Divina Commedia

“ Is it not almost as incongruous, it may be asked, to look for humour in the Divina Commedia as it would be to search for jokes in the Bible? We are prepared to maintain that even the intense seriousness of Dante—that sublime and solemn earnestness which can only be compared to the temper of Holy Writ, is not merely compatible with a playful use of the intellect, artistically restrained, but is rendered more complete and effective thereby. And what about Holy Scripture itself? ”

“ These works, omitting several others of inferior value, would have been more than sufficient to place Dante above all his contemporaries; yet, they stand at an immeasurable distance from the ‘Divina Commedia,’ the great poem by which he has recommended his name to the veneration of the remotest posterity. The Divine Comedy is the narrative of a mysterious journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, which he supposes himself to have performed in the year 1300, during the passion week, having Virgil as his guide through the two regions of woe, and Beatrice through that of happiness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Neither poem could have existed without the woman; the action of each turns entirely upon her; but the appearance of each is infrequent until, in Beatrice's case, she appears as the pervading spirit of the Paradiso. Yet, had we merely known her from the Divina Commedia, their opinion who regard her as a mere symbol would not have appeared so groundless as it must in the light of the transparent autobiography of the Vita Nuova. If the great epic has given her her world-wide fame, she is indebted for her personality to the brief lyrics and snatches of impassioned prose. ”

“ Dante, indeed, speaking throughout in his own character, cannot help portraying himself in some measure, though our conception of him is probably largely made up of involuntary associations with the more palpable Dante of the Divina Commedia. But Beatrice remains what he meant her to be, a spiritual presence, visible but intangible. No heroine of fiction conveys a stronger impression of perfection ”

“ Such erudition, originality, insight, give promise that we shall find in Dante a real teacher; and the promise is abundantly fulfilled to those who tread the spacious halls of his School, which is his Poem.
The very language in which the Divina Commedia is written is a testimony to the Poet’s grasp of the fundamental condition of all teaching—that it should be intelligible! There is a saying of Alcuin’s great disciple, Rabanus Maurus, which expresses simply and well this obvious, but oft-forgotten principle. “Teach,” he says, “in words that teach; not in words that do not teach.” ”

“ The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius. ”

“ But so long as these are presented to us nimbused by the wizard light that fuses the Real and the Ideal, we believe while we read and listen, and that is enough. The very first line of the Divina Commedia, so familiar to every one, though it is to introduce us to the horrors of the Inferno, is so realistic, so within the range of the experience of all who have reached the meridian of life or even looked on that period in others, that we are at once predisposed to yield our imagination passively to what follows. ”

“ Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the “Divina Commedia,” and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it. This was the first fruits and the last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others may catch. ”

“ For, if the work were successful, it would possess the same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In the Divina Commedia Dante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy and experience of life of the Middle Ages ”

“ But the University moved so slowly that it was some weeks before I received the special paper set me, which, to my horror, ran as follows: "Determine the correlation between the pathetic and the symbolic in general, in order by that means to elucidate the contrast between Shakespeare's tragedies and Dante's Divina Commedia, together with the possible errors into which one might fall through a one-sided preponderance of either of these two elements." ”

“ He was thus able to deal with the burning questions of his day in one of the greatest poetic masterpieces of any age, people, or tongue. His Divina Commedia describes a vision in which the poet is led, first by the hand of Virgil, as the representative of human wisdom, through Hell and Purgatory, then by Beatrice, whose place at times is taken by the German Matilda (§ 107, 2) , and finally by St. Bernard, as representatives of revealed religion, through Paradise and the several heavens up to the empyræum, the eternal residence of the triune God. ”

“ The theology of the poem need not obstruct for any one these educating influences. They are quite independent of the theology, as are the educating influences of the 'Divina Commedia' independent of its mediæval Catholicism. The absolute man was in the ascendent in both Dante and Milton; and by virtue of that ascendency, they are, and ever will continue to be, great educating personalities, whatever false science and false opinions on various subjects are embodied in their works, and however much the world's faith in things which they most vitally believed may decline and entirely cease to be. ”

“ Only, therefore, in days when the Cross was received with courage, the Scripture searched with honesty, and the Pastor heard in faith, can the pure word of God, and the bright sword of the Spirit, be recognised in the heart and hand of Christianity. The effect of Biblical poetry and legend on its intellect, must be traced farther, through decadent ages, and in unfenced fields;—producing 'Paradise Lost' for us, no less than the 'Divina Commedia';—Goethe's 'Faust,' and Byron's 'Cain,' no less than the 'Imitatio Christi.'
45. ”

