lines that for ethereal beauty, are, I think unmatched; and I will not
presume to render them into verse. But what they say is that the Angel had
no need of mortal expedients, of sail, or oar, or anything beside, save
his own wings, that fanned the air with their eternal breath. The barque,
thus driven and thus steered, is equally unsubstantial and ideal, for it
makes no ripple in the wave through which it glides. But at length--not,
you may be quite sure, of purpose prepense, but guided by that unerring
instinct which is the great poet's supreme gift--Dante gradually passes
from idealistic to realistic treatment of the episode, thereby compelling
you, by what Shakespeare, in _The Tempest_, through the mouth of Prospero,
calls "my so potent art," to believe implicitly in its occurrence, even if
your incapacity to linger too long in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ideal
has begun to render you incredulous concerning it. For all at once he
introduces Casella, Florence, his own past cares and labours there, the
weariness of the spirit that comes over all of us, even from our very
spiritual efforts, and the soothing power of tender music. Then, with a
passing touch of happy egotism, which has such a charm for us in poets
that are dead, but which, I am told, is resented, though perhaps not by
the gracious or the wise, in living ones, Dante enforces our belief by
representing Casella as forthwith chanting a line of the poet's own that
occurs in a _Canzone_ of the _Convito_:
Amor che nella mente mi ragiona.
Love that holds high discourse within my mind.
For a moment we seem to be again transported into the pure realm of the
Ideal, as not Dante and Virgil alone, but the souls just landed on the
shores of Purgatory, are described as being so enthralled by the
song--_tutti fissi ed attenti_--that they can think of and heed nothing
else. But quickly comes another realistic touch in the reproof to the
spellbound spirits not there to loiter listening to the strain, but to
hurry forward to their destined bourne. Finally, as if to confirm the
impression of absolute reality, while not removing us from the world, or
withdrawing from us the charm, of the Ideal, the poet ends with the
exquisite but familiar simile of the startled doves already recited to
you.
What is the impression left, what the result produced, by the entire
canto? Surely it is that the poet's imagination, operating through the
poet's realistic treatment of the Ideal, and his idealistic treatment of
the Real, has taken us all captive, so that we feel nothing of the
_Incredulus odi_ disposition, the unwillingness to believe, and the mental
antipathy engendered by that unwillingness, so tersely and so truly
described by Horace, but yield credence wholly and absolutely to the
existence of a place called Purgatory, with its circles, its denizens, its
hopes, its aspirations, and purifying power. But, read where you will in
the pages of the _Divina Commedia_, you will find this is one of the main
causes of its permanent hold on the attention of the world. Its theology
may to many seem open to question, to some obsolete and out of date; its
astronomy necessarily labours under the disadvantage of having been prior
to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, not to speak of the
great astronomers of later date, including our own times; and its
erudition, weighty and wonderful as it is, can occasionally be shown by
more recent and more advantageously circumstanced scholarship to be faulty
and inaccurate. But so long as these are presented to us nimbused by the
wizard light that fuses the Real and the Ideal, we believe while we read
and listen, and that is enough. The very first line of the _Divina
Commedia_, so familiar to every one, though it is to introduce us to the
horrors of the _Inferno_, is so realistic, so within the range of the
experience of all who have reached the meridian of life or even looked on
that period in others, that we are at once predisposed to yield our
imagination passively to what follows. But I must allow that the passage
which does immediately follow, and which discourses of the panther, the
lion, and the wolf, is so symbolic, and has lent itself to so many
suggestions and interpretations, that, had the poem generally been
conceived and composed in that fashion, it would not only have fallen
short of immortality, it would long since have been buried in the pool of
Lethe, which is the predestined resting-place of all untempered and
unredeemed symbolism in verse. I smile, and I have no doubt you will smile
also, when I say that I, too, have my own interpretation of the inner
meaning of those three menacing beasts. But be assured I have not the
smallest intention of communicating it to you. I gladly pass on, gladly
and quickly, as Dante himself passes on, to a more welcome and less
disputable apparition, who answers, when questioned as to who and what he
is, that man he is not, but man he was; that his parents were of Lombardy,
and all his folk of Mantuan stock; that he lived in the age of the great
Caesar and the fortunate Augustus; that he was a poet--_Poeta fui_--sang of
the just and right-minded son of Anchises, the pious AEneas, who came to
Italy and founded a greater city even than Troy, when proud Ilium was
levelled to the dust. In the presence of Virgil we forget the embarrassing
symbolism of the preceding passage, and believe once more; and, when Dante
addresses him in lines of affectionate awe, that you all know by heart,
and with repeating which all lovers of poets and poetry console themselves
when the prosaic world passes on the other side, every doubt, every
misgiving, every lingering remnant of incredulity is dismissed, and we are
prepared, nay, we are eager, to take the triple journey, along two-thirds
of which Virgil tells Dante he has been sent by the _Imperador che lassu
regna_, the Ruler of the Universe, to conduct him. Prepared we are, nay,
eager, I say, to hear the _disperate strida_ of the _spiriti dolenti_, the
wailings of despair of the eternally lost, and the yearning sighs of those
_che son contenti nel fuoco_, who are resigned to purgatorial pain, and
scarce suffer from it, since they are buoyed up by the hope of finally
joining the _beate genti_, and, along with the blessed, seeing the face of
God.
