian poets did as much to popularize the Vita Nuova as Cary had done for the Comedy. Rossetti’s paintings of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, or of Janie Morris, with whom he was in love, not only provide some of the most powerful pieces of visualized erotic fantasy, but are tributes to the way in which Dante can never be read with detachment. The reader once gripped by the Comedy enters into it; the pilgrimage becomes an allegory of the reader’s own life. The line illustrations to the Comedy by John Flaxman (1755–1826) had been among the most powerful. They had a resurrection-existence when Francisco Goy
a (1746–1828) reworked Flaxman’s images in his own paintings and etchings of the devastations of the Peninsular War, Los Desastres de la Guerra.24 Likewise, when Gustave Doré (1832–83) began to illustrate the Comedy in 1855 – his first illustrations were published in Paris in 1861 – no observer could fail to see the overlap in the artist’s imagination between Dante’s visionary Hell and the modern Hells of the slum-dwellers and the industrial waste-lands which were also Doré’s eerie theme. It is noticeable as we read through the works of John Ruskin that the quotations from Dante increase as the art history of Italy is left behind and the comments on the condition of industrial England become Ruskin’s chief concern.25 Horrified by the conditions of the urban poor, enraged by the indifference of the Victorian rich, Ruskin proclaimed, in his letters to the working classes, ‘that one main purpose of the education I want you to seek is that you may see the sky, with the stars of it again, and be enabled, in their material light – riveder le stelle’.26 Dante for Ruskin became the visionary who could reclaim the essential humanity of a dehumanized industrial proletariat.