Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is serious, but submits his romantic matter—Godfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade—to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century. Two indeed of gli antichi, "the all Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine homme du moyen âge, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. "Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music."
The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its multitudinous references to local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with a shiver of repulsion,
"How grim the master was of Tuscan song."
"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed by the Abbé Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of Dante to their countrymen.
Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules" and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passage from the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance with the "Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the nineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on increasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him."
In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound of classical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's "disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace. Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But Warton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell," he wrote, "grows darker at his frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes.
If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among classical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his "Saturday papers" misses the very obvious chance for a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived." [1]
In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very mild poem "The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno." "Voltaire," he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which so frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," i.e., the terza rima, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used before in English. His translation is by no means contemptible—much better than Boyd's,—but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he renders
"Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco,"
"Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute";