In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal
with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world
“from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the
thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the
horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s _Last
Judgment_ at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the
theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua
together, was probably painted under the personal influence of that
great authority and explorer. There is no justification in Dante’s own
work, however, for the Father’s supersession by the Son, who—while _Il
Padre Eterno_ is relegated to the choir-arch—occupies, as so often, the
judicial bench, and looms dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an
incomplete spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and
golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath his feet making a
decorative division of Heaven from Hell, and its arms providing
clinging-points for floating angels. Among the beatific company on the
celestial side of the Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady
saints, and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing up out
of their coffins, some looking round in surprise, some instinctively
begging for grace, and one looking back into his coffin, as into a cab
for something forgotten. The Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by
the Personal Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow very
familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You see their legs
protruding, and others ready for his maw clutched in his greedy hands.
Still other sinners stand on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver
under the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine beasts,
or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over all the agony, with
beautiful serene face, floats the angel, clinging to the Cross, and the
saints sit placid on their golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic
prevision of Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of
woe, as one’s enjoyment of one’s warm hearth is spiced by the howling of
the winds about.
The mere ardour of life was immoral to the mediæval mind, as we may see
from the celebrated anonymous frescoes of _Il Trionfo della Morte_ in
the Campo Santo of Pisa—as if a cemetery needed any enforcement of
Death’s triumph! But the opportunity is seized of besmirching “The
Triumph of Life,” and by way of prelude to the tomb and its terrors a
gay cavalcade of hunters rides to the chase, with hound and horn,
winding through a lovely landscape. Their horses are arrested by three
open coffins on the roadside, precisely of the shape of horse-troughs,
but containing corpses, apparently a king’s, a priest’s, and a layman’s.
The last is a mere skeleton; the others are fully robed and serpents
curl spitefully about them. A stag, a rabbit, and a partridge rest
serenely upon a little plateau, as if conscious there will be no danger
to-day from these disconcerted sportsmen. A cowled monk holds out a long
scroll to the leader of the chase, like an official presenting an
address. Other holy hermits read ostentatiously beneath the trees
outside their humble cottage, and one milks a quaint goat. As if the
hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover
fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to
their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this
forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great
scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are
his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and
angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of
pull devil, pull angel. In one case the angel has gripped the arms, the
devil the feet, and they tug and lug with wings distended to their
fullest, every muscle a-strain; even if the angel succeeds, the racked
ghost will have known the Inferno. Let us pray the poor soul may recover
breath in the Hesperian garden, where sit the meek sainted playing on
lutes and lyres or nursing pet doves and spaniels.
A companion fresco devotes itself to _The Last Judgment_. To the sound
of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their coffins, to be marched right
or left by stern sworded archangels, as the great arbiter—again in a
surmounting oval—may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe platform on
high and watch the suppliant, panic-stricken sinners in the dock. Hell
in many compartments takes half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a
grisly Colossus, horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of
horrors unspeakable, or a caldron of stewing sinners, most noteworthy of
whom are the three arch-heretics of the fourteenth century, Mohammed,
Anti-Christ, and Averroes (the last grown much less respectable since
Dante put him with Plato). This composition—the heretics apart—is
obviously on the general lines of Giotto’s, which may be considered the
archetype of all the Judgment pictures, and the crudity of the
conception is apparent. It is a mere parody of earthly tribunals. In the
hands of a Signorelli—as at Orvieto—the vigour of the technique
dominates and sweeps away the _naïveté_. It is the sublimity of terror—
“Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.”
But this conventional and crowded rendering has always impressed me far
less than Maso di Bianco’s in S. Croce, where a solitary soul appears
for judgment in a wild gorge under the throne of Christ, while two
down-sweeping angels, blowing their trumpets perpendicularly, assist the
awesomeness of the design. What a pity Michelangelo did not handle the
theme with this massive simplicity, and give us one naked, shivering
soul with the fierce light of judgment beating upon him, instead of the
stereotyped arrangement of the Judge on high, the blessed on his right,
the damned on his left, the rising dead at his feet, with Hell opening
underneath! His colossal fresco, with its huddle of naked saints—to
which the clothes provided by later Popes lent the last touch of
gloom—is, with the possible exception of Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, the
dismallest picture in the world, and it is even worse placed than
Tintoretto’s stupendous canvas.
