The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the
opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and
the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn
monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can
reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on,
marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and
adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with
the Iliad and Shakspere's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and
Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's
Code, with the Parthenon and S. Peter's. It is the first Christian
poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of
Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of
date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it
began.
We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
pushed its achievements to a new limit, with a kind of awe. The
beginnings of all things, their bursting out from nothing, and gradual
evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn
influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up
without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear,
cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
world—as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of
nature, so it is with those offsprings of man's mind, by which he has
added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a
new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the
inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable
combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it,
are out of the reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs
of the precariousness of the result; by how little the world might
have lost one of its ornaments—by one sharp pang, or one chance
meeting, or any other among the countless accidents among which man
runs his course. And then the solemn recollection supervenes, that
powers were formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged,
and actions controlled, that thus it should be: and the work which man
has brooded over, and at last created, is the foster-child too of that
"Wisdom which reaches from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing
all things."
It does not abate these feelings, that we can follow in some cases and
to a certain extent, the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
particular accidents among which it was developed—which belong
perhaps to a heterogeneous and widely discordant order of things,
which are out of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not
explain it, which have, as it may seem to us, no natural right to be
connected with it, to bear on its character, or contribute to its
accomplishment, to which we feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we
can least spare, yet on which its forming mind and purpose were
dependent, and with which they had to conspire—affects the
imagination even more than cases where we see nothing. We are tempted
less to musing and wonder by the Iliad, a work without a history,
cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of its age,
unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the Divina
Commedia, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from
its chance incidents.
The Divina Commedia is singular among the great works with which it
ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
general we associate little more than the name—not the life—of a
great poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to
greatness in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea
and purpose of the Commedia, as well as its filling up and
colouring, are determined by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest,
perhaps, in its aim and flight of all poems, it is also the most
individual; the writer's own life is chronicled in it, as well as the
issues and upshot of all things. It is at once the mirror to all time
of the sins and perfections of men, of the judgments and grace of God,
and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local
factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes, of the poet's
own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most
unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And when this
peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the poem which was to
hold such a place in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of
chance events, rather than the deliberate design of its author.
History indeed here, as generally, is but a feeble exponent of the
course of growth in a great mind and great ideas. It shows us early a
bent and purpose—the man conscious of power and intending to use
it—and then the accidents among which he worked: but how that current
of purpose threaded its way among them, how it was thrown back,
deflected, deepened, by them, we cannot learn from history. It
presents but a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady
of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a
wonder of earth, but as a Saint in Paradise, and relieves his heart in
an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and
subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he
closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the
resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory
of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great
work. But a prosaic change seems to come over this half-ideal
character. The lover becomes the student—the student of the 13th
century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot
after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle,
inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing
with dialectical forms, loose in premiss and ostentatiously rigid in
syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste, and the
mannerisms of the Provençals. Boethius and Cicero, and the mass of
mixed learning within his reach, are accepted as the consolation of
his human griefs: he is filled with the passion of universal
knowledge, and the desire to communicate it. Philosophy has become the
lady of his soul—to write allegorical poems in her honour, and to
comment on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose, his
mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it is said, not happily.
The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that
Beatrice also was married some years before her death. He appears, as
time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a family, a
politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share
in the quarrels of the day. At length we see him, at once an exile,
and the poet of the Commedia. Beatrice reappears—shadowy, melting
at times into symbol and figure—but far too living and real,
addressed with too intense and natural feeling to be the mere
personification of anything. The lady of the philosophical Canzoni
has vanished. The student's dream has been broken, as the boy's had
been; and the earnestness of the man, enlightened by sorrow,
overleaping the student's formalities and abstractions, reverted in
sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and brooded once more on that
Saint in Paradise, whose presence and memory had once been so
soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him and that stable
country, "where the angels are in peace." Round her image, the
reflection of purity, and truth, and forbearing love, was grouped that
confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which
the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful
order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living
memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and
hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of
imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
dissipated by study and business, and revived in memory by heavy
sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted,
though it would be hazardous to say in Dante's case, laid aside, for
apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and suggested the form of
the "Sacred poem of earth and heaven."
And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of
this passage of a soft and dreamy boy, into the keenest, boldest,
sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was,
what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical
inspiration,—the political life. The boy had sensibility, high
aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added
to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas
on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence
which made Dante a great poet. But for them, he might have been a
modern critic and essayist born before his time, and have held a high
place among the writers of fugitive verses; in Italy, a graceful but
trifling and idle tribe, often casting a deep and beautiful thought
into a mould of expressive diction, but oftener toying with a foolish
and glittering conceit, and whose languid genius was exhausted by a
sonnet. He might have thrown into the shade the Guidos and Cinos of
his day, to be eclipsed by Petrarch. But he learned in the bitter
feuds of Italy not to trifle; they opened to his view, and he had an
eye to see, the true springs and abysses of this mortal life—motives
and passions stronger than lovers' sentiments, evils beyond the
consolations of Boethius and Cicero; and from that fiery trial which
without searing his heart, annealed his strength and purpose, he drew
that great gift and power, by which he stands pre-eminent even among
his high compeers, the gift of being real. And the idea of the
Commedia took shape, and expanded into its endless forms of terror
and beauty, not under the roof-tree of the literary citizen, but when
the exile had been driven out to the highways of the world, to study
nature on the sea or by the river or on the mountain track, and to
study men in the courts of Verona and Ravenna, and in the schools of
Bologna and Paris—perhaps of Oxford.
The connexion of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the middle
age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving in
itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
felicitous in issue, of the other western nations. It is remarkable
for keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern
arrangements, it has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In
ancient history all that is most memorable and instructive gathers
round cities; civilisation and empire were concentrated within walls;
and it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be
possessed and wielded, by numbers larger than might be collected in a
single market-place. The Roman Empire indeed aimed at being one in its
administration and law; but it was not a nation, nor were its
provinces nations. Yet everywhere but in Italy, it prepared them for
becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and
union was becoming organisation—and neither geographical remoteness,
nor unwieldiness of numbers, nor local interests and differences, were
untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the
ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even
where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and
joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going
on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the
ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and
jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of
Southern Italy indeed is mainly a foreign one, the history of modern
Rome merges in that of the Papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of
its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
cities—points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of
classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual
character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another
with the minuteness of private life.
Two cities were the centres of ancient history in its most interesting
time. And two cities of modern Italy represent, with entirely
undesigned but curiously exact coincidence, the parts of Athens and
Rome. Venice, superficially so unlike, is yet in many of its
accidental features, and still more in its spirit, the counterpart of
Rome, in its obscure and mixed origin, in its steady growth, in its
quick sense of order and early settlement of its polity, in its grand
and serious public spirit, in its subordination of the individual to
the family, and the family to the state, in its combination of remote
dominion with the liberty of a solitary and sovereign city. And though
the associations and the scale of the two were so different—though
Rome had its hills and its legions, and Venice its lagunes and
galleys—the long empire of Venice, the heir of Carthage and
predecessor of England on the seas, the great aristocratic republic of
1000 years, is the only empire that has yet matched Rome in length and
steadiness of tenure. Brennus and Hannibal were not resisted with
greater constancy than Doria and Louis XII.; and that great
aristocracy, long so proud, so high-spirited, so intelligent, so
practical, who combined the enterprise and wealth of merchants, the
self-devotion of soldiers and gravity of senators, with the uniformity
and obedience of a religious order, may compare without shame its
Giustiniani, and Zenos, and Morosini, with Roman Fabii and Claudii.
And Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens than Venice with
Italian and contemporary Florence—stability with fitfulness,
independence impregnable and secure, with a short-lived and troubled
liberty, empire meditated and achieved, with a course of barren
intrigues and quarrels. Florence, gay, capricious, turbulent, the city
of party, the head and busy patroness of democracy in the cities round
her—Florence, where popular government was inaugurated with its
utmost exclusiveness and most pompous ceremonial; waging her little
summer wars against Ghibelline tyrants, revolted democracies, and her
own exiles; and further, so rich in intellectual gifts, in variety of
individual character, in poets, artists, wits, historians—Florence in
its brilliant days recalled the image of ancient Athens, and did not
depart from its prototype in the beauty of its natural site, in its
noble public buildings, in the size and nature of its territory. And
the course of its history is similar and the result of similar
causes—a traditional spirit of freedom, with its accesses of fitful
energy, its periods of grand display and moments of glorious
achievement, but producing nothing politically great or durable, and
sinking at length into a resigned servitude. It had its Peisistratidæ
more successful than those of Athens; it had, too, its Harmodius and
Aristogeiton; it had its great orator of liberty, as potent and as
unfortunate as the antagonist of Philip. And finally, like Athens, it
became content with the remembrance of its former glory, with being
the fashionable and acknowledged seat of refinement and taste, with
being a favoured dependency on the modern heir of the Cæsars. But if
to Venice belongs a grander public history, Florentine names and
works, like Athenian, will be living among men, when the Brenta shall
have been left unchecked to turn the Lagunes into ploughland, and when
Rome herself may no longer be the seat of the Popes.
The year of Dante's birth was a memorable one in the annals of
Florence, of Italy, and of Christendom.[2] The year 1265 was the year
of that great victory of Benevento, where Charles of Anjou overthrew
Manfred of Naples, and destroyed at one blow the power of the house of
Swabia. From that time till the time of Charles V., the emperors had
no footing in Italy. Further, that victory set up the French influence
in Italy, which, transient in itself, produced such strange and
momentous consequences, by the intimate connexion to which it led
between the French kings and the Popes. The protection of France was
dearly bought by the captivity of Avignon, the great western schism,
and the consequent secularisation of the Papacy, which lasted on
uninterrupted till the Council of Trent. Nearly three centuries of
degradation and scandal, unrelieved by one heroic effort among the
successors of Gregory VII., connected the Reformation with the triumph
of Charles and the Pope at Benevento. Finally, by it the Guelf party
was restored for good in Florence; the Guelf democracy, which had been
trampled down by the Uberti and Manfred's chivalry at Monteaperti,
once more raised its head; and fortune, which had long wavered between
the rival lilies, finally turned against the white one, till the name
of Ghibelline became a proscribed one in Florence, as Jacobite was
once in Scotland, or Papist in England, or Royalist in France.
The names of Guelf and Ghibelline were the inheritance of a contest
which, in its original meaning, had been long over. The old struggle
between the priesthood and the empire was still kept up traditionally,
but its ideas and interests were changed: they were still great and
important ones, but not those of Gregory VII. It had passed over from
the mixed region of the spiritual and temporal into the purely
political. The cause of the popes was that of the independence of
Italy—the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north, and
the dependence of the centre and south on the Roman See. To keep the
Emperor out of Italy—to create a barrier of powerful cities against
him south of the Alps—to form behind themselves a compact territory,
rich, removed from the first burst of invasion, and maintaining a
strong body of interested feudatories, had now become the great object
of the popes. It may have been a wise policy on their part, for the
maintenance of their spiritual influence, to attempt to connect their
own independence with the political freedom of the Italian
communities; but certain it is that the ideas and the characters which
gave a religious interest and grandeur to the earlier part of the
contest, appear but sparingly, if at all, in its later forms.
The two parties did not care to keep in view principles which their
chiefs had lost sight of. The Emperor and the Pope were both real
powers, able to protect and assist; and they divided between them
those who required protection and assistance. Geographical position,
the rivalry of neighbourhood, family tradition, private feuds, and
above all private interest, were the main causes which assigned
cities, families, and individuals to the Ghibelline or Guelf party.
One party called themselves the Emperor's liegemen, and their
watchword was authority and law; the other side were the liegemen of
Holy Church, and their cry was liberty; and the distinction as a broad
one is true. But a democracy would become Ghibelline, without scruple,
if its neighbour town was Guelf; and among the Guelf liegemen of the
Church and liberty the pride of blood and love of power were not a
whit inferior to that of their opponents. Yet, though the original
principle of the contest was lost, and the political distinctions of
parties were often interfered with by interest or accident, it is not
impossible to trace in the two factions differences of temper, of
moral and political inclinations, which though visible only on a large
scale and in the mass, were quite sufficient to give meaning and
reality to their mutual opposition. These differences had come down,
greatly altered of course, from the quarrel in which the parties took
their rise. The Ghibellines as a body reflected the worldliness, the
licence, the irreligion, the reckless selfishness, the daring
insolence, and at the same time the gaiety and pomp, the princely
magnificence and generosity and largeness of mind of the house of
Swabia; they were the men of the court and camp, imperious and haughty
from ancient lineage or the Imperial cause, yet not wanting in the
frankness and courtesy of nobility; careless of public opinion and
public rights, but not dead to the grandeur of public objects and
public services. Among them were found, or to them inclined, all who,
whether from a base or a lofty ambition, desired to place their will
above law[3]—the lord of the feudal castle, the robber-knight of the
Apennine pass, the magnificent but terrible tyrants of the cities, the
pride and shame of Italy, the Visconti and Scaligers. That renowned
Ghibelline chief, whom the poet finds in the fiery sepulchres of the
unbelievers with the great Ghibelline emperor and the princely
Ghibelline cardinal—the disdainful and bitter but lofty spirit of
Farinata degli Uberti, the conqueror, and then singly and at his own
risk, the saviour of his country which had wronged him, represents the
good as well as the bad side of his party.
The Guelfs, on the other hand, were the party of the middle classes;
they rose out of and held to the people; they were strong by their
compactness, their organisation in cities, their commercial relations
and interests, their command of money. Further, they were professedly
the party of strictness and religion, a profession which fettered them
as little as their opponents were fettered by the respect they claimed
for imperial law. But though by personal unscrupulousness and
selfishness, and in instances of public vengeance, they sinned as
deeply as the Ghibellines, they stood far more committed as a party to
a public meaning and purpose—to improvement in law and the condition
of the poor, to a protest against the insolence of the strong, to the
encouragement of industry. The genuine Guelf spirit was austere,
frugal, independent, earnest, religious, fond of its home and Church,
and of those celebrations which bound together Church and home; but
withal very proud, very intolerant; in its higher form intolerant of
evil, but intolerant always to whatever displeased it. Yet there was a
grave and noble manliness about it which long kept it alive in
Florence. It had not as yet turned itself against the practical
corruptions of the Church, which was its ally; but this also it was to
do, when the popes had forsaken the cause of liberty, and leagued
themselves with the brilliant tyranny of the Medici. Then Savonarola
invoked, and not in vain, the stern old Guelf spirit of resistance, of
domestic purity and severity, and of domestic religion, against
unbelief and licentiousness even in the Church; and the Guelf
"Piagnoni" presented, in a more simple and generous shape, a
resemblance to our own Puritans, as the Ghibellines often recall the
coarser and worse features of our own Cavaliers.
In Florence, these distinctions had become mere nominal ones, confined
to the great families who carried on their private feuds under the old
party names, when Frederick II. once more gave them their meaning.
"Although the accursed Guelf and Ghibelline factions lasted amongst
the nobles of Florence, and they often waged war among themselves out
of private grudges, and took sides for the said factions, and held one
with another, and those who called themselves Guelfs desired the
establishment of the Pope and Holy Church, and those who called
themselves Ghibellines favoured the Emperor and his adherents, yet
withal the people and commonalty of Florence maintained itself in
unity, to the well-being and honour and establishment of the
commonwealth."[4] But the appearance on the scene of an emperor of
such talent and bold designs revived the languid contest, and gave to
party a cause, and to individual passions and ambition an impulse and
pretext. The division between Guelf and Ghibelline again became
serious, involved all Florence, armed house against house, and
neighbourhood against neighbourhood, issued in merciless and
vindictive warfare, grew on into a hopeless and deadly breach, and
finally lost to Florence, without remedy or repair, half her noble
houses and the love of the greatest of her sons. The old badge of
their common country became to the two factions the sign of their
implacable hatred; the white lily of Florence, borne by the
Ghibellines, was turned to red by the Guelfs, and the flower of two
colours marked a civil strife as cruel and as fatal, if on a smaller
scale, as that of the English roses.[5]
It was waged with the peculiar characteristics of Italian civil war.
There the city itself was the scene of battle. A thirteenth century
city in Italy bore on its face the evidence that it was built and
arranged for such emergencies. Its crowded and narrow streets were a
collection of rival castles, whose tall towers, rising thick and close
over its roofs, or hanging perilously over its close courts, attested
the emulous pride and the insecurity of Italian civic life. There,
within a separate precinct, flanked and faced by jealous friends or
deadly enemies, were clustered together the dwellings of the various
members of each great house—their common home and the monument of
their magnificence and pride, and capable of being, as was so often
necessary, their common refuge. In these fortresses of the leading
families, scattered about the city, were the various points of onset
and recovery in civic battle; in the streets barricades were raised,
mangonels and crossbows were plied from the towers, a series of
separate combats raged through the city, till chance at length
connected the attacks of one side, or some panic paralysed the
resistance of the other, or a conflagration interposed itself between
the combatants, burning out at once Guelf and Ghibelline, and laying
half Florence in ashes. Each party had their turn of victory; each,
when vanquished, went into exile, and carried on the war outside the
walls; each had their opportunity of remodelling the orders and
framework of government, and each did so relentlessly at the cost of
their opponents. They excluded classes, they proscribed families, they
confiscated property, they sacked and burned warehouses, they levelled
the palaces, and outraged the pride of their antagonists. To destroy
was not enough, without adding to it the keenest and newest refinement
of insult. Two buildings in Florence were peculiarly dear—among their
"cari luoghi"—to the popular feeling and the Guelf party: the
Baptistery of St. John, "il mio bel S. Giovanni," "to which all the
good people resorted on Sundays,"[6] where they had all received
baptism, where they had been married, where families were solemnly
reconciled; and a tall and beautiful tower close by it, called the
"Torre del Guardamorto," where the bodies of the "good people," who of
old were all buried at S. Giovanni, rested on their way to the grave.
