GABRIELE ROSSETTI
As the career of Gabriele Rossetti was much mixed up with political and dynastic events in the Kingdom of Naples (or of the Two Sicilies), it may be as well at starting to give a very brief résumé of historical facts.
In the year 1734 the Kingdom of Naples, in the resettlement of Europe consequent upon the Treaty of Utrecht, was under the dominion of the Empire, or, as we should now word it, of Austria; but in that year an almost bloodless conquest brought-in a different dynasty. Charles, Duke of Parma, a son of the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., by his second wife Elizabeth Farnese, a spirited youth only seventeen years of age, determined to assert his ancestral claims upon the kingdom, and in a trice he was firmly seated upon the Neapolitan throne. His government, though in a sense despotic, was popular and enlightened. In 1759 he became by succession King of Spain; and, under the obligation of existing treaties, he relinquished the Kingdom of Naples to his third son, Ferdinand, aged only eight. In 1768 Ferdinand married Maria Caroline, daughter of the Emperor Francis and of Maria Theresa, and sister of Marie Antoinette.
Ferdinand IV., as he was then termed (afterwards Ferdinand I.) was a man of no great ability, but of vigorous physique, and sufficiently well-disposed as a sovereign; his wife, strong-minded and domineering, was the more active governor of the two, and promoted various innovations, some of which fairly counted as reforms. Things went on well enough for the rulers and the subjects until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, when Neapolitan opposition to France and all things French became pronounced. Queen Caroline naturally did not relish the decapitation of her sister in 1793, and hostilities against the Republic ensued. In 1798 the king decamped to Sicily, and in the following year his continental dominions became the “Parthenopean Republic.” This was of short duration, January to June 1799. The Southern provinces rose in arms, under the leadership of Cardinal Ruffo; the French army departed, and Ferdinand was re-installed in Naples—Lord Nelson, victorious from the Battle of the Nile, playing a large part, and a much-debated one, in this transaction. Ferdinand now ruled with great rigour, and committed some barbaric acts of repression and retaliation, for which his consort was regarded as gravely responsible. The great Napoleon, Consul, Emperor, and King of Italy, was not likely to tolerate for long the anti-French severities, demonstrations, and intrigues, of “il Rè Nasone,” as Ferdinand was nicknamed in virtue of his portentously long and prominent nose. Early in 1806 Ferdinand and Caroline disappeared once more into Sicily, under British protection, and Joseph Bonaparte was enthroned in Naples. Joseph, in 1808, was transferred to the Spanish kingdom; and Joachim Murat, brother-in-law of Napoleon and of Joseph by his marriage with their sister Caroline, reigned in Naples in his stead. Ferdinand, with the other Caroline, remained meanwhile unattackable in Sicily, and was turned into a constitutional king there by British predominance. In 1815, on the final collapse of the Napoleonic régime, and very shortly after the death of his Queen, he returned to Naples.
These particulars, meagre as they are, seem to be sufficient to show what was the historical background to the fortunes of Gabriele Rossetti, with whom alone I am directly concerned. He was born under a recently-established dynasty, in a kingdom of despotic rule and many relics of feudalism; from the age of twenty-three to thirty-two he was the subject of a new and intrusive dynasty, not less despotic, but free from all trammels inherited from the past. Then in 1815 he again came under the old system, but in a state of public feeling and aspiration which rapidly led to a constitutional government, sworn to by the sovereign, and abolished by him at the first opportunity.
I propose to relate my father’s life in his own verse as translated by me, supplemented by a little of my prose. It was towards the year 1850, when his general health and strength had grievously decayed, and he was conscious of the imminent approaches of death, that he composed a versified autobiography, of which the great majority is here embodied. He wrote it in rhymed sextets; but I, for ease and literality, have rendered it into blank verse. His own verse is, as he himself acknowledges, here pitched in a very subdued key, with little endeavour after poetic elevation; though there are some passages in a higher strain. My translation makes still less pretension as poetry; it conveys the sense with strict accuracy, and that is all it affects. My father retained in his old age some of the habits of “poetic diction” which had been customary in the Italy of his youth; and one finds here more than one quite wants of Phœbus, Neptune, Minerva’s fane, and other “rattle-traps of mythology” (to borrow a phrase from William Blake); in all this I follow my original. The versification of the Italian text is often ingenious, and even masterly; abounding in dactylic line-endings, or rime sdrucciole, as the Italians call them—a difficult feat, at which Rossetti was uncommonly deft. I have given the great bulk of the production—which, indeed, I had in the first instance translated in full; but eventually I thought some passages here and there, and also some amplifications of phrase, useless for the purposes of the British reader, and have therefore excluded them. The whole of the expressly biographical matter is preserved. Those notes which are not marked by an initial are my father’s own; those to which “W.” is appended are mine—there being several points which seemed to need some explanation.
My material does not call for much division or subdivision. I shall therefore simply separate it into the Life of Gabriele Rossetti (his full Christian names were Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe) in Italy, and his Life in Exile, Malta and England; and, plunging at once into the versified autobiography, I commence the