banks of enforced concrete, with nothing except its sober, serious,
and self-concentrated current to speak of the sinuous, sparkling,
effervescent charm, the “careless rapture” of its native motion.
If we are to substantiate our claim for Dante as the many-sided Apostle
of Liberty, we must satisfy ourselves that he is at least not devoid of
that foundation of the sense of humour which takes a man outside himself,
makes possible to him something of a detached and external point of view,
enables him, if need be, even to see the ridiculous side of his own
earnest efforts.
That Dante is in earnest, no one doubts. But does he, in his earnestness,
“take himself so seriously” as to incapacitate himself from doing justice
to other points of view?
Prof. Sannia’s work on the humorous element in the _Divine Comedy_[88]
marks in some respects an epoch in the study of Dante. Its title may seem
audacious, to the verge of irreverence; but if this is so, the fault lies
partly in an age-long neglect of one aspect of the great poet’s nature,
partly in a difficulty (common to both the Italian language and our own)
confronting the critic who would define in appropriate language that
subtle element—now gently playful, now fiercely ironical—which redeems
Dante’s work as a whole from dulness, and makes the _Divine Comedy_ in
particular one of the most human books ever written.
Whether or not Prof. Sannia has fallen deep into the pit that ensnares
most critics who have a hobby and a mission, his pioneer movement is
certainly far from futile. We believe that he has largely proved his
point, and given us, in consequence, a living Dante in place of the
traditional wooden effigy. At any rate his work will have justified
itself if it turns the attention of all-too-serious Dante students to a
new field, and emphasizes those qualities in the Divine Poet which the
sheer sublimity of his work has hitherto tended to obscure.
In the following study we shall not confine ourselves to the limits of
the _Divina Commedia_, but gather all we can in so short a space from
his other works, and especially from the _Convivio_ and the _De Vulgari
Eloquentia_.
As a preliminary we shall do well to bestow a glance at least upon
Dante’s environment from this particular point of view—the temper of
the generation in which he lived, and that of his immediate circle,
not neglecting such inferences as may be suggested by the tradition of
his physiognomy and the evidence of his earliest biographers. For a
provisional definition of the subject we may turn to “The Philosopher”
from whom Dante and his contemporaries drew directly and indirectly.
“Melancholy men of all others are most witty.” So said the “Maestro di
color che sanno,” according to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_;
and Boccaccio,[89] describing the habitual expression of Dante’s face,
says it was “always melancholy and thoughtful.”
Before we draw the enticing inference that Dante was a paragon of wit,
we shall, however, do well to verify our quotation from Aristotle, and
to bear in mind the fact that the words “wit” and “witty,” like their
companions “humour,” “humorous,” have changed their meaning since the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By “Wit and Humour,” as applied to
Dante, we mean something vague and general, yet sufficiently definite to
make our quest practicable. The phrase is intended to cover the playful
and fanciful use of the intellect upon literary material, in the broadest
sense: from the simplest and most elementary puns and word-plays to
the subtlest and most surprising analogies; from the most discursive
description of a laughably incongruous situation, to the swift agility
of brilliant paradox; from the quiet, genial sally of the man who laughs
_with_ you; while he laughs _at_ you, to the biting sarcasm of the
satirist, whose keen and often envenomed darts are winged with wrath and
indignation. It is this last phase that we shall naturally expect to find
most prominent in Dante.
In so far as it is to be expressed by a single Aristotelian word, our
subject corresponds most nearly in connotation to the Greek εὐτραπελία,
that intellectual elasticity and adroitness which seizes instinctively
upon the right subjects on which to vent its fun, and handles them with
a sure, artistic touch. It stands midway between the vulgarity of the
buffoon (βωμολόχος) and the insensibility to humour of the downright boor
(ἄγροικος). Indeed, in one place (_Mag. Mor_, i. 31, 1193) this quality
of εὐτραπελία is described by the Philosopher in terms which practically
identify it with our own useful phrase, “A sense of humour.” “The vulgar
buffoon,” he says, “deems everybody and everything a legitimate mark for
a jest, while the boor has no will to jest himself, and to be jested upon
makes him angry. The witty man”—the true humorist, as we may say—“avoids
both extremes. He selects his subjects—and is not a boor. On the one
hand he has the capacity of jesting with decency and decorum”—his
jokes do not jar on our good taste—“and on the other, he can bear good
humouredly jests of which he is himself the butt.”[90]
How far Dante would satisfy the second part of this canon, may perhaps
be open to discussion. But this is to anticipate. For the moment it
behoves us to observe that a somewhat tedious search in the Berlin Index
volume for the passage cited in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ reveals the
fact that Burton’s “witty man” is not εὐτράπελος but εὔστοχος.[91] In
other words, what Aristotle attributes to the melancholy temperament is
inductive acumen, the qualification of the scientific discoverer, rather
than a sense of humour. The two qualities have, however, something in
common: the gift of seeing and grasping analogies not obvious to the
plain man in his plain moments.[92] So this crumb of comfort may hearten
us in our quest, although the path be at first sight as unpromising as
were certain stages of the Poet’s mystical journey.