The victorious Ghibellines, when they levelled the Guelf towers,
overthrew this one, and endeavoured to make it crush in its fall the
sacred church, "which," says the old chronicler, "was prevented by a
miracle." The Guelfs, when their day came, built the walls of Florence
with the stones of Ghibelline palaces.[7] One great family stands out
pre-eminent in this fierce conflict as the victim and monument of
party war. The head of the Ghibellines was the proud and powerful
house of the Uberti, who shared with another great Ghibelline family,
the Pazzi, the valley of the upper Arno. They lighted up the war in
the Emperor's cause. They supported its weight and guided it. In time
of peace they were foremost and unrestrained in defiance of law and in
scorn of the people—in war, the people's fiercest and most active
enemies. Heavy sufferers, in their property, and by the sword and axe,
yet untamed and incorrigible, they led the van in that battle, so long
remembered to their cost by the Guelfs, the battle of Monteaperti
(1260)—
Lo strazio, e 'l gran scempio
Che fece l'Arbia colorata in rossa.—Inf. 10.
|
That the head of their house, Farinata, saved Florence from the
vengeance of his meaner associates, was not enough to atone for the
unpardonable wrongs which they had done to the Guelfs and the
democracy. When the red lily of the Guelfs finally supplanted the
white one as the arms of Florence, and the badge of Guelph triumph,
they were proscribed for ever, like the Peisistratidæ and the
Tarquins. In every amnesty their names were excepted. The site on
which their houses had stood was never again to be built upon, and
remains the Great Square of Florence; the architect of the Palace of
the People was obliged to sacrifice its symmetry, and to place it
awry, that its walls might not encroach on the accursed ground.[8]
"They had been," says a writer, contemporary with Dante, speaking of
the time when he also became an exile; "they had been for more than
forty years outlaws from their country, nor ever found mercy nor pity,
remaining always abroad in great state, nor ever abased their honour,
seeing that they ever abode with kings and lords, and to great things
applied themselves."[9] They were loved as they were hated. When under
the protection of a cardinal one of them visited the city, and the
chequered blue and gold blazon of their house was, after an interval
of half a century, again seen in the streets of Florence; "many
ancient Ghibelline men and women pressed to kiss the arms,"[10] and
even the common people did him honour.
But the fortunes of Florentine factions depended on other causes than
merely the address or vigour of their leaders. From the year of
Dante's birth and Charles's victory, Florence, as far as we shall have
to do with it, became irrevocably Guelf. Not that the whole commonalty
of Florence formally called itself Guelf, or that the Guelf party was
co-extensive with it; but the city was controlled by Guelf councils,
devoted to the objects of the great Guelf party, and received in
return the support of that party in curbing the pride of the nobles,
and maintaining democratic forms. The Guelf party of Florence, though
it was the life and soul of the republic, and irresistible in its
disposal of the influence and arms of Florence, and though it embraced
a large number of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as
something distinct from, and external to, the governing powers, and
the whole body of the people. It was a body with a separate and
self-constituted existence;—in the state and allied to it, but an
independent element, holding on to a large and comprehensive union
without the state. Its organisation in Florence is one of the most
curious among the many curious combinations which meet us in Italian
history. After the final expulsion of the Ghibellines, the Guelf party
took form as an institution, with definite powers, and a local
existence. It appears with as distinct a shape as the Jacobin Club or
the Orange Lodges, side by side with the government. It was a
corporate body with a common seal, common property, not only in funds
but lands—officers, archives, a common palace,[11] a great council, a
secret committee, and last of all, a public accuser of the
Ghibellines; of the confiscated Ghibelline estates one-third went to
the republic, another third to compensate individual Guelfs, the rest
was assigned to the Guelf party.[12] A pope, (Clement IV., 1265-68)
had granted them his own arms[13]; and their device, a red eagle
clutching a serpent, may be yet seen, with the red lily, and the
party-coloured banner of the commonalty, on the battlements of the
Palazzo Vecchio.
But the expulsion of the Ghibellines did but little to restore peace.
The great Guelf families, as old as many of the Ghibellines, had as
little reverence as they for law or civic rights. Below these, the
acknowledged nobility of Florence, were the leading families of the
"people," houses created by successful industry or commerce, and
pushing up into that privileged order, which, however ignored and
even discredited by the laws, was fully recognised by feeling and
opinion in the most democratic times of the republic. Rivalries and
feuds, street broils and conspiracies, high-handed insolence from the
great men, rough vengeance from the populace, still continued to vex
jealous and changeful Florence. The popes sought in vain to keep in
order their quarrelsome liegemen; to reconcile Guelf with Guelf, and
even Guelf with Ghibelline. Embassies went and came, to ask for
mediation and to proffer it; to apply the healing paternal hand; to
present an obsequious and ostentatious submission. Cardinal legates
came in state, and were received with reverential pomp; they formed
private committees, and held assemblies, and made marriages; they
harangued in honeyed words, and gained the largest promises; on one
occasion the Great Square was turned into a vast theatre, and on this
stage one hundred and fifty dissidents on each side came forward, and
in the presence and with the benediction of the cardinal kissed each
other on the mouth.[14] And if persuasion failed, the pope's
representative hesitated not to excommunicate and interdict the
faithful but obdurate city. But whether excommunicated or blessed,
Florence could not be at peace; however wise and subtle had been the
peace-maker's arrangements, his departing cortège was hardly out of
sight of the city before they were blown to the winds. Not more
successful were the efforts of the sensible and moderate citizens who
sighed for tranquillity within its walls. Dino Compagni's interesting
though not very orderly narrative describes with great frankness, and
with the perplexity of a simple-hearted man puzzled by the continual
triumph of clever wickedness, the variety and the fruitlessness of the
expedients devised by him and other good citizens against the resolute
and incorrigible selfishness of the great Guelfs—ever, when checked
in one form, breaking out in another; proof against all persuasion,
all benefits; not to be bound by law, or compact, or oath; eluding or
turning to its own account the deepest and sagest contrivances of
constitutional wisdom.
A great battle won against Ghibelline Arezzo[15] raised the renown and
the military spirit of the Guelf party, for the fame of the battle was
very great; the hosts contained the choicest chivalry of either side,
armed and appointed with emulous splendour. The fighting was hard,
there was brilliant and conspicuous gallantry, and the victory was
complete. It sealed Guelf ascendancy. The Ghibelline warrior-bishop
of Arezzo fell, with three of the Uberti, and other Ghibelline chiefs.
It was a day of trial. "Many that day who had been thought of great
prowess were found dastards, and many who had never been spoken of
were held in high esteem." It repaired the honour of Florence, and the
citizens showed their feeling of its importance by mixing up the
marvellous with its story. Its tidings came to Florence—so runs the
tale in Villani, who declares what he "heard and saw" himself—at the
very hour in which it was won. The Priors of the republic were resting
in their palace during the noonday heat; suddenly the chamber door was
shaken, and the cry heard: "Rise up! the Aretini are defeated." The
door was opened, but there was no one; their servants had seen no one
enter the palace, and no one came from the army till the hour of
vespers, on a long summer's day. In this battle the Guelf leaders had
won great glory. The hero of the day was the proudest, handsomest,
craftiest, most winning, most ambitious, most unscrupulous Guelf noble
in Florence—one of a family who inherited the spirit and recklessness
of the proscribed Uberti, and did not refuse the popular epithet of
"Malefami"—Corso Donati. He did not come back from the field of
Campaldino, where he had won the battle by disobeying orders with any
increased disposition to yield to rivals, or court the populace, or
respect other men's rights. Those rivals, too—and they also had
fought gallantly in the post of honour at Campaldino—were such as he
hated from his soul—rivals whom he despised, and who yet were too
strong for him. His blood was ancient, they were upstarts; he was a
soldier, they were traders; he was poor, they the richest men in
Florence. They had come to live close to the Donati, they had bought
the palace of an old Ghibelline family, they had enlarged, adorned,
and fortified it, and kept great state there. They had crossed him in
marriages, bargains, inheritances. They had won popularity, honour,
influence; and yet they were but men of business, while he had a part
in all the political movements of the day. He was the friend and
intimate of lords and noblemen, with great connexions and famous
through all Italy; they were the favourites of the common people for
their kindness and good nature; they even showed consideration for
Ghibellines. He was an accomplished man of the world, keen and subtle,
"full of malicious thoughts, mischievous and crafty;" they were
inexperienced in intrigue, and had the reputation of being clumsy and
stupid. He was the most graceful and engaging of courtiers; they were
not even gentlemen. Lastly, in the debates of that excitable republic
he was the most eloquent speaker, and they were tongue-tied.[16]
"There was a family," writes Dino Compagni, "who called themselves the
Cerchi, men of low estate, but good merchants and very rich; and they
dressed richly, and maintained many servants and horses, and made a
brave show; and some of them bought the palace of the Conti Guidi,
which was near the houses of the Pazzi and Donati, who were more
ancient of blood but not so rich; therefore, seeing the Cerchi rise to
great dignity, and that they had walled and enlarged the palace, and
kept great state, the Donati began to have a great hatred against
them." Villani gives the same account of the feud.[17] "It began in
that quarter of scandal the Sesta of Porta S. Piero, between the
Cerchi and Donati, on the one side through jealousy, on the other
through churlish rudeness. Of the house of the Cerchi was head Messer
Vieri de' Cerchi, and he and those of his house were people of great
business, and powerful, and of great relationships, and most wealthy
traders, so that their company was one of the greatest in the world;
men they were of soft life, and who meant no harm; boorish and
ill-mannered, like people who had come in a short time to great state
and power. The Donati were gentlemen and warriors, and of no
excessive wealth.... They were neighbours in Florence and in the
country, and by the conversation of their jealousy with the peevish
boorishness of the others, arose the proud scorn that there was
between them." The glories of Campaldino were not as oil on these
troubled waters. The conquerors flouted each other all the more
fiercely in the streets on their return, and ill-treated the lower
people with less scruple. No gathering for festive or serious purposes
could be held without tempting strife. A marriage, a funeral, a ball,
a gay procession of cavaliers and ladies—any meeting where one stood
while another sat, where horse or man might jostle another, where
pride might be nettled or temper shown, was in danger of ending in
blood. The lesser quarrels meanwhile ranged themselves under the
greater ones; and these, especially that between the Cerchi and
Donati, took more and more a political character. The Cerchi inclined
more and more to the trading classes and the lower people; they threw
themselves on their popularity, and began to hold aloof from the
meetings of the "Parte Guelfa," while this organised body became an
instrument in the hands of their opponents, a club of the nobles.
Corso Donati, besides mischief of a more substantial kind, turned his
ridicule on their solemn dulness and awkward speech, and his friends
the jesters, one Scampolino in particular, carried his gibes and
nicknames all over Florence. The Cerchi received all in sullen and
clogged indifference. They were satisfied with repelling attacks, and
nursed their hatred.[18]
Thus the city was divided, and the attempts to check the factions only
exasperated them. It was in vain that, when at times the government
and the populace lost patience, severe measures were taken. It was in
vain that the reformer, Gian della Bella, carried for a time his harsh
"orders of justice" against the nobles, and invested popular vengeance
with the solemnity of law and with the pomp and ceremony of a public
act—that when a noble had been convicted of killing a citizen, the
great officer, "Standard-bearer," as he was called, "of justice,"
issued forth in state and procession, with the banner of justice borne
before him, with all his train, and at the head of the armed citizens,
to the house of the criminal, and razed it to the ground. An
eyewitness describes the effect of such chastisement:—"I, Dino
Compagni, being Gonfalonier of Justice in 1293, went to their houses,
and to those of their relations, and these I caused to be pulled down
according to the laws. This beginning in the case of the other
Gonfaloniers came to an evil effect; because, if they demolished the
houses according to the laws, the people said that they were cruel;
and if they did not demolish them completely, they said that they were
cowards; and many distorted justice for fear of the people." Gian
della Bella was overthrown with few regrets even on the part of the
people. Equally vain was the attempt to keep the peace by separating
the leaders of the disturbances. They were banished by a kind of
ostracism; they departed in ostentatious meekness, Corso Donato to
plot at Rome, Vieri de' Cerchi to return immediately to Florence.
Anarchy had got too fast a hold on the city, and it required a
stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory of the republic,
to keep it down.
Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew richer, more intellectual,
more refined, more beautiful, more gay. With its anarchy there was no
stagnation. Torn and divided as it was, its energy did not slacken,
its busy and creative spirit was not deadened, its hopefulness not
abated. The factions, fierce and personal as they were, did not hinder
that interest in political ideas, that active and subtle study of the
questions of civil government, that passion and ingenuity displayed in
political contrivance, which now pervaded Northern Italy, everywhere
marvellously patient and hopeful, though far from being equally
successful. In Venice at the close of the thirteenth century, that
polity was finally settled and consolidated, by which she was great as
long as cities could be imperial, and which even in its decay survived
the monarchy of Louis XIV. and existed within the memory of living
men. In Florence, the constructive spirit of law and order only
resisted, but never triumphed. Yet it was at this time resolute and
sanguine, ready with experiment and change, and not yet dispirited by
continual failure. Political interest, however, and party contests
were not sufficient to absorb and employ the citizens of Florence.
Their genial and versatile spirit, so keen, so inventive, so elastic,
which made them such hot and impetuous partisans, kept them from being
only this. The time was one of growth; new knowledge, new powers, new
tastes were opening to men—new pursuits attracted them. There was
commerce, there was the school philosophy, there was the science of
nature, there was ancient learning, there was the civil law, there
were the arts, there was poetry, all rude as yet, and unformed, but
full of hope—the living parents of mightier offspring. Frederick II.
had once more opened Aristotle to the Latin world; he had given an
impulse to the study of the great monuments of Roman legislation which
was responded to through Italy; himself a poet, his example and his
splendid court had made poetry fashionable. In the end of the
thirteenth century a great stride was made at Florence. While her
great poet was growing up to manhood, as rapid a change went on in her
streets, her social customs, the wealth of her citizens, their ideas
of magnificence and beauty, their appreciation of literature. It was
the age of growing commerce and travel; Franciscan missionaries had
reached China, and settled there;[19] in 1294, Marco Polo returned to
Venice, the first successful explorer of the East. The merchants of
Florence lagged not; their field of operation was Italy and the West;
they had their correspondents in London, Paris, and Bruges; they were
the bankers of popes and kings.[20] And their city shows to this day
the wealth and magnificence of the last years of the thirteenth
century. The ancient buildings, consecrated in the memory of the
Florentine people, were repaired, enlarged, adorned with marble and
bronze—Or San Michele, the Badia, the Baptistery; and new buildings
rose on a grander scale. In 1294 was begun the Mausoleum of the great
Florentine dead, the Church of S. Croce. In the same year, a few
months later, Arnolfo laid the deep foundations which were afterwards
to bear up Brunelleschi's dome, and traced the plan of the magnificent
cathedral. In 1298 he began to raise a Town-hall worthy of the
Republic, and of being the habitation of its magistrates, the frowning
mass of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1299, the third circle of the walls
was commenced, with the benediction of bishops, and the concourse of
all the "lords and orders" of Florence. And Giotto was now beginning
to throw Cimabue into the shade—Giotto, the shepherd's boy, painter,
sculptor, architect, and engineer at once, who a few years later was
to complete and crown the architectural glories of Florence by that
masterpiece of grace, his marble Campanile.
Fifty years made then all that striking difference in domestic habits,
in the materials of dress, in the value of money, which they have
usually made in later centuries. The poet of the fourteenth century
describes the proudest nobleman of a hundred years before "with his
leathern girdle and clasp of bone;" and in one of the most beautiful
of all poetic celebrations of the good old time, draws the domestic
life of ancient Florence in the household where his ancestor was born:
A così riposato, a così bello
Viver di cittadini, a così fida
Cittadinanza, a così dolce ostello
Maria mi diè, chiamata in alte grida.—Par. c. 15.[21]
|
There high-born dames, he says, still plied the distaff and the loom;
still rocked the cradle with the words which their own mothers had
used; or working with their maidens, told them old tales of the
forefathers of the city, "of the Trojans, of Fiesole, and of Rome."
Villani still finds this rudeness within forty years of the end of the
century, almost within the limits of his own and Dante's life; and
speaks of that "old first people," il primo Popolo Vecchio, with
their coarse food and expenditure, their leather jerkins, and plain
close gowns, their small dowries and late marriages, as if they were
the first founders of the city, and not a generation which had lasted
on into his own.[22] Twenty years later, his story is of the gaiety,
the riches, the profuse munificence, the brilliant festivities, the
careless and joyous life, which attracted foreigners to Florence as
the city of pleasure; of companies of a thousand or more, all clad in
white robes, under a lord, styled "of Love," passing their time in
sports and dances; of ladies and knights, "going through the city with
trumpets and other instruments, with joy and gladness," and meeting
together in banquets evening and morning; entertaining illustrious
strangers, and honourably escorting them on horseback in their passage
through the city; tempting by their liberality, courtiers, and wits,
and minstrels, and jesters, to add to the amusements of Florence.[23]
Nor were these the boisterous triumphs of unrefined and coarse
merriment. How variety of character was drawn out, how its more
delicate elements were elicited and tempered, how nicely it was
observed, and how finely drawn, let the racy and open-eyed
story-tellers of Florence testify.
Not perhaps in these troops of revellers, but amid music and song, and
in the pleasant places of social and private life, belonging to the
Florence of arts and poetry, not to the Florence of factions and
strife, should we expect to find the friend of the sweet singer,
Casella, and of the reserved and bold speculator, Guido Cavalcanti;
the mystic poet of the Vita Nuova, so sensitive and delicate,
trembling at a gaze or a touch, recording visions, painting angels,
composing Canzoni and commenting on them; finally devoting himself to
the austere consolations of deep study. To superadd to such a
character that of a democratic politician of the middle ages, seems an
incongruous and harsh combination. Yet it was a real one in this
instance. The scholar's life is, in our idea of it, far separated from
the practical and the political; we have been taught by our experience
to disjoin enthusiasm in love, in art, in what is abstract or
imaginative, from keen interest and successful interference in the
affairs and conflicts of life. The practical man may sometimes be also
a dilettante; but the dreamer or the thinker, wisely or indolently,
keeps out of the rough ways where real passions and characters meet
and jostle, or if he ventures, seldom gains honour there. The
separation, though a natural one, grows wider as society becomes more
vast and manifold, as its ends, functions, and pursuits are
disentangled, while they multiply. But in Dante's time, and in an
Italian city, it was not such a strange thing that the most refined
and tender interpreter of feeling, the popular poet, whose verses
touched all hearts, and were in every mouth, should be also at once
the ardent follower of all abstruse and difficult learning, and a
prominent character among those who administered the State. In that
narrow sphere of action, in that period of dawning powers and
circumscribed knowledge, it seemed no unreasonable hope or unwise
ambition to attempt the compassing of all science, and to make it
subserve and illustrate the praise of active citizenship.[24] Dante,
like other literary celebrities of the time, was not less from the
custom of the day, than from his own purpose, a public man. He took
his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he
fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory
of Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he
enrolled himself in one of the Guilds of the people, and was
matriculated in the "Art" of the Apothecaries; he served the State as
its agent abroad; he went on important missions to the cities and
courts of Italy—according to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates
fourteen distinct embassies, even to Hungary and France. In the
memorable year of Jubilee, 1300, he was one of the Priors of the
Republic. There is no shrinking from fellowship and co-operation and
conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and
council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself,
exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the
workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought
of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in
the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the
miraculous page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such
feeling—no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager
inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all
affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully
directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with
distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and
appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that
admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour and love,
to be exercised, proved, and judged.
