A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose hopes are innocent.
Or in Coventry Patmore’s?—
So wise in all she ought to know,
So ignorant in all beside.
Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to Literature and Art homely tasks thus described?—
... She brims the pail,
Straining the udders with her dainty palms,
Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream,
And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms,
Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.
A wimple on her head, and kirtled short,
She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind,
A heavenly earthliness.
In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated passage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero, before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the passage in the original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:
So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father’s aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet’s top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.
Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman. Only in an age sicklied o’er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.
But a poet’s ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most—indeed, nearly all—of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom
Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.