II

I begin with examples in which these data are derived from _religion_;

and, in the first place, from religion still untouched by philosophic

reflection. Without rashly assuming the solution of unsolved or

insoluble problems, one may venture to assert that the Homeric epics

owe their present form neither to purely religious awe nor merely to

conscious and deliberate artistry, but to a poetic apprehension of

the world operating upon the data of the savage cults and rituals,

the animism, totemism, and magic, which anthropology is gradually

deciphering under the palimpsest of their obliterating splendour. With

some aspects of the process we are not here concerned. If ‘Homer,’ as

many modern scholars suppose, disliked human sacrifice and similar

barbarities, and tempered or effaced the record of them, he reflects

the growing efficacy of civilized, but not necessarily of poetic,

ideas. It is otherwise with the transformation, whatever its precise

nature and history, which put the defined character and rich personal

accent of the Homeric Olympus in place of the psychological fluidity

and incoherence of primitive religion. For the childhood of poetry the

change possibly involved a loss. A world where there are no barriers,

or none which magic cannot dissolve, where gods and men and beasts pass

over into one another without resistance or demur, where everything can

be done and had if the right formula be pronounced and the due charm

applied--such a world is the home and habitat of the fairy tale; but

its facile instability must be overcome before a mature poetry, no

less certainly than before a mature science, can arise. The Homeric

outlook upon the world had as a religion grave flaws, which merited

the strictures of later moralists; but it had also, as a religion,

magnificent qualities to which they rarely did justice. His deathless

figures permanently raised the status of man and the ideals of human

achievement; and every line of the poetry is instinct with an assurance

of the glory of the world and the goodness of life, and the nobility

of heroic emprise, and of reverence and of pity, which justly made his

book the Bible of later Greece.

Yet it is plain that even Homer reflects or finds reflection in but

a limited tract of the Greek mind; that there were many deeper, as

well as darker, currents in the Greek way of apprehending the world,

of which that radiant mirror shows no trace. Humanity had triumphed

over the superhuman as well as over the subhuman, clarity over

mystery as well as over confusion. The Ionian thinkers of the sixth

century swept away the fables of Olympus, fastened on the problem of

substance, and proclaimed the sublime discovery that the All is One.

The Orphic cults and the Thracian orgies of Dionysus betrayed by the

widespread and intimate hold which they won in Greek life, refined

and humanized as they doubtless were, that religion in Greece too

included the riot of intoxicated rapture as well as clear-eyed piety;

the Bacchic frenzy, which carries men beyond themselves, as well as

temperate self-reverence and self-control. Both these new elements

enriched and uplifted, if at some points they also impoverished and

degraded, Greek mentality and the Greek apprehension of the world,

religious, philosophic, and poetic alike. The philosophic apprehension

of unity reacted on religion, and the two strains coalesced in the

sublime theism of Cleanthes’ hymn. The Dionysiac rapture reacted on

philosophy--without it should we have had the great doctrine proclaimed

in the _Phædrus_, of the divine vision won through madness and love?

And both reacted upon poetry--above all on tragedy, with its stringent

ideal of unity, maintained and manifested through all the phases and

moods of conflict, and the alliance, disclosed in its very structure,

of Apolline clarity and order with the lyric exaltation of Dionysus.

But the matter of tragedy shows yet more evidently the larger and

deeper World-view which poetry has now won. In passing from Homer to

Aeschylus we enter an atmosphere in which the gods are hardly ever

visible, but which is laden and tense with the sense of divine things.

His persons, it was said, are more than human; certainly his gods are

sometimes--like the Zeus of the _Prometheus_--less than divine. But the

Aeschylean universe has outgrown Olympus without having dispossessed

it. A soul of immense reach and depth, apprehending life from many

sides, but always with a sense of vast issues and inexhaustible import,

here interprets the old stories of man’s relations with the gods, and

leaves us with a new vision of the possibilities and responsibility

of man. His tragic conflicts call incommensurate forces into play,

and their apparent solution leaves yet larger problems unsolved. The

story of Prometheus ended with his reconciliation to Zeus; and this

doubtless expressed the poet’s deliberate intention and design. The

modern world has remembered Prometheus, not for his final surrender

or appeasement, but as the assertor and embodiment of something in

man which stands over against the gods he recognizes, and not only

endures unflinchingly all that their utmost anger can inflict, but

arraigns them himself before a law of Justice higher than their own.

