Che sempre al cominciar di sotto è grave:
E quant’ uom più va su, e men fa male.
Però, quand’ ella ti parrà soave
Tanto che il su andar ti fia leggero,
Com’ a seconda giù andar per nave,
Allor sarai al fin d’ esto sentiero:
Quivi di riposar l’ affanno aspetta![216]
There is a moral progression by which man enters gradually and by
accumulation into the fulness of self-conquest, and so, of his
inheritance of Freedom.
But “grading” also, in the more specific sense, seems to be symbolised in
the _Purgatorio_. This principle was not born with Froebel, though its
emphatic recognition to-day may be an outcome of his message that each
stage of the child-life has its own absolute value and rights.
We are apt to wonder now how people were ever so psychologically
impious as to attempt to teach in a single group, by means of the same
cut-and-dried phrases, minds at every different stage of growth and of
receptiveness; hurling ready-made truths at the devoted heads of pupils
like so many tons of explosive bombs shot down from aircraft upon massed
enemy battalions! Grading, and the individual point of contact—which,
after all, is just Aristotle’s time-honoured principle of “beginning from
that which we know”—these we recognise to be of the first importance, and
that whether we be University professors or Sunday school teachers. And
so we are prepared to appreciate a fourteenth century scheme which is
dominated by the principle of graded progress.
We note that the souls which are not yet psychologically fit to begin
the regular course of purgation are kept outside, in Antepurgatory, for
a longer or shorter term of years, as each has need. The “Infants,”
so to speak, are graded among themselves, and are not grouped with
“Standard I.” Within the Gate, the seven terraces are arranged in an
order corresponding (not, of course, to a psychological series that would
be accepted as it stands to-day, but) to a very carefully-thought-out
classification of the seven capital sins; and until the lesson of a given
Terrace is completely mastered, there is no chance of moving up. When, on
the other hand, the teaching in that particular grade has been thoroughly
grasped and the pupil has nothing more to learn there, no power in heaven
or earth—or anywhere else—can keep him back. In Dante’s School there are
no mistakes in grading, and no wrong removes.
We have spoken of the “atmosphere” of the _Purgatorio_ as one of
“naturalness,” meaning by that, that it is an environment not calculated
to hamper or restrict normal and spontaneous development. It is “natural”
also in a more literal sense, in that the Poet has seen fit to depart
from the almost invariable tradition of his predecessors (who place
Purgatory underground, side by side with Hell, and make it scarcely
distinguishable therefrom save in the matter of duration) and to furnish
his penitents with an “open-air cure.”
It is this background of noble scenery, of landscape and skyscape, of
slope and scarp, of Flowery Valley and Divine Forest, of star-light and
dawn, of sunrise and high noon and sunset—it is this that gives its
peculiar beauty to the second _Cantica_ of the _Divine Comedy_. But
this open-air Purgatory is more than a clever artifice, by which a fine
dramatic contrast is produced after the murk and gloom of the _Inferno_.
It is, as we have seen, essential to Dante’s conception of the perfect
work of penitence in man, that it should draw his footsteps up to the
Earthly Paradise, the primal home of Innocence. And so the background
of the _Purgatorio_, as it were inevitably, completes the illusion of
“naturalness” in the world beyond, and enforces the parallel between
the upward struggle of those elect spirits and our own daily pilgrimage
in this life. It suggests further, all that the magic phrase “Open Air”
means to our modern ears: that healthy out-door life, nurse of the _mens
sana in corpore sano_, that life of robust activities in close contact
with external Nature of which the prime importance is recognised by all
schools of thought in the world of modern education.
Finally (and here we touch upon one of the most beautiful features of
Dante’s conception), the spiritual atmosphere, in spite of purgatorial
framework of the Seven Sins, is not that of the Decalogue, but of the
Beatitudes. The Sins themselves are interpreted as disordered Love,
and the manifold love which goes up to make a Saint is expressed in
sweetest harmony when each successive barrier is passed.[217] Love is the
atmosphere, and Love the supreme lesson, the learning whereof continues
beyond the grave.