Allor si mosse, ed io gli tenni dietro,
says Dante in the closing line of this, the First Canto of the _Divina
Commedia_.
Then moved he on, and I paced after him.
Could you have a more realistic touch? So realistic, so real is it, in the
Realm of the Ideal, that, just as Dante followed Virgil, so we follow
both, humble and unquestioning believers in whatever may be told us.
I am not unaware that, in an age in which the approval of inflexibly
avenging justice consequent on wrongdoing is less marked and less frequent
than sentimental compassion for the wrongdoer, the punishments inflicted
in the _Inferno_ for the infraction of the Divine Law, as Dante understood
it, are found repellent by many persons, and agreeable to few. I grant
that they are appalling in their sternness; nor was Dante himself
unconscious of this, for he does describe Minos as "scowling horribly" as
the souls of the damned came before him for judgment, and for
discriminating consignment to their allotted circle of torture. Always
terse, and therefore all the more terrible, he nevertheless exhausts the
vocabulary of torment in describing the _doloroso ospizio_, the dolorous
home from which they will never return. As Milton speaks of the "darkness
visible" of Hell, so Dante, before him, writes of it as _loco d'ogni luce
muto_, a place silent of light, but that wails and moans like a
tempestuous sea, battered and buffeted by jarring winds, finally
designated
La bufera infernal, che mai non resta.
The infernal hurricane that ceases never.
Of those who are whirled about by it, _di qua, di la, di giu, di su_,
hither and thither, upward and downward, he writes the awful line:
Nulla speranza li conforta mai,
Non che di posa, ma di minor pena.
They have no hope of consolation ever,
Or even mitigation of their woe.
I could not bring myself, and I am sure you would not wish me to cite more
minutely, the magnificently merciless phrases--all of them thoroughly
realistic touches concerning ideal torment--wherewith Dante here makes his
_terza rima_ an instrument or organ on which to sound the very diapason of
the damned; and, did he dwell overlong on those deep, distressing octaves
of endless suffering, without passing by easy and natural gradations into
the pathetic minor, he would end by alienating all but the austerer
natures. But he is too great an artist, too human, too congenitally and
rootedly a poet, to make that mistake. I am sure you all know in which
canto of the _Inferno_ occur the terrific phrases I have been citing, and
need no telling that they are immediately followed by the most tender and
tearful passage in the wide range of poetic literature. While even yet the
sound of _la bufera infernal_ seems howling in our ears, suddenly it all
subsides, and we hear instead a musically plaintive voice saying:
Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.
The land where I was born sits by the sea,
Unto whose shore a restless river rolls,
To be at peace with all its followers.
