It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose
"used the language of the market-place," so as to be understanded of the
common people; but we do not in practice either admire or understand a
man who writes in the language of our own market-place. It must be the
Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century--not Fulton Market of
to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of
course, he could have done it only because not merely he himself, the
great poet, but his audience also, would have accepted it as natural.
The nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of
itself as being the greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards
purely material objects, ranging from locomotives to bank buildings, it
did not wholly believe in its boasting. A nineteenth-century poet, when
trying to illustrate some point he was making, obviously felt
uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century heroes if he also
referred to those of classic times, lest he should be suspected of
instituting comparisons between them. A thirteenth-century poet was not
in the least troubled by any such misgivings, and quite simply
illustrated his point by allusions to any character in history or
romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened to occur to him.
Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only
one who dared use the Bowery--that is, use anything that was striking
and vividly typical of the humanity around him--as Dante used the
ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural in
doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions and
prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a
little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions of
his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it, no
less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of the
great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied
interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is
haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the
_Inferno_. But no man of Dante's art and with Dante's soul would write
of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman
wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but
his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it was,
he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to the
people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few--the men
like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley--who prize him
as he ought to be prized.
Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people
would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante did
six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as he
saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose that
this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always to read a
comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that no comparison
is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating their relative
greatness or importance, when the career of each of them is chosen
merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess. It is also
probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical faculty is
greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous inability
to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages accept as
a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and indeed
ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike from the
Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from Tammany
and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of Cæsar. To
Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.
Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which
dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and
therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to him
apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so,
when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate
his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only of great and
prominent characters; but in the present of his day most of the men he
knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent importance--just
as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the passions of these
men were the same as those of the heroes of old, godlike or demoniac;
and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate
predecessors, to illustrate his points, without regard to their
prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned with the
differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic proportions
or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose imagination soared so
high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far depths of our being
that he was also quite simply a realist; for the eternal mysteries were
ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the differences between the
careers of the mighty masters of mankind and the careers of even very
humble people seemed trivial. If we translate his comparisons into the
terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused over this trait of his,
until we go a little deeper and understand that we are ourselves to
blame, because we have lost the faculty simply and naturally to
recognize that the essential traits of humanity are shown alike by big
men and by little men, in the lives that are now being lived and in
those that are long ended.
Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more
than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from
out his burning sepulcher, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with
scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames; the
great souls--magnanimous, Dante calls them--whom no torture, no
disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield or
to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has created
these men, has made them permanent additions to the great figures of the
world; they are imaginary only in the sense that Achilles and Ulysses
are imaginary--that is, they are now as real as the figures of any men
that ever lived. One of them was a mythical hero in a mythical feat, the
other a second-rate faction leader in a faction-ridden Italian city of
the thirteenth century, whose deeds have not the slightest importance
aside from what Dante's mention gives. Yet the two men are mentioned as
naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt
upon at length because Dante felt it his duty to express a peculiar
horror for that fierce pride which could defy its overlord, while at the
same time, and perhaps unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain
shuddering admiration for the lofty courage on which this evil pride was
based.
The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated
one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example of a
man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial politics
of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of the soul;
yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one of hundreds of
the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom Benton, of
Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed to one
another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived asunder
Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They played
mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any mediæval
city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an iron will
and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of varied
interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the career of
the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for his
principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed right
in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure. Each, when
the forces against which he fought overcame him--for in his latter years
Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri, just as Jefferson
Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in the Nation--fronted an
adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the high heart, and the
stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all time in his hero who
"held hell in great scorn." Yet a modern poet who endeavored to
illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis would be
uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him. He would
feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression of being ill
at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was forced and
unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes of the Paris
Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many similar but
smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.
Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian
poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they
illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not
possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists
in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that we
ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and therefore
we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to assail those
guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks of the torments
inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him with Pyrrhus and
Sextus Pompey--a sufficiently odd conjunction in itself, by the way),
and in the next stanza mentions the names of a couple of local
highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular neighborhoods. The
two highwaymen in question were by no means as important as Jesse James
and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far less formidable fighting men,
and their adventures were less striking and varied. Yet think of the way
we should feel if a great poet should now arise who would incidentally
illustrate the ferocity of the human heart by allusions both to the
terrible Hunnish "scourge of God" and to the outlaws who in our own
times defied justice in Missouri and New Mexico!
When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human heart,
he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two local
contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles between
Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte, whom he
mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is entirely
right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able simply and
naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan, or Raphael
Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities shown by
Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or Hercules?
Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks were in no
way as important as these American soldiers of the second or third rank.
Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the qualities of
all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius of the
unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign
conquerors of the past--he was thinking only of the qualities of courage
and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal with what
is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose soul we take.
In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of Padua and Siena,
who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding canto he had dwelt
upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon de Montfort, guarded
by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason he hated the
spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary South Carolina
and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De Lancey; and to
him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson from one couple of
offenders more than from another. (It would, by the way, be outside my
present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling manner in which Dante
confounds his own hatreds, with those of heaven, and, for instance,
shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal opponent Filippo
Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)
When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those for
whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating through
the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate his point
no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of citherns.
Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument by
introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again, when
examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast at
Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life of a
kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could we now link
together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a sense of
incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local note who had
written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction who had lectured at
Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such fine unconsciousness
bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_
into a life comparison.
When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and
barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as
those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption;
and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still living,
and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have been
trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers in our
own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than those of
the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth circle of
the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be condemned as an
instance of shocking taste.
One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural,
and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves
nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by what
is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different
compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was good
or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the times
past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than useless;
and the very qualities that help to make Dante's poem immortal would, if
copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless, it would be
a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the mighty
Florentine's high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of
recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire or
condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the world's
previous history. Dante's masterpiece is one of the supreme works of
art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been the last to
wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or worshiped only
for art's sake, without reference to the dread lessons it teaches
mankind.
[From _History as Literature and Other Essays_, by Theodore
Roosevelt. Copyright, 1913, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]