Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays

by Julia Ward Howe

Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go,

Musing, mayhap, on what is far away,

Come ye from climes so far, as your array

And look of foreign nurture seem to shew,

That from your eyes no tears of pity flow,

As ye along our mourning city stray,

Serene of countenance and free, as they

Who of her deep disaster nothing know?

Oh! she hath lost her Beatrice, her saint,

And what of her her co-mates can reveal

Must drown with tears even strangers' hearts, perforce.

On the first anniversary of his lady's death, as he sits absorbed in thoughts of her, he sketches the figure of an angel upon his tablets. Turning presently from his work, he sees near him some gentlemen of his acquaintance, who are watching the movements of his pencil. He answers the interruption thus:

Into my lonely thoughts that noble dame

Whom Love bewails, had entered in the hour

When you, my friends, attracted by his power,

To see the task that did employ me came.

Many a sigh of dole escapes his heart, he says,

But they which came with sharpest pang were those

Which said: "O intellect of noble mould,

A year to-day it is since thou didst seek the skies."

We may find, perhaps, a more wonderful proof of his constancy in his stout-hearted resistance to the charms of a beautiful lady who regards him with that intense pity which is akin to love. To her he says:

Never was Pity's semblance, or Love's hue

So wondrously in face of lady shown,

That tenderly gave ear to Sorrow's moan

Or looked on woful eyes, as shows in you.

To this new attraction he is on the point of surrendering, when the vision of Beatrice rises before him, as he first saw her,—robed in crimson, and bright with the angelic beauty of childhood. All other thoughts are put to flight by this, and with renewed faith he devotes himself to the memory of Beatrice, hoping to say of her some day "that which hath never yet been said of any lady."

All who have been lovers—and who has not?—must feel, I think, that the "Vita Nuova" is the romance of a true love. The Beatrice of the "Divina Commedia" is this love, and much more. Dante has had a deep and availing experience of life. Statesman and scholar, he has laid his fiery soul upon the world's great anvil, where Fate, with heavy hammering and fiery blowing, has wrought out of him a stern, sad man, so hunted and exiled that the ways of Imagination alone are open to him. In its domain, he calls around him the majestic shadows of those with whom his life has made him familiar. For him, the way to Heaven lies through Hell and Purgatory. Into these regions, the blessed Beatrice cannot come. She sends, however, the poet shade, who seems to her most fit to be his guide. The classic refinement makes evident to him the vulgarity of sin and the logic of its consequences. He surveys the eternal, hopeless punishment, and passes through the cleansing fires of Purgatory, at whose outer verge, a fair vision comes to bless him. Beatrice, in a mystical car, her beauty at first concealed by a veil of flowers which drop from the hands of attendant angels, speaks to him in tones which move his penitential grief.

The high love of his youth thus appears to him as accusing Conscience, which stands to question him with the offended majesty of a loving mother. Through her rebukes, precious in their bitterness, he attains to that view of his own errors without which it would have been impossible for him to forsake them. It is a real orthodox "repentance and conviction of sin" with which the religious renewal of his life begins. Tormented by this cruel retrospect, the poet is mercifully bathed in the waters of forgetfulness, and then, being made a new creature, regains the society of Beatrice.