As Rossetti has here mentioned his edition of Dante’s Comedy, and his own Psaltery, and as references occur later on to other publications of his, I may as well enter at once into some details in elucidation. After his arrival in England he printed the following works:—
1. 1826-7. Dante’s Inferno, with a “Comento Analitico.” The intention was to publish the whole of the Divina Commedia: but, the expense proving too great, the Inferno alone came out. The great majority of the comment on the Purgatorio was written—not any (I think) of that on the Paradiso. The MS. comment on the Purgatorio was presented by me in 1883 to the Municipality of Vasto, under a stipulation (volunteered by the Municipality itself) that they would print it; but this has not been done, and indeed the MS. volume was treated in a highly neglectful style. My father, when in Italy, was of course very well acquainted with Dante’s poem; but he had not studied it with any keenness of scrutiny until he settled in London. When he did that, he soon reached the conclusion that the surface of Dante’s Commedia is very different from its inner core of meaning. At first he considered the inner core to be political: the Empire and Ghibellinism, as against the Papacy and Guelfism. As he progressed his conceptions expanded, and he regarded Dante as a member, both in politics and in religion, of an occult society having a close relation to what we now call Freemasonry; and he opined that the Commedia and other writings of Dante, and also the books of many other famous authors in various languages and epochs, are of similar internal significance. It is not my purpose here to discuss whether he was right or wrong: I hold that he was highly ingenious, that some of his reasonings deserve very careful attention, and that in several instances he pushed things too far. His comment on Dante, and subsequent writings in the same direction, excited some notice in Italy, and at least as much in England. Coleridge thought well of his speculations up to, but not beyond, a certain point; Isaac Disraeli was fully convinced by them; Arthur Hallam, and afterwards Panizzi and Schlegel, wrote in opposition. A learned German, Joseph Mendelssohn, lectured in Berlin on Rossetti’s system, and published his discourses, which are more expository than critical, in 1843. A remarkable book (later than my No. 2) was brought out at Naples by Vecchioni, embodying a course of interpretation and argument closely resembling that of Rossetti, who never quite understood whether the conclusions of Vecchioni had been formed independently or not.
2. 1832. Lo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma (The Anti-papal Spirit which produced the Reformation) develops and extends the ideas, which Rossetti had conceived during his study of Dante, as to a secret society to which that poet and many other writers belonged, and as to the essentially anti-Christian as well as anti-papal opinions covertly expressed in their writings. An English translation of this work was published.
3. 1833. The work to which the Autobiography has applied the name Psaltery is entitled Iddio e l’Uomo, Salterio (God and Man, a Psaltery). The majority of it was written in Malta: in London considerable additions and changes were made. Leaving some of his individual lyrics out of account, this may be regarded as the completest and best poetic work produced by Rossetti. In 1843 it was republished under a new title, Il Tempo (Time), and with some substantial modifications of plan. This book, and our No. 2, are down in the Pontifical Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
4. 1840. Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo derivato dai Misteri Antichi (The Mystery of the Platonic Love of the Middle Ages derived from the Ancient Mysteries). This extensive and rather discursive work, in five volumes, follows up the line of speculation and argument shown in Nos. 1 and 2. Rossetti wrote it with a consciousness that the themes of religion or irreligion which it discusses were volcanic matter for readers to handle, as well as perilous to his own professional position in England. He therefore exhibited his subject with some amount of reticence, meandering through thickets of very audacious thought—the thought of great writers of the past as interpreted (but also to a great extent deprecated) by himself. This book was printed; but, as Mr Frere, partially seconded by Mr Charles Lyell, pronounced it to be foolhardy, it was withheld from publication in England, and was only put on sale on the Continent with precaution and in small numbers.
5. 1842. La Beatrice di Dante—an argument that Dante’s Beatrice was not in any sense a real woman, but an embodiment of Philosophy. The reasoning extends a good deal beyond this limit, into regions explored in Nos. 1, 2, and 4. Rossetti completed the work in three disquisitions—or indeed, according to the final arrangement, in nine disquisitions. Only the first of these was published. The others were entrusted to a French writer, M. E. Aroux. He studied them, and published a book named Dante Hérétique, Révolutionnaire, et Socialiste—a book which my father, on seeing it in print, did not acknowledge as by any means faithful to his own views. The MS. was returned to Rossetti: somehow it could never be found in our household until the close of 1900, when I discovered it, more or less complete, in an old portfolio.
6. 1846. Il Veggente in Solitudine (The Seer in Solitude) is a long poem of patriotic aim, in several books and all sorts of metres. Its main object is to denounce the then political and religious condition of Italy, and to forecast a better future. This is mixed up with a good deal of autobiographical matter, and with many lyrics of old time (some of them evincing Rossetti’s very best work) interpolated into the context. As a rounded achievement of poetry, this book cannot be eulogized; it had, however, a great though clandestine circulation in Italy, roused enthusiastic feelings, and was so much prized that an honorary medallion of Rossetti, the work of Signor Cerbara, was struck.
7. 1847. Versi, published at Lausanne. This volume has not a directly patriotic or political complexion: it consists of many of Rossetti’s best poems of early date, along with some of recent years.
8. 1852. L’Arpa Evangelica (The Evangelic Harp). Although printed in 1852, this volume only reached Rossetti’s hands at an advanced date in 1853. It consists of hymns and lyrics of a distinctly Christian, combined with an enlarged humanitarian, character. Several of the poems in this volume are now used in the Evangelical churches of Italy. I find twenty-one in a volume entitled Inni e Cantici ad uso delle Chiese, Famiglie, Scuole, ed Associazioni Cristiane d’ Italia. Roma, 1897.
It may be as well to say here something as to my father’s religious opinions. His parents were religious Catholics of the ordinary Italian type. His bringing-up was religious; and I suppose that, until manhood was well advanced, he acquiesced, without special zeal, in the established views and practices of Catholicism. As his political opinions progressed into active opposition to despotism and the foreign yoke, so did his religious opinions progress into active, and indeed very fierce, opposition to Papal dogma and pretensions, and to all that side of Roman Catholicism which pertains more to sacerdotal and hierarchical system than to the personality and the gospel utterances of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, he never ceased to cherish and reverence this original basis of Evangelical faith and practice. As I knew him from my earliest years (say from 1834), he adhered to no ecclesiastical sect whatever; and—allowing for the primitive-Christian sympathy just referred to—he was certainly far more a free-thinker than definitely a Christian. As his writings were never of a personally anti-Christian tone (though they often developed the anti-Christian views of other authors), and were of an anti-papal tone, he became mixed up in his later years with Italian anti-papal Protestantizing religionists, to an extent greater than in his prime he would have tolerated. Towards 1849 disfrocked priests and semi-Waldensian semi-simpletons got a good deal about him, when broken health and precarious eyesight had to some extent enfeebled his mental along with his bodily powers; and association with these people and their publications did certainly not tend to promote a vigorous presentment of his essentially undogmatic but not essentially unspiritual mind. He came to write about Christian matters in terms suited to an absolute Christian believer; whereas, in fact, he was a devotional adherent to the moral and spiritual utterances of Jesus, but was not a practising member of any Christian denomination, nor a disciple in any theological school. It should be understood that, though a fervent and outspoken anti-papalist, he never expressly renounced the Roman Catholic faith. In the earlier years of his London sojourn it might have been to his advantage (as Professor of Italian in King’s College and elsewhere) to join the Anglican rather than the Roman communion; but this he considered unworthy of an Italian, and he never took any step in that direction. Neither did he naturalize himself as an Englishman.