Then comes the love-story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, told
in such exquisite accents, so veiled in music, so transfigured by verse,
that even the sternest moralist, I imagine, can hardly bring himself to
call it illicit. I confess I think it the loveliest single passage in
poetry ever written; yes, lovelier even than anything in Shakespeare, for
it has all Shakespeare's genius, and more than Shakespeare's art; and I
compassionate the man or woman who, having had the gift of birth, goes
down to the grave without having read it. There is no such other
love-story, no such other example of the _lacrymae rerum_, the deep abiding
tearfulness of things. Nothing should be taken from, nothing can be added
to it. To me it seems sacred, like the Ark of the Covenant, that no one
must presume to touch; and I own I tremble as I presume, here and there,
to attempt, unavailingly, to translate it. It was my good fortune to be in
Florence in the month of May 1865, when the City of Flowers, the City of
Dante, which then seemed peopled with nightingales and roses, was
celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her exiled poet;
and those of us who loved him assembled in the Pagliano Theatre to hear
Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi repeat, to the accompaniment of living
pictures, the best-known passages of the _Divina Commedia_. One of those
supreme elocutionists, who still lives, recited the story of Paolo and
Francesca; and from her gifted voice we heard of the _tempo de' dolci
sospiri_ and _i dubbiosi aesiri_, the season of sweet sighs and hesitating
desires, the _disiato riso_, the longed-for smile, the trembling kiss, the
closing of the volume, and then the final lines of the canto:
Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse,
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
Io venni men cosi com'io morisse:
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.
While the one told to us this dolorous tale,
The other wept so bitterly, that I
Out of sheer pity felt as like to die;
And down I fell, even as a dead body falls.
This unmatched tale of tender transgression and vainly penitential tears
almost reconciles us to the more abstract description of punishment that
precedes it, and the detailed account of pitiless penalty that follows
it, in succeeding cantos; and the absolute fusion of the ideal and the
real in the woeful story imparts to it a verisimilitude irresistible even
by the most unimaginative and incredulous. Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, are
names so familiar to us all that any story concerning them would have to
be to the last degree improbable to move our incredulity. But who is it
that is not prepared to believe in the sorrows of a love-tale?
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
It is the greatest of all masters of the human heart, the greatest and
wisest teacher concerning human life, who tells us that; and Dante, who in
this respect is to be almost as much trusted as Shakespeare himself, makes
Francesca, with her truly feminine temperament, say:
Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer si forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.
Love that compels all who are loved to love,
Entangled both in such abiding charm,
That, as you see, he still deserts me not.
As we hear those words, it is no longer Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, Paolo,
Francesca, that arrest our attention and rivet it by their reality. We are
enthralled by the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you
will, of the larger and wider world we all inhabit, of this vast and
universal theatre, of whose stage Love remains to-day, as it was
yesterday, and will remain for ever, the central figure, the dominant
protagonist.
So far we have seen, by illustrations purposely taken from passages in the
_Inferno_ and the _Purgatorio_ familiar to all serious readers of the
_Divine Comedy_, how Dante, by realistic touches, makes us believe in the
ideal, and how, by never for long quitting the region of the Ideal, he
reconciles us to the most accurate and merciless realism. But there is a
third Realm to which he is admitted, and whither he transports us, the
_Paradiso_. Some prosaically precise person would, perhaps, say that the
thirtieth canto of the _Purgatorio_ is not a portion of the _Paradiso_.
But you know better, for in it Beatrice appears to her poet-lover:
Sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color di fiamma viva,
In mantle green, and girt with living light,
while angelic messengers and ministers from Heaven round her scatter
lilies that never fade; and when Dante, overcome by the celestial vision,
turns to Virgil with the same instinctive feeling of trust
Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma,
Quando ha paura
--trust such as is shown by a little child hurrying to its mother when
afraid, and exclaims, translating a line of Virgil's own:
Conosco i segni dell' antica fiamma,
O how I know, and feel, and recognise
The indications of my youthful love;--
he finds that Virgil, _dolcissimo padre_, his gentle parent and guide, has
left him, and he stands alone in the presence of Beatrice, and hears her
voice saying:
Non pianger anco, non pianger ancora;
Che pianger ti convien per altra spada.
Weep not as yet, Dante, weep not as yet,
Though weep you shortly shall, and for good cause.
Tearless, and with downcast eyes, he listens to her just reproaches,
trying not even to see the reflection of himself in the water of the
translucent fountain at his side:--
Tanta vergogna mi gravo la fronte.
