LIFE IN ITALY
I know my fame will have but scanty flight,
Readers to whom I speak of Italy.
Yet, if in any of you there rose a wish
To know me who I am, I’ll meet it here.
Ovid’s own native soil is mine as well:
He spoke about himself, and so will I.
In verses Ovid wrote, but I in prose—
Prose of eleven syllables with rhymes;
But, be they verses, I shall not contest.
And, without more preamble, hear me now.
Along the beach of the Frentani lies
On teeming hills, the Adriatic near,
A small municipality of Rome—
Histonium once and Vasto now ’tis called.
There, with no waft of Fortune, I received
A humble cradle from a worthy pair.[1]
The brief statement of my father, in his verses and his note, may be slightly extended. Nicola Rossetti was a blacksmith and locksmith; his wife, Maria Francesca Pietrocola, was the daughter of a shoemaker. Both families seem to have held a creditable, though certainly a by no means distinguished, position in the small Vastese community. The original name of the Rossetti race (as I have heard my father more than once affirm) was not Rossetti but Della Guardia. Some babies in the Della Guardia family were born with red or reddish hair (I presume, four or five generations before my father’s birth); and the Vastese—who, like other Italians, never lose a chance of calling people by nicknames—termed them “the Rossetti”—i.e. “The Little Reds,” and this continued to serve as surname for their progeny. Thus the surname Rossetti may be regarded as equivalent to the English surname Reddish, or Rudkins (if Rudkins is an abbreviation of Ruddykins). The family of Della Guardia still exists in Vasto. It appears to have been entitled to bear a crest—which is a sturdy-looking tree, with the motto “Frangas non flectas”; for a seal (still in my possession), showing this crest and motto, was delivered to Gabriele Rossetti, on his quitting Vasto in youth, by his elder brother the Canon Andrea, who told him that it was the family-device. This was often used, I may add, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It appears that in the Rossetti line, or else in the Della Guardia line, there must have been some degree of literary eminence prior to the date of the blacksmith Nicola; as I find, in a letter addressed by Gabriele Rossetti, towards 1807, to his elder brother Domenico, the phrase: “You know that our stock has always abounded in great men of letters.” One cannot suppose that this statement is a mere fib: I have not, however, found any confirmation of it in books about Vasto, nor do I remember that my father ever referred to such a matter by word of mouth.
I believe that Nicola Rossetti came to his end in a distressing way. When the French Republican army invaded the Neapolitan territory in 1798, the troops required Nicola to render some service, such as horseshoeing, provisioning, transport, or what not. He showed no inclination to comply, and was beaten or otherwise ill-treated; and this so preyed on his mind that his health suffered, and death ensued. His decease may, I presume, have occurred towards 1800; his widow survived till 1822 or some such date. Gabriele Rossetti used to speak with much affection of his mother, who (like so many Italian women of the lower middle class in those days) could neither write nor read. He remembered his father as a somewhat harsh man, but upright and worthy of respect. The Rossetti family is now wholly extinct, save in the persons of myself and my four children; the line of my father’s married sisters is also extinct.
The precise date of my father’s birth was 28th February 1783 (not 1st March, as has at times been written and printed). He was born in a lofty brown building, which, in a water-colour with which I was favoured towards the date of the Vastese centenary celebration of his birth, wears a somewhat stately though wholly unadorned aspect. It looks like an edifice which has stood for some centuries, solid but uncared for. It is now, I understand, a dilapidated structure, let out in tenements to a poor class of people. The question of buying it for the city of Vasto, in memory of Gabriele Rossetti, has often been mooted, but not carried into effect. There are prophets who have no honour in their own country; and others who, rather profusely honoured there by word of mouth, are left in the lurch when deeds and subscriptions are in demand.
In the first opening years of joyousness
I showed clear sign of studious aptitude;
And, following my brothers, three in count,
Whose lively parts had been in evidence,
I was escorted by this goodly three
Into Apollo’s and Minerva’s fane.[2]
Thrilled by the first Phœbean impulses,
Rough versicles I traced with facile hand:
And yet, to my surprise, those lines of mine
Almost took wing into a distant flight.
A hope of Pindus did I hear me named:
But praise increased my ardour, not my pride.
And yet some vanity there came and mixed
With the fair issue of my preluding:
But, all the more I heard the applause increase,
With equal force did study grow in me.
Not surely that I tried to load my page
With pomp abstruse extraneous to my drift;
But counterwise each image and each rhyme,
The more spontaneous, so meseemed more fair.
In trump of gold and in the oaten pipe
Let some seek the sublime, I seek for ease.
I shunned those verses which sprawl forth untuned
Even from my days of schoolboy tutelage:
I know they please some people, but not me:
Admiring Dante, Metastasio
I laud; and hold—a true Italian ear
Must not admit one inharmonious verse.
Some lines require a very surgeon’s hand
To make them upon crutches stand afoot.
So be they! But, to set them musical,
They must, by Heaven, be in themselves a song.
This seems a truthful, not a jibing, rule—
Music and lyric are a twinborn thing.
Yet think not that I deem me satisfied
With upblown empty sound without ideas:—
Then will a harmony be beautiful
When great emotions and great thoughts it stirs.
To painting with an equal ardency
An almost sudden impulse led me on;
And with the pen I drew in such a mode
That all my work would look as if engraved.
To question what I say would nothing serve,
For on my hands more than one proof remains.[3]
A plaining ditty which describes my state,
And wherein I deplore my fate perverse,
And whose adorning is two pen-designs,
Is still preserved among my earliest scraps:
And many more, for him who disbelieves,
Can thoroughly attest what I aver.
Not every magnate takes to banqueting,
Or lust of Cyprus and Pentapolis.
The Marchese di Vasto, a high-placed lord,
The King of Naples’ Majordomo in Chief
(Whatever face he show in history,
By me his memory must be always blest),
Being once in company with men of mark
Whom he was wont to invite from time to time,—
My verses read by him, and drawings seen—
Felt pleased that I was of his vassalage;
He wrote to his agent telling him of this
And bidding him to send me on to Naples.[4]
There I was patronized, without parade,
By him, who from the first received me well:
But little did that firm support endure,
For a political whirlwind cut it short.
Poor I—how fare in a vast capital?
I had to bow before my destinies.
For scarcely had a year and month elapsed,
In which new studies occupied my mind,
When the French army of invasion came
In the sixth year of this our century,—
And, seeking Sicily in urgent flight,
The Marquis vanished with the perjured King.
Then for the kingdom rose an altered time,
And all the people vied to give it hail,
For they abhorred that Bourbon void of faith,
With executions and with treasons smirched,—
And more his wife, a type unparagoned,
Megæra, Alecto, and Tisiphone.
I will not paint that husband and his wife—
Thank Heaven, the tomb has swallowed them ere now.
Their grandson—this suffices—pairs them both,
Re-named King Bomba, monster in human form.