In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podestà[25] at
Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of his
contemporary Giotto. It was discovered in 1841 under the whitewash,
and a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced in
fac-simile by the Arundel Society. The fresco was afterwards restored
or repainted with no happy success. He is represented as he might have
been in the year of Campaldino (1289). The countenance is youthful yet
manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings of the picture;
but it only suggests the strong deep features of the well-known
traditional face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and
melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something also of the quaint
stiffness of the Vita Nuova—with his flower and his book. With him
is drawn his master, Brunetto Latini,[26] and Corso Donati. We do not
know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the great
"Baron." Dante was, indeed, closely connected with the Donati. The
dwelling of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of Scandal,"
the Ward of the Porta S. Piero. He married a daughter of their house,
Madonna Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more
affection than the companion of his light and wayward days, remembered
not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with love and hope,
Corso's brother, Forese.[27] No sweeter spirit sings and smiles in the
illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom Forese remembers as on
earth one,
Che tra bella e buona
Non so qual fosse più—[28]
|
and who, from the depth of her heavenly joy, teaches the poet that in
the lowest place among the blessed there can be no envy[29]—the
sister of Forese and Corso, Piccarda. The Commedia, though it
speaks, as if in prophecy, of Corso's miserable death, avoids the
mention of his name.[30] Its silence is so remarkable as to seem
significant. But though history does not group together Corso and
Dante, the picture represents the truth—their fortunes were linked
together. They were actors in the same scene—at this distance of time
two of the most prominent; though a scene very different from that
calm and grave assembly, which Giotto's placid pencil has drawn on the
old chapel wall.
The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it
is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know
not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the
parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a
neighbouring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and
the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs who were led by the
Donati, and the White Guelfs who sided with the Cerchi.[31] It still
professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but
they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and
for a time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men;
but it grew evident that one party must crush the other, and become
dominant in Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White
adherents were less formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous
and overbearing Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes;
proud not merely of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal
champions, once the martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the
great Guelf cause. The Cerchi with less character and less zeal, but
rich, liberal, and showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar
good-nature for the common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence
than the "Parte Guelfa;" and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them
well. Both the contemporary historians of Florence lead us to think
that they might have been the governors and guides of the Republic—if
they had chosen, and had known how; and both, though condemning the
two parties equally, seemed to have thought that this would have been
the best result for the State. But the accounts of both, though they
are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the
White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and
coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were
too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their
hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The
commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the
lovers of republican government, and for the most part the
magistrates; but they shrank from their fortune, "more from cowardice
than from goodness, because they exceedingly feared their
adversaries."[32] Boniface VIII. had no prepossessions in Florence,
except for energy and an open hand; the side which was most popular he
would have accepted and backed; but "he would not lose," he said, "the
men for the women." "Io non voglio perdere gli uomini per le
femminelle."[33] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser
or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's Hell, the White party
surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly
selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the
vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to
rebel nor be faithful, but "were for themselves;" and whoever it may
be who is singled out in the "setta dei cattivi," for deeper and
special scorn—he,
Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto—[34]
the idea was derived from the Cerchi in Florence.
A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and make peace in
Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso Donati came with him. The
magistrates were overawed and perplexed. The White party were, step by
step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in
the elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery,
of Italian intrigue—finally chased out of their houses and from the
city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in name and property, by the
Pope's French mediator. With them fell many citizens who had tried to
hold the balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the Black
Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two extant lists of
the proscribed—condemned by default, for corruption and various
crimes, especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of Charles
de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment—then, two months after, for
contumacy, to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the
Republic—appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and more than this,
concerning the history of his expulsion, we know not.[35]
Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general
character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party,
when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them
up at last in scorn and despair: but he never returned to Florence.
And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years,
from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is
stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or
dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and
there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by
antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence,
planning, with the Cerchi and the White party, an attack on the Black
Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace
between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of a
certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about
Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a
cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation,
his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for awhile, in
the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a
visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the
streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the West—with probability to
Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little certain can be made out
about the places where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be,
not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished,
and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still
rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a
Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones;
but rightly asked in vain.[36] His place of repose is better in those
remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by
the last relics of the Roman Empire—the mausoleum of the children of
Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian—than among the assembled
dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnificence of S. Maria del Fiore.[37]
The Commedia, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast
is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of
change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of
the middle ages, in which "the way" was the technical theological
expression for this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his
state of trial, as "comprehensor" meant man made perfect, having
attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The
writer's mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his
various journeys. The permanent scenery of the Inferno and
Purgatorio, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel.
The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred
Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes—one who had climbed
painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow
ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps
and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local
reminiscences abound:—the severed rocks of the Adige Valley—the
waterfall of S. Benedetto—the crags of Pietra-pana and S. Leo, which
overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna—the "fair river" that flows
among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri—the marble quarries of
Carrara—the "rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia," and
those towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which
travellers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember
with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveller
caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the
vapours grow thin, and the sun's orb appear faintly through them; and
issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of
sunset was lost already on the shores below:
Ai raggi, morti già nei bassi lidi:—Purg. 17.
or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the
Alpine fir—
Un'ombra smorta
Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri
Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l'Alpe porta:—Purg. 33.[38]
|
or of the large snow-flakes falling without wind, among the
mountains—
d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde
Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.—Inferno, 14.[39]
|
He delights in a local name and local image—the boiling pitch, and
the clang of the shipwrights in the arsenal of Venice—the sepulchral
fields of Arles and Pola—the hot-spring of Viterbo—the hooded monks
of Cologne—the dykes of Flanders and Padua—the Maremma, with its
rough brushwood, its wild boars, its snakes, and fevers. He had
listened to the south wind among the pine tops, in the forest by the
sea, at Ravenna. He had watched under the Carisenda tower at Bologna,
and seen the driving clouds "give away their motion" to it, and make
it seem to be falling; and had noticed how at Rome the October sun
sets between Corsica and Sardinia.[40] His images of the sea are
numerous and definite—the ship backing out of the tier in harbour,
the diver plunging after the fouled anchor, the mast rising, the ship
going fast before the wind, the water closing in its wake, the arched
backs of the porpoises the forerunners of a gale, the admiral watching
everything from poop to prow, the oars stopping altogether at the
sound of the whistle, the swelling sails becoming slack when the mast
snaps and falls.[41] Nowhere could we find so many of the most
characteristic and strange sensations of the traveller touched with
such truth. Everyone knows the lines which speak of the voyager's
sinking of heart on the first evening at sea, and of the longings
wakened in the traveller at the beginning of his journey by the
distant evening bell[42]; the traveller's morning feelings are not
less delicately noted—the strangeness on first waking in the open air
with the sun high; morning thoughts, as day by day he wakes nearer
home; the morning sight of the sea-beach quivering in the early light;
the tarrying and lingering, before setting out in the morning[43]—
Noi eravam lunghesso 'l mare ancora,
Come gente che pensa al suo cammino,
Che va col cuore, e col corpo dimora.[44]
|
He has recorded equally the anxiety, the curiosity, the suspicion with
which, in those times, stranger met and eyed stranger on the road; and
a still more characteristic trait is to be found in those lines where
he describes the pilgrim gazing around in the church of his vow, and
thinking how he shall tell of it:
E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
Nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
E spera già ridir com'ello stea:—Parad. 31.[45]
|
or again, in that description, so simple and touching, of his thoughts
while waiting to see the relic for which he left his home:
Quale è colui che forse di Croazia
Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
Che per l'antica fama non si sazia,
Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra;
Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Dio verace,
Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?—Parad. 31.[46]
|
Of these years then of disappointment and exile the Divina Commedia
was the labour and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told
with some detail, implies indeed that it was begun, and some progress
made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence—begun in Latin, and he
quotes three lines of it—continued afterwards in Italian. This is not
impossible; indeed the germ and presage of it may be traced in the
Vita Nuova. The idealised saint is there, in all the grace of her
pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's
soul. She is already in glory with Mary the queen of angels. She
already beholds the face of the Everblessed. And the envoye of the
Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. "After this sonnet,"
(in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love
had beheld a lady receiving honour, and dazzling by her glory the
unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a
marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to
speak more of this blessed one, until such time as I should be able to
indite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the
utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that, if it shall be the
pleasure of Him, by whom all things live, that my life continue for
some years, I hope to say of her that which never hath been said of
any woman. And afterwards, may it please Him, who is the Lord of
kindness, that my soul may go to behold the glory of her lady, that
is, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously gazes on the countenance
of Him, qui est per omnia secula benedictus."[47] It would be
wantonly violating probability and the unity of a great life, to
suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or
laid aside. The poet knew not indeed what he was promising, what he
was pledging himself to—through what years of toil and anguish he
would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form
his high venture should be realised. But the Commedia is the work of
no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve
and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept
the key supplied by the words of the Vita Nuova. The spell of
boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course
of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to
age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides
with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may
assume various changes—an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a
voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy—but
still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative
and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too
deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught—to be other than
the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in
the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the
prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man
without a home. Beatrice's glory might have been sung in grand though
barbarous Latin to the literati of the fourteenth century; or a poem
of new beauty might have fixed the language and opened the literature
of modern Italy; but it could hardly have been the Commedia. That
belongs, in its date and its greatness, to the time when sorrow had
become the poet's daily portion, and the condition of his life.
The Commedia is a novel and startling apparition in literature.
Probably it has been felt by some, who have approached it with the
reverence due to a work of such renown, that the world has been
generous in placing it so high. It seems so abnormal, so lawless, so
reckless of all ordinary proprieties and canons of feeling, taste, and
composition. It is rough and abrupt; obscure in phrase and allusion,
doubly obscure in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually kept
distinct: scandal of the day and transcendental science, politics and
confessions, coarse satire and angelic joy, private wrongs, with the
mysteries of the faith, local names and habitations of earth, with
visions of hell and heaven. It is hard to keep up with the
ever-changing current of feeling, to pass as the poet passes, without
effort or scruple, from tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter
scorn or querulous complaint, from high-raised devotion to the
calmness of prosaic subtleties or grotesque detail. Each separate
element and vein of thought has its precedent, but not their
amalgamation. Many had written visions of the unseen world, but they
had not blended with them their personal fortunes. S. Augustine had
taught the soul to contemplate its own history, and had traced its
progress from darkness to light;[48] but he had not interwoven with it
the history of Italy, and the consummation of all earthly destinies.
Satire was no new thing; Juvenal had given it a moral, some of the
Provençal poets a political turn; S. Jerome had kindled into it
fiercely and bitterly even while expounding the Prophets; but here it
streams forth in all its violence, within the precincts of the eternal
world, and alternates with the hymns of the blessed. Lucretius had
drawn forth the poetry of nature and its laws; Virgil and Livy had
unfolded the poetry of the Roman empire; S. Augustine, the still
grander poetry of the history of the City of God; but none had yet
ventured to weave into one the three wonderful threads. And yet the
scope of the Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue of all
things, universal as the government which directs nature and
intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to the lowest caitiff he has
ever despised, the minutest fact in nature that has ever struck his
eye, the merest personal association which hangs pleasantly in his
memory. Writing for all time, he scruples not to mix with all that is
august and permanent in history and prophecy, incidents the most
transient, and names the most obscure; to waste an immortality of
shame or praise on those about whom his own generation were to inquire
in vain. Scripture history runs into profane; Pagan legends teach
their lesson side by side with Scripture scenes and miracles; heroes
and poets of heathenism, separated from their old classic world, have
their place in the world of faith, discourse with Christians of
Christian dogmas, and even mingle with the Saints; Virgil guides the
poet through his fear and his penitence to the gates of Paradise.
This feeling of harsh and extravagant incongruity, of causeless and
unpardonable darkness, is perhaps the first impression of many readers
of the Commedia. But probably as they read on, there will mingle
with this a sense of strange and unusual grandeur, arising not alone
from the hardihood of the attempt, and the mystery of the subject, but
from the power and the character of the poet. It will strike them that
words cut deeper than is their wont; that from that wild uncongenial
imagery, thoughts emerge of singular truth and beauty. Their
dissatisfaction will be chequered, even disturbed—for we can often
bring ourselves to sacrifice much for the sake of a clear and
consistent view—by the appearance, amid much that repels them, of
proofs undeniable and accumulating of genius as mighty as it is
strange. Their perplexity and disappointment may grow into distinct
condemnation, or it may pass into admiration and delight; but no one
has ever come to the end of the Commedia without feeling that if it
has given him a new view and specimen of the wildness and
unaccountable waywardness of the human mind, it has also added, as few
other books have, to his knowledge of its feelings, its capabilities,
and its grasp, and suggested larger and more serious thoughts, for
which he may be grateful, concerning that unseen world of which he is
even here a member.
Dante would not have thanked his admirers for becoming apologists.
Those in whom the sense of imperfection and strangeness overpowers
sympathy for grandeur, and enthusiasm for nobleness, and joy in
beauty, he certainly would have left to themselves. But neither would
he teach any that he was leading them along a smooth and easy road.
The Commedia will always be a hard and trying book; nor did the
writer much care that it should be otherwise. Much of this is no doubt
to be set down to its age; much of its roughness and extravagance, as
well as of its beauty—its allegorical spirit, its frame and scenery.
The idea of a visionary voyage through the worlds of pain and bliss is
no invention of the poet—it was one of the commonest and most
familiar medieval vehicles of censure or warning; and those who love
to trace the growth and often strange fortunes of popular ideas, or
whose taste leads them to disbelieve in genius, and track the
parentage of great inventions to the foolish and obscure, may find
abundant materials in the literature of legends.[49] But his own
age—the age which received the Commedia with mingled enthusiasm and
wonder, and called it the Divine, was as much perplexed as we are,
though probably rather pleased thereby than offended. That within a
century after its composition, in the more famous cities and
universities of Italy, Florence, Venice, Bologna, and Pisa, chairs
should have been founded, and illustrious men engaged to lecture on
it, is a strange homage to its power, even in that time of quick
feeling; but as strange and great a proof of its obscurity. What is
dark and forbidding in it was scarcely more clear to the poet's
contemporaries. And he, whose last object was amusement, invites no
audience but a patient and confiding one.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Desiderosi di ascoltar, seguiti
Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,
Tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
Non vi mettete in pelago, chè forse
Perdendo me rimarreste smarriti.
L'acqua ch'io prendo giammai non si corse:
Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo,
E nuove muse mi dimostran l'Orse.
Voi altri pochi, che drizzaste 'l collo
Per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale
Vivesi qui, ma non si vien satollo,
Metter potete ben per l'alto sale
Vostro navigio, servando mio solco
Dinanzi all'acqua che ritorna eguale.
Que gloriosi che passaro a Colco,
Non s'ammiraron, come voi farete,
Quando Jason vider fatto bifolco.—Parad. 2.[50]
|
The character of the Commedia belongs much more, in its excellence
and its imperfections, to the poet himself and the nature of his
work, than to his age. That cannot screen his faults; nor can it
arrogate to itself, it must be content to share, his glory. His
leading idea and line of thought was much more novel then than it is
now, and belongs much more to the modern than the medieval world. The
Story of a Life, the poetry of man's journey through the wilderness
to his true country, is now in various and very different shapes as
hackneyed a form of imagination, as an allegory, an epic, a legend of
chivalry were in former times. Not, of course, that any time has been
without its poetical feelings and ideas on the subject; and never were
they deeper and more diversified, more touching and solemn, than in
the ages that passed from S. Augustine and S. Gregory to S. Thomas and
S. Bonaventura. But a philosophical poem, where they were not merely
the colouring, but the subject, an epos of the soul, placed for its
trial in a fearful and wonderful world, with relations to time and
matter, history and nature, good and evil, the beautiful, the
intelligible, and the mysterious, sin and grace, the infinite and the
eternal—and having in the company and under the influences of other
intelligences, to make its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to
gain the light, or be lost—this was a new and unattempted theme. It
has been often tried since, in faith or doubt, in egotism, in sorrow,
in murmuring, in affectation, sometimes in joy—in various forms, in
prose and verse, completed or fragmentary, in reality or fiction, in
the direct or the shadowed story, in the Pilgrim's Progress, in
Rousseau's Confessions, in Wilhelm Meister and Faust, in the
Excursion. It is common enough now for the poet, in the faith of
human sympathy, and in the sense of the unexhausted vastness of his
mysterious subject, to believe that his fellows will not see without
interest and profit, glimpses of his own path and fortunes—hear from
his lips the disclosure of his chief delights, his warnings, his
fears—follow the many-coloured changes, the impressions and workings,
of a character, at once the contrast and the counterpart to their own.
But it was a new path then; and he needed to be, and was, a bold man,
who first opened it—a path never trod without peril, usually with
loss or failure.
And certainly no great man ever made less secret to himself of his own
genius. He is at no pains to rein in or to dissemble his consciousness
of power, which he has measured without partiality, and feels sure
will not fail him. "Fidandomi di me più che di un altro"[51]—is a
reason which he assigns without reserve. We look with the distrust and
hesitation of modern days, yet, in spite of ourselves, not without
admiration and regret, at such frank hardihood. It was more common
once than now. When the world was young, it was more natural and
allowable—it was often seemly and noble. Men knew not their
difficulties as we know them—we, to whom time, which has taught so
much wisdom, has brought so many disappointments—we who have seen how
often the powerful have fallen short, and the noble gone astray, and
the most admirable missed their perfection. It is becoming in us to
distrust ourselves—to be shy if we cannot be modest; it is but a
respectful tribute to human weakness and our brethren's failures. But
there was a time when great men dared to claim their greatness—not in
foolish self-complacency, but in unembarrassed and majestic
simplicity, in magnanimity and truth, in the consciousness of a
serious and noble purpose, and of strength to fulfil it. Without
passion, without elation as without shrinking, the poet surveys his
superiority and his high position, as something external to him; he
has no doubts about it, and affects none. He would be a coward, if he
shut his eyes to what he could do; as much a trifler in displaying
reserve as ostentation. Nothing is more striking in the Commedia
than the serene and unhesitating confidence with which he announces
himself the heir and reviver of the poetic power so long lost to the
world—the heir and reviver of it in all its fulness. He doubts not
of the judgment of posterity. One has arisen who shall throw into the
shade all modern reputations, who shall bequeath to Christendom the
glory of that name of Poet, "che più dura e più onora," hitherto the
exclusive boast of heathenism, and claim the rare honours of the
laurel:
Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie
Per trionfare o Cesare o poeta,
(Colpa e vergogna dell'umane voglie),
Che partorir letizia in su la lieta
Delfica deità dovrìa la fronda
Peneia quando alcun di sè asseta.—Parad. 1.[52]
|
He has but to follow his star to be sure of the glorious port:[53] he
is the master of language: he can give fame to the dead—no task or
enterprise appals him, for whom spirits keep watch in heaven, and
angels have visited the shades—"tal si partì dal cantar
alleluia:"—who is Virgil's foster child and familiar friend. Virgil
bids him lay aside the last vestige of fear. Virgil is to "crown him
king and priest over himself,"[54] for a higher venture than heathen
poetry had dared; in Virgil's company he takes his place without
diffidence, and without vain-glory, among the great poets of old—a
sister soul.[55]
Poichè la voce fu restata e queta,
Vidi quattro grand'ombre a noi venire:
Sembianza avean nè trista nè lieta:
****
Così vidi adunar la bella scuola
Di quel signor dell'altissimo canto
Che sovra gli altri come aquila vola.
