combative or spirited element, rather than the senses, may get out of
hand, and lead to crimes of violence. Violence, like incontinence, is
spontaneous enough in its personal origin, and would not be odious if it
did not inflict, and intend to inflict, harm on others; so that besides
incontinence, there is malice in it. Ill-will to others may arise from
pride, because one loves to be superior to them, or from envy, because
one abhors that they should seem superior to oneself; or through desire
for vengeance, because one smarts under some injury. Sins of these kinds
are more serious than those of foolish incontinence; they complicate the
moral world more; they introduce endless opposition of interests, and
perpetual, self-propagating crimes. They are hateful. Dante feels less
pity for those who suffer by them: he remembers the sufferings these
malefactors have themselves caused, and he feels a sort of joy in
joining the divine justice, and would gladly lash them himself.
Worse still than violence, however, is guile: the sin of those who in
the service of their intemperance or their malice have abused the gift
of reason. _Corruptio optimi pessima_; and to turn reason, the faculty
that establishes order, into a means of organizing disorder, is a
perversity truly satanic: it turns evil into an art. But even this
perversity has stages; and Dante distinguishes ten sorts of dishonesty
or simple fraud, as well as three sorts of treachery.
Besides these positive transgressions there is a possibility of general
moral sluggishness and indifference. This Dante, with his fervid nature,
particularly hates. He puts the Laodiceans in the fringe of his hell;
within the gate, that they may be without hope, but outside of limbo,
that they may have torments to endure, and be stung by wasps and
hornets into a belated activity.[11]
To these vices, known to Aristotle, the Catholic moralist was obliged to
add two others: original sin, of which spontaneous disbelief is one
consequence, and heresy, or misbelief, after a revelation has been given
and accepted. Original sin, and the paganism that goes with it, if they
lead to nothing worse, are a mere privation of excellence and involve,
in eternity merely a privation of joy: they are punished in limbo. There
sighs are heard, but no lamentation, and the only sorrow is to live in
desire without hope. This fate is most appropriately imputed to the
noble and clear-sighted in the hereafter, since it is so often their
experience here. Dante was never juster than in this stroke.[12] Heresy,
on the other hand, is a kind of passion when honest, or a kind of fraud
when politic; and it is punished as pride in fiery tombs,[13] or as
faction by perpetual gaping wounds and horrible mutilations.[14]
So far, with these slight additions, Dante is following Aristotle; but
here a great divergence sets in. If a pagan poet had conceived the idea
of illustrating the catalogue of vices and virtues in poetic scenes, he
would have chosen suitable episodes in human life, and painted the
typical characters that figured in them in their earthly environment;
for pagan morality is a plant of earth. Not so with Dante. His poem
describes this world merely in retrospect; the foreground is occupied by
the eternal consequences of what time had brought forth. These
consequences are new facts, not merely, as for the rationalist, the old
facts conceived in their truth; they often reverse, in their emotional
quality, the events they represent. Such a reversal is made possible by
the theory that justice is partly retributive; that virtue is not its
own sufficient reward, nor vice its own sufficient punishment. According
to this theory, this life contains a part of our experience only, yet
determines the rest. The other life is a second experience, yet it does
not contain any novel adventures. It is determined altogether by what we
have done on earth; as the tree falleth so it lieth, and souls after
death have no further initiative.
The theory Dante adopts mediates between two earlier views; in so far as
it is Greek, it conceives immortality ideally, as something timeless;
but in so far as it is Hebraic, it conceives of a new existence and a
second, different taste of life. Dante thinks of a second experience,
but of one that is wholly retrospective and changeless. It is an
epilogue which sums up the play, and is the last episode in it. The
purpose of this epilogue is not to carry on the play indefinitely: such
a romantic notion of immortality never entered Dante’s mind. The purpose
of the epilogue is merely to vindicate (in a more unmistakable fashion
than the play, being ill acted, itself could do) the excellence of
goodness and the misery of vice. Were this life all, he thinks the
wicked might laugh. If not wholly happy, at least they might boast that
their lot was no worse than that of many good men. Nothing would make an
overwhelming difference. Moral distinctions would be largely impertinent
and remarkably jumbled. If I am a simple lover of goodness, I may
perhaps put up with this situation. I may say of the excellences I prize
what Wordsworth says of his Lucy: there may be none to praise and few to
love them, but they make all the difference to me.
