of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened
by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness,
even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most
liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to
set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,--a sad
condition for man or writer.
Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A
writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself
is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity;
it looks as though the very self--which will shine through the
style--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in
writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be
himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style
any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.
Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no
_style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by
rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert,
drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will
have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought
in the deep ocean of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences
were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that
there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a
lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence
Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.
The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral
harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener
in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is
alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.
On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes
in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a
broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray
clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of
bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from
unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing,
unseen, and ever rhythmical.
The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in
its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only
reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack
"the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light
into a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the gift
poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to
kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and
transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly
rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will
understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is
utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_dénué de la faculté du
style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great
Molière. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in
prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and
audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too,
some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers,
have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities,
with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the
exclusive property of the poetic idiom."
A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the
better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in
presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a
mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of
thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the
writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine
correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by
discipline. In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and
proportion. Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought
and its worded envelope to warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact
and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The
best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it
shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and
plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that
only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a
thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art,
and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must
unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.
Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse
of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile
intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master
in style but through kindred endowment. The compact, symmetrical
combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded
for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not
have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light
whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form,
deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that
fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.
IV.
DANTE AND HIS LATEST TRANSLATORS.[5]
[5] Putnam's Magazine, 1868.
"Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic." So said
Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class.
Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as
evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the
epopee. The term "machinery" implies ignorance of the import of the
super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism
and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write
an epic, with or without the "machinery." Such acceptance would
betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want
of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.
A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth
and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of
a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the
method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic
poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together
with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret
and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of
them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the
senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are
what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--
"Light half-believers in our casual creeds."
Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active
presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had
they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."
Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and
an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine
judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision
through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he
lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought
them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of
Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of
Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of
his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all
this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.
The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his
sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations,
his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.
Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which
were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,--and
literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,--no more
broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all
poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed,
moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for
its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world
to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a
manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a
stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian
scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of
Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict;
and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy,
while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to
tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled,
the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly
woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times,
contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.
Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble
character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his
personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the
theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as
molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous
initiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combined
to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six
centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three
or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of
universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their
most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar
superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that
he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven--of the world to
come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured
more or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awful
hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.
Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid as
to become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorial
mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of
popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial
superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future,
the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations
of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures
of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the
grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them
with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual
prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self,
with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state
is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some
power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be
entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his
preëminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the
faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a
unique success.
To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world,
would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination.
But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures,
puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion
wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an
illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening
of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every
line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that
is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats
it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every
scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is
presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness,
which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader
finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is
mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual
imagination.
Dante had it in him,--this hell, purgatory, and heaven--so full and
warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with
the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the
griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a
fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and,
added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_
reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need
scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits,
relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a
theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to
himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the
altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of
famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and,
along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with
its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its
wraths and triumphs.
Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but,
besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of
inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the
necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and
abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and
yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"
and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put
together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement,
and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception,
does the framework of incident support and display? That is the
æsthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material
inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and
sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.
The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions
of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for
their mere exuberance and diversity,--for that might have come from a
comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then
were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,--but for the heart there
is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and
thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift
poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as
regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is
that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader
are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and
reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.
Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each
one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the
attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure
or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits,
classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and
separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a
weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however
attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to
person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey,
although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has
effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every
limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally
reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great
unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is
inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and
Shakespearean tragedies.
The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and,
with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his
page--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among
the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most
active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual
and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall
be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that
just in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birth
of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous,
form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante,
too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized
objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.
Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it
were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic,
Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets,
ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any
other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of
the 'Divina Commedia.'"
Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his
strongest side: he is preëminently a poet of form. In his mind and in
his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet
of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but
more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his
intellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by the
concurrence of his æsthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admits
of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected
delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the
other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in
transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being
saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with
diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance,
more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and
profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:
he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion.
Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,--
"As when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations,"
Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are
poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through
a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us
to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,--not
involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely
between physical, not between subtle, relations,--that Dante chiefly
deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet,
but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.
The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the
intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with
aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the
utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or
image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the
reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there
is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the
passage--
"and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."
This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire;
this gives its greatness to the passage.
Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to
the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher
imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so
aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?
"And the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."
Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of
Milton's demon-host--
"That tore Hell's concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?
Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and
breadth.
Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves
poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes
than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command
than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often
to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and
facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with
the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his
similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition.
In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at
once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest
translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the
"Inferno," that of Mr. Dayman for those from the "Purgatorio," and
that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the "Paradiso."
"As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell,
Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent;
So to the earth that cruel monster fell,
And straightway down to Hell's Fourth Pit he went."
_Inferno_: Canto VII.
"Swept now amain those turbid waters o'er
A tumult of a dread portentous kind,
Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore,
Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind;
As when, made furious by opposing heats,
Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours,
Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats,
And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers;
Then fly the herds,--the swains to shelter scud.
Freeing mine eyes, 'Thy sight,' he said, 'direct
O'er the long-standing scum of yonder flood,
Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.'"
_Inferno_: Canto IX.
"When, lo! there met us, close beside our track,
A troop of spirits. Each amid the band
Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by
'Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned,
As an old tailor doth a needle's eye."
_Inferno_: Canto XV.
"And just as frogs that stand, with noses out
On a pool's margin, but beneath it hide
Their feet and all their bodies but the snout,
So stood the sinners there on every side."
_Inferno_: Canto XXII.
"A cooper's vessel, that by chance hath been
Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft,
Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin
I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft."
_Inferno_: Canto XXVIII.
"We tarried yet the ocean's brink upon,
Like unto people musing of their way,
Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone;
And lo! as near the dawning of the day,
Down in the west, upon the watery floor,
The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array,
Even such appeared to me a light that o'er
The sea so quickly came, no wing could match
Its moving. Be that vision mine once more."
_Purgatorio_: Canto II.
"And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees
The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one
That on her bed of down can find no ease,
But turns and turns again her ache to shun,"
_Purgatorio_: Canto VI.
"'T was now the hour the longing heart that bends
In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway,
Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends;
And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way
With poignant love, to hear some distant bell
That seems to mourn the dying of the day;
When I began to slight the sounds that fell
Upon my ear, one risen soul to view,
Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel."
_Purgatorio_: Canto VIII.
"There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss
Each with his mate from every part, nor stay,
Contenting them with momentary bliss.
So one with other, all their swart array
Along, do ants encounter snout with snout,
So haply probe their fortune and their way."
_Purgatorio_: Canto XXVI.
"Between two viands, equally removed
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.
So would a lamb between the ravenings
Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike;
And so would stand a dog between two does.
Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not,
Impelled in equal measure by my doubts,
Since it must be so, nor do I commend."
_Paradiso_: Canto IV.