The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

What is the impression left, what the result produced, by the entire canto? Surely it is that the poet’s imagination, operating through the poet’s realistic treatment of the Ideal, and his idealistic treatment of the Real, has taken us all captive, so that we feel nothing of the Incredulus odi disposition, the unwillingness to believe, and the mental antipathy engendered by that unwillingness, so tersely and so truly described by Horace, but yield credence wholly and absolutely to the existence of a place called Purgatory, with its circles, its denizens, its hopes, its aspirations, and purifying power. But, read where you will in the pages of the Divina Commedia, you will find this is one of the main causes of its permanent hold on the attention of the world. Its theology may to many seem open to question, to some obsolete and out of date; its astronomy necessarily labours under the disadvantage of having been prior to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, not to speak of the great astronomers of later date, including our own times; and its erudition, weighty and wonderful as it is, can occasionally be shown by more recent and more advantageously circumstanced scholarship to be faulty and inaccurate. 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. But I must allow that the passage which does immediately follow, and which discourses of the panther, the lion, and the wolf, is so symbolic, and has lent itself to so many suggestions and interpretations, that, had the poem generally been conceived and composed in that fashion, it would not only have fallen short of immortality, it would long since have been buried in the pool of Lethe, which is the predestined resting-place of all untempered and unredeemed symbolism in verse. I smile, and I have no doubt you will smile also, when I say that I, too, have my own interpretation of the inner meaning of those three menacing beasts. But be assured I have not the smallest intention of communicating it to you. I gladly pass on, gladly and quickly, as Dante himself passes on, to a more welcome and less disputable apparition, who answers, when questioned as to who and what he is, that man he is not, but man he was; that his parents were of Lombardy, and all his folk of Mantuan stock; that he lived in the age of the great Cæsar and the fortunate Augustus; that he was a poet—Poeta fui—sang of the just and right-minded son of Anchises, the pious Æneas, who came to Italy and founded a greater city even than Troy, when proud Ilium was levelled to the dust. In the presence of Virgil we forget the embarrassing symbolism of the preceding passage, and believe once more; and, when Dante addresses him in lines of affectionate awe, that you all know by heart, and with repeating which all lovers of poets and poetry console themselves when the prosaic world passes on the other side, every doubt, every misgiving, every lingering remnant of incredulity is dismissed, and we are prepared, nay, we are eager, to take the triple journey, along two-thirds of which Virgil tells Dante he has been sent by the Imperador che lassù regna, the Ruler of the Universe, to conduct him. Prepared we are, nay, eager, I say, to hear the disperate strida of the spiriti dolenti, the wailings of despair of the eternally lost, and the yearning sighs of those che son contenti nel fuoco, who are resigned to purgatorial pain, and scarce suffer from it, since they are buoyed up by the hope of finally joining the beate genti, and, along with the blessed, seeing the face of God.

Allor si mosse, ed io gli tenni dietro,

says Dante in the closing line of this, the First Canto of the Divina Commedia.

Then moved he on, and I paced after him.

Could you have a more realistic touch? So realistic, so real is it, in the Realm of the Ideal, that, just as Dante followed Virgil, so we follow both, humble and unquestioning believers in whatever may be told us.

I am not unaware that, in an age in which the approval of inflexibly avenging justice consequent on wrongdoing is less marked and less frequent than sentimental compassion for the wrongdoer, the punishments inflicted in the Inferno for the infraction of the Divine Law, as Dante understood it, are found repellent by many persons, and agreeable to few. I grant that they are appalling in their sternness; nor was Dante himself unconscious of this, for he does describe Minos as “scowling horribly” as the souls of the damned came before him for judgment, and for discriminating consignment to their allotted circle of torture. Always terse, and therefore all the more terrible, he nevertheless exhausts the vocabulary of torment in describing the doloroso ospizio, the dolorous home from which they will never return. As Milton speaks of the “darkness visible” of Hell, so Dante, before him, writes of it as loco d’ogni luce muto, a place silent of light, but that wails and moans like a tempestuous sea, battered and buffeted by jarring winds, finally designated

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta.
The infernal hurricane that ceases never.

Of those who are whirled about by it, di qua, di là, di giù, di su, hither and thither, upward and downward, he writes the awful line:

Nulla speranza li conforta mai,
Non che di posa, ma di minor pena.
They have no hope of consolation ever,
Or even mitigation of their woe.

I could not bring myself, and I am sure you would not wish me to cite more minutely, the magnificently merciless phrases—all of them thoroughly realistic touches concerning ideal torment—wherewith Dante here makes his terza rima an instrument or organ on which to sound the very diapason of the damned; and, did he dwell overlong on those deep, distressing octaves of endless suffering, without passing by easy and natural gradations into the pathetic minor, he would end by alienating all but the austerer natures. But he is too great an artist, too human, too congenitally and rootedly a poet, to make that mistake. I am sure you all know in which canto of the Inferno occur the terrific phrases I have been citing, and need no telling that they are immediately followed by the most tender and tearful passage in the wide range of poetic literature. While even yet the sound of la bufera infernal seems howling in our ears, suddenly it all subsides, and we hear instead a musically plaintive voice saying: