I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and from
my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a reading
acquaintance with the language. I had really wanted to go to Germany,
that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I first
applied for the consulate at Munich. The powers at Washington thought it
quite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of the
Roman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to decline
it. Then the President’s private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr.
John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had written
poems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and
promised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year,
under the new law to embarrass privateers. It was really put up to
fifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the city
whose influence changed the whole course of my literary life.
No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that the
Florida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years of
nearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ in
reading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic.
The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did not
quite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time;
besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a good
deal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian,
preparatory to the efforts before me.
I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt,
and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to
read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso,
but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who,
from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind. As a
matter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of all
these, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went off
from them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrights
who interested me so much more. After my wonted fashion I read half a
dozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which I
began with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at that
time, or ever for the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice I
met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and
who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the “Inferno.” This
part of the “Divine Comedy” I read with a beginner’s carefulness, and
with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not
appear in every line.
Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about the
masterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not every
moment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as is
certainly the case with Dante’s. Some day, perhaps, we shall have this
way of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feel
obliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not always
enjoying himself it is his own fault. At any rate I will permit myself
the luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majesty
and grandeur of Dante’s design, many points of its execution bored me,
and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhood
history in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblest
effect. What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante’s
personality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance its
greatness as a work of art. I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed them
the more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began to
open all about me. Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did not
understand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute about
among those who profess to know them clearly. What I finally perceived
was that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, such
as it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expresses
that life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its
love and its hate.
Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the end
of the ends the “Divine Comedy” will stand for the patriotism of
medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and
lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. This is
vague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess also
that I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the
“Inferno.” I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was that
sort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliant
episodes, the striking pictures. This was the effect with me of all the
criticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that the
criticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things “whole,”
is of any definite effect. As a matter of fact we see nothing whole,
neither life nor art. We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we can
deal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor to
compass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger very
threatening to our intellectual integrity.
Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very
glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and
pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth
dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. I took
my sad heart’s fill of the sad story of “Paolo and Francesca,” which I
already knew in Leigh Hunt’s adorable dilution, and most of the lines
read themselves into my memory, where they linger yet. I supped on the
horrors of Ugolino’s fate with the strong gust of youth, which finds
every exercise of sympathy a pleasure. My good priest sat beside me in
these rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of the
snuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in things
that he had often before enjoyed. No doubt he had an inexhaustible
pleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in them
perennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read or
repeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself. This pleasure
came often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of a
phrase quite apart from its meaning. I did not get then, and I have not
got since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and as
often as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I have
fatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaning
was lost upon me.
I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport,
the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it,
while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed,
at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in
the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then he
would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in
reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of
the mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound.
I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of the
strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature--the
printer, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and the
bookbinder--I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I who was then I, might be
said to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self in
anything but the “increasing purpose” which has kept me one in my love of
literature. He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing,
quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled.
I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact I
was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful how
I consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy.
I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed
him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I was
then giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me.
Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the “Divina
Commedia,” and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so
remote that no editor would print it. This was the first fruits and the
last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I
would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too
unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in
him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others
may catch.