Is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superstitious regard in Italy, and in the sixteenth century? His creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. No one epoch has held the key to him. There lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's works." It will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. But as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "We are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pass, "but of this we are sure: Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai."
THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO
There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given.
A work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,—
"Onorate 'l altissimo poeta,
Torna sua ombra che era dipartita"?
The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lines in Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian words. They alone shine with the idea. They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.
Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most foreign to the genius of the English race. From the point of view of English-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman.
In the treatment of the supernatural the Teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny," etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. Perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,—palsied, as it were, with fear,—there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. The strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. Sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. This lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.