If then we elect to follow Aristotle, as Dante followed Virgil (and
I feel sure the Divine Poet would approve our choice of guide), we
may draw one more drop of comfort from a passage in the _Endemian
Ethics_,[93] in which the Philosopher, discoursing of friendship, notes
how unlike characters often pair off together, “as austere people
with witty ones (εὐτράπελοι).” May we look for this friendly union of
playfulness and austerity within a single personality? in the redoubtable
person of Dante Alighieri?
Is it not almost as incongruous, it may be asked, to look for humour
in the _Divina Commedia_ as it would be to search for jokes in the
Bible? We are prepared to maintain that even the intense seriousness of
Dante—that sublime and solemn earnestness which can only be compared to
the temper of Holy Writ, is not merely compatible with a playful use of
the intellect, artistically restrained, but is rendered more complete and
effective thereby. And what about Holy Scripture itself? I speak with all
reverence.
Hebraists assure us that puns and plays on words are far from rare in the
Old Testament; and there are, in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah,[94]
and elsewhere, passages of which the irony, at once keen and sublime,
cannot fail to strike the English reader. Would it not be possible
also to quote even from the New Testament—from the Gospels—phrases and
metaphors in which the deepest and most solemn truths are cast into a
form which, for want of a better word, must be described as playful or
witty? The picture of the children in the market place discontented with
their games; the ironical description of the “blind guides of the blind”;
and of the pedants who “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” the still
more terrible irony of the “whited sepulchres”—instances like these
show that Truth and Wisdom incarnate did not disdain to use the whip
wherewith the old Hebrew Prophets had scourged the idolatrous follies of
their contemporaries.[95]
In the light of what has just been said, we may perhaps be justified in
doubting whether the most perfect presentation of ideas—or at any rate
the most surely effective—does not involve of necessity the use of those
faculties with which we are at present concerned. “Without a sense of
humour,” it is often said, “no man can be a perfect Saint.” Surely it is
equally true to say that the same quality is essential for a really great
man of letters, be he Essayist, Historian or Poet.
One more question before we come to Dante himself. What about the age
and place in which the Poet lived? Were the Italians of Dante’s time
devoid of the spirit of mirth and of the power to express it? Boccaccio
and Sacchetti, the _Novellino_, nay, even the Franciscan Legend with its
_Jaculatores Domini_, and not least the charming _Fioretti_, cry out
with one voice against the unjust imputation. But one single name would
be enough to vindicate for the Italy of Dante’s elder contemporaries,
and for the men who figure largely in Dante’s writings, the possession
of the sense of humour and the gift of wit. Fra Salimbene of Parma, the
immortal gossip, who so dearly loves a joke, and is so ready to pardon
other failings in the man who has “a pretty wit.” He peoples the world
into which Dante Alighieri was born with folk whose joy of laughter and
rollicking sense of fun match in their intensity the sternness, cruelty,
savagery of those strange days. And to Florence he accords the palm for
wit and humour,[96] though not in the strict Aristotelian sense; for
Salimbene’s Florentines are far from being always seemly and decorous in
their jests.
The mirthful spirit that pervades the pages of Salimbene recalls
indeed most forcibly a passage of Aristotle to which we have not yet
referred, and a definition of _urbanitas_ (εὐτραπελία) which, if slightly
mysterious, is the most epigrammatic and the most suggestive of all his
utterances on the subject.