Æschylus, we know, was a devoutly religious man, and never dreamed of

surrendering his reverence for the divine because of the crimes of the

gods. Possibly, as Wilamowitz has suggested, he believed that divinity

itself had passed through a youth ‘full of foolish noise’ to become

with ripening years a righteous God and Father, worthy at length of

universal reverence. Reverence for such an erring divinity is hardly

distinguishable from forgiveness; in any case it foreshadows, if it

does not announce, the clear recognition of human responsibility. And

that recognition is already dominant in the mature work of Æschylus.

The traditional superstitions which still entangled the Greek mind--the

doctrine of an irresistible fate, or of a divine jealousy attending

human greatness--dissolve under the scrutiny of his terrible insight.

Man is free even in his crimes, and the greater because he is free.

Clytaemnestra chooses and wills as freely as Lady Macbeth; she is as

little the helpless victim of the curse of Atreus as the other of the

Witches’ spell. It needed a great poet thus to embrace in his vision

of life things incompatible to common sense. ‘Whether Æschylus is

greater,’ declares the penetrating interpreter to whom I have referred,

‘when he uplifts our hearts by the full tones of surrender to the

divine, or when he thrills us with the terrible acts and sufferings

of human freewill, every one must decide for himself from his own

experience; but let no one say that he understands the poet until he

has known them both.’[31] The poet’s eye, ‘glancing from heaven to

earth, from earth to heaven,’ overcomes the antinomies of theological

dogma; and herein lies one of the most signal services which poetic

apprehension has rendered to thought, and not least to religion.

To pass from Æschylus to Dante is to watch operations of poetic

intelligence in which only the environment, the material, and the

instruments of expression are profoundly changed. The words just quoted

of the Greek might apply without the alteration of a syllable to the

Florentine; and if ever poet saw earth and heaven at once it was he.

But the theological World-view which he found was more authoritatively

established, more intellectual in its philosophical substance, and more

rich and beautiful in its human appeal. The fresh fountain of religious

feeling, still abundantly flowing, was fortified and entrenched within

a vast structure of elaborated dogma, for which councils and saints

had supplied the architects and the masons, and ancient philosophy

the stones. Within this imposing edifice, nevertheless, Dante, with

complete conviction, found and made his home. No one now questions the

absoluteness of Dante’s Catholic faith, and we should seek in vain

for any rebellious upsurging of the poet in him against the starkest

of scholastic abstractions. On the contrary, his wonderful gift of

style continually finds the material for poetry in the most seemingly

arid regions. Sometimes the result is merely an astonishing _tour de

force_; but often we become aware that Dante has not only invented but

discovered, and that many a dogma which has the air of being the mere

husk of religion is in reality the imperfect, stammering utterance

through which religious passion sought to make itself articulate.

Dante, in short, makes us feel in these constructions of the intellect

the language of the soul.

To do this needed something more than devout belief. It needed the

imaginative intuition of a poet. The poetry of Dante was distinguished

from that of his older contemporaries above all by being just this

intense soul-vision put into words. ‘I simply write down what Love

within dictates.’[32] Psychological veracity never fails him. Allegory,

in so many hands a tissue of personified abstractions, becomes, in

his, a living image of humanity. Symbolic meanings and applications

interweave and encircle it, but the core is real. His vision is only

on the surface a description--necessarily speculative--of the fortunes

of souls after death; its substance, as he tells us, is ‘man of his

freewill choosing good or evil here.’ The human denizens of his hell

and purgatory and paradise have undergone no inner change; they are the

men he had known, in their spiritual habits as they lived; and their

fate, when Dante is thinking most as a poet and least as a theologian,

is a continuation of their crucial actions. That Paolo and Francesca

are immersed in unquenchable flames satisfies the theological idea of

retribution; Dante inflicts on them the more searching penalty of being

for ever locked in the embrace of their illicit love. And how often,

when he thinks he is devoutly following out to the last consequence the

Church’s dogma of eternal punishment, he is unconsciously testifying

to the poet’s sublime faith in the soul of man as stronger than death

and hell. ‘Who is he,’ asks Dante, looking upon Capaneo (_Inf._ xiv.

