For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote, perverted, archaic loveliness of certain figures on the walls of Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moon beneath her feet.
But neither of them know, as does their worshiper and lover, what lies on the other side of the moon.
What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift is his pride and his humility. The one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He, alone of great artists, holds in his hand the true sword of the Spirit for the dividing asunder of men and things. There is no necessity to lay all the stress upon the division between the Lower and the Higher Love, between Hell and Heaven. There are other distinctions in life than these. And between all distinctions, between all those differences which separate the "fine" from the "base," the noble from the ignoble, the beautiful from the hideous, the generous from the mean; Dante draws the pitiless sword-stroke of that "eternal separation" which is the most tragic thing in the world. In the truest sense tragic! For so many things, and so many people, that must be thus "cut off," are among those who harrow our hearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in their weakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused age—our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneath the beautiful—through the thick air of indolence masquerading as toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the commonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division," his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted with such Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether our "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter? Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recovers its "Tone"; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward to its own Music!
That Angel of God, who when their hearts were shaken with fear before the flame-lit walls of Dis, came, so straight across the waters, and quelled the insolence of Hell; with what Disdain he turns away his face, even from those he has come to save!
These "messengers" of God, who have so superb a contempt for all created things, does one not meet them, sometimes, even in this life, as they pass us by upon their secret errands?
The beginning of the Inferno contains the cruellest judgment upon our generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit of this age that, hearing it, one staggers as if from a stab. Are we not this very tribe of caitiffs who have committed the "Great Refusal?" Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they envy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for God or for his Enemies but are "for themselves"; those who may not even take refuge in Hell, lest the one damned get glory of them! The very terror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone from bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers of humanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything." But one sometimes wonders whether a life all "irony," all "pity," all urbane "interest," would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger, not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial air of universal acceptance which has become the fashion.
What if, after all—even though this universe be so poor a farce—the mad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists, were right?
Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe! One loves to repeat "all is possible;" but that particular possibility has little attraction. It would be indeed an anti-climax if the queer Comedy we have so daintily been patronizing turned out to be a Divine Comedy—and ourselves the point of the jest! Not that this is very likely to occur. It is more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage that in this wager of faith with un-faith neither will ever discover who really won!
But Dante's "Disdain" is not confined to the winners in the cosmic dicing match. There are heroic hearts in hell who, for all their despair, still yield not, nor abate a jot of their courage. Such a one was that great Ghibelline Chief who was lost for "denying immortality." "If my people fled from thy people—that more torments me than this flame." In one respect Dante is, beyond doubt, the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heightening the glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the three-fold kingdom of his "Terza Rima" passes, in tragic array, the whole procession of human history—and each figure there, each solitary person, whether of the Blessed or the Purged, or the Condemned, wears, like a garment of fire, the dreadful dignity of having been a man! The moving sword-point that flashes, first upon one and then upon another, amid our dim transactions, is nothing but the angry arm of human imagination, moulding life to grander issues; creating, if not discovering, sublimer laws.
In conveying that thrilling sense of the momentousness of human destiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke, none can surpass him. The brief, branding lines, with which the enemies of God are engraved upon their monuments "more lasting than brass," seem to add a glory to damnation. Who can forget how that "Simonist" and "Son of Sodom" lifts his hands up out of the deepest Pit, and makes "the fig" at God? "Take it, God, for at Thee I aim it!" There is a sting of furious blasphemy in this; personal outrage that goes beyond all limits.