Dante, however, was not merely a simple lover of excellence: he was also
a keen hater of wickedness, one that took the moral world tragically
and wished to heighten the distinctions he felt into something absolute
and infinite. Now any man who is _enragé_ in his preferences will
probably say, with Mohammed, Tertullian, and Calvin, that good is
dishonoured if those who contemn it can go scot-free, and never repent
of their negligence; that the more horrible the consequences of
evil-doing, the more tolerable the presence of evil-doing is in the
world; and that the everlasting shrieks and contortions of the damned
alone will make it possible for the saints to sit quiet, and be
convinced that there is perfect harmony in the universe. On this
principle, in the famous inscription which Dante places over the gate of
hell, we read that primal love, as well as justice and power,
established that torture-house; primal love, that is, of that good
which, by the extreme punishment of those who scorn it, is honoured,
vindicated, and made to shine like the sun. The damned are damned for
the glory of God.
This doctrine, I cannot help thinking, is a great disgrace to human
nature. It shows how desperate, at heart, is the folly of an egotistic
or anthropocentric philosophy. This philosophy begins by assuring us
that everything is obviously created to serve our needs; it then
maintains that everything serves our ideals; and in the end, it reveals
that everything serves our blind hatreds and superstitious qualms.
Because my instinct taboos something, the whole universe, with insane
intensity, shall taboo it for ever. This infatuation was inherited by
Dante, and it was not uncongenial to his bitter and intemperate spleen.
Nevertheless, he saw beyond it at times. Like many other Christian
seers, he betrays here and there an esoteric view of rewards and
punishments, which makes them simply symbols for the intrinsic quality
of good and evil ways. The punishment, he then seems to say, is nothing
added; it is what the passion itself pursues; it is a fulfilment,
horrifying the soul that desired it.
For instance, spirits newly arrived in hell require no devil with his
prong to drive them to their punishment. They flit towards it eagerly,
of their own accord.[15] Similarly, the souls in purgatory are kept by
their own will at the penance they are doing. No external force retains
them, but until they are quite purged they are not able, because they
are not willing, to absolve themselves.[16] The whole mountain, we are
told, trembles and bursts into psalmody when any one frees himself and
reaches heaven. Is it too much of a gloss to say that these souls change
their prison when they change their ideal, and that an inferior state of
soul is its own purgatory, and determines its own duration? In one
place, at any rate, Dante proclaims the intrinsic nature of punishment
in express terms. Among the blasphemers is a certain king of Thebes, who
defied the thunderbolts of Jupiter. He shows himself indifferent to his
punishment and says: “Such as I was alive, such I am dead.” Whereupon
Virgil exclaims, with a force Dante had never found in his voice before:
“In that thy pride is not mortified, thou art punished the more. No
torture, other than thy own rage, would be woe enough to match thy
fury.”[17] And indeed, Dante’s imagination cannot outdo, it cannot even
equal, the horrors which men have brought upon themselves in this world.
If we were to choose the most fearful of the scenes in the _Inferno_, we
should have to choose the story of Ugolino, but this is only a pale
recital of what Pisa had actually witnessed.
