[155] Tr. IV. c. 28.
[156] Inferno, XXV. 64-67.
[157] Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126.
[158] Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and who was probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the "Faerie Queene" (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a compliment, and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is instructive to compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. They are singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a "sage and serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as Urania. Better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor old god of gardens! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable.
[159] This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim humor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former pupil. There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but his own damnation. We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. There is something like humor in the opening verses of the XVI. Paradiso, where Dante tells us how even in heaven he could not help glorying in being gently born,—he who had devoted a Canzone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, something touchingly natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of his property, and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing
"Needy nothings trimmed in jollity,
And captive Good attending Captain Ill,"
would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could neither buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Convito which shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. He tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the bad rather than the good. "Verily I saw the place on the flanks of a mountain in Tuscany called Falterona, where the basest peasant of the whole countryside digging found there more than a bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which perhaps had awaited him more than a thousand years." (Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see the grimness of his face as he looked and thought, "how salt a savor hath the bread of others!"
[160] L'Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere, I. of the Convito. Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37.
[161] How Dante himself could allegorize even historical personages may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c. 28), where, commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Martia and Cato as mere figures of speech.
[162] II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface.