Margaret Oliphant Oliphant

“ To some critics it has seemed an allegory from beginning to end, and these writers have found in the peerless Beatrice no true woman at all, but only an emblem of heavenly wisdom, the highest light and inspiration of the soul. This far-fetched theory we are fortunately not called upon to discuss; for we cannot believe that any new reader, approaching the wonderful tale with an unbiassed mind, could ever imagine a love so tremulous with delicate passion, so absorbing and all-pervading, to be directed to an abstract quality. ”

“ Thus he goes about the dream-streets, his young soul rapt in this contemplation, his being thrilled through and through by the delight of seeing her moving towards him in gracious sweetness, the only creature in Florence unaware of her own perfections, "crowned and clothed with humility;" or when the thoughts become too big to keep silent, betakes him to his chamber to write down the glowing words, and explain and dwell upon them, ringing the changes upon each intense minute detail. ”

“ Thus dreaming dreams and seeing visions—now of Love himself, the youthful god, now of that fair representative of his, supreme above all women—the visionary tale flows on. By right of her own superlative grace, and by right, too, we seem to perceive, of that poetic adoration of which all the neighbourhood had become aware, Beatrice acquired, in her young lover's thoughts at least, a kind of divinity in Florence. ”

“ In no other work that we can recall has the passion of love, which trembles in every word, ever been represented as so entirely separate from its object. The love of Dante lives upon no interchange of feeling, no meetings, no glances, no close consorting; but is nourished by its own musings, its dreams, by the sight of her as she passes, her distant salutation, the beauty and glory of her being, unenhanced by any personal contact; and it is told, not to her ear, but in an exquisite confidence and trust in poetic sympathy to those other poet-souls who could understand this rapture of feeling. ”

“ The great dramatists of Greece press close upon the steps of their venerable leader, but neither in Italy nor in Latin Europe has any one arisen worthy to take his place by the side of the great dreamer, who was the first to rescue the vulgar tongue, the language of the people, from the babble of common affairs, and make of it that noble, sonorous, majestic Italian language which has ever since been the admiration of the world. ”

“ Some of them, according to the stories of the time, lofty and refined as they are, were sung about the streets of Florence, by the carters and blacksmiths, in the very hearing of the poet; which wonderful popular appreciation of those finest ethereal voices goes far to make us believe in the stately dream-city of the 'Vita Nuova,' where, when Beatrice lived there, and the young Dante who loved her, angels, and muses, and every lovely imagination seem to have trod the antique pavement, and, with a dazzling of celestial smiles and sunshine, irradiated all the ancient place. ”

“ This doctrine, I say, makes us sure above all other reasonings; since He has given it who sees and measures our immortality, which we cannot perfectly see while our mortal is mixed with the immortal; but we see it perfectly by faith; and by reason we see it darkly in consequence of the mixture of our mortality. And this should be the most potent argument of all, that in us these two exist; and I thus believe, and affirm, and am certain that I shall pass after this life to a better—where lives that glorious lady whom my soul loved. ”

“ The dim, sweet vicissitudes of the tale, mystically intimated to us through a twilight of soft allusions, are no sooner experienced than they are woven into verse, to be sent to Guido Cavalcanti and the others of the brotherhood, who stand round in a hush and thrill of sympathetic spectatorship, watching every change of the delicate drama, not always understanding it, puzzled by times, as we are, by the discrepancy between those fantastic passionate refinements and their own ruder realisation of what love is. ”

“ The reader is like the populace, which the poet describes as hastening to the corners of the streets to look at her as she passes, saying, "This is no woman, but a beautiful angel." She is entirely raised above even the adoring record of her perfections. That is for the lover, for the spectators, who themselves worship in a far-off degree, but not worthy the look of the most gentle Beatrice. ”

“ As the other love ends in marriage, so this developed, with that lofty kind of suitableness which is nature on such high levels, into the adoration, scarcely less distant, of a saint in heaven; and Madonna Beatrice, who never seems to have approached him nearer than in those passing encounters, whose presence so abashed him as to take away all power of speech, whose very approach was indicated to him by a tremor of all his being, became his, in a sweet, ineffable alliance, accepting and acknowledging in heaven the visionary tie which on earth had no existence. ”

“ No one else, so far as we know, has ever thus accomplished the highest results of art with such a visionary exquisite vagueness, with an outline so veiled in mists of sacred awe and reverence. To every man and woman who has purely and truly loved, loved for love's sake, "all for love and nothing for reward," the 'Vita Nuova,' to the end of time, will be a revelation not only of Dante and the peerless Beatrice, but of themselves and their own hearts. ”

