Three Philosophical Poets Part 5

The astronomy of Dante's day fell in beautifully with his poetic task.

It described and measured a firmament that would still be identified with the posthumous heaven of the saints. The whirling invisible spheres of that astronomy had the earth for their centre. The sublime complexities of this Ptolemaic system were day and night before Dante's mind. He loves to tell us in what constellation the sun is rising or setting, and what portion of the sky is then over the antipodes; he carries in his mind an orrery that shows him, at any given moment, the position of every star.

Such a constant dragging in of astronomical lore may seem to us puerile or pedantic; but for Dante the astronomical situation had the charm of a landscape, literally full of the most wonderful lights and shadows; and it also had the charm of a hard-won discovery that unveiled the secrets of nature. To think straight, to see things as they are, or as they might naturally be, interested him more than to fancy things impossible; and in this he shows, not want of imagination, but true imaginative power and imaginative maturity. It is those of us who are too feeble to conceive and master the real world, or too cowardly to face it, that run away from it to those cheap fictions that alone seem to us fine enough for poetry or for religion. In Dante the fancy is not empty or arbitrary; it is serious, fed on the study of real things. It adopts their tendency and divines their true destiny. His art is, in the original Greek sense, an imitation or rehearsal of nature, an antic.i.p.ation of fate. For this reason curious details of science or theology enter as a matter of course into his verse. With the straightforward faith and simplicity of his age he devours these interesting images, which help him to clarify the mysteries of this world.

There is a kind of sensualism or aestheticism that has decreed in our day that theory is not poetical; as if all the images and emotions that enter a cultivated mind were not saturated with theory. The prevalence of such a sensualism or aestheticism would alone suffice to explain the impotence of the arts. The life of theory is not less human or less emotional than the life of sense; it is more typically human and more keenly emotional. Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities. For this reason philosophy, when a poet is not mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into his life; or rather, the detail of things and the detail of ideas pa.s.s equally into his verse, when both alike lie in the path that has led him to his ideal. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting to words there; for words, too, are symbols without the sensuous character of the things they stand for; and yet it is only by the net of new connections which words throw over things, in recalling them, that poetry arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

Never before or since has a poet lived in so large a landscape as Dante; for our infinite times and distances are of little poetic value while we have no graphic image of what may fill them. Dante's s.p.a.ces were filled; they, enlarged, to the limits of human imagination, the habitations and destinies of mankind. Although the saints did not literally inhabit the spheres, but the empyrean beyond, yet each spirit could be manifested in that sphere the genius of which was most akin to his own. In Dante's vision spirits appear as points of light, from which voices also flow sometimes, as well as radiance. Further than reporting their words (which are usually about the things of earth) Dante tells us little about them. He has indeed, at the end, a vision of a celestial rose; tier upon tier of saints are seated as in an amphitheatre, and the Deity overarches them in the form of a triple rainbow, with a semblance of man in the midst. But this is avowedly a mere symbol, a somewhat conventional picture to which Dante has recourse unwillingly, for want of a better image to render his mystical intention. What may perhaps help us to divine this intention is the fact, just mentioned, that according to him the celestial spheres are not the real seat of any human soul; that the pure rise through them with increasing ease and velocity, the nearer they come to G.o.d; and that the eyes of Beatrice--the revelation of G.o.d to man--are only mirrors, shedding merely reflected beauty and light.

These hints suggest the doctrine that the goal of life is the very bosom of G.o.d; not any finite form of existence, however excellent, but a complete absorption and disappearance in the G.o.dhead. So the Neoplatonists had thought, from whom all this heavenly landscape is borrowed; and the reservations that Christian orthodoxy requires have not always remained present to the minds of Christian mystics and poets.