The angel Michael, whose scales weigh souls, must have been hard at work
ere he could find enough good people to fill this _Paradise_. When I
last peeped into it in the Palace of the Doges, it was conveniently on
the floor, having been removed from its wall for repair, and, standing
thus propped up in the centre of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, it
loomed even more gigantic than my recollection of it, filling half the
vast hall and extending to the ceiling. Its precise dimensions,
according to a buzzing attendant, were twenty-two metres broad by seven
metres high. Here surely is the prize of prizes for the American
millionaire. The largest picture in the world! Think of it! But, alas! a
pauperised Government arrogantly clings to its treasures, forbids
exportation. How smuggle it out? What railway carriage could hold it?
How get it even across the Grand Canal to the station? What gondola,
what _barca_, what _vapore_ even could carry it? Perhaps a bridge of
boats might be built, as for the passing of an army. And an army indeed
it holds.
Tintoretto’s Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any hygienic standard.
’Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleasing and muddy in colour, where
you are doomed to carry for ever the emblems of your life, where Moses
must eternally uphold his Tables of the Law and St. George sport his
armour, and martyrs shiver in perpetual undress. As usual, God the
Father is an absentee Lord, and Christ and the Madonna—in equal
authority, not with the woman subordinate, as in a Veronese in the same
Sala—dominate the chaos of figures, flying, whirling, praying, playing,
or reading. To see this Heaven is to be reconciled with Earth. Some
parts of it are already destroyed, and I look forward to the day when it
shall pass away with a great noise. Smaller but far more select is
Tintoretto’s impressionist _Paradiso_ in the Louvre, with its rainbow
swirls or celestial vortices, its curving sweeps of figures flying on
clouds, only prosaic by its platform where Christ, the Madonna, and the
greater saints sit like the distinguished persons at a public meeting.
His _Purgatorio_ in Parma is equally imaginative, a whirl of figures and
wild cliffs and rugged, lurid, serpent-haunted chasms, down which angels
plunge to bring up souls to the Madonna, who sits alone in her gloriole.
Bartolommeo Spranger’s Heaven—which may be seen in Turin—is a place
where saintly companies link hands as in a child’s game, while grimacing
demons or snakes tear at sinners.
Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the Sala dello
Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace with an emulation of Tintoretto, but the
main renown of his _Last Judgment_ seems to rest on his humorous idea of
putting his wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay off
private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course everybody can
plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise—that of Jacobello del Fiore—the
symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue and red and gold recall
exactly the groups in the La Scala ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli’s
_Assumption of the Virgin_ in the National Gallery is also somewhat
geometric, though the empty lilied court below gives beautiful relief.
Fra Bartolommeo’s large faded fresco of _The Last Judgment_, in
Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet the poor souls as they
rise from their graves, is inspired by the Pisan fresco, and is less
interesting than that of Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San
Marco, in whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweetness
and finish accentuate again the intellectual _naïveté_. His series of
little panels in the Accademia of Florence has a quaint originality, the
Judge sitting over a mystic red and green wheel, with the blessed on
either hand. Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected, while
demons poke spears into the damned. More conventional in composition is
his large easel-picture in the same room—a miracle of detailed
loveliness, except for the Hell, which is botched, as though unsuited to
his artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil hideous out
of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep are divided from the goats by a
curious row of open graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is
superdominant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting
angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the saints in
couples and companies; the sinners—in crowns, mitres, or mere caps—are
driven Hellward at the points of a pitchfork into their respective
circles, where some are eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are
eating one another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands. There
are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a laden table, sinners
hung up, sinners holding their own heads in their hands. Demons like
brown bears gnash white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of
Hell a capacious big-toothed gullet—horrible in its suggestion of more
behind—is gulping down two red-headed wretches. In his _Christ in
Hades_ the gentle painter, following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates
Hell in a demon crushed beneath its door.
