THE DIVINE COMEDY
To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively
discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in the _Vita
Nuova_, would alone have ensured Dante immortality as a poet. But his
lyrical works are to his epic as Shakespeare’s sonnets to Shakespeare’s
dramas.
Any narrative in verse not familiar or humorous, nor of extreme
brevity, may be entitled an epic; although we might do well to
naturalise, as we have done in the case of _idyll_, the pretty Greek
word _epyll_ to denote a narrative composition of such compass as
Keats’s _Eve of St. Agnes_ or Wordsworth’s _Laodamia_. But there are at
least three classes of epics, excluding the merely romantic like the
_Orlando_, and the mock-heroic, from consideration. The most important
in every point of view is the national, originally not the work of
a man but of a people; sometimes, as in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,
indebted for its final form to the shaping hand of the most consummate
genius; sometimes, as in the Finnish _Kalevala_, an agglomeration of
legends, united by community of spirit, but not fashioned into an
artistic whole. At the remotest point from these stands the artificial
epic, like the _Teseide_ of Boccaccio or the _Jason_ of William Morris,
where the poet has selected for its mere picturesqueness a subject
which stands in no vital relation to himself and his times; and such
epics are necessarily the most numerous.
Yet there is an intermediate class of epic, partly national, partly
artificial, where the poet, conscious of a high patriotic purpose,
has, like Virgil and Camoens, sung the glories of his country at their
zenith; or, like Lucan, actually related contemporary history; or, like
Shelley in the _Revolt of Islam_, bodied this forth under the veil of
allegory; or, like Tasso, embalmed ere too late the feeling of an age
passing away. Two great epic poets of the intermediate class have done
more than this: they have preserved and expressed the sentiment of
their age, its replies to the deepest questions which man can propound;
have clothed these abstractions with form, colour, and music, and have
lent fleeting opinion an adamantine immortality. These are Dante and
Milton.
“Dante,” says Shelley, “was the second epic poet, that is, the second
poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in
which he lived. Milton was the third.” Hence Shelley in another place
calls Milton “the third among the sons of light.” Both these great men,
in truth, versed in all the learning of their ages, and entertaining a
conviction of the indefeasible truth of what they believed themselves
to know which no successor will be able to share, applied themselves
to embody these beliefs in works of genius. Even as great empires have
vanished from the earth, and left nothing but the works of art which
were not the greatness itself but merely its testimonies and symbols,
so here the opinions have gone while the works remain. It almost seems
a law that every great poem which thus resumes the thought of an age
shall be a song, not of Carlyle’s phœnix “soaring aloft, hovering with
outstretched wings, filling earth with her music,” but rather of the
same phœnix “with spheral swan-song immolating herself in flame, that
she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.” Homer’s theology, we may
be sure, was already obsolete for the higher Greek mind when, or not
long after,
_The Iliad and the Odyssee
Rose to the swelling of the voiceful sea._
Our own national epic, Shakespeare’s series of historical plays, could
not be written until the state of society it depicted was ceasing to
exist.
Dante himself has told us the origin of his poem. In the last sonnet of
his _Vita Nuova_ he represents himself as having in thought followed
Beatrice from earth to heaven:
_Beyond the sphere that doth all spheres enfold
Passes the sigh that from my heart takes flight,
By weeping Love with new perception dight
Sure way to the ethereal vault to hold;
Then having won unto that height untold,
Of Lady throned in honour hath he sight,
Resplendent so, that by the vesturing light
The spirit peregrine doth her behold.
So seen, that when he doth report the same,
I miss his sense, so subtle doth it seem
Unto the grieving heart that makes demand;
Vet know I that my Lady is his theme,
For oft he nameth Beatrice’s name,
And then, dear Ladies, well I understand._
Here is the germ of the _Paradiso_, at all events; but, to preclude
all misapprehension, Dante adds: “After this sonnet there appeared to
me a wondrous vision, wherein I beheld things which made me resolve to
say no more concerning my Blessed One until I could treat of her more
worthily. And that I may attain unto this I study with all my might, as
she truly knoweth. Wherefore if it shall be the pleasure of Him by whom
all things live that my life shall yet endure for some years, I hope
to say concerning her that which has never been said concerning any
woman.” The _Vita Nuova_ is believed to have been written about 1294.
At this time, therefore, Dante was meditating a poetical apotheosis of
Beatrice on a scale surpassing anything attempted before, although the
natural inference from his words would seem to be that he had not yet
begun to write.
He would probably at first contemplate nothing more than the expansion
of the thought of his sonnet into a vision somewhat resembling that of
Laura in Petrarch’s _Trionfi_; but ere long he might say to himself,
inverting the question which Ellwood the Quaker addressed to Milton:
“Thou hast told us of Paradise _gained_, what hast thou to tell us
of Paradise _lost_?” and, granted the existence of the intermediate
realm of Purgatory, the entire scheme of the _Divina Commedia_ would
be present to his mind. As poets but rarely “imitate the example of
those two prudent insects the bee and the spider,” he would begin with
the _Inferno_, where, notwithstanding the inscription, offensive to an
age as far in advance of its sentiment as Dante himself was in advance
of Homer’s polytheism and anthropomorphism, which he has thought fit
to place upon the portal, Beatrice could have neither part nor lot. It
must be long indeed before he could rejoin her.
It can hardly be said, then, that Beatrice is the heroine of his poem,
unless Helen of Troy is the heroine of the _Iliad_. Neither poem could
have existed without the woman; the action of each turns entirely upon
her; but the appearance of each is infrequent until, in Beatrice’s
case, she appears as the pervading spirit of the _Paradiso_. Yet, had
we merely known her from the _Divina Commedia_, their opinion who
regard her as a mere symbol would not have appeared so groundless as it
must in the light of the transparent autobiography of the _Vita Nuova_.
If the great epic has given her her world-wide fame, she is indebted
for her personality to the brief lyrics and snatches of impassioned
prose. The old love, though not extinct, had been transformed into
something far more expansive, as alchemists are said to revive a
glowing rose from the ashes of a faded one. When Dante himself essays
to give Can Grande some insight into the purpose of his poem, he does
not mention Beatrice, but says: “The object of the whole work is to
make those who live in this life leave their state of misery, and to
lead them to a state of happiness.” By this, as Symonds points out, is
not to be understood that the purpose of the poem was the admonition of
individuals. “It was both moral and political. The _status miseriæ_ was
the discord of divided Christendom as well as of the unregenerate will;
the _status felicitatis_ was the pacification of the world under the
coequal sway of Emperor and Pope in Rome, as well as the restoration of
the human soul to faith.”
The conception, therefore, was essentially mediæval. It expressed the
beliefs and aspirations of the Middle Age. It was in poetry what the
work of another of the greatest of the Italians, St. Thomas Aquinas,
had been in theology and philosophy--an endeavour to stereotype the
dominant convictions of the age. And therefore, although not among
the only genuine epics in the highest sense--those which the nations
have written for themselves--the _Divina Commedia_ approaches these
more nearly than any other epic of the second class; for, although the
utterance of a single voice, it says what the average mediæval man
would have said had he known how. The nearest parallel is Milton’s
epic, which sets forth the view of divine things which had commended
itself to a large portion of the Christian world, but still only to
a portion, and therefore a less memorable deliverance than Dante’s.
One needs only to consider how much lower the Middle Ages would stand
in our estimation if their great interpreter had never written, to
appreciate the enormous importance of Dante’s work for history and
culture.
Dante’s great position, nevertheless, in this point of view, somewhat
detracts from his originality in other respects. He is the man of
his age, not a man in advance of his age. He does not, like Goethe,
point the path of progress along an illimitable future. He has no
prevision of Bacon and Galileo; nor is he fertile in germs, hints, or
prefigurements of greater things to come. His philosophy is that of
Aquinas, and his science that of Aristotle. This in no way impairs
his poetical power, and it still remains the greatest of marvels that
the transcendent poet and the most representative thinker of the age
should have met in the same person. Much that appears original in him
is really not peculiar to him, as, for instance, his generous treatment
of the heathen world. There was nothing in this that could surprise
any contemporary. The beatification of the Emperor Trajan was already
an approved legend, and similar promotions in the instances of Ripheus
and Statius only carry the principle somewhat further. His astonishing
treatment of Ulysses might be regarded as a strong counterpoise, but it
must be remembered that he was unacquainted with Homer, and probably
took his view of the character of Ulysses from the _Æneid_. On the
whole, his attitude towards the classical world is highly to his
credit; but it merely expresses the dim perception of his age, that
greater men and greater civilisations had flourished before them, and
that inspiration from these was wanting to transform the semi-barbarism
around them into a well-ordered society. Hence Dante’s loving devotion
to Virgil, the only portrait in his epic that evinces any considerable
power of character painting; and his tenderness to all things
classical. Had he flourished along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, Dante
would have been a great humanist, his scholarship and statesmanship
would have found wider and more profitable fields of action than his
own age vouchsafed to them; but we should not have had the _Divine
Comedy_, towering above every other work of the age much higher even
than Shakespeare towers above contemporary dramatists; and all his own,
even to its metrical structure, since _terza rima_ appears to have been
Dante’s invention.