46), ‘who seems not to heed the flame, but lies fiercely unsubdued by

the fiery vein?’ Or the yet greater picture of Farinata (_Inf._ x. 85),

defiantly erect where the rest grovel in agony, ‘as if he held hell

in great disdain.’ Even the criminals whom the poet most abhors, and

thrusts into the very depths of the abyss, even the traitors guilty of

the death of Cæsar or of Christ, he allows still to show greatness of

soul; Brutus, champed to a bloody foam in the jaws of Lucifer, is still

the Stoic philosopher, and though he writhes in agony, utters not a

word (_Inf._ xxxiv. 66). And how wonderfully in the great Ulysses scene

(_Inf._ xxvi) the poet takes the pen out of the hand of the theologian,

and, forgetting the ‘fraud’ for which the captor of Troy is doing

penance in hell, compels us to listen entranced to his tale of that

last voyage, beyond the sunset, of the old wanderer, still insatiable

of experience, who had kindled his shrinking comrades by bidding them

‘Consider of what seed ye are sprung; ye were not made to live like

the brute beasts, but to follow after virtue and knowledge.’ Strange

words to issue from the quenchless flames of hell! But Dante goes

beyond this. For the sake of the heroism of Cato, he flatly violates

the theological categories which condemned him to hell, and makes

him the guardian of Purgatory.[33] As for the rest of the ‘virtuous

heathen,’ he cannot indeed transfer them from the hell to which the

Church has assigned them--a hell much more ferocious than any of which

they had dreamed--to Elysium. But he does what he may, and he provides

for them within the precincts of hell an Elysium of green lawns and

running streams, ‘the one place in the Inferno where there is light and

air’ (_Inf._ iii). The theological ethic of sin is thus unconsciously

crossed, again and again, by the poetic ethic for which ‘good’ means

greatness of soul.

Moreover, with a depth of spiritual insight strangely in contrast with

the vulgar notion of punishment which dictated the theological hell,

Dante has asserted, even in this realm of iron necessity, the freedom

of man. The inmates of hell are not convicts condemned and punished for

sins long since repented of: they are there of their own motion and by

their own will; and if there is no hope there, it is not because God

has no mercy, but because they cannot repent. The souls in Purgatory

are held there by no compulsion; they desire nothing but to be purified

of their sins, and the moment they desire to mount to Paradise, that

moment they are free.

It would be strange, then, had Dante, with all his sense of supreme

cosmic forces, not stood for the faith that man is yet the ‘captain of

his soul.’ There he is at one with Æschylus and Milton, and the other

great theological poets of the West. Man’s ‘freedom’ is a root idea of

the Comedy; and not merely because its purpose was to show him ‘in the

exercise of freewill,’ determining his fate hereafter. Dante went much

farther than this. A devoted Catholic and citizen, and eager to welcome

the authority both of Church and State, he was driven by the corruption

of the one and the anarchy of the other to seek ‘another way’--the way

of spiritual self-help with the aid of philosophy and theology, along

which he is led by Vergil and Beatrice. The great farewell words with

which Vergil leaves him in the Earthly Paradise, ‘I crown and mitre

thee king and bishop over thyself,’ express with thrilling power the

individualist--nay, the revolutionary--side of his thought. He would

not have been the great poet he was if it had been the only side.

Dante’s reverence for Vergil and for Beatrice is of the very substance

of his self-assertion; he has crowned and mitred himself by taking them

for his guides, and the result is the great poetic cosmos eloquent

beyond all the other masterpieces of the world of devout discipleship,

and yet instinct in every line with the ardour of a soul ‘voyaging

through strange seas of thought alone.’

But the name of Beatrice points to another aspect of Dante’s work on

which the impress of the poet in him is yet more unmistakably set.

