interesting as just these stones which a practical builder would have
rejected. He forgives the ignorance and barbarism that placed them
where they are; he is absorbed in studying their sculptured surface
and delighted if his fancy can pass from them to the idea of the
majestic whole to which they once belonged. So in the presence of a
much-abused philosophic phrase, we may be interested in reconstructing
the experience which once gave it meaning and form. Words are at least
the tombs of ideas, and the most conventional formulas of poets or
theologians are still good subjects for the archæologist of passion. He
may find a treasure there; or at any rate he may hope to be rewarded
for his labour by the ideal restoration of some once beautiful temple
of Athena.
Something of this kind is what we may now attempt to do with regard to
one or two Platonic ideas, ideas which under the often ironical title
of Platonic love, are constantly referred to and seldom understood.
These ideas may be defined as the transformation of the appreciation
of beautiful things into the worship of an ideal beauty and the
transformation of the love of particular persons into the love of God.
These mystical phrases may acquire a new and more human meaning if we
understand, at least in part, how they first came to be spoken. We
shall then not think of them merely as the reported sayings of Plato
or Plotinus, Porphyry or Proclus; we shall not learn them by rote, as
the unhappy student learns the enigmas, which, in the histories of
philosophy, represent all that survives of the doctrine of a Thales or
a Pythagoras. We shall have some notion of the ideas that once prompted
such speech.
And we shall be the better able to reconstruct those conceptions
inasmuch as the reflection by which they are bred has recurred often
in the world--has recurred, very likely, in our own experience.
We are often Platonists without knowing it. In some form or other
Platonic ideas occur in all poetry of passion when it is seasoned with
reflection. They are particularly characteristic of some Italian poets,
scattered from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These poets
had souls naturally Platonic; even when they had heard something of
Plato they borrowed nothing from him. They repeated his phrases, when
they did so, merely to throw the authority of an ancient philosopher
over the spontaneous suggestions of their own minds. Their Platonism
was all their own: it was Christian, mediæval, and chivalrous, both
in origin and expression. But it was all the more genuine for being a
reincarnation rather than an imitation of the old wisdom.
Nothing, for example, could be a better object-lesson in Platonism than
the well-known sentimental history of Dante. There is no essential
importance in the question whether Dante could have read anything of
Plato or come indirectly under his influence. The Platonism of Dante,
is, in any case, quite his own. It is the expression of his inner
experience moulded by the chivalry and theology of his time. He tells
us the story himself very quaintly in the "Vita Nuova."
At the age of nine he saw, at a wedding-feast in Florence, Beatrice,
then a child of seven, who became, forthwith, the mistress of his
thoughts. This precocious passion ruled his imagination for life, so
that, when he brings to an end the account of the emotions she aroused
in him by her life and death, he tells us that he determined to speak
no more about her until he should be able to do so more worthily, and
to say of her what had never been said of any woman. In the "Divine
Comedy," accordingly, where he fulfils this promise, she appears
transfigured into a heavenly protectress and guide, whose gentle
womanhood fades into an impersonation of theological wisdom. But this
life-long devotion of Dante to Beatrice was something purely mental
and poetical; he never ventured to woo; he never once descended or
sought to descend from the sphere of silent and distant adoration;
his tenderness remained always tearful and dreamy, like that of a
supersensitive child.
Yet, while his love of Beatrice was thus constant and religious, it
was by no means exclusive. Dante took a wife as Beatrice herself had
taken a husband; the temptations of youth, as well as the affection
of married life, seem to have existed beneath this ideal love, not
unrebuked by it, indeed, but certainly not disturbing it. Should we be
surprised at this species of infidelity? Should we regard it as proof
of the artificiality and hollowness of that so transcendental passion,
and smile, as people have done in the case of Plato himself, at the
thin disguise of philosophy that covers the most vulgar frailties of
human nature? Or, should we say, with others, that Beatrice is a merely
allegorical figure, and the love she is said to inspire nothing but a
symbol for attachment to wisdom and virtue? These are old questions,
and insoluble by any positive method, since they cannot be answered by
the facts but only by our interpretation of them. Our solution can have
little historical value, but it will serve to test our understanding of
the metaphysics of feeling.
