Dante

“ Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.
Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic representation of his Belief about this Universe:—some Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an 'Allegory,' perhaps an idle Allegory! ”

“ At length, in Dante, the one poet arose whose genius was sufficient to extricate from this heap of trivialities the great dogmas of the Christian faith which lay at the bottom, and, by his matchless constructive power, to give form and substance to the theme, to illustrate it with all that his age could afford of philosophy and learning, to animate it with the spirit of devotion and sublime human passion, and to enrich it with all the resources of the poetical imagination. ”

“ Yet Dante is at the same time the most original of poets. It is his mighty individuality which, rising above the conventionality of his age and country, has made him a world-poet, as true to-day as ever in his depiction of the human heart in all its sin and sorrow, virtue, and vice, in its love and hate and its inextinguishable aspiration toward a better and happier existence in the world beyond the grave. ”

“ In the topmost circle of Purgatory, amongst the fierce flames from which Dante would have hurled himself into molten glass for coolness, he sees souls whose cheeks flush at the memory of their sin with a shame that adds a burning to the burning flame; whilst others, clustering at the edge that they may speak with him, yet take good heed to keep within the flame, lest for one moment they should have respite from the fierce pain which is purging away their sins and drawing them nearer to their desire. ”

“ When the fairest of all earthly things was mouldering in the dust, should he not have freed himself from the entanglements of the less beauteous things remaining?
To all these reproaches, urged by Beatrice, Dante had no reply. With eyes rooted to the ground, filled with unutterable shame, like a child repentant and confessing, longing to throw himself at his mother's feet, but afraid to meet her glance while her lips still utter the reproof, so Dante stood. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In Dante's time the citizens of Florence were perversely divided into two factions, and by the operations of astute and prudent leaders each party was very powerful, so that sometimes one ruled and sometimes the other, to the displeasure of its defeated rival. In his wish to unite the divided body of his republic, Dante brought all genius, all art, all study to bear, showing the wiser citizens how great things soon perish through discord, and how little things through harmony have infinite growth. ”

“ Dante, while doing as he was desired, felt like one who has suddenly waked up from a dream, and endeavours in vain to recollect it.
"Never," said he, "can that moment be erased from the book of the past. If all the tongues were granted me that were fed with the richest milk of Polyhymnia and her sisters, they could not express one thousandth part of the beauty of that divine smile, or of the thorough perfection which it made of the whole of her divine countenance." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sick with petty quarrels and dissensions, Dante strained his eyes towards the hills for the appearance of a universal monarch, raised above the jars of faction and the spur of ambition, under whom each country, each city, each man, might, under the institutions best suited to it, lead the life and do the work for which it was best fitted. United in spiritual harmony with the vicar of Christ, he should show for the first time to the world an example of a government where the strongest force and the highest wisdom were interpenetrated by all that God had given to the world of piety and justice. ”

“ Dante was an artist in words, and in imagination a master. The history of literature can never be written and the name of Dante left out. And he, of all writers, both ancient and modern, most vividly portrays the truth that without human love, there would be no such thing as poetry. ”

“ In the seventh circle Virgil leads Dante to the river of blood, "in which boils every one who by violence injures others." Centaurs, half horses and half men, are there. "Around the fosse they go by thousands, piercing with their arrows whatever spirit wrenches itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted for it." ”

“ Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. ”

“ Have five and a half centuries of progress outgrown the poem, or are Dante's still the mightiest and most living words in which man has ever painted in detail the true deserts of sin, of penitence, of sanctity? The growing mind of man has burst the shell of Dante's mediæval creed. Is his portrayal of the true conditions of blessedness as antiquated as his philosophy, [Pg 158] his religion as strange to modern thought as his theology? Or has he still a power, wielded by no other poet, of taking us into the very presence of God and tuning our hearts to the harmonies of Heaven? ”

“ To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result. ”

“ Dante does not tell us where he found himself when the vision broke. He only tells us this: that as a wheel moves equally in all its parts, so his desire and will were, without strain or jar, revolved henceforth by that same Love that moves the sun and all the other stars. [94]
This was the end of all that Dante had thought and felt and lived through—a will that rolled in perfect oneness with the will of God. This was the end to which he would bring his readers, this was the purpose of his sacred poem, this was the meaning of his life. ”

“ CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill which he begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he turns back and is met by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into the eternal world.
Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been missed. Ah! how hard a thing it is to tell what this wild and rough and dense wood was, which in thought renews the fear! So bitter is it that death is little more. But in order to treat of the good that there I found, I will tell of the other things that I have seen there. ”

“ They now rise to the highest heaven, outside of all the spheres, in which all the blessed have their true place. At first Dante is aware of light only, but gradually a fresh power of sight comes to him, and he sees a river, from and to which bright sparks are ever issuing and returning. The banks are brilliant with flowers. At the command of Beatrice he bows down and drinks, and at once sees the river as a lake of light, the flowers on the banks as concentric rows of saints seated on thrones, and the flitting sparks as angels. ”

“ On the other hand, the sting of Dante’s private wrongs, like the enthusiasm of his private loves, lent a wonderful warmth and clearness to the great objects of his imagination. We are too often kept from feeling great things greatly for want of power to assimilate them to the little things which we feel keenly and sincerely. Dante had, in this respect, the art of a Platonic lover: he could enlarge the object of his passion, and keep the warmth and ardour of it undiminished. ”

“ Moreover, the mysticism of Dante stands with its feet planted firmly upon the earth: man and his deeds might be fleeting, but they laid so strong a hold upon the poet’s imagination that he welded them into a stepping-stone to that which shall not pass away. His own life was spent in a ceaseless political activity; for all his visionary journeys through heaven and hell, Dante lived as keenly as any of his contemporaries. The fire still burns in the dead heart ”

“ ITALY.—CARY'S DANTE.
TRANSLATING Dante is indeed a labor of love. It is one in which even a moderate degree of success is impossible. No great Poet can be well translated. The form of his thought is inseparable from his thought. The births of his genius are perfect beings: body and soul are in such perfect harmony that you cannot at all alter the one without veiling the other. The variation in cadence and modulation, even where the words are exactly rendered, takes not only from the form of the thought, but from the thought itself, its most delicate charm. ”

“ The extraordinary character of Dante, which is personally mixed up with his writings beyond that of any other poet, has led me into references to his church and creed, unavoidable at any time in the endeavour to give a thorough estimate of his genius, and singularly demanded by certain phenomena of the present day. I hold those phenomena to be alike feeble and fugitive; but only so by reason of their being openly so proclaimed; for mankind have a tendency to the absurd, if their imaginations are not properly directed ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are no doubt in the Divina Commedia (regarded merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both of physics and metaphysics, but with every deduction Dante remains the first of descriptive as well as moral poets. His verse is as various as the feeling it conveys; now it has the terseness and edge of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness like the breast of a dove. In vividness he is without a rival. ”

“ But might not any man, any thoughtful man at all events, of thirty-five years old and upwards, take Dante’s words with perfect sincerity, as the expression of his own deepest thoughts? Why assume that the faults of which Dante repented with tears in the presence of Beatrice, were limited to a too great reliance on human reason, or to a secret leaning to the philosophy of Averroes? ”

“ After conversing for a while with Virgil, these bards graciously welcome Dante as sixth in their poetic galaxy. Talking of things which cannot be mentioned save in such exalted company, Dante walks on with them until he nears a castle girdled with sevenfold ramparts and moat. Through seven consecutive portals the six poets pass on to a meadow, where Dante beholds all the creations of their brains, and meets Hector, Aeneas, Camilla, and Lucretia, as well as the philosophers, historians, and mathematicians who from time to time have appeared upon our globe. ”

“ At the time of Dante's birth the sun was in the sign of the Twins.
“Thou art so near the ultimate salvation,” began Beatrice, “that thou oughtest to have thine eyes clear and sharp. And therefore ere thou further enterest it, look back downward, and see how great a world I have already set beneath thy feet, in order that thy heart, so far as it is able, may present itself joyous to the triumphant crowd which comes glad through this round aether.” With my sight I returned through each and all the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its mean semblance ”

“ 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 ”

“ At this sign that Dante’s body was that of a living man.
“O thou! who goest, not from being slower, but perhaps from reverence, behind the others, reply to me who in thirst and fire am burning. Nor to me only is thy reply of need, for all these have a greater thirst for it than Indian or Ethiop of cold water. Tell us how it is that thou makest of thyself a wall to the sun, as if thou hadst not yet entered within the net of death.” ”