Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia.

by R. W. Church; Dante Alighieri

Mira Quanto è 'l convento delle bianche stole—

under a figure already taken into the ceremonial of the Church—the mystic Rose, whose expanding leaves image forth the joy of the heavenly Jerusalem, both triumphant and militant.[108]

But this universal reference to the religious ideas of the Church is so natural, so unaffected, that it leaves him at full liberty in other orders of thought. He can afford not to be conventional—he can afford to be comprehensive and genuine. It has been remarked how, in a poem where there would seem to be a fitting place for them, the ecclesiastical legends of the middle ages are almost entirely absent. The sainted spirits of the Paradiso are not exclusively or chiefly the Saints of popular devotion. After the Saints of the Bible, the holy women, the three great Apostles, the Virgin mother, they are either names personally dear to the poet himself, friends whom he had loved, and teachers to whom he owed wisdom—or great men of masculine energy in thought or action, in their various lines "compensations and antagonists of the world's evils"—Justinian and Constantine, and Charlemagne—the founders of the Orders, Augustine, Benedict, and Bernard, Francis and Dominic—the great doctors of the Schools, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, whom the Church had not yet canonized. And with them are joined—and that with a full consciousness of the line which theology draws between the dispensations of nature and grace—some rare types of virtue among the heathen. Cato is admitted to the outskirts of Purgatory; Trajan, and the righteous king of Virgil's poem, to the heaven of the just.[109]

Without confusion or disturbance to the religious character of his train of thought, he is able freely to subordinate to it the lessons and the great recollections of the Gentile times. He contemplates them with the veil drawn off from them; as now known to form but one whole with the history of the Bible and the Church, in the design of Providence. He presents them in their own colours, as drawn by their own writers—he only adds what Christianity seems to show to be their event. Under the conviction, that the light of the Heathen was a real guide from above, calling for vengeance in proportion to unfaithfulness, or outrage done to it—"He that nurtureth the heathen, it is He that teacheth man knowledge—shall not He punish?"—the great criminals of profane history are mingled with sinners against God's revealed will—and that, with equal dramatic power, with equal feeling of the greatness of their loss. The story of the voyage of Ulysses is told with as much vivid power and pathetic interest as the tales of the day.[110] He honours unfeignedly the old heathen's brave disdain of ease; that spirit, even to old age, eager, fresh, adventurous, and inquisitive. His faith allowed him to admire all that was beautiful and excellent among the heathen, without forgetting that it fell short of what the new gift of the Gospel can alone impart. He saw in it proof that God had never left His will and law without their witness among men. Virtue was virtue still, though imperfect, and unconsecrated—generosity, largeness of soul, truth, condescension, justice, were never unworthy of the reverence of Christians. Hence he uses without fear or scruple the classic element. The examples which recall to the minds of the penitents, by sounds and sights, in the different terraces of Purgatory, their sin and the grace they have to attain to, come indiscriminately from poetry and Scripture. The sculptured pavement, to which the proud are obliged ever to bow down their eyes, shows at once the humility of S. Mary and of the Psalmist, and the condescension of Trajan; and elsewhere the pride of Nimrod and Sennacherib, of Niobe, and Cyrus. The envious hear the passing voices of courtesy from saints and heroes, and the bursting cry, like crashing thunder, of repentant jealousy from Cain and Aglaurus; the avaricious, to keep up the memory of their fault, celebrate by day the poverty of Fabricius and the liberality of S. Nicolas, and execrate by night the greediness of Pygmalion and Midas, of Achan, Heliodorus, and Crassus.

Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind, was worthy to open the grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote from popular thought—too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so undoubting—her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. Yet with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics and theology, and his poetical taste always owning allegiance to Virgil, Ovid, and Statius—keen and subtle as a Schoolman—as much an idolator of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance—his eye is as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of external nature, to the wonders of the physical world—his interest in them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct, his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as elastic, and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom, and such keen discriminative sense of what is real, in feeling and image;—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.

But let no reader of fastidious taste disturb his temper by the study of Dante. Dante certainly opened that path of freedom and poetic conquest, in which the greatest efforts of modern poetry have followed him—opened it with a magnificence and power which have never been surpassed. But the greatest are but pioneers; they must be content to leave to a posterity, which knows more, if it cannot do as much, a keen and even growing sense of their defects. The Commedia is open to all the attacks that can be made on grotesqueness and extravagance. This is partly owing, doubtless, to the time, in itself quaint, quainter to us, by being remote and ill-understood; but even then, weaker and less daring writers than Dante do not equally offend or astonish us. So that an image or an expression will render forcibly a thought, there is no strangeness which checks him. Barbarous words are introduced, to express the cries of the demon or the confusion of Babel—even to represent the incomprehensible song of the blessed;[111] inarticulate syllables, to convey the impression of some natural sound—the cry of sorrowful surprise:

Alto sospir, che duolo strinse in hui;—Purg. 16.

or the noise of the cracking ice:

Se Tabernicch Vi fosse sù caduto, o Pietra-pana Non avria pur da l'orlo fatto cricch;—Inf. 32.