The conception of Love as the universal motive power, expressed at length
in _Purg._ xvii. 91 _sqq._—
Nè creator nè creatura mai
Cominciò el, figliuol, fu sanza amore ...
suggests a comparison of Dante’s psychology with that of the most
modern school. In an age when (as a glance at Fra Salimbene’s pages
will demonstrate)—pages written, it must be remembered, for the eye of
a Sister of the Order of Sta Clara!—something more than Elizabethan
broadness of speech was not uncommon, Dante pours out volumes of prose
and verse, every line of which may be said to be suitable _pour les
jeunes filles_. He would scarcely have subscribed to that domination
of the Sex-instinct which is an axiom of the Freudian psychology. In
the lines referred to above he more or less adumbrates the doctrine of
“Libido”; but it does not occur to him to label that psychic force with
so doubtfully reputable a name as “Libido.” The noble title “Amor” is for
him, as for earlier philosophers, the more appropriate one.
It would, of course, be absurd to credit Dante with the place of a
pioneer of the twentieth century psychology of the Unconscious, which
had its roots in the Psychical Research of F. W. Myers and his friends,
and sprouted up to visible life and growth so recently under the hands
of the Viennese Freud and the Switzer Jung. But it would probably not
be too much to say, in view of his remarkably intelligent interest in
mental processes, and especially in the phenomena of dreams and of the
border-land between sleeping and waking, that, given the assets and the
advantages of our modern thinkers, he would have taken no mean place
among psychologists of the modern type.
From _Inf._ i. 10—Tant ’era pien di sonno—to _Par._ xxxiii. 58, we find
this interest displayed; and before we pass on to consider his teaching
on the more human aspect of Education, the personal relation between
Teacher and Pupil, it may be worth while to direct attention to one or
two passages which emphasise this point.
In the 30th Canto of _Inferno_[218] he uses as a simile that significant
situation in which the dreamer hopes he is dreaming—
Qual è colui che suo dannaggio sogna,
Che sognando desidera sognare ...
In another passage[219] he sketches a case where the wakened dreamer
forgets the “dream-cognition,” but is still dominated by the “affect”—
... Colui che somniando vede
Che dopo il sogno la passione impressa
Rimane, e l’ altro a la mente non riede....
Ere he quits the Terrace of Accidie, Dante falls asleep, and here he
describes[220] in vivid and picturesque language the process of going to
sleep, when thought follows thought in more or less inconsequent fashion—
Novo pensiero dentro a me si mise
Del qual più altri nacquero, e diversi;
E tanto d’un in altro vaneggiai,
Che gli occhi per vaghezza ricopersi,
E ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai.
At the opening of the next Canto[221] comes the dream—dream of the two
symbolic Ladies—and the awakening. The dreamer is apparently roused by
the intensity of a dream-stench; but his awakening is due as a matter of
fact to the arresting voice of Virgil, whose person is projected into the
“manifest content” of the dream a few lines earlier,[222] in the cry of
the “Donna Santa”—
O Virgilio, o Virgilio, chi è questa?
“Three times,” says Dante’s Guide, “have I called you. Get up, and come
along!”
... Il buon maestro, “Almen tre
Voci t’ ho messe,” dicea, “Surgi e viene!”
In the last Canto of _Purgatory_ proper[223] we have another picture of a
going to sleep and an awaking. The sleepiness has been induced by a sort
of natural self-hypnotism, the poet’s gaze steadily fixed on a few bright
stars seen through the confined opening between the cliffs as he lies on
the rocky stair.
Poco potea parer li del di fori;
Ma, per quel poco, vedev’ io le stelle
Di lor solere e più chiare e maggiori
Sì ruminando e sì mirando in quelle,
Mi prese il sonno; il sonno che sovente,
Anzi che ’l fatto sia, sa le novelle.
This time the awakening is not sudden or violent.[224] After the
altogether lovely dream of Lia—the sublimation of Dante’s desire,
suggested, or coloured, by the natural anticipations of one on the
threshold of the earthly Paradise—he wakes up quite naturally, his sleep
“breaking from him” with the breaking dawn.[225]
Le tenebre fuggian da tutti lati
E il sonno mio con esse; ond’ io leva’ mi.
Dante’s analysis of Dreams was naturally relative to the knowledge and
tendency of his day. The presaging quality of Dreams—
... Il sonno che sovente
Anzi che ’l fatto sia, sa le novelle;
like the proverbial belief that the truest dreams are those that come
before dawn—
... Presso al mattin del ver si sogna[226]
is not for him the fruit of scientific psycho-analysis; but rather the
unscientific or quasi-scientific deduction of untold generations of men
on whom the dreams that “came true” left a far deeper impress than the
large majority that proved fallacious.
Dante was, however, a real psychologist of his own time and date, as
many qualities of his thought and interest testify; and his discerning
interest in the dream-consciousness supplies a definite link between the
thinkers of the Trecento and our modern Masters.
III
It must not, however, be supposed that the somewhat specialised
comparison of Dante’s purgatorial scheme with the Montessori Method
sketched above[227] by any means exhausts the educational principles
of the _Purgatorio_; still less that it covers the whole area of
such principles enshrined in the _Divine Comedy_. The old-fashioned
relation between Master and Pupil has still something to be said for
it. The personal element cannot be eliminated, however great may be the
need—especially in certain stages of self-restraint and self-effacement.
This personal relation, in its permanently important aspects, is
beautifully figured in the relation between Dante as learner and Virgil,
Beatrice, and Statius as teachers.
Benedetto Croce[228] draws attention to the frequent _Intramesse
didascaliche_ which mark the XXIst and following Cantos of the
_Purgatorio_—notably the discourse of Statius on “generation” in _Purg._
xxv. “This poetry,” he says, “breathes throughout the spirit of the
Master who knows, and desires to make clear the idea he is expounding;
who stoops down towards the pupil to embrace him and lift him up
towards the Truth.”[229] Beatrice, again, as Croce points out,[230]
taking Virgil’s place in the journey through the skies, is like an
elder sister patiently schooling her younger brother. She helps him to
overcome his prejudices, to solve his problems, to conquer his doubts;
now turning upon him the eye of a fond mother nursing a delirious
child,[231] now laughing him out of his “childish notions,” the charm
of her resplendent beauty and the illumination of her smile giving just
that touch of romance to their relations that suggests the final stage
of the transfiguration of the half-earthly love of the _Vita Nuova_
into something wholly celestial. But the type of this relation between
Master and Pupil is most surely and most prominently drawn in that
which subsists all through the first two cantiche between Virgil and
Dante.[232] “Mia scuola,” Virgil calls this relation in the beautiful
scene with Statius;[233] and a striking feature of this “School,”
recurring in the same Canto[234] and elsewhere, is the close, intimate,
easy and even playful mutual understanding between Teacher and Pupil. To
this point we shall return; but first a word may be said on the sterner
aspect of Education, from the pupils’ point of view.
Granted that the “Primrose Path” is the only appropriate one for infant
steps to toddle on; that path itself has its ups and downs—slight
gradients from the adult point of view, but for the infant involving
a demand for real effort and adventure. And the end of man—our human
Good—lies above the zone where primroses bloom, on the heights: as Tasso
sings—
... In cima all’ erto e faticoso colle
Della virtù è riposto il nostro bene.[235]
Let us glance, then, at what Dante has to say about the sterner side of
Education—the necessary sacrifices that must be made for Liberty—and
about the responsibilities of the teacher in his relation to the pupil
whom he would guide up to freedom of mind and soul.
To the former we have already referred above (p. 102) in connection with
the Montessori principle of the joyous facing of difficulties. The hard
initial battle[236] is symbolically represented by the place which the
_Inferno_ holds in Dante’s quest of Liberty. For him indeed the “prime
battaglie” are the hardest. No essential routine or inevitable drudgery
which beset the path of learning can match in sheer distastefulness
the weary horror of that first part of the Poet’s journey, of which
his self-pitying anticipations are recorded in the lovely and pathetic
opening lines of the second canto: “The day was departing, and the
darkened air was relieving from their labours the animals on earth, and I
was preparing all alone to sustain the struggle alike of the journey and
of my piteous thoughts.”
Lo giorno se n’ andava, e l’ aere bruno
Toglieva gli animai che sono in terra
Dalle fatiche loro; e io sol uno
M’ apparecchiava a sostener la guerra
Sì del cammino e sì della pietate.[237]
The youthful scholar, in his quest for knowledge and truth and the
freedom that is truth’s guerdon, has not, as a rule, to face this literal
isolation in drudgery and painfulness. For him the social instinct and
the companionship of fellow-victims, not to say the healthy stimulus of
friendly rivalry and competition, are present to lighten his burden and
sweeten his lot. Yet each, after all, has to tackle the drudgery and the
difficulties for himself. There is no Royal Road. The Master may spur
him on with the vision of the “gladsome mountain which is the origin and
source of all joy.”
