arbitrary. The very world in which we live is but a form, whose spirit,
breathing through Nature and Experience, slowly creates its own
interpretation, adding a new testament to an old testament, lifting the
veil between Truth and Mercy, clasping the mailed hand of Righteousness
in the velvet glove of Peace.
The spirit of Religion is the immanence of the divine in the human, the
image of the eternal in the transitory, of things infinite in things
limited. I have heard endless discussions and vexed statements of how
the world came out of chaos. From the Mosaic version to the last
rationalistic theory, I have been willing to give ear to these. It is a
subject upon which human ingenuity may exercise itself in its allowable
leisure. One thing concerns all of us much more; _viz._, how to get
heaven out of earth, good out of evil, instruction out of opportunity.
This is our true life work. When we have done all in this that life
allows us, we have not done more than half, the other half lying beyond
the pale struggle and the silent rest. Oh! when we shall reach that
bound, whatever may be wanting, let not courage and hope forsake us.
Dante and Beatrice
DANTE and Beatrice--names linked together by holy affection and high
art. Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,--the
stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of Hell held in
a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose
intervention he passed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing
to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of
humanity.
My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating
even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a
new inspiration. Yet it seems to me that no part of my life, since that
reading, has been without some echo of the "Divine Comedy" in my mind.
In the walk through Hell, I strangely believe. Its warnings still
admonish me. I see the boat of Charon, with its mournful freight. I pass
before the judgment seat of Midas. I see the souls tormented in hopeless
flame. I feel the weight of the leaden cloaks. I shrink from the jar of
the flying rocks, hurled as weapons. For me, dark Ugolino still feeds
upon his enemy. Francesca still mates with her sad lover.
From this hopeless abyss, I emerge to the kindlier pain of Purgatory,
whose end is almost Heaven. And of that blessed realm, my soul still
holds remembrance--of its solemn joy, of its unfolding revelation. The
vision of that mighty cross in which all the stars of the highest heaven
range themselves is before me, on each fair cluster the word "Cristo"
outshining all besides.
Among my dearest recollections is that of an Easter sermon devised by me
for an ignorant black congregation in a far-off West Indian isle, in
which I told of this vision of the cross, and tried to make it present
to them. But this grateful remembrance which I have carried through so
many years does not regard the poet alone. In the world's great goods,
as in its great evils, a woman has her part. And this poem, which has
been such a boon to humanity, has for its central inspiration the memory
of a woman.
In the prologue, already we hear of her. It is she who sends her poet
his poet-guide. When he shrinks from the painful progress which lies
before him, and deems the companionship even of Virgil an insufficient
pledge of safety, the words of his lady, repeated to him by his guide,
restore his sinking courage, and give him strength for his immortal
journey.
Here are those words of Beatrice, spoken to Virgil, and by him brought
to Dante:--
O courteous shade of Mantua! thou whose fame
Yet lives and shall live long as Nature lasts!
A friend, not of my fortune, but myself,
On the wide desert in his road has met
Hindrance so great that he through fear has turned.
Assist him: so to me will comfort spring.
I who now bid thee on this errand forth
Am Beatrice.
Who and what was Beatrice, whose message gave Dante strength to explore
the fearful depths of evil and its punishment? This we may learn
elsewhere.
Dante, passionate poet in his youth, has left to posterity a work unique
of its sort,--the romance of a childish love which grew with the growth
of the lover. In his adolescence, its intensity at times overpowers his
bodily senses. The years that built up his towering manhood built up
along with it this ideal womanhood, which, whether realized or
realizable, or neither, was the highest and holiest essence which his
imagination could infuse into a human form. The sweet shyness of that
first peep at the Beautiful, of that first thrill of the master chord of
being, is rendered immortal for us by the candor of this great master.
We can see the shamefaced boy, taken captive by the dazzling vision of
Beatrice, veiling the features of his unreasonable passion, and retiring
to his own closet, there to hide his joy at having found on earth a
thing so beautiful.
