Or again, when at the foot of the mountain Dante is dismayed at its steepness, the Master explains: “It is ever easier as you ascend.”[243] When Dante is frightened as the Mountain trembles (Purg. xx. 135) Virgil interposes with a call to confidence—
Non dubbiar mentr’ io ti guido
But Virgil not only encourages; he explains. From time to time he pauses with the double object of giving his companion a breathing-space and of enheartening him by an exposition of the end and purpose of the drudgery—of the whole scheme, of which the experience they are now undergoing is an integral and necessary part. Thus he expounds to his disciple the topography of Hell when they have passed within the rampart of the City of Dis, and before they begin the steep and terrible descent, and encounter the Minotaur.[244] Again, after the uncomfortable ordeal of the suffocating fumes on the Terrace of Wrath, he diverts his pupil’s attention with a sketch of the order and inner meaning of the purgatorial terraces, and explains how Sin, in all its deadly forms, is just “disordered Love.”[245] And we may note in passing how this postponement of the explanation and the detailed scheme till the movement of learning is well on its course, is itself typical of the New Teaching,[246] and grounded on sound psychological principles. Virgil supplies, indeed, in the first Canto of the Inferno, a summary forecast of the journey, but does not sit down at the beginning and burden his Pupil’s mind with an elaboration of details. Nor can we leave the lecture on “Disordered Love” of Purg. xvii. without drawing attention to the ideal relations of Teacher and Pupil depicted in the following Canto, and especially to the masterly way in which Virgil suggests ever fresh problems to Dante’s mind and draws him on with an increasing “thirst to know.”[247]
The liberty which Education “goes seeking,” and in which its nobler forms live and move as in a bracing atmosphere, demands some sacrifice alike from Teacher and from Pupil. From the Pupil, especially in its earlier middle stages, it demands a degree of submissiveness and docility, and courage and perseverance to face distasteful drudgery; from the Teacher, that self-restraint of which we have already spoken—yet not mere self-effacement. Like the Divine Master, he must “begin to do and to teach.”[248] He must be a fellow-pilgrim, sharing the toils of the road, and over the roughest places a leader, even as Virgil volunteers to go first where the grim descent begins into the “cieco mondo”: “I will go first and thou shalt follow me.”
Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo.[249]
As fellow-pilgrim, he will not hesitate to let the Pupil witness something of his distress. The Master girds himself to the descent pallid with sympathetic suffering—tutto smorto[250]—nor does he hide the tokens of shame and confusion when he becomes conscious that he has been a party to an unwarranted delay.[251] And we note the effect of this frankness on the Pupil—an enhancement of loyal admiration for the Master; and, for his own conscience, a more delicate perception of moral values: “He appeared to me self-reproached. O noble, stainless, conscience, how bitter to thy taste is a trifling fault!”
El mi parea da se stesso rimorso;
O dignitosa coscienza e netta,
Come t’ è picciol fallo amaro morso!
Even so pleads the spirit of the New Teaching.[252] Let not the Teacher “put on airs of omniscience and solemnity. He must be a part of the gay company; he must not mind ‘giving himself away,’ he must be a human being, not a wooden stick; gladly must he learn, and then he will gladly teach.” Thus Virgil moves in Dante’s company as a fellow-learner, not omniscient, not infallible; ever ready to confess with frankness his own limitations, and to own up to his mistakes. In this spirit he apologises to Pier delle Vigne[253] for the inconsiderate act to which he was forced owing to his inability to convince Dante through the medium of his own verses. In the same spirit he gives place to Nessus when a description is needed of Nessus’ own region of the Inferno, reversing his dictum about the original descent: “Regard him (Nessus) as thy prime authority, and me as secondary.”