reality and completeness of passion, though it is passion for a woman
whom the poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, we must go
back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, of Sappho or Catullus; for
modern times are too hesitating and weak. So at least it seems; but in
fact, if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in no earthly
love can we find this reality and completeness: it is possible only in
love like Dante's. For there can be no unreality in it: it is a reality
of the imagination, and leaves, with all its mysticism and idealism, no
room for falsehood. Any other kind of love may be set aside, silenced,
by the activity of the mind; this love of Dante's constitutes that very
activity. And, after reading that last page which I have above
transcribed, as those closing Latin words echo through our mind like the
benediction from an altar, we feel as if we were rising from our knees
in some secret chapel, bright with tapers and dim with incense; among a
crowd kneeling like ourselves; yet solitary, conscious of only the glory
we have seen and tasted, of that love _qui est per omnia scecula
benedictus._
III.
But is it right that we should feel thus? Is it right that love,
containing within itself the potentialities of so many things so sadly
needed in this cold real world, as patience, tenderness, devotion, and
loving-kindness--is it right that love should thus be carried away out
of ordinary life and enclosed, a sacred thing for contemplation, in the
shrine or chapel of an imaginary Beatrice? And, on the other hand, is it
right that into the holy places of our soul, the places where we should
come face to face with the unattainable ideal of our own conduct that we
may strive after something nobler than mere present pleasure and
profit--is it right that into such holy places, destined but for an
abstract perfection, there should be placed a mere half-unknown, vaguely
seen woman? In short, is not this "Vita Nuova" a mere false ideal, one
of those works of art which, because they are beautiful, get worshipped
as holy?
This question is a grave one, and worthy to make us pause. The world is
full of instances of the fatal waste of feelings misapplied: of human
affections, human sympathy and compassion, so terribly necessary to
man, wasted in various religious systems, upon Christ and God: of
religious aspirations, contemplation, worship, and absorption, necessary
to the improvement of the soul, wasted in various artistic or poetic
crazes upon mere pleasant works, or pleasant fancies, of man;
wastefulness of emotions, wastefulness of time, which constitute
two-thirds of mankind's history and explain the vast amount of evil in
past and present. The present question therefore becomes, is not this
"Vita Nuova" merely another instance of this lamentable carrying off of
precious feelings in channels where they result no longer in
fertilization, but in corruption? The Middle Ages, especially, in its
religion, its philosophy, nay, in that very love of which I am writing,
are one succession of such acts of wastefulness. This question has come
to me many a time, and has left me in much doubt and trouble. But on
reflection I am prepared to answer that such doubts as these may safely
be cast behind us, and that we may trust that instinct which, whenever
we lay down the "Vita Nuova," tells us that to have felt and loved this
book is one of those spiritual gains in our life which, come what may,
can never be lost entirely.
The "Vita Nuova" represents the most exceptional of exceptional moral
and intellectual conditions. Dante's love for Beatrice is, in great
measure, to be regarded as an extraordinary and exquisite work of art,
produced not by the volition of man, but by the accidental combination
of circumstances. It is no more suited to ordinary life than would a
golden and ivory goddess of Phidias be suited to be the wife of a mortal
man. But it may not therefore be useless; nay, it may be of the highest
utility. It may serve that high utilitarian mission of all art, to
correct the real by the ideal, to mould the thing as it is in the
semblance of the thing as it should be. Herein, let it be remembered,
consists the value, the necessity of the abstract and the ideal. In the
long history of evolution we have now reached the stage where selection
is no longer in the mere hands of unconscious nature, but of conscious
or half-conscious man; who makes himself, or is made by mankind,
according to not merely physical necessities, but to the intellectual
necessity of realizing the ideal, of pursuing the object, of imitating
the model, before him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of
that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and gold, nay,
marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing; flesh is another, and
flesh fashioned by mere blind accident. But the man who should have
beheld that Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfection,
would not have been as easily satisfied as any other with a mere
commonplace living woman; he would have sought--and seeking, would have
had more likelihood of finding--the woman of flesh and blood who nearest
approached to that ivory and gold perfection. The case is similar with
the "Vita Nuova." No earthly affection, no natural love of man for
woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for another entire human
being, can ever be the counterpart of this passion for Beatrice, the
passion of a mere mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old
lust-fattened evil of the world is to diminish rather than to increase,
why then every love of man for woman and of woman for man should tend,
to the utmost possibility, to resemble that love of the "Vita Nuova."
