This is the positive statement emanating, in all probability, from the poet. Perhaps it is as well that he did not live to inaugurate the series of Commentaries upon his poem, which began within a few years of his death and show no signs of ceasing.[745] So it has been left to others to determine the metes and bounds and special features of the Commedia’s allegorical intent. The task has proved hazardous, because Dante was such a great poet, so realistic in his visualizing and so masterful in forcing the different phases of his many-sided thoughts to combine in concrete creations. His drama is so living that one can hardly think it an allegory.
Evidently certain matters, like the Mystic Procession and its apocalyptic appurtenances in the last cantos of the Purgatorio, are sheer allegory. Such, while suited to suggest theological tenets, are formal and lifeless, a little like the hieratic allegorical mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, which were composed before Christian art had become imbued with Christian feeling.[746] Indeed, doffing for an instant one’s reverence for the great poet, one may say that from the point of view of art and life, Dante’s symbolism becomes jejune, or at least ceases to draw us, according as it becomes palpable allegory.[747]
Beyond such incidents one recognizes that the general course of the poem, its more pointed occurrences, together with its chief characters and the scenes amid which they move, have commonly both literal and allegorical meaning.[748] Usually it is wise not to press either side too rigorously. The poet’s mind worked in the clearly imagined setting and dramatic action of his poem, where fact and symbolism combined in that reality which is both art and life. Surely the Commedia was completed and rendered real and beautiful through many a touch and incident which had no allegorical intent. Even as in a French cathedral, the main sculptured and painted subjects have doctrinal, that is to say, allegorical, significance, besides their literal truth; but there is also much lovely carving of scroll and flowered ornament and beast and bird, which beautifies the building.
For Dante’s purpose, to set out the state of disembodied spirits after death, allegory might prove prejudicial, because of the intensity of his artist’s vision. Much of the poem’s symbolism, especially in the Paradiso, belongs to that unavoidable imagery to which every one is driven when attempting to describe spiritual facts. Such symbolism, however, when constructed with the plastic power of a Dante, may become itself so convincing or compelling as to reduce the intended spiritual signification to the terms of its concrete embodiment in the symbol. In view of the carnality of most sin, one is not surprised to find the place of punishment a converging cavity within the earth. With Dante, as with Hildegard, the sights and torments of Hell are realistically given quite as of course. Perhaps Dante’s Mount of Purgatory begins to give us pause, and its corniced mise en scène tends to enflesh the idea of spirit and materialize its purgation. But the limiting effect of symbolism is most keenly felt in the Paradiso, notwithstanding the beauty of that cantica; for its very concrete symbolism seems sometimes to ensphere the intended truths of spirit in a sort of crystalline translucency. It is all a marvellously imagined description of the state of blessed souls. Yet in the final pure and glorious image of a white rose (candida rosa) the company of the glorified spirits is so visualized as to become, surely not theatrical, but as if assembled upon the rounding tiers of seats occupied by an audience.[749] There are topics in which the sheer ratiocination of Thomas is more completely spiritual than the poetic vision of Dante.
Dante’s most admirable symbolic creation was also his dearest reality—Beatrice. And while this being in which he has immortalized his fame and hers, is eminently the creation of his genius, the elements were drawn from the many-chambered mediaeval past. Some issued out of the vast matter of chivalric love, with its high heart of service and sense of its own worth, its science, its foolish and most wise reasoning, its preciosity of temper—Dante and his literary friends were virtuosos in everything pertaining to its understanding.[750] This love was of the fine-reasoning mind. The first canzone of the Vita Nuova does not begin “Donne, che sentite amore,” but: “Donne, ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore.” Through that book love is what it never ceases to be with Dante, intelligenza:
“Intelligenza nuova, che l’ Amore
Piangendo mette in lui....”
The piangendo, the tears, have likewise part; without them love is not had or even understood. The enormous sense of love’s supreme worth—that too is in Dante. It had all been with the Troubadours of Provence, with Chrétien de Troies, and with the great Minnesingers, and had been reasoned on, appreciated, felt and wept over, by ladies and knights who listened to their poems. From France and Provence love and its reasonings had come to Italy even before Dante’s eyes had opened to it and other matters.
This was one strain that entered the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, of the Convito, of the Commedia. But Beatrice is something else: she is, or becomes, Theology, the God-given science of the divine and human. Long had Theologia (divina scientia) been a queen; and even before her, Philosophia, as with Boëthius, had been a queenly woman gowned with as full symbolical particularity as ever the Beatrice of Dante. Indeed from the time of the Psychomachia of Prudentius to the Roman de la Rose of De Lorris and De Meun, every human quality, and many an aspect of human circumstance, had been personified, for the most part under the forms of gracious or seductive women. Above all of these rose, sweet, gracious, and potent, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. It came as of course to Dante to symbolize his conception of divine wisdom in a woman’s form. The achievement of his genius was the transfusing combination of elements of courtly love, didactic allegory, and divina scientia, in a creature before whom the whole man Dante, heart and reason and religious faith, could stand and gaze and love and worship.
Beatrice was his and of him always; but with the visions and experience of that mature and grace-illuminated manhood, which expressed itself in the Commedia, she comes to be much that she had not been when she lived on earth or had just left it, and Dante was a maker of exquisite verses in Florence; and much too that she had scarce become while the poet was consoling himself with philosophy for his bereavement and the dulling of his early faith. Beatrice lives and moves and has her ever more uplifted being as the reality as well as symbol of Dante’s thoughts of life. With all first love’s idealism, he loved a girl; then she, having passed from earth, becomes the inspiration and object of address of the young maker of sonnets and canzoni, who with such intellectual preciosity was intent on building these verses of fine-spun sentiment. Thereafter, when he is in darker mood, she does not altogether leave him, whatever variant attitudes his thought and temper take. And at last the yearning self-fulfilments of his renewed life draw together in the Beatrice of the Commedia.
It is very beautiful, and the growth, as well as work, of genius; but it is not strange. For there is no bound to the idealizing of the love which first transfuses a youth’s nature with a mortal golden flame, and awakens it to new understanding. Out of whatever of experience of life and joy and sorrow may come to the man, this first love may still vivify itself anew—often in dreams—and become again living and beautiful, in tears, and will awaken new perceptions and disclose further vistas of the intelligenza nuova which love never ceases to impart to him who has loved.