In the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella the theme is repeated by the
brothers Orcagna. Andrea took Paradise and suffused it with tender
beauty, fitting it with row upon row of seraphim and saintly figures,
whose serried symmetrical haloes suggest, however, a marshalling of
saints for inspection; while Bernardo made of Hell a chart of
ugliness—a compartmental chaos of strange fading horrors—fading though
the Heaven has lasted. But it is not easy to get decorative beauty into
the Inferno, especially when broken up into parishes of pain and not
part of a complete _Last Judgment_ such as that by Andrea single-handed
in the same Chapel. In this last, angels carrying the cross and the
thorns make a variant in the composition. In the Spanish Chapel of the
same church _The Way to Paradise_ is treated as of more concern to
mortals than the nature of the goal, of which we get the merest peep;
and perhaps the artist’s own concern was Beauty, for the central pattern
of the picture is woven by a procession on richly caparisoned horses
winding round and round. Tranquilly beautiful are the figures at the
Passion, even apart from the tender figure of Christ, whose halo hides
the form of the decorative polished cross he bears.
The Paradise is, however, a Dominican Paradise, for this noble fresco on
examination turns out to be a complicated allegory in glorification of
the order, even including the pictorial pun or rebus of black-and-white
dogs (_domini canes_), guarding the faithful sheep and worrying the
heretical wolves. The Dominican Heaven has always a marked preference
for Dominican dogma, as the Dominican Hell is particularly hospitable to
rival forms of teaching. Incidentally this great anonymous painting is a
social _Mappamondo_ of the mediæval, including every type in Church and
State from Pope to pauper; the vanities and pomps, the penances and
renunciations. A lovely peace broods over this picture, as over all the
Chapel. Hell does not disturb its restful walls, save as the mild Limbo
to which Christ descends to redeem Adam, Noah, and other figures,
proleptically haloed. He hovers majestically over the vague scene,
carrying a red-cross flag over his left shoulder. It is only the demons
who give grotesquerie to the picture, but they are unsurpassable. One of
these baffled imps falls prostrate in the void, another is tearing his
goatee beard, a third stands scowling, with folded wings, the hair of a
fourth stands on end, a bristle of wires. This last demon is livid in
hue; his fellows are more or less fiery.
Bronzino has dealt less happily, if less grotesquely, with the same
theme, for to his later vision it was a good opportunity for studying
the nude and the half-nude. But to follow out the theme of _Christ in
Hades_ would carry me too far. I must, however, refer to the touching
conception of Christ _rushing_ to the rescue: as in the picture by
Andrea Previtali in which Christ is seen in a whirl of drapery with a
streaming flag, pulling up an old woman and a girl. A large cross
occupies the centre of this Limbo, to which cling or pray rescued nude
figures, while St. John stands by with a smaller cross.
The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but in other
art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa Niccolò Pisano
carved it in relief, imaginatively rendering the faces of the damned
almost animal with sin. Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel,
in stone and bronze, while on the rich-jewelled Pala d’Oro of St.
Mark’s, _Christ in Hades_ has called forth the craft of the goldsmith.
An exhaustive study of eschatological æsthetics would include also the
innumerable apotheoses and receptions in Heaven, would involve a
comparison with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would
range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the decorative
compositions of the decadents.
I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the genesis and
evolution of these pictorial images. They certainly did not derive from
Dante, for Dante’s poem itself contains an allusion to a Florentine
calamity, which we know to have been the collapse in 1304 of a wooden
bridge over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular representation of
the horrors of the Inferno.
Moreover—apart from the demons and chimæras dire on the old Etruscan
tombs—fumblings at the theme exist in art prior to Dante, as, for
instance, those rude bronze reliefs in the Byzantine manner on the doors
of S. Zeno in Verona, which mark, as it were, the Bronze Age of the
concept. These, I was assured, were ninth-century, but even dating them
at the eleventh or twelfth—and the church contains frescoes as
early—they were in time for Dante to have seen them when enjoying Can
Grande’s hospitality in Verona. His denunciation of Alberto della Scala
for appointing his bastard as abbot of the monastery shows his interest
in S. Zeno. In these rude bronzes Dante beheld the bare elements of that
Hell which he furnished so handsomely. Here is already the giant
fee-fi-fo-fum figure holding—O primeval irony!—a quaking monk. Here is
the sinner upside down whose legs are disappearing within a caldron.
