66 66 66 'I Mantuan, capering, squalid, squalling!' There's alliteration and inversion enough, surely! I have advised him to frontis'piece his book with his own head, Capo "di Traditore, the head of a traitor; then "will come the title-page comment—Hell!” I asked Lord Byron the meaning of a passage in The Prophecy of Dante.' He laughed and said: "I suppose I had some meaning when "I wrote it: I believe I understood it "then *." * "If If you insist on grammar, though I never think about it in a heat-" Don Juan, Canto VII. Stanza 42. "I don't "That," said I, "is what the disciples of Swedenborg say. There are many people who do not understand passages in your writings, among our own countrymen: I wonder how foreigners contrive to translate them." "And yet," said he, " they have been "translated into all the civilized, and many " uncivilized tongues. Several of them have 66 appeared in Danish, Polish, and even Rus"sian dresses. These last, being transla❝tions of translations from the French, must "be very diluted. The greatest compliment 66 ever paid me has been shewn in Germany, "where a translation of the Fourth Canto "I don't pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when I would be very fine." Don Juan, Canto IV, Stanza 5. 66 subject of a University prize. But as to 66 obscurity, is not Milton obscure? ❝ do you explain How Smoothing the raven down Of darkness till it smiled!' "Is it not a simile taken from the electricity "of a cat's back? I'll leave you to be my "commentator, and hope you will make "better work with me than Taaffe is doing "with Dante, who perhaps could not him"self explain half that volumes are written "about, if his ghost were to rise again from "the dead. I am sure I wonder he and 66 Shakspeare have not been raised by their "commentators long ago!" "People are always advising me," said he, "to write an epic. You tell me that I "shall leave no great poem behind me ;"that is, I suppose you mean by great, a "heavy poem, or a weighty poem; I be"lieve they are synonymous. You say that "Childe Harold' is unequal; that the last 66 two Cantos are far superior to the two But "first. I know it is a thing without form "or substance,-a voyage pittoresque. "who reads Milton? My opinion as to the 66 inequality of my poems is this,-that one is 66 not better or worse than another. And as "to epics, have you not got enough of Sou they's? There's 'Joan d'Arc,' 'The Curse "of Kehama,' and God knows how many 66 more curses, down to The Last of the "Goths! If you must have an epic, there's "Don Juan' for you. I call that an epic : it ❝is an epic as much in the spirit of our day 66 as the Iliad was in that of Homer's.* Love, 66 religion, and politics form the argument, "and are as much the cause of quarrels now as they were then. There is no want of "Parises and Menelauses, nor of Crim.-cons "into the bargain. In the very first Canto 66 you have a Helen. Then, I shall make 66 66 my hero a perfect Achilles for fighting,—a man who can snuff a candle three successive "times with a pistol-ball: and, depend upon "it, my moral will be a good one; not even "Dr. Johnson should be able to find a flaw " in it! "Some one has possessed the Guiccioli * Only five Cantos of Don Juan' were written when I held this conversation with him, which was committed to paper half an hour after it occurred. |