Dilettoso monte
Ch’ è principio e cagion di tutta gioia;
may encourage him to face the flames by the thought of the welcoming
smile of Beatrice on the other side: “as you tempt a child with an
apple!” “Mark you, my son, this barrier separates thee from Beatrice.”
Or vedi, figlio:
Tra Beatrice e te è questo muro;[238]
but, none the less, the grim journey has to be undertaken, the
distasteful plunge to be made. It is largely the Teacher’s attitude and
example that make this effort possible; that evoke the manly spirit in
the pupil, and encourage him to persevere in face of difficulties.
All this is recognised by the best modern theory and practice. “The New
Teaching,” says Professor Adams,[239] “does not seek to free the pupils
from effort”—we have seen that this is really the case, even in its
extremest form of Montessorianism, with its individualistic charter of
Child-liberty—“not ... to free the pupils from effort, but to encourage
them to strenuous work”; it “does not seek to get rid of drudgery, but
to make it tolerable by giving it a meaning, and shewing its relation to
the whole learning process in school, and to the whole process of living
in the world.” This is exactly Virgil’s attitude towards Dante. He is,
first of all, alert to cheer and encourage him in moments of special
difficulty. He encourages Dante both by example and by precept to mount
the grisly back of the monster Geryon, their sole means of descent into
the Abyss[240]; and later, when the flame has to be faced before entering
the Earthly Paradise,[241] he reminds him of the success of that past
experiment of faith, much in the manner of the noble self-encouragement
of that Homeric hero, who, known to Dante only at second-hand, yet
captured his imagination. “Be of good cheer, my heart, we have suffered
worse things ere this.”
τέτλαθι δὴ κραδίη, καὶ κύντερον ἄλλος ποτ’ ἔτλης.[242]
Or again, when at the foot of the mountain Dante is dismayed at its
steepness, the Master explains: “It is ever easier as you ascend.”[243]
When Dante is frightened as the Mountain trembles (_Purg._ xx. 135)
Virgil interposes with a call to confidence—
Non dubbiar mentr’ io ti guido
But Virgil not only encourages; he explains. From time to time he pauses
with the double object of giving his companion a breathing-space and
of enheartening him by an exposition of the end and purpose of the
drudgery—of the whole scheme, of which the experience they are now
undergoing is an integral and necessary part. Thus he expounds to his
disciple the topography of Hell when they have passed within the rampart
of the City of Dis, and before they begin the steep and terrible descent,
and encounter the Minotaur.[244] Again, after the uncomfortable ordeal
of the suffocating fumes on the Terrace of Wrath, he diverts his pupil’s
attention with a sketch of the order and inner meaning of the purgatorial
terraces, and explains how Sin, in all its deadly forms, is just
“disordered Love.”[245] And we may note in passing how this postponement
of the explanation and the detailed scheme till the movement of learning
is well on its course, is itself typical of the New Teaching,[246] and
grounded on sound psychological principles. Virgil supplies, indeed, in
the first Canto of the _Inferno_, a summary forecast of the journey, but
does not sit down at the beginning and burden his Pupil’s mind with an
elaboration of details. Nor can we leave the lecture on “Disordered Love”
of _Purg._ xvii. without drawing attention to the ideal relations of
Teacher and Pupil depicted in the following Canto, and especially to the
masterly way in which Virgil suggests ever fresh problems to Dante’s mind
and draws him on with an increasing “thirst to know.”[247]
The liberty which Education “goes seeking,” and in which its nobler forms
live and move as in a bracing atmosphere, demands some sacrifice alike
from Teacher and from Pupil. From the Pupil, especially in its earlier
middle stages, it demands a degree of submissiveness and docility,
and courage and perseverance to face distasteful drudgery; from the
Teacher, that self-restraint of which we have already spoken—yet not mere
self-effacement. Like the Divine Master, he must “begin to do and to
teach.”[248] He must be a fellow-pilgrim, sharing the toils of the road,
and over the roughest places a leader, even as Virgil volunteers to go
first where the grim descent begins into the “cieco mondo”: “I will go
first and thou shalt follow me.”
Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo.[249]
As fellow-pilgrim, he will not hesitate to let the Pupil witness
something of his distress. The Master girds himself to the descent pallid
with sympathetic suffering—_tutto smorto_[250]—nor does he hide the
tokens of shame and confusion when he becomes conscious that he has been
a party to an unwarranted delay.[251] And we note the effect of this
frankness on the Pupil—an enhancement of loyal admiration for the Master;
and, for his own conscience, a more delicate perception of moral values:
“He appeared to me self-reproached. O noble, stainless, conscience, how
bitter to thy taste is a trifling fault!”
El mi parea da se stesso rimorso;
O dignitosa coscienza e netta,
Come t’ è picciol fallo amaro morso!
Even so pleads the spirit of the New Teaching.[252] Let not the Teacher
“put on airs of omniscience and solemnity. He must be a part of the gay
company; he must not mind ‘giving himself away,’ he must be a human
being, not a wooden stick; gladly must he learn, and then he will gladly
teach.” Thus Virgil moves in Dante’s company as a fellow-learner, not
omniscient, not infallible; ever ready to confess with frankness his own
limitations, and to own up to his mistakes. In this spirit he apologises
to Pier delle Vigne[253] for the inconsiderate act to which he was forced
owing to his inability to convince Dante through the medium of his own
verses. In the same spirit he gives place to Nessus when a description is
needed of Nessus’ own region of the Inferno, reversing his _dictum_ about
the original descent: “Regard him (Nessus) as thy prime authority, and me
as secondary.”
Questi ti sia or primo, e io secondo.[254]
In like manner he gives way to Statius when an explanation is wanted of
the emaciation of spirits no longer subject to bodily hunger,[255] and
leads Dante to expect from Beatrice the completion of his own careful but
yet not fully satisfying exposition of a heavenly matter: “And if this
argument of mine doth not appease thy cravings thou wilt see Beatrice,
and she will fully relieve thee of this and every other desire.”
E se la mia ragion non ti disfama
Vedrai Beatrice, ed ella pienamente
Ti torrà questa e ciascun altra brama.[256]
Dante in his portrait of Virgil reminds us that the quest of Truth
demands “truth in the inward parts,” that a humble and limpid sincerity
is essential. Finally, he shews us this humility transfigured into a
Divine self-effacement, where the elder Poet hands over his disciple
entirely into his own guidance and that of Beatrice, in humble
acknowledgement of his own limitations.[257] This act of self-effacement
has indeed been in his mind from the first. When the time shall come
for Dante’s ascent to the realms of the _beate genti_, “a spirit more
worthy than I shall be appointed thereto, with whom I will leave thee at
my departure; for that Potentate who reigns in heaven above, because I
was rebellious against His law, wills not that any by my guidance should
enter His city.”
Anima fia a ciò più di me degna;
Con lei ti lascerò nel mio partire;
Chè quello imperador che là su regna
Perch’ io fu’ ribellante a la sua legge
Non vuol che ’n sua città per me si vegna.[258]
And so Virgil’s work is done, and the Teacher shews himself sublimest in
the last act. “The hardest lesson,” says the apostle of the New Teaching,
“for a clever teacher to learn, is to let a clever pupil be clever in
his own way,” nor “has a teacher been really successful” until “he has,
by skilful preparation, enabled his pupil to do without him.”[259] This
final self-effacement of the Teacher, with its corollary, the achievement
of self-mastery and self-determination in the Pupil—the achievement of
that _liberty of soul_ which is the supreme aim of the pilgrimage—is best
described in Virgil’s matchless words of farewell, which we may now quote
in their fulness. His “skilful preparation” has all led up to this ... to
make itself dispensable! “By force of wit and skill I have conducted thee
hither; henceforward let thine own pleasure be thy guide; from both the
steep and the narrow ways thou art now free.... No longer await either
word or sign from me; free, sound, and upright is thy will, and it would
be amiss not to do its bidding; wherefore over thyself I invest thee with
supreme control.”
Tratto t’ ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;
Fuor sei de l’ erte vie, fuor sei de l’ arte.
...
Non aspettar mio dir più, nè mio cenno,
Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio
E fallo fora non far a suo senno:
Perch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio.[260]
VI
DANTE AND ISLAM
(_As represented by_ “THE GOSPEL OF BARNABAS”)
E solo in parte vidi il Saladino.
—_Inf._ iv. 129.