Dante's love for Beatrice dates from the completion of his own ninth
year, and the beginning of hers. He first sees her at a May party, at
the house of her father, Folco Polinari. Her apparel, he says, "was of a
most noble tincture, a subdued and becoming crimson; and she wore a
girdle and ornaments becoming her childish years." At the sight of her,
his heart began to beat with painful violence. A master thought had
taken possession of him, and that master's name was well known to him,
as how should it not have been in that day when, if ever in this world,
Love was crowned lord of all? Urged by this tyrant, from time to time,
to go in search of Beatrice, he beheld in her, he says, a demeanor so
praiseworthy and so noble as to remind him of a line of Homer, regarding
Helen of Troy:--
"From heaven she had her birth, and not from mortal clay."
These glimpses of her must have been transient ones, for the poet tells
us that his second meeting, face to face, with Beatrice occurred nine
years after their first encounter. Her childish charm had now ripened
into maidenly loveliness. He beholds her arrayed in purest white,
walking between two noble ladies older than herself. "As she passed
along the street, she turned her eyes toward the spot where I, thrilled
through and through with awe, was standing; and in her ineffable
courtesy, which now hath its guerdon in everlasting life, she saluted
me in such gracious wise that I seemed in that moment to behold the
utmost bounds of bliss."
He now begins to dream of her in his sleeping moments, and to rhyme of
her in his waking hours. In his first vision, Love appears with Beatrice
in his arms. In one hand he holds Dante's flaming heart, upon which he
constrains her to feed; after which, weeping, he gathers up his fair
burthen and ascends with her to Heaven. This dream seemed to Dante fit
to be communicated to the many famous poets of the time. He embodies it
in a sonnet, which opens thus:--
To every captive soul and gentle heart
Into whose sight shall come this song of mine,
That they to me its matter may divine,
Be greeting in Love's name, our master's, sent.
And now begins for him a season of love-lorn pining and heart-sickness.
The intensity of the attraction paralyzes in him the power of
approaching its object. His friends notice his altered looks, and ask
the cause of this great change in him. He confesses that it is the
master passion, but so misleads them as to the person beloved, as to
bring upon another a scandal by his feigning. For this he is punished by
the displeasure of Beatrice, who, passing him in the street, refuses him
that salutation the very hope of which, he says, kindled such a flame
of charity within him as to make him forget and forgive every offence
and injury.
Love now visits him in his sleep, in the guise of a youth arrayed in
garments of exceeding whiteness, and desires him to indite certain words
in rhyme, which, though not openly addressed to Beatrice, shall yet
assure her of what she partly knows,--that the poet's heart has been
hers from boyhood. The ballad which he composes in obedience to his
love's command is not a very literal rendering of his story.
He now begins to have many conflicting thoughts about Love, two of which
constitute a very respectable antinomy. One of these tells him that the
empire of Love is good, because it turns the inclinations of its vassal
from all that is base. The opposite thought is: "The empire of Love is
not good, since the more absolute the allegiance of his vassal, the more
severe and woful are the straits through which he must perforce pass."
These conflicting thoughts sought expression in a sonnet, of which I
will quote a part:--
Of Love, Love only, speaks my every thought;
And all so various they be that one
Bids me bow down to his dominion,
Another counsels me his power is naught.
One, flushed with hopes, is all with sweetness fraught;
Another makes full oft my tears to run.
* * * * *
Where, then, to turn, what think, I cannot tell.
Fain would I speak, yet know not what to say.
While these uncertainties still possess him, Dante is persuaded by a
friend to attend a bridal festivity, where it is hoped that the sight of
much beauty may give him great pleasure.
"Why have you brought me among these ladies?" he asks. "In order that
they may be properly attended," is the answer.
Small attendance can Dante give upon these noble beauties. A fatal
tremor seizes him; he looks up and, beholding Beatrice, can see nothing
else. Nay, even of her his vision is marred by the intensity of his
feeling. The ladies first wonder at his agitation, and then make merry
over it, Beatrice apparently joining in their merriment. His friend,
chagrined at his embarrassment, now asks the cause of it; to which
question Dante replies: "I have set my foot in that part of life to pass
beyond which, with purpose to return, is impossible."