“ This slander came to the ears of "that most gentle being, who was the destroyer of every vice and the very queen of virtue," and a terrible punishment followed. "As she passed me on a time," says the unhappy lover, "she denied me that most gracious salutation which was my all-in-all of bliss." Here he pauses to enlarge upon what that salutation was to him. It was all the recompense, so far as appears, that he ever had for his love, yet it was enough not only to delight but to purify his adoring mind. ”

“ Could Italy, with all its glories, be swept away, as the middle ages have passed away, with all their struggles and splendour, Dante would remain as great as ever, notwithstanding that he is Italian and medieval in every feature of his genius; and so long as human nature remains the thing it is, steadily triumphant in character and emotion over all the preaching of developments, no antiquity will make the great poet old. ”

“ Whether it is the intention of the young lover to make us more sensible of the supreme elevation of his lady by keeping her purposely out of our reach, so that no profane fancy might guess at the state of her affections, or be able to discover whether she ever stooped from these ethereal heights to repay him so much as by a thought; or whether it is but the subliming influence of the age which received as a solemn doctrine that canon of chivalry by which the respectful adoration of a lady was made necessary to all true knighthood and manhood ”

“ Like Homer, he may be said to have created, in using it, the noble language in which his great poem is the chief monument; like Shakespeare, he has searched to the deepest roots of life, and combined philosophy with imagination: but his position is independent and individual, as distinct from those of his great companions as they are from each other. ”

“ To ourselves, we cannot deny, even the sometimes sublime strain of the "Paradiso" is impaired by the very large admixture of theology and philosophy to which the denizens of heaven give vent, in their anxiety to remove those "doubts" which so persistently assail the poet. ”

“ It is impossible, indeed, to know anything of Dante, either as a man or a poet, without knowing Beatrice, the one love of his life. Even if it might be only the arbitrary whim of his genius to make her the centre of his spiritual world, he has done it so effectually, that without her he can be but faintly seen, and not at all understood ”

“ But we, who have the world for our country as fishes have the sea, although we drank the waters of Arno before we had teeth, and have so much loved Florence that for love of her we suffer unjust exile—we nevertheless lean the shoulders of our judgment rather upon reason than upon sense ”

“ It is much more reasonable to suppose that the trick played upon him went no further than an innocent conspiracy to introduce him suddenly into the presence of the object of his fanciful adoration. That he should be completely overcome by love and awe and shamefacedness is quite natural, and in keeping with the delicacy of his passion, and especially that any appearance on the part of Beatrice of joining in the laugh against him should have cut him to the quick. ”

“ In the twelfth century, however, twitterings of native song began to rise over the common country, irrepressible—rising among the Provençal vineyards, echoing back from Teutonic wastes, and by the dim and stormy shores of ancient Bretagne, and caught up again among the Umbrian villages. "The use of the vulgar tongue in Italy," says Crescimbeni, while describing the beginning of Italian poetry, "was introduced for no other end than to please the beautiful women, who listened more willingly to the songs of their lovers when in their native tongue than in Latin." ”

“ The name of Dante Alighieri, the first and greatest of Italian poets, has been universally allowed a place in the very highest rank of literature—that airy summit reaching to the skies, where as yet only two others have been acknowledged as his equals, sovereign poets, beyond all competition or decay. ”

“ It is certain that human nature is the most perfect of every created thing here below—and none deny this; Aristotle, indeed, asserts it in his work upon 'Animals,' where he says that man is the perfection of all the animals. While, therefore, many who live are entirely mortal, like the brute creation, and are, while they live, without any hope of another life, it follows that, if our hope were vain, greater would be our defects than those of any other animal ”

“ Florence, however, obstinately and bitterly rejected, to his latest breath, the poet who is her greatest glory, and he died at Ravenna in the year 1321, aged fifty-six, and still lies there, the people of Ravenna having indignantly rejected the tardy inclination of the Florentines to do honour to their greatest countryman. Dante Alighieri, so much as remains of his mortal frame, is an exile still. ”

“ He appeals to the Spirits which move the third heaven—that is, the star of Venus—the high controllers and inspiring influences of love, who have led him into the state in which he is, to hear him now; but so interwoven with allegory is the tale, that the reader, less intelligent perhaps than these Angels of Venus, may well be bewildered between the real lady of the window and the mystical lady Philosophy, who also beguiled his sorrows and consoled his heart after the death of his first love. ”

