II
I begin with examples in which these data are derived from religion; and, in the first place, from religion still untouched by philosophic reflection. Without rashly assuming the solution of unsolved or insoluble problems, one may venture to assert that the Homeric epics owe their present form neither to purely religious awe nor merely to conscious and deliberate artistry, but to a poetic apprehension of the world operating upon the data of the savage cults and rituals, the animism, totemism, and magic, which anthropology is gradually deciphering under the palimpsest of their obliterating splendour. With some aspects of the process we are not here concerned. If ‘Homer,’ as many modern scholars suppose, disliked human sacrifice and similar barbarities, and tempered or effaced the record of them, he reflects the growing efficacy of civilized, but not necessarily of poetic, ideas. It is otherwise with the transformation, whatever its precise nature and history, which put the defined character and rich personal accent of the Homeric Olympus in place of the psychological fluidity and incoherence of primitive religion. For the childhood of poetry the change possibly involved a loss. A world where there are no barriers, or none which magic cannot dissolve, where gods and men and beasts pass over into one another without resistance or demur, where everything can be done and had if the right formula be pronounced and the due charm applied—such a world is the home and habitat of the fairy tale; but its facile instability must be overcome before a mature poetry, no less certainly than before a mature science, can arise. The Homeric outlook upon the world had as a religion grave flaws, which merited the strictures of later moralists; but it had also, as a religion, magnificent qualities to which they rarely did justice. His deathless figures permanently raised the status of man and the ideals of human achievement; and every line of the poetry is instinct with an assurance of the glory of the world and the goodness of life, and the nobility of heroic emprise, and of reverence and of pity, which justly made his book the Bible of later Greece.
Yet it is plain that even Homer reflects or finds reflection in but a limited tract of the Greek mind; that there were many deeper, as well as darker, currents in the Greek way of apprehending the world, of which that radiant mirror shows no trace. Humanity had triumphed over the superhuman as well as over the subhuman, clarity over mystery as well as over confusion. The Ionian thinkers of the sixth century swept away the fables of Olympus, fastened on the problem of substance, and proclaimed the sublime discovery that the All is One. The Orphic cults and the Thracian orgies of Dionysus betrayed by the widespread and intimate hold which they won in Greek life, refined and humanized as they doubtless were, that religion in Greece too included the riot of intoxicated rapture as well as clear-eyed piety; the Bacchic frenzy, which carries men beyond themselves, as well as temperate self-reverence and self-control. Both these new elements enriched and uplifted, if at some points they also impoverished and degraded, Greek mentality and the Greek apprehension of the world, religious, philosophic, and poetic alike. The philosophic apprehension of unity reacted on religion, and the two strains coalesced in the sublime theism of Cleanthes’ hymn. The Dionysiac rapture reacted on philosophy—without it should we have had the great doctrine proclaimed in the Phædrus, of the divine vision won through madness and love? And both reacted upon poetry—above all on tragedy, with its stringent ideal of unity, maintained and manifested through all the phases and moods of conflict, and the alliance, disclosed in its very structure, of Apolline clarity and order with the lyric exaltation of Dionysus. But the matter of tragedy shows yet more evidently the larger and deeper World-view which poetry has now won. In passing from Homer to Aeschylus we enter an atmosphere in which the gods are hardly ever visible, but which is laden and tense with the sense of divine things. His persons, it was said, are more than human; certainly his gods are sometimes—like the Zeus of the Prometheus—less than divine. But the Aeschylean universe has outgrown