When Dante wrote the Paradise, he well knew that he was engaged in the supreme effort of his life, to which all else had led up. He well knew that he was engaged in no pastime, but with intensest concentration of matured power was delivering such a message from God to man as few indeed had ever been privileged or burdened to receive. He well knew that the words in which through long years of toil he had distilled the sweetness and the might of his vision were immortal, that to latest ages they would bear strength and purity of life, would teach the keen eye of the spirit to gaze into the uncreated light, and would flood the soul with a joy deeper than all unrest or sorrow, with a glory that no gloom could ever dispel. He knew moreover that this his last and greatest poem would speak to a few only in any generation, though speaking to those few with a voice of transforming power and grace.
'Oh, ye,' he cries almost at the beginning of the Paradise, 'who, desirous to hear, have followed in slight bark behind my keel, which sings upon its course, now turn you back and make for your own shores, trust not the open wave lest, losing me, ye should be left bewildered. As yet all untracked is the wave I sail. Minerva breathes, Apollo leads me on, and the nine Muses point me to the pole. Ye other few, who timely have lift up your heads for bread of angels fed by which man liveth but can never surfeit know, well may ye launch upon the ocean deep, keeping my furrow as ye cut your way through waters that return and equal lie.'[77]
In these last words, comparing the track he leaves to the watery furrow that at once subsides, Dante seems to indicate that he was well aware how easily the soul might drop out of his verses, how the things he had to say were essentially unutterable, so that his words could at best be only a suggestion of his meaning dependent for their effect upon the subtlest spiritual influences and adjustments, as well as upon the receptive sympathy of those to whom they were addressed. And if there are so many that fail to catch the spirit and feel the heavenly harmony of the music when it is Dante's own hand that touches the strings, how hopeless seems the task of transferring even its echo, by translated extracts, or descriptions, from which the soul has fled.
There is indeed much that is beautiful, much that is profound, in the Paradise which is capable of easy reproduction, but the divine aroma of the whole could only be translated or transferred by another Dante. Petal after petal of the rose of Paradise may be described or copied, but the heavenly perfume that they breathed is gone.
'His glory that moves all things,' so Dante begins the Paradise, 'pierces the universe; and is here more, here less resplendent. In that Heaven which of His light has most, was I. There I saw things which he who thence descends has not the knowledge or power to retell. For as it draws anigh to its desire, our intellect pierces so deep that memory cannot follow in its track. But of that sacred empire so much as I had power in my mind to store, shall now be matter of my poesy.'[78]
And again, almost at the close he sings, 'As is he who dreams, and when the dream is broke still feels the emotion stamped upon his heart though all he saw is fled beyond recall, e'en such am I; for, all the vision gone well-nigh without a trace, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart.'[79]
If so much as an echo of that echo, if so much as a dream of that dream, falls upon our ears and sinks into our hearts, then we are amongst those few for whom Dante wrote his last and his divinest poem.
Through the successive heavens of Paradise Dante is conducted by Beatrice; and here again the intimate blending in the divine guide of two distinct almost contradictory conceptions forms one of the great obstacles towards giving an intelligible account of the poem. This obstacle can only disappear when patient study guided by receptive sympathy has led us truly into the poet's thought.