“The young,” he says in the second book of the _Rhetoric_, “are
laughter-loving, and therefore witty, for wittiness is πεπαιδευμένη
ὕβρις....[97]” How shall we render it? “A disciplined ‘cheek,’” an
“educated insolence!” The riotous, effervescent self-assertion of the
Middle Ages, outcome of abundant vitality, offered splendid raw material
for the manufacture of _urbanitas_. The uncontrollable vivacity which
vented itself in the field of life sometimes in horseplay or in huge
practical jokes; too often in fighting and bloodshed; which vented itself
in the field of Art in the fantastically contorted and quaintly humorous
subjects of the illuminations with which even sacred MSS. were adorned,
and in the carving of grotesque figures in wood or stone—
Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto
Per mensola tal volta una figura
Si vede giugner le ginocchia al petto;[98]
and in the field of literature ranged from sheer profanity and lewdness
to the edifying if amusing hagiological tales which meet us everywhere in
the pages of Tammassia’s work upon St. Francis.[99]
That Dante’s own literary circle was not innocent of this πεπαιδευμένη
ὕβρις—ὕβρις, that is, more or less πεπαιδευμένη—a glance at the dainty
little collection in Rossetti’s volume will show at once.[100] Not
to speak of the famous _Tenzone_ or “literary wrangle” between Dante
and Forese Donati, of which the Poet, it would seem, was afterwards
ashamed[101]; a group which included the extravagantly humorous Cecco
Angiolieri cannot be described as wanting in the “playful use of the
intellect.”
“Del resto,” says Prof. Sannia, “Dante era un toscano, un fiorentino;
che è tutto dire ... nella facoltà comica e satirica ei fu degno
rappresentante della sua stirpe, il più degno e il più alto: il genio
comico e satirico fu in lui impronta, eredità etnica.”[102]
And though he fails to cross-examine the Friar of Parma—perhaps the
most telling of all witnesses on this point—he has much to adduce to
the same effect. Most pertinent is his quotation of D’Ancona’s remark
that the gay songs with which the streets of old Florence rang were not
all love-ditties. Popular poetry was one of the forces which ruled the
city, “Firenze fu un Comune nel quale la poesia era uno dei pubblici
poteri.” It cannot fail to be significant that Dante spent the most
impressionable years of his life where the _poesia popolare_, by the
inspiration of its eulogy and the stimulus of its satire, took the place
of our modern newspapers in the formation, guidance and control of
effective public opinion. And if the lessons of Florence were not fully
learned at the time—if the _Vita Nuova_ may be said by the unsympathetic
to reveal something of the prig—the rough and tumble of an exiled life in
fourteenth century Italy had no mean share of teaching to offer.
We have thus narrowed the field of observation to Dante himself, and are
justified in claiming to have established at the outset at least so much
as this: that if Dante was humourless, it was not for want of inspiration
in his environment, or of material in the human—the _very_ human—spirits
among whom he moved.
It is not unnatural to ask first of all, whether Dante’s physiognomy
has anything to tell us on the subject. Two features act emphatically
as index of the movements of the unseen spirit—as the Author himself
points out in the _Convivio_[103]—the eyes and the mouth, those “Balconi
della donna che nello edificio del corpo abita.” And though the spirit
of pleasantry and humour is apt to reveal itself through these windows
chiefly in momentary flashes, the genial temper will usually leave some
prominent tokens of its influence more especially about the corners of
the mouth. As regards the eye, that most expressive of all our features,
no fourteenth century portraiture, however faithful, could hope to
reproduce its living flesh. Moreover, the most authentic portrait
of Dante is blind, alas, or rather worse than blind: fitted with an
execrable false eye by the much-abused Marini. The pose of Dante’s mouth
might teach us something, if only we could be sure of it. Mr. Holbrook in
his recent monograph[104] has confirmed our suspicions about the famous
“Death Mask,” which at best would naturally have furnished nothing more
significant than the smile of peace which so often graces our poor clay,
a parting gift from the spirit as it leaves.
The magnificent Naples Bust is seemingly, like the so-called “Death Mask”
itself, the creation of some abnormally gifted artist, who derived his
inspiration, perhaps indirectly, through the Palatine Miniature (No.
320)[105] from the Bargello portrait to which we have already referred.
