Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti[[59]].
‘Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the world made crooked’. These last words, ‘la Montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti’, ‘the Mountain which straightens you whom the world made crooked’, for the Mountain of Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in severity, where the poet’s mind is too full charged to suffer him to speak more explicitly. But the very next stanza is a beautiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and clearness:
Tanto dice di farmi sua compagna
Ch’ io sarὸ là dove fia Beatrice;
Quivi convien che senza lui rimagna[[60]].
‘So long’, Dante continues, ‘so long he (Virgil) saith he will bear me company, until I shall be there where Beatrice is; there it behoves that without him I remain’. But the noble simplicity of that in the Italian no words of mine can render.
Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly grand; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as we attend most to the great personality, to the noble nature, in the poet its author; the simple seems the grandest when we attend most to the exquisite faculty, to the poetical gift. But the simple is no doubt to be preferred. It is the more magical: in the other there is something intellectual, something which gives scope for a play of thought which may exist where the poetical gift is either wanting or present in only inferior degree: the severe is much more imitable, and this a little spoils its charm. A kind of semblance of this style keeps Young going, one may say, through all the nine parts of that most indifferent production, the Night Thoughts. But the grand style in simplicity is inimitable:
αἰὼν ἀσφαλὴς
οὐκ ἔγεντ’ οὔτ’ Αἰακίδᾳ παρὰ Πηλεῖ,
οὔτε παρ’ ἀντιθέῳ Κάδμῳ· λέγονται μὰν βροτῶν