Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out
of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, "a
hollow image of fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me that hollow
image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the
exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats
but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long
escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of
his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that
it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in
Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he
celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not
merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but
because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his
lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the
world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. "Always," says
Boccaccio, "both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for
lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, "his
conduct was exceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates
him, finds "too much baseness" in his friend:
"And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,
Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;
But now I dare not, for thy abject life,
Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes."
And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because,
when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning
dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has
"visited ... the Portals of the Dead," and chosen Virgil for his courier?
While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his "lovely
heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free":
"Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,
Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;
Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,
French and Italian vengeance on such pride
May fall like Anthony on Cicero."
Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino "at the approach of death";
"The King, by whose rich grave his servants be
With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,
Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,
And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory."
V
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from
remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our
uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by
the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no
fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere
life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth,
were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad
about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out
and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one
in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor
has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist.
The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose
to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion
is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in
position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to
be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the
momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from
Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation
of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist
wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found
there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She
spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I
wanted to paint her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I
could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by
hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest
achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and
therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by
hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can
create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable
pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be
rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not
find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being
but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not
impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never
be a portion of our being, "Soon got, soon gone," as the proverb says. I
shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I
have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen
of the soul a passing bell.
The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a
season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks
one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the
sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the
divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the
sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives
amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.