Dante broaches this very point in the memorable interview he has with the spirit of Piccarda, in the third canto of the _Paradiso_. She is in the lowest sphere of heaven, that of the inconstant moon, because after she had been stolen from her convent and forcibly married, she felt no prompting to renew her earlier vows. Dante asks her if she never longs for a higher station in paradise, one nearer to G.o.d, the natural goal of all aspiration. She answers that to share the will of G.o.d, who has established many different mansions in his house, is to be truly one with him. The wish to be nearer G.o.d would actually carry the soul farther away, since it would oppose the order he has established.[19]

Even in heaven, therefore, the Christian saint was to keep his essential fidelity, separation, and lowliness. He was to feel still helpless and lost in himself, like Tobias, and happy only in that the angel of the Lord was holding him by the hand. For Piccarda to say that she accepts the will of G.o.d means not that she shares it, but that she submits to it. She would fain go higher, for her moral nature demands it, as Dante--incorrigible Platonist--perfectly perceived; but she dare not mention it, for she knows that G.o.d, whose thoughts are not her thoughts, has forbidden it. The inconstant sphere of the moon does not afford her a perfect happiness; but, chastened as she is, she says it brings her happiness enough; all that a broken and a contrite heart has the courage to hope for.

Such are the conflicting inspirations beneath the lovely harmonies of the _Paradiso_. It was not the poet's soul that was in conflict here; it was only his traditions. The conflicts of his own spirit had been left behind in other regions; on that thres.h.i.+ng-floor of earth which, from the height of heaven, he looked back upon with wonder,[20] surprised that men should take so pa.s.sionately this trouble of ants, which he judges best, says Dante, who thinks least of it.

In this saying the poet is perhaps conscious of a personal fault; for Dante was far from perfect, even as a poet. He was too much a man of his own time, and often wrote with a pa.s.sion not clarified into judgement.

So much does the purely personal and dramatic interest dominate us as we read of a Boniface or an Ugolino that we forget that these historical figures are supposed to have been trans.m.u.ted into the eternal, and to have become bits in the mosaic of Platonic essences. Dante himself almost forgets it. The modern reader, accustomed to insignificant, wayward fictions, and expecting to be entertained by images without thoughts, may not notice this lack of perspective, or may rejoice in it.

But, if he is judicious, he will not rejoice in it long. The Bonifaces and the Ugolinos are not the truly deep, the truly lovely figures of the _Divine Comedy_. They are, in a relative sense, the vulgarities in it.

We feel too much, in these cases, the heat of the poet's prejudice or indignation. He is not just, as he usually is; he does not stop to think, as he almost always does. He forgets that he is in the eternal world, and dips for the moment into a brawl in some Italian market-place, or into the council-chamber of some factious _condottiere_. The pa.s.sages--such as those about Boniface and Ugolino--which Dante writes in this mood are powerful and vehement, but they are not beautiful. They brand the object of their invective more than they reveal it; they shock more than they move the reader.

This lower kind of success--for it is still a success in rhetoric--falls to the poet because he has abandoned the Platonic half of his inspiration and has become for the moment wholly historical, wholly Hebraic or Roman. He would have been a far inferior mind if he had always moved on this level. With the Platonic spheres and the Aristotelian ethics taken out, his _Comedy_ would not have been divine.

Persons and incidents, to be truly memorable, have to be rendered significant; they have to be seen in their place in the moral world; they have to be judged, and judged rightly, in their dignity and value.

A casual personal sentiment towards them, however pa.s.sionate, cannot take the place of the sympathetic insight that comprehends and the wide experience that judges.

Again (what is fundamental with Dante) love, as he feels and renders it, is not normal or healthy love. It was doubtless real enough, but too much restrained and expressed too much in fancy; so that when it is extended Platonically and identified so easily with the grace of G.o.d and with revealed wisdom, we feel the suspicion that if the love in question had been natural and manly, it would have offered more resistance to so mystical a transformation. The poet who wishes to pa.s.s convincingly from love to philosophy (and that seems a natural progress for a poet) should accordingly be a hearty and complete lover--a lover like Goethe and his Faust--rather than like Plato and Dante. Faust, too, pa.s.ses from Gretchen to Helen, and partly back again; and Goethe made even more pa.s.sages. Had any of them led to something which not only was loved, but deserved to be loved, which not only could inspire a whole life, but which ought to inspire it--then we should have had a genuine progress.

