The Commedia is a novel and startling apparition in literature. Probably it has been felt by some, who have approached it with the reverence due to a work of such renown, that the world has been generous in placing it so high. It seems so abnormal, so lawless, so reckless of all ordinary proprieties and canons of feeling, taste, and composition. It is rough and abrupt; obscure in phrase and allusion, doubly obscure in purpose. It is a medley of all subjects usually kept distinct: scandal of the day and transcendental science, politics and confessions, coarse satire and angelic joy, private wrongs, with the mysteries of the faith, local names and habitations of earth, with visions of hell and heaven. It is hard to keep up with the ever-changing current of feeling, to pass as the poet passes, without effort or scruple, from tenderness to ridicule, from hope to bitter scorn or querulous complaint, from high-raised devotion to the calmness of prosaic subtleties or grotesque detail. Each separate element and vein of thought has its precedent, but not their amalgamation. Many had written visions of the unseen world, but they had not blended with them their personal fortunes. S. Augustine had taught the soul to contemplate its own history, and had traced its progress from darkness to light;[48] but he had not interwoven with it the history of Italy, and the consummation of all earthly destinies. Satire was no new thing; Juvenal had given it a moral, some of the Provençal poets a political turn; S. Jerome had kindled into it fiercely and bitterly even while expounding the Prophets; but here it streams forth in all its violence, within the precincts of the eternal world, and alternates with the hymns of the blessed. Lucretius had drawn forth the poetry of nature and its laws; Virgil and Livy had unfolded the poetry of the Roman empire; S. Augustine, the still grander poetry of the history of the City of God; but none had yet ventured to weave into one the three wonderful threads. And yet the scope of the Italian poet, vast and comprehensive as the issue of all things, universal as the government which directs nature and intelligence, forbids him not to stoop to the lowest caitiff he has ever despised, the minutest fact in nature that has ever struck his eye, the merest personal association which hangs pleasantly in his memory. Writing for all time, he scruples not to mix with all that is august and permanent in history and prophecy, incidents the most transient, and names the most obscure; to waste an immortality of shame or praise on those about whom his own generation were to inquire in vain. Scripture history runs into profane; Pagan legends teach their lesson side by side with Scripture scenes and miracles; heroes and poets of heathenism, separated from their old classic world, have their place in the world of faith, discourse with Christians of Christian dogmas, and even mingle with the Saints; Virgil guides the poet through his fear and his penitence to the gates of Paradise.
This feeling of harsh and extravagant incongruity, of causeless and unpardonable darkness, is perhaps the first impression of many readers of the Commedia. But probably as they read on, there will mingle with this a sense of strange and unusual grandeur, arising not alone from the hardihood of the attempt, and the mystery of the subject, but from the power and the character of the poet. It will strike them that words cut deeper than is their wont; that from that wild uncongenial imagery, thoughts emerge of singular truth and beauty. Their dissatisfaction will be chequered, even disturbed—for we can often bring ourselves to sacrifice much for the sake of a clear and consistent view—by the appearance, amid much that repels them, of proofs undeniable and accumulating of genius as mighty as it is strange. Their perplexity and disappointment may grow into distinct condemnation, or it may pass into admiration and delight; but no one has ever come to the end of the Commedia without feeling that if it has given him a new view and specimen of the wildness and unaccountable waywardness of the human mind, it has also added, as few other books have, to his knowledge of its feelings, its capabilities, and its grasp, and suggested larger and more serious thoughts, for which he may be grateful, concerning that unseen world of which he is even here a member.
Dante would not have thanked his admirers for becoming apologists. Those in whom the sense of imperfection and strangeness overpowers sympathy for grandeur, and enthusiasm for nobleness, and joy in beauty, he certainly would have left to themselves. But neither would he teach any that he was leading them along a smooth and easy road. The Commedia will always be a hard and trying book; nor did the writer much care that it should be otherwise. Much of this is no doubt to be set down to its age; much of its roughness and extravagance, as well as of its beauty—its allegorical spirit, its frame and scenery. The idea of a visionary voyage through the worlds of pain and bliss is no invention of the poet—it was one of the commonest and most familiar medieval vehicles of censure or warning; and those who love to trace the growth and often strange fortunes of popular ideas, or whose taste leads them to disbelieve in genius, and track the parentage of great inventions to the foolish and obscure, may find abundant materials in the literature of legends.[49] But his own age—the age which received the Commedia with mingled enthusiasm and wonder, and called it the Divine, was as much perplexed as we are, though probably rather pleased thereby than offended. That within a century after its composition, in the more famous cities and universities of Italy, Florence, Venice, Bologna, and Pisa, chairs should have been founded, and illustrious men engaged to lecture on it, is a strange homage to its power, even in that time of quick feeling; but as strange and great a proof of its obscurity. What is dark and forbidding in it was scarcely more clear to the poet's contemporaries. And he, whose last object was amusement, invites no audience but a patient and confiding one.