Here also, in another bronze relief, is Christ in Limbo, haling figures
out. Christ’s halo is novel, consisting of three tufts, one sticking out
on either side of his head, the other on top. It may interest the
decadent to learn that there is also a relief of Salome dancing, in
which she anticipates all the modern contortionists.
To pass back from the Bronze Age of the _Last Judgment_ to the Stone
Age, that fine old Lombardic cathedral of Ferrara, whose lateral façades
date from 1135, shows in a lunette over one of them a stone relief of
_The Day of Judgment_. Flanked by saints, “God’s in his Heaven,” holding
the saved souls in his lap in a sort of sheet, while the devil in his
Hell pokes up his busy fire and an acolyte shoves a sinner down a
dragon’s mouth. The Baptistery of Parma, a structure less ancient, but
still antecedent to Dante, shows on its left portal three dead men
coming out of their tombs, to be received by the angels or the
executioner, according to the dictum of the Judge on high, who is
nursing a saved soul. The guilty lean anxiously out of curious stone
buildings, apparently awaiting their turn to be decapitated.
With such compositions existing in Italy, it seems supererogatory of M.
Didron to have counted more than fifty French illustrations of the
“Divine Comedy,” before Dante, painted on church windows or sculptured
on church portals, or for M. Lafitte to seek for Dante’s inspiration in
the western portal of Notre-Dame, which he must have seen during his
stay in Paris.
Giotto, then, did not altogether originate his conception of the
Judgment scene. Indeed, already in the alleged discourse of Josephus to
the Greeks concerning Hades, we have a word-picture of the Hebrew Day of
Judgment in which the souls of the just are marshalled to the right and
the souls of the sinners to the left.
Dante may equally be exonerated from the crime of having originated
these grotesque notions of the after-world, if he cannot be exonerated
from the crime of corroborating them. These infantile images were made
in the brains of fasting monks and terror-stricken sinners—for brains
make day-dreams as well as nightmares—on a confused basis of the
classic Hades and Tartarus and Elysium and the Egyptian after-world and
the Hebrew Gehennah, supplemented by misapplied texts and misunderstood
metaphors. They drew their appeal from that conflict ’twixt good and
evil which every man felt raging in his own soul, and which made
plausible the externalisation of these forces as angels and demons
fighting for its possession.
But though the first sketch of the Christian Hell appears in literature
as early as the apocryphal “Acts of St. Thomas,” Dante may be said to
have systematised these chaotic conceptions, drawn the chart of the
Hereafter, and determined the scientific frontiers between Hell and
Limbo, Purgatory and Paradise. His are the nine concentric circles of
the Inferno, though Acheron and Minos, Charon and Cerberus, are borrowed
from his guide and master; he is the sole discoverer and surveyor of the
island-mountain of Purgatory, so precisely antipodal to Jerusalem, with
its seven parishes corresponding to the seven deadly sins; his are the
nine Heavens, ascending to the Beatific Vision, that is circumscribed by
the thrice three orders of the angelic hierarchies. Nevertheless,
marvellous as is the sustained imaginativeness of the achievement, his
contribution to the stock of eschatological ideas is comparatively
small. The vulgar imagination is quite capable of bodying forth these
grimacing, horned demons, these imps with prongs and lashes, those
swooping fiends, that heavy head-gear,—not unlike the English high hat
in August—those fiery floods, those gibbering, wailing ghosts, those
wretches immersed in ordure, those ghastly sinners munching each other,
those disgustful stenches and itchings. Dante would not be remembered
for such nursery horrors. Happily, he enriched the theme with finer
imaginings. They meet us at the very threshold of the dolorous city in
those neutral souls good enough neither for Heaven nor Hell; like the
abdicating Pope Celestine V, neither rebels against God nor true to Him.
Yet Dante almost spoilt his own conception by adding the material pains
inflicted by wasps and hornets to their eternal nullity. Kipling, in his
probably unconscious approximation to the idea in “Tomlinson,” had a
sounder instinct, though perhaps Ibsen’s idea of returning Peer Gynt to
the Button-Moulder hits the truer penology. Dante’s touch is more
satisfying when he pictures the doom of those who were sad in sunny air,
and must now continue sad in the more appropriate surroundings of slime.