To guide us in this delicate business we may appeal to a friend of
Dante, his fellow-poet Guido Cavalcanti, who will furnish us with
another example of this same sort of idealization, and this same sort
of inconstancy, expressed in a manner that will repay analysis. Guido
Cavalcanti had a Beatrice of his own--something of the kind was then
expected of every gentle knight and poet--and Guido's Beatrice was
called Giovanna. Dante seems to acknowledge the parity of his friend's
passion with his own by coupling the names of the two ladies, Monna
Vanna and Monna Bice, in one or two of the sonnets he addresses to
Guido. Now it came to pass that Guido, in the fervour of his devotion,
at once chivalrous and religious, bethought him of making a pilgrimage
to the tomb of Saint James the Apostle, at Compostela in Spain.
Upon this journey--a journey beguiled, no doubt, by thoughts of the
beautiful Giovanna he had left in Florence--he halted in the city of
Toulouse. But at Toulouse, as chance would have it, there lived a
lovely lady by the name of Mandetta, with whom it was impossible for
the chivalrous pilgrim not to fall in love; for chivalry is nothing
but a fine emblazoning of the original manly impulse to fight every
man and love every woman. Now in an interesting sonnet Guido describes
the conflict of these two affections, or perhaps we should rather say,
their union.
"There is a lady in Toulouse so fair,
So young, so gentle, and so chastely gay,
She doth a true and living likeness bear
In her sweet eyes to Love, whom I obey."
The word I have, to avoid confusion, here rendered by "Love" is in the
original "la Donna mia," "my Lady"; so that we have our poet falling in
love with Mandetta on account of her striking resemblance to Giovanna.
Is this inconstancy or only a more delicate and indirect homage? We
shall see; for Guido goes on to represent his soul, according to his
custom, as a being that dwells and moves about in the chambers of
his heart; and speaking still of Mandetta, the lady of Toulouse, he
continues:--
"Within my heart my soul, when she appeared,
Was filled with longing and was fain to flee
Out of my heart to her, yet was afeared
To tell the lady who my Love might be.
She looked upon me with her quiet eyes,
And under their sweet ray my bosom burned,
Cheered by Love's image, that within them lies."
So far we have still the familiar visible in the new and making its
power; Mandetta is still nothing but a stimulus to reawaken the memory
of Giovanna. But before the end there is trouble. The sting of the
present attraction is felt in contrast to the eternal ideal. There is
a necessity of sacrifice, and he cries, as the lady turns away her
eyes:--
"Alas! they shot an arrow as she turned,
And with a death-wound from the piercing dart
My soul came sighing back into my heart."
Perhaps this merely means that the lady was disdainful; had she been
otherwise the poet might never have written sonnets about her, and
surely not sonnets in which her charms were reduced to a Platonic
reminiscence of a fairer ideal. But it is this turning away of the
face of love, this ephemeral quality of its embodiments, that usually
stimulates the imagination to the construction of a supersensible ideal
in which all those evaporated impulses may meet again and rest in an
adequate and permanent object. So that while Guido's "death-wound" was
perhaps in reality nothing but the rebuff offered him by a prospective
mistress, yet the sting of it, in a mind of Platonic habit, served
at once to enforce the distinction between the ideal beauty, so full
of sweetness and heavenly charm, which had tempted the soul out of
his heart on its brief adventure, and the particular and real object
against which the soul was dashed, and from which it returned bruised
and troubled to its inward solitude.
So the meditative Guido represents his experience: a new planet swam
into his ken radiant with every grace and virtue; yet all the magic
of that lady lay in her resemblance to the mysterious Giovanna, the
double of Beatrice, the ideal of the poet's imagination. The soul, at
first, went out eagerly to the new love as to an image and embodiment
of the old, but was afraid, and justly, to mention the ideal in the
presence of the reality. There is always danger in doing that; it
breaks the spell and reduces us again to the old and patient loyalty to
the unseen. The present thing being so like the ideal we unhesitatingly
pursue it: but we are quickly disappointed, and the soul returns
sighing and mortally wounded, as the new object of passion fades away.