“ The thought at the foundation of the Divina Commedia, nevertheless, is more ancient than Dante, although the details evince marvellous fertility of invention. The idea of a descent to the under-world is the groundwork of a primitive Assyrian epic in comparison with whose antiquity the similar narratives in the Buddhistic and other scriptures are but of yesterday. It is found in Plato's Republic and the Odyssey, both unknown to Dante, who had, however, the sixth book of the Æneid by heart, and implies his obligation by making Virgil his guide. ”

“ The poem has many senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also, and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own phrase, the bread of angels.
Nor is this unity characteristic only of the Divina Commedia. All the works of Dante, with the possible exception of the De vulgari Eloquio (which is unfinished) , are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man mutually completing and interpreting one another. ”

“ It stands alone; and must be read and judged according to rules and immunities adapted to its peculiar structure, plot, and purpose, formed upon principles affording scope to the exercise of the highest powers, with little regard to precedent. If these principles, then, have {Pg 51} intrinsic excellence, and the work be found uniformly consistent with them, fulfilling to the utmost the aims of the author, the "Divina Commedia" must be allowed to stand among the proudest trophies of original genius, challenging, encountering, and overcoming unparalleled difficulties. ”

“ To discourse of Dante, concerning whom, ever since Boccaccio lectured on the Divina Commedia in the Duomo of Florence, more than five hundred years ago, there has been an unbroken procession of loving commentators, must always be a difficult undertaking; and the difficulty is increased when the audience addressed, as I believe is the case this evening, is composed, for the most part, of serious students of the austere Florentine. ”

“ The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic, of which Shakspeare must always stand for the only definition. Next is the narrative imagination, where the poet forces his own personal consciousness upon us and makes our senses the slaves of his own. Of this kind Dante’s “Divina Commedia” is the type. Below this are the poems in which the imagination is more diffused; where the impression we receive is rather from mass than from particulars; where single lines are not so strong in themselves as in forming integral portions of great sweeps of verse ”

“ Is it not rather that some few souls keep alive the lamp of zeal and high desire which God lights for most of us while life is young?
Eleanor and I worked at our lessons by ourselves. We always had her mother to “fall back upon,” as we said. When we took up the study of Italian in order to be able to read Dante—moved thereto by the attractions of the long volume of Flaxman’s illustrations of the ‘Divina Commedia’—we had to “fall back” a good deal on Mrs. Arkwright’s scholarship. ”

“ If it be urged that Dante, and even Shakespeare, [Pg 5] do not always yield up their meaning to the reader at once, the allegation must be traversed absolutely. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the various dialects of the Italian language existing in Dante’s time, and likewise with the erudition he scatters so profusely, if allusively, throughout his verse. ”

“ When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the “Divina Commedia,” we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the “Inferno,” that of Mr. Dayman for those from the “Purgatorio,” and that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the “Paradiso.” ”

“ This is the real miracle wrought by the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, and the Divina Commedia is its deathless memorial. With Dante, an art which had seemed capable of expressing only the trivial loves and conventions of courtiers and shepherdesses becomes the medium for presenting the vast and chaotic pageant of the Middle Ages, the depth of Hell and the height of Heaven, the angelic doctrine of St. ”

“ 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;" ”

“ The continuous experience of this living person who is at one and the same time a figure of each and every soul that ever breathed, and also the real Dante Alighieri, exile from Florence without blame, sustains as on one thread the medley of successive motives which else might lack poetic unity, gives life to a scheme which else might be too abstract. Expanding to embrace the universe, contracting to a point within one breast, the Commedia combines the general and the particular in an individual commensurate with man. ”

“ Man and work include the emotions and the intellectual interests of the Middle Ages, embracing what had been known,—Physics, Astronomy, Politics, History, Pagan Mythology, Christian Theology,—all bent and moulded at last to the matter of the book. Not the contents of the Commedia is Dante’s own, but the poem itself—that is his creation. ”

“ I say that the sense of our Commedia is like the flesh of the peacock, for, whether you call its sense moral or theological, it is, in whatever part of the book most pleases you, simple and immutable truth, and as such not only cannot receive corruption, but, the more it is examined, the greater odor of its incorruptible sweetness does it bring to those who perceive it. ”

“ 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. ”