THE MUCKRAKER’S HELL
Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral
indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see
that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with
suffering; “the mournfulest face,” says Carlyle, “that ever was painted
from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.” There has
never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral
problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he
believed to be sound ideas about conduct.
Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he
had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary
ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous
politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican
party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his
life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a
cruel hardship; he describes himself as “a pilgrim, almost a beggar,
displaying against my will the wounds of fortune.... Truly have I been a
vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores
and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.” Yet he
never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he
brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile
he died.
We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated
wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions
in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy
Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest
world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician,
and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting
his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his
literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into
hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine
politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards
them may be judged by the case of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who
is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair
and tears it out by the handful!
The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, “cupiditia.” He
raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the “fatal
gift” from the Emperor Constantine--the temporal possessions which made
the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The
two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven
itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that
each of them “has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth.” This
is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have
seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century!
It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a
book entitled “Dante and Other Waning Classics,” in which he argues that
the “Divine Comedy” is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate
symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin
mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell
is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly
Dante does not shirk this issue--he tells us in plain words: “The kind
of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is
moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for
speculation but for use.”
What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have
these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will
always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does
it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to
oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not
use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended
through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our
only advantage over him is that we do not even think we can answer.
The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had
brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the
discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that
gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So
the simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of
the Middle Ages; and Dante’s whole being, his total art product, was
illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by
a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without
physical expression through the poet’s whole life. No student of the
science of sex today would accept Dante’s attitude as sound or sensible;
nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and
the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul.
In Dante’s pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil.
This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have
stressed--the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a
civilization. In Dante’s time the cultured world was just making the
discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder
of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or
re-birth, we call it.
We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the
tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been
found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a
Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had
been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords,
and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day,
wishing to satirize the “war for democracy” by locating its leaders in
hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would
exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with
him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America.
And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and
Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies
whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer,
for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail;
the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general
would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But
respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no
one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soap-box
propaganda.
So the cultured Renaissance critics looked upon Dante as a crude and
“popular” person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke
patronizingly concerning “the rustic homeliness of his language and
style, his lack of decorum and grace.” If space permitted I could show
you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt
with by the academic critics of his own time.