We may now understand somewhat better that strange combination of
loyalty and disloyalty which we find in Dante. While the object of
love is any particular thing, it excludes all others; but it includes
all others as soon as it becomes a general ideal. All beauties attract
by suggesting the ideal and then fail to satisfy by not fulfilling
it. While Giovanna remained a woman, Guido, as his after life plainly
showed, had no difficulty in forgetting her and in loving many others
with a frank heart; but when Giovanna had become a name for the
absolute ideal, that sovereign mistress could never be forgotten, and
the thought of her subordinated every particular attachment and called
the soul away from it. Compared with the ideal, every human perfection
becomes a shadow and a deceit; every mortal passion leaves, as Keats
has told us,
"A heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead and a parching tongue."
Such is the nature of idealization. Like the Venus of Apelles, in
which all known beauties were combined, the ideal is the union of
all we prize in all creatures; and the mind that has once felt the
irresistible compulsion to create this ideal and to believe in it has
become incapable of unreserved love of anything else. The absolute
is a jealous god; it is a consuming fire that blasts the affections
upon which it feeds. For this reason the soul of Guido, in his sonnet,
is mortally wounded by the shaft of that beauty which has awakened a
vehement longing for perfection without being able to satisfy it. All
things become to the worshipper of the ideal so many signs and symbols
of what he seeks; like the votary who, kneeling now before one image
and now before another, lets his incense float by all with a certain
abstracted impartiality, because his aspiration mounts through them
equally to the invisible God they alike represent.
Another aspect of the same process is well described by Shakespeare, in
whom Italian influences count for much, when he says to the person he
has chosen as the object of his idealization:--
"Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead,
And there reigns love and all love's loving parts
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
As interest for the dead, which now appear
But things removed, which hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give:
That due of many now is thine alone.
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me."
We need not, then, waste erudition in trying to prove whether Dante's
Beatrice or Guido's Giovanna or any one else who has been the subject
of the greater poetry of love, was a symbol or a reality. To poets and
philosophers real things are themselves symbols. The child of seven
whom Dante saw at the Florentine feast was, if you will, a reality. As
such she is profoundly unimportant. To say that Dante loved her then
and ever after is another way of saying that she was a symbol to him.
That is the way with childish loves. Neither the conscious spell of the
senses nor the affinities of taste and character can then be powerful,
but the sense of loneliness and the vague need of loving may easily
conspire with the innocence of the eyes to fix upon a single image and
to make it the imaginary goal of all those instincts which as yet do
not know themselves.
When with time these instincts become explicit and select their
respective objects, if the inmost heart still remains unsatisfied, as
it must in all profound or imaginative natures, the name and memory
of that vague early love may well subsist as a symbol for the perfect
good yet unattained. It is intelligible that as time goes on that
image, grown thus consciously symbolic, should become interchangeable
with the abstract method of pursuing perfection--that Beatrice, that
is, should become the same as sacred theology. Having recognized that
she was to his childish fancy what the ideals of religion were to his
mature imagination, Dante intentionally fused the two, as every poet
intentionally fuses the general and the particular, the universal and
the personal. Beatrice thenceforth appeared, as Plato wished that our
loves should, as a manifestation of absolute beauty and as an avenue of
divine grace. Dante merely added his Christian humility and tenderness
to the insight of the Pagan philosopher.
The tendency to impersonality, we see, is essential to the ideal. It
could not fulfil its functions if it retained too many of the traits
of any individual. A blind love, an unreasoning passion, is therefore
inconsistent with the Platonic spirit, which is favourable rather to
abstraction from persons and to admiration of qualities. These may, of
course, be found in many individuals. Too much subjection to another
personality makes the expression of our own impossible, and the ideal
is nothing but a projection of the demands of our imagination. If
the imagination is over-powered by too strong a fascination, by the
absolute dominion of an alien influence, we form no ideal at all. We
must master a passion before we can see its meaning.
For this reason, among others, we find so little Platonism in that
poet in whom we might have expected to find most--I mean in Petrarch.
