A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid. Love’s night is noon.
Dante’s own account of his first meeting with Beatrice confirms this surmise. This is what he himself says, after Beatrice, as Boccaccio relates, “very winning, very graceful, in aspect very beautiful,” had turned her gaze on Dante from time to time at their first meeting. “At that moment the spirit of life which abides in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble, and tremulously it spake these words, ‘Behold a god stronger than I, who cometh to lord it over me.’” These may perhaps seem strange words in which to record the first meeting of a boy of nine with a girl of eight. But, over and above the fact that they are the record, written several years later, of the feeling aroused by that first meeting, allowance must be made for the proverbial precocity of genius, and also for that of southern over northern temperaments. Its genuineness is confirmed by the whole sequel, as testified by the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia; the presiding presence of Beatrice in both having long before been anticipated by the words, “If it shall please Him, by whom all things live, to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady.” How completely that hope was attained is to be seen in the closing canto of the Purgatorio and in the whole of the Paradiso.
The life and poetry of Milton contain nothing (if exception be made of his beautiful and lofty sonnet, written in the very spirit of the Divina Commedia, on his second wife, “Methought I saw my late espousèd Saint”) to compare with Dante’s love, at once real and ideal, masculine yet mystical, for Beatrice. The language used by Eve in addressing Adam, in Paradise Lost—
My author and disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey, so God ordains.
God is thy law, thou mine—
and the very choice of a subject the dominating incident of which is described by the well-known words, “The woman did give me, and I did eat,” would almost seem to indicate that Milton’s conception of woman, and his attitude towards her, were such as can be attributed to no other poet. It is the attitude of unqualified masculine domination. Again, in Samson Agonistes the very centre and pith of the poem is the incorrigible frailty and inferiority of women—a thesis that would be extraordinary, even if true, for a poet. Samson starts with a reproval of himself for weakly revealing the secret of his strength to the persistent subtlety of a woman, “that species monster, my accomplished snare,” as he calls Dalila, since “yoked her bond-slave by foul effeminacy”—a servitude he stigmatises as “ignominious and infamous,” whereby he is “shamed, dishonoured, quelled.” When Dalila, profoundly penitent for what she has done, thereby incurring his displeasure, prostrates herself before him, and sues for pardon, he spurns her from him with the words,
Out, out, hyæna! these are thy wonted arts,
and goes on to say they are the arts of every woman, “to deceive, betray,” and then to “feign remorse.” With abject humility she confesses that curiosity to learn all secrets, and then to publish them, are “common female faults incident to all our sex.” This only causes him to insult and spurn her yet more fiercely; and he declares that God sent her to “debase him”—one of those theological peculiarities which apparently made God an accomplice with “this viper,” for which the non-Calvinistic Christian finds it difficult to account.
Nor can it be said that Milton is here, like Shakespeare, speaking only dramatically and objectively. The Chorus in Samson Agonistes is of his opinion, declaring that the man is favoured of heaven who discovers “one virtuous woman, rarely found”; and that is why
God’s universal law
Gave to the man despotic power
Over his female in due awe,
Nor from that right to part, an hour,
Smiles she or lour.
After delivering itself of these opinions, the Chorus suddenly exclaims, “I see a storm,” which, in the circumstances, is perhaps scarcely wonderful.