A more subtle and interesting instance, if a less obvious one, may be
found in the punishment of Paolo and Francesca di Rimini. What makes
these lovers so wretched in the Inferno? They are still together. Can an
eternity of floating on the wind, in each other’s arms, be a punishment
for lovers? That is just what their passion, if left to speak for
itself, would have chosen. It is what passion stops at, and would gladly
prolong for ever. Divine judgement has only taken it at its word. This
fate is precisely what Aucassin, in the well-known tale, wishes for
himself and his sweetheart Nicolette,--not a heaven to be won by
renunciation, but the possession, even if it be in hell, of what he
loves and fancies. And a great romantic poet, Alfred de Musset, actually
upbraids Dante for not seeing that such an eternal destiny as he has
assigned to Paolo and Francesca would be not the ruin of their love,[18]
but the perfect fulfilment of it. This last seems to be very true; but
did Dante overlook the truth of it? If so, what instinct guided him to
choose just the fate for these lovers that they would have chosen for
themselves?
There is a great difference between the apprentices in life, and the
masters,--Aucassin and Alfred de Musset were among the apprentices;
Dante was one of the masters. He could feel the fresh promptings of life
as keenly as any youngster, or any romanticist; but he had lived these
things through, he knew the possible and the impossible issue of them;
he saw their relation to the rest of human nature, and to the ideal of
an ultimate happiness and peace. He had discovered the necessity of
saying continually to oneself: Thou shalt renounce. And for this reason
he needed no other furniture for hell than the literal ideals and
fulfilments of our absolute little passions. The soul that is possessed
by any one of these passions nevertheless has other hopes in abeyance.
Love itself dreams of more than mere possession; to conceive happiness,
it must conceive a life to be shared in a varied world, full of events
and activities, which shall be new and ideal bonds between the lovers.
But unlawful love cannot pass out into this public fulfilment. It is
condemned to be mere possession--possession in the dark, without an
environment, without a future. It is love among the ruins. And it is
precisely this that is the torment of Paolo and Francesca--love among
the ruins of themselves and of all else they might have had to give to
one another. Abandon yourself, Dante would say to us,--abandon yourself
altogether to a love that is nothing but love, and you are in hell
already. Only an inspired poet could be so subtle a moralist. Only a
sound moralist could be so tragic a poet.
The same tact and fine feeling that appear in these little moral dramas
appear also in the sympathetic landscape in which each episode is set.
The poet actually accomplishes the feat which he attributes to the
Creator; he evokes a material world to be the fit theatre for moral
attitudes. Popular imagination and the precedents of Homer and Virgil
had indeed carried him halfway in this symbolic labour, as tradition
almost always carries a poet who is successful. Mankind, from remotest
antiquity, had conceived a dark subterranean hell, inhabited by unhappy
ghosts. In Christian times, these shades had become lost souls,
tormented by hideous demons. But Dante, with the Aristotelian chart of
the vices before him, turned those vague windy caverns into a
symmetrical labyrinth. Seven concentric terraces descended, step by
step, towards the waters of the Styx, which in turn encircled the brazen
walls of the City of Dis, or Pluto. Within these walls, two more
terraces led down to the edge of a prodigious precipice--perhaps a
thousand miles deep--which formed the pit of hell. At the bottom of
this, still sinking gently towards the centre, were ten concentric
furrows or ditches, to hold ten sorts of rogues; and finally a last
sheer precipice fell to the frozen lake of Cocytus, at the very centre
of the earth, in the midst of which Lucifer was congealed amongst lesser
traitors.
Precision and horror, graphic and moral truth, were never so wonderfully
combined as in the description of this hell. Yet the conception of
purgatory is more original, and perhaps more poetical. The very approach
to the place is enchanting. We hear of it first in the fatal adventure
ascribed to Ulysses by Dante. Restless at Ithaca after his return from
Troy, the hero had summoned his surviving companions for a last voyage
of discovery. He had sailed with them past the Pillars of Hercules,
skirting the African shore; until after three months of open sea, he saw
a colossal mountain, a great truncated cone, looming before him. This
was the island and hill of purgatory, at the very antipodes of
Jerusalem. Yet before Ulysses could land there, a squall overtook him;
and his galley sank, prow foremost, in that untraversed sea, within
sight of a new world. So must the heathen fail of salvation, though some
oracular impulse bring them near the goal.