Da ch'ebber ragionato insieme alquanto
Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno
E 'l mio maestro sorrise di tanto.
E più d'onore ancora assai mi fenno:
Ch'essi mi fecer della loro schiera,
Sì ch'io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.—Inf. 4.[56]
|
This sustained magnanimity and lofty self-reliance, which never
betrays itself, is one of the main elements in the grandeur of the
Commedia. It is an imposing spectacle to see such fearlessness, such
freedom, and such success in an untried path, amid unprepared
materials and rude instruments, models scanty and only half
understood, powers of language still doubtful and suspected, the
deepest and strongest thought still confined to unbending forms and
the harshest phrase; exact and extensive knowledge, as yet far out of
reach; with no help from time, which familiarises all things, and of
which, manner, elaboration, judgment, and taste are the gifts and
inheritance;—to see the poet, trusting to his eye "which saw
everything"[57] and his searching and creative spirit, venture
undauntedly into all regions of thought and feeling, to draw thence a
picture of the government of the universe.
But such greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante
was alone:—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless.
The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his
home and the voices of his daughters; Shakspere had his free
associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, and all
Germany to applaud. Not so Dante. The friends of his youth are already
in the region of spirits, and meet him there—Casella, Forese;—Guido
Cavalcanti will soon be with them. In this upper world he thinks and
writes as a friendless man—to whom all that he had held dearest was
either lost or embittered; he thinks and writes for himself.
And so he is his own law; he owns no tribunal of opinion or standard
of taste, except among the great dead. He hears them exhort him to
"let the world talk on—to stand like a tower unshaken by the
winds."[58] He fears to be "a timid friend to truth," "—to lose life
among those who shall call this present time antiquity."[59] He
belongs to no party. He is his own arbiter of the beautiful and the
becoming; his own judge over right and injustice, innocence and guilt.
He has no followers to secure, no school to humour, no public to
satisfy; nothing to guide him, and nothing to consult, nothing to bind
him, nothing to fear, out of himself. In full trust in heart and will,
in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he gives himself free
course. If men have idolised the worthless, and canonised the base, he
reverses their award without mercy, and without apology; if they have
forgotten the just because he was obscure, he remembers him: if "Monna
Berta and Ser Martino,"[60] the wimpled and hooded gossips of the
day, with their sage company, have settled it to their own
satisfaction that Providence cannot swerve from their general rules,
cannot save where they have doomed, or reject where they have
approved—he both fears more and hopes more. Deeply reverent to the
judgment of the ages past, reverent to the persons whom they have
immortalised for good and even for evil, in his own day he cares for
no man's person and no man's judgment. And he shrinks not from the
auguries and forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. Men
reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, and without much
scruple; but not with such deliberate and discriminating sternness.
The most popular and honoured names in Florence,
Farinata e 'l Tegghiaio, che fur sì degni,
Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e 'l Mosca
E gli altri, ch'a ben far poser gl'ingegni;
|
have yet the damning brand: no reader of the Inferno can have
forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet's questionings
about their fate:
Ei son tra le anime più nere.[61]
If he is partial, it is no vulgar partiality: friendship and old
affection do not venture to exempt from its fatal doom the sin of his
famous master, Brunetto Latini;[62] nobleness and great deeds, a
kindred character and common wrongs, are not enough to redeem
Farinata; and he who could tell her story bowed to the eternal law,
and dared not save Francesca. If he condemns by a severer rule than
that of the world, he absolves with fuller faith in the possibilities
of grace. Many names of whom history has recorded no good, are marked
by him for bliss; yet not without full respect for justice. The
penitent of the last hour is saved, but he suffers loss. Manfred's
soul is rescued; mercy had accepted his tears, and forgiven his great
sins; and the excommunication of his enemy did not bar his salvation:
Per lor maladizion sì non si perde
Che non possa tornar l'eterno amore
Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.—Purg. 3.
|
Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for long years from the
perfection of heaven.[63] And with the same independence with which he
assigns their fate, he selects his instances—instances which are to
be the types of character and its issues. No man ever owned more
unreservedly the fascination of greatness, its sway over the
imagination and the heart; no one prized more the grand harmony and
sense of fitness which there is, when the great man and the great
office are joined in one, and reflect each other's greatness. The
famous and great of all ages are gathered in the poet's vision; the
great names even of fable—Geryon and the giants, the Minotaur and
Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes and Troy. But not the great and
famous only: this is too narrow, too conventional a sphere; it is not
real enough. He felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that
wonderful histories are latent in the inconspicuous paths of life, in
the fugitive incidents of the hour, among the persons whose faces we
have seen. The Church had from the first been witness to the deep
interest of individual life. The rising taste for novels showed that
society at large was beginning to be alive to it. And it is this
feeling—that behind the veil there may be grades of greatness but
nothing insignificant—that led Dante to refuse to restrict himself to
the characters of fame. He will associate with them the living men who
have stood round him; they are part of the same company with the
greatest. That they have interested him, touched him, moved his
indignation or pity, struck him as examples of great vicissitude or
of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved him—this is enough why
they should live in his poem as they have lived to him. He chooses at
will; history, if it has been negligent at the time about those whom
he thought worthy of renown, must be content with its loss. He tells
their story, or touches them with a word like the most familiar names,
according as he pleases. The obscure highway robber, the obscure
betrayer of his sister's honour—Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo,
and Caccianimico—are ranked, not according to their obscurity, but
according to the greatness of their crimes, with the famous
conquerors, and "scourges of God," and seducers of the heroic age,
Pyrrhus and Attila, and the great Jason of "royal port, who sheds no
tear in his torments."[64] He earns as high praise from Virgil, for
his curse on the furious wrath of the old frantic Florentine burgher,
as if he had cursed the disturber of the world's peace.[65] And so in
the realms of joy, among the faithful accomplishers of the highest
trusts, kings and teachers of the nations, founders of orders, sainted
empresses, appear those whom, though the world had forgotten or
misread them, the poet had enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for
their sweetness, their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the
penitent, the nun, the old crusading ancestor, the pilgrim who had
deserted the greatness which he had created, the brave logician, who
"syllogised unpalatable truths" in the Quartier Latin of Paris.[66]
There is small resemblance in all this—this arbitrary and imperious
tone, this range of ideas, feelings, and images, this unshackled
freedom, this harsh reality—to the dreamy gentleness of the Vita
Nuova, or even the staid argumentation of the more mature Convito.
The Vita Nuova is all self-concentration—a brooding, not unpleased,
over the varying tides of feeling, which are little influenced by the
world without; where every fancy, every sensation, every superstition
of the lover is detailed with the most whimsical subtlety. The
Commedia, too, has its tenderness—and that more deep, more natural,
more true, than the poet had before adapted to the traditionary
formulæ of the "Courts of Love,"—the eyes of Beatrice are as bright,
and the "conquering light of her smile;"[67] they still culminate,
but they are not alone, in the poet's heaven. And the professed
subject of the Commedia is still Dante's own story and life; he
still makes himself the central point. And steeled as he is by that
high and hard experience of which his poem is the projection and
type—"Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura"—a stern and brief-spoken
man, set on objects, and occupied with a theme, lofty and vast as can
occupy man's thoughts, he still lets escape ever and anon some passing
avowal of delicate sensitiveness,[68] lingers for a moment on some
indulged self-consciousness, some recollection of his once quick and
changeful mood—"io che son trasmutabil per tutte guise"[69]—or half
playfully alludes to the whispered name of a lady,[70] whose pleasant
courtesy has beguiled a few days of exile. But he is no longer
spell-bound and entangled in fancies of his own weaving—absorbed in
the unprofitable contemplation of his own internal sensations. The man
is indeed the same, still a Florentine, still metaphysical, still a
lover. He returns to the haunts and images of youth, to take among
them his poet's crown; but "with other voice and other garb,"[71] a
penitent and a prophet—with larger thoughts, wider sympathies, freer
utterance; sterner and fiercer, yet nobler and more genuine in his
tenderness—as one whom trial has made serious, and keen, and
intolerant of evil, but not sceptical or callous; yet with the
impressions and memories of a very different scene from his old
day-dreams.
After that it was the pleasure of the citizens of that
fairest and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast
me forth from her most sweet bosom (wherein I had been
nourished up to the maturity of my life, and in which, with
all peace to her, I long with all my heart to rest my weary
soul, and finish the time which is given me), I have passed
through almost all the regions to which this language
reaches, a wanderer, almost a beggar, displaying, against my
will, the stroke of fortune, which is ofttimes unjustly wont
to be imputed to the person stricken. Truly, I have been a
ship without a sail or helm, carried to divers harbours, and
gulfs, and shores, by that parching wind which sad poverty
breathes; and I have seemed vile in the eyes of many, who
perchance, from some fame, had imagined of me in another
form; in the sight of whom not only did my presence become
nought, but every work of mine less prized, both what had
been and what was to be wrought.—Convito, Tr. i. c. 3.
Thus proved, and thus furnished—thus independent and confident,
daring to trust his instinct and genius in what was entirely untried
and unusual, he entered on his great poem, to shadow forth, under the
figure of his own conversion and purification, not merely how a single
soul rises to its perfection, but how this visible world, in all its
phases of nature, life, and society, is one with the invisible, which
borders on it, actuates, accomplishes, and explains it. It is this
vast plan—to take into his scope, not the soul only in its struggles
and triumph, but all that the soul finds itself engaged with in its
course; the accidents of the hour, and of ages past; the real persons,
great and small, apart from and without whom it cannot think or act;
the material world, its theatre and home—it is this which gives so
many various sides to the Commedia, which makes it so novel and
strange. It is not a mere personal history, or a pouring forth of
feeling, like the Vita Nuova, though he is himself the mysterious
voyager, and he opens without reserve his actual life and his heart;
he speaks, indeed, in the first person, yet he is but a character of
the drama, and in great part of it with not more of distinct
personality than in that paraphrase of the penitential Psalms, in
which he has preluded so much of the Commedia. Yet the Commedia is
not a pure allegory; it admits, and makes use of the allegorical, but
the laws of allegory are too narrow for it; the real in it is too
impatient of the veil, and breaks through in all its hardness and
detail, into what is most shadowy. History is indeed viewed not in its
ephemeral look, but under the light of God's final judgments; in its
completion, not in its provisional and fragmentary character; viewed
therefore but in faith;—but its issues, which in this confused scene
we ordinarily contemplate in the gross, the poet brings down to detail
and individuals; he faces and grasps the tremendous thought that the
very men and women whom we see and speak to, are now the real
representatives of sin and goodness, the true actors in that scene
which is so familiar to us as a picture—unflinching and terrible
heart, he endures to face it in its most harrowing forms. But he wrote
not for sport, nor to give poetic pleasure; he wrote to warn; the seed
of the Commedia was sown in tears, and reaped in misery: and the
consolations which it offers are awful as they are real.
Thus, though he throws into symbol and image, what can only be
expressed by symbol and image, we can as little forget in reading him
this real world in which we live, as we can in one of Shakspere's
plays. It is not merely that the poem is crowded with real personages,
most of them having the single interest to us of being real. But all
that is associated with man's history and existence is interwoven with
the main course of thought—all that gives character to life, all that
gives it form and feature, even to quaintness, all that occupies the
mind, or employs the hand—speculation, science, arts, manufactures,
monuments, scenes, customs, proverbs, ceremonies, games, punishments,
attitudes of men, habits of living creatures. The wildest and most
unearthly imaginations, the most abstruse thoughts take up into, and
incorporate with themselves the forcible and familiar impressions of
our mother earth, and do not refuse the company and aid even of the
homeliest.
This is not mere poetic ornament, peculiarly, profusely, or
extravagantly employed. It is one of the ways in which his dominant
feeling expresses itself—spontaneous and instinctive in each several
instance of it, but the kindling and effluence of deliberate thought,
and attending on a clear purpose—the feeling of the real and intimate
connexion between the objects of sight and faith. It is not that he
sees in one the simple counterpart and reverse of the other, or sets
himself to trace out universally their mutual correspondences; he has
too strong a sense of the reality of this familiar life to reduce it
merely to a shadow and type of the unseen. What he struggles to
express in countless ways, with all the resources of his strange and
gigantic power, is that this world and the next are both equally real,
and both one—parts, however different, of one whole. The world to
come we know but in "a glass darkly;" man can only think and imagine
of it in images, which he knows to be but broken and faint
reflections: but this world we know, not in outline, and featureless
idea, but by name, and face, and shape, by place and person, by the
colours and forms which crowd over its surface, the men who people its
habitations, the events which mark its moments. Detail fills the sense
here, and is the mark of reality. And thus he seeks to keep alive the
feeling of what that world is which he connects with heaven and hell;
not by abstractions, not much by elaborate and highly-finished
pictures, but by names, persons, local features, definite images.
Widely and keenly has he ranged over and searched into the world—with
a largeness of mind which disdained not to mark and treasure up, along
with much unheeded beauty, many a characteristic feature of nature,
unnoticed because so common. All his pursuits and interests contribute
to the impression, which, often instinctively it may be, he strives to
produce, of the manifold variety of our life. As a man of society, his
memory is full of its usages, formalities, graces, follies,
fashions—of expressive motions, postures, gestures, looks—of music,
of handicrafts, of the conversation of friends or associates—of all
that passes, so transient, yet so keenly pleasant or distasteful,
between man and man. As a traveller, he recalls continually the names
and scenes of the world;—as a man of speculation, the secrets of
nature—the phenomena of light, the theory of the planets' motions,
the idea and laws of physiology. As a man of learning, he is filled
with the thoughts and recollections of ancient fable and history; as a
politician, with the thoughts, prognostications, and hopes, of the
history of the day; as a moral philosopher he has watched himself, his
external sensations and changes, his inward passions, his mental
powers, his ideas, his conscience; he has far and wide noted
character, discriminated motives, classed good and evil deeds. All
that the man of society, of travel, of science, of learning, the
politician, the moralist, could gather, is used at will in the great
poetic structure; but all converges to the purpose, and is directed by
the intense feeling of the theologian, who sees this wonderful and
familiar scene melting into, and ending in another yet more wonderful,
but which will one day be as familiar—who sees the difficult but sure
progress of the manifold remedies of the Divine government to their
predestined issue; and, over all, God and His saints.
So comprehensive in interest is the Commedia. Any attempt to explain
it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral
life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the
key-note; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and
art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet
ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a
single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion
in it, the plain-spoken prose of the Convito would show how he
placed "the Divine Science, full of all peace, and allowing no strife
of opinions and sophisms, for the excellent certainty of its subject,
which is God," in single perfection above all other sciences, "which
are, as Solomon speaks, but queens, or concubines, or maidens; but she
is the 'Dove,' and the 'perfect one'—'Dove,' because without stain of
strife—'perfect,' because perfectly she makes us behold the truth, in
which our soul stills itself and is at rest." But the same passage[72]
shows likewise how he viewed all human knowledge and human interests,
as holding their due place in the hierarchy of wisdom, and among the
steps of man's perfection. No account of the Commedia will prove
sufficient, which does not keep in view, first of all, the high moral
purpose and deep spirit of faith with which it was written, and then
the wide liberty of materials and means which the poet allowed himself
in working out his design.
Doubtless, his writings have a political aspect. The "great Ghibelline
poet" is one of Dante's received synonymes; of his strong political
opinions, and the importance he attached to them, there can be no
doubt. And he meant his poem to be the vehicle of them, and the record
to all ages of the folly and selfishness with which he saw men
governed. That he should take the deepest interest in the goings on of
his time, is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at
them, or that he subordinated to political objects or feelings all the
other elements of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very
narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by
Italians, by men who read the Commedia in their own mother-tongue.
It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it—maintained
with great labour and pertinacious ingenuity—that Dante meant nothing
more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal triumph of a political
party. The hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but a
manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of
historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to
announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a
specimen of the jargon, cant, and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry.
When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their
country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of
schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of
Dante's works, by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to
say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that
we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with
gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's Historic Doubts. The
fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of
injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse
blindness.[73]
Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of
an Imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline
party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been
brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from
Florence, were at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party[74];
and he acted with them for a time.[75] But no words can be stronger
than those in which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish
company," and claims his independence—
A te fia bello
Averti fatto parte per te stesso.[76]
|
And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partisan putting into the
mouth of Justinian, the type of law and empire, a general condemnation
of his party as heavy as that of their antagonists;—the crime of
having betrayed, as the Guelfs had resisted, the great symbol of
public right—
Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali
Ch'io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli
Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mali.
L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli
Oppone, e quel s'appropria l'altro a parte,
Sì ch'è forte a veder qual più si falli.
Faccian li Ghibellin, faccian lor arte
Sott'altro segno; chè mal segue quello
Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte.[77]
|
And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he found refuge
among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among Guelfs also. His steps
and his tongue were free to the end. And in character and feeling, in
his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his intolerance of
corruption and pride, his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was
much less a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed
Savonarola.
But he had a very decided and complete political theory, which
certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it was not much
more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of men would have more
vigorously resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have
joined more heartily with all immediate opponents—Guelfs, Black,
White, and Green, or even Boniface VIII.,—to keep out such an emperor
as Dante imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates.
Dante's political views were a dream; though a dream based on what had
been, and an anticipation of what was, in part at least, to come. It
was a dream in the middle ages, in divided and republican Italy, the
Italy of cities—of a real and national government, based on justice
and law. It was the dream of a real state. He imagined that the
Roman empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that
Christendom might be such. He was wrong in both instances; but in this
case, as in so many others, he had already caught the spirit and ideas
of a far-distant future; and the political organisation of modern
times, so familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding
wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a form very different
from what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those
expectations which are in outward form so chimerical—"i miei non
falsi errori."