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O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, Desiderosi di ascoltar, seguiti Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, Tornate a riveder li vostri liti: Non vi mettete in pelago, chè forse Perdendo me rimarreste smarriti. L'acqua ch'io prendo giammai non si corse: Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo, E nuove muse mi dimostran l'Orse. Voi altri pochi, che drizzaste 'l collo Per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale Vivesi qui, ma non si vien satollo, Metter potete ben per l'alto sale Vostro navigio, servando mio solco Dinanzi all'acqua che ritorna eguale. Que gloriosi che passaro a Colco, Non s'ammiraron, come voi farete, Quando Jason vider fatto bifolco.—Parad. 2.[50] |
The character of the Commedia belongs much more, in its excellence and its imperfections, to the poet himself and the nature of his work, than to his age. That cannot screen his faults; nor can it arrogate to itself, it must be content to share, his glory. His leading idea and line of thought was much more novel then than it is now, and belongs much more to the modern than the medieval world. The Story of a Life, the poetry of man's journey through the wilderness to his true country, is now in various and very different shapes as hackneyed a form of imagination, as an allegory, an epic, a legend of chivalry were in former times. Not, of course, that any time has been without its poetical feelings and ideas on the subject; and never were they deeper and more diversified, more touching and solemn, than in the ages that passed from S. Augustine and S. Gregory to S. Thomas and S. Bonaventura. But a philosophical poem, where they were not merely the colouring, but the subject, an epos of the soul, placed for its trial in a fearful and wonderful world, with relations to time and matter, history and nature, good and evil, the beautiful, the intelligible, and the mysterious, sin and grace, the infinite and the eternal—and having in the company and under the influences of other intelligences, to make its choice, to struggle, to succeed or fail, to gain the light, or be lost—this was a new and unattempted theme. It has been often tried since, in faith or doubt, in egotism, in sorrow, in murmuring, in affectation, sometimes in joy—in various forms, in prose and verse, completed or fragmentary, in reality or fiction, in the direct or the shadowed story, in the Pilgrim's Progress, in Rousseau's Confessions, in Wilhelm Meister and Faust, in the Excursion. It is common enough now for the poet, in the faith of human sympathy, and in the sense of the unexhausted vastness of his mysterious subject, to believe that his fellows will not see without interest and profit, glimpses of his own path and fortunes—hear from his lips the disclosure of his chief delights, his warnings, his fears—follow the many-coloured changes, the impressions and workings, of a character, at once the contrast and the counterpart to their own. But it was a new path then; and he needed to be, and was, a bold man, who first opened it—a path never trod without peril, usually with loss or failure.
And certainly no great man ever made less secret to himself of his own genius. He is at no pains to rein in or to dissemble his consciousness of power, which he has measured without partiality, and feels sure will not fail him. "Fidandomi di me più che di un altro"[51]—is a reason which he assigns without reserve. We look with the distrust and hesitation of modern days, yet, in spite of ourselves, not without admiration and regret, at such frank hardihood. It was more common once than now. When the world was young, it was more natural and allowable—it was often seemly and noble. Men knew not their difficulties as we know them—we, to whom time, which has taught so much wisdom, has brought so many disappointments—we who have seen how often the powerful have fallen short, and the noble gone astray, and the most admirable missed their perfection. It is becoming in us to distrust ourselves—to be shy if we cannot be modest; it is but a respectful tribute to human weakness and our brethren's failures. But there was a time when great men dared to claim their greatness—not in foolish self-complacency, but in unembarrassed and majestic simplicity, in magnanimity and truth, in the consciousness of a serious and noble purpose, and of strength to fulfil it. Without passion, without elation as without shrinking, the poet surveys his superiority and his high position, as something external to him; he has no doubts about it, and affects none. He would be a coward, if he shut his eyes to what he could do; as much a trifler in displaying reserve as ostentation. Nothing is more striking in the Commedia than the serene and unhesitating confidence with which he announces himself the heir and reviver of the poetic power so long lost to the world—the heir and reviver of it in all its fulness. He doubts not of the judgment of posterity. One has arisen who shall throw into the shade all modern reputations, who shall bequeath to Christendom the glory of that name of Poet, "che più dura e più onora," hitherto the exclusive boast of heathenism, and claim the rare honours of the laurel:
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Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie Per trionfare o Cesare o poeta, (Colpa e vergogna dell'umane voglie), Che partorir letizia in su la lieta Delfica deità dovrìa la fronda Peneia quando alcun di sè asseta.—Parad. 1.[52] |
He has but to follow his star to be sure of the glorious port:[53] he is the master of language: he can give fame to the dead—no task or enterprise appals him, for whom spirits keep watch in heaven, and angels have visited the shades—"tal si partì dal cantar alleluia:"—who is Virgil's foster child and familiar friend. Virgil bids him lay aside the last vestige of fear. Virgil is to "crown him king and priest over himself,"[54] for a higher venture than heathen poetry had dared; in Virgil's company he takes his place without diffidence, and without vain-glory, among the great poets of old—a sister soul.[55]
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Poichè la voce fu restata e queta, Vidi quattro grand'ombre a noi venire: Sembianza avean nè trista nè lieta: **** Così vidi adunar la bella scuola Di quel signor dell'altissimo canto Che sovra gli altri come aquila vola. Da ch'ebber ragionato insieme alquanto Volsersi a me con salutevol cenno E 'l mio maestro sorrise di tanto. E più d'onore ancora assai mi fenno: Ch'essi mi fecer della loro schiera, Sì ch'io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.—Inf. 4.[56] |