Divine, indeed, are those lines of Dante. Why didn’t he write all such, instead of employing two volumes out of three, to show us how much less he cared to be divine than infernal? Was it absolutely necessary for him to have so much black ground for his diamonds?
And another poet who took to the black, or rather the burlesque, side of things, how could he write so beautifully on the same theme, and resist giving us whole poems as tender and confiding, to assist in making the world happy? The stanza respecting the Ave Maria is surely the best in Don Juan:—
Ave Maria! blessed be the hour!
The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft
Have felt the moment in its fullest power
Sink o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft,
And not a breath crept through the rosy air,
And yet the forest leaves seemed stirr’d with prayer.
Not, we beg leave to say, that we are Roman Catholic, either in our creed or our form of worship; though we should be not a little inclined to become such, did the creed contain nothing harsher or less just than the adoration of maternity. We have been taught to be too catholic in the true sense of the word (Universal) to wish for any ultimate form of Christianity, except that which shall drop all the perplexing thorns through which it has grown, and let the odour of its flower be recognised in its spotless force without one infernal embitterment.
But it will be said that there are infernal embitterments even in the sweetest forms of things, whether we will have them or no—massacres in bee-hives, Dantes among the greatest poets, Sicilian Vespers. Think of those, it will be said. Think of the horrible massacre known by the name of the “Sicilian Vespers.” Think of the day in your honeyed, Hyblæan island, when the same hour which
Sinks o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,
with not a breath in its rosy air, and with the leaves of its trees moving as if they were lips of adoring silence, was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children; ay, babes at the breast, and mothers innocent as the object of vesper worship. Was there nothing infernal in that? Is there nothing hellish, and of everlasting embitterment in the recollection?
No. And again a loud and happy No, of everlasting sweetness.
The infernal and the everlasting bitter imply the same things. There is nothing infernal that has a limit; therefore there is nothing infernal in nature. Look round, and show it if you can. Nature will have no unlimited pain. The sufferer swoons, or dies, or endures; but the limit comes. Death itself is but the dissolution of compounds that have either been disordered or worn out, and therefore cannot continue pleasantly to co-exist. Horrible was this Sicilian massacre; horrible and mad; one of the wildest reactions against wickedness in human history. The French masters of the island had grown mad with power and debauchery, and the islanders grew mad with revenge. It was the story in little of the French Revolution; not the Revolution of the Three Days, truly deserving the title of Glorious for its Christian forbearance; but the old, untaught, delirious, Robespierre Revolution. Dreadful is it to think of the vesper bell ringing to that soft worship of the mother of Jesus, and then of thousands of daggers, at the signal, leaping out of the bosoms of the worshippers, and plunging into the heart of every foreigner present, man, woman, and child. But there came an end; soon to the body; sooner or later, to the mind. The dead were buried; the French government in the island was expelled, and a better brought in. The evil perished, good came out of it; and myriads of vespers have taken place since then, but not one like that. Yes, myriads of vespers—a vesper every day, ever since—from the year 1282 to this present 1848,—all gentle, all secure from the like misery, all more or less worthy of the beautiful description of the poet. If the massacre called the Sicilian Vespers had been infernal, it would have been going on now! and nature has not made such hellish enormities possible. The only durability to which she tends is a happy one. Her shortest lives (generally speaking) are her least healthy; her greatest longevities are those of healthy serenity. Supposing the earth to be animated (as some have thought it), we cannot conceive it to be unhappy, rolling, as it has done for ages, round the sun, with a swiftness like the blood in the veins of childhood. Eternity of existence is inconceivable on any ground of analogy, except as identical with healthy prevalence; and healthy prevalence, with sensation, is inconceivable apart from sensations of pleasure.
Gone long ago are the bad Sicilian Vespers; but the good Sicilian Vespers, the beautiful Sicilian music, the beautiful Sicilian poetry, these remain; and, as if in sweet scorn of the catastrophe, they are particularly famous for their gentleness. To be told that a Sicilian air is about to be sung, is to be prepared to hear something especially sweet and soft. Every Protestant as well as Roman Catholic lover of music knows the Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn; and is a Catholic, if not a Roman worshipper, while he sings it. Fancy it rising at a distance out of the white-sailed boat in the darkling blue waters, when the sun has just gone down, and the rock on the woody promontory above the chapel, whose bell gave the notice, is touched with rose-colour. Nay, fancy you forget all this, and think only of the honest simple mariners singing this hymn, at the moment when their wives and children are repeating the spirit of it on shore, and all Italy is doing the same: