by Thomas Moore
“Get from Mr. Hobhouse, and send me a proof (with the Latin) of my Hints from Horace; it has now the nonum prematur in annum complete for its production, being written at Athens in 1811. I have a notion that, with some omissions of names and passages, it will do; and I could put my late observations for Pope amongst the notes, with the date of 1820, and so on. As far as versification goes, it is good; and, on looking back to what I wrote about that period, I am astonished to see how little I have trained on. I wrote better then than now; but that comes of my having fallen into the atrocious bad taste of the times. If I can trim it for present publication, what with the other things you have of mine, you will have a volume or two of variety at least, for there will be all measures, styles, and topics, whether good or no. I am anxious to hear what Gifford thinks of the tragedy: pray let me know. I really do not know what to think myself.
“If the Germans pass the Po, they will be treated to a mass out of the Cardinal de Retz’s Breviary. * *’s a fool, and could not understand this: Frere will. It is as pretty a conceit as you would wish to see on a summer’s day.
“Nobody here believes a word of the evidence against the Queen. The very mob cry shame against their countrymen, and say, that for half the money spent upon the trial, any testimony whatever may be brought out of Italy. This you may rely upon as fact. I told you as much before. As to what travellers report, what are travellers? Now I have lived among the Italians — not Florenced, and Romed, and galleried, and conversationed it for a few months, and then home again; but been of their families, and friendships, and feuds, and loves, and councils, and correspondence, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners, — and have been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadine; and you may be sure of what I say to you.
“Yours,” &c.
LETTER 388. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Ravenna, Sept. 28. 1820.
“I thought that I had told you long ago, that it never was intended nor written with any view to the stage. I have said so in the preface too. It is too long and too regular for your stage, the persons too few, and the unity too much observed. It is more like a play of Alfieri’s than of your stage (I say this humbly in speaking of that great man); but there is poetry, and it is equal to Manfred, though I know not what esteem is held of Manfred.
“I have now been nearly as long out of England as I was there during the time I saw you frequently. I came home July 14th, 1811, and left again April 25th, 1816: so that Sept. 28th, 1820, brings me within a very few months of the same duration of time of my stay and my absence. In course, I can know nothing of the public taste and feelings, but from what I glean from letters, &c. Both seem to be as bad as possible.
“I thought Anastasius excellent: did I not say so? Matthews’s Diary most excellent; it, and Forsyth, and parts of Hobhouse, are all we have of truth or sense upon Italy. The Letter to Julia very good indeed, I do not despise * * * * * *; but if she knit blue stockings instead of wearing them, it would be better. You are taken in by that false stilted trashy style, which is a mixture of all the styles of the day, which are all bombastic (I don’t except my own — no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language); but it is neither English nor poetry. Time will show.
“I am sorry Gifford has made no further remarks beyond the first Act: does he think all the English equally sterling as he thought the first? You did right to send the proofs: I was a fool; but I do really detest the sight of proofs: it is an absurdity; but comes from laziness.
“You can steal the two Juans into the world quietly, tagged to the others. The play as you will — the Dante too; but the Pulci I am proud of: it is superb; you have no such translation. It is the best thing I ever did in my life. I wrote the play from beginning to end, and not a single scene without interruption, and being obliged to break off in the middle; for I had my hands full, and my head, too, just then; so it can be no great shakes — I mean the play; and the head too, if you like.
“P.S. Politics here still savage and uncertain. However, we are all in our ‘bandaliers,’ to join the ‘Highlanders if they cross the Forth,’ i.e. to crush the Austrians if they cross the Po. The rascals! — and that dog Liverpool, to say their subjects are happy! If ever I come back, I’ll work some of these ministers.
“Sept. 29.
“I opened my letter to say, that on reading more of the four volumes on Italy, where the author says ‘declined an introduction,’ I perceive (horresco referens) it is written by a WOMAN!!! In that case you must suppress my note and answer, and all I have said about the book and the writer. I never dreamed of it until now, in my extreme wrath at that precious note. I can only say that I am sorry that a lady should say any thing of the kind. What I would have said to one of the other sex you know already. Her book too (as a she book) is not a bad one; but she evidently don’t know the Italians, or rather don’t like them, and forgets the causes of their misery and profligacy (Matthews and Forsyth are your men for truth and tact), and has gone over Italy in company — always a bad plan: you must be alone with people to know them well. Ask her, who was the ‘descendant of Lady M.W. Montague,’ and by whom? by Algarotti?
“I suspect that, in Marino Faliero, you and yours won’t like the politics, which are perilous to you in these times; but recollect that it is not a political play, and that I was obliged to put into the mouths of the characters the sentiments upon which they acted. I hate all things written like Pizarro, to represent France, England, and so forth. All I have done is meant to be purely Venetian, even to the very prophecy of its present state.
“Your Angles in general know little of the Italians, who detest them for their numbers and their GENOA treachery. Besides, the English travellers have not been composed of the best company. How could they? — out of 100,000, how many gentlemen were there, or honest men?
“Mitchell’s Aristophanes is excellent. Send me the rest of it.
“These fools will force me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them ‘the loud lie.’ They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling — and ‘a wild justice,’ as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can’t or won’t reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, according to circumstances or place. For instance, I am living here exposed to it daily, for I have happened to make a powerful and unprincipled man my enemy; — and I never sleep the worse for it, or ride in less solitary places, because precaution is useless, and one thinks of it as of a disease which may or may not strike. It is true that there are those here, who, if he did, would ‘live to think on’t;’ but that would not awake my bones: I should be sorry if it would, were they once at rest.”
LETTER 389. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Ravenna, 8bre 6°, 1820.
“You will have now received all the Acts, corrected, of the Marino Faliero. What you say of the ‘bet of 100 guineas’ made by some one who says that he saw me last week, reminds me of what happened in 1810: you can easily ascertain the fact, and it is an odd one.
“In the latter end of 1811, I met one evening at the Alfred my old school and form fellow (for we were within two of each other, he the higher, though both very near the top of our remove,) Peel, the Irish secretary. He told me that, in 1810, he met me, as he thought, in St. James’s Street, but we passed without speaking. He mentioned this, and it was denied as impossible, I being then in Turkey. A day or two afterward, he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way:— ‘There,’ said he, ‘is the man whom I took for Byron.’ His brother instantly answered, ‘Why, it is Byron, and no one else.’ But this is not all: — I was seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the enquirers after the King’s health, then attacked by insanity. Now, at this very period, as nearly as I could make out, I was ill of a strong fever at Patras, caught in the marshes near Olympia, from the malaria. If I had died there, this would have been a new ghost story for you. You can easily make out the accuracy of this from Peel himself, who
told it in detail. I suppose you will be of the opinion of Lucretius, who (denies the immortality of the soul, but) asserts that from the ‘flying off of the surfaces of bodies, these surfaces or cases, like the coats of an onion, are sometimes seen entire when they are separated from it, so that the shapes and shadows of both the dead and living are frequently beheld.’
“But if they are, are their coats and waistcoats also seen? I do not disbelieve that we may be two by some unconscious process, to a certain sign, but which of these two I happen at present to be, I leave you to decide. I only hope that t’other me behaves like a gemman.
“I wish you would get Peel asked how far I am accurate in my recollection of what he told me; for I don’t like to say such things without authority.
“I am not sure that I was not spoken with; but this also you can ascertain. I have written to you such letters that I stop.
“Yours, &c.
