these confessions of Dante. The learned are perhaps not those best
fitted to solve the problem. It is a matter for literary tact and
sympathetic imagination. It must be left to the delicate intelligence
of the reader, if he has it; and if he has not, Dante does not wish to
open his heart to him. His enigmatical manner is his protection against
the intrusion of uncongenial minds.
Without passing beyond the sphere of learned criticism, I think we may
say this: the various interpretations, in this matter, are not mutually
exclusive. Symbolism and literalness, in Dante’s time, and in his
practice, are simultaneous. For instance, in any history of mediaeval
philosophy you may read that a great subject of dispute in those days
was the question whether universal terms or natures, such as man, or
humanity, existed before the particulars, in the particulars, or after
the particulars, by abstraction of what was common to them all. Now,
this matter was undoubtedly much disputed about; but there is one
comprehensive and orthodox solution, which represents the true mind of
the age, above the peculiar hobbies or heresies of individuals. This
solution is that universal terms or natures exist before the
particulars, _and_ in the particulars, _and_ after the particulars: for
God, before he made the world, knew how he intended to make it, and had
eternally in his mind the notions of a perfect man, horse, etc., after
which the particulars were to be modelled, or to which, in case of
accident, they were to be restored, either by the healing and
recuperative force of nature, or by the ministrations of grace. But
universal terms or natures existed also _in_ the particulars, since the
particulars illustrated them, shared in them, and were what they were by
virtue of that participation. Nevertheless, the universals existed also
after the particulars: for the discursive mind of man, surveying the
variety of natural things, could not help noticing and abstracting the
common types that often recur in them; and this _ex postfacto_ idea, in
the human mind, is a universal term also. To deny any of the three
theories, and not to see their consistency, is to miss the mediaeval
point of view, which, in every sense of the word, was Catholic.
Just such a solution seems to me natural in the case of Beatrice. We
have it on independent documentary evidence that in Dante’s time there
actually lived in Florence a certain Bice Portinari; and there are many
incidents in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the _Commedia_ which hardly admit
of an allegorical interpretation; such as the death of Beatrice, and
especially that of her father, on which occasion Dante writes a
sympathetic poem.[6] can see no reason why this lady, as easily as any
other person, should not have called forth the dreamful passion of our
poet. That he had loved some one is certain. Most people have; and why
should Dante, in particular, have found the language of love a natural
veil for his philosophy, if the passion and the language of love had not
been his mother-tongue? The language of love is no doubt usual in the
allegories of mystics, and was current in the conventional poetry of
Dante’s time; but mystics themselves are commonly crossed or potential
lovers; and the troubadours harped on the string of love simply because
it was the most responsive string in their own natures, and that which
could most easily be made to vibrate in their hearers. Dante was not
less sensitive than the average man of his generation; and if he
followed the fashion of minstrels and mystics, it was because he shared
their disposition. The beautiful, the unapproachable, the divine, had
passed before him in some visible form; it matters nothing whether this
vision came once only, and in the shape of the actual Beatrice, or
continuously, and in every shape through which a divine influence may
seem to come to a poet. No one would deserve this name of poet--and who
deserves it more than Dante?--if real sights and sounds never impressed
him; and he would hardly deserve it either, if they impressed him only
physically, and for what they are in themselves. His sensibility creates
his ideal.
If to deny the existence of an historical Beatrice seems violent and
gratuitous, it would be a much worse misunderstanding not to perceive
that Beatrice is _also_ a symbol. On one occasion, as we read in the
_Vita Nuova_,[7] Dante found himself, in a church, in the presence of
Beatrice. His eyes were inevitably fixed upon her; but as he wished to
conceal his profound passion from the gossiping crowd, he chose another
lady, who happened to stand in the direct line of vision between him and
Beatrice, and pretended to be gazing at her, in reality looking beyond
her to Beatrice. This intervening lady, _la donna gentile_, became the
screen to his true love.[8] But his attentions to her were so assiduous
that they were misinterpreted. Beatrice herself observed them, and
thinking he was going too far and not with an honourable purpose, showed
her displeasure by refusing to greet him as he passed. This sounds real
and earthly enough: but what is our surprise when we read expressly, in
the _Convito_, that the _donna gentile,_ the screen to Dante’s true
love, is philosophy.[9] If the _donna gentile_ is philosophy, the
_donna gentilissima,_ Beatrice, must be something of the same sort, only
nobler. She must be theology, and theology Beatrice undoubtedly is. Her
very name is played upon, if not selected, to mean that she is what
renders blessed, what shows the path of salvation.
Now the scene in the church becomes an allegory throughout. The young
Dante, we are given to understand, was at heart a religious and devout
soul, looking for the highest wisdom. But intervening between his human
reason and revealed truth (which he really was in love with, and wished
to win and to understand) he found philosophy or, as we should say,
science. To science he gave his preliminary attention; so much so that
the mysteries of theology were momentarily obscured in his mind; and his
faith, to his great sorrow, refused to salute him as he passed. He had
fallen into materialistic errors; he had interpreted the spots on the
moon as if they could be due to physical, not to Socratic, causes; and
his religious philosophy had lost its warmth, even if his religious
faith had not actually been endangered. It is certain, then, that
Beatrice, besides being a woman, was also a symbol.
But this is not the end. If Beatrice is a symbol for theology, theology
itself is not-final. It, too, is an avenue, an interpretation. The eyes
of Beatrice reflect a supernal light. It is the ineffable vision of
God, the beatific vision, that alone can make us happy and be the reason
and the end of our loves and our pilgrimages.
A supreme ideal of peace and perfection which moves the lover, and which
moves the sky, is more easily named than understood. In the last canto
of the _Paradiso_, where Dante is attempting to describe the beatific
vision, he says many times over that our notion of this ideal must be
vague and inadequate. The value of the notion to a poet or a philosopher
does not lie in what it contains positively, but in the attitude which
it causes him to assume towards real experience. Or perhaps it would be
better to say that to have an ideal does not mean so much to have any
image in the fancy, any Utopia more or less articulate, but rather to
take a consistent moral attitude towards all the things of this world,
to judge and coordinate our interests, to establish a hierarchy of goods
and evils, and to value events and persons, not by a casual personal
impression or instinct, but according to their real nature and tendency.
So understood, an ultimate ideal is no mere vision of the philosophical
dreamer, but a powerful and passionate force in the poet and the orator.
It is the voice of his love or hate, of his hope or sorrow, idealizing,
challenging, or condemning the world.
It is here that the feverish sensibility of the young Dante stood him in
good stead; it gave an unprecedented vigour and clearness to his moral
vision; it made him the classic poet of hell and of heaven. At the same
time, it helped to make him an upright judge, a terrible accuser, of the
earth. Everything and everybody in his day and generation became to him,
on account of his intense loyalty to his inward vision, an instance of
divine graciousness or of devilish perversity. Doubtless this keenness
of soul was not wholly due to the gift of loving, or to the discipline
of love; it was due in part also to pride, to resentment, to theoretical
prejudices. But figures like that of Francesca di Rimini and Manfred,
and the light and rapture vibrating through the whole _Paradiso,_ could
hardly have been evoked by a merely irritated genius. The background and
the starting-point of everything in Dante is the _intelletto d’amore_,
the genius of love.
Everybody has heard that God is love and that love makes the world go
round; and those who have traced this latter notion back to its source
in Aristotle may have some notion of what it means. It means, as we saw
in the beginning, that we should not try to explain motion and life by
their natural antecedents, for these run back _in infinitum_. We should
explain motion and life rather by their purpose or end, by that
unrealized ideal which moving and living things seem to aspire to, and
may be said to love. What justifies itself is not any fact or law; for
why should these not have been different? What justifies itself is what
is good, what is as it ought to be. But things in motion, Aristotle
conceived, declare, as it were, that they are not satisfied, and ought
to be in some different condition. They look to a fulfilment which is as
yet ideal. This fulfilment, if it included motion and life, could
include them inwardly only; it would consist in a sustained activity,
never lapsing nor suffering change. Such an activity is the unchanging
goal towards which life advances and by which its different stages are
measured: But since the purpose of things, and not their natural
causes, is that which explains them, we may call this eventual activity
their reason for being. It will be their unmoved mover.
But how, we may ask,--how can the unchanging, the ideal, the eventual,
initiate anything or determine the disposition and tendency of what
actually lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossibility of
giving an answer, may be expressed in a single word: magic. It is magic
when a good or interesting result, because it would prove good or
interesting, is credited with marshalling the conditions and evoking the
beings that are to realize it. It is natural that I should be hungry,
and natural that there should be things suitable for me to eat--for
otherwise I should not be hungry long; but if my hunger, in case it is
sharp enough, should be able of itself to produce the food it calls
for, that would be magic. Nature would be evoked by the incantations of
the will.
I do not forget that Aristotle, with Dante after him, asserts that the
goal of life is a separate being already existing, namely, the mind of
God, eternally realizing what the world aspires to. The influence of
this mind, however, upon the world is no less magical than would be that
of a non-existent ideal. For its operation is admittedly not transitive
or physical. It itself does not change in working. No virtue leaves it;
it does not, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, even know that it
works. Indeed, it works only because other things are disposed to pursue
it as their ideal; let things keep this disposition, and they will
pursue and frame their ideal no less if it nowhere has an actual
existence, than if by chance it exists elsewhere in its own person. It
works only in its capacity of ideal; therefore, even if it exists, it
works only by magic. The matter beneath feels the spell of its presence,
and catches something of its image, as the waves of the sea might
receive and reflect tremblingly the light shed by the moon. The world
accordingly is moved and vivified in every fibre by magic, by the magic
of the goal to which it aspires.