How easy is success, on the other hand, to the ministers of grace! From
the mouth of the Tiber, where the souls of Christians congregate after
death, a light skiff, piloted by an angel, and propelled only by his
white wings, skims the sea swiftly towards the mountain of purgatory,
there deposits the spirits it carries, and is back at the mouth of the
Tiber again on the same day. So much for the approach to purgatory. When
a spirit lands it finds the skirts of the mountain broad and spreading,
but the slope soon becomes hard and precipitous. When he has passed the
narrow gate of repentance, he must stay upon each of the ledges that
encircle the mountain at various heights, until one of his sins is
purged, and then upon the next ledge above, if he has been guilty also
of the sin that is atoned for there. The mountain is so high as to lift
its head into the sphere of the moon, above the reach of terrestrial
tempests. The top, which is a broad circular plain, contains the Garden
of Eden, watered by the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, one to heal all painful
memories, and the other to bring all good thoughts to clearness. From
this place, which literally touches the lowest heaven, the upward flight
is easy from sphere to sphere.
The astronomy of Dante’s day fell in beautifully with his poetic task.
It described and measured a firmament that would still be identified
with the posthumous heaven of the saints. The whirling invisible spheres
of that astronomy had the earth for their centre. The sublime
complexities of this Ptolemaic system were day and night before Dante’s
mind. He loves to tell us in what constellation the sun is rising or
setting, and what portion of the sky is then over the antipodes; he
carries in his mind an orrery that shows him, at any given moment, the
position of every star.
Such a constant dragging in of astronomical lore may seem to us puerile
or pedantic; but for Dante the astronomical situation had the charm of a
landscape, literally full of the most wonderful lights and shadows; and
it also had the charm of a hard-won discovery that unveiled the secrets
of nature. To think straight, to see things as they are, or as they
might naturally be, interested him more than to fancy things impossible;
and in this he shows, not want of imagination, but true imaginative
power and imaginative maturity. It is those of us who are too feeble to
conceive and master the real world, or too cowardly to face it, that run
away from it to those cheap fictions that alone seem to us fine enough
for poetry or for religion. In Dante the fancy is not empty or
arbitrary; it is serious, fed on the study of real things. It adopts
their tendency and divines their true destiny. His art is, in the
original Greek sense, an imitation or rehearsal of nature, an
anticipation of fate. For this reason curious details of science or
theology enter as a matter of course into his verse. With the
straightforward faith and simplicity of his age he devours these
interesting images, which help him to clarify the mysteries of this
world.
There is a kind of sensualism or aestheticism that has decreed in our
day that theory is not poetical; as if all the images and emotions that
enter a cultivated mind were not saturated with theory. The prevalence
of such a sensualism or aestheticism would alone suffice to explain the
impotence of the arts. The life of theory is not less human or less
emotional than the life of sense; it is more typically human and more
keenly emotional. Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than
common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is
something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the
rumble of cities. For this reason philosophy, when a poet is not
mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into
his life; or rather, the detail of things and the detail of ideas pass
equally into his verse, when both alike lie in the path that has led him
to his ideal. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting to
words there; for words, too, are symbols without the sensuous character
of the things they stand for; and yet it is only by the net of new
connections which words throw over things, in recalling them, that
poetry arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of
crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s
length.