Petrarch is musical, ingenious, learned, and passionate, but he is
weak. His art is greater than his thought. In the quality of his mind
there is nothing truly distinguished. The discipline of his long and
hopeless love brings him little wisdom, little consolation. He is
lachrymose and sentimental at the end as at the beginning, and his best
dream of heaven, expressed, it is true, in entrancing verse, is only to
hold his lady's hand and hear her voice. Sometimes, indeed, he repeats
what he must have read and heard so often, and gives us his version of
Plato in half a sonnet. Thus, for instance, speaking of his love for
Laura, he says in one place:--
"Hence comes the understanding of love's scope
That seeking her to perfect good aspires,
Accounting little what all flesh desires;
And hence the spirit's happy pinions ope
In flight impetuous to the heaven's choirs,
Wherefore I walk already proud in hope."
If we are looking, however, for more direct expressions of the idealism
of feeling, of love, and the sense of beauty passing into religion,
we shall do well to turn to another Italian, not so great a poet as
Petrarch by any means, but a far greater man--to Michael Angelo.
Michael Angelo justly regarded himself as essentially a sculptor, and
said even of painting that it was not his art; his verses are therefore
both laboured and rough. Yet they have been too much neglected, for
they breathe the same pathos of strength, the same agony in hope, as
his Titanic designs.
Like every Italian of culture in those days, Michael Angelo was in the
habit of addressing little pieces to his friends, and of casting his
thoughts or his prayers into the mould of a sonnet or a madrigal. Verse
has a greater naturalness and a wider range among the Latin peoples
than among the English; poetry and prose are less differentiated. In
French, Italian, and Spanish, as in Latin itself, elegance and neatness
of expression suffice for verse. The reader passes without any sense of
incongruity or anti-climax from passion to reflection, from sentiment
to satire, from flights of fancy to homely details: the whole has a
certain human sincerity and intelligibility which weld it together.
As the Latin languages are not composed of two diverse elements, as
English is of Latin and German, so the Latin mind does not have two
spheres of sentiment, one vulgar and the other sublime. All changes
are variations on a single key, which is the key of intelligence. We
must not be surprised, therefore, to find now a message to a friend,
now an artistic maxim, now a bit of dialectic, and now a confession of
sin, taking the form of verse and filling out the fourteen lines of a
sonnet. On the contrary, we must look to these familiar compositions
for the most genuine evidence of a man's daily thoughts.
We find in Michael Angelo's poems a few recurring ideas, or rather the
varied expression of a single half æsthetic, half religious creed.
The soul, he tells us in effect, is by nature made for God and for
the enjoyment of divine beauty. All true beauty leads to the idea of
perfection; the effort toward perfection is the burden of all art,
which labours, therefore, with a superhuman and insoluble problem.
All love, also, that does not lead to the love of God and merge into
that love, is a long and hopeless torment; while the light of love is
already the light of heaven, the fire of love is already the fire of
hell. These are the thoughts that perpetually recur, varied now with
a pathetic reference to the poet's weariness and old age, now with an
almost despairing appeal for divine mercy, often with a powerful and
rugged description of the pangs of love, and with a pious acceptance
of its discipline. The whole is intense, exalted, and tragic, haunted
by something of that profound terror, of that magnificent strength,
which we admire in the figures of the Sixtine Chapel, those noble
agonies of beings greater than any we find in this world.
What, we may ask, is all this tragedy about? What great sorrow,
what great love, had Michael Angelo or his giants that they writhe
so supernaturally As those decorative youths are sprinkled over the
Sixtine vault, filled, we know not why, with we know not what emotion,
so these scraps of verse, these sibylline leaves of Michael Angelo's,
give us no reason for their passion. They tell no story; there seems to
have been no story to tell. There is something impersonal and elusive
about the subject and occasion of these poems. Attempts have been made
to attribute them to discreditable passions, as also to a sentimental
love for Vittoria Colonna. But the friendship with Vittoria Colonna
was an incident of Michael Angelo's mature years; some of the sonnets
and madrigals are addressed to her, but we cannot attribute to her
influence the passion and sorrow that seem to permeate them all.