With these words the poet departs, and in his chamber of tears persuades
himself that Beatrice would not have joined in the laughter of her
friends if she had really known his state of mind. Then follows,
naturally, a sonnet:--
With other ladies thou dost flaunt at me,
Nor thinkest, lady, whence doth come the change,
What fills mine aspect with a trouble strange
When I the wonder of thy beauty see.
If thou didst know, thou must, for charity,
Forswear the wonted rigor of thine eye.
With this poetic utterance comes the plain prose question: "Seeing thou
dost present an aspect so ridiculous whenever thou art near this lady,
wherefore dost thou seek to come into her presence?"
It takes two sonnets to answer this question. He is not the only person
who asks it. Meeting with some merry dames, he is thus questioned by her
of them who seems "most gay and pleasant of discourse:" "Unto what end
lovest thou this lady, seeing that her near presence overwhelms thee?"
In reply, he professes himself happy in having words wherewith to speak
the praises of his lady, and going thence, determines in his heart to
devote his powers of expression to that high theme. He leaves the
cramping sonnet now, and expands his thought in the _canzone_, of which
I need only repeat the first line:--
Ladies who have the intellect of Love.
Why the course of this true love never did run smooth, we know not.
Beatrice, at the proper age, was given in marriage to Messer Simone dei
Bardi. It is thought that she was wedded to him before the occasion on
which Dante's love-lorn appearance moved her to a mirth which may have
been feigned. Still, the thought of her continues to be his greatest
possession, and he and his master, Love, hold many arguments together
concerning the bliss and bane of this high fancy. He has great comfort
in the general esteem in which his lady is held, and is proud and glad
when those who see her passing in the street hasten to get a better view
of her. He sees the controlling power of her loveliness in its influence
on those around her, who are not thrown into the shade, but brightened,
by her radiance.
Such virtue rare her beauty hath, in sooth
No envy stirs in other ladies' breast;
But in its light they walk beside her, dressed
In gentleness, and love, and noble truth.
Her looks whate'er they light on seem to bless;
Nor her alone make lovely to the view,
But all her peers through her have honor, too.
Dante was still engaged in interpreting the merits of Beatrice to the
world when that most gentle being met the final conflict, and received
the crown of immortality. His first feeling is that Florence is made
desolate by her loss. He can think of no words but those with which the
prophet Jeremiah bewailed the spoiling of Jerusalem: "How doth the city
sit desolate!" The princes of the earth, he thinks, should learn the
loss of this more than princess. He speaks of her in sonnet and
_canzone_.
The passing of a band of pilgrims in the street suggests to him the
thought that they do not know of his sweet saint, nor of her death, and
that if they did, they would perforce stop to weep with him:--
Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go,
Musing, mayhap, on what is far away,
Come ye from climes so far, as your array
And look of foreign nurture seem to shew,
That from your eyes no tears of pity flow,
As ye along our mourning city stray,
Serene of countenance and free, as they
Who of her deep disaster nothing know?
Oh! she hath lost her Beatrice, her saint,
And what of her her co-mates can reveal
Must drown with tears even strangers' hearts, perforce.
On the first anniversary of his lady's death, as he sits absorbed in
thoughts of her, he sketches the figure of an angel upon his tablets.
Turning presently from his work, he sees near him some gentlemen of his
acquaintance, who are watching the movements of his pencil. He answers
the interruption thus:
Into my lonely thoughts that noble dame
Whom Love bewails, had entered in the hour
When you, my friends, attracted by his power,
To see the task that did employ me came.
Many a sigh of dole escapes his heart, he says,
But they which came with sharpest pang were those
Which said: "O intellect of noble mould,
A year to-day it is since thou didst seek the skies."
We may find, perhaps, a more wonderful proof of his constancy in his
stout-hearted resistance to the charms of a beautiful lady who regards
him with that intense pity which is akin to love. To her he says:
Never was Pity's semblance, or Love's hue
So wondrously in face of lady shown,
That tenderly gave ear to Sorrow's moan
Or looked on woful eyes, as shows in you.