Never before or since has a poet lived in so large a landscape as Dante;
for our infinite times and distances are of little poetic value while we
have no graphic image of what may fill them. Dante’s spaces were
filled; they enlarged to the limits of human imagination, the
habitations and destinies of mankind. Although the saints did not
literally inhabit the spheres, but the empyrean beyond, yet each spirit
could be manifested in that sphere the genius of which was most akin to
his own. In Dante’s vision spirits appear as points of light, from which
voices also flow sometimes, as well as radiance. Further than reporting
their words (which are usually about the things of earth) Dante tells us
little about them. He has indeed, at the end, a vision of a celestial
rose; tier upon tier of saints are seated as in an amphitheatre, and the
Deity overarches them in the form of a triple rainbow, with a semblance
of man in the midst. But this is avowedly a mere symbol, a somewhat
conventional picture to which Dante has recourse unwillingly, for want
of a better image to render his mystical intention. What may perhaps
help us to divine this intention is the fact, just mentioned, that
according to him the celestial spheres are not the real seat of any
human soul; that the pure rise through them with increasing ease and
velocity, the nearer they come to God; and that the eyes of
Beatrice--the revelation of God to man--are only mirrors, shedding
merely reflected beauty and light.
These hints suggest the doctrine that the goal of life is the very
bosom of God; not any finite form of existence, however excellent, but a
complete absorption and disappearance in the Godhead. So the
Neoplatonists had thought, from whom all this heavenly landscape is
borrowed; and the reservations that Christian orthodoxy requires have
not always remained present to the minds of Christian mystics and poets.
Dante broaches this very point in the memorable interview he has with
the spirit of Piccarda, in the third canto of the _Paradiso_. She is in
the lowest sphere of heaven, that of the inconstant moon, because after
she had been stolen from her convent and forcibly married, she felt no
prompting to renew her earlier vows. Dante asks her if she never longs
for a higher station in paradise, one nearer to God, the natural goal of
all aspiration. She answers that to share the will of God, who has
established many different mansions in his house, is to be truly one
with him. The wish to be nearer God would actually carry the soul
farther away, since it would oppose the order he has established.[19]
Even in heaven, therefore, the Christian saint was to keep his essential
fidelity, separation, and lowliness. He was to feel still helpless and
lost in himself, like Tobias, and happy only in that the angel of the
Lord was holding him by the hand. For Piccarda to say that she accepts
the will of God means not that she shares it, but that she submits to
it. She would fain go higher, for her moral nature demands it, as
Dante--incorrigible Platonist--perfectly perceived; but she dare not
mention it, for she knows that God, whose thoughts are not her thoughts,
has forbidden it. The inconstant sphere of the moon does not afford her
a perfect happiness; but, chastened as she is, she says it brings her
happiness enough; all that a broken and a contrite heart has the courage
to hope for.
Such are the conflicting inspirations beneath the lovely harmonies of
the _Paradiso_. It was not the poet’s soul that was in conflict here; it
was only his traditions. The conflicts of his own spirit had been left
behind in other regions; on that threshing-floor of earth which, from
the height of heaven, he looked back upon with wonder,[20] surprised
that men should take so passionately this trouble of ants, which he
judges best, says Dante, who thinks least of it.
In this saying the poet is perhaps conscious of a personal fault; for
Dante was far from perfect, even as a poet. He was too much a man of his
own time, and often wrote with a passion not clarified into judgement.
So much does the purely personal and dramatic interest dominate us as we
read of a Boniface or an Ugolino that we forget that these historical
figures are supposed to have been transmuted into the eternal, and to
have become bits in the mosaic of Platonic essences. Dante himself
almost forgets it. The modern reader, accustomed to insignificant,
wayward fictions, and expecting to be entertained by images without
thoughts, may not notice this lack of perspective, or may rejoice in it.
But, if he is judicious, he will not rejoice in it long. The Bonifaces
and the Ugolinos are not the truly deep, the truly lovely figures of the
_Divine Comedy_. They are, in a relative sense, the vulgarities in it.
We feel too much, in these cases, the heat of the poet’s prejudice or
indignation. He is not just, as he usually is; he does not stop to
think, as he almost always does. He forgets that he is in the eternal
world, and dips for the moment into a brawl in some Italian
market-place, or into the council-chamber of some factious
_condottiere_. The passages--such as those about Boniface and
Ugolino--which Dante writes in this mood are powerful and vehement, but
they are not beautiful. They brand the object of their invective more
than they reveal it; they shock more than they move the reader.