Yet there is here a touch of the Gilbertian grotesque; a foreshadowing
of the Mikado, whose “object all sublime” was “to make the punishment
fit the crime.” This suggestion is even stronger in the twenty-seventh
canto, where Mohammed and the arch-heretics who provoked schisms are
ripped and cleft from chin to forelock. Savagery, too, is met by savage
punishment, as in the Ugolino episode.
There are a few inventions, indeed, beyond the vulgar imagination: the
six-footed serpent that transmutes the sinner to its own form, a passage
palpitating with Æschylean genius; the monstrous-paunched coiner,
consumed with a terrible hate; the shore “turreted with giants”; the
tears that cannot be shed. Nor could the vulgar—pre-occupied with
fire—have conceived a Hell of ice, though Dante’s Arctic circle is
bettered in the Gospel of Barnabas preserved in an Italian MS., which
compounds a Hell of fire and ice united by the Justice of God, “so that
neither tempers the other, but each gives its separate torment to the
infidel,” and in Vondel’s “Lucifer” the archfiend is condemned to
“The eternal fire
Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled.”
But neither the Dutch poet nor his contemporary, Milton, condescended to
the fee-fi-fo-fum infantility of Dante’s three-headed King of Hell, that
fantastic fiend who holds in each of his mouths one of the three
archetypal traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. And that Dante’s
“Judgment” was not considered “The Last” is shown by the popularity of
Brutus—as a tyrannicide—in the Florence of the Medici. The beauty of
the verse and the imaginative intensity alone render Dante’s “Inferno”
bearable. Translated into the images of Signorelli or Michelangelo—and
these more truly than Botticelli were Dante’s illustrators—the
grossness of his “Inferno” leaps to the eye, while his finer imaginings
are not capable of interpretation by brush or pencil.
The paradox of the “Divina Commedia,” indeed, is that it lives less by
its supernatural visionings, sombre and splendid as these occasionally
are, than by its passages of the earth, earthy, when the world the poet
has left behind breaks in upon the starless gloom of Hell or upon the
too ardent radiancy of Paradise. Nor need I prove my case by the
familiar episodes of Paolo and Francesca, and of Ugolino, though Dante’s
fame rests so largely upon them. Never was poem more terrestrial, more
surcharged with the beauty and grossness of earth-life. The delicious
touches of natural beauty, the splendid descriptions of sunrise and
moonlight, the keen observation of animal and insect life, of starlings
and doves, of storks and frogs, of falcons and goshawks, the pictures of
the jousts at Arezzo, or of the busy arsenal of Venice, the homely
similes painting indirectly the labours of ploughmen and shepherds,
warriors and sailors, even the demeanour of dicers—this last Dante’s
sole approach to humour—it is by these that Dante will live when his
Heaven and Hell are rolled up like a scroll. The sound of the vesper
bell that touches the earthly pilgrim moves us more than all the
celestial music of the Purgatory; the vision of beatific goodness,
beside the lovely picture of the ancient virtue of Florence in the
homely ages, is an airy nothing—one is more interested even to hear the
ladies of the day rebuked for their low-necked dresses. The dazzling
circles of Paradise leave us lethargic compared with the irrelevant
intrusion therein of the lark’s rapture of song or the earthly pain of
exile.
“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle
Lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.”
To prove how salt is others’ bread, how hard the passage up and down
others’ stairs! How impotent all the laboured strivings to shadow forth
the vision celestial compared with this touch of the terrestrial
concrete! In truth Dante did not go “out of his senses,” even in his
most transcendental moments of inspiration. His five senses were all he
had wherewith to obtain the raw material of his imaginings, and out of
his sensations of touch and sight, of smell and taste and hearing, he
wove both his Hell and his Heaven. The stored repugnances of mankind,
the shudders and horrors at beasts and serpents, at bites and wounds and
loathsome diseases, the dread of fire—he himself was condemned to be
burnt alive—the chill of ice, the nausea of stinks and dizzying
motions—these are the factors of his Hell, as the odour of flowers and
incense, the shimmer of jewels, the sound of music, and the pains and
pleasures of anticipation are the factors of his Purgatory. As for his
Paradise, it is merely the sublimation of the philosophic Elysium
Aristotle and Cicero had conceived before Christianity; his very ecstasy
of Light is anticipated by Seneca.
