Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.
The land where I was born sits by the sea,
Unto whose shore a restless river rolls,
To be at peace with all its followers.
Then comes the love-story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, told in such exquisite accents, so veiled in music, so transfigured by verse, that even the sternest moralist, I imagine, can hardly bring himself to call it illicit. I confess I think it the loveliest single passage in poetry ever written; yes, lovelier even than anything in Shakespeare, for it has all Shakespeare’s genius, and more than Shakespeare’s art; and I compassionate the man or woman who, having had the gift of birth, goes down to the grave without having read it. There is no such other love-story, no such other example of the lacrymæ rerum, the deep abiding tearfulness of things. Nothing should be taken from, nothing can be added to it. To me it seems sacred, like the Ark of the Covenant, that no one must presume to touch; and I own I tremble as I presume, here and there, to attempt, unavailingly, to translate it. It was my good fortune to be in Florence in the month of May 1865, when the City of Flowers, the City of Dante, which then seemed peopled with nightingales and roses, was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her exiled poet; and those of us who loved him assembled in the Pagliano Theatre to hear Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi repeat, to the accompaniment of living pictures, the best-known passages of the Divina Commedia. One of those supreme elocutionists, who still lives, recited the story of Paolo and Francesca; and from her gifted voice we heard of the tempo de’ dolci sospiri and i dubbiosi aesiri, the season of sweet sighs and hesitating desires, the disiato riso, the longed-for smile, the trembling kiss, the closing of the volume, and then the final lines of the canto:
Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
L’altro piangeva sì, che di pietade
Io venni men così com’io morisse:
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.
While the one told to us this dolorous tale,
The other wept so bitterly, that I
Out of sheer pity felt as like to die;
And down I fell, even as a dead body falls.
This unmatched tale of tender transgression and vainly penitential tears almost reconciles us to the more abstract description of punishment that precedes it, and the detailed account of pitiless penalty that follows it, in succeeding cantos; and the absolute fusion of the ideal and the real in the woeful story imparts to it a verisimilitude irresistible even by the most unimaginative and incredulous. Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, are names so familiar to us all that any story concerning them would have to be to the last degree improbable to move our incredulity. But who is it that is not prepared to believe in the sorrows of a love-tale?
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
It is the greatest of all masters of the human heart, the greatest and wisest teacher concerning human life, who tells us that; and Dante, who in this respect is to be almost as much trusted as Shakespeare himself, makes Francesca, with her truly feminine temperament, say:
Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Love that compels all who are loved to love,
Entangled both in such abiding charm,
That, as you see, he still deserts me not.
As we hear those words, it is no longer Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, Paolo, Francesca, that arrest our attention and rivet it by their reality. We are enthralled by the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will, of the larger and wider world we all inhabit, of this vast and universal theatre, of whose stage Love remains to-day, as it was yesterday, and will remain for ever, the central figure, the dominant protagonist.
So far we have seen, by illustrations purposely taken from passages in the Inferno and the Purgatorio familiar to all serious readers of the Divine Comedy, how Dante, by realistic touches, makes us believe in the ideal, and how, by never for long quitting the region of the Ideal, he reconciles us to the most accurate and merciless realism. But there is a third Realm to which he is admitted, and whither he transports us, the Paradiso. Some prosaically precise person would, perhaps, say that the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio is not a portion of the Paradiso. But you know better, for in it Beatrice appears to her poet-lover:
Sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color di fiamma viva,
In mantle green, and girt with living light,