But this magic, on earth, bore the name of love. The life of the world
was a love, produced by the magic attraction of a good it has never
possessed and, so long as it remains a world, is incapable of
possessing. Actual things were only suggestions of what the elements in
that ulterior existence ought to be: they were mere symbols. The acorn
was a mere prophecy--an existing symbol--for the ideal oak; because when
the acorn falls into good ground it will be corrupted, but the idea of
the oak will arise and be manifested in its place. The acorn was a sort
of reliquary in which the miraculous power of the idea was somehow
enshrined. In the vulgar attribution of causes we, like Anaxagoras,
resemble a superstitious relic-worshipper who should forget that the
intercession and merits of the saint really work the miracle, and should
attribute it instead to the saint’s bones and garments in their material
capacity. Similarly, we should attribute the power which things exerted
over us, not to the rarer or denser substance, but to the eternal ideas
that they existed by expressing, and existed to express. Things merely
localized--like the saint’s relics--the influences which flowed to us
from above. In the world of values they were mere symbols, accidental
channels for divine energy; and since divine energy, by its magic
assimilation of matter, had created these things, in order to express
itself, they were symbols altogether not merely in their use, but in
their origin and nature.
A mind persuaded that it lives among things that, like words, are
essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic
attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind
poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and
philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become
poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence. When Plato
and Aristotle, following the momentous precept of Socrates, decreed that
observation of nature should stop and a moral interpretation of nature
should begin, they launched into the world a new mythology, to take the
place of the Homeric one which was losing its authority. The power the
poets had lost of producing illusion was possessed by these philosophers
in a high degree; and no one was ever more thoroughly under their spell
than Dante. He became to Platonism and Christianity what Homer had been
to Paganism; and if Platonism and Christianity, like Paganism, should
ever cease to be defended scientifically, Dante will keep the poetry and
wisdom of them alive; and it is safe to say that later generations will
envy more than they will despise his philosophy. When the absurd
controversies and factious passions that in some measure obscure the
nature of this system have completely passed away, no one will think of
reproaching Dante with his bad science, and bad history, and minute
theology. These will not seem blemishes in his poetry, but integral
parts of it.
A thousand years after Homer, Alexandrian critics were expounding his
charming myths as if they were a revealed treatise of physics and
morals. A thousand years after Dante we may hope that his conscientious
vision of the universe, where all is love, magic, and symbolism, may
charm mankind exclusively as poetry. So conceived, the _Divine Comedy_
marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s dialogues mark
the beginning: a pause of two thousand years in the work of political
reason, during which the moral imagination spun out of itself an
allegorical philosophy, as a boy, kept at home during a rainy day with
books too hard and literal for his years, might spin his own romance out
of his father’s histories, and might define, with infantile precision,
his ideal lady-love, battles, and kingdoms. The middle age saw the good
in a vision. It is for the new age to translate those delightful symbols
into the purposes of manhood.
* * * * *
In a letter which tradition assigns to Dante, addressed to his
protector, Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona and Vicenza, are these
words about the _Divine Comedy_: “The subject of the whole work, taken
merely in its literal sense, is the state of souls after death,
considered simply as a fact. But if the work is understood in its
allegorical intention, the subject of it is man, according as, by his
deserts and demerits in the use of his free-will, he is justly open to
rewards and punishments.” This by no means exhausts, however, the
significations which we may look for in a work of Dante’s. How many
these may be is pointed out to us in the same letter, and illustrated by
the beginning of the one hundred and fourteenth Psalm: “When Israel went
out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language;
Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” Here, Dante tells us,
“if we look to the _letter_ only, what is conveyed to us is the
deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt in the time of Moses;
if we look to the _allegory_ of it, what is signified is our redemption
accomplished through Christ; if we consider the _moral sense_, what is
signified is the conversion of the soul from her present grief and
wretchedness to a state of grace; and if we consider the _anagogical
sense_ [that is, the revelation contained concerning our highest
destiny], what is signified is the passing of the sanctified soul from
the bondage of earthly corruption to the freedom of everlasting glory.”
When people brooded so much over a simple text as to find all these
meanings in it, we may expect that their own works, when meant to be
profound, should have stage above stage of allegorical application. So
in the first canto of the _Inferno_ we find a lion that keeps Dante from
approaching a delectable mountain; and this lion, besides what he is in
the landscape of the poem, is a symbol for pride or power in general,
for the king of France in particular, and for whatever political
ambitions in Dante’s personal life may have robbed him of happiness or
distracted him from faith and from piety. Thus, throughout the _Divine
Comedy_, meaning and meaning lurk beneath the luminous pictures; and the
poem, besides being a description of the other world, and of the rewards
and punishment meted out to souls, is a dramatic view of human passions
in this life; a history of Italy and of the world; a theory of Church
and State; the autobiography of an exile; and the confessions of a
Christian, and of a lover, conscious of his sins and of the miracle of
divine grace that intervenes to save him.