“P.S. Last year (in June, 1819), I met at Count Mosti’s, at Ferrara, an Italian who asked me ‘if I knew Lord Byron?’ I told him no (no one knows himself, you know). ‘Then,’ says he, ‘I do; I met him at Naples the other day.’ I pulled out my card and asked him if that was the way he spelt his name: he answered, yes. I suspect that it was a blackguard navy surgeon, who attended a young travelling madam about, and passed himself for a lord at the post-houses. He was a vulgar dog — quite of the cock-pit order — and a precious representative I must have had of him, if it was even so; but I don’t know. He passed himself off as a gentleman, and squired about a Countess * * (of this place), then at Venice, an ugly battered woman, of bad morals even for Italy.”
LETTER 390. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Ravenna, 8bre 8°, 1820.
“Foscolo’s letter is exactly the thing wanted; firstly, because he is a man of genius; and, next, because he is an Italian, and therefore the best judge of Italics. Besides,
“He’s more an antique Roman than a Dane;
that is, he is more of the ancient Greek than of the modern Italian. Though ‘somewhat,’ as Dugald Dalgetty says, ‘too wild and salvage’ (like ‘Ronald of the Mist’), ’tis a wonderful man, and my friends Hobhouse and Rose both swear by him; and they are good judges of men and of Italian humanity.
“Here are in all two worthy voices gain’d:
Gifford says it is good ‘sterling genuine English,’ and Foscolo says that the characters are right Venetian. Shakspeare and Otway had a million of advantages over me, besides the incalculable one of being dead from one to two centuries, and having been both born blackguards (which ARE such attractions to the gentle living reader); let me then preserve the only one which I could possibly have — that of having been at Venice, and entered more into the local spirit of it. I claim no more.
“I know what Foscolo means about Calendaro’s spitting at Bertram; that’s national — the objection, I mean. The Italians and French, with those ‘flags of abomination,’ their pocket handkerchiefs, spit there, and here, and every where else — in your face almost, and therefore object to it on the stage as too familiar. But we who spit nowhere — but in a man’s face when we grow savage — are not likely to feel this. Remember Massinger, and Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach —
“Lord! thus I spit at thee and at thy counsel!
Besides, Calendaro does not spit in Bertram’s face; he spits at him, as I have seen the Mussulmans do upon the ground when they are in a rage. Again, he does not in fact despise Bertram, though he affects it — as we all do, when angry with one we think our inferior. He is angry at not being allowed to die in his own way (although not afraid of death); and recollect that he suspected and hated Bertram from the first. Israel Bertuccio, on the other hand, is a cooler and more concentrated fellow: he acts upon principle and impulse; Calendaro upon impulse and example.
“So there’s argument for you.
“The Doge repeats; — true, but it is from engrossing passion, and because he sees different persons, and is always obliged to recur to the cause uppermost in his mind. His speeches are long: — true, but I wrote for the closet, and on the French and Italian model rather than yours, which I think not very highly of, for all your old dramatists, who are long enough too, God knows: — look into any of them.
“I return you Foscolo’s letter, because it alludes also to his private affairs. I am sorry to see such a man in straits, because I know what they are, or what they were. I never met but three men who would have held out a finger to me: one was yourself, the other William Bankes, and the other a nobleman long ago dead: but of these the first was the only one who offered it while I really wanted it; the second from good will — but I was not in need of Bankes’s aid, and would not have accepted it if I had (though I love and esteem him); and the third —— —— .
“So you see that I have seen some strange things in my time. As for your own offer, it was in 1815, when I was in actual uncertainty of five pounds. I rejected it; but I have not forgotten it, although you probably have.
“P.S. Foscolo’s Ricciardo was lent, with the leaves uncut, to some Italians, now in villeggiatura, so that I have had no opportunity of hearing their decision, or of reading it. They seized on it as Foscolo’s, and on account of the beauty of the paper and printing, directly. If I find it takes, I will reprint it here. The Italians think as highly of Foscolo as they can of any man, divided and miserable as they are, and with neither leisure at present to read, nor head nor heart to judge of any thing but extracts from French newspapers and the Lugano Gazette.