For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind merely by the
development of those possibilities of intellectual and moral passion
which the animal has not got; an animal man will never cease to be, but
a man he can daily more and more become, until from the obscene
goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we commonly see, he has turned
into something like certain antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not
noticeably a beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature.
In order that this may come to pass--and its coming to pass means, let
us remember, the enormous increase of happiness and diminution of misery
upon earth--it is necessary that day by day and year by year there
should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits, into his whole
life, a greater proportion of that which is his own, and is not shared
by the animal; that his actions, preferences, the great bulk of his
conscious existence, should be busied with things of the soul, truth,
good, and beauty, and not with things of the body. Hence the love of
such a gradually improving and humanizing man for a gradually improving
and humanizing woman, should become, as much as is possible, a
connection of the higher and more human, rather than of the lower and
more bestial, portions of their nature; it should tend, in its
reciprocal stimulation, to make the man more a man, the woman more a
woman, to make both less of the mere male and female animals that they
were. In brief, love should increase, instead, like that which oftenest
profanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration, of
self-direction, of self-restraint, which may exist within us. Now to
tend to this is to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend
towards the love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this. Say what
you will of the irresistible force of original constitution, it remains
certain, and all history is there as witness, that mankind--that is to
say, the only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good, mankind which
can judge and select--possesses the faculty of feeling and acting in
accordance with its standard of feeling and action; the faculty in great
measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable to become. Now to
have perceived the even imaginary existence of such a passion as that of
Dante for Beatrice, must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step
towards attempting to bring into reality a something of that passion:
the real passion conceived while the remembrance of that ideal passion
be still in the mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as,
according to the ancients, the children born of mothers whose rooms
contained some image of Apollo or Adonis would have in them a reflex,
however faint, of that beauty in whose presence they came into
existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita Nuova" embodies
the utmost ideal of absolutely spiritual love, and as to spiritualize
love must long remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world,
there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value, a power in its
unearthly passion and purity, which, as much as anything more
deliberately unselfish, more self-consciously ethical, we must
acknowledge and honour as holy.
As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita Nuova" cannot but
strive towards a purer nature, so also the love of which poets sang
became also nobler as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of
platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing to men the
knowledge of a kind of love born of that idealizing and worshipping
passion of the Middle Ages; but of mediaeval love chastened by the
manners of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of Christian
mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this influence of the "Vita
Nuova"--for the "Vita Nuova" had concentrated in itself all the
intensest characteristics of Dante's immediate predecessors and
contemporaries, causing them to become useless and forgotten--of this
influence of the "Vita Nuova," there is perhaps no more striking example
than that of the poet who, constituted by nature to be the mere
continuator of the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours,
became, and hence his importance and glory, the mediator between Dante
and the centuries which followed him; the man who gave to mankind,
incapable as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual essence of
the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of intellectual love in an
immortal dilution. I speak, of course, of Petrarch. His passion is
neither ideal nor strong. The man is in love, or has been in love,
existing on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the beautiful
woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly, half-scholarly, and
altogether courtly mind is delighted with her; with her curly yellow
hair, her good red and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's
Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not than this Laura,
descended from all the golden-haired bright-eyed ladies of the
troubadours!), with her manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity
in this ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains a
semi-artificial love; frequenting her house, writing sonnet after
sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from the antique and the
Provencal, for the most part; he, who was born to be a mere troubadour
like Ventadour or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante, the
type of the poet Abate, of the poetic _cavaliere servente_; a good, weak
man with aspirations, who, failing to get the better of Laura's virtue,
doubtless consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual
contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a troubadour, an
Italian priest turned partly Provencal, vexed at her not becoming his
mistress; then (having made up his mind, which was but little set upon
her), quite pleased at her refusal: it turns her into a kind of
Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him! into a kind of Dante--a
Dante for the use of the world at large. He goes on visiting Laura, and
writing to her a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the best,
carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at regular intervals.
It is a determined cultus, a sort of half-real affectation, something
equivalent to lighting a lamp before a very well-painted and very
conspicuous shrine. All his humanities, all his Provencal lore go into
these poems--written for whom? For her? Decidedly; for she has no reason
not to read the effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet; she feels
nothing for him. For her; but doubtless also to be handed round in
society; a new sonnet or canzone by that charming and learned man, the
Abate Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this: he praises
Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then praises her again; adores
her, calls her cruel, his goddess, his joy, his torment; he does not
really want her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does;
calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic names which mean
nothing. He plays loud and soft with this absence of desire; he fiddle
faddles in descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but
delicately undressed: he sees her (but with chaste eyes) in her bath;
he envies her veil, &c.; he neither violently intellectually embraces,
nor humbly bows down in imagination before her; he trifles gracefully,
modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the locks of her
hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing Beatrice; fancy Dante talking of
Beatrice in her bath; the mere idea of his indignation and shame makes
one shameful and indignant at the thought. But this perfect Laura is no
Beatrice, or only a half-and-half sham one. She is no ideal figure,
merely a figure idealized; this is no imaginative passion, merely an
unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion of Laura's possible
death with the suggestion of the possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch
does not love sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then
Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing of the dear old
habits, the absence of the sweet reality, the terrible sense that all is
over, Death, the great poetizer and giver of love philters, all this
makes him love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor weak
creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek a new mistress when the
old one fails him, feels dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary
around him; he sits down and cries, and his crying is genuine, making
the tears come also into our eyes. And Laura, as she becomes a more
distant ideal, becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly
graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living Beatrice. And,
as he goes on, growing older and weaker and more desolate, the thought
of a glorified Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the
weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante was haunted by the
thought of Beatrice alive. Yet, even at this very time, come doubts of
the lawfulness of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a mortal
woman; he does not know whether all this may not have been vanity and
folly; he tries to turn his thoughts away from Laura and up to God.
Perhaps he may be called on to account for having given too much of his
life to a mere earthly love. Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in
his memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away. He is weak, and
sad, and helpless, and alone; and his heart is empty; he knows not what
to think nor how to feel; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere could
there be found a stranger contrast than this nostalgic craving after the
dead Laura, vacillating and troubled by fear of sin and doubt of
unworthiness of object, with that solemn ending of the "Vita Nuova,"
where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last time before it be
glorified in Paradise, where Dante devotes his life to becoming worthy
of saying "such words as have never been said of any lady." The ideal
woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and unchangeable is the passion
of her lover; but of this sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and
cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-unworthiness all her
life, of her the poor weak Petrarch begins to doubt, of her and her
worthiness of all this love; and when? when she is dead and himself is
dying.
Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible purifying and
elevating power of the "Vita Nuova,'" this man came to write not other
_albas_ and _serenas,_ not other love-songs to be added to the
love-songs of Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for four
centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to receive Dante's passion
at first hand, a nobler and more spiritual love. After Petrarch a
gradual change takes place in the poetic conception of love: except in
learned revivalisms or in loose buffooneries, the mere fleshly love of
Antiquity disappears out of literature; and equally so, though by a
slower process of gradual transformation, vanishes also the adoring, but
undisguisedly adulterous love of the troubadours and minnesingers. Into
the love Instincts of mankind have been mingled, however much diluted,
some drops of the more spiritual passion of Dante. The _puella_ of
Antiquity, the noble dame of feudal days, is succeeded in Latin
countries, in Italy, and France, and Spain, and Portugal, by the
_gloriosa donna_ imitated from. Petrarch, and imitated by Petrarch from
Dante; a long-line of shadowy figures, veiled in the veil of Madonna
Laura, ladies beloved of Lorenzo and Michael Angelo, of Ariosto, and
Tasso, and Camoens, and Cervantes, passes through the world; nay, even
the sprightly-mistress of Ronsard, half-bred pagan and troubadour has
airs of dignity and mystery which make us almost think that in this
dainty coquettish French body, of Marie or Helene or Cassandrette, there
really may be an immortal soul. But with the Renaissance--that movement
half of mediaeval democratic progress, and half of antique revivalism,
and to which in reality belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and
every one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni, Cavalcanti, who
broke with the feudal poetry of Provence and Sicily--with the
Renaissance, or rather with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for
the moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin peoples in the
domain of poetry. All the things for two centuries which Italy and
France and Spain and Portugal (which we must remember for the sake of
Camoens) continue to produce, are but developments of parts left
untouched; or refinements of extreme detail, as in the case,
particularly, of the French poets of the sixteenth century; but poetry
receives from these races nothing new or vital, no fresh ideal or
fruitful marriage of ideals. And here begins, uniting in itself all the
scattered and long-dormant powers of Northern poetry, the great and
unexpected action of England. It had slept through the singing period of
the Middle Ages, and was awakened, not by Germany or Provence, but by
Italy: Boccaccio and Petrarch spoke, and, as through dreams, England in
Chaucer's voice, made answer. Again, when the Renaissance had drawn to a
close, far on in the sixteenth century, English poetry was reawakened;
and again by Italy. This time it was completely wakened, and arose and
slept no more. And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by
English poetry in this its final awakening was to give to the world the
new, the modern, perhaps the definitive, the final ideal of love.
England drank a deep draught--how deep we see from Sidney's and
Spenser's sonnets--of Petrarch; and in this pleasant dilution, tasted
and felt the burning essence of the "Vita Nuova;" for though Dante
remained as the poet, the poet of heaven and hell, this happy
half-and-half Petrarch had for full two centuries completely driven into
oblivion the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For England, for this
magnificent and marvellous outburst of all the manifold poetic energy
stored up and quintupled during that long period of inertness, there
could however be no foreign imported ideal of love; there was no
possibility of a new series of spectral Lauras, shadows projected by a
shadow. Already, long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by
the side of the merely mediaeval love types--of brutish lust and doglike
devotion--of the Wife of Bath and of Griseldis, had rough-sketched a
kind of modern love, the love which is to become that of Romeo and
Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among the poetic material
which existed in England at the close of the sixteenth century was the
old, long-neglected, domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, essentially
unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed also of the Greek and
Hindoo) epics; a domestic love which, in a social condition more closely
resembling our own than any other, even than that of the Italian
democracies, which had preceded it; among a people who permitted a woman
to choose her own husband, and forbade a man wooing another man's wife,
had already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint-twitter of song.
To this love of the man and the woman who hope to marry, strong and
tender, but still (as Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser
Elizabethan playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by the pure
spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of Shakespeare, that vivifying
drop of burning, spiritual love taken from out of the "Vita Nuova,"
which had floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top of
Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world possesses a new kind of
love: the love of Romeo, of Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of
Juliet; the love of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning
and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, exaggeration of passion,
all that might have made it foolish and impracticable, leads no longer
to folly and sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination
of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization in our fancy of
all our vague dreams of perfection; a love which, though it may cool
down imperceptibly and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires
into a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of the wife, some
glory in the heart of the husband, has been, however fleeting, a vision
of beauty which has made beauty more real. And all this owing to the
creation, the storing up, the purification by the Platonic poets of
Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so artificial and unreal thing,
mediaeval love; the very forms and themes of whose poetry, the _serena_
and the _alba_, which had been indignantly put aside by the early
Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and purified and
consecrated in the two loveliest love poems of Elizabethan poetry: the
_serena_, the evening song of impatient expectation in Spenser's
Epithalamium; the _alba_, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the
balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet."
Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave to mankind a more
refined and spiritual love, a love all chivalry, fidelity, and
adoration, but a love steeped in the poison of adultery; and to save the
pure and noble portions of this mediaeval love became the mission of the
Tuscan poets of that strange school of Platonic love which in its very
loveliness may sometimes seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing
this mediaeval love to a mere intellectual passion, seeking in woman
merely a self-made embodiment of cravings after perfection, they
cleansed away that deep stain of adultery; they quadrupled the intensity
of the ideal element; they distilled the very essential spirit of poetic
passion, of which but a few drops, even as diluted by Petrarch,
precipitated, when mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to
the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser ingredients.
And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to
appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful
conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century
for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains
concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all time the
sovereign purifier to which the world must have recourse whenever that
precipitate of baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love
poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the purity of the love
poetry of to-day.
EPILOGUE.