In the next place, Dante talks too much about himself. There is a sense in which this egotism is a merit, or at least a ground of interest for us moderns; for egotism is the distinctive att.i.tude of modern philosophy and of romantic sentiment. In being egotistical Dante was ahead of his time. His philosophy would have lost an element of depth, and his poetry an element of pathos, had he not placed himself in the centre of the stage, and described everything as his experience, or as a revelation made to himself and made for the sake of his personal salvation. But Dante's egotism goes rather further than was requisite, so that the transcendental insight might not fail in his philosophy. It extended so far that he cast the shadow of his person not only over the terraces of purgatory (as he is careful to tell us repeatedly), but over the whole of Italy and of Europe, which he saw and judged under the evident influence of private pa.s.sions and resentments.

Moreover, the personality thrust forward so obtrusively is not in every respect worthy of contemplation. Dante is very proud and very bitter; at the same time, he is curiously timid; and one may tire sometimes of his perpetual tremblings and tears, of his fainting fits and his intricate doubts. A man who knows he is under the special protection of G.o.d, and of three celestial ladies, and who has such a sage and magician as Virgil for a guide, might have looked even upon h.e.l.l with a little more confidence. How far is this s.h.i.+vering and swooning philosopher from the laughing courage of Faust, who sees his poodle swell into a monster, then into a cloud, and finally change into Mephistopheles, and says at once: _Das also war des Pudels Kern_! Doubtless Dante was mediaeval, and contrition, humility, and fear of the devil were great virtues in those days; but the conclusion we must come to is precisely that the virtues of those days were not the best virtues, and that a poet who represents that time cannot be a fair nor an ultimate spokesman for humanity.

Perhaps we have now reviewed the chief objects that peopled Dante's imagination, the chief objects into the midst of which his poetry transports us; and if a poet's genius avails to transport us into his enchanted world, the character of that world will determine the quality and dignity of his poetry. Dante transports us, with unmistakable power, first into the atmosphere of a visionary love; then into the history of his conversion, affected by this love, or by the divine grace identified with it. The supreme ideal to which his conversion brought him back is expressed for him by universal nature, and is embodied among men in the double inst.i.tution of a revealed religion and a providential empire. To trace the fortunes of these inst.i.tutions, we are transported next into the panorama of history, in its great crises and its great men; and particularly into the panorama of Italy in the poet's time, where we survey the crimes, the virtues, and the sorrows of those prominent in furthering or thwarting the ideal of Christendom. These numerous persons are set before us with the sympathy and brevity of a dramatist; yet it is no mere carnival, no _danse macabre_: for throughout, above the confused strife of parties and pa.s.sions, we hear the steady voice, the implacable sentence, of the prophet that judges them.

Thus Dante, gifted with the tenderest sense of colour, and the firmest art of design, has put his whole world into his canvas. Seen there, that world becomes complete, clear, beautiful, and tragic. It is vivid and truthful in its detail, sublime in its march and in its harmony. This is not poetry where the parts are better than the whole. Here, as in some great symphony, everything is c.u.mulative: the movements conspire, the tension grows, the volume redoubles, the keen melody soars higher and higher; and it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual incident, but in sustained reflection, in the sense that it has not ended, but remains by us in its totality, a revelation and a resource for ever. It has taught us to love and to renounce, to judge and to wors.h.i.+p., What more could a poet do? Dante poetized all life and nature as he found them. His imagination dominated and focused the whole world. He thereby touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can aspire; he set the standard for all possible performance, and became the type of a supreme poet. This is not to say that he is the "greatest" of poets. The relative merit of poets is a barren thing to wrangle about. The question can always be opened anew, when a critic appears with a fresh temperament or a new criterion. Even less need we say that no greater poet can ever arise; we may be confident of the opposite. But Dante gives a successful example of the _highest species_ of poetry. His poetry covers the whole field from which poetry may be fetched, and to which poetry may be applied, from the inmost recesses of the heart to the uttermost bounds of nature and of destiny. If to give imaginative value to something is the minimum task of a poet, to give imaginative value to all things, and to the system which things compose, is evidently his greatest task.

Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special conditions and limitations, personal and social; but he fulfilled it, and he thereby fulfilled the conditions of supreme poetry. Even Homer, as we are beginning to perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion of his time that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a euphemistic art; it had a sort of pervasive blandness, like that which we now a.s.sociate with a fas.h.i.+onable sermon. It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the state, to the conquerors; and it spread an intentional glamour over their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No such partiality in Dante; he paints what he hates as frankly as what he loves, and in all things he is complete and sincere. If any similar adequacy is attained again by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest imagination, the supernatural must figure as an idea in the human mind,--a part of the natural. To conceive it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight of this age, not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet of the supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato, of that phase of thought and feeling in which the supernatural seems to be the key to nature and to happiness. This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral unity has been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the most complete idealization and comprehension of things achieved by mankind hitherto. Dante is the type of a consummate poet.

[1] Plato, _Phaedo_,97B-99C, Jowett's translation. I have changed the rendering of _????_ from "mind" to "reason."

[2] "Est pro fundamento tenenda veritas historiae et desuper spirituales expositiones fabricandae." Thomas Aquinas, _Summa Theologiae_, i.

quaest. 102, conclusio.

[3] _Paradiso_, xv. 97, 99:

Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchia antica...

Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.

[4] Ibid., 100-26:

Non avea catenella, non corona, Non donne contigiate, non cintura Che fosse a veder pin che la persona.

Non faceva nascendo ancor paura La figlia al padre, che il tempo e la dote Non fuggan quinci e quindi la misura.

Non avea case di famiglia vote; Non v'era giunto ancor Sardanapalo A mostrar ci che in camera si puote....

O fortunate! Ciascuna era certa Delia sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla Era per Francia nel letto deserta.

L' una vegghiava a studio della culla, E consolando usava l' idioma Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla; L' altra traendo alia rocca la chioma, Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia De' Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.

[5] _Paradiso_, x.x.xiii. 143-45:

Volgeva il mio disiro e il _velle,_ Si come rota ch' egualmente e mossa, L' amor che move il sole e l' altre stelle.

[6] _Vita Nuova_, -- 22: Secondo l' usanza della sopradetta cittade, donne con donne, e uomini con uomini si adunino a cotale tristizia; molte donne s' adunaro cola, ove questa Beatrice piangea pietosamente, &c.

Also, _Purgatorio_, x.x.xi. 50, 51:

Le belle membra in ch' io Rinchiusa fui, e sono in terra sparte.

[7] _Vita Nuova_,-- v.

[8] _Schermo della veritade_,--natural philosophy.

[9] _Convito_, II. cap. 16: _Faccia che gli occhi d' esta Donna miri_; gli occhi di questa Donna sono le sue _dimostrazioni_, le quali dritte negli occhi dello intelletto inhamorano l' anima, libera nelle condizioni. Oh dolcissimi ed ineffabili sembianti, e rubatori subitani della mente umana, che nelle dimostrazioni negli occhi della Filosofia apparite, quando essa alli suoi drudi ragiona! Veramente in voi e la salute, per la quale si fa beato chi vi guarda, e salvo dalla morte della ignoranza e delli vizi.... E cosi, in fine di questo secondo Trattato, dico e affermo che la Donna, di cui io innamorai appresso lo primo amore, fu la bellissima e onestissima figlia dello Imperadore dell' universo, alla quale Pittagora pose nome _Filosofia_.

[10] _Purgatorio_, xvii. 106-11:

Or perche mai non pu dalla salute Amor del suo suggetto volger viso, Dall' odio proprio son le cose tute: E perche intender non si pu diviso, E per se stante, alcuno esser dal primo, Da quello odiare ogni affetto e deciso.

[11] _Inferno_, iii. 64-66:

Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi, Erano ignudi e stimolati molto Da mosconi e da vespe ch' erano ivi.

[12] _Ibid._, iv. 41, 42:

Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi Che senza speme vivemo in disio.

Cf. _Purgatorio_, iii. 37-45, where Virgil says:

"State contenti, umana gente, al _quia_; Che se potuto aveste veder tutto, Mestier non era partorir Maria; E disiar vedeste senza frutto Tai, che sarebbe lor disio quetato, Ch' eternalmente e dato lor per lutto.

Io dico d' Aristotele e di Plato, E di molti altri." E qui chin la fronte; E piu non disse, e rimase turbato.

[13] _Inferno_, ix. 106-33, and x.