“We are all looking at one another, like wolves on their prey in pursuit, only waiting for the first falling on to do unutterable things. They are a great world in chaos, or angels in hell, which you please; but out of chaos came Paradise, and out of hell — I don’t know what; but the devil went in there, and he was a fine fellow once, you know.
“You need never favour me with any periodical publication, except the Edinburgh Quarterly, and an occasional Blackwood; or now and then a Monthly Review; for the rest I do not feel curiosity enough to look beyond their covers.
“To be sure I took in the British finely. He fell precisely into the glaring trap laid for him. It was inconceivable how he could be so absurd as to imagine us serious with him.
“Recollect, that if you put my name to ‘Don Juan’ in these canting days, any lawyer might oppose my guardian right of my daughter in Chancery, on the plea of its containing the parody; — such are the perils of a foolish jest. I was not aware of this at the time, but you will find it correct, I believe; and you may be sure that the Noels would not let it slip. Now I prefer my child to a poem at any time, and so should you, as having half a dozen.
“Let me know your notions.
“If you turn over the earlier pages of the Huntingdon peerage story, you will see how common a name Ada was in the early Plantagenet days. I found it in my own pedigree in the reign of John and Henry, and gave it to my daughter. It was also the name of Charlemagne’s sister. It is in an early chapter of Genesis, as the name of the wife of Lamech; and I suppose Ada is the feminine of Adam. It is short, ancient, vocalic, and had been in my family; for which reason I gave it to my daughter.”
LETTER 391. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Ravenna, 8bre 12°, 1820.
“By land and sea carriage a considerable quantity of books have arrived; and I am obliged and grateful: but ‘medio de fonte leporum, surgit amari aliquid,’ &c. &c.; which, being interpreted, means,
“I’m thankful for your books, dear Murray; But why not send Scott’s Monastery?
the only book in four living volumes I would give a baioccolo to see— ‘bating the rest of the same author, and an occasional Edinburgh and Quarterly, as brief chroniclers of the times. Instead of this, here are Johnny Keats’s * * poetry, and three novels by God knows whom, except that there is Peg * * *’s name to one of them — a spinster whom I thought we had sent back to her spinning. Crayon is very good; Hogg’s Tales rough, but RACY, and welcome.
“Books of travels are expensive,
and I don’t want them, having travelled already; besides, they lie. Thank the author of ‘The Profligate’ for his (or her) present. Pray send me no more poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to look at them. I say nothing against your parsons, your S * *s and your C * *s — it is all very fine — but pray dispense me from the pleasure. Instead of poetry, if you will favour me with a few soda-powders, I shall be delighted: but all prose (‘bating travels and novels NOT by Scott) is welcome, especially Scott’s Tales of my Landlord, and so on.
“In the notes to Marino Faliero, it may be as well to say that ‘Benintende’ was not really of the Ten, but merely Grand Chancellor, a separate office (although important): it was an arbitrary alteration of mine. The Doges too were all buried in St. Mark’s before Faliero. It is singular that when his predecessor, Andrea Dandolo, died, the Ten made a law that all the future Doges should be buried with their families, in their own churches, — one would think by a kind of presentiment. So that all that is said of his ancestral Doges, as buried at St. John’s and Paul’s, is altered from the fact, they being in St. Mark’s. Make a note of this, and put Editor as the subscription to it.
“As I make such pretensions to accuracy, I should not like to be twitted even with such trifles on that score. Of the play they may say what they please, but not so of my costume and dram. pers. they having been real existences.
“I omitted Foscolo in my list of living Venetian worthies, in the notes, considering him as an Italian in general, and not a mere provincial like the rest; and as an Italian I have spoken of him in the preface to Canto 4th of Childe Harold.
“The French translation of us!!! oimè! oimè! — the German; but I don’t understand the latter and his long dissertation at the end about the Fausts. Excuse haste. Of politics it is not safe to speak, but nothing is decided as yet.