The subject-matter of the _Divine Comedy_ is accordingly the moral
universe in all its levels,--romantic, political, religious. To present
these moral facts in a graphic way, the poet performed a double work of
imagination. First he chose some historical personage that might
plausibly illustrate each condition of the soul. Then he pictured this
person in some characteristic and symbolic attitude of mind and of body,
and in an appropriate, symbolic environment. To give material embodiment
to moral ideas by such a method would nowadays be very artificial, and
perhaps impossible; but in Dante’s time everything was favourable to the
attempt. We are accustomed to think of goods and evils as functions of
a natural life, sparks struck out in the chance shock of men with things
or with one another. For Dante, it was a matter of course that moral
distinctions might be discerned, not merely as they arise incidentally
in human experience, but also, and more genuinely, as they are displayed
in the order of creation. The Creator himself was a poet producing
allegories. The material world was a parable which he had built out in
space, and ordered to be enacted. History was a great charade. The
symbols of earthly poets are words or images; the symbols of the divine
poet were natural things and the fortunes of men. They had been devised
for a purpose; and this purpose, as the Koran, too, declares, had been
precisely to show forth the great difference there is in God’s sight
between good and evil.
In Platonic cosmology, the concentric spheres were bodies formed and
animated by intelligences of various orders. The nobler an intelligence,
the more swift and outward, or higher, was the sphere it moved; whence
the identification of “higher” with better, which survives, absurdly, to
this day. And while Dante could not attribute literal truth to his
fancies about hell, purgatory, and heaven, he believed that an actual
heaven, purgatory, and hell had been fashioned by God on purpose to
receive souls of varying deserts and complexion; so that while the
poet’s imagination, unless it reechoed divine revelation, was only
human and not prophetic, yet it was a genuine and plausible imagination,
moving on the lines of nature, and anticipating such things as
experience might very well realize. Dante’s objectification of morality,
his art of giving visible forms and local habitations to ideal virtues
and vices, was for him a thoroughly serious and philosophical exercise.
God had created nature and life on that very principle. The poet’s
method repeated the magic of Genesis. His symbolical imagination
mirrored this symbolical world; it was a sincere anticipation of fact,
no mere laboured and wilful allegory.
This situation has a curious consequence. Probably for the first and
last time in the history of the world a classification worked out by a
systematic moralist guided the vision of a great poet. Aristotle had
distinguished, named, and classified the various virtues, with their
opposites. But observe: if the other world was made on purpose--as it
was--to express and render palpable those moral distinctions which were
eternal, and to express and render them palpable in great detail, with
all their possible tints and varieties; and if Aristotle had correctly
classified moral qualities, as he had--then it follows that Aristotle
(without knowing it) must have supplied the ground-plan, as it were, of
hell and of heaven. Such was Dante’s thought. With Aristotle’s _Ethics_
open before him, with a supplementary hint, here and there, drawn from
the catechism, and with an ingrained preference (pious and almost
philosophic) for the number three and its multiples, he needed not to
voyage without a chart. The most visionary of subjects, life after
death, could be treated with scientific soberness and deep sincerity.
This vision was to be no wanton dream. It was to be a sober meditation,
a philosophical prophecy, a probable drama,--the most poignant,
terrible, and consoling of all possible truths.
The good--this was the fundamental thought of Aristotle and of all Greek
ethics,--the good is the end at which nature aims. The demands of life
cannot be radically perverse, since they are the judges of every
excellence. No man, as Dante says, could hate his own soul; he could not
at once be, and contradict, the voice of his instincts and emotions. Nor
could a man hate God; for if that man knew himself, he would see that
God was, by definition, his natural good, the ultimate goal of his
actual aspirations.[10] Since it was impossible, according to his
insight, that our faculties should be intrinsically evil, all evil had
to arise from the disorder into which these faculties fall, their too
great weakness or strength in relation to one another. If the animal
part of man was too strong for his reason, he fell into
incontinence,--that is, into lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath, or pride.
Incontinence came from an excessive or ill-timed pursuit of something
good, of a part of what nature aims at; for food, children, property,
and character are natural goods. These sins are accordingly the most
excusable and the least odious. Dante puts those who have sinned through
love in the first circle of hell, nearest to the sunlight, or in the
topmost round of purgatory, nearest to the earthly paradise. Below the
lovers, in each case, are the gluttons,--where a northern poet would
have been obliged to place his drunkards. Beneath these again are the
misers,--worse because less open to the excuse of a merely childish lack
of self-control.