To this new attraction he is on the point of surrendering, when the
vision of Beatrice rises before him, as he first saw her,--robed in
crimson, and bright with the angelic beauty of childhood. All other
thoughts are put to flight by this, and with renewed faith he devotes
himself to the memory of Beatrice, hoping to say of her some day "that
which hath never yet been said of any lady."
All who have been lovers--and who has not?--must feel, I think, that the
"Vita Nuova" is the romance of a true love. The Beatrice of the "Divina
Commedia" is this love, and much more. Dante has had a deep and availing
experience of life. Statesman and scholar, he has laid his fiery soul
upon the world's great anvil, where Fate, with heavy hammering and fiery
blowing, has wrought out of him a stern, sad man, so hunted and exiled
that the ways of Imagination alone are open to him. In its domain, he
calls around him the majestic shadows of those with whom his life has
made him familiar. For him, the way to Heaven lies through Hell and
Purgatory. Into these regions, the blessed Beatrice cannot come. She
sends, however, the poet shade, who seems to her most fit to be his
guide. The classic refinement makes evident to him the vulgarity of sin
and the logic of its consequences. He surveys the eternal, hopeless
punishment, and passes through the cleansing fires of Purgatory, at
whose outer verge, a fair vision comes to bless him. Beatrice, in a
mystical car, her beauty at first concealed by a veil of flowers which
drop from the hands of attendant angels, speaks to him in tones which
move his penitential grief.
The high love of his youth thus appears to him as accusing Conscience,
which stands to question him with the offended majesty of a loving
mother. Through her rebukes, precious in their bitterness, he attains to
that view of his own errors without which it would have been impossible
for him to forsake them. It is a real orthodox "repentance and
conviction of sin" with which the religious renewal of his life begins.
Tormented by this cruel retrospect, the poet is mercifully bathed in the
waters of forgetfulness, and then, being made a new creature, regains
the society of Beatrice.
Seated at the root of the great Tree of Humanity, she bids him take note
of the prophetic vision which symbolizes the history of the church. Of
the sanctity of the tree, she thus admonishes him:
This whoso robs,
This whoso plucks, with blasphemy of deed
Sins against God, who for His use alone
Creating, hallowed it.
Dante drinks now of a stream whose sweetness can never satiate, and from
that holy wave returns,
Regenerate,
Pure, and made apt for mounting to the stars.
It appears to me quite simple and natural that the image of the poet's
earthly love, long lost from physical sense, should prompt the awakening
of his higher nature, which, obscured, as he confesses, by the disorders
of his mortal life, asserts itself with availing authority when
Beatrice, the beloved, becomes present to his mind. All progress, all
heavenly learning, is thenceforth associated with her. High as he may
climb, she always leads him. Where he passes as a stranger, she is at
home. Where he poorly guesses, she wholly knows. Nor does he part from
her until he has attained the highest point of spiritual vision, where
he sees her throned and crowned in immortal glory, and above her, the
lovely one of Heaven,--the Virgin Mother of Christ. What he sees after
this, he says, cannot be told with mortal tongue.
Here vigor failed the towering fantasy,
But yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel,
In even motion, by the love impelled
That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.
Two opposite points in great authors give us pleasure; _viz._, the
originality of their talent or genius, and the catholicity of their
sentiments and interest,--in other words, their likeness and their
unlikeness to the average of humanity. We are delighted to find Plato at
once so modern and so ancient, his prevision and prophecy needing so
little adaptation to make them germane to the wants of our own or of any
other time, his grasp of apprehension and comparison so peculiar to
himself, so unrivalled by any thinker of any time. In like manner, the
mediæval pictures drawn by Dante delight us, and the bold daring of his
imagination. At the same time, the perfectly sound and rational common
sense of many of his utterances seems familiar from its accordance with
the soundest criticism of our own time:--
Florence within her ancient circle set,
Remained in sober, modest quietness.
Nor chains had she, nor crowns, nor women decked
In gay attire, with splendid cincture bound,
More to be gazed at than the form itself.
Not yet the daughter to the father brought
Fear from her birth, the marriage time and dower
Not yet departing from their fitting measure.
Nor houses had she, void of household life.