He had studied the "infinite disorders of the world" in one of their
most unrestrained scenes, the streets of an Italian republic. Law was
powerless, good men were powerless, good intentions came to naught;
neither social habits nor public power could resist, when selfishness
chose to have its way. The Church was indeed still the salt of the
nations; but it had once dared and achieved more; it had once been the
only power which ruled them. And this it could do no longer. If
strength and energy had been enough to make the Church's influence
felt on government, there was a Pope who could have done it—a man who
was undoubtedly the most wondered at and admired of his age, whom
friend or foe never characterised, without adding the invariable
epithet of his greatness of soul—the "magnanimus peccator,"[78]
whose Roman grandeur in meeting his unworthy fate fascinated into
momentary sympathy even Dante.[79] But among the things which
Boniface VIII. could not do, even if he cared about it, was the
maintaining peace and law in Italian towns. And while this great
political power was failing, its correlative and antagonist was
paralysed also. "Since the death of Frederic II.," says Dante's
contemporary, "the fame and recollections of the empire were well-nigh
extinguished."[80] Italy was left without government—"come nave senza
nocchiero in gran tempesta"—to the mercies of her tyrants:
Che le terre d'Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan, che parteggiando viene.—Purg. 6.
|
In this scene of violence and disorder, with the Papacy gone astray,
the empire debased and impotent, the religious orders corrupted, power
meaning lawlessness, the well-disposed become weak and cowardly,
religion neither guide nor check to society, but only the consolation
of its victims—Dante was bold and hopeful enough to believe in the
Divine appointment, and in the possibility, of law and government—of
a state. In his philosophy, the institutions which provide for man's
peace and liberty in this life are part of God's great order for
raising men to perfection;—not indispensable, yet ordinary parts;
having their important place, though but for the present time; and
though imperfect, real instruments of His moral government. He could
not believe it to be the intention of Providence, that on the
introduction of higher hopes and the foundation of a higher society,
civil society should collapse and be left to ruin, as henceforth
useless or prejudicial in man's trial and training; that the
significant intimations of nature, that law and its results, justice,
peace, and stability, ought to be and might be realised among men, had
lost their meaning and faded away before the announcement of a kingdom
not of this world. And if the perfection of civil society had not been
superseded by the Church, it had become clear, if events were to be
read as signs, that she was not intended to supply its political
offices and functions. She had taught, elevated, solaced, blessed, not
only individual souls, but society; she had for a time even governed
it: but though her other powers remained, she could govern it no
longer. Failure had made it certain that, in his strong and quaint
language, "Virtus authorizandi regnum nostræ mortalitatis est contra
naturam ecclesiæ; ergo non est de numero virtutum suarum."[81]
Another and distinct organisation was required for this, unless the
temporal order was no longer worthy the attention of Christians.
This is the idea of the De Monarchia; and though it holds but a
place in the great scheme of the Commedia, it is prominent there
also—an idea seen but in a fantastic shape, encumbered and confused
with most grotesque imagery, but the real idea of polity and law,
which the experience of modern Europe has attained to.
He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy, the theory of
merely human society; and raising its end and purpose, "finem totius
humanæ civilitatis," to a height and dignity which Heathens could not
forecast, he adopted it in its more abstract and ideal form. He
imagined a single authority, unselfish, inflexible, irresistible,
which could make all smaller tyrannies to cease, and enable every man
to live in peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is
simply what each separate state of Christendom has by this time more
or less perfectly achieved. The theoriser of the middle ages could
conceive of its accomplishment only in one form, as grand as it was
impossible—a universal monarchy.
But he did not start from an abstraction. He believed that history
attested the existence of such a monarchy. The prestige of the Roman
empire was then strong. Europe still lingers on the idea, and cannot
even yet bring itself to give up its part in that great monument of
human power. But in the middle ages the Empire was still believed to
exist. It was the last greatness which had been seen in the world, and
the world would not believe that it was over. Above all, in Italy, a
continuity of lineage, of language, of local names, and in part of
civilisation and law, forbad the thought that the great Roman people
had ceased to be. Florentines and Venetians boasted that they were
Romans: the legends which the Florentine ladies told to their maidens
at the loom were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman element,
little understood, but profoundly reverenced and dearly cherished, was
dominant; the conductor of civilisation, and enfolding the inheritance
of all the wisdom, experience, feeling, art, of the past, it elevated,
even while it overawed, oppressed, and enslaved. A deep belief in
Providence added to the intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred
character. The flight of the eagle has been often told and often sung;
but neither in Livy or Virgil, Gibbon or Bossuet, with intenser
sympathy or more kindred power, than in those rushing and unflagging
verses in which the middle-age poet hears the imperial legislator
relate the fated course of the "sacred sign," from the day when Pallas
died for it, till it accomplished the vengeance of heaven in Judæa,
and afterwards, under Charlemagne, smote down the enemies of the
Church.[82]
The following passage, from the De Monarchia, will show the poet's
view of the Roman empire, and its office in the world:
To the reasons above alleged, a memorable experience brings
confirmation: I mean that state of mankind which the Son of
God, when He would for man's salvation take man upon Him,
either waited for, or ordered when so He willed. For if from
the fall of our first parents, which was the starting-point
of all our wanderings, we retrace the various dispositions
of men and their times, we shall not find at any time,
except under the divine monarch Augustus, when a perfect
monarchy existed, that the world was everywhere quiet. And
that then mankind was happy in the tranquillity of universal
peace, this all writers of history, this famous poets, this
even the Scribe of the meekness of Christ has deigned to
attest. And lastly, Paul has called that most blessed
condition, the fulness of time. Truly time, and the things
of time, were full, for no mystery of our felicity then
lacked its minister. But how the world has gone on from the
time when that seamless robe was first torn by the claws of
covetousness, we may read, and would that we might not also
see. O race of men, by how great storms and losses, by how
great shipwrecks hast thou of necessity been vexed since,
transformed into a beast of many heads, thou hast been
struggling different ways, sick in understanding, equally
sick in heart. The higher intellect, with its invincible
reasons, thou reckest not of; nor of the inferior, with its
eye of experience; nor of affection, with the sweetness of
divine suasion, when the trumpet of the Holy Ghost sounds to
thee—"Behold, how good is it, and how pleasant, brethren,
to dwell together in unity."—De Monarch. lib. i. p. 54.
Yet this great Roman empire existed still unimpaired in name—not
unimposing even in what really remained of it. Dante, to supply a
want, turned it into a theory—a theory easy to smile at now, but
which contained and was a beginning of unknown or unheeded truth. What
he yearns after is the predominance of the principle of justice in
civil society. That, if it is still imperfect, is no longer a dream in
our day; but experience had never realised it to him, and he takes
refuge in tentative and groping theory. The divinations of the
greatest men have been vague and strange, and none have been stranger
than those of the author of the De Monarchia. The second book, in
which he establishes the title of the Roman people to Universal
Empire, is as startling a piece of mediæval argument as it would be
easy to find.
As when we cannot attain to look upon a cause, we commonly
wonder at a new effect, so when we know the cause, we look
down with a certain derision on those who remain in wonder.
And I indeed wondered once how the Roman people had, without
any resistance, been set over the world; and looking at it
superficially, I thought that they had obtained this by no
right, but by mere force of arms. But when I fixed deeply
the eyes of my mind on it, and by most effectual signs knew
that Divine Providence had wrought this, wonder departed,
and a certain scornful contempt came in its stead, when I
perceived the nations raging against the pre-eminence of the
Roman people:—when I see the people imagining a vain thing,
as I once used to do; when, moreover, I grieve over kings
and princes agreeing in this only, to be against their Lord
and his anointed Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, not
without a certain grief, I can cry out, for that glorious
people and for Cæsar, with him who cried in behalf of the
Prince of Heaven, "Why did the nations rage, and the people
imagine vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and
the rulers were joined in one against the Lord and his
anointed." But (because natural love suffers not derision to
be of long duration, but, like the summer sun, which,
scattering the morning mists, irradiates the east with
light, so prefers to pour forth the light of correction)
therefore to break the bonds of the ignorance of such kings
and rulers, to show that the human race is free from their
yoke, I will exhort myself, in company with the most holy
Prophet, taking up his following words, "Let us break their
bonds, and cast away from us their yoke."—De Monarch.
lib. ii. p. 58.
And to prove this pre-eminence of right in the Roman people, and their
heirs, the Emperors of Christendom, he appeals not merely to the
course of Providence, to their high and noble ancestry, to the
blessings of their just and considerate laws, to their unselfish
guardianship of the world—"Romanum imperium de fonte nascitur
pietatis;"—not merely to their noble examples of private virtue,
self-devotion, and public spirit—"those most sacred victims of the
Decian house, who laid down their lives for the public weal, as
Livy—not as they deserved, but as he was able—tells to their
glory; and that unspeakable sacrifice of freedom's sternest guardians,
the Catos;" not merely to the "judgment of God" in that great duel and
wager of battle for empire, in which heaven declared against all other
champions and "co-athletes"—Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and by all
the formalities of judicial combat awarded the great prize to those
who fought, not for love or hatred, but justice—"Quis igitur nunc
adeo obtusæ mentis est, qui non videat, sub jure duelli gloriosum
populum coronam totius orbis esse lucratum?"—not merely to arguments
derived "from the principles of the Christian faith"—but to
miracles. "The Roman empire," he says, "was, in order to its
perfections, aided by the help of miracles; therefore it was willed by
God; and, by consequence, both was, and is, of right." And these
miracles, "proved by the testimony of illustrious authorities," are
the prodigies of Livy—the ancile of Numa, the geese of the Capitol,
the escape of Clelia, the hail-storm which checked Hannibal.[83]
The intellectual phenomenon is a strange one. It would be less strange
if Dante were arguing in the schools, or pleading for a party. But
even Henry of Luxemburg cared little for such a throne as the poet
wanted him to fill, much less Can Grande and the Visconti. The idea,
the theory, and the argument, are of the writer's own solitary
meditation. We may wonder. But there are few things more strange than
the history of argument. How often has a cause or an idea turned out,
in the eyes of posterity, so much better than its arguments. How
often have we seen argument getting as it were into a groove, and
unable to extricate itself, so as to do itself justice. The everyday
cases of private experience, of men defending right conclusions on
wrong or conventional grounds, or in a confused form, entangled with
conclusions of a like yet different nature;—of arguments, theories,
solutions, which once satisfied, satisfying us no longer on a question
about which we hold the same belief—of one party unable to comprehend
the arguments of another—of one section of the same side smiling at
the defence of their common cause by another—are all reproduced on a
grander scale in the history of society. There too, one age cannot
comprehend another; there too it takes time to disengage, subordinate,
eliminate. Truth of this sort is not the elaboration of one keen or
strong mind, but of the secret experience of many; "nihil sine ætate
est, omnia tempus expectant." But a counterpart to the De Monarchia
is not wanting in our own day; theory has not ceased to be mighty. In
warmth and earnestness, in sense of historic grandeur, in its support
of a great cause and a great idea, not less than in the thought of its
motto, εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω, De Maistre's volume Du Pape,
recalls the antagonist De Monarchia; but it recalls it not less in
its bold dealing with facts, and its bold assumption of principles,
though the knowledge and debates of five more busy centuries, and the
experience of modern courts and revolutions, might have guarded the
Piedmontese nobleman from the mistakes of the old Florentine.
But the idea of the De Monarchia is no key to the Commedia. The
direct and primary purpose of the Commedia is surely its obvious
one. It is to stamp a deep impression on the mind, of the issues of
good and ill doing here—of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do
this forcibly, it is done in detail—of course it can only be done in
figure. Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are,
as he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the numberless
spirits who have ever lived here—spirits still living and sentient as
himself: parallel with our life, they too are suffering or are at
rest. Without pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this
awful scene is going on—the judgments of God are being
fulfilled—could we but see it. It exists, it might be seen, at each
instant of time, by a soul whose eyes were opened, which was carried
through it. And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is
the working out, which is peculiar to him. It is not a barren vision.
His subject is, besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates
it; by sight, according to his figures—in reality, by faith. As he is
led on from woe to deeper woe, then through the tempered
chastisements and resignation of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he
is tracing the course of the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning
itself from it—of its purification and preparation for its high lot,
by converse with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by
efforts of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some
single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institution, or
thought. Nor will we say but that beyond this earthly probation, he is
not also striving to grasp and imagine to himself something of that
awful process and training, by which, whether in or out of the flesh,
the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief
Good.
Thus it seems that even in its main design, the poem has more than one
aspect; it is a picture, a figure, partially a history, perhaps an
anticipation. And this is confirmed, by what the poet has himself
distinctly stated, of his ideas of poetic composition. His view is
expressed generally in his philosophical treatise, the Convito; but
it is applied directly to the Commedia, in a letter, which, if in
its present form, of doubtful authenticity, without any question
represents his sentiments, and the substance of which is incorporated
in one of the earliest writings on the poem, Boccaccio's commentary.
The following is his account of the subject of the poem:
For the evidence of what is to be said, it is to be noted,
that this work is not of one single meaning only, but may be
said to have many meanings ("polysensuum"). For the first
meaning is that of the letter—another is that of things
signified by the letter; the first of these is called the
literal sense, the second, the allegorical or moral. This
mode of treating a subject may for clearness' sake be
considered in those verses of the Psalm, "In exitu
Israel." "When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of
Jacob from the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary, and
Israel his dominion." For if we look at the letter only,
there is here signified, the going out of the children of
Israel in the time of Moses—if at the allegory there is
signified our redemption through Christ—if at the moral
sense there is signified to us the conversion of the soul
from the mourning and misery of sin to the state of
grace—if at the anagogic sense,[84] there is signified
the passing out of the holy soul from the bondage of this
corruption to the liberty of everlasting glory. And these
mystical meanings, though called by different names, may all
be called allegorical as distinguished from the literal or
historical sense.... This being considered, it is plain that
there ought to be a twofold subject, concerning which the
two corresponding meanings may proceed. Therefore we must
consider first concerning the subject of this work as it is
to be understood literally, then as it is to be considered
allegorically. The subject then of the whole work, taken
literally only, is the state of souls after death considered
in itself. For about this, and on this, the whole work
turns. But if the work be taken allegorically, its subject
is man, as, by his freedom of choice deserving well or ill,
he is subject to the justice which rewards and punishes.[85]
The passage in the Convito is to the same effect; but his remarks on
the moral and anagogic meaning may be quoted:
The third sense is called moral; that it is which readers
ought to go on noting carefully in writings, for their own
profit and that of their disciples: as in the Gospel it may
be noted, when Christ went up to the mountain to be
transfigured, that of the twelve Apostles, he took with him
only three; in which morally we may understand, that in the
most secret things we ought to have but few companions. The
fourth sort of meaning is called anagogic, that is, above
our sense; and this is when we spiritually interpret a
passage, which even in its literal meaning, by means of the
things signified, expresses the heavenly things of
everlasting glory: as may be seen in that song of the
Prophet, which says, that in the coming out of the people of
Israel from Egypt, Judah was made holy and free; which
although it is manifestly true according to the letter, is
not less true as spiritually understood; that is, that when
the soul comes out of sin, it is made holy and free, in its
own power.[86]
With this passage before us there can be no doubt of the meaning,
however veiled, of those beautiful lines, already referred to, in
which Virgil, after having conducted the poet up the steeps of
Purgatory, where his sins have been one by one cancelled by the
ministering angels, finally takes leave of him, and bids him wait for
Beatrice, on the skirts of the earthly Paradise:
Come la scala tutta sotto noi
Fu corsa e fummo in su 'l grado superno,
In me ficcò Virgilio gli occhi suoi,
E disse: "Il temporal fuoco, e l'eterno
Veduto hai, figlio, e se' venuto in parte
Ov'io per me più oltre non discerno.
Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte:
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;
Fuor se' dell'erte vie, fuor se' dell'arte.
Vedi il sole che 'n fronte ti riluce:
Vedi l'erbetta, i fiori, e gli arboscelli
Che quella terra sol da sè produce.
Mentre che vegnon lieti gli occhi belli
Che lagrimando a te venir mi fenno,
Seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.
Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno:
Libero, dritto, sano è tuo arbitrio,
E fallo fora non fare a suo senno:—
Perch'io te sopra te corono e mitrio."[87]
|
The general meaning of the Commedia is clear enough. But it
certainly does appear to refuse to be fitted into a connected formal
scheme of interpretation. It is not a homogeneous, consistent
allegory, like the Pilgrim's Progress and the Fairy Queen. The
allegory continually breaks off, shifts its ground, gives place to
other elements, or mingles with them—like a stream which suddenly
sinks into the earth, and after passing under plains and mountains,
reappears in a distant point, and in different scenery. We can,
indeed, imagine its strange author commenting on it, and finding or
marking out its prosaic substratum, with the cold-blooded precision
and scholastic distinctions of the Convito. However, he has not done
so. And of the many enigmas which present themselves, either in its
structure or separate parts, the key seems hopelessly lost. The early
commentators are very ingenious, but very unsatisfactory; they see
where we can see, but beyond that they are as full of uncertainty as
ourselves. It is in character with that solitary and haughty spirit,
while touching universal sympathies, appalling and charming all
hearts, to have delighted in his own dark sayings, which had meaning
only to himself. It is true that, whether in irony, or from that
quaint studious care for the appearance of literal truth, which makes
him apologise for the wonders which he relates, and confirm them by an
oath, "on the words of his poem,"[88] he provokes and challenges us;
bids us admire "doctrine hidden under strange verses;"[89] bids us
strain our eyes, for the veil is thin:
Aguzza, qui, lettor, ben l'occhi al vero:
Chè il velo è ora ben tanto sottile,
Certo, che il trapassar dentro è leggiero.—Purg. c. 8.
|
But eyes are still strained in conjecture and doubt.
Yet the most certain and detailed commentary, one which assigned the
exact reason for every image or allegory, and its place and connexion
in a general scheme, would add but little to the charm or to the use
of the poem. It is not so obscure but that every man's experience who
has thought over and felt the mystery of our present life, may supply
the commentary—the more ample, the wider and more various has been
his experience, the deeper and keener his feeling. Details and links
of connexion may be matter of controversy. Whether the three beasts of
the forest mean definitely the vices of the time, or of Florence
specially, or of the poet himself—"the wickedness of his heels,
compassing him round about"—may still exercise critics and
antiquaries; but that they carry with them distinct and special
impressions of evil, and that they are the hindrances of man's
salvation, is not doubtful. And our knowledge of the key of the
allegory, where we possess it, contributes but little to the effect.
We may infer from the Convito[90] that the eyes of Beatrice stand
definitely for the demonstrations, and her smiles for the
persuasions of wisdom; but the poetry of the Paradiso is not about
demonstrations and persuasions, but about looks and smiles; and the
ineffable and holy calm—"serenitatis et æternitatis
afflatus"—which pervades it, comes from the sacred truths, and holy
persons, and that deep spirit of high-raised yet composed devotion,
which it requires no interpreter to show us.
Figure and symbol, then, are doubtless the law of composition in the
Commedia; but this law discloses itself very variously, and with
different degrees of strictness. In its primary and most general form,
it is palpable, consistent, pervading. There can be no doubt that the
poem is meant to be understood figuratively—no doubt of what in
general it is meant to shadow forth—no doubt as to the general
meaning of its parts, their connexion with each other. But in its
secondary and subordinate applications, the law works—to our eye at
least—irregularly, unequally, and fitfully. There can be no question
that Virgil, the poet's guide, represents the purely human element in
the training of the soul and of society, as Beatrice does the divine.