Olympus without having dispossessed it. A soul of immense reach and depth, apprehending life from many sides, but always with a sense of vast issues and inexhaustible import, here interprets the old stories of man’s relations with the gods, and leaves us with a new vision of the possibilities and responsibility of man. His tragic conflicts call incommensurate forces into play, and their apparent solution leaves yet larger problems unsolved. The story of Prometheus ended with his reconciliation to Zeus; and this doubtless expressed the poet’s deliberate intention and design. The modern world has remembered Prometheus, not for his final surrender or appeasement, but as the assertor and embodiment of something in man which stands over against the gods he recognizes, and not only endures unflinchingly all that their utmost anger can inflict, but arraigns them himself before a law of Justice higher than their own. Æschylus, we know, was a devoutly religious man, and never dreamed of surrendering his reverence for the divine because of the crimes of the gods. Possibly, as Wilamowitz has suggested, he believed that divinity itself had passed through a youth ‘full of foolish noise’ to become with ripening years a righteous God and Father, worthy at length of universal reverence. Reverence for such an erring divinity is hardly distinguishable from forgiveness; in any case it foreshadows, if it does not announce, the clear recognition of human responsibility. And that recognition is already dominant in the mature work of Æschylus. The traditional superstitions which still entangled the Greek mind—the doctrine of an irresistible fate, or of a divine jealousy attending human greatness—dissolve under the scrutiny of his terrible insight. Man is free even in his crimes, and the greater because he is free. Clytaemnestra chooses and wills as freely as Lady Macbeth; she is as little the helpless victim of the curse of Atreus as the other of the Witches’ spell. It needed a great poet thus to embrace in his vision of life things incompatible to common sense. ‘Whether Æschylus is greater,’ declares the penetrating interpreter to whom I have referred, ‘when he uplifts our hearts by the full tones of surrender to the divine, or when he thrills us with the terrible acts and sufferings of human freewill, every one must decide for himself from his own experience; but let no one say that he understands the poet until he has known them both.’[31] The poet’s eye, ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ overcomes the antinomies of theological dogma; and herein lies one of the most signal services which poetic apprehension has rendered to thought, and not least to religion.
To pass from Æschylus to Dante is to watch operations of poetic intelligence in which only the environment, the material, and the instruments of expression are profoundly changed. The words just quoted of the Greek might apply without the alteration of a syllable to the Florentine; and if ever poet saw earth and heaven at once it was he. But the theological World-view which he found was more authoritatively established, more intellectual in its philosophical substance, and more rich and beautiful in its human appeal. The fresh fountain of religious feeling, still abundantly flowing, was fortified and entrenched within a vast structure of elaborated dogma, for which councils and saints had supplied the architects and the masons, and ancient philosophy the stones. Within this imposing edifice, nevertheless, Dante, with complete conviction, found and made his home. No one now questions the absoluteness of Dante’s Catholic faith, and we should seek in vain for any rebellious upsurging of the poet in him against the starkest of scholastic abstractions. On the contrary, his wonderful gift of style continually finds the material for poetry in the most seemingly arid regions. Sometimes the result is merely an astonishing tour de force; but often we become aware that Dante has not only invented but discovered, and that many a dogma which has the air of being the mere husk of religion is in reality the imperfect, stammering utterance through which religious passion sought to make itself articulate. Dante, in short, makes us feel in these constructions of the intellect the language of the soul.
