‘Nevertheless, no poet had as yet powerfully affected the mind, no philosopher had penetrated the depths of thought and sentiment, when the greatest of the Italians, the father of their poetry, Dante, appeared, and showed to the world how a powerful genius is able to arrange the gross materials prepared for him, in such a manner as to rear from them an edifice, magnificent as the universe, of which it was the image. Instead of love songs, addressed to an imaginary mistress,—instead of madrigals, full of cold conceits,—of sonnets painfully harmonious,—or allegories false and forced, the only models which Dante had before his eyes in any modern tongue, he conceived in his mind an image of the whole invisible world, and unveiled it to the eyes of his astonished readers. In the country, indeed, of Dante, that is, at Florence, on the 1st of May, 1304,’ (our author says), ‘all the sufferings of hell were placed before the eyes of the people, at a horrible representation appointed for a festival day; the first idea of which was no doubt taken from the Inferno. The bed of the river Arno was to represent the gulf of hell; and all the variety of torments which the imagination of monks or of the poet had invented, streams of boiling pitch, flames, ice, serpents, were inflicted on real persons, whose cries and groans rendered the illusion complete to the spectators.
‘The subject, then, which Dante chose for his immortal poem, when he undertook to celebrate the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, hell, purgatory, and paradise, was in that age the most popular of all; at once the most profoundly religious, and the most closely allied to the love of country, of glory, and of party-feelings, inasmuch as all the illustrious dead were to appear on this extraordinary theatre; and in short, by its immensity, the most loftily sublime of any which the mind of man has ever conceived. The commentaries on Dante, left us by Boccace and others, furnish a new proof of the superiority of this great man. We are there astonished to find his professed admirers unable to appreciate his real grandeur. Dante himself, as well as his commentators, attaches his excellence to purity and correctness: yet he is neither pure nor correct; but he is a creator. His characters walk and breathe; his pictures are nature itself; his language always speaks to the imagination, as well as to the understanding; and there is scarcely a stanza in his poem, which might not be represented with the pencil.’
M. Sismondi seems to have understood the great poet of Italy little better than his other commentators; and indeed the Divine Comedy must completely baffle the common rules of French criticism, which always seeks for excellence in the external image, and never in the internal power and feeling. But Dante is nothing but power, passion, self-will. In all that relates to the imitative part of poetry, he bears no comparison with many other poets; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead-weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul, that make amends for all other deficiencies. Dante is a striking instance of the essential excellences and defects of modern genius. The immediate objects he presents to the mind, are not much in themselves;—they generally want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become every thing by the force of the character which he impresses on them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the barren vastnesses of illimitable space. In point of diction and style, he is the severest of all writers, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering—who relies most on his own power, and the sense of power in the reader—who leaves most to the imagination.[[2]]
Dante’s only object is to interest; and he interests only by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been excited; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly frequently gives us the thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive; but the interest never flags, from the intense earnestness of the author’s mind. Dante, as well as Milton, appears to have been indebted to the writers of the old Testament for the gloomy tone of his mind, for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry. But there is more deep-working passion in Dante, and more imagination in Milton. Milton, more perhaps than any other poet, elevated his subject, by combining image with image in lofty gradation. Dante’s great power is in combining internal feelings with familiar objects. Thus the gate of Hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. The beauty to be found in Dante is of the same severe character, or mixed with deep sentiment. The story of Geneura, to which we have just alluded, is of this class. So is the affecting apostrophe, addressed to Dante by one of his countrymen, whom he meets in the other world.
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale!
Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
And another example, even still finer, if any thing could be finer, is his description of the poets and great men of antiquity, whom he represents ‘serene and smiling,’ though in the shades of death,
——‘because on earth their names
In fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’
This is the finest idea ever given of the love of fame.