For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to the Divina Commedia, written in the fullness of the Poet’s powers. But there are three lines in the Vita Nuova about the death of Beatrice that have haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all will feel:
Non la ci tolse qualità di gelo,
Nè di color, siccome l’altro fece,
Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:
lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals, but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true home.
It is not necessary to comment here on the First Canto of the Divina Commedia. That, one has done already before the Dante Society, and it is not requisite for one’s present theme. But in Canto the Second we meet with the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova. She it is that sends Virgil, who dwells in the neutral territory of Limbo, to the Poet, saying:
Io son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare:
Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.
And not only does she say that she is animated by love, which has caused her, now in Heaven, to feel so compassionately towards him, but also because he loved her so while she was on earth, and continued to do so after she had quitted it, with a fidelity that has lifted him above the crowd of ordinary mortals, and made of him a Poet. Here, let it be said in passing, we get another indication of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman, which is, among other qualities, to co-operate in the making and fostering of Poets, a mission in which they have never been wanting. Where, indeed, is the Poet who could not say of some woman, and, if he be fortunate, of more than one, what, in the Twenty-second Canto of the Purgatorio, Dante makes Statius say to Virgil, “Per te poeta fui,” “It was through you that I became a Poet.”
Throughout the remaining Cantos of the Inferno, Beatrice naturally is never mentioned, nor yet in the Purgatorio, till we reach Canto the Thirtieth, wherein occurs perhaps the most painful scene in the awe-inspiring poem. In it she descends from Heaven, an apparition of celestial light, compared by the Poet to the dazzling dawn of a glorious day. Smitten with fear, he turns for help to Virgil, but Virgil has left him. “Weep not,” says Beatrice to him, “that Virgil is no longer by your side; you will need all your tears when you hear me.” Then begins her terrible arraignment:
Guardaci ben: ben sem, ben sem Beatrice.
Look on me well! Yes, I am Beatrice.
Confused, Dante gazes upon the ground, and then glances at a fountain hard by; but, seeing his own image trembling in the water, he lowers his eyes to the green sward encircling it, and fixes them there, while she upbraids him for his deviation from absolute fidelity to her memory, and his disregard of her heavenly endeavours still to help and purify him. Boccaccio says that Dante was a man of strong passions, and possibly, indeed probably, he was. But Beatrice seems to reproach him with only one transgression, and, if one is to say what one thinks, she has always appeared to me a little hard on him. Nor does she rest content till she has compelled him to confess his fault. He does so, and then she tells him to lay aside his grief, and think no more of it, for he is forgiven. Perhaps, in mitigation of the feeling that her severity was in excess of the cause, one ought to remember, since it is peculiarly pertinent to my theme, that we are in the above harrowing scene presented with the crowning characteristic of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman, that, be the offence against her what it may, she forgets and forgives.
It might be interesting on some other occasion to inquire how far Dante’s poetic conception of Woman is shared by Poets generally, and by the greater Poets of our own land in particular. Meanwhile one may affirm that the inquiry would serve to show that it is in substance the same, though no other Poet, in whatsoever tongue, has extolled and glorified a woman as Dante did Beatrice. But Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, could all be shown, by apposite illustration, to leave on the mind a conception of woman as a being tender, devoted, faithful, helpful, “sweet, and serviceable,” as Tennyson says of Elaine, quick to respond to affection, sensitive to beauty in Nature and Arts, sympathising companion alike of the hearth and of man’s struggle with life—in a word, a creature of whom it is true to say, as, indeed, Byron has said, that “Love is her whole existence,” meaning by Love not what is too frequently in these days falsely presented to us in novels as such, but Love through all the harmonious scale of loving, maternal, filial, conjugal, romantic, religious, and universal.