To do this needed something more than devout belief. It needed the imaginative intuition of a poet. The poetry of Dante was distinguished from that of his older contemporaries above all by being just this intense soul-vision put into words. ‘I simply write down what Love within dictates.’[32] Psychological veracity never fails him. Allegory, in so many hands a tissue of personified abstractions, becomes, in his, a living image of humanity. Symbolic meanings and applications interweave and encircle it, but the core is real. His vision is only on the surface a description—necessarily speculative—of the fortunes of souls after death; its substance, as he tells us, is ‘man of his freewill choosing good or evil here.’ The human denizens of his hell and purgatory and paradise have undergone no inner change; they are the men he had known, in their spiritual habits as they lived; and their fate, when Dante is thinking most as a poet and least as a theologian, is a continuation of their crucial actions. That Paolo and Francesca are immersed in unquenchable flames satisfies the theological idea of retribution; Dante inflicts on them the more searching penalty of being for ever locked in the embrace of their illicit love. And how often, when he thinks he is devoutly following out to the last consequence the Church’s dogma of eternal punishment, he is unconsciously testifying to the poet’s sublime faith in the soul of man as stronger than death and hell. ‘Who is he,’ asks Dante, looking upon Capaneo (Inf. xiv. 46), ‘who seems not to heed the flame, but lies fiercely unsubdued by the fiery vein?’ Or the yet greater picture of Farinata (Inf. x. 85), defiantly erect where the rest grovel in agony, ‘as if he held hell in great disdain.’ Even the criminals whom the poet most abhors, and thrusts into the very depths of the abyss, even the traitors guilty of the death of Cæsar or of Christ, he allows still to show greatness of soul; Brutus, champed to a bloody foam in the jaws of Lucifer, is still the Stoic philosopher, and though he writhes in agony, utters not a word (Inf. xxxiv. 66). And how wonderfully in the great Ulysses scene (Inf. xxvi) the poet takes the pen out of the hand of the theologian, and, forgetting the ‘fraud’ for which the captor of Troy is doing penance in hell, compels us to listen entranced to his tale of that last voyage, beyond the sunset, of the old wanderer, still insatiable of experience, who had kindled his shrinking comrades by bidding them ‘Consider of what seed ye are sprung; ye were not made to live like the brute beasts, but to follow after virtue and knowledge.’ Strange words to issue from the quenchless flames of hell! But Dante goes beyond this. For the sake of the heroism of Cato, he flatly violates the theological categories which condemned him to hell, and makes him the guardian of Purgatory.[33] As for the rest of the ‘virtuous heathen,’ he cannot indeed transfer them from the hell to which the Church has assigned them—a hell much more ferocious than any of which they had dreamed—to Elysium. But he does what he may, and he provides for them within the precincts of hell an Elysium of green lawns and running streams, ‘the one place in the Inferno where there is light and air’ (Inf. iii). The theological ethic of sin is thus unconsciously crossed, again and again, by the poetic ethic for which ‘good’ means greatness of soul.
Moreover, with a depth of spiritual insight strangely in contrast with the vulgar notion of punishment which dictated the theological hell, Dante has asserted, even in this realm of iron necessity, the freedom of man. The inmates of hell are not convicts condemned and punished for sins long since repented of: they are there of their own motion and by their own will; and if there is no hope there, it is not because God has no mercy, but because they cannot repent. The souls in Purgatory are held there by no compulsion; they desire nothing but to be purified of their sins, and the moment they desire to mount to Paradise, that moment they are free.
It would be strange, then, had Dante, with all his sense of supreme cosmic forces, not stood for the faith that man is yet the ‘captain of his soul.’ There he is at one with Æschylus and Milton, and the other great theological poets of the West. Man’s ‘freedom’ is a root idea of the Comedy; and not merely because its purpose was to show him ‘in the exercise of freewill,’ determining his fate hereafter. Dante went much farther than this. A devoted Catholic and citizen, and eager to welcome the authority both of Church and State, he was driven by the corruption of the one and the anarchy of the other to seek ‘another way’—the way of spiritual self-help with the aid of philosophy and theology, along which he is led by Vergil and Beatrice. The great farewell words with which Vergil leaves him in the Earthly Paradise, ‘I crown and mitre thee king and bishop over thyself,’ express with thrilling power the individualist—nay, the revolutionary—side of his thought. He would not have been the great poet he was if it had been the only side. Dante’s reverence for Vergil and for Beatrice is of the very substance of his self-assertion; he has crowned and mitred himself by taking them for his guides, and the result is the great poetic cosmos eloquent beyond all the other masterpieces of the world of devout discipleship, and yet instinct in every line with the ardour of a soul ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.’