But neither represent the whole; he does not sum up all appliances of
wisdom in Virgil, nor all teachings and influences of grace in
Beatrice; these have their separate figures. And both represent
successively several distinct forms of their general antitypes. They
have various degrees of abstractness, and narrow down, according to
that order of things to which they refer and correspond, into the
special and the personal. In the general economy of the poem, Virgil
stands for human wisdom in its widest sense; but he also stands for it
in its various shapes, in the different parts. He is the type of human
philosophy and science.[91] He is, again, more definitely, that spirit
of imagination and poetry, which opens men's eyes to the glory of the
visible, and the truth of the invisible; and to Italians, he is a
definite embodiment of it, their own great poet, "vates, poeta
noster."[92] In the Christian order, he is human wisdom, dimly
mindful of its heavenly origin—presaging dimly its return to
God—sheltering in heathen times that "vague and unconnected family
of religious truths, originally from God, but sojourning without the
sanction of miracle or visible home, as pilgrims up and down the
world."[93] In the political order, he is the guide of law-givers,
wisdom fashioning the impulses and instincts of men into the harmony
of society, contriving stability and peace, guarding justice; fit part
for the poet to fill, who had sung the origin of Rome, and the justice
and peace of Augustus. In the order of individual life, and the
progress of the individual soul, he is the human conscience witnessing
to duty, its discipline and its hopes, and with yet more certain and
fearful presage, to its vindication; the human conscience seeing and
acknowledging the law, but unable to confer power to fulfil
it—wakened by grace from among the dead, leading the living man up to
it, and waiting for its light and strength. But he is more than a
figure. To the poet himself, who blends with his high argument his
whole life, Virgil had been the utmost that mind can be to
mind—teacher, quickener and revealer of power, source of thought,
exemplar and model, never disappointing, never attained to, observed
with "long study and great love:"
Tu duca, tu signor, e tu maestro.—Inf. 2.
And towards this great master, the poet's whole soul is poured forth
in reverence and affection. To Dante he is no figure, but a
person—with feelings and weaknesses—overcome by the vexation,
kindling into the wrath, carried away by the tenderness, of the
moment. He reads his scholar's heart, takes him by the hand in danger,
carries him in his arms and in his bosom, "like a son more than a
companion," rebukes his unworthy curiosity, kisses him when he shows a
noble spirit, asks pardon for his own mistakes. Never were the kind,
yet severe ways of a master, or the disciple's diffidence and
open-heartedness, drawn with greater force, or less effort; and he
seems to have been reflecting on his own affection to Virgil, when he
makes Statius forget that they were both but shades:
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell'amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento la nostra vanitate
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.—Purg. 21.
|
And so with the poet's second guide. The great idea which Beatrice
figures, though always present, is seldom rendered artificially
prominent, and is often entirely hidden beneath the rush of real
recollections, and the creations of dramatic power. Abstractions
venture and trust themselves among realities, and for the time are
forgotten. A name, a real person, a historic passage, a lament or
denunciation, a tragedy of actual life, a legend of classic times, the
fortunes of friends—the story of Francesca or Ugolino, the fate of
Buonconte's corpse, the apology of Pier delle Vigne, the epitaph of
Madonna Pia, Ulysses' western voyage, the march of Roman
history—appear and absorb for themselves all interest: or else it is
a philosophical speculation, or a theory of morality, or a case of
conscience—not indeed alien from the main subject, yet independent of
the allegory, and not translateable into any new meaning—standing on
their own ground, worked out each according to its own law; but they
do not disturb the main course of the poet's thought, who grasps and
paints each detail of human life in its own peculiarity, while he sees
in each a significance and interest beyond itself. He does not stop in
each case to tell us so, but he makes it felt. The tale ends, the
individual disappears, and the great allegory resumes its course. It
is like one of those great musical compositions which alone seem
capable of adequately expressing, in a limited time, a course of
unfolding and change, in an idea, a career, a life, a society—where
one great thought predominates, recurs, gives colour and meaning, and
forms the unity of the whole, yet passes through many shades and
transitions; is at one time definite, at another suggestive and
mysterious; incorporating and giving free place and play to airs and
melodies even of an alien cast; striking off abruptly from its
expected road, but without ever losing itself, without breaking its
true continuity, or failing of its completeness.
This then seems to us the end and purpose of the Commedia;—to
produce on the mind a sense of the judgments of God, analogous to that
produced by Scripture itself. They are presented to us in the Bible in
shapes which address themselves primarily to the heart and conscience,
and seek not carefully to explain themselves. They are likened to the
"great deep," to the "strong mountains"—vast and awful, but abrupt
and incomplete, as the huge, broken, rugged piles and chains of
mountains. And we see them through cloud and mist, in shapes only
approximating to the true ones. Still they impress us deeply and
truly, often the more deeply because unconsciously. A character, an
event, a word, isolated and unexplained, stamps its meaning
ineffaceably, though ever a matter of question and wonder; it may be
dark to the intellect, yet the conscience understands it, often but
too well. In such suggestive ways is the Divine government for the
most part put before us in the Bible—ways which do not satisfy the
understanding, but which fill us with a sense of reality. And it seems
to have been by meditating on them, which he certainly did, much and
thoughtfully—and on the infinite variety of similar ways in which
the strongest impressions are conveyed to us in ordinary life, by
means short of clear and distinct explanation—by looks, by images, by
sounds, by motions, by remote allusion and broken words, that Dante
was led to choose so new and remarkable a mode of conveying to his
countrymen his thoughts and feelings and presentiments about the
mystery of God's counsel. The Bible teaches us by means of real
history, traced so far as is necessary along its real course. The poet
expresses his view of the world also in real history, but carried on
into figure.
The poetry with which the Christian Church had been instinct from the
beginning, converges and is gathered up in the Commedia. The faith
had early shown its poetical aspect. It is superfluous to dwell on
this, for it is the charge against ancient teaching that it was too
large and imaginative. It soon began to try rude essays in sculpture
and mosaic: expressed its feeling of nature in verse and prose, rudely
also, but often with originality and force; and opened a new vein of
poetry in the thoughts, hopes, and aspirations of regenerate man.
Modern poetry must go back, for many of its deepest and most powerful
sources, to the writings of the Fathers, and their followers of the
School. The Church further had a poetry of its own, besides the poetry
of literature; it had the poetry of devotion—the Psalter chanted
daily, in a new language and a new meaning; and that wonderful body of
hymns, to which age after age had contributed its offering, from the
Ambrosian hymns to the Veni, Sancte Spiritus of a king of France,
the Pange lingua of Thomas Aquinas, the Dies iræ, and Stabat
Mater, of the two Franciscan brethren, Thomas of Celano, and
Jacopone.[94] The elements and fragments of poetry were everywhere in
the Church—in her ideas of life, in her rules and institutions for
passing through it, in her preparation for death, in her offices,
ceremonial, celebrations, usages, her consecration of domestic,
literary, commercial, civic, military, political life, the meanings
and ends she had given them, the religious seriousness with which the
forms of each were dignified—in her doctrine, and her dogmatic
system—her dependence on the unseen world—her Bible. From each and
all of these, and from that public feeling, which, if it expressed
itself but abruptly and incoherently, was quite alive to the poetry
which surrounded it, the poet received due impressions of greatness
and beauty, of joy and dread. Then the poetry of Christian religion
and Christian temper, hitherto dispersed, or manifested in act only,
found its full and distinct utterance, not unworthy to rank in
grandeur, in music, in sustained strength, with the last noble voices
from expiring Heathenism.
But a long interval had passed since then. The Commedia first
disclosed to Christian and modern Europe that it was to have a
literature of its own, great and admirable, though in its own language
and embodying its own ideas. "It was as if, at some of the ancient
games, a stranger had appeared upon the plain, and thrown his quoit
among the marks of former casts, which tradition had ascribed to the
demi-gods."[95] We are so accustomed to the excellent and varied
literature of modern times, so original, so perfect in form and rich
in thought, so expressive of all our sentiments, meeting so completely
our wants, fulfilling our ideas, that we can scarcely imagine the time
when this condition was new—when society was beholden to a foreign
language for the exponents of its highest thoughts and feelings. But
so it was when Dante wrote. The great poets, historians, philosophers
of his day, the last great works of intellect, belonged to old Rome,
and the Latin language. So wonderful and prolonged was the fascination
of Rome. Men still lived under its influence; believed that the Latin
language was the perfect and permanent instrument of thought in its
highest forms, the only expression of refinement and civilisation; and
had not conceived the hope that their own dialects could ever rise to
such heights of dignity and power. Latin, which had enchased and
preserved such precious remains of ancient wisdom, was now shackling
the living mind in its efforts. Men imagined that they were still
using it naturally on all high themes and solemn business; but though
they used it with facility, it was no longer natural; it had lost the
elasticity of life, and had become in their hands a stiffened and
distorted, though still powerful, instrument. The very use of the word
latino in the writers of this period, to express what is clear and
philosophical in language,[96] while it shows their deep reverence for
it, shows how Latin civilisation was no longer their own, how it had
insensibly become an external and foreign element. But they found it
very hard to resign their claim to a share in its glories; with
nothing of their own to match against it, they still delighted to
speak of it as "our language," or its writers as "our poets," "our
historians."[97]
The spell was indeed beginning to break. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's
strange, stern, speculative friend, who is one of the fathers of the
Italian language, is characterised in the Commedia[98] by his
scornful dislike of Latin, even in the mouth of Virgil. Yet Dante
himself, the great assertor, by argument and example, of the powers of
the Vulgar tongue, once dared not to think that the Vulgar tongue
could be other to the Latin, than as a subject to his sovereign. He
was bolder when he wrote De Vulgari Eloquio: but in the earlier
Convito, while pleading earnestly for the beauty of the Italian, he
yields with reverence the first place to the Latin—for nobleness,
because the Latin is permanent, and the Vulgar subject to fluctuation
and corruption; for power, because the Latin can express conceptions
to which the Vulgar is unequal; for beauty, because the structure of
the Latin is a masterly arrangement of scientific art, and the beauty
of the Vulgar depends on mere use.[99] The very title of his poem, the
Commedia, contains in it a homage to the lofty claims of the Latin.
It is called a Comedy, and not Tragedy, he says, after a marvellous
account of the essence and etymology of the two, first, because it
begins sadly, and ends joyfully; and next, because of its language,
that humble speech of ordinary life, "in which even women
converse."[100]
He honoured the Latin, but his love was for the Italian. He was its
champion, and indignant defender against the depreciation of ignorance
and fashion. Confident of its power and jealous of its beauty, he
pours forth his fierce scorn on the blind stupidity, the affectation,
the vain glory, the envy, and above all, the cowardice of Italians who
held lightly their mother tongue. "Many," he says, after enumerating
the other offenders, "from this pusillanimity and cowardice disparage
their own language, and exalt that of others; and of this sort are
those hateful dastards of Italy—abbominevoli cattivi d'Italia—who
think vilely of that precious language; which, if it is vile in
anything, is vile only so far as it sounds in the prostituted mouth of
these adulterers."[101] He noted and compared its various dialects; he
asserted its capabilities not only in verse, but in expressive,
flexible, and majestic prose. And to the deliberate admiration of the
critic and the man, were added the homely but dear associations, which
no language can share with that of early days. Italian had been the
language of his parents—"Questo mio Volgare fu il congiugnitore
delli miei generanti, che con esso parlavano"—and further, it was
this modern language, "questo mio Volgare," which opened to him the
way of knowledge, which had introduced him to Latin, and the sciences
which it contained. It was his benefactor and guide—he personifies
it—and his boyish friendship had grown stronger and more intimate by
mutual good offices. "There has also been between us the goodwill of
intercourse; for from the beginning of my life I have had with it
kindness and conversation, and have used it, deliberating,
interpreting, and questioning; so that, if friendship grows with use,
it is evident how it must have grown in me."[102]
From this language he exacted a hard trial;—a work which should rank
with the ancient works. None such had appeared; none had even advanced
such a pretension. Not that it was a time dead to literature or
literary ambition. Poets and historians had written, and were writing
in Italian. The same year of jubilee which fixed itself so deeply in
Dante's mind, and became the epoch of his vision—the same scene of
Roman greatness in its decay, which afterwards suggested to Gibbon the
Decline and Fall, prompted, in the father of Italian history, the
desire to follow in the steps of Sallust and Livy, and prepare the way
for Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Davila, and Fra Paolo.[103] Poetry
had been cultivated in the Roman languages of the West—in Aquitaine
and Provence, especially—for more than two centuries; and lately,
with spirit and success, in Italian. Names had become popular,
reputations had risen and waned, verses circulated and were
criticised, and even descended from the high and refined circles to
the workshop. A story is told of Dante's indignation, when he heard
the canzoni which had charmed the Florentine ladies mangled by the
rude enthusiasm of a blacksmith at his forge.[104] Literature was a
growing fashion; but it was humble in its aspirations and efforts. Men
wrote like children, surprised and pleased with their success; yet
allowing themselves in mere amusement, because conscious of weakness
which they could not cure.
Dante, by the Divina Commedia, was the restorer of seriousness in
literature. He was so, by the magnitude and pretensions of his work,
and by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see
powers fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
the Commedia checked it. The Provençal and Italian poetry was, with
the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose it was trifling;
in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless
it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement
purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion, and moral
insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick
II., for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However
strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no
one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy,
without seeing that the idea of infidelity—not heresy, but
infidelity—was quite a familiar one; and that side by side with the
theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who
influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to
whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion
almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in
Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great
doctors might have kept in safety the Latin Schools, but not the free
and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people,
if the solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia had not seized on all
minds. It would have been an evil thing for Italian, perhaps for
European literature, if the siren tales of the Decameron had been
the first to occupy the ear with the charms of a new language.
Dante has had hard measure, and from some who are most beholden to
him. No one in his day served the Church more highly, than he whose
faith and genius secured on her side the first great burst of
imagination and feeling, the first perfect accents of modern speech.
The first-fruits of the new literature were consecrated, and offered
up. There was no necessity, or even probability in Italy in the
fourteenth century that it should be so, as there might perhaps have
been earlier. It was the poet's free act—free in one, for whom nature
and heathen learning had strong temptations—that religion was the
lesson and influence of the great popular work of the time. That
which he held up before men's awakened and captivated minds, was the
verity of God's moral government. To rouse them to a sense of the
mystery of their state; to startle their commonplace notions of sin
into an imagination of its variety, its magnitude, and its infinite
shapes and degrees; to open their eyes to the beauty of the Christian
temper, both as suffering and as consummated; to teach them at once
the faithfulness and awful freeness of God's grace; to help the dull
and lagging soul to conceive the possibility, in its own case, of
rising step by step in joy without an end—of a felicity not
unimaginable by man, though of another order from the highest
perfection of earth;—this is the poet's end. Nor was it only vague
religious feelings which he wished to excite. He brought within the
circle of common thought, and translated into the language of the
multitude, what the Schools had done to throw light on the deep
questions of human existence, which all are fain to muse upon, though
none can solve. He who had opened so much of men's hearts to
themselves, opened to them also that secret sympathy which exists
between them and the great mysteries of the Christian doctrine.[105]
He did the work, in his day, of a great preacher. Yet he has been
both claimed and condemned, as a disturber of the Church's faith.
He certainly did not spare the Church's rulers. He thought they were
betraying the most sacred of all trusts; and if history is at all to
be relied on, he had some grounds for thinking so. But it is confusing
the feelings of the middle ages with our own, to convert every fierce
attack on the Popes into an anticipation of Luther. Strong language of
this sort was far too commonplace to be so significant. No age is
blind to practical abuses, or silent on them; and when the middle ages
complained, they did so with a full-voiced and clamorous rhetoric,
which greedily seized on every topic of vilification within its reach.
It was far less singular, and far less bold, to criticise
ecclesiastical authorities, than is often supposed; but it by no means
implied unsettled faith, or a revolutionary design. In Dante's case,
if words have any meaning—not words of deliberate qualification, but
his unpremeditated and incidental expressions—his faith in the Divine
mission and spiritual powers of the Popes was as strong as his
abhorrence of their degeneracy, and desire to see it corrected by a
power which they would respect—that of the temporal sword. It would
be to mistake altogether his character, to imagine of him, either as a
fault or as an excellence, that he was a doubter. It might as well be
supposed of Aquinas.
No one ever acknowledged with greater seriousness, as a fact in his
position in the world, the agreement in faith among those with whom he
was born. No one ever inclined with more simplicity and reverence
before that long communion and consent in feeling and purpose, the
"publicus sensus" of the Christian Church. He did feel difficulties;
but the excitement of lingering on them was not among his enjoyments.
That was the lot of the heathen; Virgil, made wise by death, counsels
him not to desire it:
"Matto è chi spera, che nostra ragione
Possa trascorrer la 'nfinita via
Che tiene una sustanzia in tre Persone.
State contenti, umana gente, al quia;
Chè se potuto aveste veder tutto,
Mestier non era partorir Maria:
E disiar vedeste senza frutto
Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
Ch'eternamente è dato lor per lutto;
I' dico d'Aristotile e di Plato,
E di molti altri:"—e qui chinò la fronte,
E più non disse, e rimase turbato.—Purg. c. 3.[106]
|
The Christian poet felt that it was greater to believe and to act. In
the darkness of the world one bright light appeared, and he followed
it. Providence had assigned him his portion of truth, his portion of
daily bread; if to us it appears blended with human elements, it is
perfectly clear that he was in no position to sift them. To choose was
no trial of his. To examine and seek, where it was impossible to find,
would have been folly. The authority from which he started had not yet
been seriously questioned; there were no palpable signs of
doubtfulness on the system which was to him the representative of
God's will; and he sought for none. It came to him claiming his
allegiance by custom, by universality, by its completeness as a whole,
and satisfying his intellect and his sympathies in detail. And he gave
his allegiance—reasonably, because there was nothing to hope for in
doubting—wisely, because he gave it loyally and from his heart.
And he had his reward—the reward of him who throws himself with
frankness and earnestness into a system; who is not afraid or
suspicious of it; who is not unfaithful to it. He gained not merely
power—he gained that freedom and largeness of mind which the
suspicious or the unfaithful miss. His loyalty to the Church was no
cramping or blinding service; it left to its full play that fresh and
original mind, left it to range at will in all history and all nature
for the traces of Eternal wisdom, left it to please itself with all
beauty, and pay its homage to all excellence. For upon all wisdom,
beauty, and excellence, the Church had taught him to see, in various
and duly distinguished degrees, the seal of the one Creator. She
imparts to the poem, to its form and progressive development, her own
solemnity, her awe, her calm, her serenity and joy; it follows her
sacred seasons and hours; repeats her appointed words of benediction
and praise; moulds itself on her belief, her expectations, and
forecastings.[107] Her intimations, more or less distinct, dogma or
tradition or vague hint, guide the poet's imagination through the land
where all eyes are open. The journey begins under the Easter moon of
the year of jubilee, on the evening of Good Friday; the days of her
mourning he spends in the regions of woe, where none dares to
pronounce the name of the Redeemer, and he issues forth to "behold
again the stars," to learn how to die to sin and rise to
righteousness, very early in the morning, as it begins to dawn, on the
day of the Resurrection. The whole arrangement of the Purgatorio is
drawn from Church usages. It is a picture of men suffering in calm and
holy hope the sharp discipline of repentance, amid the prayers, the
melodies, the consoling images and thoughts, the orderly ritual, the
hours of devotion, the sacraments of the Church militant. When he
ascends in his hardiest flight, and imagines the joys of the perfect
and the vision of God, his abundant fancy confines itself strictly to
the limits sanctioned by her famous teachers—ventures into no new
sphere, hazards no anticipations in which they have not preceded it,
and is content with adding to the poetry which it elicits from their
ideas, a beauty which it is able to conceive apart altogether from
bodily form—the beauty, infinite in its variety, of the expression of
the human eye and smile—the beauty of light, of sound, of motion. And
when his song mounts to its last strain of triumph, and the poet's
thought, imagination, and feeling of beauty, tasked to the utmost, nor
failing under the weight of glory which they have to express, breathe
themselves forth in words, higher than which no poetry has ever risen,
and represent, in images transcending sense, and baffling it, yet
missing not one of those deep and transporting sympathies which they
were to touch, the sight, eye to eye, of the Creator by the
creature—he beholds the gathering together, in the presence of God,
of "all that from our earth has to the skies returned," and of the
countless orders of their thrones mirrored in His light—
Mira
Quanto è 'l convento delle bianche stole—
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under a figure already taken into the ceremonial of the Church—the
mystic Rose, whose expanding leaves image forth the joy of the
heavenly Jerusalem, both triumphant and militant.[108]
But this universal reference to the religious ideas of the Church is
so natural, so unaffected, that it leaves him at full liberty in other
orders of thought. He can afford not to be conventional—he can afford
to be comprehensive and genuine. It has been remarked how, in a poem
where there would seem to be a fitting place for them, the
ecclesiastical legends of the middle ages are almost entirely absent.