Restlessness is a recurring image of doom with Dante—and perhaps his
own wander-years of exile lent vividness to the onward drifting of the
neutral spirits, the unrepose of the learned sinners, the eternal whirl
of Paolo and Francesca. Yet there are moments in which Dante rises
beyond his gross scale of punishments to a more spiritual plane.
“Thou art more punished in that this thy pride
Lives yet unquenched; no torrent, save thy rage,
Were to thy fiery pain proportioned full.”
In addressing this observation to Capaneus, Virgil, says Dante, spoke in
a higher-raised accent than ever before. In a less literal sense, it is
indeed a higher accent: it is even the note of modern thinking, from
Spinoza onwards. The wages of sin is—sin! It is probably even the note
of an earlier and still more misunderstood Master. But this note is only
heard once and faintly. The wages of sin is physical torture. But surely
such a Hell is unjustly balanced by such a Heaven—all Platonic
intellection, Plotinian ecstasy, and ethereal Light. If the wages of sin
is physical torture, then the wages of virtue should be physical
rapture. Dante’s Hell requires Mohammed’s Heaven, just as Christ’s
Heaven requires an immaterial Hell. For if the Kingdom of God is within
you, the Kingdom of the Devil cannot be without. This thought broke
dimly on Milton when, despite his material Hell, he wrote of Satan:
“But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid-heaven. . . .”
Dante’s Purgatory possesses, indeed, some of the material attractions a
logical Heaven needs: it has all the makings of an Earthly Paradise not
inferior to Addison’s in his “Vision of Mirza.” There are even great set
pieces of painting, and much that might well tempt the soul to linger on
its upward way.
The soul of the present critic is also tempted to seek superiority by
preferring the Paradise to the Inferno. Alas! a law of psychology has
ordained that pleasures shall be less exciting than tortures, and hence
the Purgatory is far duller than the Inferno, while the Paradise is
hopelessly swamped in sweetness and light. The splendid vision of the
snow-white Rose—wonderful as poetry—retains little spiritual value
under analysis, though the majestic passion of the close of the great
poem almost carries up the spirit with closed eyes to this dazzling
infinitude of Light and Love.
Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite
other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What
we see in it is the complete _Mappamondo_ of the mediæval, a complete
vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as
it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet,
whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages.
No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For
this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine
background is of the pettiest—including even Dante’s apologia for
breaking a font in the church of St. John—it is really world-history
with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern
conceives it, for Dante’s _Mappamondo_ held neither America nor China,
neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world—that
autocosm—in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a
world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as
they have in the poetry of Milton—so that the very “Paradiso” could
open with an invocation to Apollo! And this world-history is unified by
being strung together on a moral plan, precisely as in the Hebrew Bible,
Judas and Brutus finding themselves equally in Lucifer’s avenging fangs.
The flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brimstone, and if
we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chastisement are mainly those
we would wish purged from the universe in the white flame of
righteousness. Indeed, this great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went
unscathed through the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up
to Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own ardour. His
passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty and infinity. Each of his
three great sections ends with the very words. “The stars” shine again
in that noble letter refusing the Republic’s terms of pardon. “What!”
cries the exile, “shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of the sun and
the stars?” “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is,
indeed, the great doctrine of the poem—its literal last word. How this
love, “this goodness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the
universe,” is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the flame and
the other dooms, he does not explain. Though ever and anon his own tears
of pity flow, the doctrine of eternal hopeless torture does not appal
him; not even though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the
sufferers shall by then have subtilised their practised nerves for the
final damnation. It does not disconcert him—any more than it
disconcerts his great admirer, Michelangelo—that unbaptised infants and
heathens whose only crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and
that Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should need for their
salvation the special descent of Christ. For all his sublimity, his
passionate metaphysic insight into the Godhead, he falls below the
homely Rabbis of the Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier,
“The righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Yet
there are broken lights of this truth here and there.