Measured by the range and compass of thought, and by the richness and

delicacy of feeling, which the term in his usage conveys, Dante is the

first, as he is the greatest, of the poets of Love. His poetry recovers

and renews, or at the least suggests and recalls, all the varieties of

intellectual and emotional experience for which philosophy, religion,

and romance had, before his time, found in ‘Love’ the final expression,

or the speaking symbol. The cosmic love (φιλία) by which Empedocles

had first interpreted the universal phenomena which we still, hardly

less anthropomorphically, know as ‘attraction’; the passion for another

human being (ἔρως) in which the author of the _Phædrus_ and the

_Symposium_ discovered one of the sources of the divine exaltation

which emancipates men from their human limits, and endows them with

the vision of reality; the love of God for man, and of man for God

(ἀγάπη), proclaimed as the very core of Christianity in the Fourth

Gospel--these three types of love, all denoted for Dante by _Amor_,

_amore_,[34] were conjoined in his experience with a fourth, distinct

from all, though nearly allied to the second: the romantic love of

woman which had been the chief inspiration of the poetry of Provence,

and which, however sublimated and spiritualized, is enshrined in the

_Vita Nuova_. To say that Dante’s mind, equally powerful in analysis

and in synthesis, confounds these distinctions would be unjust; but it

would be equally untrue to assert that their associations are never

blended. Christian philosophy had itself absorbed the first; cosmic

attraction then reappeared in a sublime apotheosis, as the love which

draws all the universe towards God, and by which God, as its source,

‘moves the sun and the other stars.’ And if Dante, in his treatise on

poetry,[35] distinguishes himself from the poets of ‘love’ as a poet of

‘morals,’ or ‘righteousness,’ he also, as we saw, ascribes his whole

power as a poet to his writing what love dictated in his heart. Man in

virtue of his freedom has power to misuse Love, and Dante everywhere

scornfully contrasts the higher and the baser love. Nay, all sin which

can be ‘purged away’ he regards as due to ‘love’ wrongly used; the

whole population of Purgatory is there because it loved unwisely, or

loved indifferent things too well, or right things too little. But the

harm here, for Dante, arises not from love, but from the application to

it of the evil material in man’s nature--‘as a foul impress may be set

upon the most precious wax.’[36]

Something of the idealizing atmosphere which Christianity and Plato

had thrown about love thus always colours it in Dante’s mind. But it

is also subtly touched with that other idealizing force which not

Christianity but the poets had recognized, which Christian ethics had

contemptuously tolerated or scornfully tabooed. Dante had known the

love of woman in many forms. Longing for the absent wife and child

had consumed his flesh and his bones in exile;[37] and his virginal

adoration of Beatrice sprang from no coldness of the blood. The power

of womanhood to lift men to supreme heights of vision and fortitude,

which he had divined through Beatrice and sung in the great canzone

of the _Vita Nuova_,[38] no more passed out of his faith than did her

image from his memory. Nor was it for nothing that his master Vergil

had forgotten the political and imperial purpose of his poem in making

Dido the most moving heroine of antiquity. If the Comedy is a great

scheme of salvation, it is also a great song of womanhood such as, he

said, no man ever sang before; and if we say that Beatrice is there

a symbol for Theology, that is doubtless true: but a thousand phrases

remind us how much she symbolizes besides; and the look ‘in the eyes

of Beatrice,’ which draws Dante upward through the circling spheres of

Paradise to the beatific vision, attests also his faith in the power of

the lover’s adoration to lift a man out of his humanity (_trasumanar_),

and make him ‘joyful even in the flames.’

Thus Dante, though he counted himself not among the poets of love, but

among the poets of ‘righteousness,’ is one of the inspiring sources

of the modern poetry which invests the love of man and woman with

the ideal attributes which philosophy and religion had proclaimed

in other forms of love, but had ignored or repudiated in this. In

Spenser--Platonist, Christian, and lover at once--the fusion of the

three strains is complete; his great hymns to Love, who

is lord of all the world by right,

And ruleth all things by his powerful saw,

prelude his even greater hymn of marriage. Even Chaucer perhaps learnt

from Dante that amazed awe with which, in the opening lines of one of

his earliest Italianate poems, he contemplates the ‘wonderful working’

of love.[39] The Petrarchists and Sonneteers went far to reduce the

expression of this love to hollow phrase-making. But with Romanticism

it found fresh and original utterance, and its status in the world has

never been more loftily affirmed than by Celtic Romanticizing poets

of to-day. ‘I say that Eros is a being!’ declares one of the finest

spirits among them. ‘It is more than a power of the soul, though it is

that also. It has a universal life of its own.’[40]