But the name of Beatrice points to another aspect of Dante’s work on which the impress of the poet in him is yet more unmistakably set. Measured by the range and compass of thought, and by the richness and delicacy of feeling, which the term in his usage conveys, Dante is the first, as he is the greatest, of the poets of Love. His poetry recovers and renews, or at the least suggests and recalls, all the varieties of intellectual and emotional experience for which philosophy, religion, and romance had, before his time, found in ‘Love’ the final expression, or the speaking symbol. The cosmic love (φιλία) by which Empedocles had first interpreted the universal phenomena which we still, hardly less anthropomorphically, know as ‘attraction’; the passion for another human being (ἔρως) in which the author of the Phædrus and the Symposium discovered one of the sources of the divine exaltation which emancipates men from their human limits, and endows them with the vision of reality; the love of God for man, and of man for God (ἀγάπη), proclaimed as the very core of Christianity in the Fourth Gospel—these three types of love, all denoted for Dante by Amor, amore,[34] were conjoined in his experience with a fourth, distinct from all, though nearly allied to the second: the romantic love of woman which had been the chief inspiration of the poetry of Provence, and which, however sublimated and spiritualized, is enshrined in the Vita Nuova. To say that Dante’s mind, equally powerful in analysis and in synthesis, confounds these distinctions would be unjust; but it would be equally untrue to assert that their associations are never blended. Christian philosophy had itself absorbed the first; cosmic attraction then reappeared in a sublime apotheosis, as the love which draws all the universe towards God, and by which God, as its source, ‘moves the sun and the other stars.’ And if Dante, in his treatise on poetry,[35] distinguishes himself from the poets of ‘love’ as a poet of ‘morals,’ or ‘righteousness,’ he also, as we saw, ascribes his whole power as a poet to his writing what love dictated in his heart. Man in virtue of his freedom has power to misuse Love, and Dante everywhere scornfully contrasts the higher and the baser love. Nay, all sin which can be ‘purged away’ he regards as due to ‘love’ wrongly used; the whole population of Purgatory is there because it loved unwisely, or loved indifferent things too well, or right things too little. But the harm here, for Dante, arises not from love, but from the application to it of the evil material in man’s nature—‘as a foul impress may be set upon the most precious wax.’[36]
Something of the idealizing atmosphere which Christianity and Plato had thrown about love thus always colours it in Dante’s mind. But it is also subtly touched with that other idealizing force which not Christianity but the poets had recognized, which Christian ethics had contemptuously tolerated or scornfully tabooed. Dante had known the love of woman in many forms. Longing for the absent wife and child had consumed his flesh and his bones in exile;[37] and his virginal adoration of Beatrice sprang from no coldness of the blood. The power of womanhood to lift men to supreme heights of vision and fortitude, which he had divined through Beatrice and sung in the great canzone of the Vita Nuova,[38] no more passed out of his faith than did her image from his memory. Nor was it for nothing that his master Vergil had forgotten the political and imperial purpose of his poem in making Dido the most moving heroine of antiquity. If the Comedy is a great scheme of salvation, it is also a great song of womanhood such as, he said, no man ever sang before; and if we say that Beatrice is there a symbol for Theology, that is doubtless true: but a thousand phrases remind us how much she symbolizes besides; and the look ‘in the eyes of Beatrice,’ which draws Dante upward through the circling spheres of Paradise to the beatific vision, attests also his faith in the power of the lover’s adoration to lift a man out of his humanity (trasumanar), and make him ‘joyful even in the flames.’
Thus Dante, though he counted himself not among the poets of love, but among the poets of ‘righteousness,’ is one of the inspiring sources of the modern poetry which invests the love of man and woman with the ideal attributes which philosophy and religion had proclaimed in other forms of love, but had ignored or repudiated in this. In Spenser—Platonist, Christian, and lover at once—the fusion of the three strains is complete; his great hymns to Love, who
is lord of all the world by right,
And ruleth all things by his powerful saw,
prelude his even greater hymn of marriage. Even Chaucer perhaps learnt from Dante that amazed awe with which, in the opening lines of one of his earliest Italianate poems, he contemplates the ‘wonderful working’ of love.[39] The Petrarchists and Sonneteers went far to reduce the expression of this love to hollow phrase-making. But with Romanticism it found fresh and original utterance, and its status in the world has never been more loftily affirmed than by Celtic Romanticizing poets of to-day. ‘I say that Eros is a being!’ declares one of the finest spirits among them. ‘It is more than a power of the soul, though it is that also. It has a universal life of its own.’[40]