Sardanapalus had not haply shown
The deeds which may be hid by chamber walls.
I saw Bellincion Berti go his way
With bone and leather belted. From the glass
His lady moved, no paint upon her face.
I saw the Lords of Norti and del Vecchio content,
Their household dames engaged with spool and spindle.
The theory of the good old time, we see, is not a modern invention.
Dante inherits the great heart of chivalry, wise before its time in the
uplifting of Woman. The wonderful worship of the Virgin Mother, in which
are united the two poles of womanhood, completed the ideal of the Divine
Human, and cast a new glory upon the sex. Can we doubt that knight and
minstrel found a true inspiration in the lady of their heart? A mere
pretence or affection is a poor thing to fight for or to sing for. Men
will not imperil their lives for what they know to be a lie.
This newly awakened reverence for woman--shall we call it a race
characteristic? It was a golden gift to any race. Plato's deep doctrine
that all learning is a reminiscence may avail us in questioning this.
The human race does not carry the bulk of its knowledge in its hand.
Busy with its tools and toys, it forgets its ancestral heirlooms, and
leaves unexplored the legacy of the past. But in some mystical way, the
treasures lost from remembrance turn up and come to sight again. In the
far Caucasus, from which we came, there were glimpses of this ideal wife
and mother.
This history, whether real or imaginary, or both, suggests to me the
question whether the love which brings together and binds together men
and women can in any way typify the supreme affections of the soul? That
it was supposed to do so in mediæval times is certain. The sentimental
agonies of troubadours and minstrels make it evident. Even the latest
seedy sprout of chivalry, Don Quixote, shows us this. Wishing to start
upon a noble errand, the succor of oppressed humanity, his almost first
requisite is a "lady of his heart," who, in his case, is a mere lay
figure upon which he drapes the fantastic weaving of his imagination.
Another question, like unto the first, is this,--whether the heroic mode
of loving is or is not a lost art in our days.
That Plato and Socrates should busy themselves with it, that mystics and
philosophers should find such a depth of interest in the attraction
which one nature exerts upon another, and that, _per contra_, in our
time, this mystical attraction should flatten, or, as singers say, flat
out into a decorous observance of rules, assisting a mutual
endurance--what does it mean? Is Pan dead, and are the other gods dead
with him?
In an age widely, if not deeply, critical, we lose sight of the
primitive affections and temperament of our race. Affection's self
becomes merged in opinion. We contemplate, we compare, we are not able
to covet any but surface distinctions, surface attractions. Even the
poets who give us the expression of a lively participation in human
instincts are disowned by us. Wordsworth is chosen, and Byron is
discarded. We are not too rich with both of them. Inspired Browning--for
the man who wrote "Pippa" and "Saul" was inspired--loses himself and his
music in the dismal swamp of metaphysical speculation. Just at present,
it seems to me that the world has lost one of its noblest leadings;
_viz._, the desire for true companionship. Arid love of pleasure, more
arid worship of wealth, paralyze those higher powers of the soul which
take hold on friendship and on love. To know those only who can advance
your personal objects, be these amusement or ambition; to marry at
auction, going, going, for so much,--how can we who have but one human
life to live so cheat ourselves out of its real rights and privileges?
Is this a pathological symptom in the body social, produced by a surfeit
in the direction of inclination? One might think so, since asceticism
has no joylessness comparable to that of the blasted _roué_ or utter
worldling. In France, where the bent of romantic literature has been the
following of inclination,--from George Sand, who consecrates it, down to
the latest scrofulous scribbler, who outrages it,--on the banks of this
turbid stream of literature, one constantly meets with the apples of
Sodom. "There is no other fruit," say the venders. "You cultivate none
other," is the fitting reply.
The world of thought is ever full of problems as contradictory of each
other as the antinomies of which I just now made a passing mention. The
right interpretation of these riddles is of great moment in our
spiritual and intellectual life. The ages and æons of human experience
tend, on the whole, to a gradual unification of persuasion and
conviction on the part of thinking beings, and much that a prophet
breathes into a hopeless blank acquires meaning in the light of
succeeding centuries.