The thought at the foundation of the _Divina Commedia_, nevertheless,
is more ancient than Dante, although the details evince marvellous
fertility of invention. The idea of a descent to the underworld is
the groundwork of a primitive Assyrian epic in comparison with whose
antiquity the similar narratives in the Buddhistic and other scriptures
are but of yesterday. It is found in Plato’s _Republic_ and the
_Odyssey_, both unknown to Dante, who had, however, the sixth book of
the _Æneid_ by heart, and implies his obligation by making Virgil his
guide. This is a much more likely source for his poem than the vision
of Tundal and other similar mediæval legends, which are nevertheless
important as showing how strong was the hold of the conception upon
the popular mind. The vast difference between Virgil’s treatment and
Dante’s needs no elucidation. Virgil writes like a philosopher, and
Dante like a prophet. There is, no doubt, abundance of allegory in
the _Divina Commedia_, but, generally speaking, the poet’s vision is
direct and immediate. Symonds puts the essence of the poem into a word
by calling it apocalyptic, and perhaps there is no other great work to
which on the whole it presents so close an analogy as the Revelation
of St. John; but neither this nor any forerunner affords any precedent
for Dante’s astonishing innovation of peopling the unseen worlds mainly
with his own and his readers’ contemporaries, men whose hands he had
clasped or repelled, with whom he had sat at the council-board or
whom he had encountered in conflict, or who, personally unknown, had
thrilled him with the report of their fortunes or misfortunes, their
good deeds or their crimes.
Let any one try to imagine a modern poet treating the nineteenth
century in the same manner, and he will be penetrated by a sense of the
gigantic nature of the attempt, success in which could only be possible
to an intense realist capable of making his phantoms as substantial
as when they walked the earth. Yet this is only one side of Dante’s
mighty task, which was not only to render the unseen world visible and
almost palpable, but to embody what he fondly believed to be a system
of infallible dogmatic truth. It need hardly be said that it is to
the consummate execution of the former part of his mission that he is
chiefly indebted for his fame with the world at large. The _Inferno_,
where description and portraiture predominate, has impressed the
imagination of mankind far more powerfully than the more mystical and
doctrinal _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_.
This is not the judgment of the most refined readers. “The acutest
critics,” says Shelley, “have justly reversed the judgment of the
vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the _Divina Commedia_ is the
measure of the admiration which they accord to Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise.” “The whole _Purgatorio_,” says Symonds, “is a monument to
the beauty and tranquillity of Dante’s soul. The whole _Paradiso_ is a
proof of its purity and radiance and celestial love.” This is true, and
yet it is indisputable that in thinking of Dante the _Inferno_ always
comes first to the mind, and that this portion of his poem, had one
part only been published, would have done far more to preserve his name
than either of the others in the like case, and this although it is
far more tainted than they are with his most characteristic and least
pardonable faults. The chief causes, no doubt, are that the material
sublime is always more impressive to the mass of men than the moral;
that there is an element of risk and adventure in the poet’s journey
among the shades absent from the other two parts; and that Virgil is
a more tangible and human personage than Beatrice. Yet it must also
be admitted that the diviner beauty of the two latter parts suffers
from an admixture of theological and philosophical disquisition, not
the less tedious because it was impossible for the poet to avoid it.
Milton tells us that the fallen spirits reasoned “of fate, freewill,
fore-knowledge absolute,” but judiciously avoids reporting their
observations.
Dante’s place in comparison with the other chief poets of the world is
difficult to determine, for none but he has written an apocalypse. He
is emphatically the Seer among them, the “Soothsayer” in the original
sense of the term, the most independent of poetical fiction and
convention. He is also by far the most individual and autobiographic,
and the only one who is the hero of his own poem. Milton, who is most
naturally paralleled with him, does not deliver a revelation, but
records a history. This at once places Dante in a higher category than
Milton as an elementary force, and when we consider the circumstances
of their respective ages it seems impossible to deny that Dante was
by far the more wonderful man. This does not necessarily establish
the superiority of the _Divina Commedia_ to _Paradise Lost_. Isaiah
presents himself in a more august and venerable character than Homer,
but his prophecy is not as majestic as the _Iliad_. It is also
difficult, when assigning the relative ranks of poets, to discriminate
strictly between the claims that arise from mere poetical endowment and
the significance of their position in history. One may stand upon the
higher pedestal, and the other may have the sweeter voice.