In vain, therefore, does its splendid physiognomy, completely human, give
such promise of a sense of humour as a face in repose can be expected
to give. Nor does it matter for our purpose that the “Ritratto brutto”
(as the Riccardian picture—attached to MS. 1040—is justly styled by some
distinguished Florentines) would suggest the bare possibility rather than
the probability of a sense of humour; for that work of Art (if it may be
so called), is probably derived, like the famous Torrigiani Mask, from
the Naples Bust.
The one probably genuine contemporary portrait, the Bargello Fresco,
which a merciful criticism still allows us to attribute to Giotto, is
only preserved in the drawings of Kirkup and Faltoni. In these, one
window of the soul, the eye, is wanting, and there is considerable
difference between the two reproductions of that most essential feature,
the mouth; where Kirkup has much more of the conventional “Cupid’s
Bow.”[106] The most that can be said here is what we said of the Naples
Bust, that it certainly leaves room for a play of humour, restrained and
dignified.
When we pass from portraiture to written record, we have but little
material that is really _à propos_ in the early biographers of Dante.
Boccaccio, after pourtraying his character and features says, “his
expression was ever melancholy and thoughtful”—“nella faccia sempre
malinconico e pensoso” (_Vita_, § 8), but goes on to describe him as
“smiling a little”—“sorridendo alquanto” (_ib._), when he overheard the
gossips of Verona commenting on the crisped hair and darkened complexion
of the man who “goes down to Hell and returns at will to bring back
word of those below.” Later on in his biography he draws out with
evident relish the power of the poet’s sarcastic satire: “with a fine
resourcefulness of invention,” says Boccaccio (§ 17), “he fixes his fangs
on the vices of many yet alive and lashes the vices of many that have
passed away”—“con invenzione acerbissima morde le colpe di molti viventi
e quelle de’ preteriti castiga.” And speaking, in an earlier passage,
of his courtesy in intercourse with others[107]—“più che alcun altro
cortese e civile”—he takes something of the edge off Giovanni Villani’s
description of a man “somewhat haughty, reserved and disdainful, and
after the fashion of a philosopher, careless of graces and not easy
in his intercourse with laymen.”[108] Yet we feel all the time that
Villani’s description is, speaking broadly, the more convincing; and are
relieved when we realise that it is the outwardly and obviously genial
temperament rather than the saving sense of humour that the Florentine
historian would deny to his great contemporary.
Next, before we turn to the testimony of Dante’s own works, we may
refer briefly to the stories told of him; for if none of these be
incontrovertibly authentic, and not a few of them be comparatively late
in origin, their cumulative evidence should be of some value, at any rate
in suggesting what his own countrymen of succeeding generations regarded
as compatible with the Poet’s temperament.[109]
We may dismiss, if we will, as apocryphal, the tale of Dante’s
conversation with the fish at the Venetian Doge’s banquet, and of the
smearing of his court dress at King Robert’s feast, we may reject,
perhaps, with more hesitation and regret, Sacchetti’s stories of the
harmonious but offending blacksmith and the donkey-driver who farced
Dante’s songs with an interpolated _Arrhi!_ We may relinquish the
pun on Can Grande’s name, while retaining Petrarca’s story (of which
Michele Savonarola’s is possibly a “doublet”) wherein Dante administers
a deserved rebuke to Can Grande and his court for their preference of
a buffoon to a poet. But even the rejected legends add their quota of
testimony to the general and traditional belief that the Divino Poeta
could unbend, and was capable of making a joke.
And there is a certain residuum—some would say larger, some smaller—of
anecdotes that may be believed to contain a nucleus of truth.
There is to me a convincing ring about the comment of the _Anonimo
Fiorentino_ on _Purg._ iv. 106. When Belacqua makes excuses for his
laziness on the ground of the Aristotelian dictum that “by repose and
quiet mind the mind attains to wisdom,” Dante retorts: “Certainly, if
repose will make a man wise, you ought to be the wisest man on earth!”