The sainted spirits of the Paradiso are not exclusively or chiefly
the Saints of popular devotion. After the Saints of the Bible, the
holy women, the three great Apostles, the Virgin mother, they are
either names personally dear to the poet himself, friends whom he had
loved, and teachers to whom he owed wisdom—or great men of masculine
energy in thought or action, in their various lines "compensations and
antagonists of the world's evils"—Justinian and Constantine, and
Charlemagne—the founders of the Orders, Augustine, Benedict, and
Bernard, Francis and Dominic—the great doctors of the Schools, Thomas
Aquinas, and Bonaventura, whom the Church had not yet canonized. And
with them are joined—and that with a full consciousness of the line
which theology draws between the dispensations of nature and
grace—some rare types of virtue among the heathen. Cato is admitted
to the outskirts of Purgatory; Trajan, and the righteous king of
Virgil's poem, to the heaven of the just.[109]
Without confusion or disturbance to the religious character of his
train of thought, he is able freely to subordinate to it the lessons
and the great recollections of the Gentile times. He contemplates them
with the veil drawn off from them; as now known to form but one whole
with the history of the Bible and the Church, in the design of
Providence. He presents them in their own colours, as drawn by their
own writers—he only adds what Christianity seems to show to be their
event. Under the conviction, that the light of the Heathen was a real
guide from above, calling for vengeance in proportion to
unfaithfulness, or outrage done to it—"He that nurtureth the heathen,
it is He that teacheth man knowledge—shall not He punish?"—the great
criminals of profane history are mingled with sinners against God's
revealed will—and that, with equal dramatic power, with equal feeling
of the greatness of their loss. The story of the voyage of Ulysses is
told with as much vivid power and pathetic interest as the tales of
the day.[110] He honours unfeignedly the old heathen's brave disdain
of ease; that spirit, even to old age, eager, fresh, adventurous, and
inquisitive. His faith allowed him to admire all that was beautiful
and excellent among the heathen, without forgetting that it fell short
of what the new gift of the Gospel can alone impart. He saw in it
proof that God had never left His will and law without their witness
among men. Virtue was virtue still, though imperfect, and
unconsecrated—generosity, largeness of soul, truth, condescension,
justice, were never unworthy of the reverence of Christians. Hence he
uses without fear or scruple the classic element. The examples which
recall to the minds of the penitents, by sounds and sights, in the
different terraces of Purgatory, their sin and the grace they have to
attain to, come indiscriminately from poetry and Scripture. The
sculptured pavement, to which the proud are obliged ever to bow down
their eyes, shows at once the humility of S. Mary and of the Psalmist,
and the condescension of Trajan; and elsewhere the pride of Nimrod and
Sennacherib, of Niobe, and Cyrus. The envious hear the passing voices
of courtesy from saints and heroes, and the bursting cry, like
crashing thunder, of repentant jealousy from Cain and Aglaurus; the
avaricious, to keep up the memory of their fault, celebrate by day the
poverty of Fabricius and the liberality of S. Nicolas, and execrate by
night the greediness of Pygmalion and Midas, of Achan, Heliodorus, and
Crassus.
Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind, was worthy to open the
grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a
region remote from popular thought—too awful for it, too abstruse. He
had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown
himself with even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so
bold and so undoubting—her spirit of certainty, and her deep
contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had
taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the
classical writers. Yet with his mind full of the deep and intricate
questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always
owning allegiance to Virgil, Ovid, and Statius—keen and subtle as a
Schoolman—as much an idolator of old heathen art and grandeur as the
men of the Renaissance—his eye is as open to the delicacies of
character, to the variety of external nature, to the wonders of the
physical world—his interest in them as diversified and fresh, his
impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and
true and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by
conventional words, his language as elastic, and as completely under
his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and
original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such
freedom, and such keen discriminative sense of what is real, in
feeling and image;—as if he had never felt the attractions of a
crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace
of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come
when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this
is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a kind of devotion,
and showing not seldom that he had caught their spirit, he never
attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material is all his
own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from
every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and
he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry
by being expressed with the most literal reality.
But let no reader of fastidious taste disturb his temper by the study
of Dante. Dante certainly opened that path of freedom and poetic
conquest, in which the greatest efforts of modern poetry have followed
him—opened it with a magnificence and power which have never been
surpassed. But the greatest are but pioneers; they must be content to
leave to a posterity, which knows more, if it cannot do as much, a
keen and even growing sense of their defects. The Commedia is open
to all the attacks that can be made on grotesqueness and extravagance.
This is partly owing, doubtless, to the time, in itself quaint,
quainter to us, by being remote and ill-understood; but even then,
weaker and less daring writers than Dante do not equally offend or
astonish us. So that an image or an expression will render forcibly a
thought, there is no strangeness which checks him. Barbarous words are
introduced, to express the cries of the demon or the confusion of
Babel—even to represent the incomprehensible song of the
blessed;[111] inarticulate syllables, to convey the impression of some
natural sound—the cry of sorrowful surprise:
Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in hui;—Purg. 16.
or the noise of the cracking ice:
Se Tabernicch
Vi fosse sù caduto, o Pietra-pana
Non avria pur da l'orlo fatto cricch;—Inf. 32.
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even separate letters—to express an image, to spell a name, or as
used in some popular proverb.[112] He employs without scruple, and
often with marvellous force of description, any recollection that
occurs to him, however homely, of everyday life;—the old tailor
threading his needle with trouble (Inf. 15);—the cook's assistant
watching over the boiling broth (Inf. 21);—the hurried or impatient
horse-groom using his curry-comb (Inf. 29);—or the common sights
of the street or the chamber—the wet wood sputtering on the hearth:
Come d'un stizzo verde che arso sia
Dall'un de' capi, che dall'altro geme
E cigola per vento che va via;—Inf. 13.[113]
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the paper changing colour when about to catch fire:
Come procede innanzi dall'ardore
Per lo papiro suso un color bruno
Che non è nero ancora, e 'l bianco muore:—Inf. 25.[114]
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the steaming of the hand when bathed, in winter:
Fuman come man bagnata il verno:—
or the ways and appearances of animals—ants meeting on their path:
Lì veggio d'ogni parte farsi presta
Ciascun'ombra, e baciarsi una con una
Senza restar, contente a breve festa:
Così per entro loro schiera bruna
S'ammusa l'una con l'altra formica,
Forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna;—Purg. 26.[115]
|
the snail drawing in its horns (Inf. 25);—the hog shut out of its
sty, and trying to gore with its tusks (Inf. 30);—the dogs' misery
in summer (Inf. 17);—the frogs jumping on to the bank before the
water-snake (Inf. 9);—or showing their heads above water:
Come al orlo dell'acqua d'un fosso
Stan gli ranocchi pur col muso fuori,
Sì che celano i piedi, e l'altro grosso.—Inf. 22.[116]
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It must be said, that most of these images, though by no means all,
occur in the Inferno; and that the poet means to paint sin not
merely in the greatness of its ruin and misery, but in characters
which all understand, of strangeness, of vileness, of despicableness,
blended with diversified and monstrous horror. Even he seems to
despair of his power at times:
S'io avessi le rime e aspre, e chiocce,
Come si converrebbe al tristo buco,
Sovra 'l qual pontan tutte l'altre rocce;
Io premerrei di mio concetto il suco
Più pienamente; ma perch'io non l'abbo,
Non senza tema a dicer mi conduco:
Che non è 'mpresa da pigliare a gabbo
Descriver fondo a tutto l'universo,
Nè da lingua, che chiami mamma, o babbo.—Inf. 32.[117]
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Feeling the difference between sins, in their elements and, as far as
we see them, their baseness, he treats them variously. His ridicule is
apportioned with a purpose. He passes on from the doom of the sins of
incontinence—the storm, the frost and hail, the crushing
weights—from the flaming minarets of the city of Dis, of the Furies
and Proserpine, "Donna dell'eterno pianto," where the unbelievers lie,
each in his burning tomb—from the river of boiling blood—the wood
with the Harpies—the waste of barren sand with fiery snow, where the
violent are punished—to the Malebolge, the manifold circles of
Falsehood. And here scorn and ridicule in various degrees, according
to the vileness of the fraud, begin to predominate, till they
culminate in that grim comedy, with its dramatis personæ and battle
of devils, Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where the
peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by the demons from the
boiling pitch, but even there overreach and cheat their tormentors,
and make them turn their fangs on each other. The diversified forms of
falsehood seem to tempt the poet's imagination to cope with its
changefulness and inventions, as well as its audacity. The
transformations of the wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over
language is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in those cantos,
which describe the punishments of theft—men passing gradually into
serpents, and serpents into men:
Due e nessun l'imagine perversa
Parea.—Inf. 25.
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And when the traitor, who murdered his own kinsman, was still alive,
and seemed safe from the infamy which it was the poet's rule to bestow
only on the dead, Dante found a way to inflict his vengeance without
an anachronism:—Branca D'Oria's body, though on earth, is only
animated by a fiend, and his spirit has long since fled to the icy
prison.[118]
These are strange experiments in poetry; their strangeness is
exaggerated as detached passages; but they are strange enough when
they meet us in their place in the context, as parts of a scene, where
the mind is strung and overawed by the sustained power, with which
dreariness, horror, hideous absence of every form of good, is kept
before the imagination and feelings, in the fearful picture of human
sin. But they belong to the poet's system of direct and forcible
representation. What his inward eye sees, what he feels, that he means
us to see and feel as he does; to make us see and feel is his art.
Afterwards we may reflect and meditate; but first we must see—must
see what he saw. Evil and deformity are in the world, as well as good
and beauty; the eye cannot escape them, they are about our path, in
our heart and memory. He has faced them without shrinking or
dissembling, and extorted from them a voice of warning. In all poetry
that is written for mere delight, in all poetry which regards but a
part or an aspect of nature, they have no place—they disturb and mar;
but he had conceived a poetry of the whole, which would be weak or
false without them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in
nature—subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque is allowed to
intrude itself—if the horrible and the foul, undisguised and
unsoftened, make us shudder and shrink, they are kept in strong check
and in due subjection by other poetical influences; and the same power
which exhibits them in their naked strength, renders its full grace
and glory to beauty; its full force and delicacy to the most
evanescent feeling.
Dante's eye was free and open to external nature in a degree new among
poets; certainly in a far greater degree than among the Latins, even
including Lucretius, whom he probably had never read. We have already
spoken of his minute notice of the appearance of living creatures; but
his eye was caught by the beautiful as well as by the grotesque.
Take the following beautiful picture of the bird looking out for dawn:
Come l'augello intra l'amate fronde,
Posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati,
La notte, che le cose ci nasconde,
Che per veder gli aspetti desiati,
E per trovar lo cibo, onde li pasca,
In che i gravi labor gli sono aggrati,
Previene 'l tempo in su l'aperta frasca,
E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
Fiso guardando, pur che l'alba nasca.—Parad. 23.[119]
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Nothing indeed can be more true and original than his images of birds;
they are varied and very numerous. We have the water-birds rising in
clamorous and changing flocks:
Come augelli surti di riviera
Quasi congratulando a lor pasture,
Fanno di sè or tonda or lunga schiera;—Parad. 18.[120]
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the rooks, beginning to move about at daybreak:
E come per lo natural costume,
Le pole insieme, al cominciar del giorno
Si muovono a scaldar le fredde piume,
Poi altre vanno via senza ritorno,
Altre rivolgon sè onde son mosse
Ed altre roteando fan soggiorno;—Parad. 21.[121]
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the morning sounds of the swallow:
Nell'ora che comincia i tristi lai
La rondinella presso alla mattina,
Forse a memoria de' suoi primi guai;—Purg. 9.[122]
|
the joy and delight of the nightingale's song (Purg. 17); the lark,
silent at last, filled with its own sweetness:
Qual lodoletta, che 'n aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell'ultima dolcezza che la sazia;—Parad. 20.[123]
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the flight of the starlings and storks (Inf. 5, Purg. 24); the
mournful cry and long line of the cranes (Inf. 5, Purg. 26); the
young birds trying to escape from the nest (Purg. 25); the eagle
hanging in the sky:
Con l'ale aperte, e a calare intesa;—
the dove, standing close to its mate, or wheeling round it:
Sì come quando 'l colombo si pone
Presso al compagno, l'uno e l'altro pande
Girando e mormorando l'affezione;—Parad. 25.[124]
|
or the flock of pigeons, feeding:
Adunati alla pastura,
Queti, senza mostrar l'usato orgoglio.—Purg. 2.
|
Hawking supplies its images: the falcon coming for its food:
Il falcon che prima a piè si mira,
Indi si volge al grido, e si protende,
Per lo disio del pasto, che là il tira;—Purg. 19.[125]
|
or just unhooded, pluming itself for its flight:
Quasi falcon, ch'esce del cappello,
Muove la testa, e con l'ale s'applaude,
Voglia mostrando, e facendosi bello;—Parad. 19.[126]
|
or returning without success, sullen and loath:
Come 'l falcon ch'è stato assai su l'ali,
Che senza veder logoro, o uccello,
Fa dire al falconiere: Oimè tu cali!
Discende lasso onde si muove snello
Per cento ruote, e da lungi si pone
Dal suo maestro, disdegnoso e fello.—Inf. 17.[127]
|
It is curious to observe him taking Virgil's similes, and altering
them. When Virgil describes the throng of souls, he compares them to
falling leaves, or gathering birds in autumn:
Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto
Quam multæ glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus
Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis—
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Dante uses the same images, but without copying:
Come d'Autunno si levan le foglie,
L'una appresso dell'altra, infin che 'l ramo
Rende alla terra tutte le sue spoglie;
Similemente il mal seme d'Adamo:
Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una
Per cenni, com'augel per suo richiamo.
Così sen vanno su per l'onda bruna,
Ed avanti che sien di là discese,
Anche di qua nuova schiera s'aduna.—Inf. 3.[128]
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Again—compared with one of Virgil's most highly-finished and perfect
pictures, the flight of the pigeon, disturbed at first, and then
becoming swift and smooth:
Qualis spelunca subito commota columba,
Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi,
Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis
Dat tecto ingentem, mox aere lapsa quieto
Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas—
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the Italian's simplicity and strength may balance the "ornata parola"
of Virgil:
Quali colombe dal disio chiamate,
Con l'ali aperte e ferme al dolce nido
Volan per l'aer dal voler portate.—Inf. 5.[129]
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Take, again, the times of the day, with what is characteristic of
them—appearances, lights, feelings—seldom dwelt on at length, but
carried at once to the mind, and stamped upon it sometimes by a single
word. The sense of morning, its inspiring and cheering strength,
softens the opening of the Inferno; breathes its refreshing calm, in
the interval of repose after the last horrors of hell, in the first
canto of the Purgatorio; and prepares for the entrance into the
earthly Paradise at its close. In the waning light of evening, and
its chilling sense of loneliness, he prepared himself for his dread
pilgrimage:
Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aer bruno
Toglieva gli animai che sono 'n terra
Dalle fatiche loro; ed io sol uno
M'apparechiava a sostener la guerra
Sì del cammino, e sì della pietate.—Inf. 2.
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Indeed there is scarcely an hour of day or night, which has not left
its own recollection with him;—of which we cannot find some memorial
in his poem. Evening and night have many. Evening, with its softness
and melancholy—its exhaustion and languor, after the work, perhaps
unfulfilled, of day—its regrets and yearnings—its sounds and
doubtful lights—the distant bell, the closing chants of Compline, the
Salve Regina, the Te lucis ante terminum—with its insecurity, and
its sense of protection from above—broods over the poet's first
resting-place on his heavenly road—that still, solemn, dreamy
scene—the Valley of Flowers in the mountain side, where those who
have been negligent about their salvation, but not altogether
faithless and fruitless, the assembled shades of great kings and of
poets, wait, looking upwards, "pale and humble," for the hour when
they may begin in earnest their penance. (Purg. 7 and 8.) The level,
blinding evening beams (Purg. 15); the contrast of gathering
darkness in the valley or on the shore with the lingering lights on
the mountain (Purg. 17); the rapid sinking of the sun, and approach
of night in the south (Purg. 27); the flaming sunset clouds of
August; the sheet-lightning of summer (Purg. 5); have left pictures
in his mind, which an incidental touch reawakens, and a few strong
words are sufficient to express. Other appearances he describes with
more fulness. The stars coming out one by one, baffling at first the
eye:
Ed ecco intorno di chiarezza pari
Nascer un lustro sopra quel che v'era,
A guisa d'orizzonte, che rischiari.
E sì come al salir di prima sera
Comincian per lo Ciel nuove parvenze,
Sì che la cosa pare e non par vera;—Parad. 14.[130]
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or else, bursting out suddenly over the heavens:
Quando colui che tutto il mondo alluma,
De l'emisperio nostro si discende,
E 'l giorno d'ogni parte si consuma;
Lo ciel che sol di lui prima s'accende,
Subitamente si rifà parvente
Per molte luci in che una risplende;—Parad. 20.[131]
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or the effect of shooting-stars:
Quale per li seren tranquilli e puri
Discorre ad ora ad or subito fuoco
Movendo gli occhi che stavan sicuri,
E pare stella che tramuti loco,
Se non che dalla parte onde s'accende
Nulla sen perde, ed esso dura poco;—Parad. 15.[132]
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or, again, that characteristic sight of the Italian summer night—the
fire-flies:
Quante il villan che al poggio si riposa,
Nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara
La faccia sua a noi tien men ascosa,
Come la mosca cede alla zenzara,
Vede lucciole giù per la vallea
Forse colà dove vendemmia ed ara.—Inf. 26.[133]
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Noon, too, does not want its characteristic touches—the
lightning-like glancing of the lizard's rapid motion:
Come il ramarro sotto la gran fersa
Ne' dì canicular cangiando siepe
Folgore par, se la via attraversa;—Inf. 25.[134]
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the motes in the sunbeam at noontide (Par. 14); its clear,
diffused, insupportable brightness, filling all things:
E tutti eran già pieni
Dell'alto dì i giron del sacro monte.—Purg. 19.