“But lo! of those
Who call, ‘Christ, Christ,’ there shall be many found
In judgment, further off from Him by far
Than such to whom His name was never known.”
And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle against the
pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology; in his gratitude towards
the great Teachers of Antiquity, his reverence for whom anticipated the
Renaissance, albeit the Greeks among them were probably known to him
only in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance—if such were
possible—might have placed Aristotle and Plato in Paradise by
interposition of a Christ loving his Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did,
indeed, place Cicero and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during
the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle were in
Hell, and the best that Dante in his rigider century could do for them
was to put them in a painless Limbo, which they perambulate “with slow
majestic port,” acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace
which holds them thus far advanced, and which it seems not beyond all
hoping may ultimately exalt them to bliss. And with Aristotle, the
“maestro di color che sanno,” walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his
Mohammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical figures like Orpheus
and Hector. A Christendom that had never altogether lost touch with the
classical world—were it only by way of Virgil, mediæval saint and
sorcerer—a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious inspiration
in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the flames either the
classical writers or their works. Classic literature and mythology made
a second Bible, as the lore of chivalry and general history a third;
indeed, these were the three great circles in which swam the world of
the mediæval _Mappamondo_, the Biblical circle outermost and nearest to
Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tolerance on Dante’s part to make
Virgil his guide, chronology giving him no chance, as it gave with
Statius, of a legendary conversion to Christianity. And this penchant
for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the great Christian
heretics. But if Virgil himself was excluded from Heaven “for no sin
save lack of faith”—Virgil who could not possibly have believed—if
even the merits of those who lived before the Gospel, could not profit
them because they had missed baptism, it is not surprising to find the
Christian heretics collected in the ninth canto in burning sepulchres of
carefully graduated temperatures. One wishes that they, rather than
Farinata degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine disdain
foreshadowing Milton’s Satan. How Socrates would have smiled over the
perverted morality of the Christian poet, as we smile over the
constricted foot of a Chinese lady! Despite the attempt of a recent
writer to moralise his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said
for Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding that there is
no positive pain in that absence of the divine vision which St.
Chrysostom made the severest part of the punishment of the damned. But
in tolerance as well as humour he falls far below the _Ha-Tofet
weha-Eden_ (“Hell and Paradise”) of his Jewish friend and imitator,
Immanuel. It is in vain that Émile Gebhart (in “L’Italie Mystique”)
points to his revolutionary liberalism in placing Ripheus the Pagan and
Trajan, the Roman Emperor, in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only
bring out his lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though the
Æneid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as “justissimus unus” among
the Trojans and “the most observant of right,” yet it is not by the
simple force of his own goodness but by some complex operation of grace
under which he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and
even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the “luci sante.” As for
the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still worse confounded, for
he—despite the title he had won of _Optimus_—must serve his time in
hell, and is only popped into Paradise after being resuscitated,
converted and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his first
decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Christians, Dante assures us
gravely, not Gentiles as the world imagines; one believing in the
Crucifixion that was to be, and the other in the Crucifixion that had
been.
“Cristiani, in ferma fede
Quel de’ passuri, e quel de’ passi piedi.”
With all Dante’s stippling and geometric chart-drawing, his conception
of the after-world is not really clear. The sinners are able to deliver
long monologues, amid all their agony; they foreknow things terrestrial,
exactly like the Manes of Paganism; they quarrel with one another; there
are even high jinks in Hell, which according to Burckhardt show an
Aristophanic humour. (But then Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a
certain free will reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into
Dante’s excursion through their dominions a deal of breathlessness and
terror from which one should be exempt who travels with a “safe-conduct”
acquired by the interposition of powerful personages in Paradise.
Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante’s _Mappamondo
Infernale_. But the circles of his _Mappamondo Terrestre_ are clear and
resplendent. ’Twas within the illumination of these
circles—unnecessarily narrowing though they were—that the Middle Ages,
and even Ages later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their
lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though doubtless much
sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that
which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking
and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light
which electricity cannot replace.
But is our modern _Mappamondo_ as scientific as we think it? Can we
girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the
infinities?