And apart from this, if we take the Convivio with the utmost seriousness, we may remember for our comfort that πορίζεσθαι τὰ γέλοια[142] is one of the qualifications of Aristotle’s εὐτράπελος and the willingness to be laughed at another; and see in Dante (with all reverence) an example of those who, more or less unconsciously provide matter for amusement to posterity. Nay, we may treat him as he treats St. Gregory, and look upon him as laughing now at his own certitude about the ten heavens and the angelic hierarchy, from his place in the mystic rose—or are we to say on the terrace of Pride?
But to return to the Convivio. It is here, as we have already suggested, that Dante gives us his description of the ideal nature of Laughter. “Ridere,” he says, “è una corruscazione della dilettazione de l’ anima.”[143] On the Aristotelian principle of the Mean (though his actual reference is not to Aristotle, but to Pseudo-Seneca “On the Four Cardinal Virtues”), he urges that laughter should be moderate and modest, with no violent movement (such as convulses the pages, e.g. of Franco Sacchetti) and no “cackling” noise. Laughter is, in fact—like little children—“best seen and not heard.”
From each of the four extant treatises, quotations may be adduced which at any rate show the writer’s sympathy with that view of life which fastens on the incongruous and sees in it matter for genial irony or for bitter sarcasm, according to the moral context.
Tratt. I. Chapter xi. opens with a delicious satire on the “sheep-like opinion” of the multitude, which I have elsewhere compared to the charmingly nonsensical scene—“Less Bread, More Taxes!”—with which Lewis Carroll inaugurates his Sylvie and Bruno.
The “man in the street,” says Dante, is ready to follow any cry that is raised. Thus the populace will be found exclaiming “Viva la lor morte! Muoia la lor vita!—purchè alcuno cominci.” They are for all the world like sheep who follow their leader blindly over a high precipice or down a well. He goes on to rail at “a bad workman who blames his tools,” the many who “sempre danno colpa alla materia dell’ arte apparecchiata, overo alo strumento; siccome lo mal fabro biasima ferro appresentato a lui.”[144]
Nor can we fail to find in the next chapter (I, xii.) a touch of the drily humorous spirit; in the passage which Dr. Toynbee in his Anthology entitles Of Silly Questions.
“If flames were plainly to be seen issuing from the windows of a house, and a bystander were to enquire whether that house were on fire, and another man to reply that it was, I should find it difficult to decide which of the two was the more ridiculous.”[145]
What are we to say of the Trattato II? Here, if anywhere, Dante poses as the unconscious humorist; here, if anywhere, in his elaborately solemn disquisition upon arrangement of the heavens and their analogues in the trivium and quadrivium, he is qualifying himself to play the rôle of St. Gregory in the other world! But even here he finds leisure to cast occasionally a satirist’s eye on the contemporary world—
l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci;
and the naïveté of his references to it is delightful. They sometimes come in incidentally in the form of similes. In Chapter vii.,[146] for instance, is an illusion to the perennial banishments and sieges with which the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, harassed the cities of the peninsula: “When we speak of ‘the city,’” he says, “we are wont to mean those who are in possession of it, not those who are attacking it, albeit the one and the other be citizens.” Or again, in Chapter xi.,[147] a reference to the decline of good taste and culture is ingeniously worked into a question of etymology. “Cortesia” is equivalent to “onestade,” and “because in courts of old time virtuous and fair manners were in use (as now the contrary), this word was derived from courts, and ‘courtesy’ was as much as to say ‘after the usage of courts.’ If the word had been derived in modern days from the same origin, it could have signified nothing else than turpezza.”