So wise in all she ought to know,
So ignorant in all beside.
Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the
description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to
Literature and Art homely tasks thus described?--
... She brims the pail,
Straining the udders with her dainty palms,
Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream,
And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms,
Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.
A wimple on her head, and kirtled short,
She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind,
A heavenly earthliness.
In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated
passage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the
_Iliad_, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero,
before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp
the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the passage in the
original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:
So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But
the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse,
dismayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair
crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then his
dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith
glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all
gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled
him in his arms.
Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident,
founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to
Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like
Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman.
Only in an age sicklied o'er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality
could it be otherwise.
But a poet's ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not
only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect,
Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most--indeed, nearly all--of
the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the
Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it
must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater,
had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he
describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part,
also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he
had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed
womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before
his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines
from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among
those whom
Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.
She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless
torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:
A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,
Che libito fe lecito in sua legge,
Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.
She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting
others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would
otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to
Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her
along with "lustful Cleopatra" in the same passage. To Helen he is more
indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty
cause of dire events, "_per cui tanto reo tempo si volse_"; but she does
not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much
more damning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of the _AEneid_,
where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter
Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim
to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in
the hour of her lord's triumph.
But what is Dante's attitude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most
beautiful passage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry?
Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves
against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be
regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never
felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic
compassion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he
brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour,
the place, the circumstances of her disinterested and unselfish
surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story,
lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be
purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in
themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that
when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were
suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt
troubled for them and bewildered.
Pieta mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.
The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in
the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and
when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply
is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them,
and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves
floating to call, and Francesca's recognition of Dante with the words:
O animal grazioso e benigno!
who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her
narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his
own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, "What think you?"
Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:
... O lasso,
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio
Meno costoro al doloroso passo!
and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears
and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet's sympathy, she tells
him what happened, "_al tempo de' dolci sospiri_," in the season of sweet
sighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and
that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she
speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from
recalling
... il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her
narrative:
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and
Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And
Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the
ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he
utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he
done so.
Let us now turn from the fifth book of the _Inferno_ to the third of the
_Paradiso_, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante's poetic conception
of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her
lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she
herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on
than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place
in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to
violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:
Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,
that she was a nun dedicated to God, and goes on to tell how she was
violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his
accomplices, to further family ambition, and compelled to submit to the
marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not
detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively
inferior position in Paradise she says she is assigned among celestial
denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the
noblest and most beautiful passages in the whole of the _Divina Commedia_.
Like all fine passages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another
tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am
acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley--no Cary, mark you--in _terza rima_,
and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was
beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the
then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda's
reply:
Our will, O brother mine, is kept at rest
By power of heavenly love, which makes us will,
For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.
If we should crave to be exalted still
More highly, then our will would not agree
With His, who gives to us the place we fill.
For 'tis of our own will the very ground,
That in the will of God we govern ours.
Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpassed by any line
even in Dante:
In la sua voluntade e nostra pace.
Our peace is in submission to His will.
Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and
bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as
a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in
subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes
in them?
But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante
that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry
the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and
forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her
vows,
Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.
She wore the vestal's veil within her heart.
And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin
of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:
... _Ave
Maria_, cantando; e cantando vanio,
She faded from our sight, singing _Ave Maria_,
and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he
regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what
that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and
growth of his adoration of her, as described in the _Vita Nuova_.
To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has
suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to
urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein
described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not
about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for
spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was
Dante's overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an
interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the
emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but
intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.
Of the reality underlying the idealism of the _Vita Nuova_, we therefore
need have no doubt whatever. Dante's Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a
Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the
Corso, near the Canto de' Pazzi.
All that follows in the narrative of the _Vita Nuova_ may be relied on
just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her
again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older
than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how,
with the naif shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble
it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made
Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her
indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how,
thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her
twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above.
Then the _Vita Nuova_ draws mournfully to a close, ending with these
significant words:--
After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful
vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more
of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more
worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto
this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all
things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that
of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it
please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see
the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in
glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.
For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to the _Divina
Commedia_, written in the fullness of the Poet's powers. But there are
three lines in the _Vita Nuova_ about the death of Beatrice that have
haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all
will feel:
Non la ci tolse qualita di gelo,
Ne di color, siccome l'altro fece,
Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:
lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she
died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals,
but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered
earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true
home.
It is not necessary to comment here on the First Canto of the _Divina
Commedia_. That, one has done already before the Dante Society, and it is
not requisite for one's present theme. But in Canto the Second we meet
with the Beatrice of the _Vita Nuova_. She it is that sends Virgil, who
dwells in the neutral territory of Limbo, to the Poet, saying:
Io son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare:
Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.
And not only does she say that she is animated by love, which has caused
her, now in Heaven, to feel so compassionately towards him, but also
because he loved her so while she was on earth, and continued to do so
after she had quitted it, with a fidelity that has lifted him above the
crowd of ordinary mortals, and made of him a Poet. Here, let it be said in
passing, we get another indication of Dante's poetic conception of Woman,
which is, among other qualities, to co-operate in the making and fostering
of Poets, a mission in which they have never been wanting. Where, indeed,
is the Poet who could not say of some woman, and, if he be fortunate, of
more than one, what, in the Twenty-second Canto of the _Purgatorio_, Dante
makes Statius say to Virgil, "_Per te poeta fui_," "It was through you
that I became a Poet."
Throughout the remaining Cantos of the _Inferno_, Beatrice naturally is
never mentioned, nor yet in the _Purgatorio_, till we reach Canto the
Thirtieth, wherein occurs perhaps the most painful scene in the
awe-inspiring poem. In it she descends from Heaven, an apparition of
celestial light, compared by the Poet to the dazzling dawn of a glorious
day. Smitten with fear, he turns for help to Virgil, but Virgil has left
him. "Weep not," says Beatrice to him, "that Virgil is no longer by your
side; you will need all your tears when you hear me." Then begins her
terrible arraignment:
Guardaci ben: ben sem, ben sem Beatrice.
Look on me well! Yes, I am Beatrice.
Confused, Dante gazes upon the ground, and then glances at a fountain hard
by; but, seeing his own image trembling in the water, he lowers his eyes
to the green sward encircling it, and fixes them there, while she upbraids
him for his deviation from absolute fidelity to her memory, and his
disregard of her heavenly endeavours still to help and purify him.
Boccaccio says that Dante was a man of strong passions, and possibly,
indeed probably, he was. But Beatrice seems to reproach him with only one
transgression, and, if one is to say what one thinks, she has always
appeared to me a little hard on him. Nor does she rest content till she
has compelled him to confess his fault. He does so, and then she tells him
to lay aside his grief, and think no more of it, for he is forgiven.
Perhaps, in mitigation of the feeling that her severity was in excess of
the cause, one ought to remember, since it is peculiarly pertinent to my
theme, that we are in the above harrowing scene presented with the
crowning characteristic of Dante's poetic conception of Woman, that, be
the offence against her what it may, she forgets and forgives.
It might be interesting on some other occasion to inquire how far Dante's
poetic conception of Woman is shared by Poets generally, and by the
greater Poets of our own land in particular. Meanwhile one may affirm that
the inquiry would serve to show that it is in substance the same, though
no other Poet, in whatsoever tongue, has extolled and glorified a woman as
Dante did Beatrice. But Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott,
Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, could all be shown, by apposite
illustration, to leave on the mind a conception of woman as a being
tender, devoted, faithful, helpful, "sweet, and serviceable," as Tennyson
says of Elaine, quick to respond to affection, sensitive to beauty in
Nature and Arts, sympathising companion alike of the hearth and of man's
struggle with life--in a word, a creature of whom it is true to say, as,
indeed, Byron _has_ said, that "Love is her whole existence," meaning by
Love not what is too frequently in these days falsely presented to us in
novels as such, but Love through all the harmonious scale of loving,
maternal, filial, conjugal, romantic, religious, and universal.
Read then the Poets. They have a nobler conception of woman and of life
than the novelists. Their unobtrusive but conspicuous teaching harmonises
with the conduct of the best women, and has its deep foundation in a
belief in the beneficent potency of Love, from the most elementary up to
an apprehension of the meaning of the last line of the _Divina Commedia_:
L'amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.
Love that keeps the sun in its course, and journeys with the planets in
their orbit.