Perhaps there is less mystery in this than the curious would have us
see in it. Perhaps the love and beauty, however base their primal
incarnation, are really, as they think themselves, aspirations toward
the Most High. In the long studies and weary journeys of the artist,
in his mighty inspiration, in his intense love of the structural
beauty of the human body, in his vicissitudes of fortune and his
artistic disappointments, in his exalted piety, we may see quite enough
explanation for the burden of his soul. It is not necessary to find
vulgar causes for the extraordinary feelings of an extraordinary man.
It suffices that life wore this aspect to him; that the great demands
of his spirit so expressed themselves in the presence of his world.
Here is a madrigal in which the Platonic theory of beauty is clearly
stated:--
"For faithful guide unto my labouring heart
Beauty was given me at birth,
To be my glass and lamp in either art.
Who thinketh otherwise misknows her worth,
For highest beauty only gives me light
To carve and paint aright.
Rash is the thought and vain
That maketh beauty from the senses grow.
She lifts to heaven hearts that truly know,
But eyes grown dim with pain
From mortal to immortal cannot go
Nor without grace of God look up again."
And here is a sonnet, called by Mr. Symonds "the heavenly birth of love
and beauty." I borrow in part from his translation:--
"My love's life comes not from this heart of mine.
The love wherewith I love thee hath no heart,
Turned thither whither no fell thoughts incline
And erring human passion leaves no smart.
Love, from God's bosom when our souls did part,
Made me pure eye to see, thee light to shine,
And I must needs, half mortal though thou art,
In spite of sorrow know thee all divine.
As heat in fire, so must eternity
In beauty dwell; through thee my soul's endeavour.
Mounts to the pattern and the source of thee;
And having found all heaven in thine eyes,
Beneath thy brows my burning spirit flies
There where I loved thee first to dwell for ever."
Something of this kind may also be found in the verses of Lorenzo de'
Medici, who, like Michael Angelo, was a poet only incidentally, and
even thought it necessary to apologize in a preface for having written
about love. Many of his compositions are, indeed, trivial enough, but
his pipings will not seem vain to the severest philosopher when he
finds them leading to strains like the following, where the thought
rises to the purest sphere of tragedy and of religion:--
"As a lamp, burning through the waning night,
When the oil begins to fail that fed its fire
Flares up, and in its dying waxes bright
And mounts and spreads, the better to expire;
So in this pilgrimage and earthly flight
The ancient hope is spent that fed desire,
And if there burn within a greater light
'Tis that the vigil's end approacheth nigher.
Hence thy last insult, Fortune, cannot move,
Nor death's inverted torches give alarm;
I see the end of wrath and bitter moan.
My fair Medusa into sculptured stone
Turns me no more, my Siren cannot charm.
Heaven draws me up to its supernal love."
From such spontaneous meditation Lorenzo could even pass to verses
officially religious; but in them too, beneath the threadbare metaphors
of the pious muse and her mystical paradoxes, we may still feel the
austerity and firmness of reason. The following stanzas, for instance,
taken from his "Laudi Spirituali," assume a sublime meaning if we
remember that the essence to which they are addressed, before being a
celestial Monarch into whose visible presence any accident might usher
us, was a general idea of what is good and an intransitive rational
energy, indistinguishable from the truth of things.
"O let this wretched life within me die
That I may live in thee, my life indeed;
In thee alone, where dwells eternity,
While hungry multitudes death's hunger feed.
I list within, and hark! Death's stealthy tread!
I look to thee, and nothing then is dead.
"Then eyes may see a light invisible
And ears may hear a voice without a sound,--
A voice and light not harsh, but tempered well,
Which the mind wakens when the sense is drowned,
Till, wrapped within herself, the soul have flown
To that last good which is her inmost own.
"When, sweet and beauteous Master, on that day,
Reviewing all my loves with aching heart,
I take from each its bitter self away,
The remnant shall be thou, their better part.
This perfect sweetness be his single store
Who seeks the good; this faileth nevermore.
"A thirst unquenchable is not beguiled
By draught on draught of any running river
Whose fiery waters feed our pangs for ever,
But by a living fountain undefiled.
O sacred well, I seek thee and were fain
To drink; so should I never thirst again."