Quegli che vince e non colui che perde.
And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the strange words of
Ulysses,
com’ altrui piacque,
he would not have said that the preacher and prophet are lost in the
poet. “Preacher” and “prophet” are odious terms; but what Mr. Sidgwick
designates by them is something which is certainly not “lost in the
poet,” but is part of the poet.
A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is
contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the
person, or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the
person, is never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is
modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme,
is coloured by the atmosphere of that person’s residence in one of the
three worlds. About none of Dante’s characters is there that ambiguity
which affects Milton’s Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty
or grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies
and also justifies their damnation. As Jason
Guarda quel grande che viene!
E per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!
The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires
greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected—
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.
If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the _Comedy_ is
dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole
scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A
mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As
the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human
action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so
the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical.
It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible
astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be
justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be
understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure
is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, _all_ human
emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also
extended in significance by their place in the scheme.
But Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most _ordered_
presentation of emotions that has ever been made. Dante’s method of
dealing with any emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that
of other “epic” poets as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a
character apparently controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the
character and the emotion itself. The emotion is split up into
constituents—and perhaps destroyed in the process. The mind of
Shakespeare was one of the most _critical_ that has ever existed. Dante,
on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much as he exhibits
its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is, understand the
_Inferno_ without the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_. “Dante,” says
Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” That is
true, though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like
Dante’s is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and
explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch’io vidi, perchè più di largo
dicendo questo, mi sento ch’io godo.
The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist,
is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit
of beauty. But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete
scale from negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate.
The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary
scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual
and the most spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most
elusive:
Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.
Per entro sè l’eterna margarita
ne recepette, com’ acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.
or
Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe’ Glauco nel gustar dell’ erba,
che il fe’ consorto in mar degli altri dei.[11]
Footnote 11:
See E. Pound, _The Spirit of Romance_, p. 145.
Again, in the _Purgatorio_, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII,
occur passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of
Aristotle strained through the schools.
Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma l’altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore....
We are not here studying the philosophy, we _see_ it, as part of the
ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision
of life can be complete which does not include the articulate
formulation of life which human minds make.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre....
It is one of the greatest merits of Dante’s poem that the vision is so
nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance
of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as
“poetry,” is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole.
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry’s “modern poet”
who attempts “to produce in us a _state_.” A state, in itself, is
nothing whatever.
M. Valéry’s account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and
with the tendencies of such a work as William James’s _Varieties of
Religious Experience_. The mystical experience is supposed to be
valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the
true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least
that he _sees_, and the absorption into the divine is only the
necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does
not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set
something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader’s
particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante,
more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy,
not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or
as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something _perceived_.
When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had
perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still
life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the
method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively
restricted.
* * * * *
NOTE.—My friend the Abbé Laban has reproached me for attributing to
Landor, in this essay, sentiments which are merely the expression of his
dramatic figure Petrarch, and which imply rather Landor’s reproof of the
limitations of the historical Petrarch’s view of Dante, than the view of
Landor himself. The reader should therefore observe this correction of
my use of Landor’s honoured name.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form
was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.
Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).