“ The father of modern literature has thus an inalienable right to take the lead in the great line of writers who have made the countries of Christendom known to each other, and who furnish at once the clearest and surest revelation of the races in whose hands, for the last five hundred years, has lain all the progress of the world. ”

“ The outline of the absolute ruler, whose despotism is held in check by the moral perfections with which it is necessary he should be endowed, but by no other restraint—and who is made capable of universal sway by, to state it in homely words, the impossibility of bettering himself, the fact that he has reached the very height of mortal ambition, beyond all reach of cupidity, or even the wish of acquisition,—is in itself a bewildering picture. ”

“ The poet has been led to the question of immortality by his own account of his lady in heaven:—
"But as the immortality of the soul is here implied, I will make a digression upon that subject; since discoursing of that, I may most fitly terminate all that has been said concerning that living and blessed Beatrice, of whom I intend to talk no more in this book. And to begin, I say that among all brutalities, that of him who believes that after this life there is no other, is the most stupid, vile, and dangerous ”

“ That monarchy, in this universal sense, is necessary to the wellbeing of the world; that it is the Roman nation alone which has the privilege of giving such an imperial suzerain to Christendom; and that this supreme power is from God only, without any intermediate agency between,—are the principles which, with all the force of reasoning he possesses, Dante sets himself to establish. ”

“ A man who would profess to know England without knowing something of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and the great writers who have followed them, could form but an imperfect idea of the national mind and its capabilities: and so no amount of travel can make us acquainted with Italy, while Dante, Tasso, and her great historians remain unknown to us ”

“ The Classics of Italy, France, Germany, and Spain are nearer to us in time, and less separated in sentiment, than the still more famous Classics of antiquity; and if foreign travel is, as everybody allows, a great means of enlarging the mind, and dispersing its prejudices, an acquaintance with those works in which the great nations who are our neighbours have expressed their highest life, and by which their manners of thinking have been formed, cannot but possess equal advantages. ”

“ Neither is Germany herself without Goethe and Schiller: nor Spain recognisable deprived of that noble figure of Cervantes, in whom lives the very genius of the nation. This great band it is our design to give such an account of as may bring them within the acquaintance of the English reader, whose zeal may not carry him the length of the often thankless study of translations, and whose readings in a foreign language are not easy enough to be pleasant. ”

“ This is supposed by many commentators to refer to the marriage-feast of Beatrice herself; but this seems very improbable, since no friend of Dante's is likely to have led him unawares into the heart of such a merrymaking. Much more likely it would seem that the young poet, suddenly brought into immediate contact with the lady whom he had worshipped afar off, should be rendered speechless by the unsuspected shock of a privilege too much for him, and of which he could take no advantage, surrounded as both were by that bevy of smiling ladies, ready to flout and mock his too great timidity. ”

“ The thought that rushed upon him with all the force of a revelation was that some time or other "the very gentle Beatrice must die." Notwithstanding the visionary gleam of this possibility which appears in the canzone above quoted, where the angels ask for her, and God Himself leaves her on earth only for the sake of "one who dreads to lose her," yet it is evident that this sudden realisation of the inevitable drove Dante into a panic of despairing passion. ”

“ Again, we are made certain of this truth by the most true doctrine of Christ, which is the way, the truth, and the light: the way, because by it we go without impediment to the happiness of that immortality; the truth, because it permits no error; the light, because it illuminates us in the darkness of our earthly ignorance. ”

“ She passes on, "crowned and clothed with humility," always gracious, divinely courteous, but never brought to a standstill, or audibly to us letting drop one of those heavenly utterances which are too delicate for mortal ear. ”

“ To all the above arguments a memorable example bears witness. This is the condition of mortal affairs which the Son of God waited for in order to assume flesh for the salvation of man. For when we survey in our minds the ages and dispositions of men, from the transgression of our first forefathers, which was the beginning of all our errors, we shall not find a time when the world was at peace and quiet, save under Caesar Augustus, who was the monarch in a state of perfect monarchy. ”

“ Again, we have a continuous proof of our immortality in the divination of our dreams, which could not be if some part of us was not immortal; if we think closely, it is clear that the revealer must be immortal, whether in the body or out of the body: and that which is moved or informed by an immediate instructor ought to bear some proportion to the instructor; but between the mortal and the immortal there is no proportion. ”

“ Beginning with the fact that man alone has the privilege of this gift of speech, and that the first speech used was Hebrew, he travels by that stronghold of confusion and darkness the Tower of Babel, downwards to the formation of the three languages of Oc, Oil, and Si, and through the dialects of Italy, to the necessity for a single supreme standard of Italian, in which all lofty subjects might be worthily discussed ”