DANTE

The history of Dante's personal and literary appeal would be an

extremely interesting one. No great writer has managed to excite

more opposite emotions.

One thing may be especially noted as significant: Women have

always been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiar

sense the Woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine genius

which has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire

laughed at him; Nietzsche called him "an hyaena poetizing among

the tombs."

The truth is, women love Dante for the precise reason that these men

hate him. He makes sex the centre of everything. One need not be

deceived by the fact that Dante worships "purity," while Voltaire,

Goethe and Nietzsche are little concerned with it. This very

laudation of continence is itself an emphasis upon sex. These others

would play with amorous propensities; trifle with them in their life,

in their art, in their philosophy; and then, that dangerous plaything

laid aside would, as Machiavel puts it, "assume suitable attire, and

return to the company of their equals--the great sages of antiquity."

Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this

tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, more

than anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinker

says, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that the

artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and

the ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved."

Dante refuses neither; and he has, further, that peculiar mixture of

harsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especially

appealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome--not without

pleasure--by his fierce authority; and they can play the "little

mother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is

tender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but it

would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether

she is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of

the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling and

her passionate caresses.

Women, too, even quite good women, have the stress of the sexual

difference constantly before them. Indeed it may be said that the

class of women who are least sex-conscious are those who have

habitually to sell themselves. It all matters so little then!

How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused, when any

question of a love affair is rumored. In this sense every woman is a

born "go-between." Sex is not with them a thing apart, an exciting

volcanic thing, liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, but

often completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten. It is

diffused. It is everywhere. It lurks in a thousand innocent gestures

and intimations. The savage purity of an Artemis is no real

exception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be dallied with. It is all or

nothing.

One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kind

we do not derogate from the charm or dignity of women. It is no

aspersion upon them. They did not ask to have it so. It is so.

Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queer

compromise. Its restraints weigh heavily, in alternate discord, upon

both sexes.

Masculine depravity rebels against it, and the whole modern

feministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seen

whether Nature will admit of any satisfactory readjustment.

Certainly, as far as overt acts are concerned, women are far "purer"

than men. It is only when we leave the sphere of outward acts and

enter the sphere of cerebral undercurrents, that all this is changed.

There the Biblical story finds its proof, and the daughters of Eve

revert to their mother. This is the secret of that mania for the

personal which characterizes women's conversation. She can say

fine things and do fine work; but both in her wit and her art, one is

conscious of a mind that has voluptuously welcomed, or vindictively

repulsed, the approach of a particular invasion; never of a mind that,

in its abstract love for the beautiful, cannot even remember how it

came to give birth to such thoughts!

It is the close psychological association between the emotion of

religion and the emotion of sex which has always made women

more religious than men.

This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the

universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendency

to divorce his intelligence from his intuition--may not be the precise

key which opens those magic doors! _Sanctity_ itself--that most

exquisite flower of the art of character--is a profoundly feminine

thing. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear the

indescribable distinction of their Master, are always possessed of a

certain feminine quality.

Sanctity is woman's ideal--morality is man's. The one is based upon

passion, and by means of love lifts us above law. The other is based

upon vice and the recoil from vice; and has no horizons of any sort.

That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundly

feminine like Russia and France have sanctity as their ideal.

Whereas England has its Puritan morality, and Germany its

scientific efficiency. These latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, to

learn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyond

morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain

moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified air

of that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leaves

other human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood is

not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert,

always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhaps

the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between

religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing

scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into which

this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the

white nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot!

It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic Legend--German

sentimentality and Celtic romance need a Heine to deal with them!

It is indeed a difficult task to write of the relations between romantic

love and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That is

where Dante is so supremely great. And that is why, for all his

greatness, his influence upon modern art has been so morbid and

evil. The odious sensuality of the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite School"

--a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense--has

a smell of corruption about it that ought never to be associated

with Dante's name.

The worst of modern poets, the most affected and the most

meticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante.

But they are no more like that divine poet than the flies that feed on

a dead Caesar are like the hero they cause to stink!

Our brave Oscar understood him. Some of the most exquisite

passages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "Divine

Comedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strange

how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators,

too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the Ponte

Vecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult--a

sacrilege--to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit who ever dwelt on

earth! Why did not Aubrey Beardsley stop that beautiful boy on the

threshold? He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" might

have well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in the

white dawn.

For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote,

perverted, _archaic_ loveliness of certain figures on the walls of

Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist

in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the

saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious

people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves

pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante

so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot

open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark

heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His

Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moon

beneath her feet.

But neither of them know, as does their worshiper and lover, _what

lies on the other side of the moon._

What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift is his pride and his

humility. The one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He,

alone of great artists, holds in his hand the true sword of the Spirit

for the dividing asunder of men and things. There is no necessity to

lay all the stress upon the division between the Lower and

the Higher Love, between Hell and Heaven. There are other

_distinctions_ in life than these. And between all distinctions,

between all those differences which separate the "fine" from the

"base," the noble from the ignoble, the beautiful from the hideous,

the generous from the mean; Dante draws the pitiless sword-stroke

of that "eternal separation" which is the most tragic thing in the

world. In the truest sense tragic! For so many things, and so many

people, that must be thus "cut off," are among those who harrow our

hearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in their

weakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused

age--our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneath

the beautiful--through the thick air of indolence masquerading as

toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the

scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from

the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the

commonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division,"

his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted with

such Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether

our "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter?

Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recovers

its "Tone"; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward to

its own Music!

That Angel of God, who when their hearts were shaken with fear

before the flame-lit walls of Dis, came, so straight across the waters,

and quelled the insolence of Hell; with what Disdain he turns away

his face, even from those he has come to save!

These "messengers" of God, who have so superb a contempt for all

created things, does one not meet them, sometimes, even in this life,

as they pass us by upon their secret errands?

The beginning of the Inferno contains the cruellest judgment upon

our generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit of

this age that, hearing it, one staggers as if from a stab. Are we not

this very tribe of caitiffs who have committed the "Great Refusal?"

Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they

envy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for God or

for his Enemies but are "for themselves"; those who may not even

take refuge in Hell, lest the one damned get glory of them! The very

terror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone from

bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers of

humanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything." But one

sometimes wonders whether a life all "irony," all "pity," all urbane

"interest," would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger,

not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial

air of universal acceptance which has become the fashion.

What if, after all--even though this universe be so poor a farce--the

mad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists, _were

right?_

Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe! One loves to repeat

"all is possible;" but _that_ particular possibility has little attraction.

It would be indeed an anti-climax if the queer Comedy we have so

daintily been patronizing turned out to be a Divine Comedy--and

ourselves the point of the jest! Not that this is very likely to occur. It

is more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage that

in this wager of faith with un-faith neither will ever discover who

really won!

But Dante's "Disdain" is not confined to the winners in the cosmic

dicing match. There are heroic hearts in hell who, for all their

despair, still yield not, nor abate a jot of their courage. Such a one

was that great Ghibelline Chief who was lost for "denying

immortality." "If my people fled from thy people--_that_ more

torments me than this flame." In one respect Dante is, beyond doubt,

the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heightening

the glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the three-fold

kingdom of his "Terza Rima" passes, in tragic array, the whole

procession of human history--and each figure there, each solitary

person, whether of the Blessed or the Purged, or the Condemned,

wears, like a garment of fire, the dreadful dignity of having been a

man! The moving sword-point that flashes, first upon one and then

upon another, amid our dim transactions, is nothing but the angry

arm of human imagination, moulding life to grander issues;

_creating,_ if not discovering, sublimer laws.

In conveying that thrilling sense of the momentousness of human

destiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke,

none can surpass him. The brief, branding lines, with which the

enemies of God are engraved upon their monuments "more lasting

than brass," seem to add a glory to damnation. Who can forget how

that "Simonist" and "Son of Sodom" lifts his hands up out of the

deepest Pit, and makes "the fig" at God? "Take it, God, for at Thee I

aim it!" There is a sting of furious blasphemy in this; _personal

outrage_ that goes beyond all limits.

Yet who is there, but does not feel _glad_ that the "Pistoian" uttered

what he uttered--out of his Hell--to his Maker?

Is not Newman right when he says that the heart of man does not

naturally "love God?"

But perhaps in the whole poem nothing is more beautiful than that

great roll of honor of the unchristened Dead, who make up the

company of the noble Heathen. Sad, but not unhappy, they walk to

and fro in their Pagan Hades, and occupy themselves, as of old, in

discoursing upon philosophy and poetry and the Mystery of Life.

Those single lines, devoted to such names, are unlike anything else

in literature. That "Caesar, in armour, with Ger-Falcon eyes,"

challenges one's obeisance as a great shout of his own legionaries,

while that "Alone, by himself, the Soldan" bows to the dust our

Christian pride, as the Turbaned Commander of the Faithful, with

his ghostly crescent blade, strides past, dreaming of the Desert.

It is in touches like these, surely, rather than in the Beatrice scenes

or the devil scenes, that the poet is most himself.

It needs, perhaps, a certain smouldering dramatic passion, in regard

to the whole spectacle of human life, to do justice to such lines. It

needs also that mixture of disdain and humility which is his own

paramount attribute.

And the same smouldering furnace of "reverence" characterizes

Dante's use of the older literatures. No writer who has ever lived has

such a dramatic sense of the "great effects" in style, and the ritual of

words.

That passage, _"Thou_ art my master and my author. It is from

_thee_ I learnt the beautiful style that has done me so much honour,"

with its reiteration of the rhythmic syllables of "honour," opens up a

salutary field of aesthetic contemplation. His quotations, too, from

the Psalms, and from the Roman Liturgy, become, by their

imaginative inclusion, part of his own creative genius. That "Vexilla

regis prodeunt Inferni!" Who can hear it without the same thrill, as

when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence of

such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away.

That romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychic

motive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poet

forgets everything except the "Principle of Beauty" and the

"Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's

passion of reverence for the old historic places--provinces, cities,

rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice

to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of

the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves

living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of

the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to

modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among

the dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no mean

city!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance,

that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial

Empires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of a

generation that has grown "deracinated," that has lost its roots in the

soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud

tenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the

"worship of one's Dead."

Anglo-Saxon Industrialism, Teutonic Organization, have their world

place; but it is to the Latin, and, it may be, to the Slav also, that the

human spirit must turn in those subtler hours when it cannot "live by

bread alone."

The modern international empires may obliterate local boundaries

and trample on local altars. In spite of them, and in defiance of them,

the soul of an ancient race lives on, its saints and its artists forging

the urn of its Phoenix-ashes!

Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of a

World-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the Pax

Romana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarum

at the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the material

dominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closely

resembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spirit

it is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States it

would include. Its real implication may be found in the assimilative

genius of the Catholic Church, consecrating but not effacing local

altars; transforming, but not destroying, local pieties. Who can deny

that this formidable vision answers the deepest need of the modern

world?

The discovery of some Planetary Synthesis within the circle of

which all the passionate race cults may flourish; growing not less

intense but more intense, under the new World-City--this is nothing

else than what the soul of the earth, "dreaming on things to come"

may actually be evolving.

Who knows if the new prominence given by the war to Russian

thought may not incredibly hasten such a Vita Nuova? We know

that the Pan-Slavic dream, even from the days of Ivan the Terrible,

has been of this spiritual unity, and it may be remembered that it

was always from "beyond the Alps" that Dante looked for the

Liberator. Who knows? The great surging antipodal tides of life lash

one another into foam. Out of chaos stars are born. And it may be

the madness of a dream even so much as to speak of "unity" while

creation seethes and hisses in its terrible vortex. Mockingly laugh

the imps of irony, while the Saints keep their vigil. Man is a

surprising animal; by no means always bent on his own redemption;

sometimes bent on his own destruction!

And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up his

great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls

of brass. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supreme

poet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility--but "the

damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand!"