So strong the shame that weighed my forehead down.
And so he turns aside his glance to the untransparent sward, till comes
the line, awful in its reproving simplicity:
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice!
Look at me well! Yes, I am Beatrice!
Then full and fast flow the tears, like melting snows of Apennine under
Slavonian blast.
But there is yet worse to come, yet harder to bear, when, not even
addressing him, but turning from him to her heavenly escort, she speaks of
him as "_Questi_," "this man," and tells them, in his hearing, how much
his love for her might have done for him, had he still lived the _vita
nuova_, the pure fresh life with which love had inspired him while she was
yet on earth. But when she was withdrawn from him to Heaven, when she was
of flesh disrobed and became pure spirit, and so was more deserving of
love than before.
Questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.
This man from me withdrew himself, and gave
Himself to others.
What think you of that as a realistic treatment of the Ideal? If there be
any among my audience, members of the sex commonly supposed to be the
wiser, who but partly feel and imperfectly apprehend it, then let them ask
any woman they will what she thinks of it, and she will answer, "It is
supreme, it is unapproachable."
After such an illustration of the power of Dante over one of the main
secrets of fascination in great poetry, it is unnecessary to go in search
of more. With illustrating my theme of this evening I have done, and it
only remains to add a few words of repetition and enforcement of what has
been already indicated, lest perchance, if they were omitted, my meaning
and purpose should be misapprehended or overlooked. Did you happen to
observe that, a little while back, I used the phrase, "the ideal realism,
or realistic idealism, call it which you will"? But now, before
concluding, let me say, what has been in my mind all along, and has been
there for many years, that great poetry consists of the combination of
ideal Realism, realistic Idealism, and Idealism pure and simple. Upon that
point much might be said, and perhaps some day I may venture to say it. In
all ages the disposition of the more prosaic minds--by which term I do not
mean minds belonging to persons devoid of feeling, or even of sentiment,
but persons destitute of the poetic sense, or of what Poetry essentially
is--has been to incline, in works of fiction whether in prose or verse, to
Realism pure and simple; and the present Age, thanks to the invention of
photography and the dissemination of novels that seek to describe persons
and things such as they are or are supposed to be, has a peculiar and
exceptional leaning in that direction. The direction is a dangerous one,
for the last stage of Realism pure and simple in prose fiction is the
exhibition of demoralised man and degraded woman. In poetry, thank Heaven,
that operation is impossible. No doubt, it is possible in verse just as it
is possible in prose, and perhaps even more so; and there are persons who
will tell you that it is Poetry. But it is not, and never can be made
such. Poetry is either the idealised Real, the realistic Ideal, or the
Ideal pure and simple. In other words, as I long since endeavoured to
show, Poetry is Transfiguration. Attempts are made in these days, as we
all well know, to get you to accept Realism pure and simple as the newest
and most inspired utterance of the Heavenly Maid. But they will not be
successful. In that great hall of the Vatican, whither throng pilgrims
from every quarter of the world, and to whose walls Raphael has bequeathed
the ripest and richest fruits of his lucid, elevated, and elevating
genius, is a presentation of the Muse. She is seated on a throne of
majestic marble. Her feet are planted on the clouds, but her laurelled
head and outstretched wings are high in the Empyrean, and round her maiden
throat is a circlet enamelled with the unageing stars. With one hand she
cherishes the lyre, with the other she grasps the Book of Wisdom; and her
attendants are, not the sycophants of passing popularity, but the eternal
angels of God, upholding a scroll wherein are inscribed the words _Numine
afflatur_. She sings only when inspired. That is the Muse for me. Surely
it is the Muse for you. At any rate, it was the Muse of Dante; the Muse
that inspired the _Divina Commedia_ through his love for Beatrice. As an
old English song has it, "'Tis love that makes the world go round," a
homely truth that Dante idealised and transfigured in the last line of his
immortal poem:
L'Amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.
Love,
That lights the sun and makes the planets sing;
love of Love, love of Beauty, love of Virtue, love of Country, love of
Mankind; or, as one might put it in this age of physical discovery:
Electric love illuminates the world.