In one point of view, Dante’s figure is the most imposing of any
poet’s; for, intensely local as he is, he yet interprets all mediæval
Europe. When, however, he is compared with his closest analogue,
Milton, simply as a poet, it is not so clear that the comparison is to
his advantage. The great characteristics which chiefly discriminate
him from all other poets are an ineffable purity, such as we see in
the early Italian painters, and an intensity of minute description
which surpasses the similar performances of others, except England may
say with pride, Robert Browning’s, as the work of the etching tool
surpasses the work of the pen. These gifts are best displayed upon a
small scale, and hence Dante’s cabinet pieces are more successful than
his vast pictures. They depend, too, in the last resort upon the poet’s
own fidelity of observation, and hence his best delineations retrace
what he has actually seen. His general description of the _Inferno_ is
more impressive from its unflinching realism than from its imaginative
sublimity. There is no grandeur in his picture of Lucifer, though much
quaint ingenuity, Milton’s “not less than archangel ruined” tells
us more and affects us more profoundly than all Dante’s elaborate
word-painting. If Milton has nothing so beautiful as the exquisite
comparison of Beatrice to a bird awaiting the dawn that she may gather
food for her young, neither has Dante anything so sublime as Milton’s
comparison of the flying fiend to a fleet discerned afar off as hanging
in the clouds, or of Satan equipped for battle to the comet “that fires
the length of Ophiuchus huge.” The magnificent lines in which Tennyson
has celebrated the might and music of Milton would seem inappropriate
to Dante. In an age when minute description is in fashion, Dante’s
virtuoso-like skill in graphic delineation has been favourable to his
renown; but a reaction must ensue when a bolder and ampler style of
handling is again appreciated at its worth.
If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure
and simple, he is more important as a representative of a great era
of mankind. In him the Middle Age lives as it does in its cathedrals;
and when the cathedrals have crumbled, the _Divine Comedy_ will be
as fresh as it is now. Nor is this significance merely historical or
antiquarian. From the very first it was appreciated by contemporaries.
Repentant Florence endowed lectures upon the _Divine Comedy_, and
Boccaccio was the first lecturer. In the next century Frezzi tries
to transpose it into another key; and Attavanti cites from the
pulpit _Dantes ille noster_ as copiously and reverentially as any of
the Fathers. Even in the age of the Renaissance, Pius the Fourth’s
cardinals cap quotations from Dante as the last notes of Palestrina’s
Mass of Pope Marcellus die down the aisles of St Peter’s. If he
afterwards fell into comparative abeyance for a time, it must be
remembered that Italy lay prostrate in the seventeenth century, and
that his genius did not sort well with the especial mission assigned to
her in the eighteenth.
There can be no surer proof of Dante’s eternal vitality than that
the revival of his fame coincided with the manifestation of ideas
apparently the reverse of his own. The French Revolution brought the
mediæval poet into fashion; and although his best expositors, whom it
is upon the whole most profitable to study, have been those so nearly
at his own intellectual standpoint as Dean Church and Maria Rossetti,
his most eloquent champions have been those who, on a superficial
view, might seem to have least in common with him--Lamennais, Shelley,
Carlyle, Symonds, Mazzini, Leopardi. The feelings of the man of the
nineteenth century, attracted by the divine and eternal elements in
Dante with a vehemence proportioned to his repulsion by the transient
and accidental, are thus powerfully expressed by the greatest of living
Italian poets:
_Dante, how is it that my vows I bear,
Submitted at thy shrine to bend and pray,
To Night alone relinquishing thy lay,
And with returning sun returning there?
Never for me hath Lucy breathed a prayer,
Matilde with lustral fount washed sin away,
Or Beatrice on celestial way
Led up her mortal love by starry stair.
Thy Holy Empire I abhor, the head
Of thy great Frederick in Olona’s vale
Most joyfully had cloven, crown and brains.
Empire and Church in crumbling ruin fail:
Above, thy ringing song from heaven is sped:
The Gods depart, the poet’s hymn remains._
--CARDUCCI.