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and veiling the sun in his own light:
Io veggio ben sì come tu t'annidi
Nel proprio lume.
****
Sì come 'l sol che si cela egli stessi
Per troppa luce, quando 'l caldo ha rose
Le temperanze de' vapori spessi.—Parad. 5.
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But the sights and feelings of morning are what he touches on most
frequently; and he does so with the precision of one who had watched
them with often-repeated delight: the scented freshness of the breeze
that stirs before daybreak:
E quale annunziatrice degli albori
Aura di maggio muovesi ed olezza
Tutta impregnata dall'erba e da' fiori;
Tal mi senti' un vento dar per mezza
La fronte;—Purg. 24.[135]
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the chill of early morning (Purg. 19); the dawn stealing on, and the
stars, one by one, fading "infino alla più bella" (Parad. 30); the
brightness of the "trembling morning star"—
Par tremolando mattutina stella;—
the serenity of the dawn, the blue gradually gathering in the east,
spreading over the brightening sky (Parad. 1); then succeeded by the
orange tints—and Mars setting red, through the mist over the sea:
Ed ecco, qual sul presso del mattino
Per li grossi vapor Marte rosseggia
Giù nel ponente, sopra 'l suol marino,
Cotal m'apparve, s'io ancor lo veggia,
Un lume per lo mar venir sì ratto
Che 'l muover suo nessun volar pareggia;—Purg. 2.[136]
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the distant sea-beach quivering in the early light:
L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina
Che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano
Conobbi il tremolar della marina;—Purg. 1.[137]
|
the contrast of east and west at the moment of sunrise, and the sun
appearing, clothed in mist:
Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno
La parte oriental tutta rosata
E l'altro ciel di bel sereno adorno;
E la faccia del sol nascere ombrata
Sì che per temperanza di vapori
L'occhio lo sostenea lunga fiata;—Purg. 30.[138]
|
or breaking through it, and shooting his beams over the sky:
Di tutte parti saettava il giorno
Lo sol ch'avea con le saette conte
Di mezzo 'l ciel cacciato 'l Capricorno.—Purg. 2.[139]
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But light in general is his special and chosen source of poetic
beauty. No poet that we know has shown such singular sensibility to
its varied appearances—has shown that he felt it in itself the cause
of a distinct and peculiar pleasure, delighting the eye apart from
form, as music delights the ear apart from words, and capable, like
music, of definite character, of endless variety, and infinite
meanings. He must have studied and dwelt upon it like music. His mind
is charged with its effects and combinations, and they are rendered
with a force, a brevity, a precision, a heedlessness and
unconsciousness of ornament, an indifference to circumstance and
detail; they flash out with a spontaneous readiness, a suitableness
and felicity, which show the familiarity and grasp given only by daily
observation, daily thought, daily pleasure. Light everywhere—in the
sky and earth and sea—in the star, the flame, the lamp, the
gem—broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted pure
through the glass, or coloured through the edge of the fractured
emerald—dimmed in the mist, the halo, the deep water—streaming
through the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the
lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure
alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl—light contrasted
with shadow—shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow,
like voice and echo—light seen within light, as voice discerned
within voice, "quando una è ferma, e l'altra va e riede"—the
brighter "nestling" itself in the fainter—the purer set off on the
less clear, "come perla in bianca fronte"—light in the human eye
and face, displaying, figuring, and confounded with its
expressions—light blended with joy in the eye:
luce
Come letizia in pupilla viva;
|
and in the smile:
Vincendo me col lume d'un sorriso;
joy lending its expression to light:
Quivi la donna mia vid'io sì lieta—
Che più lucente se ne fè il pianeta.
E se la stella si cambiò, e rise,
Qual mi fec'io;—Parad. 5.
|
light from every source, and in all its shapes, illuminates,
irradiates, gives its glory to the Commedia. The remembrance of our
"serene life" beneath the "fair stars" keeps up continually the gloom
of the Inferno. Light, such as we see it and recognise it, the light
of morning and evening growing and fading, takes off from the
unearthliness of the Purgatorio; peopled, as it is, by the undying,
who, though suffering for sin, can sin no more, it is thus made like
our familiar world, made to touch our sympathies as an image of our
own purification in the flesh. And when he rises beyond the regions of
earthly day, light, simple, unalloyed, unshadowed, eternal, lifts the
creations of his thought above all affinity to time and matter; light
never fails him, as the expression of the gradations of bliss; never
reappears the same, never refuses the new shapes of his invention,
never becomes confused or dim, though it is seldom thrown into
distinct figure, and still more seldom coloured. Only once, that we
remember, is the thought of colour forced on us; when the bright joy
of heaven suffers change and eclipse, and deepens into red at the
sacrilege of men.[140]
Yet his eye is everywhere, not confined to the beauty or character of
the sky and its lights. His range of observation and largeness of
interest prevent that line of imagery, which is his peculiar
instrument and predilection, from becoming, in spite of its brightness
and variety, dreamy and monotonous; prevent it from arming against
itself sympathies which it does not touch. He has watched with equal
attention, and draws with not less power, the occurrences and sights
of Italian country life; the summer whirlwind sweeping over the
plain—"dinanzi polveroso va superbo" (Inf. 9); the rain-storm of
the Apennines (Purg. 5); the peasant's alternations of feeling in
spring:
In quella parte del giovinetto anno
Che 'l sole i crin sotto l'Aquario tempra,
E già le notti al mezzo dì sen vanno;
Quando la brina in su la terra assempra
L'imagine di sua sorella bianca,
Ma poco dura alla sua penna tempra,
Lo villanello a cui la roba manca
Si leva e guarda, e vede la campagna
Biancheggiar tutta; ond'ei si batte l'anca;
Ritorna a casa, e qua e là si lagna
Come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia:
Poi riede e la speranza ringavagna
Veggendo 'l mondo aver cangiata faccia
In poco d'ora, e prende il suo vincastro
E fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia:—Inf. 24.[141]
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the manner in which sheep come out from the fold:
Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso
A una a due a tre, e l'altre stanno,
Timidette atterrando l'occhio e' l muso;
E ciò che fa la prima, e l'altre fanno,
Addossandosi a lei s'ella s'arresta
Semplici e quete, e lo 'mperchè non sanno:
Sì vid'io muover a venir la testa
Di quella mandria fortunata allotta,
Pudica in faccia e nell'andare onesta.
Come color dinanzi vider rotta
La luce....
Ristaro, e trasser sè indietro alquanto,
E tutti gli altri che veniano appresso,
Non sappiendo il perchè, fero altrettanto.—Purg. 3.
|
So with the beautiful picture of the goats upon the mountain, chewing
the cud in the noontide heat and stillness, and the goatherd, resting
on his staff and watching them—a picture which no traveller among the
mountains of Italy or Greece can have missed, or have forgotten:
Quali si fanno ruminando manse
Le capre, state rapide e proterve
Sopra le cime avanti che sien pranse,
Tacite al ombra mentre che 'l sol ferve,
Guardate dal pastor che 'n su la verga
Poggiato s'è, e lor poggiato serve.—Purg. 27.[142]
|
So again, with his recollections of cities: the crowd, running
together to hear news (Purg. 2), or pressing after the winner of the
game (Purg. 6); the blind men at the church doors, or following
their guide through the throng (Purg. 13, 16); the friars walking
along in silence, one behind another:
Taciti, soli, e senza compagnia
N'andavam, l'un dinanzi, e l'altro dopo
Come i frati minor vanno per via.—Inf. 23.
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He turns to account in his poem, the pomp and clamour of the host
taking the field (Inf. 22); the devices of heraldry; the answering
chimes of morning bells over the city;[143] the inventions and
appliances of art, the wheels within wheels of clocks (Par. 24), the
many-coloured carpets of the East (Inf. 17); music and dancing—the
organ and voice in church:
—Voce mista al dolce suono
Che or sì or no s'intendon le parole,—Purg. 9.
|
the lute and voice in the chamber (Par. 20); the dancers preparing
to begin,[144] or waiting to catch a new strain.[145] Or, again, the
images of domestic life, the mother's ways to her child, reserved and
reproving—"che al figlio par superba"—or cheering him with her
voice, or watching him compassionately in the wandering of fever:
Ond'ella, appresso d'un pio sospiro
Gli occhi drizzò ver me, con quel sembiante
Che madre fa sopra figliuol deliro.—Parad. 1.
|
Nor is he less observant of the more delicate phenomena of mind, in
its inward workings, and its connexion with the body. The play of
features, the involuntary gestures and attitudes of the passions, the
power of eye over eye, of hand upon hand, the charm of voice and
expression, of musical sounds even when not understood—feelings,
sensations, and states of mind which have a name, and others, equally
numerous and equally common, which have none—these, often so
fugitive, so shifting, so baffling and intangible, are expressed with
a directness, a simplicity, a sense of truth at once broad and
refined, which seized at once on the congenial mind of his countrymen,
and pointed out to them the road which they have followed in art,
unapproached as yet by any competitors.[146]
And he has anticipated the latest schools of modern poetry, by making
not merely nature, but science tributary to a poetry with whose
general aim and spirit it has little in common—tributary in its
exact forms, even in its technicalities. He speaks of the
Mediterranean Sea, not merely as a historian, or an observer of its
storms or its smiles, but as a geologist;[147] of light, not merely in
its beautiful appearances, but in its natural laws.[148] There is a
charm, an imaginative charm to him, not merely in the sensible
magnificence of the heavens, "in their silence, and light, and
watchfulness," but in the system of Ptolemy and the theories of
astrology; and he delights to interweave the poetry of feeling and of
the outward sense with the grandeur—so far as he knew it—of order,
proportion, measured magnitudes, the relations of abstract forces,
displayed on such a scene as the material universe, as if he wished to
show that imagination in its boldest flight was not afraid of the
company of the clear and subtle intellect.
Indeed the real never daunts him. It is his leading principle of
poetic composition, to draw out of things the poetry which is latent
in them, either essentially, or as they are portions, images, or
reflexes of something greater—not to invest them with a poetical
semblance, by means of words which bring with them poetical
associations, and have received a general poetical stamp. Dante has
few of those indirect charms which flow from the subtle structure and
refined graces of language—none of that exquisitely-fitted and
self-sustained mechanism of choice words of the Greeks—none of that
tempered and majestic amplitude of diction, which clothes, like the
folds of a royal robe, the thoughts of the Latins—none of that
abundant play of fancy and sentiment, soft or grand, in which the
later Italian poets delighted. Words with him are used sparingly,
never in play—never because they carry with them poetical
recollections—never for their own sake; but because they are
instruments which will give the deepest, clearest, sharpest stamp of
that image which the poet's mind, piercing to the very heart of his
subject, or seizing the characteristic feature which to other men's
eyes is confused and lost among others accidental and common, draws
forth in severe and living truth. Words will not always bend
themselves to his demands on them; they make him often uncouth,
abrupt, obscure. But he is too much in earnest to heed uncouthness;
and his power over language is too great to allow uncertainty as to
what he means, to be other than occasional. Nor is he a stranger to
the utmost sweetness and melody of language. But it appears, unsought
for and unlaboured, the spontaneous and inevitable obedience of the
tongue and pen to the impressions of the mind; as grace and beauty, of
themselves, "command and guide the eye" of the painter, who thinks not
of his hand but of them. All is in character with the absorbed and
serious earnestness which pervades the poem; there is no toying, no
ornament, that a man in earnest might not throw into his
words;—whether in single images, or in pictures, like that of the
Meadow of the Heroes (Inf. 4), or the angel appearing in hell to
guide the poet through the burning city (Inf. 9)—or in histories,
like those of Count Ugolino, or the life of S. Francis (Parad.
11)—or in the dramatic scenes like the meeting of the poets Sordello
and Virgil (Purgat. 6), or that one, unequalled in beauty, where
Dante himself, after years of forgetfulness and sin, sees Beatrice in
glory, and hears his name, never but once pronounced during the
vision, from her lips.[149]
But this, or any other array of scenes and images, might be matched
from poets of a far lower order than Dante: and to specimens which
might be brought together of his audacity and extravagance, no
parallel could be found except among the lowest. We cannot, honestly,
plead the barbarism of the time as his excuse. That, doubtless,
contributed largely to them; but they were the faults of the man. In
another age, their form might have been different; yet we cannot
believe so much of time, that it would have tamed Dante. Nor can we
wish it. It might have made him less great: and his greatness can
well bear its own blemishes, and will not less meet its due honour
among men, because they can detect its kindred to themselves.
The greatness of his work is not in its details—to be made or marred
by them. It is the greatness of a comprehensive and vast conception,
sustaining without failure the trial of its long and hazardous
execution, and fulfilling at its close the hope and promise of its
beginning; like the greatness—which we watch in its course with
anxious suspense, and look back upon when it is secured by death, with
deep admiration—of a perfect life. Many a surprise, many a
difficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange reverse and
alternation of feelings, attend the progress of the most patient and
admiring reader of the Commedia; as many as attend on one who
follows the unfolding of a strong character in life. We are often
shocked when we were prepared to admire—repelled, when we came with
sympathy; the accustomed key fails at a critical moment—depths are
revealed which we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound
us. But the check is for a time—the gap and chasm does not dissever.
Haste is even an evidence of life—the brief word, the obscure hint,
the unexplained, the unfinished, or even the unachieved, are the marks
of human feebleness, but are also among those of human truth. The
unity of the whole is unimpaired. The strength which is working it
out, though it may have at times disappointed us, shows no hollowness
or exhaustion. The surprise of disappointment is balanced—there is
the surprise of unimagined excellence. Powers do more than they
promised; and that spontaneous and living energy, without which
neither man nor poet can be trusted, and which showed its strength
even in its failures, shows it more abundantly in the novelties of
success—by touching sympathies which have never been touched before,
by the unconstrained freshness with which it meets the proverbial and
familiar, by the freedom with which it adjusts itself to a new
position or an altered task—by the completeness, unstudied and
instinctive, with which it holds together dissimilar and uncongenial
materials, and forces the most intractable, the most unaccustomed to
submission, to receive the colour of the whole—by its orderly and
unmistakable onward march, and its progress, as in height, so in what
corresponds to height. It was one and the same man, who rose from the
despair, the agony, the vivid and vulgar horrors of the Inferno, to
the sense and imagination of certainty, sinlessness, and joy
ineffable—the same man whose power and whose sympathies failed him
not, whether discriminating and enumerating, as if he had gone through
them all, the various forms of human suffering, from the dull,
gnawing sense of the loss of happiness, to the infinite woes of the
wrecked and ruined spirit, and the coarser pangs of the material
flesh; or dwelling on the changeful lights and shades of earnest
repentance, in its hard, but not unaided or ungladdened struggle, and
on that restoration to liberty and peace, which can change even this
life into paradise, and reverse the doom which made sorrow our
condition, and laughter and joy unnatural and dangerous—the penalty
of that first fault, which
In pianto ed in affanno
Cambiò onesto riso e dolce giuoco:
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or rising finally above mortal experience, to imagine the freedom of
the saints and the peace of eternity. In this consists the greatness
of his power. It is not necessary to read through the Commedia to
see it—open it where we please, we see that he is on his way, and
whither he is going; episode and digression share in the solemnity of
the general order.
And his greatness was more than that of power. That reach and play of
sympathy ministered to a noble wisdom, which used it thoughtfully and
consciously for a purpose to which great poetry had never yet been
applied, except in the mouth of prophets. Dante was a stern man, and
more than stern, among his fellows. But he has left to those who
never saw his face an inheritance the most precious; he has left them
that which, reflecting and interpreting their minds, does so, not to
amuse, not to bewilder, not to warp, not to turn them in upon
themselves in distress or gloom or selfishness; not merely to hold up
a mirror to nature; but to make them true and make them hopeful. Dark
as are his words of individuals, his thoughts are not dark or
one-sided about mankind; his is no cherished and perverse
severity—his faith is too large, too real, for such a fault. He did
not write only the Inferno. And the Purgatorio and the Paradiso
are not an afterthought, a feebler appendix and compensation,
conceived when too late, to a finished whole, which has taken up into
itself the poet's real mind. Nowhere else in poetry of equal power is
there the same balanced view of what man is, and may be; nowhere so
wide a grasp shown of his various capacities, so strong a desire to
find a due place and function for all his various dispositions. Where
he stands contrasted in his idea of human life with other poets, who
have been more powerful exponents of its separate sides, is in his
large and truthful comprehensiveness. Fresh from the thought of man's
condition as a whole, fresh from the thought of his goodness, his
greatness, his power, as well as of his evil, his mind is equally in
tune when rejoicing over his restoration, as when contemplating the
ruins of his fall. He never lets go the recollection that human life,
if it grovels at one end in corruption and sin, and has to pass
through the sweat and dust and disfigurement of earthly toil, has
throughout, compensations, remedies, functions, spheres innumerable of
profitable activity, sources inexhaustible of delight and
consolation—and at the other end a perfection which cannot be named.
No one ever measured the greatness of man in all its forms with so
true and yet with so admiring an eye, and with such glowing hope, as
he who has also portrayed so awfully man's littleness and vileness.
And he went farther—no one who could understand and do homage to
greatness in man, ever drew the line so strongly between greatness and
goodness, and so unhesitatingly placed the hero of this world
only—placed him in all his magnificence, honoured with no timid or
dissembling reverence—at the distance of worlds, below the place of
the lowest saint.
Those who know the Divina Commedia best, will best know how hard it
is to be the interpreter of such a mind; but they will sympathise with
the wish to call attention to it. They know, and would wish others
also to know, not by hearsay, but by experience, the power of that
wonderful poem. They know its austere, yet subduing beauty; they know
what force there is, in its free and earnest and solemn verse, to
strengthen, to tranquillise, to console. It is a small thing that it
has the secret of Nature and Man; that a few keen words have opened
their eyes to new sights in earth, and sea, and sky; have taught them
new mysteries of sound; have made them recognise, in distinct image or
thought, fugitive feelings, or their unheeded expression, by look, or
gesture, or motion; that it has enriched the public and collective
memory of society with new instances, never to be lost, of human
feeling and fortune; has charmed ear and mind by the music of its
stately march, and the variety and completeness of its plan. But,
besides this, they know how often its seriousness has put to shame
their trifling, its magnanimity their faintheartedness, its living
energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low
thoughts, its thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged
distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its
vast grasp imparted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing
truths. They know how often they have found, in times of trouble, if
not light, at least that deep sense of reality, permanent, though
unseen, which is more than light can always give—in the view which
it has suggested to them of the judgments and the love of God.[150]