A like readiness of wit, in a moment where all depended on readiness,
is evinced in the story of his reply to the Florentine envoy who was
sent to Porciano to demand his extradition. “Is Dante Alighieri still
at Porciano?” asked the messenger who met the fore-warned exile on the
road, in the act of escaping. “When I was there, he was there,” was the
non-self-committing response: “quand io era, v’ era’.”[110] The stories
told of Dante, if they do not suggest a genial and convivial temperament,
do suggest a ready and caustic wit. But it is time to turn to Dante’s
own works, and taste for ourselves.
The _Divina Commedia_ is the criterion by which most would judge him,
and on this we shall spend the bulk of the space at our disposal; but
no discussion of this or any other aspect of Dante’s literary genius
can afford to neglect the field of his minor works, which are, in this
particular case, of not a little importance. The _Convivio_ (if we may
anticipate) supplies us, among other things, with Dante’s own idea of
what laughter should be; and the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ furnishes a
practical illustration of his treatment of a subject like _patois_ which
lends itself to humorous handling even in a serious treatise.
These three works not only cover a large proportion of Dante’s total
literary remains, but they are also representative of his three chief
styles of writing: Poetry, Italian Prose, and Latin Prose.
In opening the _Divina Commedia_ one would venture to issue a further
warning on the mistake of limiting the field of observation to the
_Inferno_, or of allowing its temper and atmosphere too great a place
in our estimate of the characteristics of Dante. Whatever he was to the
women of Verona, Alighieri is to us much more than “the man who goes
down to Hell and comes up again at will.” Yet now and then even educated
Italians, if you mention Dante’s name, are apt to make it clear that they
knew him mainly as the creator of two episodes—_Paolo and Francesca_
and _Conte Ugolino_; and there is a real danger among Englishmen—amply
illustrated in Dr. Paget Toynbee’s _Dante in English Literature_—of
laying too much stress on the _Inferno_, even if they do not confine
themselves to it.
The humour of the _Inferno_ is, of necessity, prevailingly grim;
sometimes almost coarsely grotesque. Here we may see the hand of the
subtle artist, and detect a deliberate purpose on Dante’s part to pour
(as I have said elsewhere) “a disdainful and indignant ridicule upon
the futile, monstrous, hideousness of sin.”[111] “His fine scorn of sin
tempts him to heap upon it all the ... burden of loathsome grotesqueness
that the resources of his imagination can furnish.”
Typical of this method is the fierce sport of the scene described in
_Inf._ xxii-xxiii, which culminates in the “nuovo ludo”[112] (puzzlingly
compared by Dante to the apocryphal Aesopian Fable of the “Frog and the
Mouse”)[113] in which Ciampolo outwits the Demons and brings them to
confusion.[114] We are in mid-Hell, in the fifth _Bolgia_ of the eighth
circle, _Malebolge_, the place of the _Barattieri_, of those, that is,
who have made traffic of justice or of public interests. Dante, who had
been falsely accused of this crime, expends all the resources at his
command to express his detestation of it, and holds it up at once to
ridicule and loathing.
In Purgatory, on the terrace where pride is purged, he seems to
acknowledge his appropriate place; but far different is his attitude
towards the spot in Hell where his political enemies would fain have
placed him.
The whole of these two Cantos and a half is pervaded by an unholy reek of
boiling pitch; the appropriate similes are those of frogs immersed to the
muzzle in stagnant ditch water[115]; of clawings, flayings, proddings of
raw flesh.[116] Here, if anywhere, Dante verges on the vulgar. The names
of the Demons are fantastically ridiculous and unpleasantly suggestive;
their actions and their gestures, their badinage and their horseplay
all remind one that the stately pageant of the Middle Ages had its
unspeakable and unpresentable side. The Cantos are only redeemed from
unreadableness by the fine similes, the lofty poetical touches which
Dante, because he was Dante, could not but introduce here and there.
The graphic picture of the Venetian arsenal in full activity,[117] the
swiftly drawn but masterly sketches of the wild duck’s dive to escape the
swooping falcon,[118] of the mother’s rescue of her child by night from
a flaming house[119]; the vivid reminiscences of Dante’s own campaigning
days, at Caprona and before Arezzo: these play, like sunlit irridescence
on the surface of a noisome pool, where foul creatures sport and gambol
in a nightmare fashion.
We must note, however, one point; that Dante never represents himself
here as moved to mirth by the fiendish antics he so conscientiously
describes. Rather he is pictured as consistently consumed by fear and
loathing.[120]